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I've often wondered why Twitter seems to do this again and again in spite of what appears to be common sense and good stewardship of its platform and ecosystem.

I've often wondered why Twitter seems to do this again and again in spite of what appears to be common sense and good stewardship of its platform and ecosystem. I think it's because Twitter is actually a successful, fairly open ecosystem that attracts all kinds of use. What seems like ham-handed or draconian decision making is just Twitter misunderstanding its role as infrastructure provider. What we all implicitly want from Twitter is for it to embody the values of net neutrality. If someone can build something cool on top of Twitter, why not let it happen? Twitter's investors have pressured the company to monetize, and most of the bad platform decisions seem to be tied to those efforts. Twitter's folly is assuming that usage patterns are "bad". It should view all usage in a content-neutral manner and provide and support APIs to let the ecosystem grow. It is the hubris of caring too much about content and content engagement metrics that is driving this folly. Twitter is a very simple broadcast graph. This is incredibly powerful, and while it's not quite as lucrative to own as Facebook (with users habituated to seeing the same boring stuff from the same boring people every day and clicking on sponsored content), it's far more powerful and is likely to change society more than other social media platforms. All this is why Twitter should pivot and become a decentralized infrastructure... of course this will never happen. I'm predicting that Twitter will die a slow death as it tries to copy Facebook's revenue generation approach. It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users don't care about). Eventually we may see a decentralized broadcast graph, but until then it makes sense to expect Twitter to behave like a cognitively impaired dictator with respect to its ecosystem. I think most of this is driven by intense cost-cutting measures and intensely misguided focus on revenue metrics in terms of content and engagement. Twitter is not a product, it's an infrastructure.

mschuster91 11y ago
> It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users don't care about). I fully agree with you, except on this point. With all the shitstorming, the mis-attribution of quotes, massive and massive amounts of fake accounts etc. going on, the Verified by Twitter program is a very good thing especially as it does not force you to publically post your real name. However, it could be expanded for greater reach.
- grandalf 11y ago
  I totally see your point. My counter-argument would be: If Twitter is a neutral platform, a fake account is not distinguishable from a real one and it doesn't matter. It takes an incredible amount of work to make a fake account seem like a real person. By creating content leaderboards that do not remove fraudulent network effects, Twitter has created an incentive for fake account creation. Its own ad-sales model benefits from this too, since many of the platform's top line numbers include fraudulent engagement data. Also, Twitter has not made data/tooling available for third party providers (like SimplyMeasured, Radian6, etc.) to do meaningful fraud analysis, so companies are paying for social media engagement numbers that include bots, sock puppets, etc. But my larger point is that as a network Twitter should not care about spam and should instead let others determine what content is "good" vs "bad" for their particular use case.
  - geofft 11y ago
    > If Twitter is a neutral platform, a fake account is not distinguishable from a real one and it doesn't matter. It takes an incredible amount of work to make a fake account seem like a real person. I think these sentences contradict each other? Or maybe I'm misreading something. Anyway, last December, after the release of The Force Awakens, someone created the account @AdamDriver2015 which was so convincing that even @VeryLonelyLuke quote-tweeted them. They were suspended after a few days, and one Twitter user claims it's because the owner of that account was creeping on other Twitter users under the guise of being the actor. https://twitter.com/jennanamika/status/684176364438601728 https://twitter.com/jennanamika/status/684176364438601728 It's very easy to make a fake account seem like a real person. > By creating content leaderboards that do not remove fraudulent network effects Do you count "retweets" here? That's a large part of the problem, and it seems hard to change that without fundamentally changing what Twitter is. > third party providers (like SimplyMeasured, Radian6, etc.) to do meaningful fraud analysis ... hm, are you focusing on the aggregate affect of fraudulent accounts? It seems to me like that's a different problem from individual fraudulent accounts, and that verified accounts are legitimately good at the latter and aren't intended to deal with the former. In particular, all the bot checks are irrelevant for an individual fraudulent account, since there is a real human behind the account, just the wrong human.
dave2000 11y ago
It's possible to over think things. Twitter exists to make money. They clearly thought this change would cost them nothing, and would perhaps save them money and effort. I don't think the "Twitter is a ..." thing has any relevance to the decision making process. I can think of very few things, related to the Internet, that haven't turned - or are not on the process of turning to - shit. No matter how cool anything starts out being, eventually the original developers sell it on or come up with stupid ideas and it gets ruined. It's like some inescapable physical property.
- tlogan 11y ago
  Yes - Twitter exists to make money. But they need to decide how they want to make their money and grow in parallel. Is it ads? Celebrities accounts? Is it selling API access? If I'm Twitter CEO I would stick with "developer friendly" approach in order to re-start Twitter growth. In short, my opinion is that companies needs to be nice with developers and cherish them all the way until the company is very very successful. I guess Twitter executives think that they made it and "developer friendly" stage is behind them.
  - tangled_zans 11y ago
    I would say that even if the developer-friendly stage was behind them (and given how rapidly the web evolves, I don't think that any social-media company should ever consider itself past that stage), the fair thing to do - in my eyes - is to at the very least show some gratitude for the people who helped you get where you are today. Twitter and Facebook may be Big Corp today, but that wasn't always the case, and a lot of the initial growth that helped them get into the mainstream was due to hobbyists and independent devs that made cool little apps like EmojiTracker that would catch the attention of early adopters that then became the initial users of the platform. The sad thing is that while Facebook became the generic one-size-fits-all "mom and dad" network (I can't even remember the last time I even used one of their 'apps' or whatever), Twitter really had the potential to evolve into something beyond that, if only it cultivated better relationships with their devs and encouraged people to build on and experiment with the platform. Oh well. Lets keep an eye out for the next thing, I suppose!
tracker1 11y ago
Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down... in order to do this, it needs to make money somehow... they've chosen a two pronged approach to this. Someone/somewhere has to pay for it, and the end users simply won't do it... 1. Promoted tweeks - frankly, I find this kind of annoying, but I do understand. 2. Limiting high bandwidth streams to paid/commercial accounts, I'm not sure what they offer for NPOs, but I'd be surprised if they weren't lenient in their pricing structure. Frankly, I understand it... At this point they aren't even breaking even iirc, so they need to make cuts to some deep cost centers that aren't facing end users. TBH, I think they should also put methods in place of detecting bot networks, and freezing out those accounts.
- grandalf 11y ago
  > Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down I realize that, I'm just not sure the investors have the right long-term view about the value Twitter offers.
  - true_religion 11y ago
    If the value it offers to others can't be recouped then its meaningless in terms of investment. Twitter, as it stands, is very useful to people in the media who use it as a free sentiment analysis and polling service during election cycles, and a free firehouse for unqualified reports that they can follow up on. However, Twitter doesn't receive remuneration on any of this value.
bby 11y ago
I'm calling upon Prashant to resign from Twitter.
obsurveyor 11y ago
Infrastructure is a bad word to Wall Street, it implies it's no longer a growth stock. Wall Street will burn TWTR to the ground if it doesn't keep growing because no one on Wall Street cares about value, they want consistent quarter-over-quarter growth. This makes public companies like Twitter flail about wildly trying to find anything to keep their stock price from sinking even if it's outside their wheelhouse and wildly distorts their services/products.
tangled_zans 11y ago
That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became. I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on this. I agree that the concept of Twitter-as-an-infrastructure could be amazing. I also agree that what they're doing is definitely taking massive steps away from that ideal (Whatever Twitter's initial lofty goals were, I would classify its current niche to be some sort of celebrity-gossip/outrage machine). I'm having trouble articulating exactly what the correct thing for them to do would be, though? What sort of API access would you envision that they can provide in order to help developers grow the infrastructure in the best way possible? You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?
- btrask 11y ago
  Twitter should be a dumb pipe. Something like twtxt[1], except trivially easy to host, and searchable, and (the hard part) with all of Twitter's users. [1] https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
  - tangled_zans 11y ago
    I don't really see the appeal, if I'm honest.
- Nadya 11y ago
  >You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work? GNU Social [0] is a good stepping stone. Decentralized Twitter with different hosted instances joined together so everyone on the network can communicate. You're free to take your data and move it to any other instance you want or even host your own. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757
  - tangled_zans 11y ago
    Tbf, that's what Diaspora tried and it never took off. While I agree with the spirit of the idea, most people don't seem to care about the benefits that self-hosting would provide, and even for the ones that do, well, it's just such a hassle. And for the majority of the world that isn't particularly clued up on how tech works? Yeah forget about it. Maybe that's where the web will go eventually, and I would see it as an improvement over what we have now. But the current reality is that mainstream adoption is centred around large, monolithic services and personally I am more interested in figuring out what is it that these services provide and how I can improve on that in the way that people already want, rather than trying to convince them why they should care about being in control of their own data. So when I think about "decentralized infrastructure", I don't think about self-hosted servers, what I'm imagining is closer to, say, google app store. Sure, it's still owned by a single corporation, but anyone can develop almost anything for it that then can be used by anyone else. Imagine what a hybrid between twitter and an app store could look like. Giving people new tools to integrate social apps around the web in totally new ways. Developing new ways of interacting with each other, rather than every news and blog site having the same facebook like button and the same "twitter feed" box and the same comment section. That's what I want to see. Not "it's like twitter but YOU control your data". Having ownership of your own data is important to have alongside any product that you develop, but (as far as we can see empirically) you can't make that your sole "killer feature" and expect mass adoption.

mschuster91 11y ago

> It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users don't care about). I fully agree with you, except on this point. With all the shitstorming, the mis-attribution of quotes, massive and massive amounts of fake accounts etc. going on, the Verified by Twitter program is a very good thing especially as it does not force you to publically post your real name. However, it could be expanded for greater reach.

grandalf 11y ago
I totally see your point. My counter-argument would be: If Twitter is a neutral platform, a fake account is not distinguishable from a real one and it doesn't matter. It takes an incredible amount of work to make a fake account seem like a real person. By creating content leaderboards that do not remove fraudulent network effects, Twitter has created an incentive for fake account creation. Its own ad-sales model benefits from this too, since many of the platform's top line numbers include fraudulent engagement data. Also, Twitter has not made data/tooling available for third party providers (like SimplyMeasured, Radian6, etc.) to do meaningful fraud analysis, so companies are paying for social media engagement numbers that include bots, sock puppets, etc. But my larger point is that as a network Twitter should not care about spam and should instead let others determine what content is "good" vs "bad" for their particular use case.
- geofft 11y ago
  > If Twitter is a neutral platform, a fake account is not distinguishable from a real one and it doesn't matter. It takes an incredible amount of work to make a fake account seem like a real person. I think these sentences contradict each other? Or maybe I'm misreading something. Anyway, last December, after the release of The Force Awakens, someone created the account @AdamDriver2015 which was so convincing that even @VeryLonelyLuke quote-tweeted them. They were suspended after a few days, and one Twitter user claims it's because the owner of that account was creeping on other Twitter users under the guise of being the actor. https://twitter.com/jennanamika/status/684176364438601728 https://twitter.com/jennanamika/status/684176364438601728 It's very easy to make a fake account seem like a real person. > By creating content leaderboards that do not remove fraudulent network effects Do you count "retweets" here? That's a large part of the problem, and it seems hard to change that without fundamentally changing what Twitter is. > third party providers (like SimplyMeasured, Radian6, etc.) to do meaningful fraud analysis ... hm, are you focusing on the aggregate affect of fraudulent accounts? It seems to me like that's a different problem from individual fraudulent accounts, and that verified accounts are legitimately good at the latter and aren't intended to deal with the former. In particular, all the bot checks are irrelevant for an individual fraudulent account, since there is a real human behind the account, just the wrong human.

dave2000 11y ago

It's possible to over think things. Twitter exists to make money. They clearly thought this change would cost them nothing, and would perhaps save them money and effort. I don't think the "Twitter is a ..." thing has any relevance to the decision making process. I can think of very few things, related to the Internet, that haven't turned - or are not on the process of turning to - shit. No matter how cool anything starts out being, eventually the original developers sell it on or come up with stupid ideas and it gets ruined. It's like some inescapable physical property.

tlogan 11y ago
Yes - Twitter exists to make money. But they need to decide how they want to make their money and grow in parallel. Is it ads? Celebrities accounts? Is it selling API access? If I'm Twitter CEO I would stick with "developer friendly" approach in order to re-start Twitter growth. In short, my opinion is that companies needs to be nice with developers and cherish them all the way until the company is very very successful. I guess Twitter executives think that they made it and "developer friendly" stage is behind them.
- tangled_zans 11y ago
  I would say that even if the developer-friendly stage was behind them (and given how rapidly the web evolves, I don't think that any social-media company should ever consider itself past that stage), the fair thing to do - in my eyes - is to at the very least show some gratitude for the people who helped you get where you are today. Twitter and Facebook may be Big Corp today, but that wasn't always the case, and a lot of the initial growth that helped them get into the mainstream was due to hobbyists and independent devs that made cool little apps like EmojiTracker that would catch the attention of early adopters that then became the initial users of the platform. The sad thing is that while Facebook became the generic one-size-fits-all "mom and dad" network (I can't even remember the last time I even used one of their 'apps' or whatever), Twitter really had the potential to evolve into something beyond that, if only it cultivated better relationships with their devs and encouraged people to build on and experiment with the platform. Oh well. Lets keep an eye out for the next thing, I suppose!

tracker1 11y ago

Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down... in order to do this, it needs to make money somehow... they've chosen a two pronged approach to this. Someone/somewhere has to pay for it, and the end users simply won't do it... 1. Promoted tweeks - frankly, I find this kind of annoying, but I do understand. 2. Limiting high bandwidth streams to paid/commercial accounts, I'm not sure what they offer for NPOs, but I'd be surprised if they weren't lenient in their pricing structure. Frankly, I understand it... At this point they aren't even breaking even iirc, so they need to make cuts to some deep cost centers that aren't facing end users. TBH, I think they should also put methods in place of detecting bot networks, and freezing out those accounts.

grandalf 11y ago
> Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down I realize that, I'm just not sure the investors have the right long-term view about the value Twitter offers.
- true_religion 11y ago
  If the value it offers to others can't be recouped then its meaningless in terms of investment. Twitter, as it stands, is very useful to people in the media who use it as a free sentiment analysis and polling service during election cycles, and a free firehouse for unqualified reports that they can follow up on. However, Twitter doesn't receive remuneration on any of this value.

bby 11y ago

I'm calling upon Prashant to resign from Twitter.

obsurveyor 11y ago

Infrastructure is a bad word to Wall Street, it implies it's no longer a growth stock. Wall Street will burn TWTR to the ground if it doesn't keep growing because no one on Wall Street cares about value, they want consistent quarter-over-quarter growth. This makes public companies like Twitter flail about wildly trying to find anything to keep their stock price from sinking even if it's outside their wheelhouse and wildly distorts their services/products.

tangled_zans 11y ago

That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became. I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on this. I agree that the concept of Twitter-as-an-infrastructure could be amazing. I also agree that what they're doing is definitely taking massive steps away from that ideal (Whatever Twitter's initial lofty goals were, I would classify its current niche to be some sort of celebrity-gossip/outrage machine). I'm having trouble articulating exactly what the correct thing for them to do would be, though? What sort of API access would you envision that they can provide in order to help developers grow the infrastructure in the best way possible? You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?

btrask 11y ago
Twitter should be a dumb pipe. Something like twtxt[1], except trivially easy to host, and searchable, and (the hard part) with all of Twitter's users. [1] https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
- tangled_zans 11y ago
  I don't really see the appeal, if I'm honest.
Nadya 11y ago
>You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work? GNU Social [0] is a good stepping stone. Decentralized Twitter with different hosted instances joined together so everyone on the network can communicate. You're free to take your data and move it to any other instance you want or even host your own. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757
- tangled_zans 11y ago
  Tbf, that's what Diaspora tried and it never took off. While I agree with the spirit of the idea, most people don't seem to care about the benefits that self-hosting would provide, and even for the ones that do, well, it's just such a hassle. And for the majority of the world that isn't particularly clued up on how tech works? Yeah forget about it. Maybe that's where the web will go eventually, and I would see it as an improvement over what we have now. But the current reality is that mainstream adoption is centred around large, monolithic services and personally I am more interested in figuring out what is it that these services provide and how I can improve on that in the way that people already want, rather than trying to convince them why they should care about being in control of their own data. So when I think about "decentralized infrastructure", I don't think about self-hosted servers, what I'm imagining is closer to, say, google app store. Sure, it's still owned by a single corporation, but anyone can develop almost anything for it that then can be used by anyone else. Imagine what a hybrid between twitter and an app store could look like. Giving people new tools to integrate social apps around the web in totally new ways. Developing new ways of interacting with each other, rather than every news and blog site having the same facebook like button and the same "twitter feed" box and the same comment section. That's what I want to see. Not "it's like twitter but YOU control your data". Having ownership of your own data is important to have alongside any product that you develop, but (as far as we can see empirically) you can't make that your sole "killer feature" and expect mass adoption.