Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit.
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time.
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.
Care to share which of pg's tweets you found powerful? I would say that when pg has something to say, he takes to his blog. I dont think his tweets are within an order of magnitude as valuable as his blog. And for that reason I don't agree with your assessment of Twitter.
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
I agree with this, Twitter is still the best place for celebrities to interact with their fans. Elon Musk for example has unveiled more than a few of his ideas and dropped details of his products on Twitter instead of anywhere else.
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
I don't have a Twitter account, so the only way I see it is if something gets reposted on my FB feed or some other media outlet. Which generally means someone notable and/or famous for some reason. Personally, I'm okay with this level of filtering.
Twitter is only useful because "normal" media makes news about notable tweets.
I surely don't get my information from twitter. Would seem silly to get all my information (or "important" information from "powerful" people) from a hundred character sound bites.
Instagram has notionally the same dynamic as twitter but somehow they do a lot better at convincing their eye balls that they are welcome on the platform and have a voice. Or at least it seems to me.
I share the same feeling when using Twitter with a following mainly consisting of friends. If the sole purpose was to communicate with friends, why do so publicly on Twitter?
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
It's basically a publishing system. On Twitter I generally put only professional broadcasting related items for 90% of the content. Blog posts, that kind've thing. I rarely even read it.
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.
This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment.
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
I don't use twitter so if I'm wrong about this, I stand by to be corrected, but with twitter, I thought you can only reach people who have already chosen to listen to you.
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
Anyone have any thoughts on turning Twitter into a publicly funded utility? It's fraught with difficulties, and maybe unconstitutional, but as you say Twitter is an extremely powerful tool and it would be a tragedy to lose it just because it can't find a way to extract money from its users.
I've never seen a company in such an advantageous market position as Twitter, do so little with so many employees. They benefit from so much free advertising through self-promotion where people proudly display their twitter handle on TV or at the end of news stories and articles yet they're still unable to achieve any growth or noticeably improve their product.
From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.
Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.
I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.
2) Charge developers for API access based on usage.
3) Incorporate some sort of single payment solution to facilitate ease of charging users for payment without users needing to give credit card details to developers (e.g. like Apple does with the AppStore).
4) Let third party developers worry about how to get users to pay by providing things of value (for various definitions of value).
Twitter's operating expenses are on par with Tesla's. Not to diminish how hard it is to manage Twitter's load but their spending is way out of proportion. And their revenue is on the order of 2 bn/year; there's no fundamental reason they can't be profitable.
I really like(d) Twitter. I feel it has played a huge role in democratizing public opinion, so that I don't just create my opinion based on what media houses throw at me. For me, it narrowed the gap between so called "celebrities" and normal people. It made possible for me to interact with and get insights from people whose work I care about.
I feel so bad about the poor execution on their product side. They get free marketing - they are all over the tv, news websites etc. So many popular people use Twitter to share information. What more can they ask for?
There are so many things that Twitter could've done first just because it was in a position to like no-one else:
1. Media sharing: absolutely ridiculous experience to the point that people share images/video on some other platform and end up posting the links in tweets. Even then, for an consuming user, the browsing experience is shit. WTF twitter?
2. Content sharing: twitter as a platform has way more relevant content (URI's, first person messages etc) than any other news/media platform. What do they do with it? They do nothing. Twitter can learn so much about my interests from so many signals that I (used to!) give them - they do nothing to help me read content that interests me.
3. Live: there is no better place than twitter to potentially learn about what's happening right now. How do they facilitate live content sharing? By having a completely different app for video (periscope) which creates a fragmented user experience.
4. Fun: they had vine - they kept it as a separate app (again creating fragmentation) and eventually killed it. How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
5. Spam: for all the attention that fake news is getting right now, Twitter has been in a unique position to innovate in this area. Unfortunately, afaik, it has done nothing.
| Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.
| The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
| Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.
What Twitter should do is extraordinarily obvious.
They should get very lean. Their platform has real value, which is why they're not disappearing in terms of use. There is also no replacement for what they provide and how they provide it, as of now.
At $2.4 - $2.6 billion in annual sales, they should be generating $600 to $800 million in net income. It's an absurdity of mismanagement that they're not. Their margins should be extremely high. At that level of net income, they can sustain a ~$20 billion market valuation and remain fully self-sustaining while they focus on growth + product.
They built Twitter as if it was going to be a juggernaut with high perpetual growth. They've been scaling back that structure very slowly, which is a mistake. They need to pull the band-aid off a lot faster, the crazy growth days are over.
If Wall Street doesn't give them a reasonable multiple on their new highly profitable structure, they should then work with perhaps a Ballmer + private equity + other insiders, to take Twitter private, where it can get out from under the Wall Street quarterly rat race.
Given the choice between believing stock analysts and stock prices, I err on the side of believing the price.
The price is set by people betting their money based on all available information INCLUDING stock analyst opinions. Any stock analyst's opinions are ALREADY factored in the price. Unless you have a reason to believe either that the market is irrational or that you have a more informed opinion, there is no more reliable prediction that you can make of future stock prices than current ones.
And remember, there are many, many, many billions of dollars looking for any market irrationality or lack of information so that investors can profit off of mistakes in current stock prices.
at what point do we all wake up from the momentary lapse of reason and admit that Twitter is not a good idea? it's not a good way to communicate (unless propaganda and vicious harrassment is what you're going for). it's not a good way to make money. it's not a good way to advertise. it's not good for anything really.
I think Twitter's business model should be to charge users based on the number of followers they have. Give them a free threshold of say 10K followers, and then charge them a fee after that. Users clearly benefit, and often profit, from their large follower base. Twitter should profit from it too.
Twitter is the perfect case of a technology company that should have never gone public. They should have followed their valley peers with inflated valuations and no actual business and take private equity and foreign investment. Wall Street calls bullshit when they see it, and smart people short these types of companies. Silicon Valley doesn't provide a way to short these propped-up companies, they just continue to self-promote themselves on private equity and foreign investment. Wall Street is the most perfect market in the world.
Twitter is useful, but needs to be smaller as a business. If they focus on their core business, tweets, and get rid of at least half the employees, they'll be profitable. They just have to accept that they're no longer a growth company.
Between the censorship, the "banning people for reporting child porn" thing, and the lack of new products and features (what are they spending so much money on, they spend as much as Tesla for crying out loud!) I think it's well deserved scorn from Wall Street.
> When analysts start to throw in the towel on a company, that is not a good sign.
I've been led to believe that is the exact opposite of the truth. Isn't the consensus most bullish at the top and most bearish at the bottom? Its almost self evident that a stock is most hated when it is low and most liked when it is high. That's not to say that it can't go lower and so from a short term trading perspective it might not be good, but at some point the sellers will be exhausted and shorts will have to be covered and the trend will reverse. Unless Twitter they are so broke that they are going out of business, at some point it will become a good buy.
Lofty valuations are based on expectations of a lot of growth in subs and $/sub.
Even though they have a lot of users and some $/sub - without the growth it won't justify the valuation multiple.
So they have to get priced more like a normal company, with normal growth rates.
Which is the 'bubble burst' that so many post-IPO companies have to face. There's a few that can keep it going, or make up for it in other ways ... but not Twitter.
I feel Snap may be in the same category: their offer at least today is somewhat nichy. My mother uses Facebook, but will never use Snapchat as it is today.
[+] [-] the_economist|9 years ago|reply
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
[+] [-] mtw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teej|9 years ago|reply
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
[+] [-] wslh|9 years ago|reply
Which means that different people in different communities choose different communication tools for reasons that are not obvious.
[+] [-] jeron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|9 years ago|reply
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...
[+] [-] Finnucane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|9 years ago|reply
Trump doesn't do Snapchat videos. He does 3AM tweets.
[+] [-] kisstheblade|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genericpseudo|9 years ago|reply
It's always been the fluff which drew the ads; the lifestyle and sports content.
[+] [-] acveilleux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boobsbr|9 years ago|reply
My sentiment as well, why I never got into Twitter at all.
[+] [-] creativityland|9 years ago|reply
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
[+] [-] dhimes|9 years ago|reply
Wow. I didn't even know he tweeted.
[+] [-] brightball|9 years ago|reply
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
[+] [-] camus2|9 years ago|reply
There is no discussion possible on Twitter, as the "threads" quickly devolve into an unintelligible mess.
You say something to the public, then you're done. It's purely a channel for viral marketing (also called "push", that word says it all).
[+] [-] wodenokoto|9 years ago|reply
Last I heard numbers, it was something like 80% of the population checked Facebook at least once a week.
Here most politicians and other "influential people" will take to Facebook when they want to be heard.
[+] [-] Pxtl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iak8god|9 years ago|reply
The President of the United States, for instance.
[+] [-] joeblau|9 years ago|reply
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
[+] [-] mfukar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
It's an amazing way to connect, but ultimately it's a loudspeaker for loudmouths. It needs to die.
[+] [-] martin-adams|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|9 years ago|reply
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
[+] [-] coldpie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarr11|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dglass|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hizanberg|9 years ago|reply
From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.
Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.
I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.
[+] [-] eliben|9 years ago|reply
I thought that the immutability of tweets is a feature, to be honest.
[+] [-] ilogik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imron|9 years ago|reply
2) Charge developers for API access based on usage.
3) Incorporate some sort of single payment solution to facilitate ease of charging users for payment without users needing to give credit card details to developers (e.g. like Apple does with the AppStore).
4) Let third party developers worry about how to get users to pay by providing things of value (for various definitions of value).
You're welcome.
[+] [-] pmcollins|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousfiddler|9 years ago|reply
I really like(d) Twitter. I feel it has played a huge role in democratizing public opinion, so that I don't just create my opinion based on what media houses throw at me. For me, it narrowed the gap between so called "celebrities" and normal people. It made possible for me to interact with and get insights from people whose work I care about.
I feel so bad about the poor execution on their product side. They get free marketing - they are all over the tv, news websites etc. So many popular people use Twitter to share information. What more can they ask for?
There are so many things that Twitter could've done first just because it was in a position to like no-one else:
1. Media sharing: absolutely ridiculous experience to the point that people share images/video on some other platform and end up posting the links in tweets. Even then, for an consuming user, the browsing experience is shit. WTF twitter?
2. Content sharing: twitter as a platform has way more relevant content (URI's, first person messages etc) than any other news/media platform. What do they do with it? They do nothing. Twitter can learn so much about my interests from so many signals that I (used to!) give them - they do nothing to help me read content that interests me.
3. Live: there is no better place than twitter to potentially learn about what's happening right now. How do they facilitate live content sharing? By having a completely different app for video (periscope) which creates a fragmented user experience.
4. Fun: they had vine - they kept it as a separate app (again creating fragmentation) and eventually killed it. How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
5. Spam: for all the attention that fake news is getting right now, Twitter has been in a unique position to innovate in this area. Unfortunately, afaik, it has done nothing.
</rant>
[+] [-] s_dev|9 years ago|reply
| The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
| Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.
- paul graham 09'
[+] [-] adventured|9 years ago|reply
They should get very lean. Their platform has real value, which is why they're not disappearing in terms of use. There is also no replacement for what they provide and how they provide it, as of now.
At $2.4 - $2.6 billion in annual sales, they should be generating $600 to $800 million in net income. It's an absurdity of mismanagement that they're not. Their margins should be extremely high. At that level of net income, they can sustain a ~$20 billion market valuation and remain fully self-sustaining while they focus on growth + product.
They built Twitter as if it was going to be a juggernaut with high perpetual growth. They've been scaling back that structure very slowly, which is a mistake. They need to pull the band-aid off a lot faster, the crazy growth days are over.
If Wall Street doesn't give them a reasonable multiple on their new highly profitable structure, they should then work with perhaps a Ballmer + private equity + other insiders, to take Twitter private, where it can get out from under the Wall Street quarterly rat race.
[+] [-] btilly|9 years ago|reply
The price is set by people betting their money based on all available information INCLUDING stock analyst opinions. Any stock analyst's opinions are ALREADY factored in the price. Unless you have a reason to believe either that the market is irrational or that you have a more informed opinion, there is no more reliable prediction that you can make of future stock prices than current ones.
And remember, there are many, many, many billions of dollars looking for any market irrationality or lack of information so that investors can profit off of mistakes in current stock prices.
[+] [-] metaphorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baron816|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drops|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nodesocket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 234dd57d2c8dba|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcg1|9 years ago|reply
I've been led to believe that is the exact opposite of the truth. Isn't the consensus most bullish at the top and most bearish at the bottom? Its almost self evident that a stock is most hated when it is low and most liked when it is high. That's not to say that it can't go lower and so from a short term trading perspective it might not be good, but at some point the sellers will be exhausted and shorts will have to be covered and the trend will reverse. Unless Twitter they are so broke that they are going out of business, at some point it will become a good buy.
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
Even though they have a lot of users and some $/sub - without the growth it won't justify the valuation multiple.
So they have to get priced more like a normal company, with normal growth rates.
Which is the 'bubble burst' that so many post-IPO companies have to face. There's a few that can keep it going, or make up for it in other ways ... but not Twitter.
I feel Snap may be in the same category: their offer at least today is somewhat nichy. My mother uses Facebook, but will never use Snapchat as it is today.
[+] [-] maverick_iceman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoinevg|9 years ago|reply
Given Twitter's utility to the rich, famous and powerful why not introduce a follower limit of say 1000?
If you want to allow more people than that to follow you then Twitter will sell you an increase in that limit.
[+] [-] bekman|9 years ago|reply