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I think twitter would be better off embracing lists. I follow relatively few people because of the firehose effect. My attitude towards the people I follow is

I think twitter would be better off embracing lists. I follow relatively few people because of the firehose effect. My attitude towards the people I follow is that I like seeing their tweets, but I don't really care if I miss them. News would be a good example of this. It's great to get news or sports tweets in the moment, but they're probably not tweets I'm going to go back through later to find out what happened. On the other hand, I have a number of lists, whose members I do not follow, but whose members tweets I do want to see. I probably spend more time in these lists than I do on my timeline. The lists are for specific types of information ("must reads", "python", "humor"). The more focused (fewer people in) the list, the more I value not missing the tweets. The twitter app makes lists very inconvenient to get to, which is too bad. I like the moments feature, but wind up using Tweetbot (or another alternative app) because I want easy access to my lists.

kin 11y ago
I second lists. I can view lists easily with TweetDeck, but organizing lists is a chore. How about themed lists & channels based on category? Make a channel called Fashion or a channel called Movies and it would more or less operate like a subreddit with moderators. I think it would be more engaging. There's too much self managing and noise right now with Twitter. I pretty much have to have a separate account in order to efficiently dive into the different networks. Let me give two use cases. Say there's a basketball player and he tweets another basketball player and as a user it's fun to retweet/share/follow these conversations. Then let's say I'm also into indie games and this one indie developer tweets a sneak peek to a new release, and some game blogger talks about it. As a user, again, it's fun to retweet/share/follow this. I can't easily do this. Content is slapped together in a shitty form of lists and I continue to miss important things and I get jealous of other people's serendipitous luck in enjoying these conversations I would love to be a part of. If Twitter can figure this out, they would do well.
- lukewrites 11y ago
  It's crazy how hard it can be to follow conversations on twitter, and seems like a huge loss. To do better, I think twitter should look at how Sina Weibo does it. Weibo started out as a complete rip-off, but wound up coming up with some very useful ideas before zombie accounts and government censorship ran it all into the ground.
snowwrestler 11y ago
I feel like this has already been real-world tested, and manual sorting loses to algorithms. Facebook had categories or lists (can't remember what they called them) and few people used them. Google+ had the "circles" as a key differentiator vs. Facebook, and it did not help them compete at all. I think social media lists are one of those ideas that seems great in theory, but whose value is dynamically unstable in real life. Lists are only valuable if they are well-maintained. But maintainence takes time and attention, which are not always available. And once lists start to be compromised, even a little, then it will take even more time and attention to fix them. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll be fixed. Obviously lists work for you, but it seems like they don't for most folks.
- infogulch 11y ago
  So if the problem with lists is that they require effort to maintain them, how about lists with algorithmic maintenance suggestions? People that are hands-off can leave it fully automatic, whereas others could still make use of suggestions to maintain their fine-tuned lists more easily.
  - argonaut 11y ago
    Still requires effort to maintain. You have to click to add friends. Take a page from Facebook. It's now really hard to manage lists; they encourage you to use automatically-generated lists, though. I'm sure they had reams of data to support this (over the objections of vocal power users).
- wcummings 11y ago
  Email is usually sorted manually, I think.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    People hate managing their email, in my experience. What was Gmail's original value proposition? You never have to worry about deleting or filing emails anymore, because you get a ton of space and really good search. I know a lot of people do carefully file their emails, but Gmail shipped without folders at all and they've done well with that model.
fivre 11y ago
Maybe more tags than lists--the current UI for adding lists/adding users to lists is clunky as hell. I would be able to make more use of it if I could just open an account and add personal tags to it without having to go through the current several menus/popups needed to manage lists.

kin 11y ago

I second lists. I can view lists easily with TweetDeck, but organizing lists is a chore. How about themed lists & channels based on category? Make a channel called Fashion or a channel called Movies and it would more or less operate like a subreddit with moderators. I think it would be more engaging. There's too much self managing and noise right now with Twitter. I pretty much have to have a separate account in order to efficiently dive into the different networks. Let me give two use cases. Say there's a basketball player and he tweets another basketball player and as a user it's fun to retweet/share/follow these conversations. Then let's say I'm also into indie games and this one indie developer tweets a sneak peek to a new release, and some game blogger talks about it. As a user, again, it's fun to retweet/share/follow this. I can't easily do this. Content is slapped together in a shitty form of lists and I continue to miss important things and I get jealous of other people's serendipitous luck in enjoying these conversations I would love to be a part of. If Twitter can figure this out, they would do well.

lukewrites 11y ago
It's crazy how hard it can be to follow conversations on twitter, and seems like a huge loss. To do better, I think twitter should look at how Sina Weibo does it. Weibo started out as a complete rip-off, but wound up coming up with some very useful ideas before zombie accounts and government censorship ran it all into the ground.

snowwrestler 11y ago

I feel like this has already been real-world tested, and manual sorting loses to algorithms. Facebook had categories or lists (can't remember what they called them) and few people used them. Google+ had the "circles" as a key differentiator vs. Facebook, and it did not help them compete at all. I think social media lists are one of those ideas that seems great in theory, but whose value is dynamically unstable in real life. Lists are only valuable if they are well-maintained. But maintainence takes time and attention, which are not always available. And once lists start to be compromised, even a little, then it will take even more time and attention to fix them. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll be fixed. Obviously lists work for you, but it seems like they don't for most folks.

infogulch 11y ago
So if the problem with lists is that they require effort to maintain them, how about lists with algorithmic maintenance suggestions? People that are hands-off can leave it fully automatic, whereas others could still make use of suggestions to maintain their fine-tuned lists more easily.
- argonaut 11y ago
  Still requires effort to maintain. You have to click to add friends. Take a page from Facebook. It's now really hard to manage lists; they encourage you to use automatically-generated lists, though. I'm sure they had reams of data to support this (over the objections of vocal power users).
wcummings 11y ago
Email is usually sorted manually, I think.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  People hate managing their email, in my experience. What was Gmail's original value proposition? You never have to worry about deleting or filing emails anymore, because you get a ton of space and really good search. I know a lot of people do carefully file their emails, but Gmail shipped without folders at all and they've done well with that model.

fivre 11y ago

Maybe more tags than lists--the current UI for adding lists/adding users to lists is clunky as hell. I would be able to make more use of it if I could just open an account and add personal tags to it without having to go through the current several menus/popups needed to manage lists.