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> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place. _You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes". Jack can introspect a

> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place. _You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes". Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better. Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double down on that effort - oh, sorry, "make it a interest-based network" - instead of take a look at whether that's users want. Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.

udwum 7y ago
They recently created (maybe not completely rolled out yet?) bookmarks, which work the way favourites did back in the day (but they are private).
T2_t2 7y ago
I think it is more a case of being everything to everyone, and one size fits all just plain sux. IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy. Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives. How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants. But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
Maybe you hate the idea of it becoming an interest-based network, and maybe I hate it, and maybe everybody on this site hates it, but we are a very very small speck of a subset of Twitter's active userbase.
code_duck 7y ago
Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the hell they were doing socially or societally.
- darawk 7y ago
  You know that Jack Dorsey also founded another successful company in Square, right? Pretty hard to argue that he lucked into both of those things.
  - rorykoehler 7y ago
    Not really. Once he had VCs attention he could do what he wanted as he wasn't exactly starting from zero.
    - darawk 7y ago
      Let me get this straight: You think that the hard part of creating a billion dollar company is getting attention from VCs?
      - rorykoehler 7y ago
        It's pretty much one and the same until you go public.
        darawk 7y ago
        What? So, you think that if you hand a million dollars in VC funding to any idiot off the street, they could create the next Square or Twitter?
        7y ago
aaron695 7y ago
> Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong. Sorry? Twitter is worth $25 billion. How did it go wrong? Even if you want to talk about morals on a philosophical level, that's not what A/B testing is.
burtonator 7y ago
> Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong. A better way to express this is that if what you're trying to OPTIMIZE is wrong you're going to make an optimally poor product. They're starting with really poor initial assumptions that things like more pageviews is always a good thing
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

udwum 7y ago

They recently created (maybe not completely rolled out yet?) bookmarks, which work the way favourites did back in the day (but they are private).

T2_t2 7y ago

I think it is more a case of being everything to everyone, and one size fits all just plain sux. IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy. Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives. How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants. But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago

Maybe you hate the idea of it becoming an interest-based network, and maybe I hate it, and maybe everybody on this site hates it, but we are a very very small speck of a subset of Twitter's active userbase.

code_duck 7y ago

Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the hell they were doing socially or societally.

darawk 7y ago
You know that Jack Dorsey also founded another successful company in Square, right? Pretty hard to argue that he lucked into both of those things.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  Not really. Once he had VCs attention he could do what he wanted as he wasn't exactly starting from zero.
  - darawk 7y ago
    Let me get this straight: You think that the hard part of creating a billion dollar company is getting attention from VCs?
    - rorykoehler 7y ago
      It's pretty much one and the same until you go public.
      - darawk 7y ago
        What? So, you think that if you hand a million dollars in VC funding to any idiot off the street, they could create the next Square or Twitter?
        7y ago

aaron695 7y ago

> Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong. Sorry? Twitter is worth $25 billion. How did it go wrong? Even if you want to talk about morals on a philosophical level, that's not what A/B testing is.

burtonator 7y ago

> Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong. A better way to express this is that if what you're trying to OPTIMIZE is wrong you're going to make an optimally poor product. They're starting with really poor initial assumptions that things like more pageviews is always a good thing

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]