It seems the the rise of influencer culture led to everyone else feeling like they had to only be in a specific niche, and only speak about it or they weren’t going to serve their “fanbase”.
And you know they’re probably right that they wouldn’t serve that fanbase, but good grief has it made the net a generally much more boring place with space only for near-deified experts & influencers and perpetual newbs, leaving little room for anyone in the middle to have nuanced and varied conversations.
no one is complaining that a given person talks about multiple things.
people sometimes complain that there is only one topic on Twitter: the main stream, and therefore only one way to consume the things those individuals say. it's all or none, and that's what people are not happy about.
there's an argument to be made that "this is how Twitter is" which is valid, I think.
there's also an argument to be made that "my interests are specific, and everything else wastes my time" and I think there is just as much merit in that point of view.
Twitter has no topic at all. The interesting is jumbled with the inane, so the signal to noise ratio is very poor.
It's fine (and necessary) for everyone to be multifaceted. But it's not wrong to not care about some facets of a person you follow, in the context of social media.
Even two different people following the same person would care about different facets of that person, and not care about others.
The point is it's easier to manage the stream of information available to you if you can filter signal from noise in a way that you want.
Does that create a filter bubble? Maybe. Would it be better for everyone to read everything from everyone to get a broader perspective? Maybe. Or, maybe that would be worse, since there would be so much noise to sift through that the signal would be impossible to find.
That said, I think the biggest issue is neither of the above, but rather that it's really hard to design interfaces that allow people to sort the signal from the noise. To weight/filter information. I just haven't seen it.
Back to OP and @JohnSmith: if OP worked in an office with @JohnSmith, OP could tune out @JohnSmith's pineapple-pizza rants … or walk away. This would be easy and natural. OP would that they were analyzing this and adjusting appropriately to maximize JS discussion while avoiding pineapple.
We naturally weigh, throttle, and filter the input of others. This allows us to take the good with the bad.
This is the nuance that Twitter—and most social media—lacks: how do I stay up on what matters most without being overwhelmed by what doesn't without separating content from context?
I follow a few hundred people who only post about specific topics they are experts in and it’s still almost too much.
The last thing I want to read is all of their half-baked political opinions thrown in with hemorrhoid complaints.
The truth is idgaf about the individual persona on Twitter. Being multifaceted is for friends and other real human relationships.
I don't care about @JohnSmith's political stance or what pizza he likes.
Twitter is really great for almost any niche interest.
It is an absolute toxic wasteland dumpster-fire for anything related to politics (yes, even your politics) so sensible people would best avoid those political posts/discussions at all costs.
I want to follow @john-smith for his nuanced, thoughtful views on solid state batteries and EVs, and I'm extremely annoyed when he's retweeting moronic, tribalist politics into my feed.
All of these companies build user experiences entirely dedicated to profit, not giving the user the best experience.
If Twitter could give me interesting topical content I’d be much more engaged on the platform.
> Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people. This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content.
Very much this. As it is, if you've been followed mostly for JS, starting to tweet about Italian food feels like standing up at a JS meetup and telling people about Italian. I'd tweet more, on a greater diversity of interests, if that didn't mean hosing people. I'd also like to have tagging of "value vs smalltalk", to distinguish a JS thing worth standing up and bending 50 people's ears on, vs only worth an aside in an after-meetup bar-table JS discussion among local friends.
How might the market be altered to avoid network effects plus we've-thankfully-found-a-viable-niche conservatism from stagnating societal infrastructure progress?
Meanwhile, somewhat on-topic, I'm still annoyed that Facebook's mighty algo is showing me posts in languages that I don't speak / interact with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce#Comparisons_with_simila...
1. What topics someone is interested in is something they probably know more about than the poster does.
2. Because Circles were used for access control, someone I had not placed in the "parenting" Circle would not be allowed to read the post.
The closest thing I've seen to this is bloggers having tags, and making RSS feeds available both for everything and for individual tags.
Initially I was very confused as to why you would want kafkaesque features added.
You're following the person, not the vision you have of the person. If you're interested in just posts about a topic then Twitter isn't the platform for you.
In this case it certainly could, and is almost already implemented (in the form of both the "hashtags" and "topics").
Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people. This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content.
As someone who tweets, I’d like some sort of kafka-ish topic queues: I would post tweets about JS in the JS queue, and tweets about Italian food in that other queue, so that people could follow the queues they want. In the end I don’t tweet on either topic because I’m afraid I’ll deceive people who followed me for the other content.