5 ms·

Am not an expert, but think Twitter is struggling because the signal to noise ratio has deteriorated significantly. Solving this isn't just a matter of some UX

Am not an expert, but think Twitter is struggling because the signal to noise ratio has deteriorated significantly. Solving this isn't just a matter of some UX tweaks, it literally speaks to the heart of a very hard problem...how to you structure relatively unstructured information in a way that enables machines to help humans navigate it

digi_owl 11y ago
Crazy thing is that Twitter have a way to deal with that noise right in their system, lists. They first came to be via Tweetdeck, as a client side sorting of the timeline. Then Twitter implemented official support for them in their API, and later bought Tweetdeck. But since then the lists have largely withered on the wine. To access them in the official client you have to jump thought a menu and list just to see a single one, when the power of lists in Tweetdeck was that you got them as columns you could see side by side. Various third party clients have this, but most of them run into the hard cap Twitter have on free API access. Frankly watching Twitter on Android tablets devolve into a wide phone UI, when i can fire up a third party app and have 3+ columns of topic sorted tweets is deeply worrying. This because it indicates something about where the focus of the company is.
- vram22 11y ago
  > lists have largely withered on the wine. Should be "vine". "wine" would make it, I don't know, some sort of malapropism (looking for the right word here), or grammatically incorrect pun? Entertaining, nonetheless :) Update: Looked up malapropism, seems my use of it is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism or at least close (which would be another malapropism :)
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    yes yes yes. My brain do that more often than i like. Sometimes i end up typing whole different words than i formulated, simply because the finger movements are so similar (or i type the incorrect word more often).
    - vram22 11y ago
      You are not alone. Seen it happen here and there, including me too. One guess I have is that it is related to information overload that is prevalent these days.
- elmar 11y ago
  I have around 40 small lists 5 to 30 members, and search based on hashtags that's the secret of not going mad scrolling Twitter feed.
mitchty 11y ago
Exactly. I got on twitter to follow certain people. Most of the time its great but honestly what sucks is there is so much noise I just ignore everything. And I'm a technical person willing to put up with a lot of BS. But I can't be arsed to prune my list because while say someone I follow posts GREAT things relating to libc internals, they also post things that are very much not what I care about. I can't tell twitter to: don't show me stuff like this from this person, or better say show me more of stuff like this, hide the rest unless i ask to see it from this user. That is a hard problem to solve. I don't envy twitter but honestly their "platform" hasn't moved for years. This whole mess is entirely of their own lack of doing.
- g8oz 11y ago
  I always thought the "Planet" sites did a decent job of aggregating posts by topic. planet.gnome.org, planet.kernel.org, planetkde.org etc.
- aikah 11y ago
  THIS, the most important thing for me. If I follow a guy who tweets about Databases, I don't need to know or read his thoughts about politics, his new born daughter, his outrage about X or Y or all that bullshit. I want to hear only about Databases, DB management and not the rest. I need to be able to follow @userX with #topicY exclusively.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    You get that problem no matter what mode you follow them, unless its by way of paid for articles in the trade press. Be it blogs, Tiwtter, or some other unedited outlet, you are going to get that person raw and unfiltered.
    - saurik 11y ago
      With a blog, one would normally follow the RSS feed of a specific tag, not the entire blog.
this_user 11y ago
I think one of the core aspects that attracts people to social media is feeling like they are in the loop. Twitter is very good at creating that feeling by encouraging its users to send lots of short messages containing real time information. But the problem is exactly this: There is way too much noise. The users receive all of these messages that make it seem like they are wired in, but in reality they are bombarded with lots of vacuous nonsense. It's similar to reading celebrity news: It may seem like you are getting important information, but in reality none of it actually matters.

digi_owl 11y ago

Crazy thing is that Twitter have a way to deal with that noise right in their system, lists. They first came to be via Tweetdeck, as a client side sorting of the timeline. Then Twitter implemented official support for them in their API, and later bought Tweetdeck. But since then the lists have largely withered on the wine. To access them in the official client you have to jump thought a menu and list just to see a single one, when the power of lists in Tweetdeck was that you got them as columns you could see side by side. Various third party clients have this, but most of them run into the hard cap Twitter have on free API access. Frankly watching Twitter on Android tablets devolve into a wide phone UI, when i can fire up a third party app and have 3+ columns of topic sorted tweets is deeply worrying. This because it indicates something about where the focus of the company is.

vram22 11y ago
> lists have largely withered on the wine. Should be "vine". "wine" would make it, I don't know, some sort of malapropism (looking for the right word here), or grammatically incorrect pun? Entertaining, nonetheless :) Update: Looked up malapropism, seems my use of it is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism or at least close (which would be another malapropism :)
- digi_owl 11y ago
  yes yes yes. My brain do that more often than i like. Sometimes i end up typing whole different words than i formulated, simply because the finger movements are so similar (or i type the incorrect word more often).
  - vram22 11y ago
    You are not alone. Seen it happen here and there, including me too. One guess I have is that it is related to information overload that is prevalent these days.
elmar 11y ago
I have around 40 small lists 5 to 30 members, and search based on hashtags that's the secret of not going mad scrolling Twitter feed.

mitchty 11y ago

Exactly. I got on twitter to follow certain people. Most of the time its great but honestly what sucks is there is so much noise I just ignore everything. And I'm a technical person willing to put up with a lot of BS. But I can't be arsed to prune my list because while say someone I follow posts GREAT things relating to libc internals, they also post things that are very much not what I care about. I can't tell twitter to: don't show me stuff like this from this person, or better say show me more of stuff like this, hide the rest unless i ask to see it from this user. That is a hard problem to solve. I don't envy twitter but honestly their "platform" hasn't moved for years. This whole mess is entirely of their own lack of doing.

g8oz 11y ago
I always thought the "Planet" sites did a decent job of aggregating posts by topic. planet.gnome.org, planet.kernel.org, planetkde.org etc.
aikah 11y ago
THIS, the most important thing for me. If I follow a guy who tweets about Databases, I don't need to know or read his thoughts about politics, his new born daughter, his outrage about X or Y or all that bullshit. I want to hear only about Databases, DB management and not the rest. I need to be able to follow @userX with #topicY exclusively.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  You get that problem no matter what mode you follow them, unless its by way of paid for articles in the trade press. Be it blogs, Tiwtter, or some other unedited outlet, you are going to get that person raw and unfiltered.
  - saurik 11y ago
    With a blog, one would normally follow the RSS feed of a specific tag, not the entire blog.

this_user 11y ago

I think one of the core aspects that attracts people to social media is feeling like they are in the loop. Twitter is very good at creating that feeling by encouraging its users to send lots of short messages containing real time information. But the problem is exactly this: There is way too much noise. The users receive all of these messages that make it seem like they are wired in, but in reality they are bombarded with lots of vacuous nonsense. It's similar to reading celebrity news: It may seem like you are getting important information, but in reality none of it actually matters.