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Has anyone considered that one of the main reasons for Twitter's lack of growth is that the product in itself is opaque to most users? Unless you have a followi

Has anyone considered that one of the main reasons for Twitter's lack of growth is that the product in itself is opaque to most users? Unless you have a following, there's no such thing as a "friend network" on Twitter. The product is not social, contrary to what most people think. It's a boring, lonely existence on Twitter if you're not a somebody and don't have the time or personality to become one. It's a niche product, a niche that happens to be 300M MAUs (I think they should measure "monthly engaged users" and the number would actually look much worse) and no more. Unless they make the product inherently _social_ and appealing to a broader set of people, I don't see them growing this number, no matter how they slice and dice it. The argument the writer makes is a valid one but just a hypothesis. You can't say for sure if that was the reason. Developers are not sprinting to build apps on Instagram and Snapchat but both are growing like wildfire. A social network needs to be social, feel social, and make you feel like you have friends who want to listen to your drivel on it. For all you know, Ev might have turned it into a "pulse of the planet" and it would've still failed to be social and/or make money. Also, we're talking of a 2009 meeting that talks of his ambition, that's |7| years ago - ample time for it to have gone astray in a different direction.

Devolver 10y ago
Absolutely, you're right. The argument is just a hypothesis and unfortunately, the known laws of physics don't allow us the time travel capabilities necessary to actually test it. However, what you're saying fits in quite nicely with the thesis of the argument: If Twitter had seen itself as a platform for capturing and analyzing "the real-time state of the world" instead of a "social network" or a "media company," its opaque product would likely have been less of an issue.
- blizkreeg 10y ago
  Real time state of the world is a nice platform for the ones who want to check the real time state of the world every day. Most of FB/Snap/Insta's B+ users just want to shoot the breeze with their posse.
  - Devolver 10y ago
    There are a fair number of companies (and governments) who would pay a LOT of money ($$ hundreds of millions/year) for an accurate picture the real time state of the world every day.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      But the users would need incentive to contribute their streams. You have to put the two pieces together. If Twitter accepts the role as a news outlet, they're still in an awkward position. Conventional news networks are already grasping to maintain relevance in a world increasingly self-connected. If Twitter overtly embraced that as its primary value proposition, all of its support from media companies, which are really what propped it up IMO, would vanish overnight.
      - bmm01 10y ago
        Completely disagree. Media companies are utterly dependent on Facebook and Google for revenue. If Twitter had succeeded in growing as Facebook did, Twitter would also be a platform that media companies believe they must be on. They couldn't afford not to be on Twitter. In fact, with nearly 320 million users, media companies already believe they need to be on Twitter to reach their audiences. With a billion users, it would only be more true.
        cookiecaper 10y ago
        People have external incentive to use Facebook and Google. Facebook: keep up with friends and family. Google: find stuff online. Twitter's only incentive is its use as a broadcast platform for people who are, in general, otherwise famous. People hop on to interact with and read content from them. If large numbers of this group decided that Twitter represented competition and not an asset, they'd dump it and the attraction would go away. For years the only place I heard of Twitter was television channels desperately begging people to get online and tweet them. It has finally penetrated to the point where most fairly tech-savvy people have started an account and issued 3-4 tweets, but that took years of constant pushing by mainstream outlets.
taurath 10y ago
Its a niche product because people you actually know aren't on twitter - if there's as many people on twitter as there is on facebook, its a plenty good platform to compete with the instagrams/etc of the world. I think the author of the OP has good points, but with the huge rush to monetize as fast as possible in 2012 I doubt there would ever be patience to achieve the goal - nor do I think they've used their engineering resources wisely. I don't think a single person on HN can tell you what the hell their 5000 something engineers actually do (may be wrong number), given the frankly very limited usages of the site and the apps, and the lack of features over time.
- Nerdenator 10y ago
  IIRC they work on not releasing Bootstrap 4.
WillPostForFood 10y ago
I don't think you need a network on Twitter for it to be interesting or useful. Just follow people you are interested in. It has ended up being a replacement for Reader for me. Instead of aggregating a bunch of RSS feeds, I follow a bunch of authors to see what they are writing, and the bonus is you get a some commentary along with it.
- blizkreeg 10y ago
  I used to do the same (I've used it since 2009 for the exact same reason). At some point though, that gets old, you hear too much noise and blabber and realize you're voicing your @ replies and thoughts in a vacuum. Nobody is listening (and I have about 1500 followers). The ones who have a voice on Twitter have become too vocal over time.
- colmvp 10y ago
  Yeah if anything, I found Twitter TOO addicting. Whether you have an interest in stats, finance, basketball, politics, tech, deep learning, mathematics... you'll find an industry leader who has an active account. Writers (journalists, authors) are especially active on the platform which makes for some rather interesting leads to things to look at. I actually found it far more interesting overall than Facebook (hah! says a lot about my social network) and Reddit.
  - TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
    I tried to go this route before I abandoned it altogether. I found 3 problems with this. First, switching contexts between subjects I'm deeply interested in was exhausting. I need categories, or even different accounts to group them. Second, my borderline OCD has a hard time not reading everything, so I wound up curating my list of follows to "reasonable" accounts,and not spammy one that post every few minutes and take over the feed. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of those. Third, I thought -- what I HOPED -- would be true is that the platform would allow me to respond to all these great posters, and get a response in return, but this hardly ever happened. I'm sure I was buried in their feeds, even if my response was worth a reply.
stevenjohns 10y ago
I tried to get my dad on there and followed a bunch of people for him, at which point it blocked his account until he would verify his phone number because of "suspicious activity." That was the end of his Twitter journey.
- tracker1 10y ago
  In fairness, most new accounts are follow-spammers... of course the bots are probably better at working around the limits in place.
  - stevenjohns 10y ago
    I followed about ~10 people, and about half of those came from Twitter's own follow suggestions. I'd understand if I followed 2500, but it was a nominal and fairly reasonable amount.
  - Crespyl 10y ago
    If I were interested enough to create a Twitter account, I would start by following a bunch of people I'm interested in, RSS style. I most likely wouldn't post very much, if at all. How many potential new users fit this pattern, are caught by the 'bot' filter, and are shut out of the platform, I wonder?
- Mikushi 10y ago
  Same experience for a writer friend, convinced him he could get some following on Twitter, created an account got promptly locked and to boot the phone confirmation never came through. Also Twitter sucks, that's why it won't grow, it's mostly bots anyway. (I would know, I wrote tons for it, laughably easy to grow massive accounts under their nose)
  - lambdadmitry 10y ago
    Do you think it's strange to complain about 1) Twitter requiring a phone number during signup 2) Twitter having a lot of bots in the same message? How are they supposed to curb bot registrations if not by checking email/phone combo? I get it that it's trendy to complain about Twitter, but why employing self-contradictions for that?
harry8 10y ago
Curating your own newspaper and never even tweeting once yourself is a compelling, amazing and totally underrated use of Twitter. Any issue of particular interest to you, follow as many of the key players and observers who tweet and get all the important stories, not just one newspaper's. And all the reaction to those stories. It is only for adults who are capable of assessing a source. If that's you it's amazing. The brevity is it's strength.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  This is what I do and it's amazing. I enjoy Twitter far, far more than any other social network tbh.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    I've always disliked Twitter but it does fill a very useful niche. News and sentiment will always bubble up first on Twitter. I think the potential of Twitter as a real-time stream of world events is, to this point, really untapped.
  - yabatopia 10y ago
    If you use it that way, great, but it's not really a social network, but rather a personalized news feed with comments. Which brings us back to the OP: Twitter doesn't feel very social,
    - lenkite 10y ago
      I agree. Twitter is just RSS on steroids. And you don't really need steroids.
      - pvdebbe 10y ago
        It's like RSS on a sugar rush.
      - dade_ 10y ago
        And once promoted content started bombarding me in Twitter, I went back to RSS. Unfortunately sites are dropping RSS, though most WordPress sites have an unpublicized feed.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
A social network needs to be social, feel social, and make you feel like you have friends who want to listen to your drivel on it. The counterpoint here is that for all platforms what this is true. If I post something on Instagram I typically get no interaction, same with snapchat, same with Twitter. Why? I don't have that many people who want to interact with what I post apparently. I'm also not a super frequent poster, don't go around commenting and liking etc...like super users do. I find Twitter to be at least as engaging as the rest of the platforms, so I think it's just that other platforms happened to be where the culture was. Note also that for all of the current major social platforms: Snapchat, Facebook and to a lesser degree Instagram, they all got their huge dedicated user base from people under 18. Twitter never had a youthful start - it was almost all tech people from the TC post to the SXSW boost, and an older demo from the start. That's an important distinction that I think is overlooked.
sigil 10y ago
I think you nailed it. This isn't about ads; Facebook is an ad business and it's 6x twitter. This is warrens vs plazas. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all warrens. Twitter is a plaza. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... Even 5 years ago it wasn't clear whether warrens or plazas would win. They were betting human behavior would change under different constraints -- maybe we'd move beyond our tiny friend networks, come out of our warrens, and have a global party in the plaza. It looks like either we're not ready for that yet, or we'll never be ready for it, because it's suboptimal. That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren.
- fnord123 10y ago
  The web is setup like a so-called plaza so obviously any time spent in a warren on the web is also in the plaza of the web. >That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren. Reddit (plaza) is 7 on alexa. Well below Facebook's 3rd place ranking, but high enough that I don't think we can say anything meaningful about the warren/plaza distinction outside the simple fact that facebook has implemented user engagement extremely well. Twitter (plaza) is 10th. http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites But note the average time on the site. Reddit outranks Facebook. So I'm not sure that each individual could be said to be spending most of their time in a warren. Of course I think all this doesn't include hits from mobile apps which is probably the majority of the time for all of these sites so you can probably ignore this whole post.
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    reddit is most definitely not a plaza. It's a large website with lots of warrens, each of which is its own echo-chamber.
    - andrewflnr 10y ago
      Reddit most definitely has aspects of both. Some subreddits are niche/echo chambers, but for example the main front page subs have a lot of overlap and fair amount of cross-talk, creating a distinctly plaza-like atmosphere. Heck, a single big public sub probably qualifies as a plaza.
yeukhon 10y ago
I actually don't even know how to see replies on someone else's thread. The UI is quite confusing TBH. > A social network needs to be social, feel social, and make you feel like you have friends who want to listen to your drivel on it. Completely agree. I see people I follow reply to each other, but when I comment on theirs, they don't. They aren't even celebrity, just engineers from various tech companies. I feel like all I can do is either retweet or like. I feel cold. I go on FB, comment, I usually get more replies from strangers I don't know but care enough to comment. This is sad.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  > I actually don't even know how to see replies on someone else's thread. The UI is quite confusing TBH. Have you tried clicking it? Because that's it..
  - mcbits 10y ago
    Then click again. And then again. Oops, clicked the picture instead of the text? Go back and try again. But don't accidentally click on the whitespace or you'll have to start over. I'm pretty sure the UI is 100% driven by counting "engagement" events rather than providing usability.
    - wingerlang 10y ago
      I get what you're saying but for me it hasn't been an issue. I see conversations on twitter highly disposable. I usually read the top level replies only and in some rare occasion I dig deeper. Not saying it is good but it kinda works for my purpose on the site anyway.
niftich 10y ago
The article posits that instead of trying to focus on display ads and impressions, they should have focused on sentiment analysis, data mining, trend forecasting as avenues of monetization. Shazam, the app that can recognize a song from a recording, did this [1], and they can predict what songs are going to become really popular based on their users' interest. Of course, actually doing this in 2010 would have been extremely ambitious, given that sentiment analysis was an up-and-coming field having recently overtaken by extreme hype (just look at the edit wars on the Wikipedia article [2] in their effort to revert marketing drivel). It was a far more sure bet at the time to pivot towards display ads and a more locked-down ecosystem, and about new user onboarding [7] and content curation [8], than the even more vague promise of being able to mine useful data out of aggregates of Tweets (preferably in near-real-time). This particular bet may have been the wrong one, as the next year academic papers were coming out by the dozens about sentiment analysis on Twitter; by this time the company had doubled down on display ads and keeping more users inside the application with embedded videos, a captive shortener, a captive image host, the acquisition and relaunch of native mobile clients, and the like. After yet another year, in 2012 Facebook smoked them with their ad onslaught [3] and also bought Instagram for good measure. Twitter acquired Crashlytics in 2013 and then the ad network MoPub and reworked it into an embeddable Twitter SDK that app makers would want to use [4], then bought a machine learning startup and I finally was sure the omnipresent sentiment mining Twitter would materialize [5] but this ship sailed at last when they sold most of that to Google after all [6] to focus on their 'core product', which isn't growing... a problem the article, despite its title, doesn't offer a solution for. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083782 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sentiment_analysis&dir=prev&limit=500&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sentiment_analysi... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/2012-year-facebook-finally-tried-make-some-money/320493/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/2012-... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11914620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11914620 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11942293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11942293 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13429179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13429179 [7] https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/a-new-version-of-twitter-is-coming-and-you-can-get-it-now/ https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/a-new-version-of-t... [8] https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/why-twitters-discover-feature-is-a-game-changer/ https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/why-twitters-disco...
manmal 10y ago
Yes, people want to be important to other people, and with Twitter you can feel quite unimportant. I use it mainly for news and technical QA stuff. You CAN meet likeminded people there, but in my experience you only really connect if you meet them on a conference or meetup at some point.
angry-hacker 10y ago
The only people who benefit from Twitter are celebrities or journalists who in turn give a tremendous amount of free advertisement for Twitter. What they really need is a place to share their press announcements or agenda. They could do it on their own blogs/sites, but it's easier to follow Twitter. The only "normal" people (people without following) who use (in a sense write/tweet) Twitter are trolls. What else can you do with 140chars if not either promote something, share a link, or troll/be snarky/harass? And Twitter at the same time is trying to get rid of the people who actually use their product besides famous people.
chmars 10y ago
That's exactly what I like about Twitter – I can easily reach people outside my usual social circles … and vice versa. And we don't have to be 'friends' to talk to each other.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  I can more easily pick up the phone and call someone. Wtf do you accomplish in twitter?
  - jeffbax 10y ago
    Following economists, journalists, technologists etc that I have no immediate connection to, let alone their phone number? Twitter is for what I care about, relative to the general drivel that FB thinks I value. My friends on FB certainly don't necessarily share my interests with what I like to read about in my spare time.
perseusprime11 10y ago
Instagram and Snapchat are also similarly opaque but they executed really well on their pivots. Twitter is not a learning organization. There is a lot of politics inside the org.

Devolver 10y ago

Absolutely, you're right. The argument is just a hypothesis and unfortunately, the known laws of physics don't allow us the time travel capabilities necessary to actually test it. However, what you're saying fits in quite nicely with the thesis of the argument: If Twitter had seen itself as a platform for capturing and analyzing "the real-time state of the world" instead of a "social network" or a "media company," its opaque product would likely have been less of an issue.

blizkreeg 10y ago
Real time state of the world is a nice platform for the ones who want to check the real time state of the world every day. Most of FB/Snap/Insta's B+ users just want to shoot the breeze with their posse.
- Devolver 10y ago
  There are a fair number of companies (and governments) who would pay a LOT of money ($$ hundreds of millions/year) for an accurate picture the real time state of the world every day.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    But the users would need incentive to contribute their streams. You have to put the two pieces together. If Twitter accepts the role as a news outlet, they're still in an awkward position. Conventional news networks are already grasping to maintain relevance in a world increasingly self-connected. If Twitter overtly embraced that as its primary value proposition, all of its support from media companies, which are really what propped it up IMO, would vanish overnight.
    - bmm01 10y ago
      Completely disagree. Media companies are utterly dependent on Facebook and Google for revenue. If Twitter had succeeded in growing as Facebook did, Twitter would also be a platform that media companies believe they must be on. They couldn't afford not to be on Twitter. In fact, with nearly 320 million users, media companies already believe they need to be on Twitter to reach their audiences. With a billion users, it would only be more true.
      - cookiecaper 10y ago
        People have external incentive to use Facebook and Google. Facebook: keep up with friends and family. Google: find stuff online. Twitter's only incentive is its use as a broadcast platform for people who are, in general, otherwise famous. People hop on to interact with and read content from them. If large numbers of this group decided that Twitter represented competition and not an asset, they'd dump it and the attraction would go away. For years the only place I heard of Twitter was television channels desperately begging people to get online and tweet them. It has finally penetrated to the point where most fairly tech-savvy people have started an account and issued 3-4 tweets, but that took years of constant pushing by mainstream outlets.

taurath 10y ago

Its a niche product because people you actually know aren't on twitter - if there's as many people on twitter as there is on facebook, its a plenty good platform to compete with the instagrams/etc of the world. I think the author of the OP has good points, but with the huge rush to monetize as fast as possible in 2012 I doubt there would ever be patience to achieve the goal - nor do I think they've used their engineering resources wisely. I don't think a single person on HN can tell you what the hell their 5000 something engineers actually do (may be wrong number), given the frankly very limited usages of the site and the apps, and the lack of features over time.

Nerdenator 10y ago
IIRC they work on not releasing Bootstrap 4.

WillPostForFood 10y ago

I don't think you need a network on Twitter for it to be interesting or useful. Just follow people you are interested in. It has ended up being a replacement for Reader for me. Instead of aggregating a bunch of RSS feeds, I follow a bunch of authors to see what they are writing, and the bonus is you get a some commentary along with it.

blizkreeg 10y ago
I used to do the same (I've used it since 2009 for the exact same reason). At some point though, that gets old, you hear too much noise and blabber and realize you're voicing your @ replies and thoughts in a vacuum. Nobody is listening (and I have about 1500 followers). The ones who have a voice on Twitter have become too vocal over time.
colmvp 10y ago
Yeah if anything, I found Twitter TOO addicting. Whether you have an interest in stats, finance, basketball, politics, tech, deep learning, mathematics... you'll find an industry leader who has an active account. Writers (journalists, authors) are especially active on the platform which makes for some rather interesting leads to things to look at. I actually found it far more interesting overall than Facebook (hah! says a lot about my social network) and Reddit.
- TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
  I tried to go this route before I abandoned it altogether. I found 3 problems with this. First, switching contexts between subjects I'm deeply interested in was exhausting. I need categories, or even different accounts to group them. Second, my borderline OCD has a hard time not reading everything, so I wound up curating my list of follows to "reasonable" accounts,and not spammy one that post every few minutes and take over the feed. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of those. Third, I thought -- what I HOPED -- would be true is that the platform would allow me to respond to all these great posters, and get a response in return, but this hardly ever happened. I'm sure I was buried in their feeds, even if my response was worth a reply.

stevenjohns 10y ago

I tried to get my dad on there and followed a bunch of people for him, at which point it blocked his account until he would verify his phone number because of "suspicious activity." That was the end of his Twitter journey.

tracker1 10y ago
In fairness, most new accounts are follow-spammers... of course the bots are probably better at working around the limits in place.
- stevenjohns 10y ago
  I followed about ~10 people, and about half of those came from Twitter's own follow suggestions. I'd understand if I followed 2500, but it was a nominal and fairly reasonable amount.
- Crespyl 10y ago
  If I were interested enough to create a Twitter account, I would start by following a bunch of people I'm interested in, RSS style. I most likely wouldn't post very much, if at all. How many potential new users fit this pattern, are caught by the 'bot' filter, and are shut out of the platform, I wonder?
Mikushi 10y ago
Same experience for a writer friend, convinced him he could get some following on Twitter, created an account got promptly locked and to boot the phone confirmation never came through. Also Twitter sucks, that's why it won't grow, it's mostly bots anyway. (I would know, I wrote tons for it, laughably easy to grow massive accounts under their nose)
- lambdadmitry 10y ago
  Do you think it's strange to complain about 1) Twitter requiring a phone number during signup 2) Twitter having a lot of bots in the same message? How are they supposed to curb bot registrations if not by checking email/phone combo? I get it that it's trendy to complain about Twitter, but why employing self-contradictions for that?

harry8 10y ago

Curating your own newspaper and never even tweeting once yourself is a compelling, amazing and totally underrated use of Twitter. Any issue of particular interest to you, follow as many of the key players and observers who tweet and get all the important stories, not just one newspaper's. And all the reaction to those stories. It is only for adults who are capable of assessing a source. If that's you it's amazing. The brevity is it's strength.

RodericDay 10y ago
This is what I do and it's amazing. I enjoy Twitter far, far more than any other social network tbh.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I've always disliked Twitter but it does fill a very useful niche. News and sentiment will always bubble up first on Twitter. I think the potential of Twitter as a real-time stream of world events is, to this point, really untapped.
- yabatopia 10y ago
  If you use it that way, great, but it's not really a social network, but rather a personalized news feed with comments. Which brings us back to the OP: Twitter doesn't feel very social,
  - lenkite 10y ago
    I agree. Twitter is just RSS on steroids. And you don't really need steroids.
    - pvdebbe 10y ago
      It's like RSS on a sugar rush.
    - dade_ 10y ago
      And once promoted content started bombarding me in Twitter, I went back to RSS. Unfortunately sites are dropping RSS, though most WordPress sites have an unpublicized feed.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

A social network needs to be social, feel social, and make you feel like you have friends who want to listen to your drivel on it. The counterpoint here is that for all platforms what this is true. If I post something on Instagram I typically get no interaction, same with snapchat, same with Twitter. Why? I don't have that many people who want to interact with what I post apparently. I'm also not a super frequent poster, don't go around commenting and liking etc...like super users do. I find Twitter to be at least as engaging as the rest of the platforms, so I think it's just that other platforms happened to be where the culture was. Note also that for all of the current major social platforms: Snapchat, Facebook and to a lesser degree Instagram, they all got their huge dedicated user base from people under 18. Twitter never had a youthful start - it was almost all tech people from the TC post to the SXSW boost, and an older demo from the start. That's an important distinction that I think is overlooked.

sigil 10y ago

I think you nailed it. This isn't about ads; Facebook is an ad business and it's 6x twitter. This is warrens vs plazas. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all warrens. Twitter is a plaza. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... Even 5 years ago it wasn't clear whether warrens or plazas would win. They were betting human behavior would change under different constraints -- maybe we'd move beyond our tiny friend networks, come out of our warrens, and have a global party in the plaza. It looks like either we're not ready for that yet, or we'll never be ready for it, because it's suboptimal. That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren.

fnord123 10y ago
The web is setup like a so-called plaza so obviously any time spent in a warren on the web is also in the plaza of the web. >That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren. Reddit (plaza) is 7 on alexa. Well below Facebook's 3rd place ranking, but high enough that I don't think we can say anything meaningful about the warren/plaza distinction outside the simple fact that facebook has implemented user engagement extremely well. Twitter (plaza) is 10th. http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites But note the average time on the site. Reddit outranks Facebook. So I'm not sure that each individual could be said to be spending most of their time in a warren. Of course I think all this doesn't include hits from mobile apps which is probably the majority of the time for all of these sites so you can probably ignore this whole post.
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  reddit is most definitely not a plaza. It's a large website with lots of warrens, each of which is its own echo-chamber.
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    Reddit most definitely has aspects of both. Some subreddits are niche/echo chambers, but for example the main front page subs have a lot of overlap and fair amount of cross-talk, creating a distinctly plaza-like atmosphere. Heck, a single big public sub probably qualifies as a plaza.

yeukhon 10y ago

I actually don't even know how to see replies on someone else's thread. The UI is quite confusing TBH. > A social network needs to be social, feel social, and make you feel like you have friends who want to listen to your drivel on it. Completely agree. I see people I follow reply to each other, but when I comment on theirs, they don't. They aren't even celebrity, just engineers from various tech companies. I feel like all I can do is either retweet or like. I feel cold. I go on FB, comment, I usually get more replies from strangers I don't know but care enough to comment. This is sad.

wingerlang 10y ago
> I actually don't even know how to see replies on someone else's thread. The UI is quite confusing TBH. Have you tried clicking it? Because that's it..
- mcbits 10y ago
  Then click again. And then again. Oops, clicked the picture instead of the text? Go back and try again. But don't accidentally click on the whitespace or you'll have to start over. I'm pretty sure the UI is 100% driven by counting "engagement" events rather than providing usability.
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    I get what you're saying but for me it hasn't been an issue. I see conversations on twitter highly disposable. I usually read the top level replies only and in some rare occasion I dig deeper. Not saying it is good but it kinda works for my purpose on the site anyway.

niftich 10y ago

The article posits that instead of trying to focus on display ads and impressions, they should have focused on sentiment analysis, data mining, trend forecasting as avenues of monetization. Shazam, the app that can recognize a song from a recording, did this [1], and they can predict what songs are going to become really popular based on their users' interest. Of course, actually doing this in 2010 would have been extremely ambitious, given that sentiment analysis was an up-and-coming field having recently overtaken by extreme hype (just look at the edit wars on the Wikipedia article [2] in their effort to revert marketing drivel). It was a far more sure bet at the time to pivot towards display ads and a more locked-down ecosystem, and about new user onboarding [7] and content curation [8], than the even more vague promise of being able to mine useful data out of aggregates of Tweets (preferably in near-real-time). This particular bet may have been the wrong one, as the next year academic papers were coming out by the dozens about sentiment analysis on Twitter; by this time the company had doubled down on display ads and keeping more users inside the application with embedded videos, a captive shortener, a captive image host, the acquisition and relaunch of native mobile clients, and the like. After yet another year, in 2012 Facebook smoked them with their ad onslaught [3] and also bought Instagram for good measure. Twitter acquired Crashlytics in 2013 and then the ad network MoPub and reworked it into an embeddable Twitter SDK that app makers would want to use [4], then bought a machine learning startup and I finally was sure the omnipresent sentiment mining Twitter would materialize [5] but this ship sailed at last when they sold most of that to Google after all [6] to focus on their 'core product', which isn't growing... a problem the article, despite its title, doesn't offer a solution for. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083782 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sentiment_analysis&dir=prev&limit=500&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sentiment_analysi... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/2012-year-facebook-finally-tried-make-some-money/320493/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/2012-... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11914620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11914620 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11942293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11942293 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13429179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13429179 [7] https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/a-new-version-of-twitter-is-coming-and-you-can-get-it-now/ https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/a-new-version-of-t... [8] https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/why-twitters-discover-feature-is-a-game-changer/ https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/why-twitters-disco...

manmal 10y ago

Yes, people want to be important to other people, and with Twitter you can feel quite unimportant. I use it mainly for news and technical QA stuff. You CAN meet likeminded people there, but in my experience you only really connect if you meet them on a conference or meetup at some point.

angry-hacker 10y ago

The only people who benefit from Twitter are celebrities or journalists who in turn give a tremendous amount of free advertisement for Twitter. What they really need is a place to share their press announcements or agenda. They could do it on their own blogs/sites, but it's easier to follow Twitter. The only "normal" people (people without following) who use (in a sense write/tweet) Twitter are trolls. What else can you do with 140chars if not either promote something, share a link, or troll/be snarky/harass? And Twitter at the same time is trying to get rid of the people who actually use their product besides famous people.

chmars 10y ago

That's exactly what I like about Twitter – I can easily reach people outside my usual social circles … and vice versa. And we don't have to be 'friends' to talk to each other.

Neliquat 10y ago
I can more easily pick up the phone and call someone. Wtf do you accomplish in twitter?
- jeffbax 10y ago
  Following economists, journalists, technologists etc that I have no immediate connection to, let alone their phone number? Twitter is for what I care about, relative to the general drivel that FB thinks I value. My friends on FB certainly don't necessarily share my interests with what I like to read about in my spare time.

perseusprime11 10y ago

Instagram and Snapchat are also similarly opaque but they executed really well on their pivots. Twitter is not a learning organization. There is a lot of politics inside the org.