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As a heavy twitter user who mostly enjoys it (I'm very particular of who I follow), I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. Their product

• meerita 5y ago
  What killed me it was Twitter killing developers apis: no more interesting apps than theirs. It sucks big time. They're also screwing the chronology, sometimes you get the latest tweets (most interesting) and sometimes they switch you to Recommended, which, normally, it sucks. Let me browse chronologically as it was in the old days.
  • atorodius 5y ago
    I recently wondered about this, from another angle. In a way it was "weird" that they had an API, given our times. I.e., it was different: imagine if FB/Instagram/WhatsApp had an API. (I think it would be awesome, but it puts into perspective that it was weird that they had one imo)
    • mschuster91 5y ago
      Facebook actually had APIs which got closed down after a couple of data-mining scandals (first these "quiz" apps and games, then Cambridge Analytica as the final nail in the coffin), and their messenger used to support federation via XMPP. IIRC that got shut down because of spam and scams.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        Facebook still has APIs, there's just a bunch of attestations and app reviews before you get access to them now. Some of them have been neutered, like friends' lists and whatnot, but there's a lot they still do.
      • winternett 5y ago
        Now devs and social engineers are using FaceBook groups to covertly gather intel... I joined a local development (to my home) group and found out after answering development questions people posted that I was suddenly getting a lot of recruiter calls out of nowhere. Facebook apparently exposes contact info in the process, or perhaps the engineers cross-reference other sites as well. It makes the job easy for scammers too. The convoluted ways in which people are gathering info on individuals is rampant in many Facebutt groups... There is way too much unsolicited spam and it grows every time I use an app or social site. Makes me not want to log in at all a lot.
    • wongarsu 5y ago
      Instagram has an API [1][2], Facebook used to have a decent API back in the days, Reddit still has an excellent API. But somehow Youtube and Twitter are the only services where I prefer 3rd party clients. 1: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api 2: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-basic-display-api https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-basic-display...
    • nradov 5y ago
      Is it viable for advertising supported services to have a fully functional API? Some third-party developer will build an alternative client app with no ads and eliminate the revenue stream.
      • vkou 5y ago
        And they'll get their API keys revoked. Just because you have an API doesn't mean you're going to allow anyone and everyone to use it how they want.
    • jrochkind1 5y ago
      Facebook used to have an API (that was useable to do interesting things).
    • riffraff 5y ago
      It wasn't our times, it was a time when every service provided APIs, and many services provided parsable html to be scraped. The era of "mash ups". It's incredible how things changed since the 00s.
    • masswerk 5y ago
      Back then, free APIs and mashups based on them were the hot thing. (Free geolocation resolvers, Google hat a free search API, Bing as well, FB had one, too, free weather forecasts APIs, etc., etc.) You couldn't be a trendy start-up without providing one. Things have changed a lot since. PS: I keep a few selected apps from this era on my phone. Once a year I open them and admire them in their data-less beauty. (Favourite one: Partly Clouded) Let's call it software shinto.
    • ximeng 5y ago
      WhatsApp has an API for $$: https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    Chronological is worse since you will see a bunch meaningless tweets from people. It's better if twitter can show me the important tweets that I've missed since I last used it.
  • winternett 5y ago
    Chronological posts were the one thing making tools like twitter useful. The ideal that you could follow someone and see their minute-to-minute thoughts was refreshing. In the age of bots and schedules posts, fake accounts and marginal content/reposts are rampant. Twitter to me now feels like a "dead body" repost zone where the only thing that grabs attention are snuff clips and pr0n. Their overhead from all the volume is probably stratospheric, and they're scrambling to stop the hemorrhage of expenses over innovating now, so it's probably gonna take an entirely different platform to recapture the classic dynamic that Twitter once had.
  • bern4444 5y ago
    Twitter's redone all their APIs and made it easier to get initial access more quickly. Have you looked at it recently? https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-started/getting-access-to-the-twitter-api https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-st...
• deepsun 5y ago
  Do they need to do anything? The product just works, pays their bills, why should everyone jump off pants trying to squeeze as much money from their product as possible?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• delecti 5y ago
  I'm amused at you questioning what they've been doing all this time, and then giving instructions to avoid seeing what they've been doing all this time. I don't like those things in my timeline either, but that's your answer. Also those annoying voice chatrooms and their lame attempt at stories.
  • zardo 5y ago
    I've noticed big strides in making the site more annoying to use if you aren't logged in.
    • colordrops 5y ago
      True, but these strides are microscopic compared to Reddit.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  One could argue they filled out their niche. Took the VC money, made the thing global, does what it says on the tin. The world now has a broadcast-short-messages service that can be used by people to reach their audience. Unfortunately that's not enough, since these tech firms tend to be priced to eat the whole planet, thus requiring a lot more than going global with a little thing that works.
  • mywittyname 5y ago
    Adding to this: it's really hard for Do One Thing Well companies to pivot.
    • the_other 5y ago
      Well, they could pivot to a paid-for service without ads and sponsored content. Then we'd see their real value.
  • beebmam 5y ago
    They're not even remotely priced at the magnitude to eat the whole planet. And yet, their market IS eating the entire world (except China, due to insular political reasons). That points to me like they're significantly undervalued.
    • ericmay 5y ago
      When you say they are you referring to Twitter specifically or social media/US tech companies in general? If you mean Twitter specifically I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on the "bull case" for this takeover. I like Twitter and use it to shout into the void from time to time. I wonder if it's just like.. a company and not a growth company? Like what if we just had Twitter with some monetization and then it just paid out dividends to shareholders? Why is that such a bad thing?
    • underwater 5y ago
      What is Twitter's market? They seem increasingly like just another online community. Most of my feed is the same few Twitter influencers with high follower counts. The drama, conventions, and memes all make it feel insular and hostile to outsiders. Feels more like Tumblr than some global, open, platform.
• pphysch 5y ago
  Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity of user not quality of user. Because their product is the user: behavioral analytics & advertising. If you're gonna use Twitter anyways, Twitter has zero incentive to make it a more productive tool for you (in fact they want to be slightly less productive so you spend more time on it). Due to network effects, they are not worried about competitors shipping a better product.
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    >Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity of user not quality of user. Then why do they ban low quality users such as bots or users who have broken their rules?
    • dageshi 5y ago
      Their advertiser don't want to advertise to bots and the users who break the rules potentially cause a pile of bad publicity for them so they're happy to get rid of them.
      • charcircuit 5y ago
        Those are examples of twitter preferring quality over quantity.
        • Kye 5y ago
          There are plenty of low-quality tweeters who know how to ride the line and not cause Twitter PR problems.
    • pphysch 5y ago
      Come on. Human users is implied.
• ARandomerDude 5y ago
  > I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. There was that one time in 2017 when they increased the character limit.
• tootie 5y ago
  I honestly don't get it. My company gets a lot of traffic from Twitter apparently so I signed up to get some perspective. I mostly follow journalists and publications as well as some business and tech folks I like. I see so many context-free messages of people arguing about topics I'm out of the loop on or posting links to news I already saw in a better aggregator. Maybe once or twice a week do I see an interesting bit of insight but it's drowning in an ocean of gibberish. And as far as I can tell that's the entire premise of the platform.
• YaBomm 5y ago
• mdns33 5y ago
• atlantas 5y ago
  Thanks, that's useful. What I don't get about twitter as a company: Why do they have so many employees? If they scaled back they could have a nice business as it is.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    The goto answer for this is that they have the number of employees they have because they deemed each new employee to provide more value than they cost to employee. That’s their goal. Their goal is not to have the minimal number of people required to run some very simplistic description of their company. They would employee a thousand milk delivery people if they thought each one would provide more value than their cost to employee.
    • 8note 5y ago
      Alternatively, the cost of hiring the employee is lower than the cost of letting a competitor hire them
• znep 5y ago
  ...and almost every time I end up on a mobile link to a tweet in a web browser I have to refresh the page to get anything but an error. Which has been going on for years, or at least seems like it.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  What they’ve been doing is tons and tons and incomprehensibly many tons of work on targeting and selling advertisements.
  • riffraff 5y ago
    Based on the ads I see in my timeline, they didn't do a great job at that. I have used the service for many many years and I have literally never seen any ad that I wanted to click. Maybe they do better for the US, but they seem to have done far worse than their competitors in ad space.
    • cpeterso 5y ago
      I've used Twitter for almost 13 years (!!) and its ads are barely relevant to me. An example of Twitter missing the mark: my Twitter mute list includes a bunch of cryptocurrency keywords and yet Twitter still shows me cryptocurrency ads that include those muted words. I've explicitly told Twitter that I'm not interested in cryptocurrency, but they show the ads anyway. Perhaps Twitter still considers me in the target audience because I've proven that I what cryptocurrency is by muting those keywords. In contrast, I joined Instagram just last year and use it very little, but its ads are much more (sometimes almost scarily) relevant to me. My wife is a big Instagram user, so perhaps Instagram has a shadow profile for our home IP address and I'm seeing ads personalized based on her activity (and thus peripherally relevant to me).
• kawsper 5y ago
  You also can't right click their trending widget to open in a new tab.
• winternett 5y ago
  They've actually screwed up the very basis that made it useful though, they reduced control over what users can elect to see, they've completely wrecked real time timelines, and they are covertly ratio-ing user accounts so that even their subscribers see posts later than they are completed or even in many cases not at all, and now they're marketing to users (main contributors to all the platform's content) to pay in order to boost their posts... The whole business model is like telling people they can ride electricity generating stationary bikes in order to charge up teslas for the wealthy. I've never seen any other tool as productive as it boched terribly... Facebook was never really as useful for real time news and events in nature (mind you).
• elcapitan 5y ago
  Do these ublock rules still work? At least in my web ui, most css classes and IDs seem to be randomized now..
  • ProfessorLayton 5y ago
    They do. Twitter's randomized css means the filters need to be based on something else like aria tags rather than css. Going after these means twitter will have to decide between blocking adblock or... Screen readers. It's unfortunate that these tags need to be leveraged outside of their intended purpose to make their product more usable, but here we are.
    • elcapitan 5y ago
      Thanks!
• timmg 5y ago
  > I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. They added NFT profile pics. What more do you want?
• j1elo 5y ago
  For me (different language, if it makes a difference), the "Discover new Lists" was interesting but didn't work because just that one doesn't have an aria-label. Instead, it's just a series of divs placed consecutively in the Lists page, each containing a span inside, with the header and the suggested lists. I found it a nice challenge to learn a bit about selectors and uBlock Origin filter rules, and got this working, for anyone who might care: twitter.com##span:has-text(Discover new Lists):upward(6) > :nth-child(n+5):nth-child(-n+11) PS. also a nice tip: you can use the uBlock's "element picker mode" and write your filter starting from the "##" (i.e. leave the domain name out), and that will provide immediate visual feedback of the affected area, without having to reload the page. Neat!
• sergiotapia 5y ago
  Thank you, here's how you can add these custom rules to Brave since it comes with a built-in adblocker. https://sergiotapia.com/how-to-use-custom-adblock-rules-in-brave-browser-131-and-up https://sergiotapia.com/how-to-use-custom-adblock-rules-in-b...