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The Twitter Contradiction
- lingben 11y agoriiiiight, beyond cherry picked anecdotal evidence, I guess that explains the MAU numbers, because errrybody is on twitter twatting away incessantly twitter was an interesting novelty a few years ago but you can't sustain a worldclass communication platform when the user can't figure out how to use it effectively or how to keep track of and follow conversations when the average user has to become a developer or a UI expert in your own freakish cult of UI to be able to use your product... well, don't be surprised when they leave in a confused herd this isn't rocket science, old fashioned bboards and forums up to now have this stuff figured out but twitter came along and said, F* that! what we need are MODAL windows out the yin-yang to confuse the hell out of each and every user until they leave and go use something with better UI
- mathattack 11y agoI sometimes feel like Twitter is morphing to where the PR flacks come to say something. Which perhaps is good enough. I don't follow any of the a16z partners on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.
- plaguuuuuu 11y agoEveryone knows it's true.
- coralreef 11y agoIf you're a celebrity, its a must-use product. If you're a normal person, nobody cares about you on Twitter. You get virtually no feedback on the content you produce. It's a one sided tool for following, not sharing or creating.
- ProAm 11y agoThis is it, Twitter is the best ad model and mechanism of the modern day internet. It's your 15 second commercial break of the web.
- Touche 11y agoAnd it's a bad product for following. I didn't see any of the NBA player tweets that he mentioned. I didn't know they existed before this article. And it's something I would be interested in, I just wasn't on Twitter in the few seconds where that topic was relevant.
- whoopdedo 11y agoWould celebrities love it as much if they had to pay to use it as their publicity platform? Lots of people are using Twitter for free and gaining from it. Except the people actually running the service don't appear to gain as much.
- tptacek 11y agoThat hasn't been my experience. I've organized events in Chicago purely from Twitter.
- ProAm 11y agoYou are arguably internet famous.
- tptacek 11y agoIf that's a thing, then we're all famous, and famous doesn't mean anything. Is there any media in which a random person can shout content out into the void and expect immediate uptake?
- Touche 11y agoYou have 16K followers, you're not a normal person. > Is there any media in which a random person can shout content out into the void and expect immediate uptake? Not into the void, no. But that's not how other social media platforms work, only Twitter.
- tptacek 11y agoI have that many followers because I'm noisy, have been on Twitter for a long time, and very occasionally post original content to Twitter before I post them elsewhere. Patrick has more followers than I do; how'd he get there? Blog posts and Bingo Card Creator. It's true that if you're LeBron James everyone will pay attention to you instantly, and if you're a random programmer it will take an investment of time and energy to get anyone to pay attention to you at all, but that doesn't seem like a flaw in the platform so much as a description of how the world works.
- Touche 11y agoIt's a flaw in the respect that if Twitter wants people to use it, it shouldn't take the amount of effort you've put into it to be noticed. I mean, I feel like I've put a lot of effort into it and I only have 600 followers. Think about it like this. How long does a typical tweet live "above the fold" (where the user doesn't have to scroll down to see it)? It varies of course depending on how many people you follow and how frequently those people tweet. But on average the stream moves pretty fast, right? Let's say, for the sake of discussion, it lasts 10 seconds. I'd be willing to bet the average is much lower than that, but whatever. You, tptacek, tweet something and you have 16,000 people who MIGHT see that within that 10 second window. The typical person with 50 followers or less needs one of their 50 followers to be looking at Twitter within that 10 second window... or their Tweet will never even be read by anyone, let alone commented on. Don't you at least see how that leads to a negative-feedback loop that makes people not want to use the platform?
- mooreds 11y agoI think following can be hugely valuable though. Just look at this tête a tête between a number of angel investors: https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/704310775448510464?s=09 https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/704310775448510464?s=09 Where else are you going to see this kind of discussion in public where you can take notes and/or jump in?
- jasode 11y agoThe grumbling around Twitter is about its continued quarterly losses and how it's not fulfilling the expected ROI from the $2.8 billion invested. Not relevant to puzzling out the losses is explaining all the other "cool" things about Twitter such as "giving people a voice" or "a broadcasting platform for journalists/celebrities/revolutionists/politicians". That's emotional analysis instead of financial analysis. The common defenses of Twitter often has the same flaws in writing structure: 1) Ignore the billions invested and repeated losses on the balance sheet 2) Then point out some amazing feature or undeniable human benefit that stirs the emotions and imagination Examples... I don't get the narrative and negativity about Iridium/Motorola satellite phone service?! Who wouldn't want the ability to make global phone calls from the middle of the ocean, Antarctica, and Mt Everest?! Humanity needs a phone like that! Well, all those cool things don't matter, the company went bankrupt. I don't get the narrative around the Concorde supersonic airplane? Who wouldn't wouldn't value the ability to fly New York to London in 3 hours instead of 6?! Well, the airlines cancelled the program after financial analysis showed it barely broke even or lost money. Idea for blog quality improvement: Instead of talking up the positive features of whatever company product, explain how the monetary numbers can work out.
- skybrian 11y agoI agree, but beware the sunk-cost fallacy. What matters is whether Twitter could turn a profit today. If so, the original investors may lose money and the company might even go bankrupt, but the service should still survive. (This is why Iridium is still around but the Concorde isn't.)
- dang 11y ago> The grumbling around Twitter is about its continued quarterly losses That, plus how hard it is to use. Twitter is the only product of the social era that ever interested me, but I almost only ever read things. Every time I think about actually posting to it, I'm daunted. It's Byzantine. It seems unfair to me, though, that they don't get to count read-only users as active for purposes of demonstrating growth. I'm definitely an active user, but (an ex-Twitterer explained to me) apparently people like us don't count. That seems seriously wrong, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture).
- Zikes 11y agoYeah, Twitter's got tons of potential. It did a lot to realize that potential back during the Arab Spring, when it was used as the primary communications platform among activists. Twitter was proud of that, being such a huge part of social and political progress. But that's not the Twitter of today. Now I more often read about how they've censored this or that. A trending hashtag that they disagree with will be removed from the trend list. Political activists that Twitter disagrees with will see their accounts de-verified or even outright banned. They used to champion freedom of speech, now they are one of the internet's most prolific censors. To me, that is the Twitter Contradiction.
- yolesaber 11y agoThis is something that I hope DeRay McKesson can rectify now that he is part of Twitter's board. I would argue that Twitter's potential is realized every time someone posts frontline reportage on it. Every time someone captures police brutality and spreads awareness via tweeting, that is the power of Twitter. It can be an incredibly empowering platform. It definitely still is the backbone for a lot of activists and organizing today
- jellicle 11y agoYes, Twitter absolutely is and will continue to be (for the near future) a very important part of the online ecosystem. But. With every change to put more ads in the faces of users, every change to control the feed and get rid of the real-time nature of it, Twitter is killing itself. Once Twitter moves to a fully-controlled feed model, Mr. Wilson will no longer see those tweets from LeBron and DeMar and Kristaps in real-time, because his feed will be showing him stuff from an hour ago that is "hot" or that is sponsored or otherwise generates money for Twitter. Something with autoplaying video from a "sponsored submitter". Something without clickable links so it won't take you out of the Twitter sandbox. There's a stench of death about Twitter. It's not dead, definitely not. But its owners are clearly intent on killing it. That aroma is real and it's only getting stronger.
- rootedbox 11y agoThink the real contradiction is.. that something so valuable is something that is so hard to monitize.
- cft 11y agoRight, exactly- Twitter has always been a circle jerk, the people who use it are the large investors, celebrities, politicians and in general moneyed people, which leads them to think that twitter is valuable, since they "use it themselves" and "all their friends use it". These people are somewhat detached from reality. But the advertising money and growth is in the massive numbers of ordinary people that click on ads, including those Snapchat and Instagram users that Twitter is actually loosing.
- xyzzy4 11y agoTwitter isn't going away. But will it make money in the same way that, for example, buying $10 billion of real estate and renting it out would make money?
- grey-area 11y agoTwitter have a problem with trolls and noise for more popular users, but it's still compelling enough for someone like Paul Graham to publish tweets like this and continue using the platform: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/703705844614094848 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/703705844614094848 and, as the article states, for the popular and the notable to use it as a broadcast platform and others to use it as a way of consuming the zeitgeist. I think the replies to that pg tweet are the perfect distillation of all that is glorious and depressing about twitter - an open conversation with everyone in the world leads to repeated questions from the crowd punctuated by spam and trolls, and amidst the cacophony serendipitous discoveries and some interesting responses, for there is in twitter all that life can afford.
- phantom_oracle 11y agoNo matter how well-meaning or in how much sincerity this post was written, these guys have a vested interest. Once (or IF) Twitter goes 15-40% over it's original IPO price again, these guys will cash out and forget what Twitter ever was.
- 0xffff2 11y agoAt the moment I'm writing this, the very first line of the post is: >So everyone around here knows I’m bullish on Twitter and we own a lot of stock. So take all of this in that context please.
- billhendricksjr 11y agoFrom the comments section on avc.com: "Twitter isn't a social network. It's a real-time publishing engine and consumer-customizable distribution network." I couldn't agree more. For me it's a news reader and occasionally a content marketing channel.
- cpeterso 11y agoTwitter is like "RSS for the rest of us." I've long wondered whether Twitter could have grown into a more approachable Google Reader product. When major news services are tweeting links to their articles even though they need to use unprofessional tweet-speak, then you know there is value here for publishers to reach readers.
- jshen 11y agoThis highlights my biggest complaint about twitter. I use it largely as your quote describes, to get publish events from people/organizations I'm interested in. In short, I use it like a modern RSS feed. The problem is that a whole bunch of people see twitter as something different, including twitter if their plan to increase the tweet limit to 10,000 happens. Some use it as a commenting system. Some use it as a medium (think tweet storms), etc. And this leaves me with the question, what is twitter trying to be? I honestly can't figure it out, and that's my issue with twitter.
- prawn 11y agoAFAIK, the 10k limit change is intended to enable a publisher to include their content (article, etc) in an expanded version of their tweet. So instead of you clicking a headline in your RSS feed and getting the story, you'd hit the tweet and get the story.
- BorisMelnik 11y agoThe kids all use Insa and Snapchat, but the vast majority of people use Twitter to disseminate / find information and written content. Snapchat and Instagram are both more intended as "social networks" in its purest definition while Twitter (and FB to a degree) is a social network more geared towards written content and more in-depth conversations relating to this written content.