8 ms·

Ask HN: What is wrong with Twitter?

• zxcvcxz 10y ago
  Where do I even begin? 1. I believe twitter (and others) is in cahoots with the NSA. I never had a twitter, wasn't interested in twitter, but it seems like from the moment twitter started it was being shoved down my throat by the media, who made it seem like everyone was on it, yet no one I knew irl actually used twitter. Everything they reported was about some post on twitter that some public figure (or revolutionary) posted. Twitter was forced down peoples throats during the Arab Spring too, and I think we all remember that it was being used by protesters to organize events/etc. Now why is half the Arab nation suddenly uploading their sensitive data to an American based company? Do people really think the NSA isn't using twitter as a data collection hub? Do people really believe the NSA (and other organizations) had no hand in making twitter popular the world over? Well I think that's a naive viewpoint. 2. I recently realized twitter, reddit, facebook, even HN are filled with people/bots/paid shills, that are just here to push some corporate agenda. They realized we block most ads so they just invade our social media with ads disguised as legitimate discussion. Twitter and reddit are the worst (although I don't use facebook). Make a post about monsanto on reddit? It'll be filled with "experts" who know monsanto has never broken the law. The monsanto shilling is blatantly obvious on reddit. Then there are other posts from people being paid by investors from Microsoft, Spotify, tons of film studios, tons of game studios. Half of the posts on reddit feel like they're exposing me to some product by some company. I just don't really go to twitter that much but it's hard to deny the twitter admins/corporate don't give a fuck about ads/bots/paid shills for the most part unless they're really abusive. There is probably monetary incentive for companies to allow these forms of advertisement and manipulation of political narrative. Right now on the front page of HN 488m fake chinese social media posts a year, yet some how people believe America is immune, or "a corpration would never ever ever do that!, sure a government would but a business, you gotta be outta your mind man!". Best case scenario you get called insane for believing this and posting it on the internet. It's naive to believe that there aren't people being paid to post on social media (or even doing it for free). It's naive to believe that multiple governments don't have organizations dedicated to spreading certain narratives and propaganda online. Operation Earnest Voice[0] is an astroturfing campaign by the US government. The aim of the initiative is to use sockpuppets to spread pro-American propaganda on social networking sites. The US government signed a $2.8 million contract with the Ntrepid web-security company to develop a specialized software, allowing agents of the government to post propaganda on "foreign-language websites", but recently the law preventing them from using this in America was repealed[1], allowing them to spread pro-American propaganda even on American media. Main characteristics of the software, as stated in the software development request, are: * 50 user "operator" licenses, 10 sockpuppets controllable by each user. * Sockpuppets are to be "replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent". Sockpuppets are to "be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world." * A special secure VPN, allowing sockpuppets to appear to be posting from "randomly selected IP addresses," in order to "hide the existence of the operation." * 50 static IP addresses to enable government agencies to "manage their persistent online personas," with identities of government and enterprise organizations protected which will allow for different state agents to use the same sockpuppet, and easily switch between different sockpuppets to "look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization." * 9 private servers, "based on the geographic area of operations the customer is operating within and which allow a customer's online persona(s) to appear to originate from." These servers should use commercial hosting centers around the world. * Virtual machine environments, deleted after each session termination, to avoid interaction with "any virus, worm, or malicious software." The US also operates in conjunction with the UK to collect and share intelligence data[2], and the GCHQ has their own internet shilling program[3]. There is not enough evidence to say without a doubt that the US government manipulates American social media, but we can say without a doubt that they do have sophisticated software for the purpose of spreading propaganda, they do manipulate social media, there are no longer propaganda laws preventing them from doing so in America, and multiple world governments have these programs in place (including but not limited to: [Russia, China, Israel, and the UK.[4]) You can keep telling your self the US government would never manipulate social media, or violate the 4th amendment, or collect data en masse, or you can wake up and accept that this is the world we live in and ignoring it will never solve the problem. That is just the evidence of state-sponsored shilling. If the state is willing to do it it's naive to believe large companies and their investors wouldn't do it too. [0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope... [1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_sockpuppetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_sockp...
  • banjobanana 10y ago
    About your point #2, I really have to tell you that Monsanto never broke the law, Microsoft is an innovative company that never fired anyone, Twitter is a wonderful social networks where every person with a soul has an account with gazillions of active followers, and Marvel movies are the best movies ever made in the complete history of the movies. You can trust me as I'm a certified expert in these domains. By the way, did you check the latest Pedigree dog food enriched with vitamins and the exclusive (and safe) extra-fast poop dissolving enzyme(tm)? That's one of the 10 secrets the dog lovers will never tell. :-p
    • pkd 10y ago
      Did you actually make a fake account just to try to validate your initial arguments?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• throwaway1231k 10y ago
  Censorship
• saluki 10y ago
  I find it useful, great way to get news, keep up with interesting things from a circle of people I follow. The main problem is the ads/promoted tweets creeping in more and more. I think the problem is now they are driven to maximize profits rather than being a great service for users. Probably should have stayed private so they could balance making some profit with providing a great user experience.
  • karimdag 10y ago
    Well, I think that for a social network to be free, ads are the only/best/most solid source of revenue.
    • kek918 10y ago
      What about; increasing the text limit by 30 extra characters for "Premium" (paying) users? Idea of the century, you're welcome TwitterHQ :)
      • corin_ 10y ago
        It could well be idea of the century if you mean the idea I've heard suggested the most often in "how should Twitter monetise" conversations this century ;)
      • karimdag 10y ago
        Would you pay for that?
        • sreyaNotfilc 10y ago
          Someone would. I don't think that having that offer will set Twitter fans off either. $.10 for 30 more characters would be a huge benefit for Twitter.
    • ascagnel_ 10y ago
      There are other ways to monetize Twitter beyond ads. The firehose is probably the most valuable thing they've got, moreso than their current ad platform, and it can deliver instant feedback across a wide cut of demographics and locations. Nothing customer-facing, but plenty of possibilities attractive to research and business. For example: I used to keep an eye on Twitter during major product launches that would generate lots of traffic (namely, iPhone preorders). Some simple searches, refreshed every few minutes, would give me an idea as to how the launch was going and if the website stayed up. If anyone tweeted a problem, I forwarded that to the PR and customer support teams, so that person would get a response within minutes instead of potentially missing out on the preorder window. The ability to integrate something like that into a customer support ticketing system would be pretty awesome.
• jdlyga 10y ago
  It's too cluttered. The official app feels like it has too many ads, and the quality of the posts that I'm seeing is pretty poor. I like that they're sorting the timeline better now with more relevant stuff first.
• dingaling 10y ago
  Twitter lost a lot of relevance to me when they killed the RSS output. It used to be awesome to have a dozen feeds being filtered and presented to me each morning. I do have a couple of pages bookmarked that I check on occasion, but generally I now find it preferable to wait until events / occurrences surface through other forms of aggregation. To the extent that I've not actually created a Twitter account. Perhaps if they offered a paid-subscription offer with powerful filtering tools to shake-out the chaff. I don't want their opinion of relevance, I want mine.
• Polarity 10y ago
  It was a minimal, chronolical short message service. Great for sharing links and compact news. Fast to read and to scan. Now, they want to turn it into a social network. Longer Texts, more media, ads. That´s not what most people on twitter want or signed up for.
• Grue3 10y ago
  The interface is bad and difficult to use. It is also incredibly bloated considering they only need to display 140 characters and some media. Say, you see a chain of replies. You click Show More replies a few times, then you want to see replies to a particular reply. You click on it. Suddenly everything disappears except the original tweet and replies to this reply. There's no way to go back to the previous state. You click back and only see the top replies again. For example go to https://twitter.com/chromakode/status/731942777131425792 https://twitter.com/chromakode/status/731942777131425792 and try to follow all the replies. If you don't want to throw your PC out of the window after a dozen tweets, I admire your patience. Also, say you're viewing an individual tweet (like the one I linked above). For some reason, search is unavailable from this view. Why? Also if you accidentally click anywhere outside of that tweet, the entire page reloads with the profile of the person who made that tweet. Happens to me all the time. What if there's an image in this tweet? You click on it and get yet another modal window that shows this image slightly enlarged. We now have two levels of modal windows and yet we can't see the full image yet. You need to copy the image's url and add :large or :orig to the end of it to actually see the uncropped, full-size image. I swear, a kindergartener could've come up with a better UI experience.
  • blumentopf 10y ago
    https://mobile.twitter.com/ https://mobile.twitter.com/ uses a much saner and faster UI.
    • ivraatiems 10y ago
      When it works. It often just doesn't for me - no links clickable, no content loads on scrolling.
    • SyneRyder 10y ago
      I'd also recommend trying a third party client. I love Twitter but I never use the official site or apps. I use Tweetbot on iOS and Mac (Osfoora is also good on Mac), and Fenix on Android.
    • alexgaribay 10y ago
• rickhanlonii 10y ago
  IMO there's nothing wrong or broken with Twitter, we just have a culture of criticism that exaggerates legitimate flaws and trends. But I will say that bots are becoming pretty damaging to the community. Bots that auto-favorite and auto-follow (only to undo those actions days later) in order to gain followers--call it astro-engagement--has created a situation where Twitter in some respect is a social network for bots.
• pidg 10y ago
  I am using it less and less, not because of a particular technical fault, but because of how it makes me think and act. First off, instantly seeing see others' half-formed thoughts makes me strongly want to find fault with their views, and the ability to instantly respond with my own half-baked opinions compounds the problem. Secondly, the character limit means that, when I do have a more considered response to make, I can either: - split it up into many tweets (and risk the recipient not reading all the parts, or simply risk annoying people) - spend time creating a blog post, which requires more thinking and a lot more time writing, or - try in vain to fit it in 140 chars, give up, and keep my views to myself, while stewing in my own annoyance. To me, this is toxic. It makes me get worked-up over pointless things, wastes time (mine and others'), and generally adds another stressor in my life that I can do without. It's a shame, as I've found Twitter to be great for actual 'social networking', and made extremely valuable contacts through it.
• billpg 10y ago
  "Oh you looked away for a minute or two, so I took you back to the top of the page again. If you want to continue reading from where you left off I'm afraid you'll have to keep scrolling and scrolling until you see something you don't recognize."
• wslh 10y ago
  My thinking about them never changed: 1/ Their restrictive API and a commercial API that is expensive for small companies. 2/ Poor business execution because they don't know how to offer services for small companies and only know about wholeselling. This clashes with the business fundamentals of Internet where individual users or small companies can pay for services like AdWords, Slack, GitHub, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227027 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11299941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11299941
• karmacondon 10y ago
  I think the biggest problem with twitter is that people follow too many other people, and the feed becomes overwhelming. It's hard to increase the signal to noise ratio because it's difficult to know in advance who will post interesting things. The only thing I know for sure is that if I unfollow someone, I will never see any of the good things they post in the future. I feel like there should be a name for this, like "The Twitterer's Dilemma" I don't think there's a technical solution. The more people use twitter, the spammier and less interesting it will be. It's the same problem that every online community faces. More traffic almost always leads to lower quality. On the whole I think twitter serves its purpose well. Always room for new ideas though.
  • hex-m 10y ago
    The same could be said about the www. There is a technical solution and it's called a recommender system. It tries it's best to rate the more interesting stuff higher. That's what search engines do for the www and it kinda works.
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      Twitter had something called "lists" that let you categorize and segment what you follow, but they've deprecated or hidden it sufficiently that I don't use it anymore. With the Twitter feed, I get this random spew of stuff that I can't categorize. It gets useless quickly, and I have better things to do with my time than curate twitter. I love the basic product, but Twitter is a clueless company that needs to die so someone can replace it.
      • zbuttram 10y ago
        Lists are still my favorite part of Twitter, but you're right, they have it hidden away. I prefer to use Twitter clients that let me view and edit my lists easily like TweetDeck and Tweetbot. I hardly ever load up twitter.com anymore.
  • FranOntanaya 10y ago
    Part of the solution could be to separate connecting from subscribing. People feel they would lose some kind of social capital from unfollowing an existing connection, but would rather not see most posts from that account. I don't put much value on Twitter's social capital so I arbitrarily stick to 150 accounts. That seems to work for me.
• mikegerwitz 10y ago
  Others covered some other points, but one of my major motivators is the issue of centralization: the world has come to depend on this single organization (much like Facebook) that not only oversees all of this data, but can impose whatever type of censorship or manipulation they want on users. Intentional or not. I use GNU Social[0], which is a federated service. I also host it myself, so I'm in complete control of my data. Because it's federated, the instance of anyone following me (or following others that repeat my messages) also have a copy of my messages, and I others; this makes censorship effectively impossible. In fact, it has some interesting side-effects: recently an instance dedicated to hosting pornographic material was federated with popular instances, which made many people uncomfortable; in that case, it's up to the individual instance to decide what to do (e.g. block the posts in the global feed). I'm sure the recent controversy surrounding Moxie's opinions on federation with Signal can help put this topic in perspective for many people. [0]: https://gnu.io/social/ https://gnu.io/social/
  • zxcvcxz 10y ago
    Is it possible to connect to all the servers to get some global feed like a reddit /r/all? Also how are posts sorted? It sounds like an IRC.
  • wslh 10y ago
    You can't build a Twitter clone in a decentralized way and expect to have good performance on the analytics side. This is a basic practical limitation. The power of Twitter is having a single firehose where you can hook and analyze ALL the tweets.
    • narrowrail 10y ago
      First, I don't understand why one couldn't federate their instance with every other instance, essentially creating a firehose. It's not as if Twitter runs on a single machine. Secondly, I do not think most users care about "performance on the analytics side" which seems more like a business need.
      • 10y ago
• spriggan3 10y ago
  I don't hate Twitter, however, when I follow someone for a specific purpose (programming for instance, or music) I don't want to hear him talking about his baby daughter, his new car or how "Trump is evil", no matter what political side I belong to. That's the biggest problem with Twitter. When you subscribe a RSS feed, most feeds have channels with separate topics, that's what Twitter need, follower tweets filtered by topics in which I'm interested in, I don't want to see the rest.
  • basch 10y ago
    twitter treats posts and comments all as first class citizens. no other place i know weights an asinine comment or reply as equal to a share/post/publish. i think it makes the product ridiculous to use to have combined the rss feed with the metaconversation annotation layer, and not be able to turn one or the other off.
• narag 10y ago
  I hanged out in IRC with a bunch of smart bloggers ten years ago. They wrote well-thought and interesting content that was easily aggregated through RSS. Then there was a massive migration to Twitter where the style changed to (supossedly) witty, and a lot of new people wrote that couldn't have written two paragraphs that made any sense. The interface is also terrible, very difficult to follow a conversation with, and the last straw was the trend to make it all with JavaScript in the client that made Twitter more of "an app" than "a web site".
• MattyMc 10y ago
  "_____ (some person I have never heard, usually a marketer) is now following you." Two days later, they're gone. This is a huge proportion of my push alerts from Twitter. It's simple for me, far too much of the content has far too little value.
• hwhatwhatwhat 10y ago
  Never used it, don't really get why I'd want to. I don't see the benefit.
  • Tenhundfeld 10y ago
    The value of Twitter really depends on how you use it and whom you follow. I get 3 main areas of benefit: 1) Exposure to new or alternative ideas: I follow a few people who post links to articles I don't see elsewhere and discuss ideas that haven't (yet) reached the mainstream. Of course, this could turn into an echo chamber if you follow likeminded people, but for me, it's broadening. 2) Casual updates from IRL friends & niche celebrities: I follow mostly people I actually know, and I enjoy seeing their random thoughts, links, pics, whatevs. I also follow a few people like Kent Beck, whom I've met a few times but don't really "know". In my slice of the tech world, he's a niche celebrity, and I like seeing his half-formed thoughts and observations. 3) Breaking news & immediate reactions: News often breaks first on Twitter. If something's happening, globally or locally, I usually check Twitter to see what news links people are recommending to find out more. I also check Twitter if I want to see how people in general are reacting. For example, I enjoyed last Sunday's Game of Thrones episode, and afterwards, I searched #GameOfThrones to see what others were saying, if they noticed the same things I did, etc. It was fun. #1 & #2 can and does happen through other forms, but I like how it happens on Twitter. I think #3 is really where Twitter has a unique value and is exactly what they're saying with the tagline: "See what’s happening right now." But part of the reason it works for me is that I'm a ruthless unfollower (or muter in Tweetbot). I'm very quick to unfollow/mute-forever if somebody just posts too damn much – or temporarily mute if they're on some jag about stuff I don't want to hear.
• shanehoban 10y ago
  I have never had the desire to read my Twitter feed. That's a serious problem for Twitter.
• dpcan 10y ago
  I think it's problem is that, as a user, I've pretty much ruined it for myself. I follow almost 1300 people. I don't even know how it got to that. Probably 2% of those tweet regularly, about 0.1% tweet anything valuable or interesting. It's just too large to go through and curate now. I don't know who sees my tweets. There's no "viewed" count or "who viewed" your tweet. I would think, if it flows past someone's eyes, it would be nice to know that it did, and how many times. Promoted tweets should have a bold background color. I never notice when one is promoted other than it feels like it might be. And something that really can't be fixed IMO is to have Twitter only show things I will be interested in. I would like it to be able to read my mind. Is that really too much to ask?
  • noer 10y ago
    >I don't know who sees my tweets. analytics.twitter.com, yo edit: it won't tell you who, but it will tell you how many
    • tombrossman 10y ago
      It's also available directly from the mobile app as explained here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171990 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171990
      • noer 10y ago
        I've seen that for so long and I've never been curious enough to tap it. It is pretty cool to have that in the mobile app. Makes it WAY easier to manage several accounts & get analytics on them in one mobile app. If only Facebook would do something like that.
  • falcolas 10y ago
    > It's just too large to go through and curate now. My advice? Declare bankruptcy. Unfollow everyone, and go back and start building up a fresh list of follows that you're genuinely interested in.
• DrNuke 10y ago
  I only follow 60+ influencers in my field and retweet their most important news. That way, I have a narrative. Twitter is easily my most important social network nowadays, also because LinkedIn morphed into a spam-trap and a click-bait.
  • karimdag 10y ago
    Despite becoming what you say it became, it's still the best online résumé in addition its strength is it's community. The reason why it is the best network for pro is because most of the pros are there and not because it's the best.
• exstudent2 10y ago
  When Twitter started banning and unverifying users based on political opinion, they ceased to be a revolutionary platform (which is what made them interesting imo). http://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-nero-unverified-by-twitter-2016-1?r=UK&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-nero-unveri...
• Torgo 10y ago
  Whoever is downvoting honest answers, stop it. I stopped using Twitter because its design encourages people to be snarky and mean and thoughtless, and over time this has been proven again and again.
  • Torgo 10y ago
    Keep it up. Twitter sucks because it's filled with assholes and every single day it's harder to deny the format encourages it.
    • J_Darnley 10y ago
      It is just twitter shills and fanboys downvoting everyone who badmouths it. It is cancer and has always been cancer.
• Keats 10y ago
  From a non-user point of view (well I check our company twitter once a day or so): - no value: we follow ~40 accounts with the company account and the feed never showed anything interesting so it seems you need to spend a lot of time to get some value. At the same time, users following too many people complain about it ruining their experience - unreadable: whenever I see someone posting a link to a twitter "conversation", I don't other opening the link because it's a mess Overall for me, it's still the same issue as I had when I first heard of it: I still don't see the point.
• UniZero 10y ago
  A better alternative to Twitter should actually provide features other websites don't. Why should I go out of my way to use Twitter to do things I can already do on Facebook? Why would I want to share status updates with strangers vs. friends? I understand what makes Twitter appealing in a marketing sense, but for me personally, it's nothing more than a chore to deal with on top of everything else.
• scholia 10y ago
  The main problem with Twitter is that it's no longer a chat system, it's a broadcasting system, where the broadcasting is done by media stars, sports people, journalists etc. Unless you already have friends on Twitter, there's basically nobody to talk to. That leaves more than 90% of users tweeting into a void, with no one listening. This is why most Twitter accounts are inactive. If you're a normal person with friends and family on Facebook, you're better of "tweeting" there, because you are far more likely to get a response.
  • martinvol 10y ago
    I do not agree. Because I don't like my family commenting on my unpopular opinions.
• sammyo 10y ago
  I had a single very useful use case. I needed to pick up someone when a famous trial recessed, parking close was impossible, phones were not allowed for most observers. Monitoring the twitter feed of a single journalist provided an accurate low latency notice.
• martinvol 10y ago
  They notification system is broken on Android! You receive a push notification -> You open it and see the content -> Go back to the app's feed -> the app shows your notification as unread! It happens every single time and I changed devices and it keeps happening, my current phone is a Nexus 5X. I honestly can't believe such a well known app has that kind of bug (You wont be able to convince me that that's not a bug and it's the expected behavior).
  • karimdag 10y ago
    I have an iPhone 6S and the notifications only appear in the notifications center or the lockscreen.
• edoceo 10y ago
  The {searchTerms} bug twitter.com would redirect to /q={searchTerms} Bug was present for months. Folk started using #searchterms so their tweets would have better visibility Easy to fix usability bug that remains for a long time indicates to me a general quality issue that is ripe inside
• mathattack 10y ago
  1) Weak curation. The signal to noise ratio is very bad. 2) Too many clicks to get to lists, which would alleviate problem 1. This worked ok in Social Media circa 2006. Not 2016.
• Mz 10y ago
  I don't hate Twitter. I actually have gotten a lot out of it. But I struggle to understand it and I think this is part of why there is friction. It if fundamentally different from other social platforms that I have experience with. And trying to figure out how to relate to it effectively has been work. To me, a big piece of this has to do with social mental models and I think Twitter would work better if someone were talking about how to relate to it effectively. It doesn't work like you typical forum. Trying to relate to it like other social media simply doesn't work. I am still figuring out how to interact with it effectively, but it has been a really positive experience for me. That doesn't mean it couldn't be improved in some manner. But I see a large piece of this as people just not having the right mental framework for interacting effectively with it.
• arisAlexis 10y ago
  Writedown.co is a stripped down to basics immutable Twitter but I don't see people using it much. I built it on the basis of what you say but I think people are way too much addicted to rihanna and they like to rant about the service they love to hate.
• Esau 10y ago
  I liked playing with Twitter in 2009 or 2010. It was almost completely text based and it displayed timelines in a straight forward manner. But then they started to mess with it: link shortners, inline multimedia, the war on 3rd party Twitter clients, pinned tweets, and an annoying amount of options. I personally don't think Twitter can be saved, long term.