16 ms·

Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions

171 points by hvo 11y ago

kennydude 11y ago
> It could become a venture like Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit that depends on donations That would be a very good decision. Could also help persuade them for having everything behind a public API again.
- swombat 11y ago
  This is less unrealistic than it might seem at first. Twitter is no longer mostly owned by VCs looking for their 10x return - it's exited already. So it's now owned by the public, just by a slice of the public who wants to increase profits to increase the valuation. This is still not exactly straightforward to turn into a charity, but it's more realistic than if it was at the point where it was sitting on $700m of VC investments...
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    I imagine that your pension fund manager would not be happy to take a 50% writeoff on his Twitter position that would ultimately be reflected in your retirement portfolio. Everyone who owns a share of Twitter is looking for capital gains.
  - AznHisoka 11y ago
    So the public aren't looking for 10x returns either? Man.. Missed the days when mom and pops were all in the stock market and you had a chance to buy in on a company when they were still very small.. Seems all the profits already made when a company IPOs
  - criddell 11y ago
    I think the transition would be pretty tough to make. If they did it quickly, they would be hammered by investor lawsuits. If they do it slowly, their stock price will fall enough that somebody would likely buy them.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    This will never happen voluntarily. You would need a major event, such as bankruptcy, to allow this to happen. There are many things in the business world where you are at position A and will end up at position B, but there are too many stakeholders who are going to lose by the transition for it to happen peacefully.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > This is still not exactly straightforward to turn into a charity, but it's more realistic than if it was at the point where it was sitting on $700m of VC investments... If you think VCs more likely to accept their investment turning into a non-profit than public market investors, then you've never interacted with stock investors. Twitter trying to turn into a non-profit would lead to a class action lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty. Guaranteed. (If they even got that far without the board and CEO getting replaced.)
  - Riod 11y ago
    Even assuming everyone bought in at today's low cost base; who would agree to this? Would you voluntarily lose $15+/share for...for what exactly? Greater good?
    - swombat 11y ago
      As it happens, that's precisely the reason why public corporations exist: the greater good. That this has been forgotten and replaced with unilateral and antisocial concerns like "increase shareholder value at all costs" is an accident along the way. There is no reason why that can't be corrected. Public corporations exist for the good of the public and are basically funded by the public - even more so if they are largely owned by pension funds. My point, that being said, was not that this is straightforward. It is clearly not an easy step from public corporation to charity. However, that is a slightly easier step than from VC owned private company to charity, because VCs are very clear about wanting one thing only: capital gains, and they are not equivalent to "the public".
      - Riod 11y ago
        What? You can't be serious..
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Touche 11y ago
Who was the early employee that argued that Twitter should federate? When they ignored that they went down this inevitable road of world domination or bust. There's no turning back now. (side note: the fact that I couldn't find the name of the person who argued for this just shows how broken web search is today. When people argue that DuckDuckGo has poor search results I always scratch my head because unless your query is a one syllable common query you will not be able to find it on Google either.)
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  Is this it? It was the first hit on HN Search. http://venomousporridge.com/post/30043951343/is-a-federated-twitter-even-possible http://venomousporridge.com/post/30043951343/is-a-federated-...
  - Touche 11y ago
    That's an article about federation, but is that the Twitter employee who had internally pushed for them to become federated during their early days? I don't see any info about that in that post.
    - bsbechtel 11y ago
      No idea....I just figured there might be some info on HN about it and decided to search there. Thought it at least might be a start on finding info on the subject :)
- balanceiskey15 11y ago
  I don't know about Twitter itself, but I think there have been a few attempts at federate competitors or protocols. The most recent I can recall is Tent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol) It seems like Tent has morphed now into this: https://cupcake.io/ https://cupcake.io/
  - zanny 11y ago
roymurdock 11y ago
Mr. Jones used to be the chief executive of Myspace, the once-giant social network, but he rejected any comparison between Twitter and that now vastly diminished network. “For me and for lots of people, Twitter has actual utility to it, and for those people, that’s what will keep it around,” he said. So instead of figuring an unorthodox way to take it private or set up a donation scheme ala Wikipedia, why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service? I also take issue with the author's opening assessment of Twitter: Twitter is the world’s most important social network. That might sound like the ravings of an addict, but look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast. Just about anything you encounter in the news media these days has some foot in the controversies and conversations occurring on the 140-character network. We live in a hyperconnected world where every tiny little twitter controversy gets blown massively out of proportion, draining people's time and energy on things that really don't matter in the face of much larger and more important problems. At the end of the day, Twitter is used mainly for entertainment purposes. The author can keep pointing to the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter, etc. but the fact remains that revolutions and social movements occurred long before Twitter existed, long before cell phones and computers existed, and that Twitter is not some be-all-end-all enabler that we need to rescue for the betterment of humanity. If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service there. If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market settle things with Twitter.
- dmethvin 11y ago
  > why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service? The big users with lots of followers are the ones who create the large audience for Twitter to reach. Right now those people create content for free, if you start charging them they are likely to leave. If Twitter could create a model like Youtube where big content creators with lots of followers shared revenue, that would straighten out the incentives. There's a model here, it just may not be as big as Twitter thought it was a few years ago.
  - 11y ago
benten10 11y ago
Are there any more popular twitter-like alternatives? I'm aware of Ello, but from what I'm told, too much of the uhh 'artistic community' for me to truly enjoy (my artist friends have unsuccessfully tried persuading me to join).
- coldpie 11y ago
  There's a thing called GNUSocial, which I think is open source and federated. No idea if it's popular, I've never heard of it before someone mentioned it on HN a few days ago. https://gnu.io/ https://gnu.io/
  - zanny 11y ago
    It always depends on your definition of "popular". Are there users using it regularly? yes. Thousand? Yes. Millions? No. How many people do you want on your social network before you consider it popular enough to use?
  - riffic 11y ago
    Great thing about software like GNUSocial is that organizations can run their own social infrastructure, a bit like how organizations could previously run their own email or any other service infrastructure, rather than rely on a third-party company to dispatch it on your behalf. By organizations, I'm talking about business, government agencies, educational institutions, et cetera.
    - majewsky 11y ago
      > a bit like how organizations could previously run their own email [...] infrastructure "Previously"?
      - riffic 11y ago
        Don't read too much into that, it was a poor choice of wording.
- deleted 11y ago
cel1ne 11y ago
I argue that Twitter, like many other services, has become public infrastructure. Public infrastructure costs money, needs maintenance and is depended upon by many. As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths, railroads, sewage-systems etc.) Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.
- Jordrok 11y ago
  I see this argument all the time and it has never made any sense to me. Do you honestly consider Twitter to have the same level of utility, ubiquity, and necessity as things like running water, electricity, sewage, roads, etc? Let's look specifically at just the US for the sake of simplicity: The idea of the Internet in general as a public utility has only very recently become accepted and is still going through growing pains. Even so, the total percentage of people in the US who use the Internet is "only" around 84%.[1] Of those people who use the Internet, around 24% are Twitter users.[2] If Twitter were to simply vanish overnight, the large majority of people in the US would be completely unaffected. I'm not sure you could say that about any other public utility. [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-access-2000-2015/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-acc... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/ http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fac...
- malsun 11y ago
  My main issue with Twitter is it grew out of the weird environment that is San Francisco and has all the baggage of people who live within that. That wouldn't be a problem if the service was a normal startup, but it's a platform for influencing public opinion that delves into journalism and politics. For that reason, I wouldn't want it to be considered a public service, never mind one that serves the world.
  - cel1ne 11y ago
    I agree wholeheartedly, but I don't think it'll disappear. It's considered too important, even if it really isn't.
owenwil 11y ago
This is definitely right. Creation on Twitter isn't for everyone. It's confusing, convoluted and hard to use. Consuming Twitter is something almost everyone does unwittingly. New stories are generated there, celebrities post directly. It tears down walls between PR and the masses. It's a great service, but truly Twitter must give up on the idea that it's going to be able to get everyone or even a larger chunk of the population to actively send messages there -- it can't and won't.
- galfarragem 11y ago
  Not sure if this formula allows twitter to be highly profitable but allows it to be a great tool: - Don't tweet (I never did it): Twitter is for broadcasting and most people have nothing important to broadcast. - Follow a maximum of 20 accounts. Be very picky and choose wisely. I don't follow friends (this is not FB). Spam and noise will almost disappear.
lukasm 11y ago
"Twitter is the world’s most important social network." Not it's not. It's a great tool for news journalists and announcements (Tesla). I don't like Twitter, I don't know how to use it and it doesn't provide enough value for me to care to learn. I like some funny stuff like Borat Dev Ops or WeWantPlates. But short of that I don't need extra cognitive overhead. Newspapers, HN etc. are my frontends for Twitter.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "Twitter is the world’s most important social network." > "Not it's not." ... "I don't like Twitter" What does you liking it or disliking it have anything to do with Twitter being the 'world's most important social network'? You only have to look at it's traffic and influence to know its position on the web. Whilst Facebook and Instagram are larger than Twitter terms of users, it could be argued that Twitter fills a more important niche in terms of the diversity of its content and its role as a fast moving news source.
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    Twitter may be "the most important social network for X" where X is "for reporters getting quotes" or "for fast moving news sources" or some other niche, but calling it "the most important social network" without any sort of qualification is downright silly.
  - Riod 11y ago
    He's actually pretty much spot on. It's not a coincidence that Twitter has 5x less users than Facebook after so many years.
  - mafribe 11y ago
    fast moving news source. There is a hard trade-off in news between speed and accuracy. Twitter helped moved news away from accuracy. This is a negative development as truth is more important than speed in most cases for most people most of the time. For all its flaws, the old media had professional journalist that at least occasionally engaged in fact-checking, however perfunctory. This has completely gone out of the window, for many reasons, the most important of which is probably the collapse of ad-revenue and print sales, which isn't Twitter's fault. But Twitter has made things worse. Twitter is a peer-to-peer tabloid.
omonra 11y ago
I might be wrong but it appears that Twitter is mostly useful for reporters who want to write a story on something and find it easy to get quotes. Whereas before this required traveling to the random place where the story takes place (with potential danger and hassle of travel), now they merely have to open twitter and find some random twat with an opinion on the subject. And presto - a quote is ready. The problem, of course, is that the importance of the quote is greatly diminished and just 'someone with a twitter account thinks X'. If before the reporter actually had to go out and ask people for their opinions which presented an accurate view 'on the ground', now he's getting a view of the 'twitter-sphere' - which might have little bearing on views of affected population at large.
- malsun 11y ago
  Before Twitter there was a phase where journalists would monitor discussion forums (think vBulletin). I know this because I would take part in speculative discussions and the next day it turned into front page news stories. No sources but obviously came from the discussion. It spooked me and made me realise that modern journalism was already becoming lazy.
  - jackcosgrove 11y ago
    So it turns out the "zeitgeist" is just reporters cribbing from gossip.
    - majewsky 11y ago
      I don't think it's zeitgeist only. Or at least, not on such a short scale. The pre-internet equivalent of that is interviewing random people on the street about current events, to fill the 2:30 of your news report with something vaguely related to the subject. Like in Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI
- JBReefer 11y ago
  I think that's the crux of the hysterical coverage around this - the media really, really needs Twitter, and no one else cares anymore. Snapchat is a better way to interact with your friends _and_ with celebrites/strangers/comedians, but it doesn't make for nice neat embedable quotes.
draw_down 11y ago
"Nope, it all went downhill when they made the fonts too small!" - HN
jpeg_hero 11y ago
I'm no neckbeard (well, maybe I am, ha) but I've been wondering really if the new "Safety Council" will be the beginning of the end. There's already stresses on the system, baroque user name / user discovery, you go to post and you can't condense your point into the space allowed even though you tried a few times, you've been using twitter for a while so the novelty is wearing off, you are in your own place in your own "timeline curation journey" -- maybe you have too few people and you don't get a lot of value out of timeline checking, maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it,,,), maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!? ,,,anyways, this is your feeling about Twitter, and then, now there is this new layer of the "Safety Council Directorate" and the wild west feel is gone from some of the signal, and maybe it even makes you worried about your own potential implosion from a social media misstep ("So You've Been Publicly Shamed"),,, and then you say to yourself, to hell with it, this Twitter thing is getting too ponderous. --- http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-council-makes-a-mockery-of-free-speech/ http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-cou...
- daigoba66 11y ago
  > maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) Unfollow. Seriously, that's the best way to decrease noise. Yeah, perhaps they do occasionally tweet something interesting. But if 50%+ is just noise, it's hardly worth it. I'll look for their content elsewhere.
- r721 11y ago
  >maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) One of solutions: add high volume posters to thematic lists and unfollow them. Check lists when you have time for that.
- 11y ago
jaydigital 11y ago
Twitter is a niche site, it's not built on appealing to everyone. It's by far my favourite social network, but Facebook provides a more populist service. Analogy time: I feel like everyone thinks of Facebook and Twitter as Coke vs Pepsi, including Twitter's head honchos. Facebook have this unique combination that is massively successful, Twitter are desperately trying to imitate it. They should look at it more like Coke and Sprite. Sprite offers a different taste, it's for us guys that like lemonade. Why not crush the lemonade game, rather than gun for Coke? (I know that Sprite is owned by Coca-Cola, the analogy doesn't run forever)
- Steuard 11y ago
  I like this analogy: Twitter intrinsically isn't Facebook, and it wouldn't make sense for it to try to be. Having that diversity in the marketplace is a good thing, and soft drinks demonstrate that such situations can absolutely be sustainable. (Aside: if you make it Coke vs. 7-Up, you'll dodge that last complaint.)
  - jackcosgrove 11y ago
    I always considered Twitter to be a subset of Facebook, namely the status update.
- coldcode 11y ago
  The difference for me is Facebook is how I communicate with people I know, and Twitter with people I don't. To me they are different things. Of course not for everyone.
- morgante 11y ago
  > I know that Sprite is owned by Coca-Cola, the analogy doesn't run forever It's a great analogy and I think it runs that far (that Twitter might be best served by becoming a subsidiary of a larger tech or media company).
- lg 11y ago
  maybe the analogy runs further than you think.. there's a lot of natural complements between these products, one is a runaway moneymaking success while the other product is more niche, but they can be sold/advertised together for bigger impact...why shouldn't they be owned by the same company?
spot 11y ago
maybe they should do like kickstarter did and convert to a public benefit corp.
- notahacker 11y ago
  I can't see the holders of $10bn in equity in Twitter agreeing to that.
treenyc 11y ago
Why does it have to make money? If service such as twitter that can benefit the world in some way without making any money, why force it into a 'business model'?
- dchuk 11y ago
  ...because it costs money to run it? And it costs money to hire good talent to maintain it?
  - treenyc 11y ago
    Yes, but I would imagine that cost is not too much. Why not make it into something like a public resource. Often that approach will generate more wealth for the greater community. Often the for-profit model and fiduciary responsibility can be constraining in wealth creation in general.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- raldi 11y ago
  Because in order to be brought into existence, young Twitter needed money, and the people who gave them that money did so in return for the right to vote on the future of the company, and the holders of those rights today vote for profit. If you'd like to see a different kind of company, you should offer to invest in startups under more altruistic terms.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  You would have a point if Twitter was a non profit, but it's a publically traded company and, thus, has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to make money.
FussyZeus 11y ago
Wall Street is where tech companies go to die. They make something good, go public, investors demand to make ALL the money on Earth instead of a modest profit for providing a good service, then the service goes to shit because developers have to sacrifice what makes it good to make it more profitable, users leave, service dies. I'm perfectly happy to make my living in a small company that does good work. I'll never be a billionaire and that's fine with me.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  This is the problem with every company that goes to Wall Street. The QER killed any hopes of companies being able to just try things. Instead, the only thing they can do is look to beat this quarter in the next. That is it.
bobby_9x 11y ago
I hope twitter collapses. Why? they gave api access to developers and business owners to use their site, used this data as free R&D, and yanked access. It put many companies out of business over night. They deserve everything they get.
morgante 11y ago
> Twitter is the world’s most important social network. I see sentiment like this and it just reminds me of how insular journalism is. Twitter is incredibly popular amongst journalists and a certain kind of person, but does that really make it "the most important" social network? Facebook has an order of magnitude more daily active users. It might not have the appeal to news and political junkies of Twitter, but it's intimately involved in the lives of a billion people. Calling Twitter the world's most important social network is like calling The New Yorker the world's most important media outlet. It's a niche product for a certain group of journalistically-influential people.
- YngwieMalware 11y ago
  I definitely agree with you re: insular journalism, though I think Twitter has been more present during world events than FB ever has. For instance, allowing people to mass communicate during crisis. It's much better at breaking news than FB ever has been, which I would say is more important, and IMO the Twitter team needs to recognize that and quit trying to become FB.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > allowing people to mass communicate during crisis. I'm not so sure about this. I think Safety Check has vastly more usage than Twitter during crises. Twitter historically dominated the real-time game, but I'm increasingly seeing Facebook do a good job of it as well.
  - devindotcom 11y ago
    it's better at public events, sure - you see stuff break on twitter because you can SEE it. But the useful part of FB is largely hidden from you. During world events the vast, vast majority of stuff people say on FB is private, but Twitter is more or less public by default. So I would disagree that FB is less "present" -- maybe to you, yes, but systemically and worldwide, I don't think so.
- redbrick 11y ago
  A majority of my news feed posts on Facebook is made up of headline tweets from twitter. I think twitter definitely is the most influential news feed.
pete_mg 11y ago
How is this possible???
cft 11y ago
The problem with this thinking is that Twitter is not a software tool that needs to be improved. It's a TV show that has ran its course and is declining. Hollywood knows how to deal with these problems: they end the show, and replace it with a new one. The problem here is that Twitter is an infotainment studio with one single show. And Wall St will not let it run as a startup anymore, incubating early stage new shows like Periscope.
- majewsky 11y ago
  I reject the metaphor. Just because a tool does not gain new followers (heh) anymore, doesn't mean it should be killed. It would be interesting to know if Twitter would be profitable if it is just put into maintenance mode. My point is, Twitter has value for me the way it is. I don't personally see any reason for changing it. Of course, that's not a reasoning that Wall Street would agree with.
spo81rty 11y ago
This all sounds like the downfall of taking massive investments and going public. They are under pressure to keep growing at a high pace. In reality maybe they have grown about as far as they can go. They have substantial revenues and what should be a very profitable business as is. But will the pressure to grow due to maintaining a high stock price kill them?
- rubidium 11y ago
  They and Pandora. You could probably make quite list of "companies that could be great and nicely profitable except that investors want it to try and be mega-huge".
  - spo81rty 11y ago
    Twitter has almost $2 billion a year in revenues and 60%+ gross margins. They should be or could be very profitable.
fossuser 11y ago
I think Twitter's issue is a vision problem, they don't have a good idea of what they're trying to do. Facebook's is trying to connect the world - this leads to FB messenger, Oculus, Instagram, trying to buy Snapchat, internet.org - basically acquiring or creating what they can to drive human interaction and communication online. Twitter has one thing they built that they've made awkward changes to which most people seem not to care about. Closing their open APIs which built on Twitters core value was a mistake and their attempts to monetize in weird ways at the cost of their own usefulness has also not worked out.
- Xyik 11y ago
  The sad thing is, one of Twitter's core values is to reach every person on the planet.
- tdeck 11y ago
  I would say the mission of Twitter seems to be "help people promote their personal brand". Unfortunately for them, not everyone is interested in either doing that or reading about other people doing it.
belltyler 11y ago
Twitter's been around for 10 years—and maybe it's just my perception—but I feel like the tech. media has never done anything but hate on them. It's well-founded criticism at times, sure, but at what point does it become a loop of negative attitudes simply based on pre-existing negative attitudes? That's just my take on the whole thing. I personally have some confidence in Twitter and have nothing poor to say about their product / direction.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  And after 10 years they can't add a damn edit feature? Little stuff like that that makes it less than desirable to use really upsets me, because they clearly pay top dollar for talent and they have tons of engineers working there (don't even get me started on their shitty mobile web pages).
  - belltyler 11y ago
    Obviously they could add it - it wouldn't be hard. Just because it doesn't have feature X doesn't mean it's bad. At that point it's a conscious decision to exclude that feature. Poor performing mobile sites? That is something they could for sure address, especially with the engineering power they have, I agree.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
Twitter needs to be Twitter. It's not for everyone and that's perfectly OK. The people criticizing it seem to care more about market cap.
perseusprime11 11y ago
Ever heard of micro-management of a CEO? All these opinions, op-eds, VC advice won't help Jack to focus on the company. Their fundamental problem is that a tweet is not a great native ad unit. That's where the story ends and a reason why Twitter cannot meet Wall Street expectations.
jgalt212 11y ago
I like twitter because I can follow people smarter or more informed than me. My facebook feed, on the other hand, is utterly inane. My thoughtful/smart friends almost never post, and if I unfollow the idiots, I'm left with only ads.
dcgoss 11y ago
What if you could curate different timelines for yourself? You could have a news timeline, with the NYT and CNN accounts added for example. Then you could have a tech timeline, or a music timeline, etc. This would make consuming the content a lot easier and less jumbled together, I feel.
- Riod 11y ago
  Good idea. Actually moments should ask you what you're interested in. Kind of like Google Now. I don't need a feed full of celebrity news
- mjquinn 11y ago
  This sounds like a good fit for Twitter's lists feature[0], if only the standard clients supported it better. [0] https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460 https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460
vonnik 11y ago
New York Times, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back Pulitzer Ambitions I find it incredible how well newspapers solve other businesses problems, and how poor they are at diagnosing their own.
headgasket 11y ago
I am a very light twitter user. I've been on for ages; but I really dont post or read tweets; I however have a use for twitter. Find smart people, and hear what they think. Smart people follow smart or smarter people. Or reply to smart people. The actual intellectual goods is usually not on twitter, but in a forum or a blog post. I usually dont event follow these though leaders on twitter, because I dont want to spend time in this constant partial attention state, I want to be here and now at 100%, in this piece of code, project or post/book. You see noise is my enemy. The size of a community is ironically then a curse. That's why I loved HN so much in the beginning. Smart guys like PG. The thing is, the smarts are distributed as a bell curve...
whatever_dude 11y ago
Twitter is another instance where a company destroys the one thing (service, product) they do well by attempting to do all other things at the same time. They end up creating a diluted, mediocre thing that everyone just dislikes equally. Horizontal expansion at the cost of vertical depth. > They see their favorite band straining to become U2. And they hate U2. This is a perfect analogy. I used to really like Twitter. But every change they do to the mobile app (or to the service in general) is just polluting the experience of what was once a pretty well controlled stream. I can't find the group of people I like to follow (developers) anywhere else, so I haven't given up on the service yet. The content is mostly still there. But the friction, and the amount of noise, is increasing drastically.
- jerrickhoang 11y ago
  can you elaborate? what were the things that you really like that they took out? What have they added that you dislike?
  - whatever_dude 11y ago
    The problem is not really with what they've taken out (although pretty much killing TweetDeck still stings), but instead added to the overall experience. * I'll click a tweet and immediately below it there will be an unrelated "Promoted Tweet". In the same place replies would normally be, so I always need to do a double take to see whether it's a reply or an ad. * I'll look at my list and it'll always show a list of tweets out of order, the "While you were away" feature. The weird thing is that you can dismiss it, and then it asks you if you liked it; I always say no, but it keeps reappearing. * They were recently inserting tweets from people I don't follow in my timeline because they were "popular". I think they changed that feature now, but it was very confusing at first. * Promoted Tweets show way too often and are too similar to real Tweets. * "Moments" is a joke. I used to like Twitter for live events (normally with just a search) and was excited to have a feature dedicated to that need, but they completely missed the point by making something that is hard to follow and not even close to real time. It's barely usable. That's what made me realize they have no idea what they're doing. I like to follow a small group of people. My experience is a bit curated. But nowadays, almost everything I do on the mobile or web app will show me content I don't care about. The fact that none of it is controllable by the user (like the "While you were away" feature) is infuriating. This is not even related to ad revenue, it's just a point of user experience they decided to break completely. I have moved away from the official clients and the experience is a little bit better. Doesn't change the fact that the platform is clearly moving away from the use case that made it popular in the first place, at least for me.
Riod 11y ago
Honestly even the changes twitter has made have been poor. Moments should ask you, like Google Now, what you're interested in. What use is a random burst of stuff if you're interested only in big basketball stories? It should blend what you want with what's going on around you in an artful manner. Google even showed the way with this.
ha8o8le 11y ago
whats twitter?
transpy 11y ago
My experience: Twitter has been very useful to get to know influencial people in my line of work. Also, to practice concise expression of ideas. The problem is, Twitter is not very actionable. Yeah, the CEO of X company now follows you. What now? I found following people and writing posts in LinkedIn is more actionable. I connect with leaders in my industry to whom I can send a CV quickly.

171 points by hvo 11y ago

> It could become a venture like Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit that depends on donations That would be a very good decision. Could also help persuade them for having everything behind a public API again.

swombat 11y ago
This is less unrealistic than it might seem at first. Twitter is no longer mostly owned by VCs looking for their 10x return - it's exited already. So it's now owned by the public, just by a slice of the public who wants to increase profits to increase the valuation. This is still not exactly straightforward to turn into a charity, but it's more realistic than if it was at the point where it was sitting on $700m of VC investments...
- roymurdock 11y ago
  I imagine that your pension fund manager would not be happy to take a 50% writeoff on his Twitter position that would ultimately be reflected in your retirement portfolio. Everyone who owns a share of Twitter is looking for capital gains.
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  So the public aren't looking for 10x returns either? Man.. Missed the days when mom and pops were all in the stock market and you had a chance to buy in on a company when they were still very small.. Seems all the profits already made when a company IPOs
- criddell 11y ago
  I think the transition would be pretty tough to make. If they did it quickly, they would be hammered by investor lawsuits. If they do it slowly, their stock price will fall enough that somebody would likely buy them.
- danielweber 11y ago
  This will never happen voluntarily. You would need a major event, such as bankruptcy, to allow this to happen. There are many things in the business world where you are at position A and will end up at position B, but there are too many stakeholders who are going to lose by the transition for it to happen peacefully.
- morgante 11y ago
  > This is still not exactly straightforward to turn into a charity, but it's more realistic than if it was at the point where it was sitting on $700m of VC investments... If you think VCs more likely to accept their investment turning into a non-profit than public market investors, then you've never interacted with stock investors. Twitter trying to turn into a non-profit would lead to a class action lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty. Guaranteed. (If they even got that far without the board and CEO getting replaced.)
- Riod 11y ago
  Even assuming everyone bought in at today's low cost base; who would agree to this? Would you voluntarily lose $15+/share for...for what exactly? Greater good?
  - swombat 11y ago
    As it happens, that's precisely the reason why public corporations exist: the greater good. That this has been forgotten and replaced with unilateral and antisocial concerns like "increase shareholder value at all costs" is an accident along the way. There is no reason why that can't be corrected. Public corporations exist for the good of the public and are basically funded by the public - even more so if they are largely owned by pension funds. My point, that being said, was not that this is straightforward. It is clearly not an easy step from public corporation to charity. However, that is a slightly easier step than from VC owned private company to charity, because VCs are very clear about wanting one thing only: capital gains, and they are not equivalent to "the public".
    - Riod 11y ago
      What? You can't be serious..

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Touche 11y ago

Who was the early employee that argued that Twitter should federate? When they ignored that they went down this inevitable road of world domination or bust. There's no turning back now. (side note: the fact that I couldn't find the name of the person who argued for this just shows how broken web search is today. When people argue that DuckDuckGo has poor search results I always scratch my head because unless your query is a one syllable common query you will not be able to find it on Google either.)

bsbechtel 11y ago
Is this it? It was the first hit on HN Search. http://venomousporridge.com/post/30043951343/is-a-federated-twitter-even-possible http://venomousporridge.com/post/30043951343/is-a-federated-...
- Touche 11y ago
  That's an article about federation, but is that the Twitter employee who had internally pushed for them to become federated during their early days? I don't see any info about that in that post.
  - bsbechtel 11y ago
    No idea....I just figured there might be some info on HN about it and decided to search there. Thought it at least might be a start on finding info on the subject :)
balanceiskey15 11y ago
I don't know about Twitter itself, but I think there have been a few attempts at federate competitors or protocols. The most recent I can recall is Tent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol) It seems like Tent has morphed now into this: https://cupcake.io/ https://cupcake.io/
- zanny 11y ago

roymurdock 11y ago

Mr. Jones used to be the chief executive of Myspace, the once-giant social network, but he rejected any comparison between Twitter and that now vastly diminished network. “For me and for lots of people, Twitter has actual utility to it, and for those people, that’s what will keep it around,” he said. So instead of figuring an unorthodox way to take it private or set up a donation scheme ala Wikipedia, why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service? I also take issue with the author's opening assessment of Twitter: Twitter is the world’s most important social network. That might sound like the ravings of an addict, but look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast. Just about anything you encounter in the news media these days has some foot in the controversies and conversations occurring on the 140-character network. We live in a hyperconnected world where every tiny little twitter controversy gets blown massively out of proportion, draining people's time and energy on things that really don't matter in the face of much larger and more important problems. At the end of the day, Twitter is used mainly for entertainment purposes. The author can keep pointing to the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter, etc. but the fact remains that revolutions and social movements occurred long before Twitter existed, long before cell phones and computers existed, and that Twitter is not some be-all-end-all enabler that we need to rescue for the betterment of humanity. If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service there. If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market settle things with Twitter.

dmethvin 11y ago
> why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service? The big users with lots of followers are the ones who create the large audience for Twitter to reach. Right now those people create content for free, if you start charging them they are likely to leave. If Twitter could create a model like Youtube where big content creators with lots of followers shared revenue, that would straighten out the incentives. There's a model here, it just may not be as big as Twitter thought it was a few years ago.
- 11y ago

benten10 11y ago

Are there any more popular twitter-like alternatives? I'm aware of Ello, but from what I'm told, too much of the uhh 'artistic community' for me to truly enjoy (my artist friends have unsuccessfully tried persuading me to join).

coldpie 11y ago
There's a thing called GNUSocial, which I think is open source and federated. No idea if it's popular, I've never heard of it before someone mentioned it on HN a few days ago. https://gnu.io/ https://gnu.io/
- zanny 11y ago
  It always depends on your definition of "popular". Are there users using it regularly? yes. Thousand? Yes. Millions? No. How many people do you want on your social network before you consider it popular enough to use?
- riffic 11y ago
  Great thing about software like GNUSocial is that organizations can run their own social infrastructure, a bit like how organizations could previously run their own email or any other service infrastructure, rather than rely on a third-party company to dispatch it on your behalf. By organizations, I'm talking about business, government agencies, educational institutions, et cetera.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    > a bit like how organizations could previously run their own email [...] infrastructure "Previously"?
    - riffic 11y ago
      Don't read too much into that, it was a poor choice of wording.
deleted 11y ago

cel1ne 11y ago

I argue that Twitter, like many other services, has become public infrastructure. Public infrastructure costs money, needs maintenance and is depended upon by many. As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths, railroads, sewage-systems etc.) Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.

Jordrok 11y ago
I see this argument all the time and it has never made any sense to me. Do you honestly consider Twitter to have the same level of utility, ubiquity, and necessity as things like running water, electricity, sewage, roads, etc? Let's look specifically at just the US for the sake of simplicity: The idea of the Internet in general as a public utility has only very recently become accepted and is still going through growing pains. Even so, the total percentage of people in the US who use the Internet is "only" around 84%.[1] Of those people who use the Internet, around 24% are Twitter users.[2] If Twitter were to simply vanish overnight, the large majority of people in the US would be completely unaffected. I'm not sure you could say that about any other public utility. [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-access-2000-2015/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-acc... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/ http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fac...
malsun 11y ago
My main issue with Twitter is it grew out of the weird environment that is San Francisco and has all the baggage of people who live within that. That wouldn't be a problem if the service was a normal startup, but it's a platform for influencing public opinion that delves into journalism and politics. For that reason, I wouldn't want it to be considered a public service, never mind one that serves the world.
- cel1ne 11y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly, but I don't think it'll disappear. It's considered too important, even if it really isn't.

owenwil 11y ago

This is definitely right. Creation on Twitter isn't for everyone. It's confusing, convoluted and hard to use. Consuming Twitter is something almost everyone does unwittingly. New stories are generated there, celebrities post directly. It tears down walls between PR and the masses. It's a great service, but truly Twitter must give up on the idea that it's going to be able to get everyone or even a larger chunk of the population to actively send messages there -- it can't and won't.

galfarragem 11y ago
Not sure if this formula allows twitter to be highly profitable but allows it to be a great tool: - Don't tweet (I never did it): Twitter is for broadcasting and most people have nothing important to broadcast. - Follow a maximum of 20 accounts. Be very picky and choose wisely. I don't follow friends (this is not FB). Spam and noise will almost disappear.

lukasm 11y ago

"Twitter is the world’s most important social network." Not it's not. It's a great tool for news journalists and announcements (Tesla). I don't like Twitter, I don't know how to use it and it doesn't provide enough value for me to care to learn. I like some funny stuff like Borat Dev Ops or WeWantPlates. But short of that I don't need extra cognitive overhead. Newspapers, HN etc. are my frontends for Twitter.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "Twitter is the world’s most important social network." > "Not it's not." ... "I don't like Twitter" What does you liking it or disliking it have anything to do with Twitter being the 'world's most important social network'? You only have to look at it's traffic and influence to know its position on the web. Whilst Facebook and Instagram are larger than Twitter terms of users, it could be argued that Twitter fills a more important niche in terms of the diversity of its content and its role as a fast moving news source.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Twitter may be "the most important social network for X" where X is "for reporters getting quotes" or "for fast moving news sources" or some other niche, but calling it "the most important social network" without any sort of qualification is downright silly.
- Riod 11y ago
  He's actually pretty much spot on. It's not a coincidence that Twitter has 5x less users than Facebook after so many years.
- mafribe 11y ago
  fast moving news source. There is a hard trade-off in news between speed and accuracy. Twitter helped moved news away from accuracy. This is a negative development as truth is more important than speed in most cases for most people most of the time. For all its flaws, the old media had professional journalist that at least occasionally engaged in fact-checking, however perfunctory. This has completely gone out of the window, for many reasons, the most important of which is probably the collapse of ad-revenue and print sales, which isn't Twitter's fault. But Twitter has made things worse. Twitter is a peer-to-peer tabloid.

omonra 11y ago

I might be wrong but it appears that Twitter is mostly useful for reporters who want to write a story on something and find it easy to get quotes. Whereas before this required traveling to the random place where the story takes place (with potential danger and hassle of travel), now they merely have to open twitter and find some random twat with an opinion on the subject. And presto - a quote is ready. The problem, of course, is that the importance of the quote is greatly diminished and just 'someone with a twitter account thinks X'. If before the reporter actually had to go out and ask people for their opinions which presented an accurate view 'on the ground', now he's getting a view of the 'twitter-sphere' - which might have little bearing on views of affected population at large.

malsun 11y ago
Before Twitter there was a phase where journalists would monitor discussion forums (think vBulletin). I know this because I would take part in speculative discussions and the next day it turned into front page news stories. No sources but obviously came from the discussion. It spooked me and made me realise that modern journalism was already becoming lazy.
- jackcosgrove 11y ago
  So it turns out the "zeitgeist" is just reporters cribbing from gossip.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    I don't think it's zeitgeist only. Or at least, not on such a short scale. The pre-internet equivalent of that is interviewing random people on the street about current events, to fill the 2:30 of your news report with something vaguely related to the subject. Like in Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI
JBReefer 11y ago
I think that's the crux of the hysterical coverage around this - the media really, really needs Twitter, and no one else cares anymore. Snapchat is a better way to interact with your friends _and_ with celebrites/strangers/comedians, but it doesn't make for nice neat embedable quotes.

draw_down 11y ago

"Nope, it all went downhill when they made the fonts too small!" - HN

jpeg_hero 11y ago

I'm no neckbeard (well, maybe I am, ha) but I've been wondering really if the new "Safety Council" will be the beginning of the end. There's already stresses on the system, baroque user name / user discovery, you go to post and you can't condense your point into the space allowed even though you tried a few times, you've been using twitter for a while so the novelty is wearing off, you are in your own place in your own "timeline curation journey" -- maybe you have too few people and you don't get a lot of value out of timeline checking, maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it,,,), maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!? ,,,anyways, this is your feeling about Twitter, and then, now there is this new layer of the "Safety Council Directorate" and the wild west feel is gone from some of the signal, and maybe it even makes you worried about your own potential implosion from a social media misstep ("So You've Been Publicly Shamed"),,, and then you say to yourself, to hell with it, this Twitter thing is getting too ponderous. --- http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-council-makes-a-mockery-of-free-speech/ http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-cou...

daigoba66 11y ago
> maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) Unfollow. Seriously, that's the best way to decrease noise. Yeah, perhaps they do occasionally tweet something interesting. But if 50%+ is just noise, it's hardly worth it. I'll look for their content elsewhere.
r721 11y ago
>maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...) One of solutions: add high volume posters to thematic lists and unfollow them. Check lists when you have time for that.
11y ago

jaydigital 11y ago

Twitter is a niche site, it's not built on appealing to everyone. It's by far my favourite social network, but Facebook provides a more populist service. Analogy time: I feel like everyone thinks of Facebook and Twitter as Coke vs Pepsi, including Twitter's head honchos. Facebook have this unique combination that is massively successful, Twitter are desperately trying to imitate it. They should look at it more like Coke and Sprite. Sprite offers a different taste, it's for us guys that like lemonade. Why not crush the lemonade game, rather than gun for Coke? (I know that Sprite is owned by Coca-Cola, the analogy doesn't run forever)

Steuard 11y ago
I like this analogy: Twitter intrinsically isn't Facebook, and it wouldn't make sense for it to try to be. Having that diversity in the marketplace is a good thing, and soft drinks demonstrate that such situations can absolutely be sustainable. (Aside: if you make it Coke vs. 7-Up, you'll dodge that last complaint.)
- jackcosgrove 11y ago
  I always considered Twitter to be a subset of Facebook, namely the status update.
coldcode 11y ago
The difference for me is Facebook is how I communicate with people I know, and Twitter with people I don't. To me they are different things. Of course not for everyone.
morgante 11y ago
> I know that Sprite is owned by Coca-Cola, the analogy doesn't run forever It's a great analogy and I think it runs that far (that Twitter might be best served by becoming a subsidiary of a larger tech or media company).
lg 11y ago
maybe the analogy runs further than you think.. there's a lot of natural complements between these products, one is a runaway moneymaking success while the other product is more niche, but they can be sold/advertised together for bigger impact...why shouldn't they be owned by the same company?

spot 11y ago

maybe they should do like kickstarter did and convert to a public benefit corp.

notahacker 11y ago
I can't see the holders of $10bn in equity in Twitter agreeing to that.

treenyc 11y ago

Why does it have to make money? If service such as twitter that can benefit the world in some way without making any money, why force it into a 'business model'?

dchuk 11y ago
...because it costs money to run it? And it costs money to hire good talent to maintain it?
- treenyc 11y ago
  Yes, but I would imagine that cost is not too much. Why not make it into something like a public resource. Often that approach will generate more wealth for the greater community. Often the for-profit model and fiduciary responsibility can be constraining in wealth creation in general.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
raldi 11y ago
Because in order to be brought into existence, young Twitter needed money, and the people who gave them that money did so in return for the right to vote on the future of the company, and the holders of those rights today vote for profit. If you'd like to see a different kind of company, you should offer to invest in startups under more altruistic terms.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
You would have a point if Twitter was a non profit, but it's a publically traded company and, thus, has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to make money.

FussyZeus 11y ago

Wall Street is where tech companies go to die. They make something good, go public, investors demand to make ALL the money on Earth instead of a modest profit for providing a good service, then the service goes to shit because developers have to sacrifice what makes it good to make it more profitable, users leave, service dies. I'm perfectly happy to make my living in a small company that does good work. I'll never be a billionaire and that's fine with me.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
This is the problem with every company that goes to Wall Street. The QER killed any hopes of companies being able to just try things. Instead, the only thing they can do is look to beat this quarter in the next. That is it.

bobby_9x 11y ago

I hope twitter collapses. Why? they gave api access to developers and business owners to use their site, used this data as free R&D, and yanked access. It put many companies out of business over night. They deserve everything they get.

morgante 11y ago

> Twitter is the world’s most important social network. I see sentiment like this and it just reminds me of how insular journalism is. Twitter is incredibly popular amongst journalists and a certain kind of person, but does that really make it "the most important" social network? Facebook has an order of magnitude more daily active users. It might not have the appeal to news and political junkies of Twitter, but it's intimately involved in the lives of a billion people. Calling Twitter the world's most important social network is like calling The New Yorker the world's most important media outlet. It's a niche product for a certain group of journalistically-influential people.

YngwieMalware 11y ago
I definitely agree with you re: insular journalism, though I think Twitter has been more present during world events than FB ever has. For instance, allowing people to mass communicate during crisis. It's much better at breaking news than FB ever has been, which I would say is more important, and IMO the Twitter team needs to recognize that and quit trying to become FB.
- morgante 11y ago
  > allowing people to mass communicate during crisis. I'm not so sure about this. I think Safety Check has vastly more usage than Twitter during crises. Twitter historically dominated the real-time game, but I'm increasingly seeing Facebook do a good job of it as well.
- devindotcom 11y ago
  it's better at public events, sure - you see stuff break on twitter because you can SEE it. But the useful part of FB is largely hidden from you. During world events the vast, vast majority of stuff people say on FB is private, but Twitter is more or less public by default. So I would disagree that FB is less "present" -- maybe to you, yes, but systemically and worldwide, I don't think so.
redbrick 11y ago
A majority of my news feed posts on Facebook is made up of headline tweets from twitter. I think twitter definitely is the most influential news feed.

pete_mg 11y ago

How is this possible???

cft 11y ago

The problem with this thinking is that Twitter is not a software tool that needs to be improved. It's a TV show that has ran its course and is declining. Hollywood knows how to deal with these problems: they end the show, and replace it with a new one. The problem here is that Twitter is an infotainment studio with one single show. And Wall St will not let it run as a startup anymore, incubating early stage new shows like Periscope.

majewsky 11y ago
I reject the metaphor. Just because a tool does not gain new followers (heh) anymore, doesn't mean it should be killed. It would be interesting to know if Twitter would be profitable if it is just put into maintenance mode. My point is, Twitter has value for me the way it is. I don't personally see any reason for changing it. Of course, that's not a reasoning that Wall Street would agree with.

spo81rty 11y ago

This all sounds like the downfall of taking massive investments and going public. They are under pressure to keep growing at a high pace. In reality maybe they have grown about as far as they can go. They have substantial revenues and what should be a very profitable business as is. But will the pressure to grow due to maintaining a high stock price kill them?

rubidium 11y ago
They and Pandora. You could probably make quite list of "companies that could be great and nicely profitable except that investors want it to try and be mega-huge".
- spo81rty 11y ago
  Twitter has almost $2 billion a year in revenues and 60%+ gross margins. They should be or could be very profitable.

fossuser 11y ago

I think Twitter's issue is a vision problem, they don't have a good idea of what they're trying to do. Facebook's is trying to connect the world - this leads to FB messenger, Oculus, Instagram, trying to buy Snapchat, internet.org - basically acquiring or creating what they can to drive human interaction and communication online. Twitter has one thing they built that they've made awkward changes to which most people seem not to care about. Closing their open APIs which built on Twitters core value was a mistake and their attempts to monetize in weird ways at the cost of their own usefulness has also not worked out.

Xyik 11y ago
The sad thing is, one of Twitter's core values is to reach every person on the planet.
tdeck 11y ago
I would say the mission of Twitter seems to be "help people promote their personal brand". Unfortunately for them, not everyone is interested in either doing that or reading about other people doing it.

belltyler 11y ago

Twitter's been around for 10 years—and maybe it's just my perception—but I feel like the tech. media has never done anything but hate on them. It's well-founded criticism at times, sure, but at what point does it become a loop of negative attitudes simply based on pre-existing negative attitudes? That's just my take on the whole thing. I personally have some confidence in Twitter and have nothing poor to say about their product / direction.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
And after 10 years they can't add a damn edit feature? Little stuff like that that makes it less than desirable to use really upsets me, because they clearly pay top dollar for talent and they have tons of engineers working there (don't even get me started on their shitty mobile web pages).
- belltyler 11y ago
  Obviously they could add it - it wouldn't be hard. Just because it doesn't have feature X doesn't mean it's bad. At that point it's a conscious decision to exclude that feature. Poor performing mobile sites? That is something they could for sure address, especially with the engineering power they have, I agree.

bitmapbrother 11y ago

Twitter needs to be Twitter. It's not for everyone and that's perfectly OK. The people criticizing it seem to care more about market cap.

perseusprime11 11y ago

Ever heard of micro-management of a CEO? All these opinions, op-eds, VC advice won't help Jack to focus on the company. Their fundamental problem is that a tweet is not a great native ad unit. That's where the story ends and a reason why Twitter cannot meet Wall Street expectations.

jgalt212 11y ago

I like twitter because I can follow people smarter or more informed than me. My facebook feed, on the other hand, is utterly inane. My thoughtful/smart friends almost never post, and if I unfollow the idiots, I'm left with only ads.

dcgoss 11y ago

What if you could curate different timelines for yourself? You could have a news timeline, with the NYT and CNN accounts added for example. Then you could have a tech timeline, or a music timeline, etc. This would make consuming the content a lot easier and less jumbled together, I feel.

Riod 11y ago
Good idea. Actually moments should ask you what you're interested in. Kind of like Google Now. I don't need a feed full of celebrity news
mjquinn 11y ago
This sounds like a good fit for Twitter's lists feature[0], if only the standard clients supported it better. [0] https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460 https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460

vonnik 11y ago

New York Times, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back Pulitzer Ambitions I find it incredible how well newspapers solve other businesses problems, and how poor they are at diagnosing their own.

headgasket 11y ago

I am a very light twitter user. I've been on for ages; but I really dont post or read tweets; I however have a use for twitter. Find smart people, and hear what they think. Smart people follow smart or smarter people. Or reply to smart people. The actual intellectual goods is usually not on twitter, but in a forum or a blog post. I usually dont event follow these though leaders on twitter, because I dont want to spend time in this constant partial attention state, I want to be here and now at 100%, in this piece of code, project or post/book. You see noise is my enemy. The size of a community is ironically then a curse. That's why I loved HN so much in the beginning. Smart guys like PG. The thing is, the smarts are distributed as a bell curve...

whatever_dude 11y ago

Twitter is another instance where a company destroys the one thing (service, product) they do well by attempting to do all other things at the same time. They end up creating a diluted, mediocre thing that everyone just dislikes equally. Horizontal expansion at the cost of vertical depth. > They see their favorite band straining to become U2. And they hate U2. This is a perfect analogy. I used to really like Twitter. But every change they do to the mobile app (or to the service in general) is just polluting the experience of what was once a pretty well controlled stream. I can't find the group of people I like to follow (developers) anywhere else, so I haven't given up on the service yet. The content is mostly still there. But the friction, and the amount of noise, is increasing drastically.

jerrickhoang 11y ago
can you elaborate? what were the things that you really like that they took out? What have they added that you dislike?
- whatever_dude 11y ago
  The problem is not really with what they've taken out (although pretty much killing TweetDeck still stings), but instead added to the overall experience. * I'll click a tweet and immediately below it there will be an unrelated "Promoted Tweet". In the same place replies would normally be, so I always need to do a double take to see whether it's a reply or an ad. * I'll look at my list and it'll always show a list of tweets out of order, the "While you were away" feature. The weird thing is that you can dismiss it, and then it asks you if you liked it; I always say no, but it keeps reappearing. * They were recently inserting tweets from people I don't follow in my timeline because they were "popular". I think they changed that feature now, but it was very confusing at first. * Promoted Tweets show way too often and are too similar to real Tweets. * "Moments" is a joke. I used to like Twitter for live events (normally with just a search) and was excited to have a feature dedicated to that need, but they completely missed the point by making something that is hard to follow and not even close to real time. It's barely usable. That's what made me realize they have no idea what they're doing. I like to follow a small group of people. My experience is a bit curated. But nowadays, almost everything I do on the mobile or web app will show me content I don't care about. The fact that none of it is controllable by the user (like the "While you were away" feature) is infuriating. This is not even related to ad revenue, it's just a point of user experience they decided to break completely. I have moved away from the official clients and the experience is a little bit better. Doesn't change the fact that the platform is clearly moving away from the use case that made it popular in the first place, at least for me.

Riod 11y ago

Honestly even the changes twitter has made have been poor. Moments should ask you, like Google Now, what you're interested in. What use is a random burst of stuff if you're interested only in big basketball stories? It should blend what you want with what's going on around you in an artful manner. Google even showed the way with this.

ha8o8le 11y ago

whats twitter?

transpy 11y ago

My experience: Twitter has been very useful to get to know influencial people in my line of work. Also, to practice concise expression of ideas. The problem is, Twitter is not very actionable. Yeah, the CEO of X company now follows you. What now? I found following people and writing posts in LinkedIn is more actionable. I connect with leaders in my industry to whom I can send a CV quickly.