Have any of you on Twitter tried describing this to someone not on Twitter? It’s really hard to describe, things are moving so fast & so crazily.
It’s extremely useful for breaking news, especially in areas where mainstream media does not have much of a presence.
The lead stories on Ukraine, for example, tend to break first on Twitter, and then get followed up by other media presences.
If Twitter disappears, then people in isolated areas lose a valuable way of getting their stories out to the world.
The easiest way I found was to compare it to their favorite medium…
"Imagine if ABC allowed someone to buy ad time as Coca-Cola, this ad announcing that cocaine is being added to the formula. Now assume nobody can tell the difference between a real Coke ad and this fake Coke ad. And now assume that ABC ran real Coke ads alongside fake Coke ads.
“What would you do if you were Coca-Cola?”
… replace “ABC” with “Facebook”, “YouTube”, etc, as needed.
It’s kind of more like, the fake ad says it’s a parody in that tiny type few people bother to read.
But how often does it really matter that you hear about a news event instantly? Frankly I would be better informed if I read more long form analyses about major issues and fewer news items.
It is a way to get the news out in areas that do not have mainstream news on the spot. By getting the news out, it may attract the attention of other media outlets, who otherwise may not even have known of the event.
Timely breaking news announcements and in-depth news analyses are both important. But they’re two completely different kinds of journalism. We need them both.
See, I use it differently. For me, the breaking news I follow relates to concerts and ticket sales. And in that case, it does make a difference how fast I learn about them. Many of the shows I go to sell out in just a few minutes. So learning about them the next day is too late.
Now Mr. Musk has gone too far. Employees will have to pay for lunch in the cafeteria. He’s trying to starve them!
If that’s the kind of whiny entitled brats that work there, maybe he should fire them all, and start over.
Okay, it seems like Twitter performs a service for you, but … in the greater scheme of things, is quick info on ticket sales important, compared to, say, knowing what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine?
I should think that the vultures would swoop in pretty fast to solve any disconnect about ticket sales due to Twitter disruption. As for me, I just heard on our local public radio station that David Sedaris is coming to Hawaii in February 2023 - I don’t know that I necessarily got the best price for tickets, because I’m not really savvy about all the ticket sales companies that are clearly trying to make a profit on demand for popular performers, but without Twitter I managed to snag the tickets I wanted at a not TOO insane price.
Do you really need Twitter to buy concert tickets?
It’s all relative. Google employees having been getting awesome free gourmet lunches for years, along with lots of other perks. The only thing Twitter employees have been getting lately is fired. Both companies are vying for the best talent. Where would you rather work?
They’re certainly not going to starve, as Mr. Wortman claims. Unless they are really that bad at adulting?
So I gather that you don’t like hyperbole as a literary device and would prefer that Wortman had used different words to describe Musk’s catastrophic mismanagement. OK.
I generally think Twitter is a net negative for society. but I will make a gigantic exception for things like the virality of “police misconduct” videos. Absent Twitter, the mainstream media generally ignores these because they’re controversial and hard to cover, but when a million people are independently drawing attention to an incident of official abuse, suddenly there’s some solid ground on which the media can base a story. I don’t think Chauvin gets prosecuted, let alone convicted, without Twitter, for example.
When Musk is done pressing Twitter’s face into the garbage disposal, whatever replaces it will need to have the same broad reach and user-driven communication agenda to have the same kind of social effect.
…I think that the person who is bad at “adulting” would be the person who has arbitrarily decided to remove part of their employee’s compensation package without notice or mutual agreement.
It’s not about speed, it’s that all sorts of stuff breaks on twitter and then the stuff that gets engagement later gets amplified through mainstream media. It lowers the barrier to entry which brings in a more diverse set of voices who get to set the news agenda.
eg: One of the first indications we had of the OBL operation were people in Pakistan tweeting that they heard strange helicopters going overhead. None of them would have had access to forward these videos to traditional media but because they posted it on twitter, people put two and two together and there was a more complete record of how the operation went down.
Similarly, stories of celebrity sexual misconduct or videos of police brutality get put on twitter first and then later get covered by the news who can do more investigation and provide more context.
Twitter has fact-checked another of Dear Leader’s twits.
Yes, this is your third post along these lines and we get it: you don’t use Twitter and you are cooler and better for it.
That’s such bullshit. The cafeteria wasn’t a gift, it was an agreed-upon benefit of their employment, and the free food was part of their pay. Cancelling it is for all effects and purposes cutting their salaries. Who wouldn’t complain if someone wasn’t paying them what they were owed?
Here’s a good overview of how and why Elmo’s thinking is channeled and constrained, leading him to decisions like this.
Note that this is from a week ago, and accurately predicts how the blue-check fiasco was going to blow up in Elmo’s face.