Very interesting point regarding the illusion of interaction that Instagram provides. I do find Twitter's displaying of replies and retweets (to the first 100) questionable.
As for how Twitter can improve in that aspect, how about a horizontally-scrolling feed of users who retweet, and a less-annoying version of such for comments? They seem like relatively easy design choices.
> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text.
That's not unexpected given their signup flow, it's pages and pages you have to click through where it automatically follows hundreds of celebrities unless you uncheck the boxes.
My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I get more and more bot 'followers' and more ads in my timeline. The signal / noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.
It is incredibly easy to set up a bot in twitter. (Slightly hard since the API v1.1, but still easy.) If an account is attached to a bot, there should be a small icon in all it's tweet to indicate that.
Another thing on the "desert island" effect is that, from the perspective of a artistist or creator, it seems oddly difficult to get discovered on Twitter. Maybe it's something about the interface or recommendation system?
Twitter itself does not encourage creators who want to share content that much. I don't know if this is a problem with media integration (as mentioned in the article) or with the types of people who use Twitter, but as a creator of anything artistic it's not that nice of a platform. I've found tumblr to be much better, both in terms of community (lots of artists, game developers, musicians, etc hang out there) and in how the system itself works. People are much more liberal with notes and reblogs, which means it's easier to gain a following and it's also easier to get some data on how much something you created resonates with people.
For those who care about their image, authenticity is an important social media currency. See, e.g.: https://www.twitteraudit.com/
For some, it's about the same reason one would report spam: a dislike of abuse.
I feel both of those a little, but for me it's mostly about having a real connection with my audience. I definitely pay attention to who's following me, who favorites my stuff, et cetera. When I write on some social medium, I write for my audience. Writing for a bunch of spambots, marketroids, and scammers is... offputting.
Twitter requires auth for every API call, even reading public information. They would burn out their own API quota pretty fast if they didn't have each user grant them a read-only token.
My main reason is that I don't want to write to an audience of bots. I'm using twitter semi-anonymously so none of my real life friends follow me there (I don't have a separate account for this), so people who follow me and I follow are the people I'd talked to before on twitter. If I'm followed by more bots than actual people, I feel like the social feeling of twitter would fade away. I have a small number of followers (around 70) and keeping my followers as authentic as possible gives me the feeling that people care about what I write. (They probably don't but blocking bots gives me the illusion that they do, because my follow count rarely changes.)
Additionally, I'm obsessively organised and spend a lot of time thinking about the tiniest of details and this may be a product of that tiring (and somewhat problematic) personality trait. This is the same reason why I delete my tweets the day after I tweeted them.
I have a very similar attitude towards bot accounts. Early on, they were instantly recognizable and took no time to identify and block. Now that I'm doing it for a while, I feel obliged to continue and I've discovered that some bot accounts look semi-legit at first (Twitter's 'uncanny valley') but that dragging their profile image into Google's reverse image search would give them away. Same image, loads of different accounts all almost normal but when viewed as a group they were obvious fakes. Curating your Twitter followers list is just a matter of personal preference, nothing more.
And I'm definitely a 'tweet deleter' after reading this article[0] and agreeing with the premise that Twitter messages aren't that important to preserve. I'd rather deny data miners the ability to better profile me than keep old messages. The article's linked-to Ruby script to archive & delete messages stopped working recently but I found a newer one[1] which works very well. Set it up as a cron job, set the preferred threshold for RTs, favorites and time, and it keeps your feed tidy. If that old message was so great your followers will mark it as such and the script will preserve it. The rest disappear after X days.
That's my reasoning behind deleting tweets as well. They just aren't worth preserving. I only tweet about the things I'm passionate about, which are human rights, privacy and politics so I can and do tweet impulsively to vent from time to time. I almost always regret those tweets and I don't want them be on my timeline permanently.
Data mining is a concern, though not a big one because I'm pretty sure twitter keeps my deleted tweets anyway. If I don't want to say something I don't want to be found on the internet, I just don't say it.
I don't tweet a lot, so I've been deleting them manually. Which isn't a big hassle for me. I wanted to use scripts to automate the process but they all require API tokens and twitter doesn't let you have them without giving them your phone number, so I decided not to use them. I try to keep my account as anonymous as possible. If I had been tweeting a lot more, I would've definitely used them but currently they're not for me. Thanks for sharing it though. I'll bookmark it just in case I need it in the future.
I'm fortunate to still have an API token from before they required that :-) Can't make any new ones though. But for the occasional script it can be useful :-)
As someone who has managed accounts for business, keeping an authentic follower list to me is about providing a valuable, ethical service to clients. It would be easy for a client to hire me to increase their followers and for me to do so with the thousands of fake accounts. Instead I choose to provide a true follower increase, meaning people that actually value their product. In most cases business owners and managers are appreciative to this approach. It is better to have 50 followers who engage with your product/service, than to have 1000 followers who do not.
Somewhat related, but my follower count stays about the same on average. I go through spurts where I post a lot and then don't post at all. I don't use Twitter that often for direct engagement with individuals, but do from time to time. About a month ago I woke up one day with over a thousand new followers. I thought for a second I had tweeted out something great the night before and was curious what it was that drew so many new eyes. A quick glance at my followers though revealed that ever last one of the new followers was a spam account. To me this devalues the entire ecosystem at Twitter. Twitter has this hard limit on following 2000 people until you reach some undisclosed threshold of followers (presumably close to 2000 followers). I believe that many of the spam accounts are created solely for the purpose of following people to bypass that arbitrary limit. To me though, Twitter has it completely wrong here. It would seem they are encouraging spam accounts by having this limit in place in the first place. There are better ways to detect spam accounts than saying if a user is following >2000 people yet doesn't have 2000 followers they must be spam. Twitter can tell if a user interacts with the systems and tweets on a fairly regular basis. This to me is a better determination of whether an account is spam than simply the number of followers an account has.
Facebook has a different problem - sold or hacked accounts.
There was an artist I "liked", let's call him Bob. Bob made maybe a post a week, and it was always worth seeing. Bob also had a lot of followers.
A few weeks ago, Bob's account was suddenly renamed to "BobMemes". It then became a spambot spewing clickbait several times an hour, often not SFW.
I don't know if the account was sold or hacked, but this isn't the way Bob behaves, and several weeks on there's been no change (as I'd expect if there was a hack).
So it's not just about followers, it's about choosing who you "like".
I have a very high signal/noise ratio but that's because I did the work to follow interesting people. But its also true that the noise is encroaching and we as users have to do work to find more signal.
So one of the core problems of twitter is that you are required to do that; it's work. That's fixable.
Certainly the front page for a new visitor should be rich with content.
You can improve the signal/noise ratio by using lists to follow groups of people with common interests. This is even more work, but in some cases, you can follow other people's lists instead.
You can get an even better signal/noise ratio by using Nuzzel, which extracts the most popular stories. Again, you can use it to read other people's lists.
The signal/noise ratio bothers me too... exacerbated by promoted tweets, unconvincingly implemented 'while you were away' boxes, and similar, diluting the signal even further.
I'm still stupidly holding out hope that one day Twitter will offer to take money to get rid of that stuff.
One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken. Sometimes when I'm trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on Twitter.
Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.
I suspect that the number of people who use Twitter search for that is exceedingly low and non-monetizable compared to their target market.
Twitter has been working on excellent support (where "excellent" is defined as "good for Twitter") for embedding tweets inside news articles and the like. This means that if a celebrity (not a startup celebrity, a celebrity) tweets something important, it'll get picked up by BuzzFeed or something, and then you can use Google, the search engine people actually use, to find it. If it's not important, it doesn't need to be found; that's not what the platform is about.
My main issue with Twitter now is the recent (undocumented) change to the mobile apps for "suggested tweets." (example: http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png )
As mentioned by the commentators, Twitter has a discovery issue. Twitter's solution is to put "suggested tweets" below the normal replies, but without any clear discernible division. (just "Suggested by Twitter" in light gray color). Way too many times I accidentally read suggested tweets instead of normal replies while instinctively scrolling to the bottom and I get very confused.
I recently visited a Twitter page, to find that it downloaded 6.3 MB of data across 63 requests. Since it only displays around 10 140-character tweets on the first page, that's a bloat factor of 4718x in my book. Twitter is done.
How is bloat related to their viability as a business / long-term profitability? Does the extra bandwidth cost them a significant amount of money? Does it negatively impact a significant number of users in their target market, sufficiently so that they will stop using Twitter?
I think it's time to rethink the 140 charcter limit.
When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort.
Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?
It's impossible to have meaningful conversations with that kind of limit. You end up having to use "1/N" over and over again. That limit has always left me wondering how Twitter even got started...
What you're saying is inherently incorrect. "Usefulness" of content is always going to be more limited by 140 characters than it would otherwise be.
It worked, not because people want to "share" less, but because they want to read less. Same reason a lot of people browsing Reddit for example only browse it by glimpsing the headlines. The more news there is, the less people are interested in the details of the news - they want to let their brains fill in the details.
Say, for example (and please don't read too much into the example), you read an article that says "Police shoots an innocent civilian". Then a few days later, you read another article very similar to it. Then another. At some point you stop reading the article and you just glimpse the headline - filling in the details yourself, even if they are wrong. You do this for every article you come across, and you enter a cycle where everything you read ends up fitting your own learned narrative. Your brain autocompletes the content of every article... and if there is no match, you can just ignore it.
This sort of behaviour is something you see a lot of on Reddit. People are attracted to short snippets of information they can autocomplete. Most don't want to spend a lot of time on something they might be reading on the toilet, or on the subway. It's the same reason mobile toilet games are racking in millions, while the PC gaming market is taking a major hit.
It actually got set like this because tweets were originally sent and received via SMS, which has a 160 char limit. The additional 20 characters were reserved for twitter metadata.
If you're interested in a service exactly like Twitter but without the limit, take a look at GNU Social - https://gnusocial.no. Granted, it's mostly developers on there, but Twitter was similar when it started.
Because I mostly don't want longer text from people. Twitter forces people to be concise. One of my favorite things about Twitter is the large number of voices I can follow. More text per person means less voices.
That said, I think they could do it successfully if text were treated as another media attachment like photos or videos or links. People would still have to write a concise ~120 character intro; if I wanted more I could click to expand. But making main posts longer would be a great disappointment to me, possibly enough to kill my use of the platform.
The 140 limit is a feature, not a bug. The character limit places the burden on the sender to compress their message, instead of forcing the receiver to read more. Shorter messages = faster reading = faster replying = a more active network.
As I've written in past comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396), and as this post suggests, rebuilding developer relations and improving integrations would go a long way. There's a lot of potential locked in the platform right now; they should work on letting developers get access to it more easily and strive to remove the cloud of uncertainty that has built up around it (i.e., will they shut me down if I do something too popular that colors outside the current lines?) It would benefit everyone, especially Twitter.
Do you think that's even possible? They really burned a lot of bridges with the way they treated developers in the past. Trying to build a business on top of somebody else's social networking platform has been a spectacularly bad bet the last 5 years or so. I sure wouldn't be first into that pool.
I hope it is. At the very least, they should be trying. It certainly won't be an overnight process, but with time and enough developer-friendly decisions / public guarantees, it could happen. They should start yesterday, though.
> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it.
It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that.
> Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.”
Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills. I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they've trusted me with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality from various art project bots I follow. I don't need a "huge fucking banner" telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking about it.
When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their @name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will reply and help fix it.
Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn't going to get a reply. Duh? Would they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own account? There's a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by their social media specialists, and they're boring as fuck because they're not really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters.
Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he's not using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.
> Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere.
That's very true, and I'm surprised I didn't remember that while reading this article. There are news stories that I've seen first on Twitter, and had trouble finding an actual news article.
Of course, it's not going to cover every last "major debate in the US" or "bomb has exploded in Bangkok" mention. It'll only cover it if people I follow think it's interesting enough to tweet about. If I wanted CNN, I'd have a cable subscription.
I think the point was that even in your example you have to have friends who will retweet those events for you to see them, there is no banner up top saying "breaking news: thousands gain eternal life in alien invasion" and that is a link to click where everything outside of your normal stream is collected and displayed in a frontpage news kind of way.
I don't personally know one single person I follow on Twitter, I use it mostly for following muscisians and dancers in a weeaboo reality thatonly exists for me inside my head and on social media/YT. I'm never going to see any real news, but it's a service Twitter should be designing and pushing, it would be better than the other guff they inject into my timeline.
Thank you a bunch for saying this, I feel the same way. I cultivate a list of accounts I follow strictly because their posts tend to be relevant or interesting.
If you have a stream of garbage on Twitter, don't follow people who post garbage.
I follow people primarily in tech and programming. Most of them use Twitter to talk about things they work on, issues they have, things that are interesting. Occasionally they share something funny, but I rarely see something distasteful or annoying. Sometimes I follow somebody and after a few days I feel like I'm not getting any benefit from what they are posting--it will be annoying or I will realize that they are trying to reach an audience with a different set of values--and I unfollow them. That's OK, they are not meeting my expectations.
The argument for Twitter being broken because signal/noise ratio is like saying email is broken because your inbox is full of newsletters for sites you don't like. The problem isn't with email, it is with how you are using it. Unsubscribe, clean it out, make a new address...
But that's the exact problem for many average users. They were shunted into a default track of follwing 10s of "garbage" posters. My mom's Gmail inbox is exactly this problem - she has dozens of daily useless newsletters she was default opted into and can't be bothered to unsubscribe (or doesn't find it easy), so they just pile up and make email pretty useless.
So yes, it's their fault, but the product needs to correct for this behavior.
I strongly suspect you are in a small minority there. Most people do not have network of friends actively posting interesting content on Twitter. To overcome critical mass/network effect issues Twitter needs to make the experience enjoyable for rest of us.
Twitter's real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO's vision is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
"Satisfy" was the wrong word but I couldn't think of the right one. What I'm saying is that the CEO of Twitter will never have the same power as say Mark Zuckerberg does.
> Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses.
This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for "@justinbieber" (click on "live") or look at any of his tweets, and you'll see innumerable 16-year-old fangirls who have found some incentive to tweet at him. There's also the subphenomenon of these 16-year-old fangirls getting incredibly excited when those tweets do get seen and interacted with, which indicates, one, that they don't go into the ether, and two, people have a genuine hope of interaction.
I've seen this in practice, because I do actually follow certain parts of popular culture and music and trashy television (not Bieber, as it happens, but enough others) and occasionally look at what they're up to on Twitter. It happens without fail for every celebrity.
So I wonder if the author is actually reporting on how actual people actually use Twitter, or extrapolating from the eyes of a non-16-year-old non-fangirl who cares about things like reply threading.
I've seen the same thing; it also seems like it's not so much an issue of the platform as celebrities understandably don't have the time or inclination to interact with strangers on a regular basis.
The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes).
I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it."
(Think of the economics for a touring band which can sell out a 100 seat theatre. The approximate lifestyle is "They plow 80% of their meagre revenues into the costs of producing music, make McDonalds wages, and live in a van." Now, give that band the ability to tweet for two hours, glad hand some fans, and make $10k with no venue cut and no label cut. The specific example I heard was "DM fan123: Hey Dave. Enjoyed seeing you at the last 5 concerts. Got a VIP event coming up Thursday: 12 people, live in studio with us, light drinks to follow. Thought you'd want to know. Tix & details: linkylink. Hope to see you there.")
P.S. Before anyone on says "Wait, Patrick, the economics do not make 2 hours of Kayne's time affordable on the budget of upper middle class Americans unless he is sharded between so many people to not even have the pretense of interacting with all of them" think less "movie tickets" as a comparable and more "season tickets to an NFL team" or "a set of golf clubs" or "a cruise around Europe" or any of the host of big-ticket items which upper middle class Americans actually do purchase frequently when given the chance.
I don't know, as much as the growing money from events being made by musicians is great for music as a whole, I wish we could put money's incentivizing focus back on album production, like the recording companies' golden days. What if, taking this supporter/fan model (which is also more generally available in something like Patreon), we sell tiers for fans to peek into the production of the album at different stages. Like you subscribe with X, you follow all our updates Y, with 2X, all our updates Y and Z, so on and so forth. Using a social network frontend (not unlike twitter or soundcloud) and backend software connecting to something like Ableton Live, musicians could literally share/stream their workflow and assets for people to toy around at home (only for upper echelons of patrons, of course). Those kind of insider views/treats could also inspire and even serve as learning tools for fans to learn into how their idols work. Maybe more niche, then maybe again with all the people getting into computer musicianship and electronic music being as big as ever, not so niche.
That's what I want to see, and I'm willing to code it, just not now.
P.S. I like how my grand parent comment had -1 score before you replied but is now recovering well.
P.S. I like how my grand parent comment had -1 score before you replied but is now recovering well.
FWIW, it's easy to read that as a reddit-esque throwaway oneliner, which HN doesn't really encourage, rather than serious commentary about social media optimization for a musician. When I have a comment like that, and I do occasionally, I generally thicken it out a bit to signal "No, wait, actual thought happened." (An example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177005 was originally just the first two sentences, which taken alone read like middlebrow dismissal, so I added a bit of supporting detail.)
Yes, I'm sure twitter could highlight the followers with the most followed and then Kanye could reply to them. He could also get a highlight of those most engaged in twitter (though they might not have a lot of followers) and tweet to them as well.
And, while it's at it, twitter could provide some kind of AI analysis of his followers to find the ones who are the most positive and have said the most positive things about Kanye.
Hell, they could even advertise they're doing that. Imagine being a rabid fan and learning that if you say lots of nice things about Kanye all over twitter that it'll bring you to his attention and he'll start personally replying to your tweets! Oh the algorithmic cult of personality...
We were verified on Twitter last week, and one of the useful additions is a verified notifications tab, which similarly, allows us to quickly see 'important' accounts interacting with us amongst all the 'noise'.
I think your suggestions are great, but I don't see why Twitter should do it -- what they should do is open up the game for developers, so Kanyer's software development/PR team can work a specific system to do that. Or a company do a generic platform and sell the service to celebrities.
OK, I'll admit, I haven't been following what is going on with Twitter, but come on people, their product is limited to 140 characters. Surely they have something to fix.
But the post won't discuss about financials. It went on bashing twitter as if it at its current state is pretty much screwed up which I disagree because I am quite active on the platform and find it cool.
-> Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction.
I totally disagree. If you follow a avalanche of people and brands your timeline gets useless within an hour. Twitter is place to build a community that you want to be in and participate if you want to get max out of it. If one expects it to be a community he/she shall participate. Why would I expect Paul Graham to be replying me on Twitter for nothing (just because I follow him and mentioned him some non of his business comment) ?
What about Tumblr? Commonly when people ask to lose the 140-character limit I try and understand what people are trying to accomplish and how that is any different from what Tumblr has now.
After spending some time on tumblr, I've noticed the 140-character limit is great from a reader point of view. What it ensures (like you are alluding to) is that one user doesn't dominate my feed/attention with one really long post. I don't need curation on Twitter, because the time it takes to read 100 twitter posts is constant. It's harder to get trapped in an platform-imposed filter bubble on Twitter this way too because there's less pressure on the platform to algorithmically rearrange your newsfeed as well.
The image cropping is something that annoys me. Someone will often post a photo in the their timeline that is pointless when it is cropped. eg a Meme with the captions missing.
Not sure I agree about #1 and maybe my twitter experience is different from others. First, if I want to communicate with others I take it over FB/Email/Messenger of choice. Sure public conversation is nice, but its painful over Twitter and I'm not sure how it could be made better. Everyone talks about how a threaded view would be nice, but people fail to consider that Twitter conversations are never 1-to-1, its usually multiple people tweeting at one person. Having a conversation on something as open as Twitter is like trying to have a conversation with the President during his speech. Not everyone can talk at one, and no matter how you do it, the interface will drown some out. Combine that with the fact that you can tweet anything at anyone (unlike a Facebook/HN thread which is usually around a specific topic), you get a very constrained opportunity to have actually conversations.
However, Twitter does a better job at problem #1 than instagram does. Beiber is not replying to fans over Instagram - and I doubt people are actually communicating to celebrities via Instagram comments, have you seen Beiber's (or any music celeb's) instagram? Its a wasteland of spam, self promotion, and emoji. I doubt Justin Bieber has a higher reply rate on Instagram than Twitter - it's very easy to see that Justin Beiber engages fans on Twitter, not so much on Instagram.
That said, as someone who uses Twitter heavily, but never tweets - my most useful function for it is a realtime news feed (to not just news orgs, but people, parody accounts, comedians, tech nerds, sports news, ...). I place as much emphasis on the ability to "respond and have conversations" to the success of Twitter, as to the success of Buzzfeed and other news orgs (- I doubt you need an active comments section to have a good news site - most of it is garbage anyways).
The second and third points are apt though - Facebook's "trending" seems a lot more useful the Twitter's, however I'm not sure how useful either is without constant curation. Even if Twitter had a super sophisticated algorithm to automatically detect topics - without curation you end up with garbage. Facebook's trending is just as useless once you have the reason why its trending.
Lastly, FTA
>Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text.
I'm not sure how Twitter can fix this, but my response to this is if this is what Twitter has become, then its because you made it that way. Reddit now has a subreddit /r/BlackPeopleTwitter which would give you a very different idea on what Twitter is if your Twitter experience was like that.
What amazes me is how slowly it seems to move on for users.
There's a ton you could do to improve search, UIs on top of the feed, analytics, communities, twitter lists, conversations, media embedding and interactions.
On top of that social graph they had the potential to build a better, more real time, more community led Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube.
And yet it doesn't seem to move forward as a product.
I'm being honest - you took a position and defended it, I read it, and moved on. All in 139 characters.
I literally wouldn't have had time to read a wall of text (which is what 5,000 characters is, it's 850 words, i.e. a dense, full page and a half in a word processor, if 11-point text.)
this is why twitter took off. it makes certain communication possible that just wouldn't be! it lets a celebrity talk to people who wouldn't read even a single page interview by them, for example. sorry if people don't get this.
Twitter doesnt seem like it's capitalized on what it's good at, or anything really.
For personal: Facebook has network effect, complex relationships, share anything and everything, privacy, groups, etcs. Younger generations more focused on sharing are using Instagram, Snapchat, and all the messaging apps.
For work: LinkedIn gives value in seeing work histories, connections, companies, etc (although still a bad product but without competition)
For news: The mainstream just use news sites, search and Facebook or get alerts from all the other apps/networks/reddit and there's RSS which is way nicer for following blogs and niche news.
What Twitter has been good at is allowing people to have a easy public voice (although nobody might see it but its there) without being tied to a personal identity and giving the chance to talk to people you might never be able to reach otherwise. You can tweet at politicians, celebrities, top executives, companies and can reasonably expect a reply or exposure. That's really powerful and a great equalizer. It's also good for real-time obviously, working like a constant stream of consciousness of the collective you follow.
However like the article says, thats it. There's no movement on the product itself. Terrible UI with broken conversations, broken sharing, broken lists, no new features like deduping tweets, non-chronological ordering, better developer APIs, and the ads product isn't great either.
It's kind of sad that the network that originally began as messaging based around sms/phones has been completely overtaken by all other messaging and sharing apps while still keeping completely unnecessary limitations like 140 chars. There's just no focus here...
I love that the author is criticizing Twitter's UI, yet when I tried to find a date of the article, I had to mysteriously hover over the title of the post to see it magically appear before me.
His complaint that a readability issue on a single string somehow makes the author unsuited to comment on the clusterfuck that is twitters UI? I don't agree.
Twitter's problem is simpler: it is great for power users, shite for everyone else.
Twitter needs to curate the content I see better - especially for newer users. Twitter is boring as sin until you follow a few interesting people, then it becomes overwhelming as it adds too many more.
Twitter needs to focus on the feed being more malleable, both with and without personal effort from me.
That may be trading one problem for another. The number one complaint I hear about Facebook is how unpredictable the feed is. For power users, Twitter's current approach to their feed is predictable and reliable: strict time order, nothing missing from the people you want to hear from.
Personally, my initial reaction was instantly negative. I've now come to grudgingly tolerate it; it's not very good, but it's limited to a small number of tweets at a predictable place in my timeline, so I know it's not messing with anything. I've never missed it when at a desktop, though.
There might be no fixing Twitter. The reason Twitter grew imho is because of the rich ecosystem of developers they had. Those developers, time and time again, found new ways to use Twitter and did the development, marketing, and educating of the public. The result was rich engagement and growth.
Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go and tell the developer community to come back? How do you trust Twitter? The answer is you don't.
I can believe that the growth was significantly helped by third-party clients, but I wouldn't believe that the more creative twitter integrations had a major effect. That would be a dev/techy-centric view of the world, similar to those that truly believe that the real-name policy was a mainstream issue that killed G+.
When I started on twitter, it had no hashtags, replies were public (because they weren't initially part of the protocol), no t.co, no embedded photo sharing, no geotagging. All of these features were added, and made popular, in third party clients before being added to Twitter. It was like a giant lab where the features could be tried by smaller groups who shared certain clients or norms and the popular ones wrapped into the "official" API eventually.
Indeed. The trust has been lost. Trust is a really simple issue that many people in our industry like the article's author simply don't get. To expect Twitter to recover in this area is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, there are plenty of young, stupid developers, but given Twitter's animosity towards developers in the past, even with a dedicated campaign, I doubt they could get any significant ones to work with the platform again. From a business' point of view, it's suicide, from a developer's point of view, it's a waste of time and effort, and from an investor's point of view, it's a risk not worth taking.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadAs for how Twitter can improve in that aspect, how about a horizontally-scrolling feed of users who retweet, and a less-annoying version of such for comments? They seem like relatively easy design choices.
That's not unexpected given their signup flow, it's pages and pages you have to click through where it automatically follows hundreds of celebrities unless you uncheck the boxes.
For some, it's about the same reason one would report spam: a dislike of abuse.
I feel both of those a little, but for me it's mostly about having a real connection with my audience. I definitely pay attention to who's following me, who favorites my stuff, et cetera. When I write on some social medium, I write for my audience. Writing for a bunch of spambots, marketroids, and scammers is... offputting.
Additionally, I'm obsessively organised and spend a lot of time thinking about the tiniest of details and this may be a product of that tiring (and somewhat problematic) personality trait. This is the same reason why I delete my tweets the day after I tweeted them.
And I'm definitely a 'tweet deleter' after reading this article[0] and agreeing with the premise that Twitter messages aren't that important to preserve. I'd rather deny data miners the ability to better profile me than keep old messages. The article's linked-to Ruby script to archive & delete messages stopped working recently but I found a newer one[1] which works very well. Set it up as a cron job, set the preferred threshold for RTs, favorites and time, and it keeps your feed tidy. If that old message was so great your followers will mark it as such and the script will preserve it. The rest disappear after X days.
[0]http://fusion.net/story/50322/meet-the-tweet-deleters-people...
[1]https://github.com/mikemcquaid/TwitterDelete
Data mining is a concern, though not a big one because I'm pretty sure twitter keeps my deleted tweets anyway. If I don't want to say something I don't want to be found on the internet, I just don't say it.
I don't tweet a lot, so I've been deleting them manually. Which isn't a big hassle for me. I wanted to use scripts to automate the process but they all require API tokens and twitter doesn't let you have them without giving them your phone number, so I decided not to use them. I try to keep my account as anonymous as possible. If I had been tweeting a lot more, I would've definitely used them but currently they're not for me. Thanks for sharing it though. I'll bookmark it just in case I need it in the future.
Somewhat related, but my follower count stays about the same on average. I go through spurts where I post a lot and then don't post at all. I don't use Twitter that often for direct engagement with individuals, but do from time to time. About a month ago I woke up one day with over a thousand new followers. I thought for a second I had tweeted out something great the night before and was curious what it was that drew so many new eyes. A quick glance at my followers though revealed that ever last one of the new followers was a spam account. To me this devalues the entire ecosystem at Twitter. Twitter has this hard limit on following 2000 people until you reach some undisclosed threshold of followers (presumably close to 2000 followers). I believe that many of the spam accounts are created solely for the purpose of following people to bypass that arbitrary limit. To me though, Twitter has it completely wrong here. It would seem they are encouraging spam accounts by having this limit in place in the first place. There are better ways to detect spam accounts than saying if a user is following >2000 people yet doesn't have 2000 followers they must be spam. Twitter can tell if a user interacts with the systems and tweets on a fairly regular basis. This to me is a better determination of whether an account is spam than simply the number of followers an account has.
Facebook has a different problem - sold or hacked accounts.
There was an artist I "liked", let's call him Bob. Bob made maybe a post a week, and it was always worth seeing. Bob also had a lot of followers.
A few weeks ago, Bob's account was suddenly renamed to "BobMemes". It then became a spambot spewing clickbait several times an hour, often not SFW.
I don't know if the account was sold or hacked, but this isn't the way Bob behaves, and several weeks on there's been no change (as I'd expect if there was a hack).
So it's not just about followers, it's about choosing who you "like".
So one of the core problems of twitter is that you are required to do that; it's work. That's fixable.
Certainly the front page for a new visitor should be rich with content.
You can get an even better signal/noise ratio by using Nuzzel, which extracts the most popular stories. Again, you can use it to read other people's lists.
http://nuzzel.com/
I'm still stupidly holding out hope that one day Twitter will offer to take money to get rid of that stuff.
One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken. Sometimes when I'm trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on Twitter.
Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.
Twitter has been working on excellent support (where "excellent" is defined as "good for Twitter") for embedding tweets inside news articles and the like. This means that if a celebrity (not a startup celebrity, a celebrity) tweets something important, it'll get picked up by BuzzFeed or something, and then you can use Google, the search engine people actually use, to find it. If it's not important, it doesn't need to be found; that's not what the platform is about.
As mentioned by the commentators, Twitter has a discovery issue. Twitter's solution is to put "suggested tweets" below the normal replies, but without any clear discernible division. (just "Suggested by Twitter" in light gray color). Way too many times I accidentally read suggested tweets instead of normal replies while instinctively scrolling to the bottom and I get very confused.
A multimedia site can justify the heavy asset loading.
When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort.
Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?
most of the worst, most useless content you've ever written to anyone would be several paragraphs.
that's why it worked.
It worked, not because people want to "share" less, but because they want to read less. Same reason a lot of people browsing Reddit for example only browse it by glimpsing the headlines. The more news there is, the less people are interested in the details of the news - they want to let their brains fill in the details.
Say, for example (and please don't read too much into the example), you read an article that says "Police shoots an innocent civilian". Then a few days later, you read another article very similar to it. Then another. At some point you stop reading the article and you just glimpse the headline - filling in the details yourself, even if they are wrong. You do this for every article you come across, and you enter a cycle where everything you read ends up fitting your own learned narrative. Your brain autocompletes the content of every article... and if there is no match, you can just ignore it.
This sort of behaviour is something you see a lot of on Reddit. People are attracted to short snippets of information they can autocomplete. Most don't want to spend a lot of time on something they might be reading on the toilet, or on the subway. It's the same reason mobile toilet games are racking in millions, while the PC gaming market is taking a major hit.
That said, I think they could do it successfully if text were treated as another media attachment like photos or videos or links. People would still have to write a concise ~120 character intro; if I wanted more I could click to expand. But making main posts longer would be a great disappointment to me, possibly enough to kill my use of the platform.
It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that.
> Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.”
Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills. I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they've trusted me with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality from various art project bots I follow. I don't need a "huge fucking banner" telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking about it.
When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their @name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will reply and help fix it.
Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn't going to get a reply. Duh? Would they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own account? There's a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by their social media specialists, and they're boring as fuck because they're not really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters.
Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he's not using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.
That's very true, and I'm surprised I didn't remember that while reading this article. There are news stories that I've seen first on Twitter, and had trouble finding an actual news article.
Of course, it's not going to cover every last "major debate in the US" or "bomb has exploded in Bangkok" mention. It'll only cover it if people I follow think it's interesting enough to tweet about. If I wanted CNN, I'd have a cable subscription.
I don't personally know one single person I follow on Twitter, I use it mostly for following muscisians and dancers in a weeaboo reality thatonly exists for me inside my head and on social media/YT. I'm never going to see any real news, but it's a service Twitter should be designing and pushing, it would be better than the other guff they inject into my timeline.
If you have a stream of garbage on Twitter, don't follow people who post garbage.
I follow people primarily in tech and programming. Most of them use Twitter to talk about things they work on, issues they have, things that are interesting. Occasionally they share something funny, but I rarely see something distasteful or annoying. Sometimes I follow somebody and after a few days I feel like I'm not getting any benefit from what they are posting--it will be annoying or I will realize that they are trying to reach an audience with a different set of values--and I unfollow them. That's OK, they are not meeting my expectations.
The argument for Twitter being broken because signal/noise ratio is like saying email is broken because your inbox is full of newsletters for sites you don't like. The problem isn't with email, it is with how you are using it. Unsubscribe, clean it out, make a new address...
That's Twitter's problem, not the user's problem. Your comment is akin to the old open source saying, "It's open source, go fix the bug yourself."
Except no one is discussing anything and topics change every other tweet.
I follow ~20 people and even that I cannot keep up with. But then again maybe I simply don't use Twitter enough to know how to use it well.
https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-delete/
As Twitter is a publicly-traded company, it would be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for "@justinbieber" (click on "live") or look at any of his tweets, and you'll see innumerable 16-year-old fangirls who have found some incentive to tweet at him. There's also the subphenomenon of these 16-year-old fangirls getting incredibly excited when those tweets do get seen and interacted with, which indicates, one, that they don't go into the ether, and two, people have a genuine hope of interaction.
I've seen this in practice, because I do actually follow certain parts of popular culture and music and trashy television (not Bieber, as it happens, but enough others) and occasionally look at what they're up to on Twitter. It happens without fail for every celebrity.
So I wonder if the author is actually reporting on how actual people actually use Twitter, or extrapolating from the eyes of a non-16-year-old non-fangirl who cares about things like reply threading.
I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it."
(Think of the economics for a touring band which can sell out a 100 seat theatre. The approximate lifestyle is "They plow 80% of their meagre revenues into the costs of producing music, make McDonalds wages, and live in a van." Now, give that band the ability to tweet for two hours, glad hand some fans, and make $10k with no venue cut and no label cut. The specific example I heard was "DM fan123: Hey Dave. Enjoyed seeing you at the last 5 concerts. Got a VIP event coming up Thursday: 12 people, live in studio with us, light drinks to follow. Thought you'd want to know. Tix & details: linkylink. Hope to see you there.")
P.S. Before anyone on says "Wait, Patrick, the economics do not make 2 hours of Kayne's time affordable on the budget of upper middle class Americans unless he is sharded between so many people to not even have the pretense of interacting with all of them" think less "movie tickets" as a comparable and more "season tickets to an NFL team" or "a set of golf clubs" or "a cruise around Europe" or any of the host of big-ticket items which upper middle class Americans actually do purchase frequently when given the chance.
That's what I want to see, and I'm willing to code it, just not now.
P.S. I like how my grand parent comment had -1 score before you replied but is now recovering well.
FWIW, it's easy to read that as a reddit-esque throwaway oneliner, which HN doesn't really encourage, rather than serious commentary about social media optimization for a musician. When I have a comment like that, and I do occasionally, I generally thicken it out a bit to signal "No, wait, actual thought happened." (An example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177005 was originally just the first two sentences, which taken alone read like middlebrow dismissal, so I added a bit of supporting detail.)
Ableton have built this: https://blend.io/
Note the remixes competitions listed further down the page. AFAIK it doesn't have much traction, although I think their execution was very good.
There have been quite a few online collaboration products built into sequencers. Rocket Network back in 2000: http://www.1000tracks.ru/remembering-rocket-network/
And, while it's at it, twitter could provide some kind of AI analysis of his followers to find the ones who are the most positive and have said the most positive things about Kanye.
Hell, they could even advertise they're doing that. Imagine being a rabid fan and learning that if you say lots of nice things about Kanye all over twitter that it'll bring you to his attention and he'll start personally replying to your tweets! Oh the algorithmic cult of personality...
There is no point discussing about it should be this or that. Feel free to use it the way you want it to be.
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html
-> Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction.
I totally disagree. If you follow a avalanche of people and brands your timeline gets useless within an hour. Twitter is place to build a community that you want to be in and participate if you want to get max out of it. If one expects it to be a community he/she shall participate. Why would I expect Paul Graham to be replying me on Twitter for nothing (just because I follow him and mentioned him some non of his business comment) ?
[Edit: added some reference from the post]
If twitter wants to survive they need to get content onto their platform which means loose the 140 character.
In some ways and ironically, Medium could be a kind of replacement for twitter if they found a nicer balance between long and short posts.
After spending some time on tumblr, I've noticed the 140-character limit is great from a reader point of view. What it ensures (like you are alluding to) is that one user doesn't dominate my feed/attention with one really long post. I don't need curation on Twitter, because the time it takes to read 100 twitter posts is constant. It's harder to get trapped in an platform-imposed filter bubble on Twitter this way too because there's less pressure on the platform to algorithmically rearrange your newsfeed as well.
However, Twitter does a better job at problem #1 than instagram does. Beiber is not replying to fans over Instagram - and I doubt people are actually communicating to celebrities via Instagram comments, have you seen Beiber's (or any music celeb's) instagram? Its a wasteland of spam, self promotion, and emoji. I doubt Justin Bieber has a higher reply rate on Instagram than Twitter - it's very easy to see that Justin Beiber engages fans on Twitter, not so much on Instagram.
That said, as someone who uses Twitter heavily, but never tweets - my most useful function for it is a realtime news feed (to not just news orgs, but people, parody accounts, comedians, tech nerds, sports news, ...). I place as much emphasis on the ability to "respond and have conversations" to the success of Twitter, as to the success of Buzzfeed and other news orgs (- I doubt you need an active comments section to have a good news site - most of it is garbage anyways).
The second and third points are apt though - Facebook's "trending" seems a lot more useful the Twitter's, however I'm not sure how useful either is without constant curation. Even if Twitter had a super sophisticated algorithm to automatically detect topics - without curation you end up with garbage. Facebook's trending is just as useless once you have the reason why its trending.
Lastly, FTA >Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text.
I'm not sure how Twitter can fix this, but my response to this is if this is what Twitter has become, then its because you made it that way. Reddit now has a subreddit /r/BlackPeopleTwitter which would give you a very different idea on what Twitter is if your Twitter experience was like that.
There's a ton you could do to improve search, UIs on top of the feed, analytics, communities, twitter lists, conversations, media embedding and interactions.
On top of that social graph they had the potential to build a better, more real time, more community led Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube.
And yet it doesn't seem to move forward as a product.
(139 characters, maybe I should use twitter...)
I literally wouldn't have had time to read a wall of text (which is what 5,000 characters is, it's 850 words, i.e. a dense, full page and a half in a word processor, if 11-point text.)
this is why twitter took off. it makes certain communication possible that just wouldn't be! it lets a celebrity talk to people who wouldn't read even a single page interview by them, for example. sorry if people don't get this.
For personal: Facebook has network effect, complex relationships, share anything and everything, privacy, groups, etcs. Younger generations more focused on sharing are using Instagram, Snapchat, and all the messaging apps.
For work: LinkedIn gives value in seeing work histories, connections, companies, etc (although still a bad product but without competition)
For news: The mainstream just use news sites, search and Facebook or get alerts from all the other apps/networks/reddit and there's RSS which is way nicer for following blogs and niche news.
What Twitter has been good at is allowing people to have a easy public voice (although nobody might see it but its there) without being tied to a personal identity and giving the chance to talk to people you might never be able to reach otherwise. You can tweet at politicians, celebrities, top executives, companies and can reasonably expect a reply or exposure. That's really powerful and a great equalizer. It's also good for real-time obviously, working like a constant stream of consciousness of the collective you follow.
However like the article says, thats it. There's no movement on the product itself. Terrible UI with broken conversations, broken sharing, broken lists, no new features like deduping tweets, non-chronological ordering, better developer APIs, and the ads product isn't great either.
It's kind of sad that the network that originally began as messaging based around sms/phones has been completely overtaken by all other messaging and sharing apps while still keeping completely unnecessary limitations like 140 chars. There's just no focus here...
Twitter needs to curate the content I see better - especially for newer users. Twitter is boring as sin until you follow a few interesting people, then it becomes overwhelming as it adds too many more.
Twitter needs to focus on the feed being more malleable, both with and without personal effort from me.
At the beginning of the year Twitter started testing out a "while you were away" feature that curates, currently on mobile only: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-you-...
Personally, my initial reaction was instantly negative. I've now come to grudgingly tolerate it; it's not very good, but it's limited to a small number of tweets at a predictable place in my timeline, so I know it's not messing with anything. I've never missed it when at a desktop, though.
Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go and tell the developer community to come back? How do you trust Twitter? The answer is you don't.