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I've long wondered this. I haven't followed the evolution of Twitter's homepage, but I'd be really shocked if they hadn't tested this to death. The thing is,

I've long wondered this. I haven't followed the evolution of Twitter's homepage, but I'd be really shocked if they hadn't tested this to death. The thing is, this keeps causing me to miss moments to engage with them. Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE! While I do of course have an account, if I were a non-user, I'd keep thinking "why would I sign-up when I have no idea if it is worth my time to be nagged by you via email?" There's a well understood notion that on user-generated content sites like Twitter, Reddit, etc. the number of content producers is relatively low compared to the number of content consumers. While I don't have data to support my hypothesis on this yet, my gut tells me that you have a better chance of converting people to content producers if you can get them hooked on being a content consumer. Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical. If I felt like I was really missing out on all the cool stuff going on within Twitter, I might be more inclined to sign up if I hadn't yet, and exposing that data lowers the barrier to entry. But again, I'd be shocked if they hadn't tested that to death.

rdl 11y ago
Three answers, one of which makes me feel shamefully too much of an asshole. 1) I think optimizing the naive-to-twitter experience is something which can't really be done through incremental A/B testable changes. 2) They have had technical capability limits which prevent them from surfacing great content for users based on what anyone else would call "ad tech". These are both technical and organizational/philosophical (which, over a long enough timescale, are the root cause of technical limitations in a $20b company). 3) (the obvious one involving the quote about clown cars and gold mines). It's not just "not logged in", it's "haven't been an active user for a long time". If one of my friends joins and JUST follows me, Twitter is boring/useless as can be. Their "recommend to follow" thing is utterly inadequate. Compare this to Facebook which is fucking awesome from your first interaction.
- jacobwcarlson 11y ago
  On Facebook you're generally connected to people you know in real life. So if a new person joins Facebook and connects with you, the FB recommendations are likely people the new person also knows. You frequently follow people on Twitter you only know from Twitter. Even if they follow you back, your friend just signing up may not know who the hell they are. So recommendations are more difficult.
  - rdl 11y ago
    Absolutely - Twitter has a harder problem to solve. Facebook also capitalized on the benefits of rich media earlier (biggest photo site in the world, now borging YouTube).
vacri 11y ago
> Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE! If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very big. > Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical. The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not the login process. It's the content itself, which is only a couple of sentences. It's not editing a video, or writing a short article, or creating an image, or managing a forum. It's just 'spurt out what I'm thinking right now in one sentence'. Login processes are not the barrier to content creation, effort required is.
- resu_nimda 11y ago
  Anecdotally, I've never bothered to sign up for Twitter, and the experience for logged-out users has contributed to that. Instead of thinking "wow all my friends and important people are on there so I guess I'll sign up," I think "well this isn't very engaging, but I still technically got the content I came for, so I'm not really incentivized to go further." And I disagree in general - login processes are often a huge barrier. People don't want to create accounts everywhere; it used to be cool and novel, now it's a burden.
  - vacri 11y ago
    I do agree that login processes can be a huge barrier. Slack got to be a gorilla by making onboarding buttery smooth, whilst its competitors had a fairly vanilla approach, clunky by comparison. But, in terms of content creation that the GP mentioned (rather than content consumption), login processes are not the problematic part.
- kriro 11y ago
  I think one of the mistakes may be that they focus on a wrong metric. I alway read signups/users as a cited metric. It would be way wiser to focus on improving more active metrics (engagement stuff). The start page is a good example...sure right now it seems to optimize for account creation but I'd say it would be more of a win if users actually engaged with the twitter stream. If it's useful they'll sign up. [alas I hope all of this was discussed and tested to death already]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

rdl 11y ago

Three answers, one of which makes me feel shamefully too much of an asshole. 1) I think optimizing the naive-to-twitter experience is something which can't really be done through incremental A/B testable changes. 2) They have had technical capability limits which prevent them from surfacing great content for users based on what anyone else would call "ad tech". These are both technical and organizational/philosophical (which, over a long enough timescale, are the root cause of technical limitations in a $20b company). 3) (the obvious one involving the quote about clown cars and gold mines). It's not just "not logged in", it's "haven't been an active user for a long time". If one of my friends joins and JUST follows me, Twitter is boring/useless as can be. Their "recommend to follow" thing is utterly inadequate. Compare this to Facebook which is fucking awesome from your first interaction.

jacobwcarlson 11y ago
On Facebook you're generally connected to people you know in real life. So if a new person joins Facebook and connects with you, the FB recommendations are likely people the new person also knows. You frequently follow people on Twitter you only know from Twitter. Even if they follow you back, your friend just signing up may not know who the hell they are. So recommendations are more difficult.
- rdl 11y ago
  Absolutely - Twitter has a harder problem to solve. Facebook also capitalized on the benefits of rich media earlier (biggest photo site in the world, now borging YouTube).

vacri 11y ago

> Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE! If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very big. > Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical. The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not the login process. It's the content itself, which is only a couple of sentences. It's not editing a video, or writing a short article, or creating an image, or managing a forum. It's just 'spurt out what I'm thinking right now in one sentence'. Login processes are not the barrier to content creation, effort required is.

resu_nimda 11y ago
Anecdotally, I've never bothered to sign up for Twitter, and the experience for logged-out users has contributed to that. Instead of thinking "wow all my friends and important people are on there so I guess I'll sign up," I think "well this isn't very engaging, but I still technically got the content I came for, so I'm not really incentivized to go further." And I disagree in general - login processes are often a huge barrier. People don't want to create accounts everywhere; it used to be cool and novel, now it's a burden.
- vacri 11y ago
  I do agree that login processes can be a huge barrier. Slack got to be a gorilla by making onboarding buttery smooth, whilst its competitors had a fairly vanilla approach, clunky by comparison. But, in terms of content creation that the GP mentioned (rather than content consumption), login processes are not the problematic part.
kriro 11y ago
I think one of the mistakes may be that they focus on a wrong metric. I alway read signups/users as a cited metric. It would be way wiser to focus on improving more active metrics (engagement stuff). The start page is a good example...sure right now it seems to optimize for account creation but I'd say it would be more of a win if users actually engaged with the twitter stream. If it's useful they'll sign up. [alas I hope all of this was discussed and tested to death already]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]