{"id":16305,"date":"2016-11-08T15:50:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-08T20:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=16305"},"modified":"2016-11-08T20:28:11","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T01:28:11","slug":"the-importance-and-potential-of-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/08\/the-importance-and-potential-of-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Importance and Potential of Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben Thompson<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

And yet it is Twitter that has reaffirmed itself as the most powerful antidote to Facebook’s algorithm: misinformation certainly spreads via a tweet, but truth follows unusually quickly; thanks to the power of retweets and quoted tweets, both are far more inescapable than they are on Facebook.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

To be clear, Twitter has a real abuse problem that it has been derelict in addressing, a decision that is costly in both human and business terms; there is real harm that comes from the ability to address anyone anonymously, including the suppression of viewpoints by de facto vigilantism. But I increasingly despair about the opposite extreme: the construction of cocoons where speech that intrudes on one’s world view with facts is suppressed for fear of what it does to the bottom line, resulting in an inert people incapable of finding common ground with anyone else.<\/p>\n

This is why Twitter must be saved: the combination of network and format is irreplaceable, especially now that everyone knows it might not be a great business.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Austin Gardner-Smith<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

I’ve always been a big fan of Twitter as a platform. But like most people I’ve met who share that sentiment, I’m a bit disappointed by the grown-up it’s become.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

These things happen. I’m not here to point out all the mistakes the management team has or has not made - these are not easy decisions to make and no one likes a Monday morning quarterback. But around 2010, when I was working on Pinyadda, I believed that Twitter was going to become something very different from what it looks like today. I thought it had a chance to become a protocol, of sorts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Twitter created and controlled perhaps the most important new protocol since HTTP. What if it had embraced third-party developers and found a different business model than advertising?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ben Thompson (Hacker News): And yet it is Twitter that has reaffirmed itself as the most powerful antidote to Facebook’s algorithm: misinformation certainly spreads via a tweet, but truth follows unusually quickly; thanks to the power of retweets and quoted tweets, both are far more inescapable than they are on Facebook. […] To be clear, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[354,101,49,96],"class_list":["post-16305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-advertising","tag-business","tag-twitter","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16305"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16317,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16305\/revisions\/16317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}