Sure you can! Michigan has a ban on smoking indoors and business grew for just about every bar and restaurant! Just gotta ban the right people. From what I can tell Twitter is doing that; but their business model is terrible and the platform is clunky. Their lack of growth has nothing to do with banning people.
> Their lack of growth has nothing to do with banning people.
Doesn't seem like that as their competitors that have sprung up are solely from conservatives being banned.
Banning smoking !== banning dissenters, your analogy has a false equivalency for multiple reasons, I wouldn't use them for debates if I were you, just teaching.
- edit because of post limit -
@cheriot: Enough users for you to know about them. Competition starts somewhere. But yes I agree Twitter has a monopoly right now, my point is that monopoly is cracking due to censorship.
@ketzo: So you know of their future competitors? That's a start. Maybe Twitter's monopoly will be dethroned one day. Conservatives make up nearly half of the US, I'd say it's a good guess.
@ribosometronome: HN and Twitter are two different entities. Twitter is used as the defacto communication medium to interact w/ official government accounts, corporations, etc. It's supposed to be for all. Hacker News is a small news aggregator and discussion community.
@shrimp_emoji: har har har JS is bad amirite guys?!
@JaimeThompson: guess conservatives are mad for no reason I guess, they are imagining being banned. Maybe if Twitter had open mod logs we'd know for sure, but there's plenty of prominent people that were banned.
Are we calling Gab/Parler “competition” now? Do they even have revenue, let alone profit?
Seems like a big reach, bordering on disingenuous, to attribute Twitter user growth/revenue slowdown to conservatives mad about being “unfairly censored”. Twitter
Their competitors (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, etc) are all moderating the same people to about the same extent.
Are you talking about their clones, like Parler and Gab? They’re fulfilling their role fine as a platform for a niche user base, but they have no shot at competing with Twitter.
Those aren't competitors to Twitter. You have to realize that social media is an umbrella for multiple services that barely compete with each other.
Youtube = long form video clips, how to / knowledge resource
TikTok = short form video clips, successor to vine
Snapchat = direct video messages, ephemeral talking
Facebook = contact book, classifieds
Instagram = living photo album
LinkedIn = living resume
Pinterest = living recipe / idea book
GitHub = living portfolio, giant forum of repos
Twitter = communication medium, broadcasts
The main FUTURE competitor to Twitter I think is Mastodon. Gab, Truth Social, and a few other services are built upon it. Eventually when a platform comes along with the interface and the will of the people generates a network effect like MySpace to Facebook, Twitter will be done.
The revenue model for ads would be akin to the restaurants giving away the food and charging others to promote stuff to you while you're eating. When you're paying for the product, it's all different.
Is this at all related to Apple's privacy change? The article mentions FB's recent miss, which was attributed to this issue, but doesn't say whether it was at play here as well.
I realize iOS users are not the majority, but it's likely that they are more valuable for advertisers and therefore could generate more revenue.
edit: as noted below, this was in the article — I had done a search for "FB" and didn't see there was another reference to Apple that was upstream from where I landed.
It's addressed in the article, though absent specific numbers:
> The company said the impact from privacy changes by Apple Inc (AAPL.O) remained modest. Last year, Apple began requiring apps to receive permission from iOS users to track their activity on apps and websites owned by other companies.
> The Apple changes could impact Twitter in the future as it grows its performance advertising business, Segal said, referring to ads that seek to drive sales or other consumer actions. He said Twitter is working to mitigate future negative impacts from Apple's changes.
Is there some reason articles like this doesn't include profits? Revenue is specified along with a number of other key metrics, but not profit.
The overall conclusion seems to be the same as with Meta last week: It's going well, but not as well as predicted. The slower than expected growth is only a problem, because the stock market likes predictability and will punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future.
Profit isn't very meaningful without a lot of context. A growing business could plow all of their would-be profits back into growing their business, making it look like they are losing money. Or a failing business could cannibalize itself to get a couple quarters of profits at the cost of destroying its long term prospects for success. Revenue is a much more concrete figure that sort of tells its own story, unlike profit.
That's is an interesting take, because the company I work for is the exact opposite. Revenue is useless, because you can just create all the revenue you want.
Among other things, we resell hardware and software. The basic idea is that customers can get a Dell, or Oracle server and a license for an Oracle database from us, when buying hosting. This saves them the trouble of dealing with multiple suppliers. The hardware and software business is just sort of a side thing, but we can generate crazy amounts of revenue by losing money on hardware. The idea is that we make the money back longterm on hosting. We never use revenue as a meaningful KPI, because we know that some years it will be inflated like crazy by hardware or software sales (which aren't profitable).
So I don't really see revenue as useful figure either, not without also knowing if you're profitable.
Your company has a different model than Twitter. Some companies need to measure Revenue, some Profit and some Growth - and many will switch which is the important one as they grow (or shrink).
This was exactly the feeling in the air around year 2000. Irrational exuberance is what they termed it. Be interesting to see how the current climate evolves.
It’s called a Ponzi scheme. It works until it doesn’t. See Robinhood and Peleton.
All five of the Big Tech companies were profitable before they went public. Even Amazon had positive margins and they were plowing money back in to the business. Most of the former unicorns don’t have positive margins.
“Growth” is okay if your funneling profits back into your business. But see DoorDash. How do you not money delivering food when everyone is afraid to leave their house like in 2020?
It’s not about growth, it’s about attrition. Every VC is hoping that they can
pawn their money losing investments off to a gullible public.
> punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future
If you're calculating the present value of future profits and the rate of increase in profits declines then the present value can swing wildly. That's not "punishment". It's the market self correcting.
Because profit doesn't matter as much for a growth story, growth does. They do it to themselves... in the face of this 'miss' the CEO continues to pitch the growth story: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/10/22925114/twitter-earnings... So it should be no surprise when the financial reporters and markets flog them when they miss.
Twitter has been an absolute mess over the last few years. Through the explore tab, they aggressively promote topics that I have no interest in: k-pop, fashion, reality TV, telenovelas and birthdays. And there's no way to tell them that I don't really care about those topics, you can't even hide them.
The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays, the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics all related to that person.
And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account.
And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
I changed my trends location to Tokyo on someone's recommendation, and it's been a great workaround. I don't speak Japanese, so it's the same as 'hiding' the trends to my brain.
(I think the way to do this is 'Explore' -> gear icon, at least on desktop.)
I loathe how often BrooklynDad_Defiant!, DutyToWarn, OccupyDemocrats, Palmer Report, Gravel Institute, Jeff Tiedrich, and many others always end up being the top tweet of whatever trending topic there happens to be. I refuse to believe this is a coincidence or the result of organic participation. Their appearance is far too consistent, predictable, and durable. Politically motivated trends also start appearing around a paltry 2,000 mentions, which seems absurdly low.
But also, in terms of non-politics, I am so tired of seeing "JUST ANNOUNCED".
I suspect these social networks don't really care, but I block any and every "public" facebook page that gets shared in my feed. Of course, you still see "what was your first car? from 93.7 THE OCTOPUS Des Moines, or whatever page you haven't yet blocked, but at least it gets rid of the worst, most-often shared offenders like the ones you cite. I'm assuming Twitter doesn't let you do that, though. I wish Facebook would give you an option "never ever ever show me anything from a public page". I will never care that a friend shared or posted on a public page. I will only ever care about their own content, and the groups I choose to be a member of.
(Incidentally, this is more broadly my problem with the default-public nature of Twitter).
I just wonder at what phase of growth-and-bust the networks will start to care a bit more about serving the demands of their eyeballs.
Nah, TikTok is much, much worse since their algorithm and the nature of the UX is so much better at it. We only think Twitter is the king of this because we have so much experience with it after 10+ years.
You have to aggresively curate your For You page constantly to stop TikTok from throwing a bombastic opinion piece at you
> You have to aggresively curate your For You page constantly to stop TikTok from throwing a bombastic opinion piece at you
As you regularly hear people say about TikTok.. "ive never seen that on my FYP". I think honestly you react in a certain way to the opinion pieces dude. Do you comment on them? Share them? Linger? Just scroll on and leave it alone...
The biggest problem for me is showing me favorites/likes/hearts of the people I follow in my feed with no way to hide them. Not only does it make my feed into a hot mess, I now make sure not like anything since I don't want that showing on my followers feed.
Aye, Twitter seems to be mostly a social network for bots and people’s scripts to talk to each other. Very few real humans posting original thoughts. Maybe celebrity types use it as an easy way to get a word out, but not the common man. Fascinating.
While there may be a flood of bots and sock puppet accounts, it’s worth noting that advertisers wouldn’t be spending if they couldn’t see actual conversions from Twitter ads. So there are at least enough real people on there for their advertising business to work.
That's not necessarily totally true. The advertising world is susceptible to FOMO just as much as other people. Companies authorize their ad agencies to come up with a campaign and agree on an ad spend for that year/campaign. That money gets split up to cover as many markets as possible. If a competitor is spending on Twitter, then you spend on Twitter as well. You can't give the competitor the entire Twitter market.
I use twitter daily and I believe most of the content I see is real people? Perhaps that's just based on who I follow so I don't have the same experience as you.
I think it depends on the topic. I don't think you will find many sockpuppet accounts when you are talking about some CS programming framework... but you want to talk about politics? Its where the culture war is being waged.
Sure - no one thinks Twitter (or anyone) knows the exact count for real users, etc. But fraudulent activity and bot development is also driven by the underlying success of the website (scammers don't scam where there's no one to scam) so there's reason to pay attention to relative changes (or lack of change) in overall patterns.
Like Instagram and others they have gotten quite hostile to visitors without an account. I guess tracking and monetizing your users earns a lot more than displaying ads for everyone.
Yeah, if you click too many links without an account it'll bring up a sign-up pop-up that takes you to the previous page when you close it. You can get around it by opening the link in a new tab, or save yourself constant hassle by disabling cookies on twitter altogether.
While we're here, take another pro-tip: Set yourself up with an RSS/Atom reader and "Follow" accounts you are interested in through Nitter. No account, no random "We thought you might like", and no ads, just posts and retweets from the accounts you're interested in.
Well with France making it illegal to use Google analytics, I expect many more websites to move forward with forcing you to login. They force you to have an account, which makes you agree to them tracking you, and they'll use you being logged in to track that. When they can use third party analytics it's not as important, but still obviously a plus to them to have people have an account.
*making it illegal to use Google Analytics because GA moves identifying data to the US. Tracking with an account doesn't solve this. Let's not be reductive.
Maybe there just aren't enough people in the world that want to be a part of something like Twitter. It's an aggressively public platform, which many people understandably don't want. one in twenty people in the world using your platform aught be enough for anybody, but the whole financial system we've set up around these companies is insane.
I feel so naive / out-of-touch when Twitter comes up. How is it we don't have a simple micro-blogging protocol. Like we do for email. Twitter didn't invent it, neither did Unix for that matter. Twtxt and others are doing some great things, but why don't we move from innovation to standardized protocols to enhance the user experience of the internet. Is it just great marketing driven by profits. As I said, I'm probably just naive, but it sure seems like a trivial protocol to write and then we can all jump on the task of building clients.
The problem is number of users they want to see on that platform. If you want to follow/read/interact with someone you will be there. If not you do not care about it. It is surprisingly hard to make a network of people if your network has no people in it. I had to teach this lesson to several managers over the years 'setup a page where our users can interact'. That turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was getting anyone to actually post anything. Much less interact with each other. That happens a decent amount when you try to move into a space that already has established players.
I use Mastodon as well as Twitter. Even though there are things that I love about it, I can't say it's easier to use or has more appeal than Twitter.
I think Twitter is easier for the mass public to join. Go to Twitter.com, put username and password, verify phone number. Done! The screens are cleaner and very intuitive.
For mastodon, there's more text and messaging about the differences regarding Twitter, what's the Fediverse, instance rules. So you just landed on the main screen and you have to think about choosing an instance with different number of people, different rules.
After you are in, you can't search!! You can only search usernames or hashtags, but that is REALLY cumbersome and ineffective since people don't write "This is my #Twilight #book #review #bookreview URL". If you are not tech/privacy focused, the trending tags are usually not interesting, apart from #caturday I guess?.
Even after you are able to follow people, you can't quote-retweet (which is a pro AND a con), and even "retweeting" is cumbersome if you are on someone's profile from another instance.
Sharing is also more cumbersome since there's no bookmarklet or chrome extension that I could find, and sites don't have a "share on mastodon" link. The solution was to enable a cross-poster, so I just keep posting on Twitter.
About instances: on some main instances, speed is ok, but try to follow some pic focused profiles on smaller instances. It can take like 5~10 seconds for an image to load. And now on the iPhone official app, I can't seem to be able to download pictures anymore, and the option to bookmark a post (not like) is not there, only on the web-mobile version.
Technology isn't the hard part, for example Mastodon exists and works fine. Funding a sustained product delivery effort is expensive, developing a value prop big enough to overcome network effects is really hard, etc.
> How is it we don't have a simple micro-blogging protocol. Like we do for email. Twitter didn't invent it, neither did Unix for that matter. Twtxt and others are doing some great things, but why don't we move from innovation to standardized protocols to enhance the user experience of the internet.
I read an interesting point somewhere: empirically, platforms can change an innovate far faster than protocols. The example given was encryption: email doesn't have it, even though people have been talking about it for literally decades, but WhatsApp added it in a relatively short time (a year? less?).
It makes sense. With a protocol, once it gets popular, change becomes really hard. It's like herding cats to get everyone to update, so things stagnate at the lowest common denominator for interoperability reasons. When all the software and installs are controlled by one entity, that entity can make a decision to change and just execute it, no herding needed.
There is some truth to the classic HN post that "Twitter can be built in a weekend". A service / protocol that can distribute 280 character messages isn't really where the value is for a service like Twitter. It's 20% engineering, 80% recruiting the right users, retaining them, and getting them to engage on the platform.
Additionally, open protocols are way harder to evolve and are therefore less competitive with closed services. The only reason why email has stuck around as long as it has is because it locked everyone in with its network effect before commercial players figured out how to compete.
Additionally, email isn't really an open protocol in practice. Sure, it's spec'd, but in order to actually participate in the network you need to navigate a really complicated system of anti-spam reputation systems. This is why people just end up paying companies like Twilio to send email instead of running their own servers.
Overall, I don't think we should be looking to learn any lessons from email. It achieved market dominance in a time that doesn't look anything like the modern era, and is much more complex than most people realize.
This is straight up denialist and hyperbolic FUD. There's a healthy and vibrant ecosystem surrounding the federated social web, which has been a thing since 2008 or so.
Also, I would argue that email's staying power isn't quite backed by the answer you gave ("it locked everyone in with its network effect") but more along the lines that it survived the Lindy effect (the great thing about this is that it's not going to its grave as a technology anytime soon).
I think the denialism is that open standards somehow magically win. That's only happened a few times and is the reason that the Web is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure humanity has ever created.
Yes, there are people using federated social products but the growth rate is low and so are the absolute numbers. If growth were good, we would see VC backed startups trying to profit off of it. Why do you think that is?
FB deservedly gets a lot of criticism. I personally feel Twitter doesn't get its fair share of blame. IME Twitter is the most toxic social media platform out there. Twitter deserves a fair share of blame for the divisive political culture we live in right now. I hope these companies go bankrupt and it'd be nothing but a blessing for humanity.
I think the difference is that the toxicity on Twitter is much more visible, it overflows onto everyones timelines, trending topics and in reply’s to celebrities and politicians. On Facebook it’s all “behind closed doors” in groups and on pages.
The problem is that these sites have optimized their algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction, they don't care if positive or toxic. At least that's what FB does, dunno about Twitter tbh.
Whenever this topic comes up, I think a lot of people assume this is some elaborate ML algorithm, but I believe it's really just "trending things go up, _sometimes_ categorized and targeted."
It's a really basic algorithm that captures the equivalent of groupthink.
But FB doesn’t randomly put “toxic” content in my feed. It’s because I’m either following “toxic” news originations or someone showed your crazy uncle how to get on line and you accepted his friend request. My feed has pictures of family, dumb non political memes, people talking about sports or “uplifting sayings and scripture verses” (I usually unfollow people who post too much of the latter)
> The problem is that these sites have optimized their algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction, they don't care if positive or toxic.
Twitter should learn from Tiktok and Spotify. Their algorithms work very differently.
Spotify has allowed me to discover some great songs just by creating a Song Radio from a song I liked. And it has also broadened the genres I listed. And spending 5 minutes on Tiktok's For You Page can help me feel better after a stressful day.
On the other hand 5 minutes on Twitter can easily lead to more stress in my case.
>"divisive political culture when “we” are the ones generating the content"
I feel like this "we" is misplaced. In a broad sense, yes, these acerbic tweets are indeed being made by our fellow citizens. That being said, Twitter tends to amplify the messaging of a small and vocal segment of it's vast userbase. It's a vicious cycle because exposure begets exposure and anger begets engagement.
Twitter optimises for engagement. That's not optimising for controversy, but it's close. Shiri's scissor statements[0] aren't the fault of the people writing the training data; they're the fault of the people making them.
Twitter doesn't synthesise things, but it fosters an environment where people are driven to write more controversial, outrageous, engaging things by tight-loop-feedback classical conditioning. It's not magic – the people posting such things are partly to blame – but Twitter wouldn't have half as many problems if it just showed random tweets to people. Instead, it shows people what it thinks will keep people on Twitter; short term, that works, but long-term it destroys Twitter's value (and value of everything Twitter touches, as a side effect).
I mean Marshall McLuhan's entire career is practically about this.
A medium of communication is not neutral. A book is not just word of mouth stories written down. There is a feedback loop in there that a book becomes something entirely different.
I mean if we take things to extremes and make a platform that we can only communicate with 4 letter words, what words do you think are going to dominate engagement and take over the platform?
It really is absurd. I don't get why the focus is all on FB. I honestly only keep FB around because my family is on it, and sometimes I use FB messenger with my friends. It has zero impact on my life.
On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
The focus is on FB because they are the ones taking ad revenue away from news publishers and traditional media. That gives the media more incentive to publish negative articles about them.
> On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
Definitely. It's really one of the few sites I block using my hosts file when I get a new computer.
If you mute the account, the conversation still happens. So awesome if you dont like a point of view. Terrible if you're gay, female, muslim, or any other hated minority subgroup that gets stalked and slandered on Twitter. If someone is posting slanderous material on Twitter, and you mute it, it isnt a solution. Even if you block it, it barely helps.
The most damage Twitter does isn't even Twitters fault. Journalist f-ing love Twitter and believe that everything important is on Twitter, and everything on Twitter is important. News media is becoming the weird echo chamber of journalist talking to journalists, press people and analysts on Twitter and reporting on their Twitter conversations.
Some stories are completely missed, due to not being Twitter friendly (to many words, hard to boil down to a tweet). Other non-stories are blow out of proportions because it was big on Twitter, even if no one outside Twitter cares.
Twitter aggressively censors anyone without institutional approval. Twitters scratch the elites' backs, so the elites scratch back.
Trump was banned from Twitter first. Any one with mildly right wing opinion is insta-banned from twitter. Blue checkmarks are strongly tied to institutional approval and fringe institutional voices are given a megaphone.
Twitter perpetuates the current class system. So those in power have no qualms with it.
The cultural elite is completely different from having money. It is the same reason that Trump was ridiculed for putting ketchup on steak or why journalists/post-docs are willing to make pennies on jobs that grand them access the cultural elite. I give the example of Trump because he the clearest contrast that differentiates wealth from the elite.
Phrases like 'Nouveau Riche' or 'Paise aaye, par aukaad nahi aaye' (money without class) have existed in different cultures for centuries. This is not a new concept.
Someone who owns private airplanes and golf courses aren’t part of the “cultural elite”? Before Trump’s conversion to a populist in 2016, he was very much part of the cultural elite and spent most of his time hanging out with celebrities and Democrats.
I actually still get a pretty decent experience out of Twitter. The only topic I really engage with is remote work.. I don’t follow very many people (only humans who post real content) and unfollow anyone who goes “off topic”. Which is too bad, but it keeps my feed simple and sane.
I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
> I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
All services would be better if they were more like Google+ (but didn't share name with a despised effort to crush pseudonyms and wasn't owned by a company that buried it as soon as they had been forced to iron out the wrinkles ;-)
I suspect that the complexity tradeoff isn't worth it for them. As in it would solve the problem but probably send overall engagement down.
Opt in would be nice, I am sure high follower people would rather go to the effort of categorising their tweets rather than losing followers when they decide to Tweet about their local sports.
That's kind of the rub with twitter, it puts individuals front and center... and individuals presumably have more than one interest that they might want to talk about. I mainly use twitter to surface fanart and some communities are very organized with using the right #tags, and when I check those tags I have a 100% hit rate on finding something new that I want to see. But anything else on that site is a crapshoot. It's kind of twitter's normal culture to be disorganized, but I'm pretty sure I and everyone I interact with on twitter are actually tumblr refugees and we're very diligent with tagging.
You're really better off with traditional thread-based forums to have conversation topics. Muting somebody's entire existence just because they occasionally dirty the general feed with 'offtopic' just doesn't seem like a sustainable way to use social media.
It has worked well for many years, at least for me. More people than you might expect really do focus an account on one topic. Some people have multiple accounts to separate work/personal life as well.
It’s nothing personal for me not to follow someone, so I don’t really see it as muting their whole existence.
Twitter it's actually on a better path for generating revenue nowadays:
- Spaces have successfully siphoned users out of Clubhouse
- Audio ads could be next
- The crypto integration they've done is just the tip of the iceberg
The funny thing about all these articles about missed growth is that all the mission statements are just arbitrary numbers. Spotify, Twitter, Facebook none of them said anything about building something new or trying to be the best at something, nope. "Our Mission is XXX with YYY growth trajectory."
It seems that every popular Social Media platform became an extension of the liberal governments. I trust a proper sentiment analysis would reveal this.
The Hacker News zeitgeist appears to be strongly anti-Twitter. I'm not entirely sure why.
As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook.
As far as "is Twitter a good product" - apart from complaints that people talk about politics on the app, I don't see anything substantial in the complaints here.
> As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook.
Twitter looks under-priced if you count its recent acquisitions from Quill, Sphere, Revue and it's intention to focus on the so-called 'web3'. Lots of ways to grow in those areas if they are smart enough.
I think there used to be an adage that if you can get enough members, you can monetize it. Twitter haven't exactly made no money but I can't imagine that there is any real trick here other than adverts - the same as most other "free" services.
Maybe they should try something more person like where people pay a certain amount of money to get exclusive content from the people they follow. Can't think of any other way I would pay for micro-blogging.
The CEO of Twitter has control over how the President is able to communicate on Twitter. As an American, this makes sense because Twitter is private property.
It's one of those things where in theory and in the rule of law the CEO can do so. It does make me feel uncomfortable, though. As time goes on I am less and less supportive of the notion that private companies can do as they please on the basis that they are private companies.
I don't know what 'the solution' is, but I do sense a precedent being established that I am weary of. Twitter is simultaneously a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users, but also a private platform where they can be ejected at-will.
> Twitter is simultaneously a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users
I do not know what public sphere means, but I doubt Twitter stops specific accounts from blocking other accounts. I do not see why that is relevant either.
The president of the United States, of all people, has the capability to put an RSS feed on Whitehouse.gov or the president’s personal website anytime they want.
Sure, but you'll have a hard time convincing people that is an effective alternative. How many people do you know who visit the official website of the White House to read press releases and memos? Does the average person know that the president used to give a weekly radio address? The medium of the message is just as important as the message itself.
I also believe AOC would be a nobody if she didn't have a Twitter account. She'd be the same as the other 435 Representatives who release statements on their house.gov website that no one realizes exists.
Edit:
>"I doubt Twitter stops specific accounts from blocking other accounts."
Okay. The whole situation still makes me uncomfortable. I don't particularly think that being a "private company" on the size and scale of Twitter justifies their ability to censor the president.
I think the root problem is that a single private platform has become a de facto public sphere, like, at all. Is there any precedent for this? I also don't know what a solution might look like, I mean, what are you going to do? Nationalize Twitter?
It's a general problem too (IMO): Microsoft/Github mediates FOSS development, Facebook (I'm never going to call them "Meta", I think the rename was a huge dick move by Zuckerberg that pollutes our language and culture. Nyah.) Facebook is Easy-Bake oven Internet for normies and they love it. Smart phones are malls.
> Twitter is [...] a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users
No, it's not.
When a public official uses their Twitter account as an official channel, that account becomes a limited public forum from which users cannot be blocked for reasons that they could not be excluded from official government fora more generally (e.g., viewpoint discrimination is not permitted.) This is not a restriction on Twitter, but on the conduct of government business by public officials that applies wherever and whenever they conduct such business.
> I'm saying it's a de-facto public sphere rather than de-jure one.
“a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users” is a de jure not de facto distinction, unless you are using hyperbolic language for a practical difficulty rather than an actual prohibition.
>As time goes on I am less and less supportive of the notion that private companies can do as they please on the basis that they are private companies.
There is no such notion - private companies have to obey the laws of the land like anyone else.
Platforms like Twitter have the right to ban politicians on the basis of the rights of private property and freedom of speech and association. The same rights that allow restaurants to eject people for "no shoes, no shirt, no service" and allow radio stations and newspapers to choose what and what not to publish, and me to tell Jehovah's Witnesses off. I don't know why this suddenly makes people feel uncomfortable, when these rights, and the ability of private enterprise to exercise them, have been part of the basis of Western liberal democracies for hundreds of years.
The inverse of this would be to give carte-blanche ownership and rights over all property to politicians - including social media platforms, that supersede the rights and desires of the platform owners. That it would be illegal to ban any politician from any private property under any circumstances.
I believe it's a good thing that the President of the United States has no more right to act the fool on Twitter than you or I should. Twitter is not, and should not be, the sole nexus for all global political and cultural communication. It's a microblogging platform, ffs, the only reason it "matters" at all is because one specific paranoiac President didn't trust his own media apparatus.
It's a convenience. It's certainly useful, but it isn't necessary.
>"The inverse of this would be to give carte-blanche ownership and rights over all property to politicians"
Why would the alternative be carte-blanche over all forms of property? The government already forces telephone companies not to discriminate based on speech. Broadcasters must follow restrictions and allow government messages to be played under certain circumstances. The Net Neutrality folks are fighting so that Comcast cannot determine which parts of the internet I am allowed to visit using their service.
What would the harm be in making a law along the lines of "A digital service used primarily for communication with over twenty million members must allow sitting members of congress, the supreme court, the president, and members of the cabinet to disseminate any communication they so desire during their tenure."
The government controls what citizens can do with their private property all the time, and in just about every facet of our lives. I see no harm in making laws depending on the scale of the company.
>Why would the alternative be carte-blanche over all forms of property?
Because the rights of property, free speech and association that apply to social media platforms apply everywhere, so altering those rights for social media platforms also alters them everywhere.
>The government already forces telephone companies not to discriminate based on speech. Broadcasters must follow restrictions and allow government messages to be played under certain circumstances.
Social media platforms are not common carriers. They don't have monopoly over free speech or the dissemination of information, nor has any platform ever claimed to act neutrally. The entire business model of social media is curation and algorithmic recommendation of content - the exact opposite of what a common carrier does.
Also, broadcasters are regulated because broadcast spectrum space is a limited resource. Cable broadcasters, for instance, aren't subject to the same regulations.
>What would the harm be in making a law along the lines of "A digital service used primarily for communication with over twenty million members must allow sitting members of congress, the supreme court, the president, and members of the cabinet to disseminate any communication they so desire during their tenure."
The harm is that the First Amendment prevents the government from abridging the people's freedom of speech, and a fundamental part of freedom of speech is freedom from compelled speech. Forcing all social media platforms which meet some arbitrary (and arbitrarily changeable) limit on membership to carry speech by the government is compelled speech, and an abridgement on freedom of speech, and thus voids, or at least weakens, the First Amendment. Which is a bad thing.
Governments already have their own media infrastructure. Members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President of the US have Twitter accounts (remember, what was banned was Trump's personal account, @POTUS is still perfectly fine.) The solution here is for the government to either comply with the rules set by social media platforms like everyone else, or else create their own platform.
...as an American, I find it strange to see a POTUS feel like the laws have no bearing on him (I am not a fan of ever expanding and oblique "executive privilege"), especially to be given exemptions for behaviors not otherwise allowed by a private entity.
You mean @realDonaldTrump? Gee, I wonder why everyone cannot stop talking, reporting about that person given that they have been 'deplatformed' for over year.
So I never created a Twitter account. Over the years, there are a few people that I liked to read their thoughts on Twitter, so I'd manually go to their wall and read occasionally. They're all verified.
Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediately followed the 4 or 5 people. On the last one, my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number. What? I haven't even tweeted anything yet and only followed verified checkmarked users. And why do I have to supply a phone number to use a web site? So, I just left the account in limbo and went back to what I was doing before - just manually going to individuals walls to read because they're bookmarked.
So then a few months ago, Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue.
As of a few weeks ago, they got rid of the ability to dismiss the modal. The page just locks and you can't scroll unless you sign in.
And that was the last day I used or visited Twitter. I now see 0 ads, will never give up a phone number to join a website, and have nothing but disdain for that company.
I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. At least I was seeing your ads before.
There's also https://fraidyc.at/ which provides a browser extension. It's an easy way to do exactly what the OP was doing and for more than just twitter.
Is there something similar for TikTok, that would simplify the interface, give you notifications for a few channels (if that's the right word), with privacy in mind, and all without the need to register there?
Sadly, your outcome is an outlier. The conversion funnel using those hostile tactics is significantly higher than churn in short term, and that's all that matters for someone's promo packet.
I don't believe Quora does this any more. They used to blur the entire page without a login but they relaxed that a couple of years ago now. I do notice that sometimes extended threads still seem to be behind a login wall but it's seems somewhat sporadic and inconsistent.
The Reddit mobile website might be the worst. Every aspect of it is geared to making it as annoying as possible to use so that you are forced to download their app (or go find a better 3rd party one).
old.reddit.com still works, and the day they disable it is the last day I am a Reddit user (which I have been since the YC days, as an original disaffected digg user)
Not for me, it repeats the same top ~20 posts over and over when I use i.reddit.com
And it's functional like a WAP site in 2001 was functional. It's incredibly barebones to the point of being useless. I reckon Reddit forgot it exists at all.
wait till they IPO. They will need to show growth and will erode away old reddit features, with more nags and modals to switch to the “new experience” — so they can boost ad revenue
The push to open web links in a mobile app has already become a PITA
they already do it in other ways like having certain features unsupported on the old reddit app. old reddit also shows a cookie modal that if you click it takes you to new reddit because it doesn't exist on old reddit
I had this exact same usage pattern and the exact same experience as what you describe. Although I refused to give them my phone number, my resolution and conclusion were also exactly the same as yours.
> my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number.
I have repeatedly heard it said that Twitter does this for every single new account as a matter of course. Twitter wants your phone number, but don’t want you to bounce right at registration.
I would guess it started as a reaction to the many botnets used by companies and countries trying to maximize certain opinions
On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers
Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at registration. Delaying it like this, claiming “suspicious activity” is hard to see any other way than how I described it.
bots can get phone numbers cheap, a cost of doing business. Speculation: Twitter wants your phone number so they can correlate you with existing marketing data so they can target you more effectively.
Twitter has massive data on your interests but collects only minimal information about you vs, say, Facebook which has your name, birthday etc etc. I would also argue that Twitter has BETTER interest data than Facebook b/c you are constantly interacting with thousands of tweets a day across multiple dimensions. Facebook tends to be your family and a couple pages you happened to like.
If they get your phone number, they get all of the available "data in the cloud" about you e.g. income, purchasing preferences etc. Cross reference the interests with that cloud data and you have a very precise target profile to sell to advertisers.
Twitter doesn't have the purest of intentions in harvesting user phone numbers, that's true. But the flip side of this, especially when I see people getting angry about apps that ask for phone number, is that it's not like 1990's or even 2000's anymore where you wanted to keep your phone number private. It's trivial to get a new phone number now and Signal makes it easy. There's also VOIP services like Google Voice (not sure if Twitter allows the use of VOIP numbers, though).
Because even a phone number is not enough to keep out bots.
Some VoIP providers do a PAYG model, so you can choose from any number of phone numbers, regional, local landlines or from mobile numbers for free and only pay when you make a call or answer their answerphone.
Now obviously Twitter will send text messages so you never incur a cost from the VoIP provider.
Don’t you have to seed the PAYG account with a non-zero amount of money to initially get the number? Even a few dollars multiplied out becomes a significant spend if it’s a unique number per bot.
its a cat and mouse game. lately I've found many websites show an error when I put in my Google Voice number for sms verification
I don't know how the implementation works, if theres a way to check for virtual vs. real number, but some sms verification service provider seems to have successfully implemented a filter on Google Voice
If Twitter asked for the phone number at registration, they would have fewer signups due to people opting not to complete their registrations. Delaying the ask for a phone number increases the number of accounts they are able to claim.
The junk calls I ritually get whenever I need to use the app, specifically after about 1 minutes of opening the app while I am reading says otherwise.
Implementing (no opt in) 2FA on sites where that level of security is not really warranted is just a ploy to get data that can be resold in my opinion.
Worked for a CEO that used to require his Customer Service to create new accounts whenever a user would request their account be deleted. You can imagine where the company ended up when the CEO's solution to people wanting to delete their accounts is to replace them with fake ones for the vanity metrics.
I had to make a new MS account to migrate a 2nd minecraft account. The account has only ever been used from the game launcher, and they have the analytics that the account was created for the migration. But apparently there was "suspicious activity" that violates TOS and they auto locked it, and rather than contact the gmail address I used for the account, they demand a phone number.
Tbf, I'm considering just raising this with the authorities, given a lot of relevant authorities, as not everyone migrating an account will be ab adult, and asking for kids phone numbers seems like a GDPR slamdunk.
Wrangling MS accounts for Minecraft is weirdly hellish. I don't know if they're trying to get people to stop using the Java edition, or what. It feels like they don't want your money.
They already have my money, twice, and the second account was after release so "full price".
Its weird because they have to know that hurting Java edition is just stabbing the most evangelical members of the community. The ones that built it up and developed so much of the word of mouth marketing.
I hear you. I'd have already bought two more if buying the first (post-Microsoft-acquisition—family has two from before that already) copy hadn't been been such a pain in the ass.
My alternative isn't switching to the non-Java edition—it's finally getting around to looking into open source clones. I'm riiiiight on the edge of pushing my kids into one of those instead.
Same experience except I discovered that, at least on iOS, browsing in a private window still works to go to an individual user’s feed. It’s just a matter of time before they close that loophole and I too go away. FWIW, I do pay many of the people I manually follow on Twitter, but through substack or PayPal.
This is also how I use Twitter. FYI, it still works for me in incognito mode.
If anyone reading this works at Twitter: WHY are you guys making these changes? I'm far more likely to just never use the service again out of outrage then make an account.
verified account status these days is meaningless. most of the truly interesting, unique thoughts come from accounts that are not. this is of course my own take after having been on the platform since 2010.
Do you know what verified means? It does not mean endorsement or "high quality user". It just means an account claiming to be a real life person is indeed actually that person.
In addition, even when fully logged in, having given a phone number, they censor the search function on the site. Not just the tweets you can post - the search - the tweets that they allow to be posted but you are not allowed to read.
This is abhorrent to me and led to me deleting my account after a dozen years of use and double digit thousands of followers.
If you won't let me read it, don't let it be posted.
I will no longer donate my writing and attention to censorship platforms.
> Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue.
you can no longer dismiss the modal, or in any other way bypass this as of a few days ago. (at least on mobile)
It's almost impossible to sign up for an account with Twitter, Google, or Facebook without divulging your phone number with them and then confirming it. They're at the stage where their growth is scrutinized by investors and partners, and they're desperate to prove that their users have real eyeballs that can see ads. Before that, they had no problem with new accounts maybe being bots because it's good for growth numbers. Now advertisers want to know if real people are seeing their ads, or if just bots are.
Fuck. How much I hate Pinterest for basically being a huge spammer on image search...
Worst part is that when Pinterest launched I even used it for a short while, it was useful for some things (e.g. collecting examples of furniture I'd be eyeing, tattoo motifs inspiration) and over time it just became a huge cluttered unusable mess. And then the spam on image search came and I simply despise Pinterest, ranting about them convinced at least 2 close friends to abandon it as well.
giphy and a couple similar sites are the ones I hate. It's so goddamn hard to get ahold of a gif that's actually a gif, these days. Why does gif search take me to a site that makes it nearly impossible to see a gif? And then doesn't include "duplicates" from other sites that would actually give me a gif.
You can use https://nitter.net, or it's another instance, https://nitter.kavin.rocks/. You can view tweets normally as you do it via official twitter site. Moreover, you can have RSS feeds for twitter profiles (main timeline or timeline with replies).
...and to think that Twitter used to be viewable easily without even JavaScript. Once they blocked that I started using Nitter, but most recently it seems that it's been more intermittent and randomly stops showing tweets.
(I've also never created an account there, and only ever used it in "read-only" mode.)
SAME exact scenario here! Twitter is a pile but its doing a good job doing away with traditional media companies so i hope it doesnt collapse just yet.
I have never created an account either, and eventually added the entire Twitter domain to my uBlock Origin block list the day they booted a certain politician from their platform. Different paths, same destination.
Remember that weird time in 2020 when they were slapping "offensive content" to all tweets from supporters of one specific party while still allowing porn clips without any filter. Yeah, I quit twitter around that time.
He had been under pressure for quite some time and held off for ages. I suspect he saw down the horizon and got out while the getting was at least good-ish.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadDoesn't seem like that as their competitors that have sprung up are solely from conservatives being banned.
Banning smoking !== banning dissenters, your analogy has a false equivalency for multiple reasons, I wouldn't use them for debates if I were you, just teaching.
- edit because of post limit -
@cheriot: Enough users for you to know about them. Competition starts somewhere. But yes I agree Twitter has a monopoly right now, my point is that monopoly is cracking due to censorship.
@ketzo: So you know of their future competitors? That's a start. Maybe Twitter's monopoly will be dethroned one day. Conservatives make up nearly half of the US, I'd say it's a good guess.
@ribosometronome: HN and Twitter are two different entities. Twitter is used as the defacto communication medium to interact w/ official government accounts, corporations, etc. It's supposed to be for all. Hacker News is a small news aggregator and discussion community.
@shrimp_emoji: har har har JS is bad amirite guys?!
@JaimeThompson: guess conservatives are mad for no reason I guess, they are imagining being banned. Maybe if Twitter had open mod logs we'd know for sure, but there's plenty of prominent people that were banned.
Seems like a big reach, bordering on disingenuous, to attribute Twitter user growth/revenue slowdown to conservatives mad about being “unfairly censored”. Twitter
Lots and lots of conservatives on Twitter so can you give examples of those who got banned simply for being conservative?
Are you talking about their clones, like Parler and Gab? They’re fulfilling their role fine as a platform for a niche user base, but they have no shot at competing with Twitter.
Youtube = long form video clips, how to / knowledge resource
TikTok = short form video clips, successor to vine
Snapchat = direct video messages, ephemeral talking
Facebook = contact book, classifieds
Instagram = living photo album
LinkedIn = living resume
Pinterest = living recipe / idea book
GitHub = living portfolio, giant forum of repos
Twitter = communication medium, broadcasts
The main FUTURE competitor to Twitter I think is Mastodon. Gab, Truth Social, and a few other services are built upon it. Eventually when a platform comes along with the interface and the will of the people generates a network effect like MySpace to Facebook, Twitter will be done.
If you repeatedly smoked in a restaurant even after being told no, the next time you won’t be allowed in.
That’s exactly what Twitter does. If you keep breaking their rules they ban you.
I realize iOS users are not the majority, but it's likely that they are more valuable for advertisers and therefore could generate more revenue.
edit: as noted below, this was in the article — I had done a search for "FB" and didn't see there was another reference to Apple that was upstream from where I landed.
> The company said the impact from privacy changes by Apple Inc (AAPL.O) remained modest. Last year, Apple began requiring apps to receive permission from iOS users to track their activity on apps and websites owned by other companies.
> The Apple changes could impact Twitter in the future as it grows its performance advertising business, Segal said, referring to ads that seek to drive sales or other consumer actions. He said Twitter is working to mitigate future negative impacts from Apple's changes.
The overall conclusion seems to be the same as with Meta last week: It's going well, but not as well as predicted. The slower than expected growth is only a problem, because the stock market likes predictability and will punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future.
But if you look at a company that is always in the red with no plan to become profitable, the question becomes:
- how is this a business?
- where is money coming from?
- why is money still coming?
Twitter seems to be mostly profitable in the past few years.
Among other things, we resell hardware and software. The basic idea is that customers can get a Dell, or Oracle server and a license for an Oracle database from us, when buying hosting. This saves them the trouble of dealing with multiple suppliers. The hardware and software business is just sort of a side thing, but we can generate crazy amounts of revenue by losing money on hardware. The idea is that we make the money back longterm on hosting. We never use revenue as a meaningful KPI, because we know that some years it will be inflated like crazy by hardware or software sales (which aren't profitable).
So I don't really see revenue as useful figure either, not without also knowing if you're profitable.
No single number tells any story on its own. You can have $1T revenue tomorrow. Just sell $10 bills for $1.
Net income would be negative. Aka profit.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/netincome.asp
If you sold 2 $10 bills and received $2 in exchange, your revenue is $2, your cost of goods sold is $20, and your net income or profit is -$18.
If you keep losing money, you eventually run out.
All five of the Big Tech companies were profitable before they went public. Even Amazon had positive margins and they were plowing money back in to the business. Most of the former unicorns don’t have positive margins.
“Growth” is okay if your funneling profits back into your business. But see DoorDash. How do you not money delivering food when everyone is afraid to leave their house like in 2020?
It’s not about growth, it’s about attrition. Every VC is hoping that they can pawn their money losing investments off to a gullible public.
If you're calculating the present value of future profits and the rate of increase in profits declines then the present value can swing wildly. That's not "punishment". It's the market self correcting.
https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-would-have-posted-1-8-b...
The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays, the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics all related to that person.
And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account.
And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
I changed my trends location to Tokyo on someone's recommendation, and it's been a great workaround. I don't speak Japanese, so it's the same as 'hiding' the trends to my brain.
(I think the way to do this is 'Explore' -> gear icon, at least on desktop.)
But also, in terms of non-politics, I am so tired of seeing "JUST ANNOUNCED".
If the Democratic Party is paying him to tweet really well, can trending topics by him be the result of coincidence or organic participation?
(Incidentally, this is more broadly my problem with the default-public nature of Twitter).
I just wonder at what phase of growth-and-bust the networks will start to care a bit more about serving the demands of their eyeballs.
You have to aggresively curate your For You page constantly to stop TikTok from throwing a bombastic opinion piece at you
As you regularly hear people say about TikTok.. "ive never seen that on my FYP". I think honestly you react in a certain way to the opinion pieces dude. Do you comment on them? Share them? Linger? Just scroll on and leave it alone...
twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"]
twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]
It won't stop your likes from showing on their feeds, however.
Has anyone been on Twitter? Bots, spam, etc.
During a gold rush, sell shovels.
While we're here, take another pro-tip: Set yourself up with an RSS/Atom reader and "Follow" accounts you are interested in through Nitter. No account, no random "We thought you might like", and no ads, just posts and retweets from the accounts you're interested in.
Unfortunately I'm not going to read another country's laws to see if this is actually the case.
You can easily make a private account.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
You can sign up here: https://mastodon.social/about
(Solving the "critical mass of users" problem is left as an exercise to the user.)
I think Twitter is easier for the mass public to join. Go to Twitter.com, put username and password, verify phone number. Done! The screens are cleaner and very intuitive.
For mastodon, there's more text and messaging about the differences regarding Twitter, what's the Fediverse, instance rules. So you just landed on the main screen and you have to think about choosing an instance with different number of people, different rules.
After you are in, you can't search!! You can only search usernames or hashtags, but that is REALLY cumbersome and ineffective since people don't write "This is my #Twilight #book #review #bookreview URL". If you are not tech/privacy focused, the trending tags are usually not interesting, apart from #caturday I guess?.
Even after you are able to follow people, you can't quote-retweet (which is a pro AND a con), and even "retweeting" is cumbersome if you are on someone's profile from another instance.
Sharing is also more cumbersome since there's no bookmarklet or chrome extension that I could find, and sites don't have a "share on mastodon" link. The solution was to enable a cross-poster, so I just keep posting on Twitter.
About instances: on some main instances, speed is ok, but try to follow some pic focused profiles on smaller instances. It can take like 5~10 seconds for an image to load. And now on the iPhone official app, I can't seem to be able to download pictures anymore, and the option to bookmark a post (not like) is not there, only on the web-mobile version.
To answer "How to solve that problem?", I'd say don't worry a damn thing about Joe Public.
I read an interesting point somewhere: empirically, platforms can change an innovate far faster than protocols. The example given was encryption: email doesn't have it, even though people have been talking about it for literally decades, but WhatsApp added it in a relatively short time (a year? less?).
It makes sense. With a protocol, once it gets popular, change becomes really hard. It's like herding cats to get everyone to update, so things stagnate at the lowest common denominator for interoperability reasons. When all the software and installs are controlled by one entity, that entity can make a decision to change and just execute it, no herding needed.
There is some truth to the classic HN post that "Twitter can be built in a weekend". A service / protocol that can distribute 280 character messages isn't really where the value is for a service like Twitter. It's 20% engineering, 80% recruiting the right users, retaining them, and getting them to engage on the platform.
Additionally, open protocols are way harder to evolve and are therefore less competitive with closed services. The only reason why email has stuck around as long as it has is because it locked everyone in with its network effect before commercial players figured out how to compete.
Additionally, email isn't really an open protocol in practice. Sure, it's spec'd, but in order to actually participate in the network you need to navigate a really complicated system of anti-spam reputation systems. This is why people just end up paying companies like Twilio to send email instead of running their own servers.
Overall, I don't think we should be looking to learn any lessons from email. It achieved market dominance in a time that doesn't look anything like the modern era, and is much more complex than most people realize.
This is straight up denialist and hyperbolic FUD. There's a healthy and vibrant ecosystem surrounding the federated social web, which has been a thing since 2008 or so.
Also, I would argue that email's staying power isn't quite backed by the answer you gave ("it locked everyone in with its network effect") but more along the lines that it survived the Lindy effect (the great thing about this is that it's not going to its grave as a technology anytime soon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Yes, there are people using federated social products but the growth rate is low and so are the absolute numbers. If growth were good, we would see VC backed startups trying to profit off of it. Why do you think that is?
So they're a growth stock, but really they're a dividend stock?
They are both bad, but in very different ways.
I’m not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically dividing the culture.
I really don’t think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I may be wrong.
It's a really basic algorithm that captures the equivalent of groupthink.
Twitter should learn from Tiktok and Spotify. Their algorithms work very differently.
Spotify has allowed me to discover some great songs just by creating a Song Radio from a song I liked. And it has also broadened the genres I listed. And spending 5 minutes on Tiktok's For You Page can help me feel better after a stressful day.
On the other hand 5 minutes on Twitter can easily lead to more stress in my case.
I feel like this "we" is misplaced. In a broad sense, yes, these acerbic tweets are indeed being made by our fellow citizens. That being said, Twitter tends to amplify the messaging of a small and vocal segment of it's vast userbase. It's a vicious cycle because exposure begets exposure and anger begets engagement.
Twitter doesn't synthesise things, but it fosters an environment where people are driven to write more controversial, outrageous, engaging things by tight-loop-feedback classical conditioning. It's not magic – the people posting such things are partly to blame – but Twitter wouldn't have half as many problems if it just showed random tweets to people. Instead, it shows people what it thinks will keep people on Twitter; short term, that works, but long-term it destroys Twitter's value (and value of everything Twitter touches, as a side effect).
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
A medium of communication is not neutral. A book is not just word of mouth stories written down. There is a feedback loop in there that a book becomes something entirely different.
I mean if we take things to extremes and make a platform that we can only communicate with 4 letter words, what words do you think are going to dominate engagement and take over the platform?
On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
When in doubt, follow the money.
To me, it feels like a small library of really cool books but the library happens to be housed randomly inside of a giant lunatic asylum.
Definitely. It's really one of the few sites I block using my hosts file when I get a new computer.
Some stories are completely missed, due to not being Twitter friendly (to many words, hard to boil down to a tweet). Other non-stories are blow out of proportions because it was big on Twitter, even if no one outside Twitter cares.
Trump was banned from Twitter first. Any one with mildly right wing opinion is insta-banned from twitter. Blue checkmarks are strongly tied to institutional approval and fringe institutional voices are given a megaphone.
Twitter perpetuates the current class system. So those in power have no qualms with it.
You think the elite all think the same? No they have their political differences. But you don't have to cry for him the GOP has its own media empire.
Phrases like 'Nouveau Riche' or 'Paise aaye, par aukaad nahi aaye' (money without class) have existed in different cultures for centuries. This is not a new concept.
I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
All services would be better if they were more like Google+ (but didn't share name with a despised effort to crush pseudonyms and wasn't owned by a company that buried it as soon as they had been forced to iron out the wrinkles ;-)
Opt in would be nice, I am sure high follower people would rather go to the effort of categorising their tweets rather than losing followers when they decide to Tweet about their local sports.
You're really better off with traditional thread-based forums to have conversation topics. Muting somebody's entire existence just because they occasionally dirty the general feed with 'offtopic' just doesn't seem like a sustainable way to use social media.
It’s nothing personal for me not to follow someone, so I don’t really see it as muting their whole existence.
Curious if anything has gotten better on that front.
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api
- Spaces have successfully siphoned users out of Clubhouse - Audio ads could be next - The crypto integration they've done is just the tip of the iceberg
As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook.
As far as "is Twitter a good product" - apart from complaints that people talk about politics on the app, I don't see anything substantial in the complaints here.
Twitter looks under-priced if you count its recent acquisitions from Quill, Sphere, Revue and it's intention to focus on the so-called 'web3'. Lots of ways to grow in those areas if they are smart enough.
Maybe they should try something more person like where people pay a certain amount of money to get exclusive content from the people they follow. Can't think of any other way I would pay for micro-blogging.
I don't know what 'the solution' is, but I do sense a precedent being established that I am weary of. Twitter is simultaneously a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users, but also a private platform where they can be ejected at-will.
I do not know what public sphere means, but I doubt Twitter stops specific accounts from blocking other accounts. I do not see why that is relevant either.
The president of the United States, of all people, has the capability to put an RSS feed on Whitehouse.gov or the president’s personal website anytime they want.
I also believe AOC would be a nobody if she didn't have a Twitter account. She'd be the same as the other 435 Representatives who release statements on their house.gov website that no one realizes exists.
Edit: >"I doubt Twitter stops specific accounts from blocking other accounts."
This was actually a court ruling. I have no clue if Twitter actually coded this requirement on @realDonaldTrump after the fact. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/trump-can-t-block-users-his...
It's a general problem too (IMO): Microsoft/Github mediates FOSS development, Facebook (I'm never going to call them "Meta", I think the rename was a huge dick move by Zuckerberg that pollutes our language and culture. Nyah.) Facebook is Easy-Bake oven Internet for normies and they love it. Smart phones are malls.
No, it's not.
When a public official uses their Twitter account as an official channel, that account becomes a limited public forum from which users cannot be blocked for reasons that they could not be excluded from official government fora more generally (e.g., viewpoint discrimination is not permitted.) This is not a restriction on Twitter, but on the conduct of government business by public officials that applies wherever and whenever they conduct such business.
“a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users” is a de jure not de facto distinction, unless you are using hyperbolic language for a practical difficulty rather than an actual prohibition.
There is no such notion - private companies have to obey the laws of the land like anyone else.
Platforms like Twitter have the right to ban politicians on the basis of the rights of private property and freedom of speech and association. The same rights that allow restaurants to eject people for "no shoes, no shirt, no service" and allow radio stations and newspapers to choose what and what not to publish, and me to tell Jehovah's Witnesses off. I don't know why this suddenly makes people feel uncomfortable, when these rights, and the ability of private enterprise to exercise them, have been part of the basis of Western liberal democracies for hundreds of years.
The inverse of this would be to give carte-blanche ownership and rights over all property to politicians - including social media platforms, that supersede the rights and desires of the platform owners. That it would be illegal to ban any politician from any private property under any circumstances.
I believe it's a good thing that the President of the United States has no more right to act the fool on Twitter than you or I should. Twitter is not, and should not be, the sole nexus for all global political and cultural communication. It's a microblogging platform, ffs, the only reason it "matters" at all is because one specific paranoiac President didn't trust his own media apparatus.
It's a convenience. It's certainly useful, but it isn't necessary.
Why would the alternative be carte-blanche over all forms of property? The government already forces telephone companies not to discriminate based on speech. Broadcasters must follow restrictions and allow government messages to be played under certain circumstances. The Net Neutrality folks are fighting so that Comcast cannot determine which parts of the internet I am allowed to visit using their service.
What would the harm be in making a law along the lines of "A digital service used primarily for communication with over twenty million members must allow sitting members of congress, the supreme court, the president, and members of the cabinet to disseminate any communication they so desire during their tenure."
The government controls what citizens can do with their private property all the time, and in just about every facet of our lives. I see no harm in making laws depending on the scale of the company.
Because the rights of property, free speech and association that apply to social media platforms apply everywhere, so altering those rights for social media platforms also alters them everywhere.
>The government already forces telephone companies not to discriminate based on speech. Broadcasters must follow restrictions and allow government messages to be played under certain circumstances.
Social media platforms are not common carriers. They don't have monopoly over free speech or the dissemination of information, nor has any platform ever claimed to act neutrally. The entire business model of social media is curation and algorithmic recommendation of content - the exact opposite of what a common carrier does.
Also, broadcasters are regulated because broadcast spectrum space is a limited resource. Cable broadcasters, for instance, aren't subject to the same regulations.
>What would the harm be in making a law along the lines of "A digital service used primarily for communication with over twenty million members must allow sitting members of congress, the supreme court, the president, and members of the cabinet to disseminate any communication they so desire during their tenure."
The harm is that the First Amendment prevents the government from abridging the people's freedom of speech, and a fundamental part of freedom of speech is freedom from compelled speech. Forcing all social media platforms which meet some arbitrary (and arbitrarily changeable) limit on membership to carry speech by the government is compelled speech, and an abridgement on freedom of speech, and thus voids, or at least weakens, the First Amendment. Which is a bad thing.
Governments already have their own media infrastructure. Members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President of the US have Twitter accounts (remember, what was banned was Trump's personal account, @POTUS is still perfectly fine.) The solution here is for the government to either comply with the rules set by social media platforms like everyone else, or else create their own platform.
Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediately followed the 4 or 5 people. On the last one, my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number. What? I haven't even tweeted anything yet and only followed verified checkmarked users. And why do I have to supply a phone number to use a web site? So, I just left the account in limbo and went back to what I was doing before - just manually going to individuals walls to read because they're bookmarked.
So then a few months ago, Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue.
As of a few weeks ago, they got rid of the ability to dismiss the modal. The page just locks and you can't scroll unless you sign in.
And that was the last day I used or visited Twitter. I now see 0 ads, will never give up a phone number to join a website, and have nothing but disdain for that company.
I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. At least I was seeing your ads before.
Thus triggering the headline "missed user growth estimates".
Instagram pulled that same crap a couple of years back, and I haven't visited since.
[0] https://nitter.net/
I think Instagram and/or Pintrest often require you to log in before letting you see even the first picture you click on.
And it's functional like a WAP site in 2001 was functional. It's incredibly barebones to the point of being useless. I reckon Reddit forgot it exists at all.
The push to open web links in a mobile app has already become a PITA
I did the exact same thing for Instagram. I never post or like anything.
I have repeatedly heard it said that Twitter does this for every single new account as a matter of course. Twitter wants your phone number, but don’t want you to bounce right at registration.
On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers
Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at registration. Delaying it like this, claiming “suspicious activity” is hard to see any other way than how I described it.
Twitter has massive data on your interests but collects only minimal information about you vs, say, Facebook which has your name, birthday etc etc. I would also argue that Twitter has BETTER interest data than Facebook b/c you are constantly interacting with thousands of tweets a day across multiple dimensions. Facebook tends to be your family and a couple pages you happened to like.
If they get your phone number, they get all of the available "data in the cloud" about you e.g. income, purchasing preferences etc. Cross reference the interests with that cloud data and you have a very precise target profile to sell to advertisers.
Some VoIP providers do a PAYG model, so you can choose from any number of phone numbers, regional, local landlines or from mobile numbers for free and only pay when you make a call or answer their answerphone.
Now obviously Twitter will send text messages so you never incur a cost from the VoIP provider.
So how does a phone number solve bot activity?
I don't know how the implementation works, if theres a way to check for virtual vs. real number, but some sms verification service provider seems to have successfully implemented a filter on Google Voice
Implementing (no opt in) 2FA on sites where that level of security is not really warranted is just a ploy to get data that can be resold in my opinion.
Instead, they end up filling their database with countless unused accounts created by those who gave up?
I had to make a new MS account to migrate a 2nd minecraft account. The account has only ever been used from the game launcher, and they have the analytics that the account was created for the migration. But apparently there was "suspicious activity" that violates TOS and they auto locked it, and rather than contact the gmail address I used for the account, they demand a phone number.
Tbf, I'm considering just raising this with the authorities, given a lot of relevant authorities, as not everyone migrating an account will be ab adult, and asking for kids phone numbers seems like a GDPR slamdunk.
Its weird because they have to know that hurting Java edition is just stabbing the most evangelical members of the community. The ones that built it up and developed so much of the word of mouth marketing.
My alternative isn't switching to the non-Java edition—it's finally getting around to looking into open source clones. I'm riiiiight on the edge of pushing my kids into one of those instead.
If anyone reading this works at Twitter: WHY are you guys making these changes? I'm far more likely to just never use the service again out of outrage then make an account.
This is abhorrent to me and led to me deleting my account after a dozen years of use and double digit thousands of followers.
If you won't let me read it, don't let it be posted.
I will no longer donate my writing and attention to censorship platforms.
you can no longer dismiss the modal, or in any other way bypass this as of a few days ago. (at least on mobile)
Pinterest images in Google image search results would like to have a word with you.
Worst part is that when Pinterest launched I even used it for a short while, it was useful for some things (e.g. collecting examples of furniture I'd be eyeing, tattoo motifs inspiration) and over time it just became a huge cluttered unusable mess. And then the spam on image search came and I simply despise Pinterest, ranting about them convinced at least 2 close friends to abandon it as well.
The latter give me longer annoyance displayed.
As of you account deactivation maybe twitter think you are a bot scanning an account.
(I've also never created an account there, and only ever used it in "read-only" mode.)
And what did it get them? Billions USD from Microsoft.
So dark patterns work.
Remember that weird time in 2020 when they were slapping "offensive content" to all tweets from supporters of one specific party while still allowing porn clips without any filter. Yeah, I quit twitter around that time.