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I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most peo

I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it. Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note. My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her. Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.

jonnathanson 12y ago
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Twitter's UX is painful, but that's really only the half of it. The real issue is that Twitter, regardless of how easy it can be made to use, is inherently useful to a very small proportion of people. I call it an "extrovert" product. I'm sure I'll catch some flak from bringing up the introvert/extrovert axis on HN (as if we don't get that topic often enough here!). But hear me out. Twitter is for people who like conferences. Twitter is for people who like stages. Twitter is for people who want to have conversations with each other, and also want the world to overhear those conversations. To me, at the other end of the spectrum, that behavior strikes me as weird. It seems painfully and willfully fake and artificial. It seems like so much peacocking, forced smiling, and posturing. It seems like "networking," in the most brutally painful sense of that word. I don't get it. I mean, I grok it, but it holds no interest for me. As an occasional journalist, I'm often told I "have" to use Twitter. It's "part of the job" to be a "public figure" these days. I'm not interested in being a public figure. I don't begrudge people who are. If anything, I envy and admire their ability to navigate the cognitive dissonance that the Twitter private-in-public dynamic forces. But I just can't do it. It drains me. I find using Twitter to be like doing homework, or eating my vegetables. It's not fun. It's a chore. When a consumer tech product feels like a chore, I don't bother; life's too short. Twitter is in an unfortunate situation, in that the company was forced to scale massively and go public at around the same time its true user base and use cases were emerging from the noise. Now it's in the unenviable position of having to make billions of dollars in revenue, and of having to compete with the likes of Facebook for a putative billion-something number of users (which it'll never get), when at its essence, Twitter is a restricted product. A substantial portion of the human population will never get any personal utility from using Twitter. Twitter isn't a bad product; it's just not everyone's cup of tea. I don't think there's anything Twitter can do to make me want to use it, and I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment. It's not you, Twitter. It's me.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  I think the biggest problem with Twitter's public perception is the belief you have to tweet to use it effectively. That's not the case at all. If I could only use Twitter in "read only" mode it would still be incredibly useful. The real trick is curating the right set of accounts to follow, which I think is the second biggest problem with Twitter's public perception: "Following" on Twitter is nothing like "Friending" on Facebook or "Linking" on LinkedIn. Users should feel no compunction about promiscuously following every account they think they might be interested in or for which they see a funny/clever/informative retweet, and guiltlessly unfollowing any account that is wasting space in their feed. But I suspect many novice Twitter users think their Twitter "social graph" should mirror their graphs in other social media, where connections are supposed to more strongly reflect real life bonds. That's a recipe for a boring feed.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    Indeed it's the "read-only" customers that are the valuable ones. Advertisers don't want to reach people composing 140 character witticisms or bots spitting out links, they want to reach people who are searching for commentary on #subject, have an interest in @celebrity or @publication or are sufficiently bored/distracted to be spending time poring through semi-curated lists of links, observations and slogans that are probably lower in quality than decent branding collateral anyway. When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap
tptacek 12y ago
Things Twitter is fantastic at: * Real-time breaking news * Event planning and announcements * Trial balloons for events, products, projects * Humor * Broadcasting the location of food trucks, or specials at a restaurant, or sudden openings at Alinea, &c * Staying connected to broad but specific peer groups, like "everyone who does software security" * Announcing and promoting content; specific example: getting a specific group of people to read a blog post Facebook is good at very few of these things. Twitter is like a more efficient, more far-reaching version of the Facebook news feed; Facebook is a more intimate and conversational version of Twitter. There has always been a weird rap on Twitter's lack of use cases, despite the fact that lots of people seem to find ways to use it effectively. A couple years ago, the rap was that the only reason to join Twitter was to follow celebrities. Nobody says that anymore; now it's "the only reason to join Twitter is if you're an extravert". Well, celebrities are 0.00001% of humanity, and extraverts are about half of it, so I'd say Twitter is making progress.
- _almosnow 12y ago
  > Real-time breakings news Nope, they fucked up that too recently. tptacek: Yeah, it still kind of works but not the way it used to. I've noticed that in the past year or so they started to heavily filter their "public firehose"; before I was used to see 100s of new tweets per second around a major event (which was fantastic), while now I only get a few of them. The thing is that when the event it's not that big (i.e. a local event in your neighborhood) that filter makes you lose some pretty valuable info.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Could've fooled me. I'm still getting crime-beat photojournalism from Chicago reporters that's 10x faster than the Trib, and world-wide coverage that's both faster and much better than CNN, in a format that I can actually keep up with.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      What do you do to get world wide coverage?

jonnathanson 12y ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Twitter's UX is painful, but that's really only the half of it. The real issue is that Twitter, regardless of how easy it can be made to use, is inherently useful to a very small proportion of people. I call it an "extrovert" product. I'm sure I'll catch some flak from bringing up the introvert/extrovert axis on HN (as if we don't get that topic often enough here!). But hear me out. Twitter is for people who like conferences. Twitter is for people who like stages. Twitter is for people who want to have conversations with each other, and also want the world to overhear those conversations. To me, at the other end of the spectrum, that behavior strikes me as weird. It seems painfully and willfully fake and artificial. It seems like so much peacocking, forced smiling, and posturing. It seems like "networking," in the most brutally painful sense of that word. I don't get it. I mean, I grok it, but it holds no interest for me. As an occasional journalist, I'm often told I "have" to use Twitter. It's "part of the job" to be a "public figure" these days. I'm not interested in being a public figure. I don't begrudge people who are. If anything, I envy and admire their ability to navigate the cognitive dissonance that the Twitter private-in-public dynamic forces. But I just can't do it. It drains me. I find using Twitter to be like doing homework, or eating my vegetables. It's not fun. It's a chore. When a consumer tech product feels like a chore, I don't bother; life's too short. Twitter is in an unfortunate situation, in that the company was forced to scale massively and go public at around the same time its true user base and use cases were emerging from the noise. Now it's in the unenviable position of having to make billions of dollars in revenue, and of having to compete with the likes of Facebook for a putative billion-something number of users (which it'll never get), when at its essence, Twitter is a restricted product. A substantial portion of the human population will never get any personal utility from using Twitter. Twitter isn't a bad product; it's just not everyone's cup of tea. I don't think there's anything Twitter can do to make me want to use it, and I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment. It's not you, Twitter. It's me.

twoodfin 12y ago
I think the biggest problem with Twitter's public perception is the belief you have to tweet to use it effectively. That's not the case at all. If I could only use Twitter in "read only" mode it would still be incredibly useful. The real trick is curating the right set of accounts to follow, which I think is the second biggest problem with Twitter's public perception: "Following" on Twitter is nothing like "Friending" on Facebook or "Linking" on LinkedIn. Users should feel no compunction about promiscuously following every account they think they might be interested in or for which they see a funny/clever/informative retweet, and guiltlessly unfollowing any account that is wasting space in their feed. But I suspect many novice Twitter users think their Twitter "social graph" should mirror their graphs in other social media, where connections are supposed to more strongly reflect real life bonds. That's a recipe for a boring feed.
- notahacker 12y ago
  Indeed it's the "read-only" customers that are the valuable ones. Advertisers don't want to reach people composing 140 character witticisms or bots spitting out links, they want to reach people who are searching for commentary on #subject, have an interest in @celebrity or @publication or are sufficiently bored/distracted to be spending time poring through semi-curated lists of links, observations and slogans that are probably lower in quality than decent branding collateral anyway. When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap

tptacek 12y ago

Things Twitter is fantastic at: * Real-time breaking news * Event planning and announcements * Trial balloons for events, products, projects * Humor * Broadcasting the location of food trucks, or specials at a restaurant, or sudden openings at Alinea, &c * Staying connected to broad but specific peer groups, like "everyone who does software security" * Announcing and promoting content; specific example: getting a specific group of people to read a blog post Facebook is good at very few of these things. Twitter is like a more efficient, more far-reaching version of the Facebook news feed; Facebook is a more intimate and conversational version of Twitter. There has always been a weird rap on Twitter's lack of use cases, despite the fact that lots of people seem to find ways to use it effectively. A couple years ago, the rap was that the only reason to join Twitter was to follow celebrities. Nobody says that anymore; now it's "the only reason to join Twitter is if you're an extravert". Well, celebrities are 0.00001% of humanity, and extraverts are about half of it, so I'd say Twitter is making progress.

_almosnow 12y ago
> Real-time breakings news Nope, they fucked up that too recently. tptacek: Yeah, it still kind of works but not the way it used to. I've noticed that in the past year or so they started to heavily filter their "public firehose"; before I was used to see 100s of new tweets per second around a major event (which was fantastic), while now I only get a few of them. The thing is that when the event it's not that big (i.e. a local event in your neighborhood) that filter makes you lose some pretty valuable info.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Could've fooled me. I'm still getting crime-beat photojournalism from Chicago reporters that's 10x faster than the Trib, and world-wide coverage that's both faster and much better than CNN, in a format that I can actually keep up with.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    What do you do to get world wide coverage?