Interesting Links for 11-08-2014

[andrewducker]

• J.R.R. Tolkien's 10 Tips For Writers
  (tags: Tolkien writing advice )
• How a Basic Income would make it easier to work flexibly, and be a better fit for modern society
  (tags: GuaranteedIncome work )
• 11 Problems With The House Of Lords Explained Using Cats
  (tags: law houseoflords cats politics reform )
• Amazon opens up a new front in its war. This

Comments

Here's What Happens When Your Joke Goes Massively Viral On Twitter

[drdoug]

I had a Twitter pic I posted go fairly-viral (thousands rather than millions). It was really cool when loads of people I know reacted positively and passed it on ... then it started to get a bit random when people I'd never heard of were responding. Then it got a bit weird when the foreign-languages-I-don't-speak messages started. I had to turn off notification emails from Twitter, since it was completely swamping my inbox. Then I stumbled across other people who'd nicked the picture and were claiming it as theirs, or not attributing it, which was slightly irksome. I realised that the wording of my Tweet was ambiguous and looked like I was passing it on unattributed, rather than saying that it was my own work inspired by someone else I'd retweeted. I'm pretty sure the picture then took on a life of its own that was harder to track.

After a fortnight or so it had calmed down and more of my notifications were from people I knew than people I didn't. It's more than two months later, and I still occasionally get flurries of notifications from Twitter when someone else comes across it and passes it on.

It was a fun ride. In retrospect I'd have been happier if I'd been clearer in the original tweet and put an attribution on the photo (which would've been ripped off at some point, but most people wouldn't). It'd also be really cool if Twitter had better features for managing that - but that's not a problem most users have.

Re: Here's What Happens When Your Joke Goes Massively Viral On Twitter

[andrewducker]

I've had a couple of tweets go on for weeks, and that was bad enough - a couple of days of my feed being full of notifications, and then having them pop up again intermittently.

This one, from April, got retweeted again two days ago:
https://twitter.com/andrewducker/status/451296684438736896/photo/1

But it's now down to that level. And it's only been 300 retweets, not many thousands of them.

(And the pic was something I found on imgur)