The day context came back to Twitter

But what if you could build a version of Twitter that kept out the Reply Guys and the sea lions, and included only people who had some shared context around a subject or interest? That’s the idea between the company’s launch today of Communities, a way to create semi-public groups where only members can participate in conversations.

And even if Twitter navigates those issues successfully, it’s still unclear how its groups product will fare against some fairly robust competition. Facebook Groups, Reddit, especially Discord have been thriving lately, and the latter two have been built from the ground up to promote the kind of group discussions that Twitter is only now getting ar... See more

One of the most useful concepts for understanding why social networks so often drive us to despair is context collapse: taking multiple audiences with different norms, standards, and levels of knowledge, and herding them all into a single digital space to coexist. Predictably, this regularly leads to conflict — and, at the scale of an entire countr... See more

Whether you say the right thing or the wrong thing, it will inevitably get misconstrued by someone, and suddenly you’ve wasted an afternoon explaining yourself to people seemingly determined to misunderstand you.

Of course, groups have their downsides. Facebook’s groups product has regularly come in for criticism for hosting extremism and misinformation, particularly related to vaccines. The same thing that can make groups fun to use — the posts are less visible to outsiders, and can therefore build a sense of shared purpose — also makes them harder to poli... See more