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Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

• dylanhassinger 10y ago
  Get rid of the multimedia content types Revert it back to pure text, which can include any type of url Make the tweets always load chronologically Make the interface faster loading and less JavaScripty open up the API basically, turn it back into #OldTwitter from 2010
  • benbristow 10y ago
    I'd leave the multimedia content types - they can be useful.
    • Raphmedia 10y ago
      Can they really afford it?
  • kowdermeister 10y ago
    Rich media is one of the few reasons I still use it. I follow lots of artists, visual programmers.
  • lcnmrn 10y ago
    Did you open up https://sublevel.net https://sublevel.net lately? It has all of those things.
    • dang 10y ago
      One of these comments would have been ok, especially if you added relevant substantive information. But at this point you're spamming the thread, so please stop.
• wheaties 10y ago
  Go the Yammer route: they already have messaging down. Might as well make "rooms" that you can tweet "in."
  • rtkwe 10y ago
    Hashtags are basically adhoc rooms to begin with. They kind of suffer from the same discoverability problems that an IRC room like system does too, sorting through the chaff to find and interesting tag/room requires largely knowing what you're looking for when you start.
• divbit 10y ago
  I want to watch the superbowl from twitter: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/technology/with-nfl-deal-twitter-live-streams-its-ambitions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/technology/with-nfl-deal-... I have no idea how to watch the superbowl and I tried several apps. I had cable tv for like 1 year of highschool, and haven't felt any reason to purchase for myself since, but some things, like the superbowl / Olympics / World Cup etc. would be really great to be able to watch - no I'm not going to deal with cable / buying a TV just for 1-3 events yearly.
  • Sorry_Rum_Ham 10y ago
    Interesting idea. It's been said that lack of alternatives to viewing sporting events is the biggest reason the remaining cable subscriber base hasn't cut the cord yet. Definitely an area sorely in need of disruption.
  • jedi_stannis 10y ago
    You could try an antenna - most of the things you mentioned are broadcast over the air
    • divbit 10y ago
      That would also require purchasing a TV I guess.
      • jdminhbg 10y ago
        No, it would require purchasing an antenna. You can plug that into a computer.
        • divbit 10y ago
          Huh. TIL.
          • pedrocr 10y ago
            Something like this works: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDM76ZW/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDM76ZW/ but you'll probably need a better directional antenna to have good reception (depends on the specific part of the world for how strong the signal is). Once you're used to fast internet you won't want any of that though. Streaming HDTV on a 50Mbps+ internet connection ends up being a better experience since you don't have to go through all the setup hassle to make this work equivalently (installing the antenna, connecting it to a dongle on your own server, installing some kind of head end software, streaming from that server over your own network). I've done both and the antenna setup is now fully deprecated.
• itomato 10y ago
  - Keep it as a pure and simple timeline. Don't show me tweets I may have missed. Make me chase them down. - No character penalty for URLs - Let people play with the data and metadata, exposing fake accounts is good for all - Encourage bots to be bots - Stump the chumps. Make this type of charade harder to pull off: @rea1DonaldTrump vs. @realDonaldTrump
• Bamberg 10y ago
  Limit restrictions on free speech as much as possible.
• unstatusthequo 10y ago
  Charge $0.01 per tweet and this also suggest people be more succinct and thoughtful in their posts to make the service a little better
  • stephancoral 10y ago
    lol this is how you kill twitter
  • adtac 10y ago
    >Charge $0.01 per tweet Guaranteed to kill twitter within a year.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• miles_matthias 10y ago
  Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with? Right now you can turn on notifications for a user's tweets, but that gives you push notifications for all of their tweets which is super annoying. Also, 99% of users don't know that exists. Their recent move to make trending topics and search more visible in the iPhone app is a step in the right direction but they're a long ways off. FOMO and live is how they're different from Facebook. I can always go back to Facebook at any time and they'll show me what I missed and I can still engage with it. With Twitter, the discussion has come and gone and I'm left out if I don't know it's happening.
  • alexose 10y ago
    > Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with? 100% agree. Twitter needs to be in the game of maximizing signal-to-noise for their users. In my experience, there's just /way/ too much noise when you're trying to follow along with a live event. I almost never want to see content from a random account with 10 followers. Nor do I want to see a d-list celebrity hocking skin care products. What I really care about is how the conversation is shaping itself over time. There are many ways of fixing this that don't spoil Twitter's free-speech mission. Personally, I think the answer is in clustering tweets based on topic and sentiment, then presenting a really intuitive filtering UI. You could expose options that would help you understand the broader conversation, but also dive into it at a super granular level. Getting this right would be in the hard-but-possible realm. Given how many engineers Twitter has stockpiled, I think it's worth trying. Solving the noise problem would necessarily cut down on abuse, too.
• shp0ngle 10y ago
  Put more effort to engineering. Facebook isn't great because of how it looks, but because they have React, hiphop (or what's the name now), things like that; and that allows them to scale and build and iterate more quickly. Twitter had Bootstrap and that was great investment IMO... now the Bootstrap guys all left. Why?
  • blackaspen 10y ago
    Previous comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13225000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13225000. Twitter's built Aurora, large parts of Mesos, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, Scalding, Finagle, and Finatra. A lot of these exist so they can build things quicker.
• joeclark77 10y ago
  I agree they need to go back to the chronological ordering of tweets. It would also be nice to have a couple levels of tweeting, like "conversational message" versus "I really mean it this time", so followers could filter by importance. I've unfollowed several great people because they just kept tweeting nonsense comments throughout the day in between a couple of really interesting posts.
• yrryeruy 10y ago
  make it so that when you click on an image in a tweet, it gets bigger not smaller
• chintan 10y ago
  Make it a protocol. again. http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html
  • radley 10y ago
    I think this is what we all want, but I'm skeptical developers will return when it's implemented. Maybe if they focused on young devs? Give them an alternative to Snapchat?
    • sksixk 10y ago
      that's interesting thought. i wouldn't be surprised if (big if) twitter opens up again and young developers embrace it for the first time (and old devs come back). it clearly still has mindshare.
  • querulous 10y ago
    i would love to see twitter-as-a-protocol but it's not going to be the current twitter. people forget that instagram bootstrapped itself off twitter's social graph and then bailed when they reached critical mass
  • LeicaLatte 10y ago
    Most boring. If they made twitter a protocol, is it even a turnaround then?
• heygrady 10y ago
  Release a new text-based product that sits in the area between Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Shift focus away from likes and followers and towards the content. Make a bold announcement about how it will combat fake news.
• dotBen 10y ago
  Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online distribution. Trump's tweets, the presidential debates broadcast on Twitter and the fact people turn to Twitter during breaking news make it a logical extension to move into news and possibly finance too. Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics and the average joe has moved their engagement to more visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat where it is much easier to create and consume more personal content and updates. Twitter would also be able to focus their monetization and advertising efforts around a much tighter content and audience niche. Plus consumers are used to paying for some of this premium content, making monetization of a freemium model even easier.
  • 40acres 10y ago
    I totally agree with this. I've seen other posts mentioning timeline changes, protocol changes, and opening up the API ecosystem, but I don't see any of these changes actually affecting Twitters bottom line. Twitter is a great place to discuss what's going on right now. Whether it be sports, a natural disaster, political debate, news, etc. Twitter needs to be the place to go when you want social commentary / news on what's happening RIGHT NOW.
  • radley 10y ago
    Twitter is very useful for professional announcements in a very informal setting. I use Twitter to follow colleagues and artists, not friends nor celebrities. I think there's something TV-ish that's possible, but Netflix level? That seems difficult both in licensing and execution. However, I will agree what you propose now appears to be their end game. #hattip
    • dotBen 10y ago
      They already have licensing deals with NFL and MLB, and built out the streaming infrastructure. I'd argue the licensing and execution is already proved out - it's time to focus on those, cut out the fat and double down on what's working.
• MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  I would add a feature that is similar to goole+ circles: allow the user to view the tweets of a subset of sources. I think it makes sense for twitter: one circle for each interest/ point of view.
  • mi100hael 10y ago
    Circles sort of make sense from a design point of view, but suck from a UX point of view. They are too time-consuming to maintain for a user. I think adding some sort of tagging system could be a better system, so I could use tags to say "this tweet is 'tech' related" or "'sports' related" and then followers could decide if they only want to follow a subset of my tweets by tag. Would make search/discovery easier too.
  • 40acres 10y ago
    Twitter sort of has this functionality via lists. During football season I only look at my 'NFL List' which is comprised of football analysts, beat writers, other media folk and 'regular' but smart football fans.
• kevwil 10y ago
  1) Go private. Twitter is a simple product that will be increasingly difficult to monetize to appease the stockholders. Being public will either mutate it into a video-ad nightmare or end up being shut down or sold. 2) Keep the timeline simple. 3) Better custom timelines, searches, and notifications. 4) Stop trying to copy Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc. and just be the best Twitter possible.
• johan_larson 10y ago
  Consolidate. I'm guessing Twitter has about as many users as it can ever hope to have, which means it's no longer about growth, it's about profits. That means it's time to cut costs, largely in engineering. You need a far smaller team to run a service and make incremental improvements than you need to grow a service aggressively.
• daliwali 10y ago
  They can continue doing what they're doing already: - Suspending accounts for no reason at all. - Shadow banning users by hiding their replies (they refer to certain users as "low quality"). - Aggressive censorship of alternative opinions.
  • accountface 10y ago
    > Aggressive censorship of alternative opinions. I feel like you're probably including instances of harassment here, which is generally unfair.
    • daliwali 10y ago
      Nope, just petty politics.
• kneel 10y ago
  I consider myself pretty tech oriented but I've never understood twitter, this is probably just my own stupidity but I've tried several times and it never makes sense. I mostly just see replies to other conversations and I don't understand the context. Scrolling through the timeline I can't parse structure, it just seems chaotic. Barely anyone I know uses twitter. It just seems to be a way to follow celebrities and politicians, I don't really care what they have to say. I'm probably missing something here.
  • richardw 10y ago
    > I'm probably missing something here. Definitely. I had the same opinion, couldn't really figure out why it had any value. At some point I created a politically-oriented (anonymous) profile to interact before one of our local elections. I followed enough of the people who used it well (media, some politicians, various individuals) to pick up the value in it. Killed that profile, created my own, still enjoy it. I don't follow too many people, I prune noise by either unfollowing or muting. I still don't care to be one of the chatteratii but it's great. Some journalists (usually serious ones), some startuppy people, some friends, some investors. I often read stuff long before it hits the news, I see what journalists say on a less-scripted platform. Find opinions you value, follow them. Use e.g. Tweetbot.
  • amalag 10y ago
    That is true, the timeline is fragments of multiple conversations or popular statements. You are right that it is difficult to parse the feed, because your brain has to context switch between all the conversations. Whereas for instance a hacker news feed gives you exclusively top level headlines with a place to go for discussion.
    • kneel 10y ago
      Oooohh that's why it's called twitter. Like a giant flock of birds all chirping to their immediate neighbor with slight variations on the same theme? Like a massive digital game of chinese whispers. I'm sticking to the tree branched nature of reddit/HN. The flock can go flap their wings all they want.
  • 10y ago
• mindcrash 10y ago
  * Remove Jack from CEO position * Let Evan return as CEO (merge with Medium) ... this will restore Twitter management to the situation around 2010, then ... * Reform or cancel the Trust & Safety council * Restore open API access and app ecosystem * Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab) * Reverse the timeline changes * Stop pandering to far left ideologues Something like that?
  • sfeng 10y ago
    How is any of this gonna result in Twitter making more money?
    • Cyph0n 10y ago
      Absolutely nothing. It's just what OP wants Twitter to be I guess.
      • zo1 10y ago
        Or rather what they think is causing Twitter to lose users/engagement. Those things directly affect whether Twitter will sink or swim within the next year or so which I think are critical.
    • amerine 10y ago
      It won't.
    • _callcc 10y ago
      If the question "How would you turn Twitter around?" is being asked in public with tons of people giving great answers, I'm sorry but you have a major leadership problem.
    • Melchizedek 10y ago
      People will stop switching to gab.ai? Twitter actually thrives on conflict - stop trying to turn it into a safe space for the easily offended! Or at least don't force it to be a neutered safe space for everyone - leave it up to the users to turn it into that for themselves, not for everyone else.
• andrewfromx 10y ago
  relaunch it. have a countdown to the end of Twitter 2007-2017 and let everyone know it's starting all over again. Rush to get your username. The new twitter will be just like it was in 2008 but stable and working but get back to what made it great in the first place.
• uladzislau 10y ago
  The twist - one of Twitter executives asking this on HN...
• ijafri 10y ago
  I have no clue why they stopped developing it any further, in old days you would eagerly wait for a new feature, every couple of month. That's also true back then it didn't even have image upload. I'd expect it be something between Facebook and twitter itself. Nope never google+. It needs a fresh look hmm! By fresh I meant the design as the aesthetics of web Facebook messenger a modern, miminial, fresh look. That Facebook lacks. I'd want to it be bit less minimal but not as much bloated as Facebook hence I suggestrd earlier something between the Facebook and twitter itself. It's stalled and boring, and at this point it looks like a driveless train that could hit the dead end pretty soon.
  • skylan_q 10y ago
    I have no clue why they stopped developing it any further, in old days you would eagerly wait for a new feature, every couple of month. Capital turns these companies into SJW havens where nothing gets done but they get to promote the companies as part of valley culture/cultural meccas. Look at Github, for example.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• kevwil 10y ago
  - Go private. Twitter is a simple product and will be increasingly difficult to monetize enough to satisfy shareholders' desire for ever-increasing profits. - Keep it simple. Stop trying to be Facebook and Snapchat and Youtube all at once. - Better AI / search to enable/improve things like custom timelines and notifications. - Optional paid accounts with appropriate benefits. Keep the cost low and don't penalize unpaid accounts.
• misterbowfinger 10y ago
  I'm surprised Twitter didn't become the newer, better Reddit.
• alistproducer2 10y ago
  Pivot to a NSFW platform. It already is but most people don't know that side of it. I'm pretty sure porn is the only reason tumblr's still breathing so it might work.
• xatan_dank 10y ago
  I wouldn't become the CEO of Twitter. If I were, I would resign. I think the business model of these "free services but you pay with your data and advertisements" is despicable. I would much rather spend my time creating and popularizing FOSS protocols for communication if I am to work in this area. I think Twitter has always been a completely ridiculous service and it's a poster child for this misguided iteration of Internet companies. If we just get enough users, we HAVE to make a profit! Turns out that isn't the case. The only thing I've seen Twitter accomplish is poisoning our collective consciousness with false information and a bad model of reality provided by an unsustainable system.
• erickhill 10y ago
  1) Offer a premium Ad Free model 2) Create a Reddit Gold type of economy to open up "premium features" ... e.g. Unfollow Tools and/or deeper analytics - this would tie into the Ad Free model 3) Allow for the creation of Groups. 4) Make Video more of a top-tier content experience, not some side-bar hand-wavy experiment (at the same level as Moments). The next Twitch could be Twitter-based. The community is already there. (note: expensive, but potentially very lucrative CPMs)
• AliAdams 10y ago
  My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or important updates from companies I'm interested in. I see a secondary value from twitter by people contributing to a conversation around an event, be that a sports game, a site outage, a traffic jam or an unfolding natural disaster. Filtering out / systemically discouragingly a lot of the countless low-value/self promotional posts alongside a better hashtag (channel) view would be a great start.
  • alexose 10y ago
    I used to work for a (terrific!) company that uses all kinds of natural language processing tools on Twitter data: http://crimsonhexagon.com/ http://crimsonhexagon.com/ Without getting into specifics, I was constantly blown away by the trends we were able to discover just with simple techniques. Twitter sells its data, so it really only pencils out for analytics companies like Crimson Hexagon to be B2B. If I were Twitter, I might recognize this as an opportunity to build good in-house filtering tools that are available to their users.
  • m-j-fox 10y ago
    Yeah. By becoming a big company, Twitter missed her calling as a profitable, sustainable, 5-person operation a la Craigslist. Celebrities and others trying to make a career on the platform ruined it as a small interest-group informal discussion side channel.
  • timdellinger 10y ago
    I think that Twitter and Facebook have similar problems - the choices that users make tend to ruin the experience for those users. People choose to follow (and continue following) folks who clutter up the feed.
  • artursapek 10y ago
    > My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. This just reflects real life. It's not a Twitter problem.
• Mikeb85 10y ago
  Get rid of censorship. They had a good idea with live streaming video and whatnot, but they're beat to everything by Instagram and Snapchat. As it stands now, I deleted Twitter simply because it's nothing but corporate accounts, overly aggressive SJWs posturing over every damn thing, and the only content I actually cared about was reposted from Instagram (apart from a few people I know who live streamed, but have since switched platforms). So now I only use Instagram.
  • ndespres 10y ago
    I'm not exactly sure what people mean when they reference "aggressive SJWs" but many would prefer stricter moderation on Twitter. Racists and targeted harassment is a big problem. I doubt that there is a pattern of "social justice warriors" who are seeking out and harassing those with mildly opposing viewpoints.
    • chasing 10y ago
      Yeah, most of the "freedom of speech" / "get rid of censorship" stuff I see seems to be code for "let people be assholes." Which, okay. But there's a line where you're just being too toxic for the community and need to be shown the door.
      • iopq 10y ago
        Twitter is not a community. It's a platform. There's a difference.
• pycal 10y ago
  Systematically delete accounts which might contribute bad press and lower ad revenue. Add a feature that allows users to censor their feeds / remove @replies from "trolls". Decrease engineering staff, increase outbound sales people. Establish syndication rights with NFL.
• accountface 10y ago
  Open up the API again and let third parties integrate live-streaming features. If you have thousands of people already watching and livetweeting a new Netflix release, facilitate that and make it easier. Imagine if everyone could watch the Superbowl while live-tweeting it in the same interface... you'd likely broaden user adoption
• perseusprime11 10y ago
  Sell Twitter to Microsoft
• ProAm 10y ago
  Layoff everyone except for the bare minimum to keep the company operational (~100-200 people), take it private and print money for 10 years then let it naturally sunset itself.
  • sfeng 10y ago
    The problem is that would require the value of the company to crash down to its actual value (some reasonable revenue multiple).
    • ProAm 10y ago
      Not really, if you layoff everyone you'd save so much in liabilities you'd have a buyer for it almost immediately. Twitter isn't worth much now, but if you cut the fat it's actually a profitable company.
  • ISL 10y ago
    Came here to say cost-cutting. I'm not sure that Twitter will sunset itself. Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen. Twitter is a protocol, and an excellent one. If it continues to serve as a backbone of public-domain discourse, it can remain relevant for the foreseeable future. WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition, with 0.5B monthly users. Twitter currently has 0.3B monthly users and 3860 employees. I keep considering TWTR, even had a limit order open for a while, but keep walking away.
    • eldavido 10y ago
      Just don't. Seriously. Let it fall another 50% before you go even close.
    • fragmede 10y ago
      > Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen. Is it? It's a private company and so is not subject to the same disclosure rules as a public company, so no one outside the company can actually say how they're actually doing. Meanwhile, as a publicly traded company, TWTR is required to publish all sorts of information about the site's popularity, for critics to play armchair CEO with.
• leroy_masochist 10y ago
  Get rid of Quote Tweet. Its primary current use case is to facilitate pointless "gotcha" games. I'd say it contributes more to the current poisonous atmosphere more than any other feature.
• CM30 10y ago
  Well, for starters I would: 1. Focus on making the company profitable by cutting down on staff and resources. Seriously, Twitter doesn't need thousands of employees, a large HQ and all that other fancy stuff. I think a team of about 30 people could probably run it fine. 2. Get developers on board again. Open up API access, stop shutting down/blocking projects, etc. Make people feel like they could start a business on Twitter's platform, without the rug being pulled out down the line. 3. Get rid of the Trust and Safety Council. It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech, which groups like the ACLU suspiciously absent. 4. Improve moderation. Kick out terrorists and nutcases on the 'left', stop looking for every excuse to ban right wing users and generally treat everyone with respect all around. 5. Try and make the Android app more usable. Because at the moment, it's really awkward to use and gets rather slow at times. 6. Stop using verification and unverification as a punishment. Really, it's like Twitter is being as confusing as possible here. 7. Have the timeline set to how it used to be. Remove the 'show best tweets first' crap from any accounts unfortunate enough to still have it enabled. 8. Make things like URLs not count towards the character limit. I think Gab already does this, and it's very useful.
  • scalesolved 10y ago
    30 people? Could you list what sort of team breakdown you are seeing for this? I'm really struggling to see how to maintain/develop and work on such a complex problem at that scale with a team of only 30.
    • criddell 10y ago
      When Facebook bought Instagram, weren't they running with something like 15 people?
      • scalesolved 10y ago
        Sure I guess they were small but their problem space seems to be similar to a more standard CRUD. I could be wrong but the one to many and many to one relations within Twitter seem much harder (at least from my perspective). Both are super tough at the scale they run :)
• monochromatic 10y ago
  I'd stop using it to suppress political speech that I disagree with. http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-here-folks http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-her...
  • skylan_q 10y ago
    Don't like Clinton? Get silenced. Want to facilitate revolutions in other countries with the help of the CIA? That's cool. No problem.
    • dang 10y ago
      We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and it's destructive of what it is for. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise to use the site as intended, i.e. for thoughtful conversation on stories that gratify intellectual curiosity.
• ncantelmo 10y ago
  There are two sides to this: usability and revenue. On the usability side, there's lots of room for improvement in terms of fostering meaningful discussion, which in turn would lead to stronger social ties between users. Addressing that issue would probably have to start with an effort to improve discoverability of accounts that engage thoughtfully with other users. So people who reply to tweets that earn hearts might show up in suggestions more often, etc. I'd also work to discourage endless ICYMI repostings of big multimedia tweets and go back to a chronological timeline. If there's too much noise in a chronological timeline, that means too much clickbait/link spam is being posted, and that's the real issue. From a revenue perspective, there are a bunch of options worth looking at: a Patreon model to encourage people with great insight to tweet more; more accessible paid analytics, baked right into the app that could help non-business users improve the quality of what they send out; an in-app store for subscribing to third-party add-ons. Basically, at some point it's worth realizing that plenty of mobile users will spend some money for an improved experience. The constant focus on ad-based revenue makes money, but ultimately incentivizes the company to do things that make the overall product experience worse.
• countryqt30 10y ago
  Sorry to say, but REMOVE [however you like] Jack Dorsey. He is an absolute incapable CEO and human, he is doing NOTHING for the company, the shareholders or the people of the US. :(
• DanBC 10y ago
  Fix the abuse problem. Lilly Allen recently had some horrific trolling on her page about her stillborn child. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39095000/lily-allen-was-attacked-online-after-revealing-she-suffered-from-ptsd-after-stillbirth http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39095000/lily-allen-wa...
• donpark 10y ago
  I tweeted this few months ago: 1) Add golden heart 2) Sell golden hearts to users. 3) Reward some golden hearts daily to users, perhaps based on tiered ranking. 4) Allow advertisers to gift golden hearts to users. 5) 'Promote' tweets with golden hearts and display them in Moments. In short, allow peer promotion. Red hearts are currently being wasted as weak social signals and nods. This change blurs the line between ads and peer-promotion.
  • xanderstrike 10y ago
    So reddit gold.
    • mrtron 10y ago
      TotalFark
  • herge 10y ago
    How's that working for reddit?
    • donpark 10y ago
      I didn't know about Reddit Gold and don't use Reddit enough to answer this. Even if mechanism is same, I think result will be different for Twitter.
  • firebones 10y ago
    That's not the worst idea on here. I have no idea how much Patreon and various crowdfunding sites take in, but scale those up to Twitter's audience (which has some meaningful overlap with those likely to use or benefit from those services) and they get the foundation for a payment/micropayment type model. Twitter tried doing this with some sort of direct commerce experiment, but "give $5 to a cause/artist/politician" tends to be a more social activity than going right after retail, or hoping to crack the micropayments for content nut.
• countryqt30 10y ago
  CUT COSTS. FIRE CEO.
• codingdave 10y ago
  I'm not sure anyone outside of twitter has enough information to really answer this. After all, they DO have revenue. So without knowing the intricate details of their expenses, it is difficult to know whether the problem lies in business strategy or just financial operations. Because the first step would be to be sure they really are running their operations in a financially effective manner. It is possible that a re-tooling of their internal operations would result in profitability. If that turns out to not be the case, then the strategy would depend on how far from profitability they are -- are we talking about minor tweaks to the business model? Or a major overhaul of entire company? In short, how would I turn it around? I'd step in and do a large analytic effort on the status quo, and then react to the result.
• d--b 10y ago
  Make people pay to tweet. something like the cost of a text message. That will cut the garbage down a lot. It will reduce the costs by easing the infrastructure. Increase quality of information by reducing the number of bots/trolls/twitstorms and so on. Plus it will bring in some money in.
• zellyn 10y ago
  I agree with what Adrian Colyer wrote at https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/02/14/reducing-controversy-by-connecting-opposing-views/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/02/14/reducing-controversy-by-... ------ Dear Twitter, You have it in your power to truly differentiate your platform and make the world a better place by implementing controversial topic and filter bubble detection (per the paper we looked at yesterday), together with letting users see their polarity score (per today’s paper) and making controversy reducing / filter-busting follower recommendations (also per today’s paper). This would be something new and unique in the world of mass media consumption, and could help to make Twitter great again. How about it? Regards, Adrian.
• pklausler 10y ago
  "again?"
• hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago
  Are corporate accounts free or do they cost? I've always thought that they should charge every big corp that is using their platform as a marketing / customer service tool. Does CNN pay Twitter every time they read someone's tweet on the air? I'm not talking about a "newsworthy" tweet (for example one from a politician's account), but CNN occasionally says, "Let's see what a random person on the internet thinks about this development." Then they prominently focus on a couple tweets. I think CNN (or who ever) should pay for that content.
• budu3 10y ago
  Developers, developers, developers. I would open up the apps store and the API -- embrace developers once again. The media companies trajectory that they're currently on seems like that which Yahoo was on, and it did help Yahoo much.
• gre 10y ago
  Twitter should buy the Sutro Baths, renovate them, and charge admission.
• Grue3 10y ago
  1. Remove post length limit. 2. Limit the number of tweets per day instead. 3. You can pay to remove the above limit. This solves the problem of timeline being unreadable once you subscribe to enough people. Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap. Once everyone is rate-limited, everyone can easily digest their timeline. Without length limit, tweets become more thoughtful. 4. Fix the UI. Make it easy to view replies. Make it easy to view embedded images. Make it lean and fast. That would give Twitter advantage over similarly bloated services. 5. Anti-trolling measures. This one is really obvious! There should be no indication that you're blocked by another person, they just don't see you anymore. If the blocked person doesn't know they're blocked, they don't get the satisfaction of being blocked, and they don't know when they need to create another account to annoy you. This should be the basic rule when you implement a blocking feature. 6. Open up API. This one is obvious.
  • calchris42 10y ago
    > Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap. +10 to this. The signal to noise on Twitter is terrible. Pretty sure I'm using it "wrong", but my likelihood of following someone on Twitter is generally inversely proportional to their number of tweets per day.
    • bad_user 10y ago
      In the set of people I follow, the popularity of Twitter accounts is directly proportional to the total number of tweets they have, which is a sample of almost 400 people. I did an analysis a while back. Of course, there are always counter examples, famous people that don't tweet at all, or people posting dumb shit and not getting followers. That tweet to follower ratio has some variation. Quality matters too and it helps if people have a following outside of Twitter. But still, I'd say that your likelihood of following someone is not representative of other Twitter users.
    • joelrunyon 10y ago
      Uh...so stop following "crap" accounts?
  • bad_user 10y ago
• deleted 10y ago
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• lhnz 10y ago
  I would try to eat journalism. I would create a system where subscription to News on Twitter helps to automate payment for individual articles. 1. The lede or quote gets pulled into the tweet. 2. http://t.co becomes a payment-debiting gateway (402 Payment Required). Basically, you would monetise the audience on behalf of the publishers who would be able to make their paywalls more porous. Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement: - Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions. - Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share. - Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops. Edit: If anyone in Twitter wants to do this, please hire me - I'd be super interested to work on it. Wouldn't even need to be the CEO. ;)
  • nine_k 10y ago
    Super-important: make payment frictionless. Let the payment gateway link to whatever payment method(s) you already have, set a limit for automatic payment per day, and make it one-click ("Buy this article"), or even optionally zero-click below a trivial threshold (e.g. 10¢). If you hit the daily limit, ask for confirmations, passwords, etc.
  • untog 10y ago
    Is there much evidence to suggest that people are willing to pay for individual articles, though? Blendle has been around for a while and hasn't set the world alight. There are plenty of free news sources to compete with.
    • uncletaco 10y ago
      Probably not, but I think there could be a "twitter wallet" that the user pays into. Let's say I add $5 a month to this wallet and twitter pays it's content partners based on the percentage of click through received by me. It would work like Brave browser's wallet. The problem with this though is it would probably encourage more junk content and instead of annoying ads we'll get more clickbait.
      • 10y ago
• dpweb 10y ago
  Many things come to mind. I love Twitter, but it becomes less of a platform for personal expression and more of a machine operated tool for propagandists and spam garbage when you just widely allow botnets. For instance, do a little digging into some of the accts that constantly retweet Trump (Dems are no better). Maybe they tie back to alt-right blog-nets - not humans - which also managed to hijack the search engines to some extent. That ain't personal expression. If they can't generate some new excitement, the BUMMER is, messaging is the future. I'll argue FB and everyone else will be known as messaging platforms - not a face book or social news feed.
• deleted 10y ago
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• _harry 10y ago
  - fix abuse & troll problem - clarify community guidelines - threaded replies - upvotes - groups public/private - add channels - follow anything, focus on live - then I'd buy Reddit & Imgur.
• colinplamondon 10y ago
  - Focus and elevate video content. Entire TV episodes are sometimes made public on Twitter - there's no way to surface this. When The Expanse has a new episode, it should go into a tab that's YouTube on Twitter. - Pay video creators out the ass to get them to dual-publish from YouTube, and create auto-sync features that let them publish in both locations. Build in live-streaming functionality to compete with Twitch. - "Async realtime". When watching a show, make it possible to replay Homeland tweets from the time you start. If you watch an Apple Keynote later, make the realtime tweets replay, and make it possible to add your own. - Allow different engagement models. If someone has a whiff of abuse in their feed, make it trivial for them to see only verified + low risk users. The moment someone sends an @message to someone they've never conversed with with a single abusive word, crank the risk on them. If someone wants to engage with the firehose, make that the default. - Make it easy to "import" feeds. I've had at least 3 friends ask me who to follow, and then we spend 15 minutes scrolling through my follow list, they manually look them up. When a new user registers on Twitter, I should be able to pick 3 people I'm most interested in following, and it should then recommend the people they like the most. - It should be one-click to "super follow" someone, and get all their follows into my feed. Make it trivial to get an awesome, active feed. And trivial to reduce noise when I'm not interested in something.
• lngnmn 10y ago
  Sell it to Trump.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • BillyParadise 10y ago
    Totally. Ban him or Sell it to him. Deescalation or scorched earth. Enough of this pesky middle-ground.
• riemannzeta 10y ago
  Twitter is the web interface for mobile messaging. The network effects have carried it so far. "Turning around" is going to mean saying no to all of the shiny new things both on mobile and on the web that have little to do with its core value. That means no live video, no original content, nothing but messaging on the web. Focus, focus, focus. With that focus, I believe Twitter can return to growth in its user base. There is more that could be done to make the experience more engaging, for example, without interfering with the core experience. By mixing some suggested tweets into my feed using machine learning, Twitter could increase engagement. The new user experience would flow better with good use of machine learning. In terms of monetization, it's about the data. Twitter APIs should be recognized as best-in-class, and access should be sold on a subscription basis on a graduated scale based on frequency of access. There is a natural scale to core Twitter, and it might not be much bigger than it is right now. Sometimes we have to be content with what we've got -- which in Twitter's case is nothing to sneeze at. They shouldn't be going all "New Coke" getting into video and media in my opinion.
• aembleton 10y ago
  - Remove advertising - Charge for longer tweets in the following way - 200 chars -> $10/year - 500 chars -> $10/month or $100/year - 1000 chars -> $100/month or $1000/year
• Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Fire almost everyone. Cease innovation and roll several things back. Open the API up more. Limit spending to what you can afford and coast forever. Growth is overrated.
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• jraines 10y ago
  - Get rid of modals for everything. Especially: when clicking on a tweet to view replies, open a new page with better threading of replies, pagination, and no reordering (or optional "quality" reordering). Twitter is a forum on speed; take some good ideas from forums. Right now it's a forum on speed and acid. - Have more options for blocking, including "block this person and everyone who follows them or followed them within last N days" - Fix trending topic spam. Seriously, how is this so bad? Free advice: for every trending topic a tweet mentions over 1 in a single tweet, the probability that it's spam asymptotically approaches 1. - Allow an unambiguous, never "played with", chronological timeline. Have a separate view that's your ML playground. The "In case you missed it" and "tweets you might like" features are good but I don't want them randomly appearing in my timeline. - Allow alternate clients, even if you have to charge a fee. - Similarly, create a separate free developer-focused API but clearly identify all tweets posted via that as "bot" and allow people to never see tweets posted by a bot, or tweets posted by a bot @ them. Tweets posted from the "alternative client" paid API would not be subject to this marking. - Identify "sleeper cell" bots -- accounts inactive for a long time that suddenly become active, usually around a single topic, concurrent with many similar bots, and aggressively ban them. - Do more and better things with Lists. Don't just show me 3 people to follow (usually clearly just based on the last person I looked at). Show me algorithmically curated suggested lists, popular lists, allow me to sort those by # of members, easily find lists that user X belongs to, etc., mark lists as low quality/harassment vehicles. Surface good content shared by my interest lists somewhere other than the timeline. - My personal #1: give me the likestream of the people I follow. This is easily more interesting than their actual tweets, at least to me. Something like a quarter of my usage these days is visiting individual accounts "Likes" pages. At least use this data in the aforementioned algorithmic curation of Lists/suggested follows.
  • bitwiseand 10y ago
    - Allow an unambiguous, never "played with", chronological timeline. Have a separate view that's your ML playground. I disagree. The alternate to a vision you may not agree with is not having two visions. Use data to support one not both.
    • 10y ago
• petergatsby 10y ago
  Stop rewarding the most hyperbolic, sensational content by propagating it the furthest, fastest. Turn tweets into "ice-berg tips"; user taps on tweet to see more, nuanced info.
• tschellenbach 10y ago
  Twitter in it's current form mainly appeals to power users. For every day users it's simply too much work to get value from Twitter. To fix that they will have to make some choices that will upset existing users though: 1. Move the chronological feed to the background, the feed should be sorted by relevancy not time. (If you're a power user you can click to the raw chronological feed.) 2. Right now you can only follow users and not interests. This makes it extremely hard for new users to get a sensible feed of content. If a mainstream user signs up for Twitter they are only going to spend a minute or so to set things up. Twitter needs to immediately add value for those users. 3. Use a machine learning approach to learn what a user is interested in based on email clicks. (Quora does a great job at that.) 4. Redesign all apps and simply. A good example is their settings screen. Another is the crazy behaviour that you have to put a . in front of your tweet. Get rid of all those power user features and settings and simplify. 5. Remove abusive bots and clearly mark bots as bots. Twitter is spending millions to facilitate people engaging in follow spam and other forms of spam. 6. Build up a dedicated team to make sure Twitter works for high profile users. (IE, do notifications and messages work if i have >10m followers). They need a team on top of that to keep those users happy. 7. Some general tips: https://getstream.io/blog/13-tips-for-a-highly-engaging-news-feed/ https://getstream.io/blog/13-tips-for-a-highly-engaging-news...
  • stevefeinstein 10y ago
    Relevance is relative.
• daveid 10y ago
  Twitter as a company needs to think about how to be profitable. Twitter as a way for people to talk to each other and broadcast important events needs to be neither commercial nor centralized [1] [1]: https://hackernoon.com/the-power-to-build-communities-a-response-to-mark-zuckerberg-3f2cac9148a4 https://hackernoon.com/the-power-to-build-communities-a-resp...
• gtsteve 10y ago
  Nice try, Jack Dorsey.
• jondubois 10y ago
  I would cut Selling/General/Admin expenses. It's costing them $1.2 billion per year which is about half of their total revenue and this cost has kept growing over the years. I would cut back on research (or at least bring it in-house) - $713 million is too much. If they paid each of their researchers 200K per year, they could hire 3500 of them which is insane.
• jacquesm 10y ago
  Turn back the clock to when Twitter was mostly a protocol and less of a web application. Re-enable the API's that have been disabled, open up easier access to the firehose. Essentially making Twitter 'too big to fail'. Tell shareholders that they're in for the long haul and that they can write off any chances for quick bucks. Most probably - unfortunately - cut deeply into the employee base because there is no way Twitter could sustain the company size they are at today based on the product that they have.
• skylan_q 10y ago
  They started a great slaughter of #FrogTwitter twitterers. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/silence-frogs-why-twitter-censoring-harmless-pepe-accounts-1608780 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/silence-frogs-why-twitter-censoring... This is the price they now pay. Also, Twitter isn't so much a business as it's a hybrid speech platform/media outlet and moneyed interests shape it as they please to promote the agenda they want.
• metaphorm 10y ago
  new economic model: users pay on the basis of how many followers they have. the first 1000 followers are free. pricing begins for accounts with over 1000 followers. the more followers you have the more you pay. this places the payment model in alignment with who the actual beneficiaries of twitter are. it's a mass broadcast advertising/propaganda platform. let the propagandists pay for it.
  • rtkwe 10y ago
    That's massively open for abuse: Find someone you don't like or want to harass and get lots of people to hate follow them. Costs them money or forces them to use some Twitter moderation tool to cull followers. Second thought with any social media feature should be how can an asshole use this to be an asshole easier.
    • metaphorm 10y ago
      I don't understand your criticism. How do you propose a bad-actor could control such a large number of accounts? even supposing this malicious figure had that much influence, the problem is just one of how Twitter bills its users. It is the platform's responsibility to determine how it bills and whether or not it is billing fairly. this is a technical implementation detail of the platform, which is beyond the scope of this discussion. finally, suppose those are "malicious followers". who cares? you pay for reach. if all those supposedly malicious followers stay as your followers they're still seeing your tweets. isn't that the point? I don't see how this is an abuse of the system. A view is a view. Are we suppose to now distinguish between friendly vs. hostile views? This is getting ridiculous.
      • rtkwe 10y ago
        A couple different ways but bots or just a large group of people getting angry at someone are the simplest, the second is already pretty common and a problem with Twitter as it stands. Next the billing is an integral part of the discussion. If it's impossible to accurately bill something it's a terrible feature. Finally there are massive number of people who use twitter completely noncommercially but might wind up with this problem. Charging anyone who isn't trying to sell something for reach is a pretty much guaranteed way to shed tons of users.
• amorphid 10y ago
  Open up the platform to third parties again, and creating a binding agreement to keep it open.
• portman 10y ago
  Charge Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, and anyone else who has 1MM+ followers. Charge them per tweet. They are the true economic beneficiaries of Twitter. (Like any software company, offer lower pricing to charities.) Use that cash to get rid of ads (they are not working) and invest in more tools for publishers (who are now paying).
  • devmunchies 10y ago
    So charge the people who are responsible for twitter's relevancy? Other companies would pay top dollar for that kind of viral marketing, and you suggest charging them for it? Thats like Nike charging Lebron James per point he scores if he wants to wear their shoes. You have it backwards.
• deleted 10y ago
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• anotheryou 10y ago
  go away from the chronological view
• nikcub 10y ago
  1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video passion-project nonsense. you don't need to own content to use twitter alongside it. strike deals with the content providers instead where tweets are shown alongside (this is already being done) and become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor 6. improve the core product for users. group messaging, longer tweets, only show replies from people who are authenticated or two degrees away from you by default, etc. etc. (and pro accounts, if you wish) 7. let people pay to get a checkmark, and then let users pay to flair tweets they like 8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter. let them pay to use it as a platform and properly authenticate their customers on twitter 9. ditto above but for marketing
  • lcnmrn 10y ago
    I got all these things right with Sublevel. It‘s like someone read my mind. Including 7, people can donate any amount so I can verify their real identity. At 1, I cut costs down to $75/year.
  • artursapek 10y ago
    > 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. I never understood why their home page is so basic. Is it just to reduce load on their servers from lurkers?
    • x0x0 10y ago
      A guess: to push people to register. For several reasons: (1) they are judged on that every quarter; (2) a hypothesis that this makes the experience better for users, and hence more likely to contribute to MAUs; (3) a hypothesis this improves ad targeting.
• gdulli 10y ago
  Get rid of the algorithmic timeline, while-you-were-away, etc.
• deleted 10y ago
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• anizan 10y ago
  Remove duplicate tweets from search.
• fjordan 10y ago
  Pitch it to Amazon as a proper monitor for their AWS Cloud.
• niftich 10y ago
  1. Take it private 2. Focus app and website around two concepts: 'Now' and 'Here' -- temporally local, and spatially local. 'Now' would surface what's happening in the world now: major entertainment events, major political events, intermingling global, culturally-similar, and local. Show a stylized zoomable map to show what's happening around the world, so one can narrow or widen the locality of the world's pulse. 'Here' would invert this, showing everything that happened hyperlocal, surfacing recent popular and random tweets from where you are now. Bonus for some visual eye candy that shows, perhaps as a Venn diagram, when 'Here' and 'Now' get closer and closer together to where if you're at a sports event, they're one and the same. 3. Keep everything chronological. For a network like this, 'Fear of Missing Out' is a feature, not a bug -- the anxiety should be palpable. For 'Now', sell ad slots for exact rotating times, like TV. This will drive demand for high-quality, high-cost brand advertising, instead of low-value mundane stuff. For 'Here', sell the ad slot to local businesses. 4. Open the API but charge a fee for access. 5. Use ML, identity, hashtags, and context to classify tweets into a limited number of categories/tags: breaking news, humor, insight, commentary, chatter, feedback. Expose these as a user-controllable filter on top of any existing view. 6. Disable most notifications. Make users want to return to the app without being nagged. 7. Only allow replies and DMs from people you follow and verified accounts.
• branchless 10y ago
  I'd change the way we issue money. I'd issue it without interest allowing companies to be free from the tiresome burden of continuous growth.
• collinglass 10y ago
  One thing for sure, I would remove posting privileges from the API. Yes it is a bold move. It has a great platform ecosystem but the amount of automation you can do is what removes the value from the platform. For example, followers mean nothing anymore and auto-DMs from people I recently followed is an Ah-NO moment. Instagram and LinkedIn have kept POSTing out of their API for the most part. One reason (of the many) they are thriving is because people know it's all handmade engagement.
  • amalag 10y ago
    That is a nice idea. Make twitter focus on personal communication and interactions.
• jamesk_au 10y ago
  This analysis from Ben Thompson (Stratechery[1]) just yesterday would be a great place to start: "Imagine a Twitter app that, instead of a generic Moment that is little more than Twitter’s version of a thousand re-blogs, let you replay your Twitter stream from any particular moment in time. Miss the Oscars gaffe? Not only can you watch the video, you can read the reactions as they happen, from the people you actually care enough to follow. Or maybe see the reactions through someone else’s eyes: choose any other user on Twitter, and see what they saw as the gaffe happened. What is so powerful about this seemingly simple feature is that it would commoditize “live” in a way that is only possibly digitally, and that would uniquely benefit the company: now the experience of “live” (except for the shock value) would be available at any time, from any perspective, and only on Twitter. That such a feature does not exist — indeed, that the company’s stated goal is to become more like old media, instead of uniquely leveraging digital — is as good an explanation for why the company has foundered as any." [1] https://stratechery.com/2017/twitter-live-and-luck/ https://stratechery.com/2017/twitter-live-and-luck/
  • xiaoma 10y ago
    Wow. He cites himself 9 times and cites himself citing himself at the end.
    • burkaman 10y ago
      Well, it's his blog. It's pretty normal to link to previous blog posts you've written about a particular topic.
    • LordHumungous 10y ago
      Gotta get that SEO juice baby
    • K0SM0S 10y ago
      It may sound egotistic, but it's also a solid way to build something akin to a 'book' albeit in a discrete blogged form: you tend to quote yourself not to make the same point over and over again in so many different phrasings. It makes the arguments consistent, and rewards thoroughness, paying attention to each post (coherency, wording, etc.) Eventually it builds up a coherent, cohesive corpus of ideas that hopefully, should the theme be well-defined, is a book. Usually when going for publication, you'd replace these quotes with references to previous chapters, typically in footnotes.
• joshwcomeau 10y ago
  Other than some small optimizations (When I reply to my own tweets, it should be visible without a page refresh), I would change nothing. Granted, I am answering a different question: from the CEOs perspective, they _need_ to do something because they aren't growing fast enough. But as a user, Twitter is more enjoyable when it's niche. I have a circle of developers that share their projects and thoughts on software dev, and it's delightful. Someone else said that it's a great resource for the medical community, I know that the hiphop scene is big on twitter, there's whatever the hell Weird Twitter is... Twitter makes more sense as a series of specialized clusters based around specific communities, not as a Facebook where it's everything for everyone.
• nitinics 10y ago
  1. Customer Service - Provide enterprise solutions for customer service and charge $$$ per transaction. The live nature of this would prove a lot of value for feedback mechanisms for enterprise when they go through their change management. 2. Live Interaction with Events, Games, Television, Radio etc. e.g. Polls, QnA, Sentiment etc. 3. Open Access to Developers to build Apps on real-time content. 4. Enable fact-check score methodologies on every tweets. Don't completely wipe out the trolls. As weird as it may sound - trolls make twitter interesting. 5. The Ultimate messaging platform that replaces SMS/Texts with an identity that is not numbers.
  • philippz 10y ago
    There is a better "Twitter for Feedback" -> STOMT
• austincheney 10y ago
  Allow private tweet capabilities and charge for it. This is really all you can do. Twitter is largely a broadcast system and echo chamber, which perfectly explains the type of people who gravitate to it most directly.
  • maxerickson 10y ago
    Accounts can be marked protected at which point tweets are only shown to confirmed followers: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14016 https://support.twitter.com/articles/14016
• deleted 10y ago
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• rrggrr 10y ago
  1. Let users charge for more rapid access to tweets and share revenue (eg. instant tweet access versus delayed access). 2. Let users pay to DM certain accounts. 3. Mesh-networked solution. 4. Launch 'labs' version as sandbox for developers and users to experiment with (eg. encrypted tweeting, blockchain embedded messaging, proxied messages, etc.) 5. Twitter comms OS embedded on hardware.
• jkaljundi 10y ago
  Threads.
• grandalf 10y ago
  I think Twitter is already pretty great. My suggestions are below: - Twitter is a platform, open it up to allow any clients first class access. - Stop political censorship immediately. It's fine to prevent scams and bot-nets, but do not stifle political speech. - Lower burn rate. Cancel all of the product-oriented projects that are expensive, simply focus on building the infrastructure to make Twitter's platform as inexpensive as possible to maintain. I'd estimate 10% of Twitter's employees are actually needed. - Be very cautious about ads. Do not compare yourself to Facebook for ad revenue generation. This is a long-term decision that will require adequate funding to undertake.
  • eropple 10y ago
    > do not stifle political speech And when that political speech threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or people? 'Cause I'm not saying you're conflating the two, but a whole lot of people for whom this is an axe they grind really kind of constantly do.
    • gre 10y ago
      Removing all the anti-hillary trending or pro-bernie hashtags really pissed me off during the election. Google does similar things with auto-complete. Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them? You can threaten people over anything, why conflate threats with political speech? There is real censorship on twitter over political ideas, and threats don't even enter into it.
      • eropple 10y ago
        > Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them? Because it's not. The actions of actively authoritarian/alt-right political actors on Twitter are inextricably tied to the movement itself. Milo Yiannopoulos was not banned for the content of what he said. He was banned for saying things he knew would rile up his base of threatening, assaultive troglodytes into attacking someone based on their political priors. Coca-Cola is not going to pay Twitter if Twitter is a cesspool of people whose idea of political speech is threats. And, right now, a very large portion of it is. And given that free speech has the implication of free association, it's very fortunate that those poor benighted alt-righters who are so very censored have their own places to talk where nobody will get in their way-- --but, of course, it's not about talking about their political ideas at all. It's about forcing others to listen to them. Twitter need not be an accessory to that. There is no great loss, either moral or financial, to the slow leakage of anime avatars and Twitter eggs.
• vezycash 10y ago
  Twitter's money issues can be solved by adsensing popluar / celebrity accounts.
• dzonga 10y ago
  Btw I made an app[0] last year as my first iOS app which centers conversations around Live events using hashtags. Based on comments on this thread, with some UX improvements the app could meet a lot your requirements. Will gladly accept feedback, and willing to iterate. [0]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/event-is/id1141185734?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/event-is/id1141185734?mt=8
  • vuyani 10y ago
    Honest question, are you a software developer? Wonder how did you get your app review approved with screenshot demo text such as "appStoreTestApp" But anyways. You might have a good idea, but that app doesnt do it justice. Poorly designed and implemented. Also, one screenshot?!?
    • dzonga 10y ago
      just a senior CS Student, though not a valid excuse the first attempt is not something I'm proud of....but yeah I will work on the UX and give it an update
• deleted 10y ago
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• dumbfounder 10y ago
  Bring back the app ecosystem and this time make a blood oath to protect the apps instead of destroying them all. If apps want to monetize they need to use Twitter's methods of monetization and share the data they generate back to Twitter. Make the rules mutually beneficial, sign that blood oath (an actual public, binding contract), and people will come back and build cool things again.
• CephalopodMD 10y ago
  A sane, open, paid API: I would pay serious money to use their historical data. It's a goldmine for machine learning research, finance, market research, news, politics, etc. I'm sure anybody could find a legitimate use for that much data from a social network. Instead, I have to hack together a way to constantly collect tweets from within the past 2 weeks or use 3rd parties to access their data in any sane way. Sell me your data! I want to buy your data!
  • tosser5392 10y ago
    They already do this through Gnip: https://gnip.com/historical/ https://gnip.com/historical/
• ChrisPodlaski 10y ago
  create a calendar app with native video... you're welcome
• imlina 10y ago
  - Slot in Ads that are 140 characters or less. - Merge Medium and Twitter. Everyone can be a news reporter/editor
• deleted 10y ago
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• redthrowaway 10y ago
  1. Lay off most of the workforce. There is absolutely no justification for them to have as many employees as they do. 2. Start charging people based on how many followers they have. Twitter isn't worth much for the average consumer, but it's hugely valuable for people with massive reach. Charge them for it. People are giving lots of product suggestions, but the product itself isn't the biggest issue. Twitter spends too much and makes too little. Patch the holes in the boat before you try to row faster.
• isanganak 10y ago
  Sell it to enterprises as a collaboration tool, charge based on number of users, kinda like #slack.
  • scrame 10y ago
    Like yammer?
• robbyking 10y ago
  Change the culture in-house. I've only known a couple people who've worked at Twitter, but both hated it and said they felt constant pressure to participate in extracurricular activities like after hours movies and games. You're never going to be innovative if your employees dread coming to work.
• xemdetia 10y ago
  Aggressively use twitter to eat Yahoo Finance. There is a type of consumer that cares about twitter only in context to market/happenings and they have one of the best feeds for it. I don't want it to look like twitter, it should just be a totally separate product that takes advantage of being a primary user of twitter's data without being external. Make it a freemium service where the premium is looking at data more than a week old for $/year.
  • K0SM0S 10y ago
    I think you're onto something with domain-oriented real-time feeds. Finance is one huge cake, perhaps not the only one. Sports, politics come to mind.
• dkrich 10y ago
  I don't think it can be turned around in the sense that it can be made into a profitable business. I think of Twitter the same way I think of highways. It fulfills a huge market demand that the market isn't willing to pay for itself, so has to be subsidized in other ways.
• moomin 10y ago
  Don't know if it's even possible, but I'd start by having a good hard look at the engagement stats. Twitter runs on those stats same way the police departments in The Wire do. And, as a consequence, they've been loath to do anything that dips those stats. Trolls, harassers and other bad actors all show up as _positives_ in Twitter's stats. Most of the UI features you hate probably cause upticks as well. In practice, making a better Twitter might be a worse business plan than continuing to flame out, so this is unlikely to happen.
• jasonkostempski 10y ago
  I think Twitter could only be improved by removing all the garbage they've added since it's inception. It was perfect on day 1 except for scaling issues. If they didn't get greedy and just took the money for access to the real-time stream of data and maybe some advanced analytics, a few people could be making a ton of money instead of a ton of people making no money.
• yoodenvranx 10y ago
  I would sell hats for the user avatar. It worked in TF2 and it also works in CSGO, Pokemon and LOL. The typical Twitter and Instagram user is so full of vanity that tons of people would invest tons of money into getting that one very rare hat on their profile pic.
• sumitgt 10y ago
  Turn the entire business model 180 degrees. This might be very radical, but hear me out. 1) Creating a twitter profile (with tweeting privileges) costs $5. Profiles without tweeting privileges are free. 2) Once you have 10000 followers, you need to pay additional $$ per year. This fees increases exponentially as you gain more followers. Eg. Famous people pay a lot. Unless this $ is paid, the follower count caps up and the follow button disappears from the profile. 3) Stop considering no of active user profiles as a metric entirely. 4) Regular non-famous people can create profiles (that do not have option for others to follow), but can follow famous paying users for free. 5) If a normal non-famous person wants to chime into the conversation, they pay a one-time fee of $5 to become a paid user. Now they can tweet and have followers. If they ever get too famous, they might have to pay again to unlock ability to have 10000+ followers. This way you try to charge the users who actually have the money to spend. Let's admit, people with high follower counts like politicians do gain a lot from twitter, and would probably pay for un-mediated access to the population. This also fixes the problem of junk / troll accounts.
  • edblarney 10y ago
    "1) Creating a twitter profile costs $5." It's over then. 99% of users don't care about Twitter that much to pay a dime. Can't charge old users, and growth is already small anyhow. Only about 1% of these various service entities will pay. And the number of 'truly famous people' on Twitter is very small. Some kind of 'unit payment' scenario would be feasible, but only if it were truly seamless, and no such paradigm exists yet. The 'problem' is not with revenue, it's with growth and engagement.
    • sumitgt 10y ago
      Edited. I meant creating profiles with tweeting privileges will cost money. I think sometimes we need to rethink what growth and engagement means. In my model, Twitter does not rely on advertising. Famous people might still be interested, because you allow them un-fettered access to disperse their message directly to the population without any filters and trolls bothering them.
• ajamesm 10y ago
  Listen to what users are overwhelmingly saying: actually fix harassment/spam/bots. Fix the opaque, unaccountable useless support processes. Twitter is fine for what it is, and all it needs to do is stay consistent, not suck, not burn money, not force opportunities
• arielm 10y ago
  In short - highlight what Twitter is really good at, which is delivering bits of fleeting information and working in commerce. The long version - ads are great, but they cause a misalignment between the service users are happy with and the services necessary to monetize. In addition (not instead), id bring payments into the platform so goods can be discovered and purchased directly through the feed without the user having to leave the platform. This would require quite a few changes throughout, but when they all come together I believe it'll bring the platform much closer to a Facebook-like status, where users spend more time on the platform as opposed to it being a "starting point" to finding interesting links.
• thehardsphere 10y ago
  Focus on the core business and aggressively eliminate any and all costs not directly associated with it. It's ridiculous that they're one of the most popular websites on Earth that makes ~$2bn/year, yet they manage to piss it all away on things that don't noticably improve their service. What Twitter really needs is to be bought up by some Wall Street type who can look at their books and do just that, and not much more.
• phn 10y ago
  Embrace the use of lists and its workflow (think tweetdeck). Side by side lists. I insist on side by side because you don't want one particular list stopping content from other lists to catch your eye. Implement smart/personalized lists by interest and suggest them to users, suggest new people to add to existing lists and/or tweets that may be relevant to that list. A bit like spotify playlists and smart radios, but oriented to tweets. Basically, make it easier for people to find tweets and users they want to follow, segmented by interest. Display relevant non-intrusive ads based on the interests on that list. They should take the hint from reddit regarding what "non-intrusive" means. Adding something like Reddit Gold wouldn't be a bad idea either. Apart from that, a nice interface to follow live events and their tweets would be awesome.
• maxdemarzi 10y ago
  Take Twitter and add a sprinkle of Groupon. Let brands sell direct via a Tweet. I click buy, boom I paid for it. For what exactly? Anything you can buy on Amazon, discount movie tickets, buy one get one free burger at mcdonalds, pre-order video games, etc. SELL STUFF. Add limits, like only 500 of x, or tweet will self destruct in x seconds. Imagine Black Friday/Cyber Monday on Twitter...
• Entangled 10y ago
  Put one ad at the top. Serve one billion a day. You can't just turn a business around from your core competency, which in the case of Twitter is short bursts of emotions. You can't turn it into a Medium or Facebook, you'll fail miserably.
• tyre 10y ago
  A few ideas: # Mass Monetization 1) Integrate payments and one-click purchasing, take a cut. 2) Host specific pages for live-stream events (not within tweets) like sports games. Target the remaining pieces of cable TV: Live sports, ESPN, Awards Shows, Olympics, Talk shows (e.g. Daily show, Colbert Report, etc.) # Large Account Monetization 1) Charge for additional features, e.g. private/protected accounts, verification, having more than XXX followers. 2) Build tools specifically for managing a) large accounts and b) brands/customer service. Charge them for it! # Data Monetization 1) Build API access for alternative clients that is free for a certain number of users (~10k) then charges on a per-install basis. 2) Partner with marketing platforms (e.g. Salesforce) to build marketing funnels from Twitter into CRM or marketing platform.
• benaadams 10y ago
  Show what advertising offers/reach etc prior to asking for payment details.
• Mendenhall 10y ago
  Be politically neutral.
• danm07 10y ago
  Get rid of all the fake users.
• z3t4 10y ago
  they have the chicken. just lay some eggs. i would probably make a micro payment system.
• Ologn 10y ago
  Allow me to publicly follow someone while privately ignoring them. Allow me to easily and permanently get rid of "In case you missed it" thing and read my feed on a strictly timeline basis. I get a lot of junk in my feed that I don't want to see, and thus I don't go to it much. Facebook is not as bad, but they've gotten worse. Two of my friends "like" some newspaper and then I start seeing the latest stories from that newspaper in my feed all the time. I want to go to these feeds once a day and read what those who publish once a day or less who are my friends (Facebook) or friends/colleagues (Twitter) say, in timeline order. Any deviation from that lessens my desire to read it. Some of my friends publish to Facebook several times a day and I usually don't even want to read that, never mind the other junk that both put in my feed.
• lcnmrn 10y ago
  I already did, I built an entire new network from scratch, eg. https://sublevel.net/ https://sublevel.net/
• dejawu 10y ago
  Ooh, I like this question. 1. Trim the fat. Reduce the number of employees dramatically. Obviously not a graceful change but I feel there should not be that as many people working there as there are now. 2. Focus on engagement, not growth. Twitter may not be growing in the way that the market wants, but the users that it does have are incredibly devoted to the platform. If I were to leave Twitter there's nowhere else I could go. If I leave Tinder or Snapchat there are many other platforms that can fill almost the same niche. Twitter needs to capitalize on that. 3. Make brands pay to have a page. In other words, if you're not an individual, you must pay to create an account. Savvy companies have realized that being on Twitter is a key part of a solid social media campaign. To not be on Twitter is to miss out on a huge opportunity to reach a very devoted audience, and you can't reach that audience anywhere else (#2). Some brands are already doing this well (e.g. Wendy's.) If the choice comes to paying for the opportunity to market on Twitter, and not market at all, companies will gladly pay. On the plus side, this could let Twitter reduce the interstitial ads on the timeline. Everyone hates ads, but the way that brands have engaged with individuals on Twitter really humanizes them and makes people form more real relationships with them. It also forces brands to be more accountable and aware. 4. Bring back Vine. A huge part of Twitter's staying power is the unique culture it has created (#2). Staying power is what gives Twitter its greatest value to advertisers (#3). 5. Ramp up engagement on Periscope. Periscope being a part of Twitter makes a lot of sense because Twitter is all about stuff happening live. It's a great platform but I think it also needs a desktop client (with OBS support, the way Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content creation to go up. 6. Re-open APIs. Twitter has sown a bad seed with the dev community by making its API very restricted. Tweets make up a very interesting dataset on which other people could build very unique things on top of. Twitter should encourage this, not stifle it. "Look what cool things we can do with Twitter" will only serve to strengthen the image of Twitter as a unique, irreplaceable platform. --- These are the main issues I see as an everyday user of Twitter. Things like live sports/TV are good ways to grow but these are all secondary to Twitter strengthening its core platform for longevity and meaningful sustainability.
  • chambo622 10y ago
    > [Periscope is] a great platform but I think it also needs a desktop client (with OBS support, the way Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content creation to go up. You can broadcast from OBS with Periscope Producer - https://help.periscope.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/2600293-what-is-periscope-producer https://help.periscope.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/260029...
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• rdl 10y ago
  1) Focus on capturing value from "Twitter as realtime newsfeed" -- creating products for non-Twitter-posting-users to see what's going on at a longer timescale. This could be first party, or through partnerships with publishers. 2) All those Twitter developer/publisher services which Twitter recently sold were IMO the real value at Twitter, Inc. Unfortunately, Twitter has burned developers too many times to be trusted. I would have made them independent rather than selling, though. 3) Rather than randomly banning users, focus on better filtering tools, and tools to coalesce spam/multiple replies/etc. If you make a popular tweet, or are the target of an attack, there should be a single "click more" link, rather than hundreds of separate notifications.
• ronreiter 10y ago
  Make Twitter both more social and more publisher oriented. 1) Twitter's ability to have a good experience around discussions around a group of friends like Facebook is 2) Twitter can be a huge publishing platform
• Oxitendwe 10y ago
  Well, for one I would stop banning and restricting people for expressing their opinions. Your phone company wouldn't disconnect your service for leaving nasty messages on someone's mailbox, so Twitter shouldn't ban people for writing nasty messages to people. It's not their responsibility and I think society suffers from their judgement of what is allowed and what isn't - how can you promote understanding and bring people closer together when one side of the argument is being silenced and marginalized? People who break laws should be dealt with by the legal system. People that do not shouldn't have to worry about their ability to communicate with people being curtailed. If you think this sort of thing doesn't happen, read this: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-here-folks http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-her... , or http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157201503761/freedom-of-speech-is-now-largely-an-illusion http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157201503761/freedom-of-speech-... . He's had problems with this for months, because of his political blogging, and this is just one example. If it can happen to the guy who made Dilbert, it can happen to anyone.
• tyingq 10y ago
  Maybe too late for these specific examples, but figure out how to use their existing tech to take over new markets as they pop up. They currently have all their eggs in one, low margin product. They should have been able to release, for example, competitive offerings against Disqus, Signal, and Slack.
  • arbirk 10y ago
    Excactly. Or they could just buy Disqus and in an instant be the webs primary commenting platform
• GiorgioG 10y ago
  1. Fire all the CXO level people. All of them. 2. Fire all the rent-seekers. 3. The 5 people that are left, keep the lights on. 4. Profit!
• LordHumungous 10y ago
  Allow users to pay to "boost" tweets and expand their exposure. I.e. you can pay $5 in boost credits to increase the reach of the tweet promoting your website or whatever. (Or maybe much more if you are a corporate account- not sure how the pricing model should work). The boosts should be invisible to other users. Basically, monetize the one thing that every wants to do on twitter, which is go viral.
  • chambo622 10y ago
    This already exists - promoted tweets
    • LordHumungous 10y ago
      Yeah but make it transparent to users
• ilamont 10y ago
  1. Give people control over things that matter to them, whether it be length of tweets, ability to enable/disable certain features, or see Twitter in preferred modes (pure reverse chron, ad-free, image-free, no politics, only sports, etc.). 2. Charge fees for this stuff 3. Make it easy to buy anything via Twitter 4. Get rid of the bots and AI-obvious trolling/threats/TOS violations. I find it astounding that despite years of promises to do something the situation seems to be getting worse. 5. Get a new fully-focused leader who can execute on these and other issues without distraction of a second company, and can also bring down headcount. This probably requires a reorg and a new board.
• ProfessorLayton 10y ago
  1. Remove senior management. They do not know what they're doing. 2. Experiment and find the right point between monetizing users and those that get the most value out of Twitter. Right now users' eyeballs are being bled dry, and getting their experience ruined with tons of ads, and timeline shuffling. It feels like those with tons of followers are getting a free ride at the expense of everyone else. 3. Introduce meaningful timeline features such as: 3a. Ability to follow #hashtags/topics instead of just people and companies. Curated "Moments" are a weak substitute. 3b. Follow geographical areas of interest (e.g. Top Tweets in Oakland, SOMA etc.) 3c. Ability to explore Twitter geographically. Again, I feel this is a huge and untapped. Heard something crazy happen over your neighborhood? Pull up an map and explore what people are saying around there. 4. Actually do something about trolls (Perhaps a reputation system?) 5. Clamp down on bots. Why is it even possible to follow 300k or a few million people? 6. Slim down the workforce, by a lot, unfortunately. I don't think a sustainable Twitter can ever be a large as it is today. 7. Bigger focus on live TV + discussion 8. Fix search: Its awful and nearly useless unless you put in a ton of effort in "advanced search". Top results are often times just the same retweets and news articles over and over again. I could keep going...
  • rcraft 10y ago
    Some thoughts on item #3: Offering the ability to follow hashtags in their current form would simply lead to more hashtag spam. However I agree with your basic premise that following topics and geographical Tweets would be very useful. One of the main reasons I built GroupTweet. Allow people to form and manage "group" topical or location based accounts with any number of contributors while giving some admin controls like limiting approval to all or only select participants, moderation, etc. Would love any feedback and suggestions on how we could improve to make your suggestions more of a reality.
• naravara 10y ago
  There are several options. I guess Twitter could go with one or all of them. As a backend service it would be nice if they focused on making your Twitter account into a sort of “internet driver’s license” to identify you anywhere and everywhere online through a sort of trust chain. I never want to have to sign up for an account again unless it pertains to my finances. I so desperately wish I could manage all my various subscriptions and accounts for random services from a central place that is highly secure and easy to access. I should be able to sign-on seamlessly, unsubscribe effortlessly, and never have to remember a username or password. This would also allow a central place for me to set privacy preferences so we can dictate exactly what the downstream services should and shouldn’t be able to see. If Twitter can just let me two-factor authorize with a token+pin and have this let me into just about any account online (aside from maybe my main email and financial accounts in the interests of not having all the eggs in one basket) that’s a service people would indispensible. (So much so that maybe ICANN should just work on something like it as a public utility?) On the more user-facing end, Twitter’s niche has always been people who are keen on promoting themselves and making announcements (new paper published, new product announced, press releases, etc.), so maybe they should just fill into what Facebook was before it became a NewsFeed. They could give you an About Me page and a status-bar. This basically is what Twitter is now, but they lack the focus to design it around that stuff as a central purpose for the service. They focus more on the “Status Bar” than the “About Me,” this would really just a difference in design language and emphasis. Make it into an RSS feed for people. Or, as a third option. . . they could just make Twitter into an RSS reader. Maybe even add Wordpress/Medium style pages for long-form writing and feed that all through the same “feed” paradigm.
  • riffic 10y ago
    So much so that maybe ICANN should just work on something like it as a public utility? Look at OStatus for a model for this: https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus Note that there hasn't been a lot of traction here, although there are a few interesting implementations with active userbases.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• smacktoward 10y ago
  Take a page from mobile gaming and let people buy extra characters. The act of whittling down a tweet to fit inside the (increasingly ridiculous) 140-character limit is the exact kind of tedious, repetitive thing a game designer would instantly recognize as a "grind": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming) And free-to-play mobile games have demonstrated that lots of people, when presented with a grind, are very willing to pay real money to skip past it. So: give Twitter users the option to buy extra characters, usable whenever they're needed, at some price point low enough to be attractive as an impulse buy. A penny per character, say, or 40 characters for a quarter, or 120 for 99 cents. The marginal cost to Twitter of shipping 141 characters over the wire instead of 140 is essentially nothing, so whatever you charge would be almost 100% pure profit. A user with a bag of such extra characters in hand would now have the ability, if they wanted to, to skip editing down every tweet and just post on the fly. Which could be a real time-saver, if you're one of the media-type power users who spend all day on Twitter! And how much it costs you depends entirely on how often you want the luxury of not having to edit yourself. If you only need it occasionally, it's cheap; if you're compulsively logorrheic, well... consider it a tax on the burden you're placing on your followers' attention. But wouldn't it ruin Twitter, you ask, if people weren't forced to be terse? I don't see how. When people use the extra space wisely, it makes their life easier, costs you nothing and generates revenue that can subsidize freeloaders like you. When people abuse the extra space, you can always unfollow them -- and when the abusers notice their follower counts crashing, they'll be encouraged to rein themselves in. Nobody logs on to Twitter in the morning with the objective of losing followers. The system would correct itself. So: Twitter makes money, power users enjoy using it more, regular users get their freight paid for by the whales, everyone has access to longer-form expression with a mechanism already in place to still encourage brevity. It's a win all around.
• usrusr 10y ago
  Cut back all monetization projects that don't produce a ROI already, hire out the technical talent as a consultancy specializing on Twitter-scale scalability problems and keep the pipes running as the mother of all reference projects. It would be like hiring Noah to design your yacht.
• overcast 10y ago
  1. Looking at their financials, they could become profitable by just removing half of their staff. I would start there before anything else. 2. Fix the mess of UI. I still don't understand how to engage in conversations to this day. Convoluted modal boxes, overlaying other screens, that then expand out to more replies, and so on and so forth. It's WAY too confusing.
• redler 10y ago
  Is Twitter involved at all in the annotation web standard [1]? There was a post and some discussion on HN a few days ago about it [2]. Seems like Twitter would be a natural fit to become a major player or popularizer of annotations and annotation infrastructure. Notwithstanding the decentralized nature of the standard, it would probably evolve to have a few major structural providers. If it takes off, one could imagine a future with billions of tweets and tweet threads anchored to source material of every kind -- adding optional value to the material, and driving traffic and value to and through Twitter. [1] https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6156 https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6156 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525
• pratyushag2 10y ago
  Twitter should own the utility of being a messaging forum for the public. This means a communication layer that can be easily used by many different services for different purposes. From there on, it should open up this message level integration as easily embrddable feature for websites and to app developers. Monetization potential will increase with engagement and engagement to a forum using twitter should be made as easy as text messages. Cut costs and cut it by a lot!
• Uhhrrr 10y ago
  Pseudo-federate it into separate sites with differing levels of moderation: minors, special snowflakes, normal people, and anything-goes free speech fans. Also, stop messing with my timeline.
• OliverJones 10y ago
  Imposing a modest signal cost should improve the signal - to - noise ratio substantially. Charge for reach. Ask accounts with more than 50K followers to either pay for all followers to receive tweets, or limit distribution to 50K followers, randomly chosen. It's the accounts with many followers that get the most benefit from the platform. And, a twitter crack could, in present circumstances, cause global political instability. The accounts with > 50K followers, if compromised, are the accounts that could cause this sort of problem. Why shouldn't the users of those accounts shoulder at least some of the cost of securing the service and making it fast? Another possibiity: the Bloomberg Terminal biz model. Charge consumers of twitter for timeliness, and delay messages to unpaid consumers and general feeds. Allow originators of messages to purchase timeliness for their own messages, even to unpaid consumers.
  • yesiamyourdad 10y ago
    I was hoping someone would say this! I've been saying this for years, and I mean since 2007 or 2008, though I had figured just price levels. If you have 100K followers, that's probably worth some money to you. If you have 1M followers, that's worth even more. I was saying in the 2008 elections that CNN should have an entire rack in the data center sponsored by them, they were pushing their Twitter handles so hard. One thing would be the fake followers, where you could DOS someone by creating bot accounts to follow people and use up their slots. I like the idea of randomly chosen followers, that's a twist I didn't think of; it also mitigates the issue of the fake followers. You could also do the opposite, charge to follow more than some number of accounts.
    • returnbuyer 10y ago
      That's what Facebook is doing. Lowering organic reach. It pisses tons of people off. Basically you hand crafted this audience under the guise that they're yours forever. You took time to post interesting content, you engaged with your audience. You basically made the platform valuable in the first place by creating value. Now you're asked to pay to reach them? No way.
• xtweeeteer 10y ago
  Lot of great ideas. The problem I see is execution (I'm an ex-employee). Primitive versions of most of the ideas suggested in these comments are tried and given up because they didnt really show huge difference in growth or other engagement numbers - This is partly because one of the below: 1) primitive implementation/design is very bad compared to the original idea. 2) There is huge reward in Twitter for starting new projects. But no one follows through to make sure project is well maintained/supported. 3) Cross team coordination is not good
  • firebones 10y ago
    Your comment leads to what may be the core advice I have: get better metrics. Twitter has always suffered from being in the wake of metrics that their competitors excel at. That's led to an inability to manage investor expectations and focus on features and project prioritization that doesn't create long-term value.
• stevefeinstein 10y ago
  I would work with the US post office, and any other countries postal service to turn the service into a public utility run by the people for the people under the same idea that the post office delivered physical messages, it would be in the public interest to deliver electronic messages as well. Stop trying to be profitable, not all useful things need to make money. Some things are worth funding because they are of public benefit.
• JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  I'd tear it apart until all that's left is a profitable, maintainable core. Like Craigslist. Twitter's payroll (to say nothing of its stock-based compensation expense) is bloated. Slashing staff isn't a popular play. This is a textbook private equity deal. Twitter's habit of ringing in the year with $500MM losses could be single-handedly cut with a 2/3rd staffing reduction (which costs lots in payroll and $800MM in stock-based compensation expense). How much of Twitter's $2bn in revenue would evaporate post-cuts. Over half? Still leaves $750MM of pre-tax income before R&D ($800MM in the FYE 2015). Cut that R&D budget in half, say you lose a further 25% of revenues, and you still have $160MM before taxes yielding $100MM of net income. That's worth $1bn to $2.5bn. If you can grow that to $500MM over 4 or 5 years, you could sell it for ~20x. Discount back at 10% or 20% and you have an optimistic valuation of $4 to $7bn. Twitter's trading at just under $12bn. I suppose I'd bid $3.50 per share and be willing to entertain someone talking just under $10 a share.
  • jy1 10y ago
    That's not a turn around scenario. It would be better to try to find a buyer at the current price.
    • keypusher 10y ago
      Finding a new buyer does nothing to turn the business into a profitable enterprise. They need to cut costs.
    • JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      > It would be better to try to find a buyer at the current price It would be even better to find a buyer at ten times the current price! Unfortunately, reality isn't so pliant. Twitter had, as of the end of 2016, $3.8bn of cash and short-term investments on their balance sheet [1]. They also have $500MM of current liabilities and $1.6bn of long-term debt. This leaves $1.7bn of "free" cash. Excluding financing activities, Twitter's operations and investments have lost about $450MM a year for the past three years ($1.0bn in 2014, $520MM in 2015 and a net gain of $165MM in 2016). So we're talking a few years until Twitter's face meets dirt. It's a better bet to wait than lock yourself into an unsustainable valuation. [1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=UOO1WOnFFYHjsgGUm4HoAw https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=UO...
• ChicagoDave 10y ago
  I'd make accounts 3-tier: 1. anonymous, free, limited use (300 tweets per month) 2. consumer, verified identity, paid, $10/month (1500 tweets per month) 3. commercial, verified identities, paid, $25/month per user (3000 tweets/month) 4. commercial, verified identities, paid, $100/month per user (unlimited tweets)
• npezolano 10y ago
  Sell to Bloomberg: 1) Twitter is already used for financial news and real time financial trading of events. 2) Bloomberg has a huge financial data and news business. 3)Bloomberg would then be the sole provider of twitter data and the revenue from that alone could keep the product afloat.
• rootedbox 10y ago
  asking for a friend
• pjc50 10y ago
  Have this conversation on Twitter. Listen to the users! https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170 https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170 USERS: we love twitter but it has problems TWITTER: great we'll fix them USERS: do you want to know what they are TWITTER: absolutely not (18k likes, 14k RTs) USERS: could you at least look at addressing the pervasive harassment of women TWITTER [twirling like Maria von Trapp]: M O M E N T S --- USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product TWITTER: likes are now florps USERS: what TWITTER: timeline goes sideways
• tekromancr 10y ago
  Paid API Access. Provide a way for businesses to build tools on top of Twitter, while also removing the fears that Twitter will kill your business if they decide to build a competing feature.
• nevi-me 10y ago
  Make advertising more accessible/cheaper. I have a Facebook page where I can spend ZAR210 a day and get value. Twitter costs way more for less perceived value. Opening up advertising to more small projects like ours brings in more revenue I think.
  • bbulkow 10y ago
    This. I have to hire another company, in order to monetize twitter, because twitter doesn't give me the tools itself. The other companies do a good job.
• hkmurakami 10y ago
  I'd first take it private with PE money (a la Dell), cut workforce/costs, then go from there. Fresh start without Wall Street pressure.
• dzink 10y ago
  As a user I struggle to stay engaged with twitter - the moment I try to read, I am flooded with irrelevant content, yet the platform is the best place for niche interest information and fast niche information. The Signal-to-Noise ratio is too low. Here is how I would fix engagement and revenue: 1. Consider twitter a user's portfolio of interest channels and let us tab between our chosen channels immediately (multi-select box at the top where I can pick VCs, medicine, Design, Oscars, whatever - and it blends my feed for me) 2. Encourage floods of content and monetise curators filtering for quality - I can pay for subscription a feed of world news from WSJ, NYT, and other paid sources, and my subscription fee is distributed to them based on consumption. The best content wins and the quality editorials get rewarded for earning loyalty, not writing clickbait. 3. Enable paid advertising-free feeds. 4. Enable premium, niche feed advertising that is hyper relevant (If I have a spine medicine feed, an ad from Stryder would be very appropriate, but one from herbal remedies providers would be irrelevant). Building the curation mechanisms would draw top engineering talent in machine learning too. 5. Allow co-watching experiences during media events. 6. Allow me to filter out topics I want to avoid (and by doing that, you get more engagement and better ad targeting capabilities) 7. Open your developer ecosystem again and this time pay attention to what works and provide guarantees that you won't kill developer efforts. Those developers build bots for Facebook now and help their user engagement instead of yours. The gist of it is: make your revenue model reward and improve quality. The moment you let advertisers lead you by the nose and dictate for obstructive anti-user product decisions, you will permanently lose your market to Facebook and others. I lead a hyper-niche collaboration network so happy to do a longer brainstorming session with Twitter people.
• bbulkow 10y ago
  Twitter does need to continue engineering. It needs to do exactly one thing: re-order the timeline so that coming to Twitter becomes fun and engaging again. Right now, when I open Twitter ( mobile or desktop ), I have a huge flurry of random things I don't really want to read, or don't want to read now. Re-ordering the timeline promises the solution - but it doesn't work yet. I would think you need "auto-group", which FB, Google, and others have tried and failed at. But in any case - twitter is the place I feel like I have to go, but don't want to go, and I think I'm not the only one.
• EdSharkey 10y ago
  Open up a cloud services arm that uses the Twitter infrastructure to host long-running business processes with broadcast-ability. Offer twitter feed integrations, human workflow steps, workbaskets/inboxes, and external partner API calls. Low latency seems to be Twitter's thing, cash in on that and make some speedy low latency workflow thing.
• nodesocket 10y ago
  If I had the nuclear option I'd create a new account type, Twitter Business. Twitter Business has special features directly linked with their advertising core. A twitter Business handle costs $9.99 a month and includes "premium" business features such as engagement analytics, brand tracking, etc.
• jecjec 10y ago
  stop banning the best accounts.
• charlesbarbier 10y ago
  Go upper market.
• charlesbarbier 10y ago
  Go upper market.
• david-cako 10y ago
  Making the UX not shit is a great start. Twitter is really an unpleasant site to use for following discussions of any sort. When I click a thread-view for a post, I want to see a clear tree-view of all of the posts and replies like any other sane website, not the current flat-layout bullshit wherein you have no clue what the chronology of anything is, or who is responding to what. There are a lot of good ideas in this thread for how twitter can refocus and monetize itself, but I think before all that you need to make it a site that more people enjoy using beyond its original use case of "waiting at the airport -- hmu".
  • paulgb 10y ago
    Shameless plug: I wrote a Chrome extension to provide a tree view: https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse/ https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse/ (It's more a visualization style than a reddit-like threaded conversation interface, but it might accomplish what you are referring to)
    • erikig 10y ago
      Thanks for sharing - this is pretty good. I'd recommend including the actual text next to or below the user's avatar instead of in a separate view.
  • marssaxman 10y ago
    I've never been a twitter user myself, but every now and then I end up following a link to a Twitter discussion, only to bounce right off again because I can't figure out what's supposed to be happening. Who is saying what to whom, in what order, in response to what? I can't tell. I imagine that there must be some context-literacy I don't have, which regular Twitter users somehow pick up on; or, possibly, Twitter only makes sense if you're following the stream of posts in real time.
    • kbart 10y ago
      Exactly the same for me. Every time I wanted to use Twitter I ended up confused by all that mess and closed it. Is it so hard to add tools (filters, permissions etc.) for more advanced users to create the experience they want? Twitter makes a wonderful media to follow interesting persons and getting breaking news, but probably 99.9% of its content for me is spam or uninteresting, annoying mess that I have no convenient way to avoid.
• blazespin 10y ago
  Duplicate facebook (private feeds) and sell adds like facebook. Facebook is just going to keep growing their pages and take over twitter anyways, so they don't have a choice.
• enknamel 10y ago
  I think Twitter could beat Reddit as the front page of the internet. They could easily expand their trending information and turn it into automated events and stories. It looks like they do this a little bit. But if they did it a lot more it would suddenly become way more interesting. Group it by hashtags or categories and you can suddenly see stories that really interest you. That's the draw of Reddit (and even Hacker News). You immediately see what's really popular on the internet right now.
• petegrif 10y ago
  Introduce channels to reduce noise and focus content.
• RyanZAG 10y ago
  Add a down vote button so people can down vote the trolls. You'd see an enormous uptake in regular people using the service if every reply wasn't some random insult with a picture attachment of something disgusting. Twitter is easily the most negative place on the internet, and that's including madness like the Something Awful forums or 4chan. A downvote option would hopefully push the constant arguments out of sight too.
  • ruipgil 10y ago
    You can't fight negativity with negativity. Let the good and positive boil to the top. Anyway, that would certainly not save twitter. They seem to be lacking better management and focus on their core product.
    • acdha 10y ago
      > You can't fight negativity with negativity. Let the good and positive boil to the top. How does that work? Someone organizes a hate mob and you're getting tons of horrible messages. How do you “let the good and positive boil to the top”? That's a huge problem for Twitter because every time someone, usually a woman, is harassed off of the service, other people notice and adjust their actions accordingly whether that is switching to a system, reducing what they post, making their account private, etc. — all of which cuts into the engagement they need to keep the service growing.
• yumaikas 10y ago
  Offer Twitter Gold: A gilded account can post tweets that are 288 (144*2) characters long. Add other nice, but slightly costly features as they make sense. Occasionally do "announce" tweets that explain "well-known" twitter features to help people be able to set it up better. Twitter could learn from Slack or Discord in this regard. Others have suggested cleaning up the engineering org, that seems like a good organizational idea, but is going to be tricky to pull off. Implement a feature or set of features to discourage bandwagon-hating. Twitter has been instrumental in destroying a non-trivial amount of careers, sometimes over things that were mere bad taste. Perhaps a limit on the number of responses a tweet can have, or rate limiting on how fast a negative tweet loads, or something. I'm not sure, but having them put some serious UX research into this problem would be a great reputation boost, if we know they are doing it.
• jackmott 10y ago
  ban nazis.
• elorant 10y ago
  Commit seppuku. Seriously, Twitter can't be saved. They fucked up when they alienated every developer out there by making their API too damn strict. There's no way back from this.
• flewthecoop47 10y ago
  Quit.
• m52go 10y ago
  Develop TweetDeck for all platforms & make it a paid product.
• __jal 10y ago
  1. Rebuild Twitter as an open, federated, decentralize service. 2. Write RFCs. 3. Shut down the massively dysfunctional company that should have been a protocol from the beginning so everyone involved can go get jobs doing something useful.
  • riffic 10y ago
    Twitter at the very least should adopt a standard and work with standardization bodies to improve the ability to federate and "self-host" your own Twitter on your own infrastructure.
  • mxuribe 10y ago
    100% agreed!
• nav 10y ago
  have the chan zuckerberg initiative buy it and turn it into a non-profit utility for instant short form information
• davidiach 10y ago
  I would have a product recommendation. Twitter missed the change to be a player in the chat space, but it could still offer a chat experience that other services can't. Imagine Twitter would start offering users the possibility to create group chats where only the invited users can write in but that others could follow in real time. So lets say there is an Apple keynote and @BenedictEvans, @asymco and @gruber start a group chat where they comment the event. I get a notification that this group chat started and I can go and follow it (the same way I could follow a live video). I can't comment myself, but I can follow their conversation (and maybe hit the like button from time to time). Because it's a chat, the participants will write much more than they would if they would be only limited to tweeting. It's crazy that in 2017 we can see celebrities interacting with each other via video, tweets,snaps, Facebook comments and so on, but there is no option to follow a real time chat between them.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 10y ago
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• whalabi 10y ago
  Cut costs and lose the millions of bots! It's disheartening to be followed and messaged by bots all the time. You feel like you're in a echo chamber for crazy people.
• orasis 10y ago
  Fix the bot problem. Beyond headline testing, I'll never advertise on Twitter again due to bot clicks.
• returnbuyer 10y ago
  They're not weakening twitter by weakening western society. If anything, weakening the society with divisive gender war and identify politics empowers twitter. The western economy suffers and more people become reclusive and stay inside all day on the internet. It's basic culture warfare and it's been happening for decades. Listen to some Yuri Besmenov [1] if you don't know what I'm talking about. Basically my point is they don't care, because any division in their enemies is a good thing for them. While they retain immense strength and nationalism. I'll give you an example of poisoning the well. So many dual-citizen self admitted Zionists in America and Europe are pro-refugee. They adamantly fight for more refugees in these host countries. However their home country, Israel. Is entirely anti-refugee to a shocking degree. It's all part of the same pie. Marxism, communism, feminism, egalitarianism. Destruction of western civilization. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4
  • burkaman 10y ago
    Can you point me to some reading that will help me understand why egalitarianism is destructive to civilization?
    • returnbuyer 10y ago
      http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitari... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tnPGJnOhDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tnPGJnOhDY
  • dang 10y ago
    Please don't use this site for ideological battle. It's not what it's for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13758157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13758157 and marked it off-topic.
• austinjp 10y ago
  Charge 1¢ per tweet. The details are friable, eg maybe don't charge for private DMs, maybe only charge per first comment per user per thread. But charge for use.
• killersmalls 10y ago
  Nice try, Twitter
• michaelalexis 10y ago
  If there was a "boost" button for every tweet like on FB page posts, then we would use it all the time.
• icantdrive55 10y ago
  1. Double the character limit. 2. Reduce costs. Had no idea they are burning through 2 billion/yr. 3. They have the news at their beconing; why don't they have well designed News Pages? A lot of people, like myself just want the news. They should have multiple news pages. And they need to not look like Twitter's API. I think Twitter needs to read, Don't make me Think. I have no desire to figure out whom to follow on Twitter. I have no desire to narcisstically yack, but certain well informed people could be paid journalists for Twitter? If Twitter had a decent, trustworthy news feeds, articles; I would put up with tasteful ads. I do want Twitter to succeed.
• thadjo 10y ago
  acquire nuzzel
• icantdrive55 10y ago
  1. Double the character limit. 2. Reduce costs. Had no idea they are burning through 2 billion/yr. 3. They have the news at their beconing; why don't they have well designed News Pages? A lot of people, like myself just want the news. They should have multiple news pages. And they need to not look like Twitter's API. I think Twitter needs to read, Don't make me Think. I have no desire to figure out whom to follow on Twitter. I have no desire to narcisstically yack, but certain well informed people could be paid journalists for Twitter? If Twitter had a decent, trustworthy news feeds, articles; I would put up with tasteful ads. I do want Twitter to succeed.
• jonathansizz 10y ago
  1. Allow limited following of accounts. Right now, when you follow someone, it's either all (default) or nothing (if you mute/unfollow). But in many cases, I'm only interested in a subset of someone's tweets, on certain topics. For example, I'd follow many more scientists if I could just see their tweets on science, but not see their political or personal or sports-related tweets, which add too much noise to my feed. This would also be good for tweeters, as they could freely tweet about anything they like without risk of alienating followers. Maybe Twitter could use the hashtag system to accomplish this? 2. Make replies work better. Relax the character limit for replies to several hundred characters, make replies threaded, make low-quality replies go away, and high-quality replies float to the top (just like HN). Remove the line noise by having @ and # symbols not show up in the feed. Hashtags and mentions also shouldn't use up any characters. If all this happens, it will become reasonable to have actual conversations on Twitter. 3. Stop showing me duplicate tweets. Once I've seen a tweet, I shouldn't see it again if it's reposted (something many media outlets tend to do frequently). Actions like this will make Twitter a better experience for regular users, and should help to kickstart growth. 4. Charge whales (those with the most followers, who disproportionately benefit from using Twitter) actual monthly fees.
• yanilkr 10y ago
  Current advertising model of Twitter is not suited for the product. They tried to emulate google and facebook model of ad revenue by programmatically showing the user what might be useful to them and it did not work so well. People developed blind spots for such content. Twitter should really look into micro payments to reward users who increase engagement. Some of our friends are good at recommending a movie or a restaurant and their opinions matter at a micro level similar to celebrity endorsements matter at a macro level. They would do more of it if they get paid like celebrities do but at a proportional rate. Take the burden out of complicated algorithms to match ad content to users and instead let users do it in between their conversations and pay for the content of their tweets. Make the normal user to be their spokesperson for the product/idea. Twitter is a very good medium for this. This is native advertising at a whole new level. Financially rewarding users who are influential in their small circle might be difficult to implement. Take the ad money from businesses, local and global and share it with users who say nice and constructive things about their campaign to their followers. It could be as simple as rewarding a user for retweeting a well designed ad. Many users will get creative and make endorsements from their daily lives if it meant their followers liking it. Its like design crowd mixed with advertising. Brands would pay for this model because its driven by results. Understanding user tweets and matching them to a business campaign and fairly allocating the reward to top/all contributors might be a much harder computer science problem but I think this model of advertising has a potential to work well for twitter. There is so much for user to tweet about. Local restaurants, to movies to their brand loyal purchases etc in exchange their tweets get financial reward based on how many people read them and engage with them.
• DigitalSea 10y ago
  1. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow employees to remotely work if they want. 2. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to go. Realise this wouldn't be popular, but Twitter is spending way too much cash. 3. Reduce the size of the ridiculous buffet they have for lunches, make it a fixed menu with 3 or 4 meals to prevent food waste. Get rid of the free alcohol and soft drink they seem to offer. 4. Actually, embrace developers, make the API limits more generous and allow developers to build cool things like the early days of Twitter. 5. Raise the character limit (even make this a premium feature, double it to 280 characters). 6. Get rid of Jack as CEO, it's not working. Twitter is losing money, they're not innovating and they keep focusing on things like video which most don't care for. 7. Focus on the core product and get rid of the Google-like dream products. The way I see it, Twitter isn't a complicated idea. It's somewhat predictable size text strings being shown in a feed. Twitter is the kind of app you clone when you're learning a framework like Ruby on Rails, it's not a complicated idea from a technical standpoint. There is no reason to be spending two-billion per year.
  • Apocryphon 10y ago
    In a different world, Twitter would be headquartered in Brisbane: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2011/01/twitter-loking-at-brisbane-as-possible.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2011/01/twitter... https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/twitter-considers-moving-its-headquarters-to-brisbane-ca/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/twitter-considers-moving-i...
    • throewai 10y ago
      Got excited and thought it might be Brisbane, AU.
  • Twirrim 10y ago
    > Twitter is the kind of app you clone when you're learning a framework like Ruby on Rails, it's not a complicated idea from a technical standpoint. That's quite a gross simplification. You could say the same about S3. It's no more complicated than a server with RAID hard disks in it. Even the simple stuff becomes really complicated at scale.
• throewai 10y ago
  Sell their fancy ML team ('Twitter Cortex') before all the heavy hitters leave (some have left already to Google Brain). They are working on video super-resolution, a pipe dream product.
• warcher 10y ago
  There are a few camps of people using twitter, which want different things and are mostly being badly served. 1) Trolls love twitter. The legion of racist eggs sowing destruction for no other reason than their own nihilistic enjoyment is an existential threat to the business and must be culled. The company and the trolls cannot live together in peace. One or the other will die. It feels like twitter hasn't figured out it's them or you. There can be no 1st amendment compromise here. These guys are ruining you for fun. They gotta go. 2) Public figures. It's a good platform for them. Cull the trolls and they'll stay, bringing an audience of 3) Regular people, who need a nice feedback loop of people interacting with their tiny little voices. Twitter is pretty shitty at this right now-- if you don't have an audience, you're shouting into the void and are eventually going to figure out you're wasting your time and quit. This is shitty for engagement and it's sinking twitter. Facebook figured this out already. Just copy them. 4) The last group is "brands" and for-profit companies who are your actual customers, but who would like to free ride on the platform, soaking up the attention of the regular people for free. If they want access, they gotta pay. No free riding for non-people. Facebook also figured this one out. If you're not a human, and not a public figure, and you want the attention of humans, pay up. Twitter is also slowly figuring this out. There's a virtuous cycle of engagement here, and Twitter is slowly getting it straight, but they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and that's going to hurt their monthly usage numbers. The management of that haircut is probably over my pay grade, but it seems like they're slowly getting it together with the algorithmic timeline. Had to be done. Livelock is a real thing for people who don't tweet professionally.
  • sverige 10y ago
    >1) Trolls love twitter. ... They gotta go. I've been hearing this since trolling was invented on Usenet. No one is going to rid the Internet of trolls unless all of the big players enforce RealName™ and we all know how well that ended. "Culling the trolls" means different things to different people, and probably almost every one of us has at some time in our internet lives posted something that another group would consider trolling. > they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and that's going to hurt their monthly usage numbers. From the handful of times I've clicked on a link to a tweet and then wandered around, I would bet that the trolls, spammers, and free riders make up something like 98% of their users, so I'm not sure this would really solve anything, since presumably their gross revenue is driven by the numbers of users.
• baron816 10y ago
  I mentioned this in another thread recently: let users have about 10K followers for free, and then charge them for followers after that. A lot of celebrities straight up profit from sending out a tweet endorsing a brand. Twitter should get a cut of that and I think this would be a fair and easy way to do so. People pay for their influence.
• powera 10y ago
  Here's my take from a few months ago: https://medium.com/@8a42aa2c33c2/870d096a64e5 https://medium.com/@8a42aa2c33c2/870d096a64e5 Very roughly: 1) Stop abuse. 2) Find something new for engineers to work on. 3) Sell to a media company. 4) Don't waste time on BS like streaming NFL games.
• Havoc 10y ago
  I wouldn't. This is a fireball. It's shining bright no doubt, but it's a fireball all right.
• piedpiper_ 10y ago
  I wouldn't, I'd build something better (disclaimer, working on it).
• arcticbull 10y ago
  1. Lay off half the employees. 2. Improve their ad product. That's it really. It doesn't do anything now that it didn't in 2014, and the workforce is significantly larger. It'd be a decent, profitable company. Or, make it a non-profit. It's in the public interest.
  • riffic 10y ago
    make it a non-profit. It's in the public interest. No, a walled garden webapp is not a public utility.
    • arcticbull 10y ago
      Not because it's a walled-garden web-app, because of what's in it. Public utilities aren't determined by their structure.
• Yhippa 10y ago
  Charge users a cent per tweet or some other amount. I hate doing this but maybe they need to consider a "freemium" model where you get basic tweets at a certain rate limit for free but to do things like post long videos or images directly in the tweet you can pay to do that. Consider charging for different types of searches a user can do. Offer researchers and people using Tweets as a dataset for sentiment or other analysis a fee for real-time and direct access to data.
• joeld42 10y ago
  Admit that it's a (better) chatroom and tailor it to that use case. It's not a new thing. Go super-aggressively after abuse, bots, etc. even if it hurts your bottom line short term, it will help it long term. Don't make statements about addressing abuse, just do it. It will be noticed. Stop focusing on growth, focus on quality of users. Make a tier of "verified" accounts that anyone can get -- subscription is fine. They verify their real contact info with you, they get a verified badge. Make eggs not able to dm or mention for two weeks. Let me right-click to save animated gifs. Allow "extended" tweets that start with 140 characters but you can click through to more, for when it's time for some game theory. Shadowban the potus.
• MrQuincle 10y ago
  Timing. Get the info you want from the sources you like at the moment you desire.
• ctdonath 10y ago
  Ability to limit distribution. I'm dropping use of Twitter because I don't want crossover between compartments in life; political rants shouldn't go to business contacts, dark humor shouldn't go to religious contacts, etc.
• arnonejoe 10y ago
  free for consumer accounts. paid model for business accounts.
• peterhunt 10y ago
  I believe Twitter's key problem is that they do not take enough product, monetization, and growth risks, either because they are too afraid to, or their org can't execute quickly enough. 1. Pay as much cash as you need to (even if it means laying off a few people) and hire one or two of FB's monetization and growth leaders, preferably away from a team like Instagram. Give them the freedom and resources to grow the team they want. 2. Based on what Twitter has done with the product over the past few years (i.e. not a lot), the product management team is too risk-averse. I would fire them and acquire a few startups to build a more aggressive PM team that knows when to listen to users/metrics and when to ignore them. 3. Partnerships team seems to be great. I would incentivize them to stay. 4. Twitter should invest in experienced engineering management to refocus the team. They have open-sourced four (four!) separate message brokers, and I heard that they had five internally recommended JS frameworks at one point. They should standardize on one boring stack for all new development and move all new development to the cloud.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• grok2 10y ago
  Charge celebrities (anyone who has above a certain volume of users) to use twitter. Provide additional analytics as a paid service for marketing. Charge for add-on services (like delayed/periodic publishing etc, running polls, etc).
• xxdesmus 10y ago
  I would add an edit button.
• RodericDay 10y ago
  Twitter should offer a secure chat channel like Signal, and the ability to publish some of the best phrases that come up as Tweets. Too often I have to take screenshots of a Signal convo, format it for Twitter, etc.
• riffic 10y ago
  I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
• jbpetersen 10y ago
  Merge it with Square to confuse the investors a while longer and/or take over the social payments space in a one fell swoop.
• PTPells 10y ago
  Make profiles more robust. Features could include: • Event creation • A forum/group tab so followers of a specific account could more easily communicate with each other • Expanded "About" section • Custom calls-to-action (i.e. "Sign Up," "Message," "Shop," etc.) Allow people to publish more content natively. Such as: • Long-form writing • Long-form video
  • PTPells 10y ago
    My thinking... Public figures post on Twitter first. As a result, it's where news breaks. However, due to the constraints Twitter has placed on how people are able to represent themselves (i.e. limited profiles) and communicate with their audiences (i.e. inability to publish long-form written content natively), these people are driven to other platforms (i.e. Facebook) to do things they might've otherwise done on Twitter. Instead of trying to compete as social utility in the way that Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have positioned themselves, why not cater explicitly to the newsmakers who are already defaulting to their platform, giving them fewer reasons to go elsewhere and attracting non-Twitter users in the process?
• p0nce 10y ago
  - for the longest time I've wished to tweet to a subpart of my followers; Then only way to have that is multiple account right now. Let me follow "person X + #hashtag". - support multiple accounts on the website - Twitter ads do not seem as valuable as other ad services, there is not enough reason to buy them. - remove the bots - Twitter need a way to lessen noise from talkative people. Something between muting and following. See point 1. - order the tweets by most recent, like it was previously. Ordering by popularity ensures your tweets are dwarfed by the popular GIF of the day.
• ZeroCool2u 10y ago
  Nice try Twitter execs.
• thisnotmyacc 10y ago
  Set a goal of $1 billion yearly profit by 2020. That places the value at PE of 20 PE (2/3rds of Alphabets 29.9) at ~$20 billion, which is ~2 times their current valuation. Assuming 5% YoY growth in revenue, which is about 2% growth in users combined with a 2% better yield, both of which are imminently doable, the current $2.5B revenue grows to about $3B. According to their 2016 financial statement, http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/3987486600x0x886152/3FBBB0EC-FDF0-41D2-9C4E-A06AE8B1D1E5/2016_Twitter_Annual_Report.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/398748660..., Twitter spent 2.668B in 2016. So that means Twitter needs to cut costs by 20% by 2020 to hit my goal of $1bn profit. Twitter spent $800 million on each of their three big areas, which they list as "Cost of revenue", "Research and development" and "Sales and marketing". If you can shave off 40% from each of "Research and development" and "Sales and marketing", costs hit $2Billion give or take, and goal achieved. None of that is silicon valley swing for the moon sexy, and it seems pretty unremarkable in a world of hype and excess. But $3B in revenue and $2bn in costs seems achievable by 2020.
  • Trundle 10y ago
    Cutting sales and marketing by 40% doesn't seem conductive to growth in users at all.
• maytc 10y ago
  Make the twitter feed relevant my modeling the presentation and curation like reddit topics.
• ededdeddie38 10y ago
  SEPARATE "celebrity and news sources" FROM "friends and family" You need limitless thumb scrolling energy to find tweets from friends.
• takeda 10y ago
  Twitter should never have succeed, it is a solution for a problem that never existed. It used funding money to artificially manufacture the need for it, to a point that news station started using it as a news source, which is IMO ridiculous. I think it should just die. I never had a Twitter account and never thought that I'm missing something. The only utility that twitter was providing was already solved by RSS feeds.
• jijji 10y ago
  1) remove the 140 character limit. It was not a problem when you wrote it, and it definitely was not a problem today. 2) two factor phone verification should be removed. It makes people want to leave. Allow it to be turned on as an option, but don't force it in your users. 3) allow users to user your service without having an account. 4) increase the number of data analytic tools available for public use, tools that can explore relationships between social networks and postings 5) remove the whole ghost-tweet feature. No one hates it more when a site says Yes this message was posted, and then you look back and it really wasnt. It frustrates users, it also will make them leave, by the millions. 6) stop censoring speech and removing accounts for trivial behavior through speech. If anything replace it with a user voting feature so that posts can be flagged for different types of bad content and reported. The whole censoring option needs to be toned down about 1000%. No one will use your service if you keep doing this. Why should they? If you don't allow them to publish, one of the other 50 twitter clones will.
  • mrep 10y ago
    Food for thought: press enter twice after each bullet/number point which acts like starting a new paragraph (i don't know why they made that the format) but it makes it easier to read.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• pandesmos 10y ago
  I worked for a major gaming company for almost a decade and based on that, I think it should be paid for by its corporate users. Not from the angle of paying to use the service to tweet, but paying for access to tweetdeck. I know there are some fees associated with that, but from my understanding most of those revolve around "customization" and "reports". I think it should straight up be "if you want to see your mentions, you pay". We dedicated multiple units of headcount in multiple departments. One department was treating it straight up as an additional contact channel and scheduled almost 24 hour coverage on it. One department devoted a whole TV to tweet deck to watch the various mentions. There were multiple instances where customer services issues were caught and handled before they blew up because we saw them emerge on twitter before we saw it on any of our internal tools. This was especially true for regional/smaller issues. I was in the department with the TV for tweetdeck, and a phenomenal value came from being able to see the "burst flow" as an issue emerged. Each individual tweet wasn't really important, but flurries = issues that need to be addressed, and specific tweets can be dug into for specifics if needed. I imagine this would be valuable to almost any "always on" type corporation, and there should be enough of them, doing well enough, that they could foot the bill.
• smoyer 10y ago
  I wouldn't bother ... it's the: - Talk radio of our time - A complete waste of mental bandwidth - Too full of negativity If you could somehow filter out the most important parts, pack them into a digest and send them to me once a day, I'd invest 20 minutes into reading through the information just to keep up-to-date. This sounds curiously like the newspaper we used to have delivered to our door.
• keyle 10y ago
  I like twitter. My biggest gripe is hashtags got so spammed by bots that by now they're pretty much useless.
• AlexDanger 10y ago
  I'm amazed they arent more profitable, given that Twitter has become Ground Zero for the daily (hourly? minutely?) news cycle. Are stock exchanges highly profitable? Twitter has become the global exchange for real-time information. I suppose Twitter cant really charge a 'brokerage' fee for tweeting. That is not in their interest. Please excuse my ignorance of Twitter's commercial offerings, but is access to the Firehose expensive? Or real-time summary of Firehose statistics relevant to your keywords? That just seems so valuable and such a singular offering....its not like there is a competing service. I know I've misued the word minutely. But there needs to be a better word for 'minute-by-minute'.
• rocky1138 10y ago
  Engineering first. Open API. Turning Twitter into a federated protocol with 100% compatibility with GNU Social.
• ttam 10y ago
  Product, product, product, product, product. But with people with a track record of actually knowing and having done good products.
• known 10y ago
  Please check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13751727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13751727
• arete24 10y ago
  Add real ways to block online harassment.
  • flukus 10y ago
    So a white list? Even that wouldn't be perfect.
• thr0waway1239 10y ago
  Automatically modify Donald Trump's tweets to say nasty things about Facebook and other social networks on a regular basis.
• postscapes1 10y ago
  1) Let SMBs pay to get a social graph of particular users, fnd influencers, etc 2) Merge with Medium and jump on their token content payment system 3) Acquire Nuzzle and team to make Moments not a pile of crap
• sova 10y ago
  Content aggregation.
• babesh 10y ago
  For new users have them auto follow tweets nearby. This will be familiar to them and from there they can learn to follow and unfollow. Make following a lot more accessible.
• mark_l_watson 10y ago
  I would offer a paid service with no 'promoted tweet' advertisements. Also, I liked it better as text only.
• mrep 10y ago
  TRY NEW THINGS!!! There are lots of ideas in this thread that are worth trying out. However, despite being an early adopter, I have not once re-tried twitter after my first attempt as there have never been any compelling reasons to. Everyone hates on Google for shutting down failed products, but it is way better to try and fail than sit on the product you have. I'll quote Walter Isaacson's book on what Steve Jobs said: One of Jobs's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize the sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize the sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.
• bane 10y ago
  Twitter is a dumb pipe for notifications. It's slightly more than the content equivalent of a bell going off when something interesting happens. Non-conversation twitter posts are mostly references to somewhere else with a longer form, and the conversation tweets are hard to follow. If these things were decoupled, and a non-human readable version was introduced, Twitter could become a defacto real-ish-time pub-sub, message bus for web applications tied to users (instead of ips). I could sit at any machine, anywhere, and my notification widget would get notifications for all sorts of events. Or it could power internet game matchmaking, or I could subscribe to reminders and have them scheduled and sent out to me wherever I am rather than having to tie those things to my device or my calendaring app or whatever. e.g. I could ask the local bbq competition to tweet-notify me when the next competition is coming up and I'd just get pinged when it happened instead of getting blasted by spam and or having to remember to put it into my calendar and/or having to remember to read my twitter feed and happen to catch the notice. How about sub with parameters, only send me a deal making coupon notice if it's for these restaurants and under $50? Okay, I bought some, now I'm unsubscribing for now. Let me write some tools on my own to tap the notification feeds and build some home-spun IFTTT stuff. Like maybe I sub to a local meetup group, tell everybody I'm putting a hike together but won't go unless I get 5 other people to go, and then I don't get notified until I get a quorum. If I don't by a certain date auto-send out a cancel-the-hike notice. Conversations should be decoupled and turned into a web-based IM (same character limits) but with easy references to human readable notifications and machine-readable notifications. Charge $10/year and guarantee a spam-free communication and notification service for you and all your devices.
• dongslol 10y ago
  Twitter always makes me sad after going on. It also makes me resent people I otherwise like, because I see them make nasty, jeering comments that they wouldn't on, say, HN. It's not because they're nasty people who jeer. It's hard not to when you have to pack criticism into 140 characters, because the most concise way to do that is to tell a joke. That's lovely, but when discourse consists of joke after joke, it gets pretty empty. Debate never happens on Twitter. People take stabs at each other and retweet snarky putdowns. When J.K. Rowling makes some witty comeback at some random person spouting their mouth off, everyone applauds it. This kind of discourse makes me nauseous. I often see tweets that make me go, that's wrong! And in my head I start writing counterarguments. But I never get to make them, which breeds resentment. And if by some miracle I do, I don't feel like my audience is a quiet, thoughtful one that will reward me for making good points. I know that's not an empty ideal, because I feel that on HN, and sometimes Reddit. Twitter gets arguments started, but ends them abruptly. That's frustrating. I keep going on, because there are a handful of famous people whose streams of consciousness I'm interested in. If they moved their content to another platform, I'd follow them there. But they don't, presumably because they also use Twitter to follow other famous people's streams of consciousness.
• quangv 10y ago
  Have people pay to read longer tweets (videos/photos) with portion of proceeds goes to tweeter. Twitter is the best way to connect directly with thought leaders. Perhaps cater to them with tools to help them connect with their followers.
• jdeibele 10y ago
  Only show me content that's been re-tweeted more than X times, where X is something that I can set. I don't want to read about what somebody had for lunch and I wouldn't expect it to be re-tweeted. But something thoughtful or interesting or funny would be. Yes, there would be problems with fake accounts re-tweeting but that should be solvable.
  • unchaotic 10y ago
    I wrote a chrome extension to solve something similar i.e. filter out by keywords and then sort my timeline to see popular tweets that I shouldn't miss. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpomfloaidpdleeoegmpikjdchjf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...
• jraedisch 10y ago
  - Remove all videos and images, or at least require an extra click to reveal them. - Remove the possibility to follow people while blocking their submissions. - Provide an ad-free premium Subscription. - Keep and enforce the message length limit.
• foxhedgehog 10y ago
  1. design the service around topic lists, make it easy for users to create lists of accounts and filter twitter's view by list. make curated lists sharable and easily discoverable. 2. delete nazis
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • foxhedgehog 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13003197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13003197
• ianamartin 10y ago
  Twitter has been chasing the explosive growth dream for years. It's not going to happen for them. If I were in charge, my number one goal would be to change expectations for shareholders and investors. Twitter has had all the rapid expansion it is going to have. From here on out, it needs to focus on retaining users and slow, steady growth. It needs to rebuild bridges with developers and become the platform it used to be. It needs to stop pretending that it can be a multi-billion user network and focus on serving the several hundred millions of people who care about it. I think a big part of the management thinking problem at twitter comes from the fact that they suffered repeated outages early on. They invested a lot in terms of people and infrastructure to make sure they they don't go down anymore. And it worked. We almost never see the fail whale anymore. I suspect that a lot of people inside twitter are sitting around in meetings saying, "Look, we're ready for 3 billion users. We built it for that. Where are the users?" And perhaps some other people are saying, "Look, if we carry this monetization scheme to 3 billion users, we would make x money. We have the infrastructure for it. Let's bring the people and make the money." The problem is that twitter's product just isn't that appealing to very many more people than they already have active. They hit the max of their growth potential very early in their time. Now it's time to serve the users they have the best they can. Twitter's number one problem is that they don't understand their market: it's not now and not ever going to explode to the level of facebook use. Fix #1: explain that clearly to all investors, stakeholders, employees. Fix #2: cut costs. There's no way it should cost as much as it does to run twitter. Fix #3: stop trying to be Facebook lite. Fix #4: repair your platform and relationships with developers. Developers will drive traffic to you and help you generate ad dollars.
• vcool07 10y ago
  Have two accounts for regular(free) users and enterprise(paid) users: 1. Free/Regular user - Restricted to 'x' tweets a day, 'y' tweets a month or ad served etc. Not applicable for enterprises, marketing firms etc. 2. Paid/Enterprise user - No restrictions on tweets per day. Enterprises need to pay 'z' amount on a monthly/yearly basis. No ads are served to the account holder. More privacy, backup options. Tweets are promoted based on keywords etc.
• ericdykstra 10y ago
  1. Privitize the company 2. Unemploy 90% of staff from all departments to stop bleeding money 3. Remove all feed filtering and return to a purely chronological timeline; highlights can hide somewhere else. 4. Increase character count to 200, don't count mentions against the limit, and reduce prominence of image posts so they don't overwhelm text-only posts. 5. Throw away all KPIs and remove all features done to service KPIs 6. Organize a small product team dedicated to making the API open and good again 7. Organize a larger product team that works on issues around custom mention/interaction filtering 8. Sell API access for business volume and use cases
• crispytx 10y ago
  I would like... try and turn a profit.
• kbody 10y ago
  In reality closing-down their API, hindered a lot of innovation that could happen, they missed a lot of devs working for free to create a product on top of the raw data that twitter is in a sense. (which they could easily acquire) Imo you should keep the core stable until you construct an alternate route, so any new direction should be an extension and not replacement until established (see: not making a Digg v4 etc.). So I'm of the opinion that at the current product monetization is at the edge of starting to damage the product, ad aggression from users will become an issue if they start to hunt for profits that way. There needs to be monetization through another product. When talking about tweets and especially on a scrolling list of tweets that is quite minimal it's tricky. You have to expand it on another product-version. Personally I would attack the inefficiency and problem of scaling (following a lot of users fails exponentially), with some tools that will drive up the quality of experience and increase user activity. Secondly, I would try to embed a patron-like feature in a big way and take a cut from the earnings. As a dev, having a big product idea for twitter's case, their past and current behavior of hindering its API use through walls and dealbreaking rate-limits, will make it really hard to give it a try again.
• apricot13 10y ago
  1. Make a bigger deal of lists. Add the lists tab to the top of the page, show the list of lists a person is in next to their name. For new users its a great way to find people with similar interests. For existing users they let you unfollow people but still check in on them every now and then so your timeline isn't so insane. 2. Add the option of removing inline images/quoted tweets from the timeline it looks ugly 3. redesign, I find twitter so difficult to read its so cluttered. 4. when I say I dont want to see the 'while you were away feature' I do not want to see the 'while you were away feature' 5. Allow me to write private notes about a user or look up all our previous interactions on one page. 6. Allow me to star users - these users tweets are highlighted in some way on my time line 7. when I clikc the tweet permalink why is it a popup then when I go directly to a page its not styled like a popup - this is confusing to some users who think they've loaded a seperate tweet 8. I'd like a daily email of a select group/list/my timeline if < 50 followed emailed to me daily/weekly Some of us dont have time to scroll through twitter 9. Bookmark where I was last. I dont like to miss any tweets. 10. allow me to send group DM's 11. dissappearing tweets. I know this is cipying snapchat/instagramstories/whatsapp but tweeting a phtoo/text which dissappears after a custom amount of time (1 month/year/day/hour/minute) would be brilliant. 12. bring back the third party apps. they made twitter. 13. make trending hashtags easier to see/browse. News articles are always saying x is trending but I never see this. 14. allow me to search tweets nearby. Useful for conferences. 15. Dont include URLS in character count, I think this was supposed to have been added but I've not noticed it working.
• aethertron 10y ago
  1. Split notifications into two streams, high and low value. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12959003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12959003 2. Per-thread privacy and write control. When you post a new OP (non-reply) tweet, you get to choose who gets to see it, and post replies to it. These options make sense to me: just you, your followees, mutually following accounts ('friends'), friends and friends of friends, or members of given lists, or anyone unblocked. But I think they won't go that way because they want to be One Big Community. My proposal would lead to balkanisation.
• EnderMB 10y ago
  I don't think Twitter is doing "that" badly. It's a popular social network that loads of people rely on daily, and they are making some money, at least. Either way, I'd make the following changes: 1. Open up the ecosystem again, and take advantage of the recent trend towards data science. Twitter have acquired a lot of startups relating to Twitter analytics, and to be honest I'd push to keep them separate, but a part of the company as a whole. Allow end-users to work with TV analytics, set up news aggregators powered by Twitter analytics, and push them as separate products on their platform. Twitter can separate themselves from the pack by being the ecosystem of choice for developers, and while it won't necessarily mean more money, it creates real value for their platform. 2. Add a cost to verified profiles. Nowadays, even people that work for magazines get a verified profile, because it's been pushed for by their sales department that deal with these people, and it provides otherwise ordinary people premium features. I'd create an "approved profile" flag to allow those that simply want to prove that they are who they are (i.e. press people, and moderately known people that may want to speak to everyone) and make verified profiles a paid-for feature for celebrities that want to ensure that the general population cannot contact them. Set this as a rolling cost per-month, and I think Twitter would make a fair bit of money from those that want to use its platform for commercial gain. 3. Drastically cut their costs by cutting sales/marketing. These departments are huge, and I think Twitter grew them out with the idea that they were going to become a media company themselves. Rather than make redundancies, I'd offer an opportunity for departments to separate from the main company and link up with outside investment, with the promise of access to the parts of the ecosystem they require. 4. Make a bigger deal of live events (i.e. sport, live shows, etc), but do it in a way that keeps them separate from the main product. This links to #3 in that a sales department that purely handles sport contracts could spin off into a separate service that utilises Twitter purely for sports events. Let people extend their Twitter profile on a separate site to indicate their sporting preferences, and allow Twitter to cater the experience for them. For example, I'm a Bristol City fan, so I could sign up to Twitter Sports as a Bristol City fan, and see highlights from the main Bristol City account, the trending hashtags around Bristol City, watch live games, and see what other Championship teams are up to. Essentially, it's making a more localised platform around sports.
• dorait 10y ago
  1. Charge a subscription fee one rate for consumers and a higher rate for businesses 2. Get rid of all inactive accounts 3. Charge a fee for tweetstreams 4. Fix the rate limit of APIs and create tools for developers 5. Add a features for event tweets/group accounts 6. Talk to developers, add features for Twitter app development 7. Fix the 140 character limitation
• joantune 10y ago
  I came a bit too late to the party. While I get the 140char limit, and they should stick with that, having something like a 10k limit that was only shown when the tweet is expanded, is, in my perspective, essential [for someone that comes from FB the 140 char limit is ludicrous bad UX]. I get that longer formats should go on something like medium, but asking people to change websites to do that is ludicrous. It's putting the barrier too high for the input of content. I know that the shareholders of Twitter that also are medium's wouldn't be happy with the lifting of that limit, yet, for those read on: Regardless of feasibility (as they are two distinct companies) more than 140characters would transform itself on a medium post and commentaries and highlights could become tweets. That's one of the two suggestions that I think would help twitter improve a lot. Enough of texts as image and other crappy UX
• v4n4d1s 10y ago
  1. Remove all bullshit features: "While you were away", Cards, Ordering. 2. Stop messing with the chronological order of the timeline. 3. Do not monetize it with in-timeline-ads, many people block all accounts serving ads. 4. Remove API limitations for 3rd party developers/apps.
• ptrptr 10y ago
  As much as i'm not a fan of Anil Dash his synapis of this problem is IMO correct https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-billion-dollar-gift-for-twitter-8b3d541b9e1e#.3jw3txw27 https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-billion-dollar-gift-for-t...
• sreenadh 10y ago
  The main thing I love about twitter is the 140 character limit. It's an elevator pitch. Many times, when I am trying to communicate an idea, I put them in 140 character chucks to better refine the idea. Especially in this Trump era where people are confused by throwing too many words that do not many any sense. Concise - that is the need and twitter is concise. Twitter should stop comparing itself to facebook and compare more to wikipedia. Twitter is an idea sharing platform. Journalist can use it to get their articles to more audience where the gist of what the article is about is given. Let's not forget the role twitter played in Arab Spring. 140char should be ONLY for text. Links & embedded media should be excluded from that limit.
• LeicaLatte 10y ago
  Launch a new but simpler product. Its the most difficult thing but very rewarding when done right.
• cja 10y ago
  Charge for large numbers of followers.
• cja 10y ago
  Allow rich text attachments to Tweets. Instantly it's a blogging platform.
• rajeshp1986 10y ago
  I feel there are majorly 3 issues which Twitter can address right away and increase their Revenue and user base. I am really pissed off that they are not doing this and sitting on this since so long: 1. Focus on getting more users onboard. Apart from Japan, where twitter has lot of users, there are very few users in Asia & Africa. The Twitter sales team in these regions are not working hard enough. They are focussing only on business side of things. They should focus on getting more users use twitter. Find innovative ways to draw more users onboard. It's a simple math, the more users you have using the platform the more money you can make. I can't believe no one at Twitter is thinking about this. They have been mostly US centric. 2. Ask your sales team to form partnership with other sporting events. They are only focusing on livestreaming NBA. I would love to have live streaming of football(Euro cup, English Premier League etc.) & Cricket(whole of India will be using Twitter once you start live streaming cricket matches). This will increase user engagement. Outside US no one follows NBA!!! This again shows they are not thinking beyond US. 3. Find other means of generating revenue, the advertising on twitter feed is one way. Since twitter doesn't have lof of user data these ads are abrupt and not highly personalized. Instead of advertising in feeds, monetize business accounts and provide them premium features.
• wildpeaks 10y ago
  I would gladly play to remove sponsored tweets and just display all tweets from the people I follow, in chronological order (because even with the preference turned off, I still see tweets being moved around in the timeline x.x)
• Finnucane 10y ago
  I'd definitely try to follow in the footsteps of many of our great 'turnaround' CEOs: 1) Insist on a 'golden parachute' clause in my contract that gives me a big payout on exit, 2) run the company into the ground, 3) jump ship before the explosion. And I could do it for less than, say, Bob Nardelli or Carly Fiorina.
• reitanqild 10y ago
  Happy to not be their CEO in 2017. That said, here are my thoughts: Either: Slowly turn it into Google+, only with users and API. (Including pseudonyms, groups and circles) Or: Make it a communication tool instead of a spam distribution machine sometimes used to communicate. Charge for API access above personal usage quotas (i.e. news organisations , company accounts etc).
• jreeder 10y ago
  Charge to hyperlink a URL. Maybe it costs $100 per year to have hyperlinks in your tweets. There are tons of businesses that rely on Twitter for distribution and twitter makes nothing off those businesses. You could still post a URL to a tweet for free, but hyperlinks cost some nominal amount.
• skdotdan 10y ago
  I would kill all the apps and the twitter.com front-end, and focus on the back-end, making Twitter an open platform again.
• alexis_faveeo 10y ago
  As ceo of Faveeo a startup active in this space since 2012, I've ben thinking a lot about these issues; and the main problems of twitter are also what motivated me to launch several products since the inception of our own company. I'll try to post my 2c here : 1) I think there is a paradox on twitter, which is that the more you follow people (the more you use and invest yourself in the tool; the harder it gets to use and to extract value from. The thing is; for more people it's already hard enough to actually take the time to find the right people to follow (and to actually find them, curate your followings, etc) butthe end result if often times am overload of information which begs the question : how can a app that rewards engagement with negative outcomes can succeed in the long run? The concept of twitter is just awesome and they invented a whole new medium; but I'm quetionning the concept of following people one by one. One thing we built at Faveeo is called Horizons, and it enables to show the system some examples of people you like and trust; and our tool will automatically uncover and follow the best links posted and shared by those users. We call it uncovering and following a trusted network at scale and we're having quite a success with it especially with people who want to tap into twitter without spending their life managing their twitter experience. Twitter is absolutely full of great content, it's too hard to find. Twitter could do a massive consumer facing app enabling people to follow topics and trusted bundles of it's own users AND surfacing their best links and content and I'm quite sure it would reach up to a billion users as more and more people are looking for content outside of their own bubble... Also, twitter should care much more about the content of the links people share; then ONLY caring about the tweets themselves, which to be fair they do with media inserts now. Happy to discuss this and have a look at http://horizons.social http://horizons.social to try our twitter network discovery approach. (self promotion but for once there is a topic I'm actually an expert on :))
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• EnjoyTomato 10y ago
  Remove the character limit and stop banning/censoring political opponents.
• valeg 10y ago
  It's profitable business based on 140 characters messages. Why Twitter is regarded as a disaster just beyond me. What I add to the mix of Twitter features: 1. Twitter for Newsrooms (like "Facebook for work" but more specified). More precise tracking of twits and streams. 2. Hashtag following 3. Twitter's instant articles And character limit must be preserved no matter what.