TECH: Twitter Takes The 'Social' Out Of Social Media

Twitter seems to be repositioning itself as a rolling news operation.  That’s not a surprise exactly, but it’s a shame.

Its new ‘Moments’ feature, so far only available in the US, seems to be a digest of the most tweeted about stories of the day.  A bit like a Twitter version of Flipboard or Google’s Play Newsstand. (Being UK-based I’m sorry if that’s not a fair description of a feature I’ve not used.  But that’s definitely what it sounds like.)

 

Twitter's 'Moments' feature

As a new direction it seems like an admission of defeat from the company – they’re giving up on trying to persuade more people to interact with each other and want to be yet another online news source.

It’s not a surprise though.  Despite the large amount of accounts out there, there’s a significant proportion of people who have never really used it at all.  And daily use is on the wane with a lot of people who to check it every minute, let alone daily.  Meanwhile, Facebook continues to thrive.  As an experiment, post exactly the same thing on Twitter and Facebook – a random bit of silliness, a link to a news article, whatever you like.  I am willing to bet that in most cases the level of interaction and debate with other people will be much larger (and faster) on Facebook than on Twitter. 

For most casual users of Twitter, if just one person replies to your tweet these days, I’d say you’d be doing very well indeed.

That’s a shame.  It’s a company that used to thrive on millions of strangers interacting with each other, discussing common interests with people from all around the world.  It felt like a threat to Facebook at one point.  It was certainly cooler and trendier than Facebook, which was yesterday’s news.  (I’m aware that using words like cool and trendy makes me look like last week’s news.  I’m in my mid-30s with a baby on the way.  Sue me.) 

The Twitter experience has changed a lot since I joined.  It seems a lot less irreverent and amusing, for instance.  The balance between humour and silliness/current affairs and politics is a lot less balanced, on my timeline at any rate.  It’s news, famous people, journalists, more news, interspersed by the odd lonely and ignored tweet from a ‘normal’ user, sitting there forlornly unretweeted and unfavourited.  I suppose I could change my experience by unfollowing some people and finding some new followers.  But the novelty’s worn off now and that feels like it would be a chore I haven’t got the time for.

Twitter nowadays feels more corporate, more adult.  That’s because it is.  A lot of teenagers have moved on to things like Snapchat and other things that parents and politicians don’t use.  The journalist Grace Dent said that when your boss follows you on Twitter, Twitter is over for you.  Well if you’re a teenager and your parents sign up I expect this is even more accurate.

But leaving that to one side, the democratic feel of Twitter vanished when a Twitterstocracy emerged.  There was at some point a distinct drift to the dominance of power users (a mix of already famous journos, celebs, comedians and politicians with a handful of early adopters who gained prominence through heavy use and controversial/witty tweeting).  People stopped following new people as much and settled for the groups they already had.  (If you are a casual user, ie not using Twitter to promote your business, when was the last time you gained a load of followers who weren’t real life friends or spam?)

New users joining after this point would realise quickly they weren’t going to get followers very quickly without putting in a lot of effort. Their voices just weren’t going to be heard unless they turned into attention seeking controversy machines or were a company that could employ dedicated social media experts to create an online presence.

Even people who have been on Twitter for quite some time find that their tweets will be read by a relatively small amount of people if by anyone at all. More and more people have become passive users, reading but not interacting, not creating, sometimes only promoting.  And even at promotion, without a lot of followers it’s not actually that great.  For instance, I have always posted links to this blog on Twitter and I can tell from my stats that I don’t get any traffic from Twitter anymore.  I used to, but not anymore, nothing.  I get more from Google + for God’s sake!  Whether that’s because I don’t tweet enough on Twitter to have a presence on it I don’t know, but it’s not really encouraging me to continue to use it as a promotional tool.

It feels like the glory days of Twitter being a fun place to natter and chatter have gone, except perhaps when there’s a live television event.  As a company it is being steered  towards having a serious purpose, which isn’t as fun.

Loads of my freemium apps have started getting adverts telling me to use Twitter for all the latest news. This morning I had a Twitter alert about some “latest news” being retweeted.  I opened the link which went to a 2007 Guardian article about Martin Amis’ comments on Islam.  Hmm.  Might not be using Twitter for all the latest news just yet…

BOOKS: So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Social Media doesn’t have to be a scary place – but it can wreck your life.

That is the main feeling I came away with after reading Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, a book which illustrates the perils of (amongst other things) having an ‘online presence’.

Here he looks at public shamings, which since the advent of Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) have become a massive part of society again.  One of the many cases explored in SYBPS is Jonah Lehrer, a writer who turned out to have used invented Bob Dylan quotes in his book.  After the initial controversy died down, he gave an apology speech, accompanied by a live Twitter feed.  That is the modern equivalent of being jeered at in the stocks, and serves as the perfect visual metaphor for what this book is about .  Social Media doesn’t accept apologies, partly because there are too many people out there who love sticking the boot in, and people find it hard to defend themselves against such overwhelming attack.  A judge from the American Deep South is interviewed for the book.  He’s known for using public shame in many of his sentences (drunk drivers have to hold signs by the highway proclaiming their crime - that sort of thing).  But he argues that the people he subjects to shame are at least found guilty first.  Who is in charge of finding people guilty on Twitter?  No one, obviously – or perhaps everyone.  We all just act as part of one big algorithm that surges wildly every now and then over specific incidents.

In the book, it is pointed out that, especially online, our reputation is everything.  And to lose it can be incredibly traumatic.  Justine Sacco is probably the most famous of the recent Twitterstorm victims, and Ronson gives a précis of the affair (and some others mentioned in the book) in this video made for The Guardian.

Justine Sacco probably naively thought the only people who would read her tweets were some of her 170 or so followers.  She thought she was making a point in a satirical way but as she says when interviewed in the book, she is not a comedienne or a character on South Park.  Her joke wasn’t funny, and because it wasn’t just an ill-judged text to a friend you could later apologise to but was a tweet it lingered in cyberspace as a potentially offensive statement waiting for people to take offence at it. 

Sacco lost her job (at a PR company of all places…).  I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine that she wouldn’t have immediately lost her job for saying the exact same sentence at work even in front of her manager.  She definitely would have had a disciplinary, possibly even been suspended, but she probably wouldn’t have been fired on the spot.  The guys at the tech conference who got fired for making a sexual innuendo about a dongle definitely wouldn’t have been fired if Twitter hadn’t been whipped up into a frenzy.  But Twitter was whipped up into such a frenzy on that occasion it meant that the person who originally complained lost her job.  I mean, no one is a winner here, are they?  As it happens I do think that Adria Richards overreacted regarding a conversation she overheard two strangers have at a conference.  I do think it was right to call her out on that.  But obviously before too long Twitter had in turn overreacted to her overreaction and there were calls for her to be raped and liberal uses of the C-word and all the other nonsense that shows Twitter at its worst.  So even Twitter loses in this case, as in similar cases (#GamerGate anyone?) where its users make it seem as if it is exclusively populated by swearing misogynists obsessed with rape.

Did these people really deserve to lose their jobs and effectively have post-traumatic stress syndrome just for making a bad call on Twitter?   I don’t think so.  I think employers will have to develop more sophisticated ways of dealing with internet indiscretions than simply firing people, because these incidents are going to keep on happening.  Ronson points out that we often like to think that when the Twitterstorm dies down, the person at the centre of it all will be fine really, but his book proves that it doesn’t really work like that.  The people he speaks to in his book all show similar signs of post-traumatic shock and depression for at least a few months after it ‘all dies down’.

Jon Ronson is an excellent journalist who is adept at taking a subject and making it accessible, without dumbing down.  He investigates a subject and lets you in on his investigations rather than just feeding back the results, which gives his books a novelistic and compulsive quality.  And at the very least, this book will definitely make you consider a few more seconds before pressing send on a tweet.