6 ms·

Fixing Twitter

308 points by rkudeshi 11y ago

josai 11y ago
Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese "copy" of twitter (hint: it's not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that's ahead of twitter in many respects. Just off the top of my head, weibo has: - the "event" grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping system ("micro topics") - rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are very popular) - payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw - properly threaded conversations, easy to follow - a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to connect companies to the system I'm aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at what they're doing seems like a pretty good starting point.
HappyTypist 11y ago
Very interesting point regarding the illusion of interaction that Instagram provides. I do find Twitter's displaying of replies and retweets (to the first 100) questionable. As for how Twitter can improve in that aspect, how about a horizontally-scrolling feed of users who retweet, and a less-annoying version of such for comments? They seem like relatively easy design choices.
steckerbrett 11y ago
> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That's not unexpected given their signup flow, it's pages and pages you have to click through where it automatically follows hundreds of celebrities unless you uncheck the boxes.
atmosx 11y ago
My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I get more and more bot 'followers' and more ads in my timeline. The signal / noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.
- honksillet 11y ago
  It is incredibly easy to set up a bot in twitter. (Slightly hard since the API v1.1, but still easy.) If an account is attached to a bot, there should be a small icon in all it's tweet to indicate that.
  - richmarr 11y ago
    How would you enforce that? Genuine question. Is there a reliable-enough-to-be-useful way to distinguish between types of API client?
- aethos 11y ago
  Another thing on the "desert island" effect is that, from the perspective of a artistist or creator, it seems oddly difficult to get discovered on Twitter. Maybe it's something about the interface or recommendation system?
  - adnzzzzZ 11y ago
    Twitter itself does not encourage creators who want to share content that much. I don't know if this is a problem with media integration (as mentioned in the article) or with the types of people who use Twitter, but as a creator of anything artistic it's not that nice of a platform. I've found tumblr to be much better, both in terms of community (lots of artists, game developers, musicians, etc hang out there) and in how the system itself works. People are much more liberal with notes and reblogs, which means it's easier to gain a following and it's also easier to get some data on how much something you created resonates with people.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - harryh 11y ago
    Why do you care about keeping an authentic follower list? I'm honestly curious because I've never really understood this phenomenon.
hackaflocka 11y ago
Great points all. Especially #5. One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken. Sometimes when I'm trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on Twitter. Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.
- geofft 11y ago
  I suspect that the number of people who use Twitter search for that is exceedingly low and non-monetizable compared to their target market. Twitter has been working on excellent support (where "excellent" is defined as "good for Twitter") for embedding tweets inside news articles and the like. This means that if a celebrity (not a startup celebrity, a celebrity) tweets something important, it'll get picked up by BuzzFeed or something, and then you can use Google, the search engine people actually use, to find it. If it's not important, it doesn't need to be found; that's not what the platform is about.
  - hackaflocka 11y ago
    Topsy has a simple "from" flag to restrict search results to a certain user. It only works sometimes when used directly in the Twitter search box.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
minimaxir 11y ago
My main issue with Twitter now is the recent (undocumented) change to the mobile apps for "suggested tweets." (example: http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png ) As mentioned by the commentators, Twitter has a discovery issue. Twitter's solution is to put "suggested tweets" below the normal replies, but without any clear discernible division. (just "Suggested by Twitter" in light gray color). Way too many times I accidentally read suggested tweets instead of normal replies while instinctively scrolling to the bottom and I get very confused.
vortico 11y ago
I recently visited a Twitter page, to find that it downloaded 6.3 MB of data across 63 requests. Since it only displays around 10 140-character tweets on the first page, that's a bloat factor of 4718x in my book. Twitter is done.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  If the average user cared about page loading time, the majority of the modern internet wouldn't exist. A multimedia site can justify the heavy asset loading.
- geofft 11y ago
  How is bloat related to their viability as a business / long-term profitability? Does the extra bandwidth cost them a significant amount of money? Does it negatively impact a significant number of users in their target market, sufficiently so that they will stop using Twitter?
perlgeek 11y ago
I think it's time to rethink the 140 charcter limit. When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort. Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  Twitter without the 140 character limit is Google+.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    No it's not, it's twitter with more characters. You need to keep the context in mind here.
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    Before Google+ I always regarded Twitter as Facebook Status with limits. At least on FB you can share images and videos somewhat properly.
- jerrac 11y ago
  It's impossible to have meaningful conversations with that kind of limit. You end up having to use "1/N" over and over again. That limit has always left me wondering how Twitter even got started...
  - logicallee 11y ago
    most incredible news you've had in your life can be shared in 140 characters. most of the worst, most useless content you've ever written to anyone would be several paragraphs. that's why it worked.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      What you're saying is inherently incorrect. "Usefulness" of content is always going to be more limited by 140 characters than it would otherwise be. It worked, not because people want to "share" less, but because they want to read less. Same reason a lot of people browsing Reddit for example only browse it by glimpsing the headlines. The more news there is, the less people are interested in the details of the news - they want to let their brains fill in the details. Say, for example (and please don't read too much into the example), you read an article that says "Police shoots an innocent civilian". Then a few days later, you read another article very similar to it. Then another. At some point you stop reading the article and you just glimpse the headline - filling in the details yourself, even if they are wrong. You do this for every article you come across, and you enter a cycle where everything you read ends up fitting your own learned narrative. Your brain autocompletes the content of every article... and if there is no match, you can just ignore it. This sort of behaviour is something you see a lot of on Reddit. People are attracted to short snippets of information they can autocomplete. Most don't want to spend a lot of time on something they might be reading on the toilet, or on the subway. It's the same reason mobile toilet games are racking in millions, while the PC gaming market is taking a major hit.
digisth 11y ago
As I've written in past comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396), and as this post suggests, rebuilding developer relations and improving integrations would go a long way. There's a lot of potential locked in the platform right now; they should work on letting developers get access to it more easily and strive to remove the cloud of uncertainty that has built up around it (i.e., will they shut me down if I do something too popular that colors outside the current lines?) It would benefit everyone, especially Twitter.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Do you think that's even possible? They really burned a lot of bridges with the way they treated developers in the past. Trying to build a business on top of somebody else's social networking platform has been a spectacularly bad bet the last 5 years or so. I sure wouldn't be first into that pool.
  - digisth 11y ago
    I hope it is. At the very least, they should be trying. It certainly won't be an overnight process, but with time and enough developer-friendly decisions / public guarantees, it could happen. They should start yesterday, though.
egypturnash 11y ago
> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that. > Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.” Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills. I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they've trusted me with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality from various art project bots I follow. I don't need a "huge fucking banner" telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking about it. When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their @name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will reply and help fix it. Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn't going to get a reply. Duh? Would they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own account? There's a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by their social media specialists, and they're boring as fuck because they're not really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters. Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he's not using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  Most people do all those things on Facebook.
msoad 11y ago
I very much like tweets be ethereal like SnapChat snaps. Many people don't like to keep a history of stuff they said previously.
- slyall 11y ago
  I know somebody who has a script setup to delete the majority of his tweets (except for blog posts) after 24 hours. https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-delete/ https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-delete/
onewaystreet 11y ago
Twitter's real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO's vision is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  > a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders. As Twitter is a publicly-traded company, it would be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
  - onewaystreet 11y ago
    "Satisfy" was the wrong word but I couldn't think of the right one. What I'm saying is that the CEO of Twitter will never have the same power as say Mark Zuckerberg does.
    - MrJagil 11y ago
      How come?
- harryh 11y ago
  The next CEO is at least moderately likely to be Jack.
geofft 11y ago
> Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses. This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for "@justinbieber" (click on "live") or look at any of his tweets, and you'll see innumerable 16-year-old fangirls who have found some incentive to tweet at him. There's also the subphenomenon of these 16-year-old fangirls getting incredibly excited when those tweets do get seen and interacted with, which indicates, one, that they don't go into the ether, and two, people have a genuine hope of interaction. I've seen this in practice, because I do actually follow certain parts of popular culture and music and trashy television (not Bieber, as it happens, but enough others) and occasionally look at what they're up to on Twitter. It happens without fail for every celebrity. So I wonder if the author is actually reporting on how actual people actually use Twitter, or extrapolating from the eyes of a non-16-year-old non-fangirl who cares about things like reply threading.
- dethstar 11y ago
  I've seen some people post on facebook about someone mildly famous favoriting their tweet, so i agree with you.
- ioddly 11y ago
  I've seen the same thing; it also seems like it's not so much an issue of the platform as celebrities understandably don't have the time or inclination to interact with strangers on a regular basis.
  - goldfeld 11y ago
    Just wait till Kanye West or Taylor Swift come out with a smart reply-bot based on their online presence and it's gonna be all the rage.
    - patio11 11y ago
      The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes). I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it." (Think of the economics for a touring band which can sell out a 100 seat theatre. The approximate lifestyle is "They plow 80% of their meagre revenues into the costs of producing music, make McDonalds wages, and live in a van." Now, give that band the ability to tweet for two hours, glad hand some fans, and make $10k with no venue cut and no label cut. The specific example I heard was "DM fan123: Hey Dave. Enjoyed seeing you at the last 5 concerts. Got a VIP event coming up Thursday: 12 people, live in studio with us, light drinks to follow. Thought you'd want to know. Tix & details: linkylink. Hope to see you there.") P.S. Before anyone on says "Wait, Patrick, the economics do not make 2 hours of Kayne's time affordable on the budget of upper middle class Americans unless he is sharded between so many people to not even have the pretense of interacting with all of them" think less "movie tickets" as a comparable and more "season tickets to an NFL team" or "a set of golf clubs" or "a cruise around Europe" or any of the host of big-ticket items which upper middle class Americans actually do purchase frequently when given the chance.
meshko 11y ago
OK, I'll admit, I haven't been following what is going on with Twitter, but come on people, their product is limited to 140 characters. Surely they have something to fix.
probdist 11y ago
Well twitter has just recently restructured the product team so maybe big things are in-store: http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-team-promotes-jeff-seibert/ http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-te...
semicolondev 11y ago
Twitter like Trello is a tool, a mainstream tool got to be horizontal product [1]. There is no point discussing about it should be this or that. Feel free to use it the way you want it to be. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Unlike Trello, Twitter is publicly-traded with mandated financial disclosures, so discussion is fair.
  - semicolondev 11y ago
    But the post won't discuss about financials. It went on bashing twitter as if it at its current state is pretty much screwed up which I disagree because I am quite active on the platform and find it cool. -> Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction. I totally disagree. If you follow a avalanche of people and brands your timeline gets useless within an hour. Twitter is place to build a community that you want to be in and participate if you want to get max out of it. If one expects it to be a community he/she shall participate. Why would I expect Paul Graham to be replying me on Twitter for nothing (just because I follow him and mentioned him some non of his business comment) ? [Edit: added some reference from the post]
- semicolondev 11y ago
  Can someone tell what is wrong with this observation and why the downvotes ?
ThomPete 11y ago
The primary problem for twitter is that they more than ever is a protocol for link-sharing. If twitter wants to survive they need to get content onto their platform which means loose the 140 character. In some ways and ironically, Medium could be a kind of replacement for twitter if they found a nicer balance between long and short posts.
- nemothekid 11y ago
  What about Tumblr? Commonly when people ask to lose the 140-character limit I try and understand what people are trying to accomplish and how that is any different from what Tumblr has now. After spending some time on tumblr, I've noticed the 140-character limit is great from a reader point of view. What it ensures (like you are alluding to) is that one user doesn't dominate my feed/attention with one really long post. I don't need curation on Twitter, because the time it takes to read 100 twitter posts is constant. It's harder to get trapped in an platform-imposed filter bubble on Twitter this way too because there's less pressure on the platform to algorithmically rearrange your newsfeed as well.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    But Tumblr is Tumblr, they start from a different context.
slyall 11y ago
The image cropping is something that annoys me. Someone will often post a photo in the their timeline that is pointless when it is cropped. eg a Meme with the captions missing.
nemothekid 11y ago
Not sure I agree about #1 and maybe my twitter experience is different from others. First, if I want to communicate with others I take it over FB/Email/Messenger of choice. Sure public conversation is nice, but its painful over Twitter and I'm not sure how it could be made better. Everyone talks about how a threaded view would be nice, but people fail to consider that Twitter conversations are never 1-to-1, its usually multiple people tweeting at one person. Having a conversation on something as open as Twitter is like trying to have a conversation with the President during his speech. Not everyone can talk at one, and no matter how you do it, the interface will drown some out. Combine that with the fact that you can tweet anything at anyone (unlike a Facebook/HN thread which is usually around a specific topic), you get a very constrained opportunity to have actually conversations. However, Twitter does a better job at problem #1 than instagram does. Beiber is not replying to fans over Instagram - and I doubt people are actually communicating to celebrities via Instagram comments, have you seen Beiber's (or any music celeb's) instagram? Its a wasteland of spam, self promotion, and emoji. I doubt Justin Bieber has a higher reply rate on Instagram than Twitter - it's very easy to see that Justin Beiber engages fans on Twitter, not so much on Instagram. That said, as someone who uses Twitter heavily, but never tweets - my most useful function for it is a realtime news feed (to not just news orgs, but people, parody accounts, comedians, tech nerds, sports news, ...). I place as much emphasis on the ability to "respond and have conversations" to the success of Twitter, as to the success of Buzzfeed and other news orgs (- I doubt you need an active comments section to have a good news site - most of it is garbage anyways). The second and third points are apt though - Facebook's "trending" seems a lot more useful the Twitter's, however I'm not sure how useful either is without constant curation. Even if Twitter had a super sophisticated algorithm to automatically detect topics - without curation you end up with garbage. Facebook's trending is just as useless once you have the reason why its trending. Lastly, FTA >Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. I'm not sure how Twitter can fix this, but my response to this is if this is what Twitter has become, then its because you made it that way. Reddit now has a subreddit /r/BlackPeopleTwitter which would give you a very different idea on what Twitter is if your Twitter experience was like that.
benjaminwootton 11y ago
What amazes me is how slowly it seems to move on for users. There's a ton you could do to improve search, UIs on top of the feed, analytics, communities, twitter lists, conversations, media embedding and interactions. On top of that social graph they had the potential to build a better, more real time, more community led Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube. And yet it doesn't seem to move forward as a product.
ghshephard 11y ago
Parts of this are a little off, at least in how I use twitter. "There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses." Maybe true for the 1mm+ follower people, but ironically, this is 90+% of how I actually use Twitter. I tweet at a mid-high volume (100k->500k) individual, and occasionally get a response, more often get a fave, and ever so often get a retweet. For < 50k follower people, I almost always get a response if what I sent was thoughtful. Also, I love looking at the responses to tweets - and often respond to those responses, and get a thread going with the responder - often dropping out the original person who tweeted altogether. I'm not saying all is well in twitter world - but I quite enjoy (perhaps too much) the back and forth/threading/responding that twitter offers. I really, really don't need any more.
StillBored 11y ago
Twitters problem, is that you had an idea, and it took 5243 characters to relate it. So, instead of using their platform you went elsewhere. (139 characters, maybe I should use twitter...)
- logicallee 11y ago
  and if you had written 5243 characters about what you just said (and you could have), then I wouldn't have read a word.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    I'm being honest - you took a position and defended it, I read it, and moved on. All in 139 characters. I literally wouldn't have had time to read a wall of text (which is what 5,000 characters is, it's 850 words, i.e. a dense, full page and a half in a word processor, if 11-point text.) this is why twitter took off. it makes certain communication possible that just wouldn't be! it lets a celebrity talk to people who wouldn't read even a single page interview by them, for example. sorry if people don't get this.
manigandham 11y ago
Twitter doesnt seem like it's capitalized on what it's good at, or anything really. For personal: Facebook has network effect, complex relationships, share anything and everything, privacy, groups, etcs. Younger generations more focused on sharing are using Instagram, Snapchat, and all the messaging apps. For work: LinkedIn gives value in seeing work histories, connections, companies, etc (although still a bad product but without competition) For news: The mainstream just use news sites, search and Facebook or get alerts from all the other apps/networks/reddit and there's RSS which is way nicer for following blogs and niche news. What Twitter has been good at is allowing people to have a easy public voice (although nobody might see it but its there) without being tied to a personal identity and giving the chance to talk to people you might never be able to reach otherwise. You can tweet at politicians, celebrities, top executives, companies and can reasonably expect a reply or exposure. That's really powerful and a great equalizer. It's also good for real-time obviously, working like a constant stream of consciousness of the collective you follow. However like the article says, thats it. There's no movement on the product itself. Terrible UI with broken conversations, broken sharing, broken lists, no new features like deduping tweets, non-chronological ordering, better developer APIs, and the ads product isn't great either. It's kind of sad that the network that originally began as messaging based around sms/phones has been completely overtaken by all other messaging and sharing apps while still keeping completely unnecessary limitations like 140 chars. There's just no focus here...
dennisnedry 11y ago
I love that the author is criticizing Twitter's UI, yet when I tried to find a date of the article, I had to mysteriously hover over the title of the post to see it magically appear before me.
- scandinavian 11y ago
  Ehh, it's right there at 0.05 opacity. It just gets opacity: 1 when hovering. Try tuning your monitor, you should really be able to see that.
  - brongondwana 11y ago
    Nice if you have a big monitor in perfect lighting conditions and good eyes. Grandparent's complaint is legit.
    - scandinavian 11y ago
      His complaint that a readability issue on a single string somehow makes the author unsuited to comment on the clusterfuck that is twitters UI? I don't agree.
T2_t2 11y ago
Twitter's problem is simpler: it is great for power users, shite for everyone else. Twitter needs to curate the content I see better - especially for newer users. Twitter is boring as sin until you follow a few interesting people, then it becomes overwhelming as it adds too many more. Twitter needs to focus on the feed being more malleable, both with and without personal effort from me.
- wpietri 11y ago
  That may be trading one problem for another. The number one complaint I hear about Facebook is how unpredictable the feed is. For power users, Twitter's current approach to their feed is predictable and reliable: strict time order, nothing missing from the people you want to hear from. At the beginning of the year Twitter started testing out a "while you were away" feature that curates, currently on mobile only: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-you-were-away/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-you-... Personally, my initial reaction was instantly negative. I've now come to grudgingly tolerate it; it's not very good, but it's limited to a small number of tweets at a predictable place in my timeline, so I know it's not messing with anything. I've never missed it when at a desktop, though.
  - scholia 11y ago
    I see "while you were away" on the browser/desktop version as well....
electic 11y ago
There might be no fixing Twitter. The reason Twitter grew imho is because of the rich ecosystem of developers they had. Those developers, time and time again, found new ways to use Twitter and did the development, marketing, and educating of the public. The result was rich engagement and growth. Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go and tell the developer community to come back? How do you trust Twitter? The answer is you don't.
- kzhahou 11y ago
  I can believe that the growth was significantly helped by third-party clients, but I wouldn't believe that the more creative twitter integrations had a major effect. That would be a dev/techy-centric view of the world, similar to those that truly believe that the real-name policy was a mainstream issue that killed G+.
  - insom 11y ago
    When I started on twitter, it had no hashtags, replies were public (because they weren't initially part of the protocol), no t.co, no embedded photo sharing, no geotagging. All of these features were added, and made popular, in third party clients before being added to Twitter. It was like a giant lab where the features could be tried by smaller groups who shared certain clients or norms and the popular ones wrapped into the "official" API eventually.
- joesmo 11y ago
  Indeed. The trust has been lost. Trust is a really simple issue that many people in our industry like the article's author simply don't get. To expect Twitter to recover in this area is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, there are plenty of young, stupid developers, but given Twitter's animosity towards developers in the past, even with a dedicated campaign, I doubt they could get any significant ones to work with the platform again. From a business' point of view, it's suicide, from a developer's point of view, it's a waste of time and effort, and from an investor's point of view, it's a risk not worth taking.
jeo1234 11y ago
Twitter need to focus more on developers. The underlying concept behind the site is really solid. Allowing people to build cool things which adds value and brings in new users is good for everyone. So make it easy for them! Their API is not great, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they don't release official libraries for the major languages?
mandeepj 11y ago
twitter's default landing page is more interesting than the default page that you see after login
smegel 11y ago
Disconnecting from twitter was one of the best moves I ever made. Being subjected to a high volume/low quality stream of garbage is not good for the mind.
- panic 11y ago
  Why not just unfollow the accounts which are posting garbage?
- welanes 11y ago
  There certainly is too much noise but lists solve that very nicely.
reitanqild 11y ago
Yes, and for that last few months the "Whats new" message on Google Play has been: We made it easier to add you comments to others tweets - or something to that effect. I have been saying their problem is they have been too busy painting themselves into a corner: [v] alienating 3rd part developers [v] public by default - no organization level settings [v] keep the cute 140 char limit that is now just an historic artifact I guess you can add more to that list.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lovamova 11y ago
Who cares about Twitter? Sublevel is way better than that crappy thing.
randomsearch 11y ago
I think the disaster that is Twitter is a product of its culture. If you read the history of the business, it started with a group of people who really arrived in the business quite randomly. There wasn't much thought given to building a balanced team or a strong culture. Effectively, twitter was an accident that came out of another business. Most worryingly, the founders couldn't agree on what the purpose of Twitter was, and illuminatingly people in this discussion still don't have a clear idea of its purpose. Is it a news broadcast system, to follow current events? Or is it about sharing your personal life with your friends? From a technical point of view, I find Twitter very confusing. I read that they were at over a million users before having any kind of backup strategy. They rewrote their systems from Java to Scala, but then seemed to regret that decision, their decisions on shutting down API access to third parties have been really nasty... this kinda thing makes me worry that they don't have clear leadership. And then there's the politics of infighting, and some of their executives being "overthrown" over time... I can't see how you can create a good culture when people at the top are behaving like that. It's hardly rocket science - just focus on the product and your users. I think creating a culture from the beginning is a lot easier than changing an engrained culture, so my view is that Twitter is screwed. Failing a Jobsian turnaround, the best they can do is sell and sell fast. I can seriously see Twitter losing out to a startup. Any thoughts on whether they will survive?
- niccaluim 11y ago
  The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala, though far more importantly, it was a re-architecting. And there are zero regrets. Without it, Twitter wouldn't exist anymore.
  - randomsearch 11y ago
    >The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala Sorry, you're exactly correct. It was Ruby -> Scala and Java. To be precise, according to Tony Pritezis from Twitter, Scala is the main language, Java is next, Ruby was still in use in 2014 but migrating away, C/C++ and Python for some specific tasks. He did also talk about some of the problems of using Scala, and I seem to recall someone saying that Scala may be less favoured at Twitter in the future.
zobzu 11y ago
Thats funny, if followed it seems these advices would transform twitter into facebook So, yeah..
OoTheNigerian 11y ago
"Nothing great is Built On Twitter" That quote sums it all up. Most of Dustin's suggested extensions are things other people should have built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton's App.Net plan where Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on ensuring the backbone stays in place. Funny enough, that is how twitter originated. Others built their clients and they focused on the core. They lost that direction and wanted to "own it all" like Facebook. But they took that direction rather too early. Take Tweetstorming as an example which is a niche need. My team built a tweetstorming app http://writerack.com http://writerack.com. It pulls and pushes all it's content from and to Twitter. In an ideal case, Twitter should support it and similar ones rather than making Twitter.com more convoluted with the aim of doing everything themselves. If Twitter had supported third patrty developers, someone/people would have built a killer app for using twitter to follow and interact live events. That would have brought another set of people into the platform and that extends to other use cases too. Hopefully, Twitter gets it right because I have come to really find Twitter useful.
- wpietri 11y ago
  I think there are two pretty good reasons that Twitter moved away from being an open platform, and they are: 1) ensuring a good user experience, and 2) making money. The tweetstorming thing, for example, conveniences particular writers at the expense of all the other writers (and quite a number of readers). I hate it, and will unfollow anybody who does it regularly. It's the tragedy of the commons for an attention economy. Twitter's demand that people be concise is a large part of its value to readers. The more they control the UI, the easier it is to nudge people in particular directions that shape good user experiences. But that's a small thing next to making money. To experiment with various ad products, they need extremely fine grained control of and reporting on user experience, and they need to be able to rapidly change that as they come up with new ideas. That's hard enough even when they control everything; getting a zillion developers to do that is impossible. Focusing on the core was great, but nobody was paying them for the core. They're spending ~$1.5 billion/year. Anybody who says, "Twitter should do X" without explaining how their plan will help pay the bills is not going to get a lot of consideration at Twitter HQ.
blazespin 11y ago
If the MM+ tweeter is half way savvy they'd do what Zuck does and reply to some small % of his followers. I'm sure if they did that, a 13 year old follower would irrationally hope that their tweet was seriously read and would engage in the conversation.
mahouse 11y ago
I'm a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps until they fucked them all. I'm now forced to use their glittery official app full of ads and suggestions and things I don't care about. I follow less than 50 people and use Twitter 24/7 literally. I never miss a tweet. > First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction. Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses. Let's force Justin Bieber to sit down and read the thousands of replies he gets to each any of his tweets. Let's also make it so when I click on a Justin Bieber tweet, my browser downloads a webpage of 50MB with all the responses so I can read them all. > Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.” No, please, please no, NOOO. Some of us are just simply not interested in real-time events and use Twitter to talk to our friends. If a bomb explodes in Bangkok, I simply don't care. If I did, I'd use the search engine. And by knowing Twitter, they would probably make the banner mandatory, or would make you dismiss it each time (along with a nice "Did you like this?"). > Third, Twitter has fucked up multimedia integration. Why the hell does adding a photo or video use up some of the 140 characters I want to use for my description? Why does it crop my photo? Why does it not show full-width images in the feed? Because Twitter is a text-only social network... Or at least that's what it was. > Fourth, let’s talk about third party payloads/integrations on Twitter. They have never felt native, and they are still–after three years–in a bizarrely dire state. Same response as before: I think media integrations should not be encouraged. > And that leads to me to the final thing I want to talk about, which is also the most important: Twitter has fucked up its platform. Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. So don't follow them. Follow only humans with real feelings that are not using Twitter to earn themselves money. > The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. So you want to read automated tweets all day? Don't be silly, who wants to read "Johnny has favourited this vid on youtube!!" "Mike has uploaded this pic to Instagram!!" all day? You? No, nobody, that's why these integrations with automatic tweets are RUDE. If I want to know what you uploaded to Instagram I'd follow you there, jackass! There, I vented it.
sreejithr 11y ago
> The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team. This is THE ONE THING they've done right. I'm come on Twitter to read what people wrote about stuff. Last thing we need is an emotionless machine generated feed.
michaelborromeo 11y ago
If Twitter didn't exist, what would the world use instead?
- scholia 11y ago
  Facebook. That's really Twitter's major problem. Facebook used to be mostly friends chatting to family and friends, but nowadays it's the single biggest source of news links and the sort of viral spam that used to circulate on Twitter. Twitter is still a faster and more reliable source of breaking news, but not that many people (apart from journalists) care about speed. And Facebook's threaded chat provides a much better way to discuss stories than Twitter. In sum, for most people, Facebook's news feed is probably now a better Twitter than Twitter.
tempodox 11y ago
Your word in Twitter's ear! I seem to recognise a pattern where Twitter & Apple's AppStore fail in the same way: Failing to give end losers (er, users) intelligent filters so they can decide what they want to see, and equally important, what they do not want to see. The conspicuous absence of those options speaks loud & clear as to the platform owner's intentions.
sushrutbidwai 11y ago
Bigger issue is no developer trusts twitter any more. Just like LinkedIn. twitter has been unkind to the developers which helped it make popular. Remember things like lists, hashtags, media embed are all brought to twitter before twitter did so itself. But developers of these innovations were treated badly. And hence no developer wants to develop for twitter platform any more.
olivermarks 11y ago
Tech celebrities such as Guy Kawasaki have had teams of tweeters working for them for years: it seems reasonable to assume large numbers of people are employed to interact with show biz personality obsessives...just like all the faked autographs the Monkees etc used to mail to their fans...
falcolas 11y ago
I encourage anyone who thinks that #2 is as easy as the OP to give it a shot. It's actually quite a hard problem, especially when you have to deal with fake news tweets and want over 80% accuracy. Disclaimer, I work for a startup doing exactly this, so if it's something you actually want to do for a paycheck, shoot me an email.
joe5150 11y ago
Dustin clearly doesn't follow @cher if he thinks there's no meaningful interaction with celebrities going on on Twitter
vit05 11y ago
Twitter is very confusing and useless to anyone who wants to use less than one hour per day. So, if they focused on interactivity between anonimous,famous and "live events", most people who do not want to live on Twitter, will have a reason to open the app at least a few times a day.
Corrado 11y ago
I really, really want to like Twitter, but I just can't. Most of the content in my stream is crap, as I (apparently) don't know the "correct" people to follow. Finding the "correct" people to follow is difficult, and even then they sometimes spew multiple boatloads of crap. :/ I wish there was a way to filter some of it out and only keep the good stuff. Conversations are almost impossible to follow. Once you locate a good tweet, its a confusing process to find all the related tweets. Sometimes, they are below the tweet (which is confusing as I don't read from the bottom up most of the time) and sometimes they are buried inside the tweet. Grrrr!!! Finally, putting non-text media in a tweet is turning out to be horrible. At least when tweets used to be ASCII, I could reasonably read through them. Now, I have pages and pages of little silent movies that start playing when they come into focus. How annoying is that!? I really like the "World News Headline" feature that Dustin proposes and would probably use Twitter more if it has something like that. However, given that Twitter is transforming itself into a Vine/Instagram clone I probably won't be hitting the tweet box much in the future. :(

308 points by rkudeshi 11y ago

josai 11y ago

Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese "copy" of twitter (hint: it's not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that's ahead of twitter in many respects. Just off the top of my head, weibo has: - the "event" grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping system ("micro topics") - rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are very popular) - payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw - properly threaded conversations, easy to follow - a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to connect companies to the system I'm aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at what they're doing seems like a pretty good starting point.

HappyTypist 11y ago

Very interesting point regarding the illusion of interaction that Instagram provides. I do find Twitter's displaying of replies and retweets (to the first 100) questionable. As for how Twitter can improve in that aspect, how about a horizontally-scrolling feed of users who retweet, and a less-annoying version of such for comments? They seem like relatively easy design choices.

steckerbrett 11y ago

> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That's not unexpected given their signup flow, it's pages and pages you have to click through where it automatically follows hundreds of celebrities unless you uncheck the boxes.

atmosx 11y ago

My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I get more and more bot 'followers' and more ads in my timeline. The signal / noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.

honksillet 11y ago
It is incredibly easy to set up a bot in twitter. (Slightly hard since the API v1.1, but still easy.) If an account is attached to a bot, there should be a small icon in all it's tweet to indicate that.
- richmarr 11y ago
  How would you enforce that? Genuine question. Is there a reliable-enough-to-be-useful way to distinguish between types of API client?
aethos 11y ago
Another thing on the "desert island" effect is that, from the perspective of a artistist or creator, it seems oddly difficult to get discovered on Twitter. Maybe it's something about the interface or recommendation system?
- adnzzzzZ 11y ago
  Twitter itself does not encourage creators who want to share content that much. I don't know if this is a problem with media integration (as mentioned in the article) or with the types of people who use Twitter, but as a creator of anything artistic it's not that nice of a platform. I've found tumblr to be much better, both in terms of community (lots of artists, game developers, musicians, etc hang out there) and in how the system itself works. People are much more liberal with notes and reblogs, which means it's easier to gain a following and it's also easier to get some data on how much something you created resonates with people.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- harryh 11y ago
  Why do you care about keeping an authentic follower list? I'm honestly curious because I've never really understood this phenomenon.

hackaflocka 11y ago

Great points all. Especially #5. One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken. Sometimes when I'm trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on Twitter. Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.

geofft 11y ago
I suspect that the number of people who use Twitter search for that is exceedingly low and non-monetizable compared to their target market. Twitter has been working on excellent support (where "excellent" is defined as "good for Twitter") for embedding tweets inside news articles and the like. This means that if a celebrity (not a startup celebrity, a celebrity) tweets something important, it'll get picked up by BuzzFeed or something, and then you can use Google, the search engine people actually use, to find it. If it's not important, it doesn't need to be found; that's not what the platform is about.
- hackaflocka 11y ago
  Topsy has a simple "from" flag to restrict search results to a certain user. It only works sometimes when used directly in the Twitter search box.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

minimaxir 11y ago

My main issue with Twitter now is the recent (undocumented) change to the mobile apps for "suggested tweets." (example: http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png ) As mentioned by the commentators, Twitter has a discovery issue. Twitter's solution is to put "suggested tweets" below the normal replies, but without any clear discernible division. (just "Suggested by Twitter" in light gray color). Way too many times I accidentally read suggested tweets instead of normal replies while instinctively scrolling to the bottom and I get very confused.

vortico 11y ago

I recently visited a Twitter page, to find that it downloaded 6.3 MB of data across 63 requests. Since it only displays around 10 140-character tweets on the first page, that's a bloat factor of 4718x in my book. Twitter is done.

minimaxir 11y ago
If the average user cared about page loading time, the majority of the modern internet wouldn't exist. A multimedia site can justify the heavy asset loading.
geofft 11y ago
How is bloat related to their viability as a business / long-term profitability? Does the extra bandwidth cost them a significant amount of money? Does it negatively impact a significant number of users in their target market, sufficiently so that they will stop using Twitter?

perlgeek 11y ago

I think it's time to rethink the 140 charcter limit. When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort. Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?

onewaystreet 11y ago
Twitter without the 140 character limit is Google+.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  No it's not, it's twitter with more characters. You need to keep the context in mind here.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  Before Google+ I always regarded Twitter as Facebook Status with limits. At least on FB you can share images and videos somewhat properly.
jerrac 11y ago
It's impossible to have meaningful conversations with that kind of limit. You end up having to use "1/N" over and over again. That limit has always left me wondering how Twitter even got started...
- logicallee 11y ago
  most incredible news you've had in your life can be shared in 140 characters. most of the worst, most useless content you've ever written to anyone would be several paragraphs. that's why it worked.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    What you're saying is inherently incorrect. "Usefulness" of content is always going to be more limited by 140 characters than it would otherwise be. It worked, not because people want to "share" less, but because they want to read less. Same reason a lot of people browsing Reddit for example only browse it by glimpsing the headlines. The more news there is, the less people are interested in the details of the news - they want to let their brains fill in the details. Say, for example (and please don't read too much into the example), you read an article that says "Police shoots an innocent civilian". Then a few days later, you read another article very similar to it. Then another. At some point you stop reading the article and you just glimpse the headline - filling in the details yourself, even if they are wrong. You do this for every article you come across, and you enter a cycle where everything you read ends up fitting your own learned narrative. Your brain autocompletes the content of every article... and if there is no match, you can just ignore it. This sort of behaviour is something you see a lot of on Reddit. People are attracted to short snippets of information they can autocomplete. Most don't want to spend a lot of time on something they might be reading on the toilet, or on the subway. It's the same reason mobile toilet games are racking in millions, while the PC gaming market is taking a major hit.

digisth 11y ago

As I've written in past comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396), and as this post suggests, rebuilding developer relations and improving integrations would go a long way. There's a lot of potential locked in the platform right now; they should work on letting developers get access to it more easily and strive to remove the cloud of uncertainty that has built up around it (i.e., will they shut me down if I do something too popular that colors outside the current lines?) It would benefit everyone, especially Twitter.

wpietri 11y ago
Do you think that's even possible? They really burned a lot of bridges with the way they treated developers in the past. Trying to build a business on top of somebody else's social networking platform has been a spectacularly bad bet the last 5 years or so. I sure wouldn't be first into that pool.
- digisth 11y ago
  I hope it is. At the very least, they should be trying. It certainly won't be an overnight process, but with time and enough developer-friendly decisions / public guarantees, it could happen. They should start yesterday, though.

egypturnash 11y ago

> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that. > Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.” Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills. I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they've trusted me with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality from various art project bots I follow. I don't need a "huge fucking banner" telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking about it. When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their @name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will reply and help fix it. Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn't going to get a reply. Duh? Would they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own account? There's a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by their social media specialists, and they're boring as fuck because they're not really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters. Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he's not using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.

onewaystreet 11y ago
Most people do all those things on Facebook.

msoad 11y ago

I very much like tweets be ethereal like SnapChat snaps. Many people don't like to keep a history of stuff they said previously.

slyall 11y ago
I know somebody who has a script setup to delete the majority of his tweets (except for blog posts) after 24 hours. https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-delete/ https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-delete/

onewaystreet 11y ago

Twitter's real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO's vision is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.

minimaxir 11y ago
> a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders. As Twitter is a publicly-traded company, it would be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  "Satisfy" was the wrong word but I couldn't think of the right one. What I'm saying is that the CEO of Twitter will never have the same power as say Mark Zuckerberg does.
  - MrJagil 11y ago
    How come?
harryh 11y ago
The next CEO is at least moderately likely to be Jack.

geofft 11y ago

> Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses. This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for "@justinbieber" (click on "live") or look at any of his tweets, and you'll see innumerable 16-year-old fangirls who have found some incentive to tweet at him. There's also the subphenomenon of these 16-year-old fangirls getting incredibly excited when those tweets do get seen and interacted with, which indicates, one, that they don't go into the ether, and two, people have a genuine hope of interaction. I've seen this in practice, because I do actually follow certain parts of popular culture and music and trashy television (not Bieber, as it happens, but enough others) and occasionally look at what they're up to on Twitter. It happens without fail for every celebrity. So I wonder if the author is actually reporting on how actual people actually use Twitter, or extrapolating from the eyes of a non-16-year-old non-fangirl who cares about things like reply threading.

dethstar 11y ago
I've seen some people post on facebook about someone mildly famous favoriting their tweet, so i agree with you.
ioddly 11y ago
I've seen the same thing; it also seems like it's not so much an issue of the platform as celebrities understandably don't have the time or inclination to interact with strangers on a regular basis.
- goldfeld 11y ago
  Just wait till Kanye West or Taylor Swift come out with a smart reply-bot based on their online presence and it's gonna be all the rage.
  - patio11 11y ago
    The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes). I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it." (Think of the economics for a touring band which can sell out a 100 seat theatre. The approximate lifestyle is "They plow 80% of their meagre revenues into the costs of producing music, make McDonalds wages, and live in a van." Now, give that band the ability to tweet for two hours, glad hand some fans, and make $10k with no venue cut and no label cut. The specific example I heard was "DM fan123: Hey Dave. Enjoyed seeing you at the last 5 concerts. Got a VIP event coming up Thursday: 12 people, live in studio with us, light drinks to follow. Thought you'd want to know. Tix & details: linkylink. Hope to see you there.") P.S. Before anyone on says "Wait, Patrick, the economics do not make 2 hours of Kayne's time affordable on the budget of upper middle class Americans unless he is sharded between so many people to not even have the pretense of interacting with all of them" think less "movie tickets" as a comparable and more "season tickets to an NFL team" or "a set of golf clubs" or "a cruise around Europe" or any of the host of big-ticket items which upper middle class Americans actually do purchase frequently when given the chance.

meshko 11y ago

OK, I'll admit, I haven't been following what is going on with Twitter, but come on people, their product is limited to 140 characters. Surely they have something to fix.

probdist 11y ago

Well twitter has just recently restructured the product team so maybe big things are in-store: http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-team-promotes-jeff-seibert/ http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-te...

semicolondev 11y ago

Twitter like Trello is a tool, a mainstream tool got to be horizontal product [1]. There is no point discussing about it should be this or that. Feel free to use it the way you want it to be. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html

minimaxir 11y ago
Unlike Trello, Twitter is publicly-traded with mandated financial disclosures, so discussion is fair.
- semicolondev 11y ago
  But the post won't discuss about financials. It went on bashing twitter as if it at its current state is pretty much screwed up which I disagree because I am quite active on the platform and find it cool. -> Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction. I totally disagree. If you follow a avalanche of people and brands your timeline gets useless within an hour. Twitter is place to build a community that you want to be in and participate if you want to get max out of it. If one expects it to be a community he/she shall participate. Why would I expect Paul Graham to be replying me on Twitter for nothing (just because I follow him and mentioned him some non of his business comment) ? [Edit: added some reference from the post]
semicolondev 11y ago
Can someone tell what is wrong with this observation and why the downvotes ?

ThomPete 11y ago

The primary problem for twitter is that they more than ever is a protocol for link-sharing. If twitter wants to survive they need to get content onto their platform which means loose the 140 character. In some ways and ironically, Medium could be a kind of replacement for twitter if they found a nicer balance between long and short posts.

nemothekid 11y ago
What about Tumblr? Commonly when people ask to lose the 140-character limit I try and understand what people are trying to accomplish and how that is any different from what Tumblr has now. After spending some time on tumblr, I've noticed the 140-character limit is great from a reader point of view. What it ensures (like you are alluding to) is that one user doesn't dominate my feed/attention with one really long post. I don't need curation on Twitter, because the time it takes to read 100 twitter posts is constant. It's harder to get trapped in an platform-imposed filter bubble on Twitter this way too because there's less pressure on the platform to algorithmically rearrange your newsfeed as well.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  But Tumblr is Tumblr, they start from a different context.

slyall 11y ago

The image cropping is something that annoys me. Someone will often post a photo in the their timeline that is pointless when it is cropped. eg a Meme with the captions missing.

nemothekid 11y ago

Not sure I agree about #1 and maybe my twitter experience is different from others. First, if I want to communicate with others I take it over FB/Email/Messenger of choice. Sure public conversation is nice, but its painful over Twitter and I'm not sure how it could be made better. Everyone talks about how a threaded view would be nice, but people fail to consider that Twitter conversations are never 1-to-1, its usually multiple people tweeting at one person. Having a conversation on something as open as Twitter is like trying to have a conversation with the President during his speech. Not everyone can talk at one, and no matter how you do it, the interface will drown some out. Combine that with the fact that you can tweet anything at anyone (unlike a Facebook/HN thread which is usually around a specific topic), you get a very constrained opportunity to have actually conversations. However, Twitter does a better job at problem #1 than instagram does. Beiber is not replying to fans over Instagram - and I doubt people are actually communicating to celebrities via Instagram comments, have you seen Beiber's (or any music celeb's) instagram? Its a wasteland of spam, self promotion, and emoji. I doubt Justin Bieber has a higher reply rate on Instagram than Twitter - it's very easy to see that Justin Beiber engages fans on Twitter, not so much on Instagram. That said, as someone who uses Twitter heavily, but never tweets - my most useful function for it is a realtime news feed (to not just news orgs, but people, parody accounts, comedians, tech nerds, sports news, ...). I place as much emphasis on the ability to "respond and have conversations" to the success of Twitter, as to the success of Buzzfeed and other news orgs (- I doubt you need an active comments section to have a good news site - most of it is garbage anyways). The second and third points are apt though - Facebook's "trending" seems a lot more useful the Twitter's, however I'm not sure how useful either is without constant curation. Even if Twitter had a super sophisticated algorithm to automatically detect topics - without curation you end up with garbage. Facebook's trending is just as useless once you have the reason why its trending. Lastly, FTA >Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. I'm not sure how Twitter can fix this, but my response to this is if this is what Twitter has become, then its because you made it that way. Reddit now has a subreddit /r/BlackPeopleTwitter which would give you a very different idea on what Twitter is if your Twitter experience was like that.

benjaminwootton 11y ago

What amazes me is how slowly it seems to move on for users. There's a ton you could do to improve search, UIs on top of the feed, analytics, communities, twitter lists, conversations, media embedding and interactions. On top of that social graph they had the potential to build a better, more real time, more community led Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube. And yet it doesn't seem to move forward as a product.

ghshephard 11y ago

Parts of this are a little off, at least in how I use twitter. "There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses." Maybe true for the 1mm+ follower people, but ironically, this is 90+% of how I actually use Twitter. I tweet at a mid-high volume (100k->500k) individual, and occasionally get a response, more often get a fave, and ever so often get a retweet. For < 50k follower people, I almost always get a response if what I sent was thoughtful. Also, I love looking at the responses to tweets - and often respond to those responses, and get a thread going with the responder - often dropping out the original person who tweeted altogether. I'm not saying all is well in twitter world - but I quite enjoy (perhaps too much) the back and forth/threading/responding that twitter offers. I really, really don't need any more.

StillBored 11y ago

Twitters problem, is that you had an idea, and it took 5243 characters to relate it. So, instead of using their platform you went elsewhere. (139 characters, maybe I should use twitter...)

logicallee 11y ago
and if you had written 5243 characters about what you just said (and you could have), then I wouldn't have read a word.
- logicallee 11y ago
  I'm being honest - you took a position and defended it, I read it, and moved on. All in 139 characters. I literally wouldn't have had time to read a wall of text (which is what 5,000 characters is, it's 850 words, i.e. a dense, full page and a half in a word processor, if 11-point text.) this is why twitter took off. it makes certain communication possible that just wouldn't be! it lets a celebrity talk to people who wouldn't read even a single page interview by them, for example. sorry if people don't get this.

manigandham 11y ago

Twitter doesnt seem like it's capitalized on what it's good at, or anything really. For personal: Facebook has network effect, complex relationships, share anything and everything, privacy, groups, etcs. Younger generations more focused on sharing are using Instagram, Snapchat, and all the messaging apps. For work: LinkedIn gives value in seeing work histories, connections, companies, etc (although still a bad product but without competition) For news: The mainstream just use news sites, search and Facebook or get alerts from all the other apps/networks/reddit and there's RSS which is way nicer for following blogs and niche news. What Twitter has been good at is allowing people to have a easy public voice (although nobody might see it but its there) without being tied to a personal identity and giving the chance to talk to people you might never be able to reach otherwise. You can tweet at politicians, celebrities, top executives, companies and can reasonably expect a reply or exposure. That's really powerful and a great equalizer. It's also good for real-time obviously, working like a constant stream of consciousness of the collective you follow. However like the article says, thats it. There's no movement on the product itself. Terrible UI with broken conversations, broken sharing, broken lists, no new features like deduping tweets, non-chronological ordering, better developer APIs, and the ads product isn't great either. It's kind of sad that the network that originally began as messaging based around sms/phones has been completely overtaken by all other messaging and sharing apps while still keeping completely unnecessary limitations like 140 chars. There's just no focus here...

dennisnedry 11y ago

I love that the author is criticizing Twitter's UI, yet when I tried to find a date of the article, I had to mysteriously hover over the title of the post to see it magically appear before me.

scandinavian 11y ago
Ehh, it's right there at 0.05 opacity. It just gets opacity: 1 when hovering. Try tuning your monitor, you should really be able to see that.
- brongondwana 11y ago
  Nice if you have a big monitor in perfect lighting conditions and good eyes. Grandparent's complaint is legit.
  - scandinavian 11y ago
    His complaint that a readability issue on a single string somehow makes the author unsuited to comment on the clusterfuck that is twitters UI? I don't agree.

T2_t2 11y ago

Twitter's problem is simpler: it is great for power users, shite for everyone else. Twitter needs to curate the content I see better - especially for newer users. Twitter is boring as sin until you follow a few interesting people, then it becomes overwhelming as it adds too many more. Twitter needs to focus on the feed being more malleable, both with and without personal effort from me.

wpietri 11y ago
That may be trading one problem for another. The number one complaint I hear about Facebook is how unpredictable the feed is. For power users, Twitter's current approach to their feed is predictable and reliable: strict time order, nothing missing from the people you want to hear from. At the beginning of the year Twitter started testing out a "while you were away" feature that curates, currently on mobile only: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-you-were-away/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-you-... Personally, my initial reaction was instantly negative. I've now come to grudgingly tolerate it; it's not very good, but it's limited to a small number of tweets at a predictable place in my timeline, so I know it's not messing with anything. I've never missed it when at a desktop, though.
- scholia 11y ago
  I see "while you were away" on the browser/desktop version as well....

electic 11y ago

There might be no fixing Twitter. The reason Twitter grew imho is because of the rich ecosystem of developers they had. Those developers, time and time again, found new ways to use Twitter and did the development, marketing, and educating of the public. The result was rich engagement and growth. Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go and tell the developer community to come back? How do you trust Twitter? The answer is you don't.

kzhahou 11y ago
I can believe that the growth was significantly helped by third-party clients, but I wouldn't believe that the more creative twitter integrations had a major effect. That would be a dev/techy-centric view of the world, similar to those that truly believe that the real-name policy was a mainstream issue that killed G+.
- insom 11y ago
  When I started on twitter, it had no hashtags, replies were public (because they weren't initially part of the protocol), no t.co, no embedded photo sharing, no geotagging. All of these features were added, and made popular, in third party clients before being added to Twitter. It was like a giant lab where the features could be tried by smaller groups who shared certain clients or norms and the popular ones wrapped into the "official" API eventually.
joesmo 11y ago
Indeed. The trust has been lost. Trust is a really simple issue that many people in our industry like the article's author simply don't get. To expect Twitter to recover in this area is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, there are plenty of young, stupid developers, but given Twitter's animosity towards developers in the past, even with a dedicated campaign, I doubt they could get any significant ones to work with the platform again. From a business' point of view, it's suicide, from a developer's point of view, it's a waste of time and effort, and from an investor's point of view, it's a risk not worth taking.

jeo1234 11y ago

Twitter need to focus more on developers. The underlying concept behind the site is really solid. Allowing people to build cool things which adds value and brings in new users is good for everyone. So make it easy for them! Their API is not great, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they don't release official libraries for the major languages?

mandeepj 11y ago

twitter's default landing page is more interesting than the default page that you see after login

smegel 11y ago

Disconnecting from twitter was one of the best moves I ever made. Being subjected to a high volume/low quality stream of garbage is not good for the mind.

panic 11y ago
Why not just unfollow the accounts which are posting garbage?
welanes 11y ago
There certainly is too much noise but lists solve that very nicely.

reitanqild 11y ago

Yes, and for that last few months the "Whats new" message on Google Play has been: We made it easier to add you comments to others tweets - or something to that effect. I have been saying their problem is they have been too busy painting themselves into a corner: [v] alienating 3rd part developers [v] public by default - no organization level settings [v] keep the cute 140 char limit that is now just an historic artifact I guess you can add more to that list.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

lovamova 11y ago

Who cares about Twitter? Sublevel is way better than that crappy thing.

randomsearch 11y ago

I think the disaster that is Twitter is a product of its culture. If you read the history of the business, it started with a group of people who really arrived in the business quite randomly. There wasn't much thought given to building a balanced team or a strong culture. Effectively, twitter was an accident that came out of another business. Most worryingly, the founders couldn't agree on what the purpose of Twitter was, and illuminatingly people in this discussion still don't have a clear idea of its purpose. Is it a news broadcast system, to follow current events? Or is it about sharing your personal life with your friends? From a technical point of view, I find Twitter very confusing. I read that they were at over a million users before having any kind of backup strategy. They rewrote their systems from Java to Scala, but then seemed to regret that decision, their decisions on shutting down API access to third parties have been really nasty... this kinda thing makes me worry that they don't have clear leadership. And then there's the politics of infighting, and some of their executives being "overthrown" over time... I can't see how you can create a good culture when people at the top are behaving like that. It's hardly rocket science - just focus on the product and your users. I think creating a culture from the beginning is a lot easier than changing an engrained culture, so my view is that Twitter is screwed. Failing a Jobsian turnaround, the best they can do is sell and sell fast. I can seriously see Twitter losing out to a startup. Any thoughts on whether they will survive?

niccaluim 11y ago
The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala, though far more importantly, it was a re-architecting. And there are zero regrets. Without it, Twitter wouldn't exist anymore.
- randomsearch 11y ago
  >The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala Sorry, you're exactly correct. It was Ruby -> Scala and Java. To be precise, according to Tony Pritezis from Twitter, Scala is the main language, Java is next, Ruby was still in use in 2014 but migrating away, C/C++ and Python for some specific tasks. He did also talk about some of the problems of using Scala, and I seem to recall someone saying that Scala may be less favoured at Twitter in the future.

zobzu 11y ago

Thats funny, if followed it seems these advices would transform twitter into facebook So, yeah..

OoTheNigerian 11y ago

"Nothing great is Built On Twitter" That quote sums it all up. Most of Dustin's suggested extensions are things other people should have built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton's App.Net plan where Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on ensuring the backbone stays in place. Funny enough, that is how twitter originated. Others built their clients and they focused on the core. They lost that direction and wanted to "own it all" like Facebook. But they took that direction rather too early. Take Tweetstorming as an example which is a niche need. My team built a tweetstorming app http://writerack.com http://writerack.com. It pulls and pushes all it's content from and to Twitter. In an ideal case, Twitter should support it and similar ones rather than making Twitter.com more convoluted with the aim of doing everything themselves. If Twitter had supported third patrty developers, someone/people would have built a killer app for using twitter to follow and interact live events. That would have brought another set of people into the platform and that extends to other use cases too. Hopefully, Twitter gets it right because I have come to really find Twitter useful.

wpietri 11y ago
I think there are two pretty good reasons that Twitter moved away from being an open platform, and they are: 1) ensuring a good user experience, and 2) making money. The tweetstorming thing, for example, conveniences particular writers at the expense of all the other writers (and quite a number of readers). I hate it, and will unfollow anybody who does it regularly. It's the tragedy of the commons for an attention economy. Twitter's demand that people be concise is a large part of its value to readers. The more they control the UI, the easier it is to nudge people in particular directions that shape good user experiences. But that's a small thing next to making money. To experiment with various ad products, they need extremely fine grained control of and reporting on user experience, and they need to be able to rapidly change that as they come up with new ideas. That's hard enough even when they control everything; getting a zillion developers to do that is impossible. Focusing on the core was great, but nobody was paying them for the core. They're spending ~$1.5 billion/year. Anybody who says, "Twitter should do X" without explaining how their plan will help pay the bills is not going to get a lot of consideration at Twitter HQ.

blazespin 11y ago

If the MM+ tweeter is half way savvy they'd do what Zuck does and reply to some small % of his followers. I'm sure if they did that, a 13 year old follower would irrationally hope that their tweet was seriously read and would engage in the conversation.

mahouse 11y ago

I'm a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps until they fucked them all. I'm now forced to use their glittery official app full of ads and suggestions and things I don't care about. I follow less than 50 people and use Twitter 24/7 literally. I never miss a tweet. > First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction. Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses. Let's force Justin Bieber to sit down and read the thousands of replies he gets to each any of his tweets. Let's also make it so when I click on a Justin Bieber tweet, my browser downloads a webpage of 50MB with all the responses so I can read them all. > Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.” No, please, please no, NOOO. Some of us are just simply not interested in real-time events and use Twitter to talk to our friends. If a bomb explodes in Bangkok, I simply don't care. If I did, I'd use the search engine. And by knowing Twitter, they would probably make the banner mandatory, or would make you dismiss it each time (along with a nice "Did you like this?"). > Third, Twitter has fucked up multimedia integration. Why the hell does adding a photo or video use up some of the 140 characters I want to use for my description? Why does it crop my photo? Why does it not show full-width images in the feed? Because Twitter is a text-only social network... Or at least that's what it was. > Fourth, let’s talk about third party payloads/integrations on Twitter. They have never felt native, and they are still–after three years–in a bizarrely dire state. Same response as before: I think media integrations should not be encouraged. > And that leads to me to the final thing I want to talk about, which is also the most important: Twitter has fucked up its platform. Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. So don't follow them. Follow only humans with real feelings that are not using Twitter to earn themselves money. > The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. So you want to read automated tweets all day? Don't be silly, who wants to read "Johnny has favourited this vid on youtube!!" "Mike has uploaded this pic to Instagram!!" all day? You? No, nobody, that's why these integrations with automatic tweets are RUDE. If I want to know what you uploaded to Instagram I'd follow you there, jackass! There, I vented it.

sreejithr 11y ago

> The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team. This is THE ONE THING they've done right. I'm come on Twitter to read what people wrote about stuff. Last thing we need is an emotionless machine generated feed.

michaelborromeo 11y ago

If Twitter didn't exist, what would the world use instead?

scholia 11y ago
Facebook. That's really Twitter's major problem. Facebook used to be mostly friends chatting to family and friends, but nowadays it's the single biggest source of news links and the sort of viral spam that used to circulate on Twitter. Twitter is still a faster and more reliable source of breaking news, but not that many people (apart from journalists) care about speed. And Facebook's threaded chat provides a much better way to discuss stories than Twitter. In sum, for most people, Facebook's news feed is probably now a better Twitter than Twitter.

tempodox 11y ago

Your word in Twitter's ear! I seem to recognise a pattern where Twitter & Apple's AppStore fail in the same way: Failing to give end losers (er, users) intelligent filters so they can decide what they want to see, and equally important, what they do not want to see. The conspicuous absence of those options speaks loud & clear as to the platform owner's intentions.

sushrutbidwai 11y ago

Bigger issue is no developer trusts twitter any more. Just like LinkedIn. twitter has been unkind to the developers which helped it make popular. Remember things like lists, hashtags, media embed are all brought to twitter before twitter did so itself. But developers of these innovations were treated badly. And hence no developer wants to develop for twitter platform any more.

olivermarks 11y ago

Tech celebrities such as Guy Kawasaki have had teams of tweeters working for them for years: it seems reasonable to assume large numbers of people are employed to interact with show biz personality obsessives...just like all the faked autographs the Monkees etc used to mail to their fans...

falcolas 11y ago

I encourage anyone who thinks that #2 is as easy as the OP to give it a shot. It's actually quite a hard problem, especially when you have to deal with fake news tweets and want over 80% accuracy. Disclaimer, I work for a startup doing exactly this, so if it's something you actually want to do for a paycheck, shoot me an email.

joe5150 11y ago

Dustin clearly doesn't follow @cher if he thinks there's no meaningful interaction with celebrities going on on Twitter

vit05 11y ago

Twitter is very confusing and useless to anyone who wants to use less than one hour per day. So, if they focused on interactivity between anonimous,famous and "live events", most people who do not want to live on Twitter, will have a reason to open the app at least a few times a day.

Corrado 11y ago

I really, really want to like Twitter, but I just can't. Most of the content in my stream is crap, as I (apparently) don't know the "correct" people to follow. Finding the "correct" people to follow is difficult, and even then they sometimes spew multiple boatloads of crap. :/ I wish there was a way to filter some of it out and only keep the good stuff. Conversations are almost impossible to follow. Once you locate a good tweet, its a confusing process to find all the related tweets. Sometimes, they are below the tweet (which is confusing as I don't read from the bottom up most of the time) and sometimes they are buried inside the tweet. Grrrr!!! Finally, putting non-text media in a tweet is turning out to be horrible. At least when tweets used to be ASCII, I could reasonably read through them. Now, I have pages and pages of little silent movies that start playing when they come into focus. How annoying is that!? I really like the "World News Headline" feature that Dustin proposes and would probably use Twitter more if it has something like that. However, given that Twitter is transforming itself into a Vine/Instagram clone I probably won't be hitting the tweet box much in the future. :(