I’m only 25 but I feel like an old man screaming into the wind when it comes to Twitter and the like. The generation before me had this stuff figured out ages ago with self-hosted blogs / RSS / old school BBS systems.
It confuses me to no end that so many brilliant minds flock to Twitter for technical discussion about math / cs / programming topics. The UI gets worse with every update–I am perpetually confused about how to follow a thread of conversation. Let me hide all retweets. Show me everything in chronological order.
Worst of all, most people don’t separate their work and personal accounts. I stopped following a Columbia CS professor because he would constantly post inane questions like “is this avocado with black spots safe to eat?”
I’m a bit older (32) but share in your frustration. I still have a 2012-era feeds export from Opera and I’m pretty sure it’s full of blogs. I’d like to see a return to everyone having one again but the unfortunate truth is no one cares to.
I’m only 25 but I feel like an old man screaming into the wind when it comes to Twitter and the like. The generation before me had this stuff figured out ages ago with self-hosted blogs / RSS / old school BBS systems.
I don’t think they solved the same problems. The value of Twitter is not just that you can broadcast a message to a huge audience, it’s that anyone in that audience can reply or amplify your message. Neither of those really works with blogs, RSS, or old-school BBSs:
With a blog, I can have a comment system but I either need to do a lot of moderation to avoid spam, need to use some other walled garden as a SSO, or give up on replies. If someone amplifies my message by posting about it elsewhere, I probably don’t see it unless we’re using the same pingback system.
With RSS, the same limitations as a blog apply, amplified by the fact that there’s no way of putting a comment system into an RSS feed.
With old-school BBSs, I don’t reach a wide audience because each one is a separate private ecosystem.
Something that replaces Twitter would require:
A low-friction way of getting an account that worked with thousands of people’s feeds.
An easy way of seeing replies and replies to where people have shared my message.
An easy way of combatting spam / abuse.
The first and last are somewhat in tension, because if it’s too easy to create an account then it’s also easy to create a hundred accounts and so blocking one account from being visible in replies to your posts doesn’t block the same person from being abusive with a hundred other accounts.
That’s definitely a fair point. I see the HN / Lobsters system as an ideal middle ground – I have a community-curated list of interesting articles, often not in my own area of expertise, and a surprisingly high-quality comments section where I can read criticism and gain context.
But where do these articles come from? Who decides to submit them? How would I find them without HN / Lobsters? RSS lets me follow people I already know, but content discovery is hard. I think people like me use Twitter to to solve the content discovery problem – the people I follow can easily share relevant articles that I might not otherwise find.
Twitter’s algorithm+UI aren’t really optimized for this use case though, which I think is the root of my frustration.
Note that most communication methods in BBS are also centralized, just on smaller setups. Which may not be a bad thing for ephemeral and/or local communication, but the bigger networks (FIDO et al) were add-ons to solve a problem with the original BBS concept
Very interesting write-up! I’ve been following #100binaries since day one and picked up a lot of new tools that have significantly improved many aspects of my development work, so thanks for your work on it!
I’m only 25 but I feel like an old man screaming into the wind when it comes to Twitter and the like. The generation before me had this stuff figured out ages ago with self-hosted blogs / RSS / old school BBS systems.
It confuses me to no end that so many brilliant minds flock to Twitter for technical discussion about math / cs / programming topics. The UI gets worse with every update–I am perpetually confused about how to follow a thread of conversation. Let me hide all retweets. Show me everything in chronological order.
Worst of all, most people don’t separate their work and personal accounts. I stopped following a Columbia CS professor because he would constantly post inane questions like “is this avocado with black spots safe to eat?”
I’m a bit older (32) but share in your frustration. I still have a 2012-era feeds export from Opera and I’m pretty sure it’s full of blogs. I’d like to see a return to everyone having one again but the unfortunate truth is no one cares to.
I don’t think they solved the same problems. The value of Twitter is not just that you can broadcast a message to a huge audience, it’s that anyone in that audience can reply or amplify your message. Neither of those really works with blogs, RSS, or old-school BBSs:
Something that replaces Twitter would require:
The first and last are somewhat in tension, because if it’s too easy to create an account then it’s also easy to create a hundred accounts and so blocking one account from being visible in replies to your posts doesn’t block the same person from being abusive with a hundred other accounts.
That’s definitely a fair point. I see the HN / Lobsters system as an ideal middle ground – I have a community-curated list of interesting articles, often not in my own area of expertise, and a surprisingly high-quality comments section where I can read criticism and gain context.
But where do these articles come from? Who decides to submit them? How would I find them without HN / Lobsters? RSS lets me follow people I already know, but content discovery is hard. I think people like me use Twitter to to solve the content discovery problem – the people I follow can easily share relevant articles that I might not otherwise find.
Twitter’s algorithm+UI aren’t really optimized for this use case though, which I think is the root of my frustration.
Note that most communication methods in BBS are also centralized, just on smaller setups. Which may not be a bad thing for ephemeral and/or local communication, but the bigger networks (FIDO et al) were add-ons to solve a problem with the original BBS concept
Very interesting write-up! I’ve been following #100binaries since day one and picked up a lot of new tools that have significantly improved many aspects of my development work, so thanks for your work on it!
Wonderful, that’s great to hear.