4 ms·

Twitter is going to have a hard time fixing its ad problem

18 points by davidbarker 11y ago

kelukelugames 11y ago
My twitter stock is something like -60%. I'm not happy.
- antisthenes 11y ago
  You should have a moment of silence for that money, since it's now gone forever. You bought stocks of a company that has never been profitable and whose stock has plummeted in a bullish market. Even a layman will probably tell you to cut your losses and invest into something else. Or maybe keep hoping they'll get acquired by another company really soon, which should prop the stock price up and hopefully mitigate most of your losses.
timthelion 11y ago
I started visiting twitter.com for the first time about 2 months ago, due to the presidential primaries. I do not have an account. Every time I visit the site, I just want to search for interesting things people are saying about politics. I don't want to create an account. I don't want to visit some recomended profile which comments on some sports team in which I have no interest. But for some reason, there is no search box. So I always vist www.twitter.com/r and then there is a search box at the top of the page. Why are they so against new people poking around?
- bobbytherobot 11y ago
  Because some top brass has the number of sign-ups tied to their pay.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- danudey 11y ago
  I created a second account last year, after having my primary account since 2007. The onboarding procedure, if you do end up creating an account, is absolutely horrible. You have to choose a username, a password, pick a photo maybe. They then walk you through half a dozen screens of 'follow one of these celebrity accounts', with the UI designed in such a way as to feel like you're supposed to choose one before you proceed to the next screen. Once you get through their awful onboarding, which in my case I did by skipping following anyone, the entire UI is geared towards pressuring you into following new people over and over, without any real idea of who you were, what you wanted out of Twitter, or what your account was for. There's always some new box taking up 30% of one of the columns telling you you should go follow a bunch of (initially) apparently random people. They've also added the new 'While you were away' feature, which consistently shows me tweets which I have already replied to via twitter clients. If I'm active on Twitter every day but I don't visit the website for two weeks, it'll show me two-week-old tweets (which, again, I've already replied to). Twitter has been so consistent in terms of adding new features that no one I know likes, and I've made dozens of sales of Tapbots' Tweetbot client solely based on telling people that all the annoying new features Twitter keeps adding are never in third-party clients, so they don't have to worry about (e.g.) DMs suddenly being relegated to three taps away from the main screen for a few months before being brought back. I get the strong impression that Twitter's management has a vision for how they get paid, and they're trying to shoehorn their user behavior into this vision rather than building something around how users actually use Twitter or what features would actually be useful to them.
pamelabuck 11y ago
It has an even bigger problem in that even remotely mediocre employees are leaving. No one is sticking around. Morale is low.
- danudey 11y ago
  Is this because they're all being forced to work on features which (at least among tech and non-tech friends of mine) not only no one wants, but everyone wishes would go away? It must be hugely demoralizing to spend months working on a new feature and then release it and have tons of people say 'why was this ever added? who is this for? why would people want this and how can I get rid of it?', yet every time they add new functionality this is what I hear from everyone I know, to the point where not supporting Twitter's latest features has become the selling point I use for third-party Twitter clients. Personally, I can't think of a feature since Lists that I actually use. I would say 'posting videos in a tweet' but you seem to have to convert them to a gif and then upload it and let them convert it back to a video so...
eps 11y ago
Twitter needs to allow advertising to your existing following. There's lots and lots of Twitter users who follow hundreds of accounts and an option to stand out in their aggregated feed would totally be worth $. But what's extra cool about this is that users will also end up seeing tweets that they actually want to see (or they would've not been following you in the first place)!
visarga 11y ago
Browsing on Twitter feels like browsing on the "new" section of YC. Lots of unfiltered stuff. It would be great to select only for non-cheap (articles containing more than 300 words) content that exactly falls on my interests (at least use a naive bayes classifier or something to cut out the cat posts from the serious posts).

18 points by davidbarker 11y ago

kelukelugames 11y ago

My twitter stock is something like -60%. I'm not happy.

antisthenes 11y ago
You should have a moment of silence for that money, since it's now gone forever. You bought stocks of a company that has never been profitable and whose stock has plummeted in a bullish market. Even a layman will probably tell you to cut your losses and invest into something else. Or maybe keep hoping they'll get acquired by another company really soon, which should prop the stock price up and hopefully mitigate most of your losses.

timthelion 11y ago

I started visiting twitter.com for the first time about 2 months ago, due to the presidential primaries. I do not have an account. Every time I visit the site, I just want to search for interesting things people are saying about politics. I don't want to create an account. I don't want to visit some recomended profile which comments on some sports team in which I have no interest. But for some reason, there is no search box. So I always vist www.twitter.com/r and then there is a search box at the top of the page. Why are they so against new people poking around?

bobbytherobot 11y ago
Because some top brass has the number of sign-ups tied to their pay.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
danudey 11y ago
I created a second account last year, after having my primary account since 2007. The onboarding procedure, if you do end up creating an account, is absolutely horrible. You have to choose a username, a password, pick a photo maybe. They then walk you through half a dozen screens of 'follow one of these celebrity accounts', with the UI designed in such a way as to feel like you're supposed to choose one before you proceed to the next screen. Once you get through their awful onboarding, which in my case I did by skipping following anyone, the entire UI is geared towards pressuring you into following new people over and over, without any real idea of who you were, what you wanted out of Twitter, or what your account was for. There's always some new box taking up 30% of one of the columns telling you you should go follow a bunch of (initially) apparently random people. They've also added the new 'While you were away' feature, which consistently shows me tweets which I have already replied to via twitter clients. If I'm active on Twitter every day but I don't visit the website for two weeks, it'll show me two-week-old tweets (which, again, I've already replied to). Twitter has been so consistent in terms of adding new features that no one I know likes, and I've made dozens of sales of Tapbots' Tweetbot client solely based on telling people that all the annoying new features Twitter keeps adding are never in third-party clients, so they don't have to worry about (e.g.) DMs suddenly being relegated to three taps away from the main screen for a few months before being brought back. I get the strong impression that Twitter's management has a vision for how they get paid, and they're trying to shoehorn their user behavior into this vision rather than building something around how users actually use Twitter or what features would actually be useful to them.

pamelabuck 11y ago

It has an even bigger problem in that even remotely mediocre employees are leaving. No one is sticking around. Morale is low.

danudey 11y ago
Is this because they're all being forced to work on features which (at least among tech and non-tech friends of mine) not only no one wants, but everyone wishes would go away? It must be hugely demoralizing to spend months working on a new feature and then release it and have tons of people say 'why was this ever added? who is this for? why would people want this and how can I get rid of it?', yet every time they add new functionality this is what I hear from everyone I know, to the point where not supporting Twitter's latest features has become the selling point I use for third-party Twitter clients. Personally, I can't think of a feature since Lists that I actually use. I would say 'posting videos in a tweet' but you seem to have to convert them to a gif and then upload it and let them convert it back to a video so...

eps 11y ago

Twitter needs to allow advertising to your existing following. There's lots and lots of Twitter users who follow hundreds of accounts and an option to stand out in their aggregated feed would totally be worth $. But what's extra cool about this is that users will also end up seeing tweets that they actually want to see (or they would've not been following you in the first place)!

visarga 11y ago

Browsing on Twitter feels like browsing on the "new" section of YC. Lots of unfiltered stuff. It would be great to select only for non-cheap (articles containing more than 300 words) content that exactly falls on my interests (at least use a naive bayes classifier or something to cut out the cat posts from the serious posts).