Twitter has changed and here's why people are leaving
Alan Jacobs is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University and the author, most recently, of The "Book of Common Prayer": A Biography and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. And
he's written a good essay on why Twitter isn't fun anymore.
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he's written a good essay on why Twitter isn't fun anymore.
As long as I've been on Twitter (I started in March 2007) people have been complaining about Twitter. But recently things have changed. The complaints have increased in frequency and intensity, and now are coming more often from especially thoughtful and constructive users of the platform. There is an air of defeat about these complaints now, an almost palpable giving-up. For many of the really smart people on Twitter, it's over. Not in the sense that they'll quit using it altogether; but some of what was best about Twitter - primarily the experience of discovery - is now pretty clearly a thing of the past.This is a bit more than your usual rant about Twitter and whether or not it's jumped the shark. It's a conversation about a communications platform whose usefulness has changed as it has gotten more popular.
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Freddie deBoer, a social liberal, on viciousness in online forums:
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/21/where-online-social-liberalism-lost-the-script/
David Sessions, a social conservative, on the quality on online media:
http://www.patrolmag.com/2014/08/25/david-sessions/the-state-of-the-internet-is-awful-and-everybody-knows-it/
Pew survey on Social Media and the Spiral of Silence:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence/
Xianhang Zhang on the Evaporative Cooling Effect:
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/
Pipedot still has a small number of articles and comments, but the civility and quality we have here are becoming increasingly rare online. Maybe it's not such a bad thing that Pipedot is small and growing slowly.