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Twitter is great when it comes to transparency. I love how they included this >Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back
by thallavajhula 5y ago
Twitter is great when it comes to transparency. I love how they included this
>Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others. We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we’re focused on making this better for you.
It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed. They didn't have to explain it, but they did and I thought it was a nice touch.
- cratermoon 5y ago> Twitter is great when it comes to transparency Pull the other leg.
- blowski 5y ago…and I like when people aren’t constantly cynical and critical of everything, so thanks for finding something positive here.
- pjc50 5y ago> anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting Have they, like, asked people? Also, do they need more people to tweet? It's not like the platform is short of content. Isn't there a role for the comfortable lurker?
- bachmeier 5y agoI think there's a real concern on Twitter's end with the conversation being dominated by those who are "good with Twitter". That's a big problem because it's kind of a snoozefest to read tweets by a small in-group that you don't know and that won't interact with you. Twitter serves no purpose without interaction.
- partiallypro 5y agoWhich IMO is why Twitter allowing users to lock their replies is actually damaging to Twitter. Now people just Quote Tweet it instead of replying.
- bachmeier 5y agoI understand the motivation behind allowing users to lock replies, but you don't need Twitter for that type of content. Twitter sucks for just about anything other than interaction.
- enos_feedler 5y agoWhat should I use instead of Twitter to just keep up with what people are talking about in my topics of interest?
- Conlectus 5y agoTwitter also sucks for meaningful interaction, in my opinion.
- manojlds 5y agoYes, they would definitely want more people to Tweet.
- paxys 5y agoTwitter started off as a low-effort life blog, and is now almost entirely a platform for amplifying celebrities and politicians. It definitely needs more normal people tweeting about normal things.
- jl6 5y agoTwitter has loads of normal people tweeting about normal things, but they are down in the very, very long tail, and ~nobody follows them. Into the void they scream.
- Consultant32452 5y agoExactly. And most importantly those normal people are not profitable. Even collectively, they do not outmatch the top 0.1% of posters in engagement.
- gumby 5y agoThey have to change; their market cap is much lower than the other "majors" and actually the usage level (and subscriber base) is lower too. It's like the inverse of reddit: reddit has a very high Alexa score yet is invisible in the public media; Twitter is discussed endlessly by the nattering nabobs, called before congress etc, yet has trouble monetizing their infamy.
- mombul 5y agoAlso, who's going to feel less anxiety when filming themselves vs. typing?
- astrange 5y agoThe idea worked for Instagram, where the aesthetic for regular posts ended up so forced nobody wanted to just make random everyday posts anymore. For Twitter I didn't see the use, though posting a Fleet does bother people less than spamming, they're too hard to make without ending up ugly. I'd rather see a change where the search doesn't let you stalk random people by searching for what they posted 3 years ago…
- jimkleiber 5y agoMakes me think (and shudder) about how one could make filters for text. I partially regret saying this and also still curious :-)
- isiahl 5y agoMicrosoft already did it, it was called Word Art
- jimkleiber 5y agoNo no, not for the visual appearance of the text, but rather the filter equivalent of "improving" the content. Almost like applying a GPT-3 editor to spice up my tweets. I type X tweet and then use GPT-3 or something like that to modify my words/sentences to have more of a Shakespeare or Steve Jobs voice to it. edit looks as if I found an experiment with GPT-3 to do exactly this: https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1287050253103968257?s=21 https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1287050253103968257...
- mdoms 5y agoPerhaps people are anxious about tweeting because a single tweet can ruin your life?
- AdrianB1 5y agoThat is the reason most of my colleagues and I have no account there, never had, never will. Same for FB, Instagram, etc., the only exception is LinkedIn where nobody is posting anything.
- theshrike79 5y agoThis is why I purge my old tweets automatically. Nothing good has ever come from someone digging up old edgy tweets.
- berniemadoff69 5y agoarchive.org scoops up all kinds of tweets - deleting them isn't really a safe way to get rid of it, just fyi
- thereare5lights 5y agoDo those archive let you search for tweets?
- berniemadoff69 5y agosort of - if you search the wayback machine for something like http://twitter.com/username/ http://twitter.com/username/* - it will list all the tweets it has - and then a user can download everything and search locally. so, it's not as simple as searching by keyword, but it might be something to be aware about, if you are concerned for that kind of thing
- theshrike79 5y agoDeleting edgy stuff at least gives plausible deniability. "I don't think like that any more, that's why I deleted the tweet" is a good defence IMO.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoYeah I actually really respect that they axed something within a timely span, posted about their thoughts, and well, lately the Twitter team has been killing it as far as deploying features and long talked about stuff, so it's all good. The idea of Fleets, whether it was inspired by Stories etc, was another way to engage users and it did have some usefulness. I love the 24hr disappearing thing on IG and I liked it similarly here.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoThe glaring omission is a time limited typo edit window. Just ducking ship it already.
- chmod775 5y agoI would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter. This isn't as simple as counting the number of changed characters, especially when you have to consider at least dozens, better hundreds, of languages. But then again you can already cram about ten times as much meaning into a single tweet if you write in Chinese or Japanese, so maybe they just don't care.
- kyrofa 5y ago> I would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter. I feel like GitHub already solved that problem by showing an edit history on comments. Twitter could do the same thing. Even easier: don't actually publish tweets for 60 seconds, during which time they can be edited.
- zerocrates 5y agoHaving a time where it's not actually posted would work fine but probably not be super effective: after all, you already have an unlimited amount of time to look at the message sitting on your screen before you actually send it. It's just often very hard to read your own writing for typos. Still it would be a step forward. You could even make it opt-in.
- gumby 5y ago> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting... That makes sense in retrospect. I have a twitter account but have only used it a handful of times when it was the only way to complain to a company (!). I read tweets only when someone links to them. Perhaps something even more lightweight would have attracted me but I'd never even heard of this product. It's a difficult problem to publicize an addition to a service to those non-users who aren't actively looking for features.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fossuser 5y agoBeing able to set retention would make me feel better about tweeting. You can do some of this with third party tools, but it'd be nice to have it built in. I stopped liking Tweets though because it's actually impossible to remove more than 3k old likes. I was eventually able to do so, but it required contacting their DPO office and having them reset the cache each time so I could remove them in batches (entire process of reaching out, getting a response, and iterating took 6weeks-ish). Limiting quote-tweets would also help people since most of the abuse comes from quote-tweeting rather than replies (which you can already limit). I'm not twitter famous so I mostly only experience the good aspects of twitter. If you have a highly curated feed and make an effort to interact pleasantly with in-good-faith people it can be a really great place. It requires aggressive blocking and intentionally not following hostile people though. Some better blocking tools would probably also be helpful (block everyone who liked this tweet, etc.) I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could pay $10/month for no ads. It's cool they have the culture to ship something big like this and decide to pivot - I think that's a pretty good sign.
- vorpalhex 5y ago> block everyone who liked this tweet It'd be more efficient to have a twitter mode where you can only ever tweet, and not read anything other people tweet.
- fossuser 5y agoAnd also no value? I'm guessing this is primarily snark, but there are a lot of tweets that are pretty good signal of bad behavior. I'm not talking about some nuanced difference in opinion. For the tweets I'm talking about knocking out everyone that liked it wouldn't be a big deal. Sure some may use this to craft an echo chamber for themselves, but they're already doing that anyway - and a lot of people 'hate follow' to stir up abuse intentionally to drive traffic. These people wouldn't find this tool valuable because they feed off of the nastiness to drive engagement and grow their audience.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
- dheera 5y agoI didn't even know about "Fleets", maybe that was part of the problem.
- skinnymuch 5y agoYeah. I’ve heard the same from a few friends/acquaintances who aren’t into tech too much but use Twitter.
- riffic 5y ago> Twitter is great when it comes to transparency Are you kidding? This is an incredibly opaque and user-hostile company. edit: I am one of the moderators of /r/Twitter on Reddit. Come look at my subreddit if you want a feel for where my opinion is being drawn from. This company is in absolutely no way transparent.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago> It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed. Every failure we can learn from is one which we can avoid for our self. Hence in the startup ecosystem, 'What not to do' is more valuable than 'What to do' but those who are new to the game flock to those selling the latter because 'they tell what one wants to hear'. The recent #buildinpublic trend is showing some promise. I started my first buildinpublic project recently, A platform to validate minimum viable product but it failed the meta validation and I've detailed the reasons in the twitter thread[1]. But I've noticed that much of the building in public ecosystem is focused upon nocode, Especially flooded with notion related projects. I haven't used it, But I presume the reason is because majority of the people who are watching the #buildinpublic threads are non-coders and are looking to learn how a project is built. [1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/1399400455285854211 https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/13994004552858542...