Now that a portion of the service is going free, I'm interested to see if they start to add offerings to the paid, all access tier. As a paying monthly customer, I'd love to have the option to enable lossless streaming, for example.
Well they did add YouTube Music Key (no ads, background play and offline access for many music videos) pretty recently, but they've done their typical terrible job of publicizing that.
I don't necessarily agree that Twitter users can't build communities. A friend of mine writes for a sports blog specific to an NFL team. His twitter account (and @replies) show that he is a part of a very strong community around the team. The tweets from these super-fans aren't just missives shouted into space, these people use Twitter almost solely as a response tool to each other. Their tweets look very much like something you'd see on IRC or a message board.
I guess another way of phrasing the original article's claim is that although communities do form, they have no straightforward way to exclude strangers, interlopers, and even griefers: and except for incessant use of hashtags (which could eat up valuable space), there's no simple way for a person who is part of multiple communities to direct comments to only one community.
That's a recipe for both serendipity and uncomfortable moments (or worse) if someone has strong opinions on, say, computer science, religion, and animal rights. People who chose to follow them over one thing will constantly see their opinions on other things. That might be great under some circumstances because it will promote more interesting and broader discussions or lead people to learn about ideas that they wouldn't have naturally come across in their own filter bubble. But it might produce some serious disruption in the conversation too, especially if that person's views are offensive or upsetting to some readers.
I know a Twitter user writes a lot about computer science and a lot about sex and sexuality. I find both sets of posts frequently insightful, but the latter would be off-topic in a forum devoted only to computer science, and they do sometimes produce offense.
It seems like the best case for avoiding really bad forms of conflict is when a group of people tweet almost exclusively on a single topic that outsiders don't find upsetting or offensive (or simply don't know about). But a lot of people do want to have at least some discussions that others will inevitably be offended by, and the broadcast medium can be a challenge for that if you didn't want to get into it with the strangers (or for that matter have some of them insult you, threaten you, or even dox you).
An example: I remember a blog written by an Orthodox Jew on theology and also cultural and political issues within the Orthodox community.
Periodically commenters would come by who would take exception to gender relations in the Orthodox world, or to the idea that there is a God who created the world and revealed his will to the Jewish people, who are uniquely continuing to follow it. The author would ban these commenters. His theory was that people are entitled to debate those topics somewhere, but that he wanted to have productive discussions on his blog with people who shared his basic premises.
It's easy for me see two different points of view about this: that it creates a "filter bubble" of the sort described by Eli Pariser, where the Orthodox (and people with other beliefs, for that matter, in their own blog communities) never see their faith questioned, and have a subjective experience that their beliefs are "normal" and don't hear about the substance of criticisms or objections to them. Or that it actually allows discussions about the topics that the audience of that blog mainly wants to discuss, without having every single thread turn into a debate about the existence of God, whether the Torah is divine, and whether Orthodoxy should adopt gender egalitarianism.
I think one idea here is that Twitter only makes one of these two options practical: the one where every thread can conceivably go off in the direction of a bunch of strangers saying that your basic beliefs are wrong (or even that you are a bad person).
Twitter has a great feature of showing you the @reply messages by the people you follow, only if you follow that same person as well.
For example, if you sent me an @reply message to me ( @djloche ) that message would only show up in the feeds of your followers IF they followed me as well. This means you can have a conversation about the latest film with me, the party last night with your co-workers, and a pancake recipe with a friend that really loves pancakes - and there won't be any cross conversation unless there is a natural crossover in the social groups.
I guess that helps quite a lot in preventing group conflicts from getting out of hand accidentally. It seems like a weaker control if someone is deliberately trying to get involved in a conversation where other people would see them as unwelcome.
That's a good point, that is clearer to what the article is trying to say.
Defining a community by its ability to exclude is interesting. Twitter just puts the impetus to exclude on a personal level (person A blocks person B) rather than on a community level (person B is banned from this IRC channel)
Yes, I think that's right. And some unmoderated mailing lists and newsgroups have also favored that approach (with killfiles), but even there there is potentially a stronger threshold for joining (you have to deliberately subscribe to the list or group) and stronger recourse for extreme misbehavior (at least on mailing lists, where someone can be banned from the list).
I agree. The hockey and baseball Twittersphere is awash in conversations. I've made a number of real-life friends through Twitter in these communities.
Sports is perhaps a special case in that people routinely disagree with each other without one being right and one being wrong. Trash talking is expected and is easily ignored (or it can be part of the fun).
The kindness requirement is awesome and refreshing. I was shocked just how much vitriol gets spewed in an average workplace, directed at customers, fellow employees, inanimate objects. I gravitate towards the people I work with that aren't like that, so specifying 'kindness' right up front is great.
I often have a cup of tea, but that's often herbal. I rarely ever drink soda. Strangely, I'll still ask people if they want to meet for coffee, even though I don't drink it. It just seems to be the standard beverage for these sorts of things.
Nope, just water and tea, often herbal. Those are really the only two things I drink with any regular frequency, not counting the milk in my morning cereal.
I'm no expert, but I suspect this is just referring to work "at will" states, where you can be fired without being given a reason. Thus, it could actually be for anything: Your orientation, your work performance, that ugly shirt you wore yesterday. Doesn't matter.
The issue is that there are specific protections for things like age, race and religion, but not sexual orientation. I consider orientation, like race, to be something that you are born with that deserves the same protections.
In an "at will" arrangement, you will never be fired for "protected" traits. With "at will" employment, you can be fired for no reason at all, so no reason will ever be given that could possibly trigger legal liability.
It makes all those "protections" completely toothless.
In order to win a case, you would need to provide extensive documentation, probably collected via clandestine recordings, that would be able to convince a jury by preponderance of the evidence that you were fired for a protected reason, and not simply because the company no longer wanted to pay you for your work.
Besides that, one of the selling points of "at will" was that making it easier to fire people would make it easier to hire people. Anecdotally, I have not found this to be the case. Companies simply find it easier to discriminate based on things like race, gender, perceived sexual orientation, weight, religion (or lack thereof), disabilities, appearance, or age, because it is easier for them to deny that those are the factors that they consider in hiring and firing.
As Apple execs engaged in collusion with other companies to weaken workers as a class via an anti-poaching cartel, Tim Cook is hardly able to take a non-hypocritical position about sexuality discrimination in the workplace. When all workers are weakened, the ones that are most often discriminated against often suffer the most, because they are the marginal hires in more places.
Even if it's not, everyone should be free to do and be who they are - it should only influence one's employment if it actually affects said employment, like (for example) alcoholism or explosive flatulism (fire hazard)
There are certainly contexts where this is a valuable sentiment, but separating sexual orientation from sexual behavior at such a gross level (ie, all not engaging in same-sex behavior at all) is simply crude and unnecessary. To each their own, but your statement seems to imply that gays should struggle against what is ultimately a harmless and very human attraction.
I recently spent the better part of a day clearing out my work inbox because I'd heard too many people preach about inbox 0, and how the only things in their inbox were things they actively needed to work on.
This worked for all of two days for me. Now, a week later, my inbox is once again packed, with nothing being moved or deleted, just read. That's just a flow that seems to work better for me. My to-do lists that I actually need to pay attention to are in other places... I'm looking at Jira to see what needs my development attention and in what order, for example. I'm pleased with treating my email as a giant bin where everything gets thrown, but can easily be fished out again given the need.
While I imagine this is all dependent on just how much email you actually get in a day, systems like Google Inbox seem useful to me at first, until I realize I'm no longer following the system, or I'm spending too much time deciding on where an email should be filed instead of simply acting on it and moving on with my life.
You should probably work on getting less email then. I find zero inbox easy to do. It takes practice, but I also unsub from newsletters and reduced my work load. Tons of email is a symptom of either over-loading yourself with work or not managing how you communicate with people well.
