Twitter has changed and here's why people are leaving

by
in internet on (#2S0R)
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.
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.

If you like this article, why not retweet it?

Re: In a similar vein... (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-04 10:26 (#2S1Q)

Wow, I wish I could mod this both informative and insightful. Alas, only one mod.

I still wonder if it's the Internet that has 'caused' this, if human nature and peoples' expectations for online interaction, or if this is simply the consequence of a new and younger generation. As for Pipedot, small and steady growth isn't a bad thing. But I highly doubt there's anything magical about Pipecode that prevents asshattery, same as any other site. Set up a perfectly reasonable subreddit and you run the risk of some schmuck taking it over and harrassing other users offline. Usenet newsgroup "protectors/guardians" are infamously boorish. And the list goes on ...
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