twitter communities/the living dead
Not a month passes by or some blogger launches a moan about how the initiative to comment on blog articles is slowly declining. This is definitely not a new phenomenon, 3 years ago I wrote my own whine to preserve the noble art of commenting, but even I was just a link in a long chain of bloggers complaining. One of the most cited arguments is that the discussion has shifted over to Twitter. A statement that can be easily verified, so why not try to do that with some numbers?
the setup
A few weeks ago the people of Smashing Magazine launched a pretty interesting question through their Twitter account. They asked themselves (and all their followers) how the skills of a good front-end developer could(/should) best be tested. While the answer to this question seems mostly relevant to team leaders and HR people, the core of the question is something that should speak to every professional front-end developer out there: "What makes a front-end developer a good professional".
It prompted me to write an article on hiring front-end developers, but at the same time I was pretty interested to read what others would consider important qualifications for becoming a good front-end developer. So for the first time in my life I clicked on a Twitter hash tag (just for reference, I'm using Tweet Deck to manage everything Twitter related), quite anxious to dive into this hidden layer of Twitter's social communication platform.
For those of you who don't know the Smashing Magazine Twitter, it's pretty much set up like a direct feed of interesting links on web development. Because of that it garnered a pretty extensive base of followers. Current numbers are flirting with the 400.000 mark, so when they present a question on Twitter it reaches 400.000 people without any form of further social intervention. That's a lot of possible replies, right?
the numbers
I did my reply count a couple of days later, by then not many new replies where added to the list. Since it was the first time I was trying out filtering on hash tags, I really had no idea what the multitude of replies would be, but even then I couldn't have imagined how poor the actual results looked. From a potential audience of roughly 400.000 people, came ... 50 replies.
That's a 0.00125% reply rate, meaning only 1 in 8000 people took the time to write a (133 characters maximum) reply. Now of course not all followers are probably active accounts and Smashing Magazine has a pretty strong focus on design, which probably eliminates a percentage of people who aren't all that interested in front-end, but no matter how you look at it, 1 in 8000 is a pretty sad statistic.
On the upside, speaking in absolute numbers, 50 reactions is still a pretty solid result. But let's not get too excited yet. 20 entries in that list of 50 are mere retweets. I don't know why a program like Tweet Deck doesn't filter these as retweets merely functions as information noise when scrolling through the list of replies, but a good 40% of what you're getting is just other people asking the same question again. An important part of the social Twitter structure no doubt, but not at all interesting to someone like me, who's looking for actual answers. So without those 20 retweets, we still have 30 actual replies left.
on comedy, feminism and other nonsense
This being the web and all, everyone can say and post whatever he wants. There isn't much in the way of moderation possible on Twitter either (at least, as far as I know), so those 30 replies are not necessarily all on-topic. Of course it's the same with comments, though those are a lot easier to moderate. So what did I find among these 30 replies?
Well, we all know the web is full of comedians, and so I found some nonsense on Star Wars and IE6 not worth reading, totaling 4 tweets. Apparently there are also a few active feminists watching the Smashing Magazine Twitter, as there appeared to be some consternation on the usage of the word "he", which obviously needed a swift intervention. Together with retweeting and some sucking up to these remarks, it totaled 5 tweets. One random tweet just listed the hash tag, so that one could be scrapped from our list too. This leaves us with 20 factual replies to the posed question.
It's a tad risky to discuss the quality of the contents of these replies as everyone has his own ideas on front-end development, but I for one don't believe that implementing front-end code in any kind of CMS is part of the basic front-end skill set. If you're looking for people who can do that, you're probably not looking for hardcore front-ender developers but a cross-over profile who's versed in both back-end and front-end development. So to be fair, let's just keep it at 20 replies in total (one of which was my own though).
the bottom line
The stone-cold bottom line: 1 in 20.000 people actually found the time to write an actual reply to the question. That's 20x133 characters, mostly comprised of straight keywords lacking any form of decent argumentation. Only 1 tweet contained a link to a blog post that actually went a bit deeper than listing things like "writing clean code" and "make him do a practical test without internet connection".
Maybe the Smashing Magazine Twitter is a bad representation of the web development community living on Twitter, but considering all the limitations the Twitter format presents to holding a decent discussion (the 140 character limit, hardly enough to fit in a full sentence) and the poor quality output of such a huge community, I'm hardly convinced that Twitter is the right place for us to talk about our work.
I do believe it's the perfect place to share links (though not in any shortened form) and to post funny/thoughtful oneliners, but beyond that it remains a rather poor communication platform. If you take the above figures into consideration, I believe it's hard to contest that conclusion. If I'm missing something though, don't tweet it to me, just list it in the comment section.
Comments
Mathias
How did you count the replies? Which page did you visit? I’m asking because Twitter is known to limit search results.
Niels Matthijs
I clicked on Tweet Deck's hash tag link. I've done so a couple of times, right after the question was posed, then once again each day for a day or 4, maybe 5.
Zubin Wadia
If you want to have extended real-time discussions with people on Twitter, I do recommend our service: SecretSocial...
Try the chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/abbfhmejhanbbdocnoigkfhdkblpbkop?hl=en#
Or go to: http://shh.sh
Mike Cane
I searched for the #smcss via Topsy. The number was even lower! Twitter Search found nothing! Yeah, that's Twitter. And why I left it.
Simon Scarfe
A question like this, being asked on Twitter is going to be somewhat temporal, making it a bad medium for anything more than casual discussion. A huge proportion of that potential 400,000 audience could well be asleep, and I don't know about you, but I don't trackback hugely on my Twitter feed.
I follow SM on twitter, and sometimes reply to these tweets, but I can only imagine that I see a small percentage of them. I guess if you wanted really quality non-blog-based feedback (beyond an IRC-style sounding board), you would post such a question (or a link to your blogpost) to a more permanent forum (e.g. Quora, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, or Reddit).
yjhall
Or, if you just want to tell somebody what you think but for some reason you must remain anonymous, tip a spot at spottiness.com.
Heyo
There's reddit, thoughtful questions end up getting thousands of comments
Me
Twitter is not that bad. I got 2 issues with my telecom provider. I called several times without a satisfactory result.
So I tweeted about the issue with the hashtag of the provider and they called me to solve my issue.
I'm glad they have helped me that quickly. But it's actually sad that all those people calling their support and paying for it get bad support....
Twitter Sucks
What's the incentive to comment? There are no threads to join in, no continuing conversation based on previous thoughts & opinions, no sense of continuity or community.
Twitter just seems like a bunch of autistic voices calling into the wind.
Bill Posters
Good point. The strength of Twitter lies in making links and isolated comments that you post visible to the people who follow you, or follow that hashtag if you included one. But for longer discussion involving things such as: elaboration, clarification, exploration, conversation, actual sentences and maybe even paragraphs involving back and forth discourse - you know, just those little things we have in our language, those things are lost in Twitter. What remains is curious, but utterly expendable, deletable, forgettable. Which is ok. Twitter is ok for mass micro-expression and sign-posting. Just don't depend on it for anything deeper than sign posting.
Martin
Interesting article but I agree with Simon Scarfe (#5).
Although Smashing Mag has 400,000 followesrs that does not mean that all of those follower accounts are active or that all of the active followers would see the question. There's also the fact that the question won't be relevant to a lot of people. I follow their twitter account but just for photoshop articles.
I think your overall point is probably true to a certain extent, although different communities will have very active/high response rates, but your figures are probably way off.
Andrew
Haven't you figured it out yet?
Tweets are nothing but ADS for the real content on the internet. Tweet = Ad ; Blog Post = TV Show
140-character limit? Sounds like 30 seconds!
Ever get real DATA from a tweet, or simply marketing bullshit?
Can you have a discussion? Maybe, but it's with the idiots in marketing, not the CEO or Engineering staff. This article proves even more that discussion via Tweets are weak.
I ignore Tweets like I ignore TV ads, with the same derision and hate of the time-wasters they are. While they may pique your interest, once you delve into the real message, most consumers are unimpressed.
Haggar
The answer is in the comment section itself. The number of comments that fit into the 133 character limit are minimal (2 ?). I would not expect a 'micro blogging' service to serve up thought provoking comments / answers within that limit.
The comment section is meant for a discussion. Does twitter really provide that ? I doubt it
Niels Matthijs
I fully agree that Twitter is no place for serious discussion, but it's an argument I see appearing many times when people are complaining about the decline in blog post comments. That's why I wanted to verify it myself. It also amuses me to see people refer to oldstyle forums for decent replies, even after more than 5 years of social web revolution.
Well, I did list these arguments in the article itself so I am aware of the assumptions I'm making here. I'm not saying that these figures are representative for the whole of Twitter, but even if only 10% of the accounts is active and 50% of those active accounts don't care about front-end at all, the results are still very meager. Which is why I didn't mind publishing this article, based on just one single experiment.