[TuringNYC]

>> Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience.

Is that really true? Suppose King goes to a new social platform. Sure, I might install that app, but without a critical mass or others on that platform, what are the chances I actually check that app frequently?

[tptacek]

Yes, this is really true. People on HN will see less of Stephen King, to the extent that they're not part of his audience (maybe HN is more of an Ari Aster crowd). But that doesn't matter: people aren't spending hundreds of millions of dollars on 2019 movies based on books he wrote in the 1980s because he's driving lots of Twitter engagement.

This whole discussion about King's relevance is super weird. I think it's just Internet poisoning (it happens to all of us). The fact is: Stephen King is probably more culturally relevant than Twitter. That a lot of people on this thread wouldn't even entertain this thought is a cognitive bias that comes from being very online. Most people aren't very online, and even among the very online, Twitter's relevance has been waning for many years.

Most people don't use Twitter at all! But it's actually possible that a significant fraction of the American public --- maybe even most of it! --- has seen or is deeply familiar with a Stephen King film. The #1 film in the IMDB Top 250 is a Stephen King film!

[gh02t]

I agree with you to an extent, but I will note that while most Americans don't directly use Twitter, I think a much much larger fraction are exposed to it. It's hard to escape when every news outlet and gossip farm cites it constantly and you have to factor that in when discussing its relevance.

I simultaneously don't think I personally know a single person that uses Twitter regularly and yet I equally don't think I know a single person that doesn't know what it is and sees second hand content from it regularly.

[kasey_junk]

I left Twitter a few years ago, and other than stories about Twitter itself I can’t think of the last time I saw Twitter content.

I’m a middle aged tech dude and I see more tik tok content! And I don’t have any tik tok presence.

I think it’s really easy to over-estimate twitters impact. I virtually never see anything from it.

[dkrich]

This is so true. Virtually all content in my feed is absolute shit and Twitter unlike Facebook and tiktok is terrible at driving engagement. Everything that’s suggested is crap. Probably just the nature of the platform and its content. I visit the site pretty frequently as a way to gauge stock market sentiment and for that it’s pretty decent but make no mistake the site overall is a bubble of a small sect of society who think they and the site are far more important than they are.

I don’t know a single person in real life who uses the site at all.

[themitigating]

If he says something note worthy on another service won't news services and maybe even other twitter users report on it?