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- 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
by 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.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI loathe the non-chronological timeline. I abandoned the official Twitter app for Twidere, which lacks many features - such as being able to display full threads most of the time - but preserves my timeline in chronological order. But you're totally right. For me, the "you might like X" or "here's what you missed" is garbage someone is flinging in my lap. But for other people, whose feed may be too chaotic or moving too fast, it's probably the perfect way to consume twitter.
- catshirt 10y agothis is a pretty robust list with some good recommendations- but do you really think iterating on the existing feature set is sufficient? isn't that the focus that got them into this situation? like, if they implemented every single one of your suggestions -- you think that would "turn Twitter around"? i'm not sure i believe it.
- jraines 10y agoA fair point, and you might be right. But I'm an engineer & product person, so the more CEO-type change of vision moves are harder for me to evaluate. What I really want is a global, public messaging protocol with Twitter-like pub-sub and integration points for secure third party apps including rich-media support and federated/individual controls for trust. And a flying pony.
- haasted 10y ago- Allow companies to purchase moderation rights to a hashtag for a limited time. This might actually make advertisement campaigns asking people to share using a hashtag a viable thing.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agoI think that's a bad idea as people will loose trust in the info. Payed search results didn't work either.
- haasted 10y agoWell, if the "sponsored hashtags" were clearly marked as such, like google's ads next to search result, I believe the loss of trust would be limited.
- tyre 10y agoHow would this help Twitter increase user count or revenue? Turning Twitter around doesn't mean fixing annoyances for current users. I agree with all of your points, but I'm already a user. The problem: 1) Many people have already tried Twitter and gotten confused, then left. How does Twitter get them to try again? 2) How do you increase revenue per user? How do you monetize on the massive accounts (e.g. @POTUS)? 3) How do you improve engagement beyond news, politics, and internet arguments?
- jraines 10y agoI think my list does address #3, at least somewhat. I don't have answers for #1 and #2, except hoping that if #3 is addressed people will give it another try.
- golergka 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). A lot of users are not comfortable with browsing using many tabs. I've seen it myself a lot of times, and I suspect it's the main reason FB and Twitter started using modals in the same window lately.
- jasimq 10y agoI'm not an avid Twitter user and I don't think any of these would turn me into one. Maybe the issue is there isn't enough for me to do there...just saying.
- lcnmrn 10y agoIf you want to see how Twitter will look like without modals, you can check the interface on Sublevel. It’s pure HTML without any JavaScript renderer.
- jldugger 10y ago> - 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. At the very least, the topic attribution should be divided into separate buckets, the way search engines tried(do?) with meta-tags.
- ManlyBread 10y ago>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. Why? I use twitter maybe once in a few months, why should I get banned for that?