>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order.
What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
Sure, but that will no longer be twitter, it'll be a reddit competitor. He should then also state what will make it better than reddit, from what he's public ally saying so far it just sounds like he's never heard of reddit and is going to invent it.
It's already a reddit competitor to some extent. I agree that it will be more of a reddit competitor, but it's already on the continuum. These things are mushy.
I use twitter specifically because it's focused on people and not interests. I love learning more about the history of communist mapping because somebody who I followed after meeting them at a conference tweeted about it.
> I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
I've had this happen, typically with interjections of sport commentary, and I will immediately unfollow them. None of the unfollows has been a great loss. People who are truly insightful have enough self-awareness not to self-indulge like this.
>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.