Twitter update

[Crow]

I fairly rarely read twitter posts unless they get highlighted somewhere. Has there been anything real good on basketball analytics on that medium in the last month or year? Seems like a lot of analysts use it but I do not see a lot there with depth when I look, except the occasional link to a file that might interest me. 140 characters is just so darn short and I find the medium very unfriendly for following dialog. I think it is unfortunate that this "long-form" forum no longer gets used or used much by many who once did.

There are more good website / blogs than there used to be, but only a few generate much or any discussion and rarely for more than a day or two. If you know of a good article that many might have missed, feel free to post that too.

[edkupfer]

ahem.

https://en.twitter.com/EdKupfer

[Mike G]

Was just coming in to ask the following question, and nothing to do with Ed posting here:
Are the twittering crowd mostly those who tend to make pithy and/or non-substantive comments anyway?

[Crow]

Sorry Ed, I scrolled thru your tweets from the last year, again, and nothing made a strong impression to me. I prefer your old substantive posts here.

[Crow]

Was just coming in to ask the following question, and nothing to do with Ed posting here:
Are the twittering crowd mostly those who tend to make pithy and/or non-substantive comments anyway?

Some of the twittering crowd making pithy and/or non-substantive comments have done excellent in-depth work in public view. Some still do. Just not here or rarely here.


One old-timer who faded away from here reportedly because he didn't have enough time, was / is however finding time though to crank out 10-20 tweets a day amongst other activities. Actually there are a number of folks in this general category, if not that level of activity. Their choice of course; but I thought I'd lament it one last time. The only real advantage I see to twitter is that a lot more people might casually view what you say but I think a lot of the folks at or previously at APBRmetrics probably miss a lot or all of that material. But maybe I am one of the few outliers who doesn't find this medium to be convenient or worthwhile.

[DSMok1]

I don't find a ton of unique stuff on Twitter, but there is enough good stuff to keep me interested.

Here is my Stats list: https://twitter.com/#!/DSMok1/stats

The only stuff that's really unique is Haralabos Voulgaris's feed. He has his own statistics system/database and doesn't post anything from it elsewhere.

[Crow]

Thanks for the link to your list.

But after spending 10-15 minutes browsing thru most of the names, I didn't see anything on twitter I was sorry to have missed.

[jbrocato23]

Crow,

I think the primary benefit of Twitter (at least for us basketball fans) is the super quick updates on things like team transactions, player injuries, and sometimes player performances shortly after games. It is also a great way to find interesting stuff when people tweet and retweet links to articles. I don't think twitter has much value with respect to useful tweets with meaningful statistical analysis though.

[Crow]

Yes there can be value from twitter for news and fan reaction to games and news and other things; but it is challenging to use it for quantitative analysis (beyond a single data point or simple comparison) or for commentary on quantitative analysis, except for simple links to files or articles or for specific short observations on analytic issues, perhaps in a running dialogue. Someone people make it work for what they want to say. It just seems harder overall to me than the alternative mediums.

I should add that I had a far easier time seeing dialogue on this check (once I saw the conversation link) than I recall from any previous attempts to follow twitter exchanges. Maybe I was missing some understanding of where to click previously as well or maybe things got easier to follow?

[Crow]

Guess there is nothing folks especially want to highlight from twitter on basketball analytics and / or they don't want to bother with a non=twitter platform. As expected. (I guess twitter is so neat and hip that they don't really wanna go back to old school conversation.)

[mtamada]

I don't find a ton of unique stuff on Twitter, but there is enough good stuff to keep me interested.

Here is my Stats list: https://twitter.com/#!/DSMok1/stats

I finally signed up for a twitter account about 5 months ago but stopped following it after a month. For me, there was nowhere near enough useful information to make it worthwhile. On the few occasions when something truly interesting or important does arise, it gets mentioned in other media or on blogs. The other tweets are simply a waste of time to read.

That being said, the twitter stream that DSMok1 follows is pretty good. E.g. when I looked just now there were a ton of tweets by John Hollinger and other bigwigs (and some not so big wigs) about Olympic basketball. If I were to start reading twitter again, I'd start by copying that twitter stream.

But. Although I like and respect John Hollinger's work, I don't read it very often. I only want to read his more important or groundbreaking stuff. Do I want to read his random comments about how the US Olympic team is playing? Nope. And I say that not out of disrespect to John, who's been a key character in the increased visibility of advanced basketball stats. But just as I don't need nor want to read Barack Obama's tweets (when he says something important, which happens almost every day, it'll be on the news), I don't want or need to read every single one of John Hollinger's basketball thoughts.

The only tweets that I've ever really liked were the fake ones from the Bronx Zoo cobra. But I quickly found that it was better to simply go to the website with her tweets whenever I wanted a laugh, than to try to follow a twitter feed.

[wilq]

Crow, I understand your sarcasm and overall bitterness toward twitter [because I had exactly the same initial reaction]. And if you are interested only in in-depth analysis or long discussions that's fine but we have platforms for such since late 90s so why would you expect twitter to improve this experience? IMHO that's totally missing the point of any new medium.
At least for me there are two main features for guys like us:

1) availability of smart/interesting people.
We know from this topic that Ed Kupfer still reads this forum and maybe Neil Paine, Kevin Pelton and John Hollinger take a look on occasion like they used to but if you want to ask them a question or discuss any topic with a hope of semi-quick answer your best bet is twitter. And this applies to almost every basketball writer right now, isn't it?
The reason for this situation is really simple: following a couple of forums where someone may ask you a question requires waaaaaaaay more effort and time than following your own twitter mentions.
Also twitter is probably the most efficient way to follow other people's work [though obviously entire content is not only on twitter and links usually lead to blog posts or articles].

2) inspiration for conversations/posts.
It used to be the domain of forums like this one but I think in recent years the focus has shifted. There are fewer topics with an approach "hey let's discuss this random idea" which could lead anywhere and more topics like "I've done a study, here are the results, any comments?" which is basically an extension of a blog model... at which point I think blogs work better.
Again, this may be only my point of view but recently I started waaaaaaaaaay more "projects" and checked waaaaaaay more curiosities based on a random tweet than from this forum because free-flowing nature of twitter is just more creative and thanks to many people involved topics can take very different paths.

[Crow]

I hear your point of view. I know what twitter has and does well; I was mainly pointing out what it doesn't have / doesn't do well at all. If more "basketball analysts" did twitter and a blog that has open discussion or a forum I would not be picking on twitter's limitations.

I've considered using twitter to ask short questions. I am not real confident on getting replies from certain folks (given their response rate to me here in the past or elsewhere) or getting very meaningful replies to me in 140 characters or less though. But maybe I'll try sometime if it really matters to me. So far it hasn't. I just generally don't feel like chasing folks who abandoned this site over to an inferior medium for super short exchanges. If they decide to bother to reply to a deeper basketball analytic question instead of doing what they do most of the time, which seems to be sharing tiny news bits and shooting the breeze talking about themselves and random stuff they think is funny.

[bbstats]

I do about 60% of my analysis, etc, purely on my twitter.

[wilq]

I just generally don't feel like chasing folks who abandoned this site over to an inferior medium

I had a similar situation/feeling with local usenet group so unless you are interested in less discussions with increasing nostalgia about good old times you have two options:
- find a new medium where you can do what you want to do. It doesn't have to be twitter, maybe other forum [RealGM has a statistical subforum] or maybe even start your own blog.
- adapt and start using tools to your advantage. I'm sorry but to me you complain about things which [in this case twitter] didn't even try to accomplish - "hey, this highway doesn't work at all like the road next to my house so I'll avoid it". You can use both! In a different way but they can complement each other very well.

If they decide to bother to reply to a deeper basketball analytic question instead of doing what they do most of the time, which seems to be sharing tiny news bits and shooting the breeze talking about themselves and random stuff they think is funny.

Is there a place where you can get answers for all your "deeper basketball analytic questions"?