NPR:
“We’ve reached the point where we’ve realized that there are other, better ways to achieve the same kind of community discussion around the issues we raise in our journalism,” he said, with money, and spending it efficiently, part of the issue. More than 5 million people each month engage with NPR on Twitter, compared to just a fraction of that number in the NPR.org comments. “In relative terms, as we set priorities, it becomes increasingly clear that the market has spoken. This is where people want to engage with us. So that’s what we’re going to emphasize,” he said.
Interesting. This is not about trolling and the high cost of moderation. Instead, it’s recognizing that engagement is moving to social media, like Twitter.
Except Twitter is not “community.” It’s a one-to-one or one-to-a-few conversation, limited to a few barks and howls per tweet. And the percentage of people who use Twitter is still quite limited.
Scary that we feel the way to have a conservation about the news of our day is a disconnected series of 140 character messages.
There are tech start-ups that would kill for Twitter’s user base. But Twitter’s user base is nothing compared to Facebook’s. Twitter might end up being a service of some larger conglomerate if they can’t monetize their user base.
Userbase is worth nothing if you can’t monetize it…
Only in terms of business performance. For users, Twitter, Facebook, Google et al would actually be better with less monetization.
When I checked, there were 1,581 comments on that article.
This is terribly disappointing to me. A bad move. DISQUS has been an excellent tool for them (and PBS) and allows better interaction than Twitter. I guess I’m done with NPR commenting…
Sadly, I believe this is actually Twitter’s current problem. The “bottom half of the internet” has moved there en masse, which is why on Twitter you’re never more than one click away from a lunatic bigot.