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No Stupid Questions @kbin.social
Saturdaycat @kbin.social

Is places like Mastodon, Twitter, and this Threads thing just places for people to just write some blurb?

I have never understood the concept of Twitter and such, is it basically like Live Journal with a text limit ? How do the interactions even work ? Just people saying something unprompted and then people just talk?

10 comments

  • I'm upvoting you purely for describing Twitter as "Live Journal with a text limit". That is exactly what it is and with infinitely less privacy or conversational value.

    • Ahhh that makes a lot of sense okay! I just don't understand how businesses and establishments claim to say that without Twitter they don't get lifesaving information. What lifesaving information lives on Twitter ? Is this just an exaggeration? Something about weather alerts ? I get weather info just fine without twitter, like on live news articles on their respective websites

      • Oh, for that use case then Twitter is a bit different. Information on Twitter moves fast and you can get quick, bite-sized updates on a company or event (via tags) much quicker than most sites. The ease of sharing information made it very popular for things like announcing updates on website/app down times or catching up on election news for example.

  • Basically, yeah. People share something whether it be a thought or an image or news or whatnot and others would reply to them and have sort of a mini-discussion. I'm not a fan, but a lot of people really enjoy how simple and brief it is.

    • Huh okay yeah I opened a Twitter so many years ago and deleted it, I didn't have anything to say and didn't care to hear anyone's burbs anyway. That makes a lot of sense then. I just don't get the appeal at all! Thank you.

      • You probably aren't real caught up in celebrity worship of any sort. It always seemed to me like a big chunk Twitter was celebrities being able to spam random stuff out to a bunch of their fans. I don't much care about celebrities of any kind, so I never was compelled to use Twitter. However, LOTS of people are way into celebrities, including the giant number of minor social media celebrities, for whatever reason, and those folks probably love being spammed by them very frequently.

  • When I was still using it for science we simply boasted about our achievements and called that "networking".
    My new paper is out in the International Journal of Unreproducible Science, cite me, I'm begging you!

    • I bet now this just happens on LinkedIn lol!

      • My bubble disappointingly is still doing that on Twitter. Since they convinced themselves that Twitter is an essential networking tool it's hard to ditch.
        LinkedIn was more seen as "if you want to leave science go to LinkedIn, otherwise ignore that platform". But it absolutely does happen there, too, just not to that extend, from what I am seeing.

10 comments