Why is Twitter Destroying Itself?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/twitter-is-the-webs-best-public-identity-service-151-so-why-is-it-destroying-itself/261497/

by ytNumbers • 14 years ago

38 22 14 years ago

theatlantic.com

tptacek9• 14 years ago

This Atlantic blog piece engages so little with the question in its headline (it really doesn't engage at all, except by means of a flimsy metaphor in the last graf of the piece) that you have to assume someone else at the Atlantic wrote this headline. That's often the case at big publications; authors write reasonable pieces, and then editors slap crazy headlines on them to maximize views.

An Atlantic blog post that merely pondered the question of "Why is Twitter willing to alienate new Tumblr users" would obviously not drive as many views; people (rightly) don't expect random bloggers at The Atlantic to have a lot of insight into that question, and the only reason you'd want to read someone grappling with that question is if there was some promise that they'd have an answer.

The Atlantic's mostly poor coverage of technology issues is synecdochic of the decline of the whole publication in the wake of its pivot towards online journalism. They built a website with a pretty firm wall between The Atlantic Monthly and The Atlantic (Website), recruited some blog writers, and got some of their correspondants (Fallows, in particular) to write alongside them. Gradually, the blog writers seem to have swallowed the whole place, driving it towards Huffington-esque short-form provocations instead of essays and journalism; this mentality has infected the Monthly as well.

The same fate, of becoming a second-rate version of Slate with a reputation propped up by a second-rate version of The New Yorker, interestingly hasn't seemed to have befallen The New Yorker itself.

deweerdt• 14 years ago

> that you have to assume someone else at the Atlantic wrote this headline

In the newspaper industry, that's common practice. It takes a different skill set to sum up an article in a small amount of words and to write said article.

klochner3• 14 years ago

Agreed on the link bait title, pretty sure you misused "synecdochic". Synecdoche is like metaphor, but the former I've only seen used to explicitly refer to figures of speech, like a simile, while the latter is used interchangeably with "symbolic", so a thing could be metaphoric, but only written or oral communications could be synecdochic.

tptacek9• 14 years ago

A small instance of a larger concept that does a good job of illustrating the contours of that larger concept; a part for the whole.

(Who the hell would downvote your comment? Weird! I fixed that.)

rhizome3• 14 years ago

Betteridge's Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

tptacek9• 14 years ago

This headline doesn't pose a yes/no question. More generally: at this point, do you still think it's helpful to remind people of this Wikipedia article?

Spooky23• 14 years ago

The piece isn't Pulitzer material, but I think the headline is reasonable. The fundamental thing that makes a bazaar successful is the network effect -- it's a commons. Teenagers hang out at the mall because that's where their friends are.

When you start capriciously kicking various people out of your bazaar, it's reasonable to ask why you are destroying yourself.

tptacek9• 14 years ago

The question the piece asks in its headline is, "why is Twitter destroying itself?". It's not until the very last graf of the piece where an allusion is made to a bazaar (actually, a town, but stipulated). But you have to support the argument that Twitter is, or needs to be, a bazaar, to tie that to the headline.

I simultaneously don't think Twitter needs to be a bazaar to avoid its destruction, and don't think denying find-friends to Tumblr is particularly good evidence for/against their long-term bazaar-i-ness.

coltr• 14 years ago

This guy just joined Tumblr on Monday? Doesn't this kind of discredit his opinion?

tptacek9• 14 years ago

The article doesn't work if he's a long-time Tumblr user, because find-friends is something you typically do when you first join.

dchuk• 14 years ago

Because they haven't properly understood how to monetize since day 1

tptacek9• 14 years ago

They are by many accounts significantly (as in, not just pro-forma) profitable.

gavinlynch• 14 years ago

It isn't.

jerrya• 14 years ago

It seems dumb in the same way that vertical integration is often seen to be inferior to horizontal integration.

If for instance Twitter is doing this to support Posterous, a tumblr competitor, this will probably harm Twitter more than it will support Posterous.

When I heard they cut of Instagram, I figured it was to support TwitPic (or?) which again seems to be a losing move for them.

Why is Twitter Destroying Itself?

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