Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions

Re:Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing... by cel1ne on Friday February 12, 2016 @09:11AM (#11087235)

I argue that Twitter, like many other services, has become public infrastructure. Public infrastructure costs money, needs maintenance and is depended upon by many.

As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths, railroads, sewage-systems etc.)

Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing... by Jordrok on Friday February 12, 2016 @10:53AM (#11088046)

I see this argument all the time and it has never made any sense to me. Do you honestly consider Twitter to have the same level of utility, ubiquity, and necessity as things like running water, electricity, sewage, roads, etc?

Let's look specifically at just the US for the sake of simplicity: The idea of the Internet in general as a public utility has only very recently become accepted and is still going through growing pains. Even so, the total percentage of people in the US who use the Internet is "only" around 84%.[1] Of those people who use the Internet, around 24% are Twitter users.[2]

If Twitter were to simply vanish overnight, the large majority of people in the US would be completely unaffected. I'm not sure you could say that about any other public utility.

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-acc... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fac...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing... by malsun on Friday February 12, 2016 @11:05AM (#11088156)

My main issue with Twitter is it grew out of the weird environment that is San Francisco and has all the baggage of people who live within that. That wouldn't be a problem if the service was a normal startup, but it's a platform for influencing public opinion that delves into journalism and politics. For that reason, I wouldn't want it to be considered a public service, never mind one that serves the world.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing... by cel1ne on Friday February 12, 2016 @05:39PM (#11091230)

I agree wholeheartedly, but I don't think it'll disappear. It's considered too important, even if it really isn't.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing... by morgante on Friday February 12, 2016 @12:17PM (#11088708)

I really don't see how it's "public infrastructure."

If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, most of the public wouldn't bat an eye.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing... by JBReefer on Friday February 12, 2016 @12:39PM (#11088893)

Hell, I would be actively happy. I really don't like the impact Twitter has had on journalism and on outrage culture. It's too short to be intellectual and seems to encourage the "2 minutes of hate."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing... by 13thLetter on Friday February 12, 2016 @01:11PM (#11089134)

I have to second that. Twitter really does provide negative societal value, given that it's almost perfectly designed to drive outrage storms and incoherent, ingroup-pleasing snark in place of journalism. If Twitter suddenly vanished tomorrow, the quality of public debate in the United States would skyrocket.

[ Parent | on HN ]