Anyone still actually having a good time on this service?
Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers.
I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" checkbox in settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and politics from elsewhere.
Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly.
Edit - Mass replying to the careful follow question:
I already choose who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it's really tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're all people who actually do things outside of comment online.
To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst (Political hot takes).
I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it.
Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.
Selection criteria I use:
- don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day
- sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam
- select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")
Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):
Best knowledge-exchange platform for tech-people I've seen so far. With some careful selection of who to follow it even has an ok signal-to-noise ratio. Every single feature Twitter has implemented in the past few years made it worse for this type of audience though.
For me it's basically an RSS feed with comments. Very valuable for learning about and keeping up to date with narrow industry news/trends.
Also a good way to connect with people professionally, but less formally than LinkedIn.
The major downside is that is that a tight group or individual can get put on blast to the whole of twitter, and then just get ignorant vitriol thrown at them and that kind of ruins the whole experience. Happened to me not long ago. Not that big of a deal in the end. Just take a week off and come back and the hive will have found something else to attack. The Twitter universe has a pretty short attention span - even if it has a long memory.
You just need to be brutal about pruning. Someone retweets politics twice in a row? Mute retweets from them. Someone posts more politics than things you want to read? Unfollow.
My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.
I haven't been able to use Twitter since the election.
I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook.
People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again.
I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.
I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes.
I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)
I think you have to pick who you follow better to get at the good content on Twitter. Whether it's Weird Twitter or just following a bunch of artists (SFW or even NSFW) there's plenty of content out there on Twitter.
I think the problem Twitter has is two fold. It wants people to come and stay on Twitter but it also wants those same people not fight with each other. The solution the developers picked was shadow banning. This banning where the user isn't aware that their tweets aren't visible to others who don't follow you and those who do follow you won't be notified of your tweets either (they only see them on their time line). The most common way this happens right now is someone uses of well known curse words. Right now, I'm shadow banned for whatever reason despite not tweeting at verified accounts often enough to run afoul their automated system. So this is the climate that new users experience where Twitter promises to help them engage with other users (especially verified users of notably celebrities and the like) but if you do anything vaguely hostile in their view then you lose the freedom to interact with anyone even those who follow you mutually. All I can say is that's probably a major contributing factor in the decline of Twitter at present. They just refuse to hire moderators to do proper moderation and to make the rules for banning or shadow banning clear and objective. Basically, it's what happens when you let technophiles try to solve a non-technological problem.
Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17
While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.
You should start muting people who talk politics and Twitter also allows you to block tweets containing keywords/phrases[0]. Honestly, I've started to enjoy Twitter so much more now that my feed is void of politics and sexism/sjw arguments.
Follow people that only tweet about stuff that interests you. Don't hesitate to unfollow or mute people. You can tweak your follows and end up with a pretty low signal to noise ratio.
I think it's key to always prune and trim the people you are following and keep the number low and relevant. If someone tweets several times about things I'm not interested in, I unfollow.
I unfollowed some high profile tech people because of their stream being full of politics.
"(Current count is 1000)"
This seems much too high, I follow 500 and this already looks too high for me (some trimming needed).
Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Reply threads are a pain. Tweetstorms get old. And all too often there is way too much spam. However, there are amazing communities of people sharing interesting content and having great conversations.
Twitter needs to realize that there value prop is the community using it and not the app itself. They need to make radical design and product changes to make for a better user experience if they want to grow. The vast majority of internet products evolve significantly as they grow, surfing the wave of changing user behavior and taste as they reach new markets.
Scrolling is very inefficient on Twitter - to read the equivalent of a single screen on reddit or HN means to scroll 20x more on T. When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost.
Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.
Amen to that. I still don't fully get the logic of what Twitter decides to display and what to hide when I click a multi-tweet reply or something. Connected tweets (which happen so often that I feel like the 140 char limit is more hindering than helpful) run bottom-up in the time line. You can't maximize embedded youtube videos. Why? When you click an image and then "back" in a long scroll, it sends you back to the start of the page. I also have to click an image like three times to get to the source. I don't get how those split-views of multiple images are supposed to work, they always open a random one. An annoying delay/stutter whenever you scroll down because of how goddamn infinite scroll loads images. No proper search, but I'm already getting used to that in modern websites. "Just google it", right?
EDIT: I just checked and a few of these things have been changed. Am I nuts or did they have differently sized fonts for tweets at one point and reverted that by now?
When I last tried to sign up, they requested a phone number, I assume as some sort of an attempt to make it harder for spammers to sign up. I don't think they have any legitimate reason for that sort of information, so I didn't provide it. I don't remember the specifics, but either I couldn't finish creating the account, or it was created and then automatically locked/suspended a few minutes later. The end result was that I couldn't sign up and use the service in any meaningful way.
I don't know if that's still the case or not. After that rather awful experience trying to sign up, I've lost all interest in trying again.
I'm not surprised they're having trouble growing when they impede the ability of people to sign up! There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.
Every time I try to get into it, usually as the result of a particularly entertaining comedian or insightful scientist, I'm driven away by all of the things you're describing. I tolerate the bad parts of Reddit, I used to do the same for Usenet and Irc, but Twitter is too much.
Facebook is similar, except without any of the temptation to actually join in the first place.
I think so much of it comes down to trying to put too much content in a small space. Twitter was a lot less annoying when it was only 140 characters and no embedded media since the information density was appropriate for a phone screen. Now it's just absurd how much one needs to scroll just to use it. It's almost more of a scrolling app than an information app.
One quick fix would be to have an option to show tweets one at a time with next and previous buttons at the bottom for rapid digestion of tweets.
Does anyone know what the status of the Twitter API is?
I remember there being a kerfuffle about Twitter placing limitations on it, but is it still possible to make a custom client that unifies, say, Twitter and Mastodon?
Twitter is such a fascinating platform. I use it on a professional basis and I really enjoy it. I get the opportunity to interact with the rock stars of my field. These are people whom I would probably never have the chance to ping otherwise. I consume more media on TWTR than FB at this point because I trust the people I follow to be great "taste makers".
Clearly the company has some value, but how they fix the business model is a big question mark. I wonder if the Microsoft-LinkedIn complex would be the most natural home for Twitter at this point.
> A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That number stands at 328 million monthly active users -- the same as in the prior quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement Thursday. Revenue fell 4.7 percent and the company’s net loss also widened, affected by a $55 million writedown of the value of its investment in SoundCloud, the German music streaming service.
This is insanity. This is utter insanity. Twitter is at over 300 million monthly users. How have we created a system where that's not enough? Twitter is incredibly relevant. The president's Tweets are basically driving the news cycle now. And yet it needs to grow? Why? (Okay, okay, I understand why -- to feed all the VCs that invested in it. I just... ugh.)
And here we all really thought their recent redesign to add border-radius: 50% to literally everything on the site (avatars, text boxes, buttons, etc) and to strip all contrast away from the icons by hollowing them all out would bring about massive growth of the platform!
How many more times do they have to listen to exactly what their users want and add things like more complicated reply-to functionality that most can't seem to figure out still, live auto-playing sports video on the frontpage regardless of your interests, temporary automatic bans for using adult language in replies to verified accounts when yours isn't, moments, reordering your timeline so that it's no longer chronological, hiding tweets behind "show more replies" (with no opt-out), hiding even more tweets behind a second "show even more sensitive replies" (still with no opt-out), invading others' discretion and flooding your timeline with other peoples' likes, replacing the dreaded egg avatar with a person silhouette, etc before the platform starts to grow? /s
1. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise to Twitter anyway.
2. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with no links.
3. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interact with other users. in other words, throttle those bots and broadcasters.
I believe the noise problem is a huge issue in twitter. it gradully causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads.
i would even go as far as banning apps like Buffer and social schedulers from Twitter. They are a net negative for users (note: I said users not marketers)
Businesses would have to get some kind of value-add (honey) otherwise literally everyone would tweet as "Owner at Business" and just happen to tweet about their business all the time. Regulating that would be a nightmare.
> causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads
I suspect a higher-than-average proportion of twitter users have simply blocked all the ads.
Personally I'd favour a payment model a bit like the "reddit gold" one, where users can pay for other users to have better features. It's a network effect. I want the people I like following to have a better time on the service so they keep using it.
How do you filter "businesses" from individual users, small, non-commercial groups or anything else, really? Ask people to register their identity with the government and then double-check? Good luck!
> Twitter began investing heavily in video, aiming to draw a more mainstream set of users and premium advertising deals
What's with this whole "pivot to video" trend among websites?
Why is it preferred to text which is probably easier to write, needs less network and is more accessible than a large number of videos (which don't have captions)?
The problem with Twitter is that it has an identity crisis. It wants to be as massive as Facebook but the way it works is only attractive to a minority.
For example the 140 characters limit which was a novelty at the launch is more of a nuisance than anything. It's very common that users are replying to themselves to be able to say more.
The other big problem is noise. For example I recently started following one of the NPM devs and my feed was flooded with LGBT content. This is not Twitter's fault, but the way its users are using Twitter has become part of the culture.
Twitter could probably solve those two problems, but at the same time it would destroy what Twitter is about for its current users.
The only solution for Twitter is to realise it can't really cater to a mainstream audience and to become profitable it needs to lower its costs.
I use twitter's web app primarily with heavy editing with uBlock origin. I don't see trends, or suggestions or moments.
I block 99% of accounts that show up as 'promoted'.
I always click 'show less often' for 'In case you missed' and 'Who you should follow'.
With all that, I love it. It's indispensable for keeping up with machine learning news.
The core product is the best curated news feed around, but you have to do the curation. Almost all the content twitter itself pushes is noise.
To survive twitter needs to start serving ads that are extremely tailored to me and my feed. Just like with google, the quality of ad results needs to match or exceed the quality of organic results.
Twitter is amazing, but it needs to ditch the 140 chars, improve discoverability, and get more modest in its expectations. Twitter is an interest network, where you follow interesting people and read what they write, re-tweet what they write and sometimes interact with them. Given that a lot of people don't have that much interest in things that can be expressed in Twitter form, Twitter has a low ceiling on how big it can get. Most sports fans would rather watch sports than following an athlete. I think Twitter should try being better at what their users use it as.
every time they make a serious mistake and alienate users, the federated timeline on my private mastodon server is flooded with new people. quite beautiful actually. fun to see how people show up ready to fight only to find that there are a lot more ways to interact with people, if you can believe it. fights break out. people show up to try to cool the situation down. some people decide to stick around. lovely.
My primary reason for not using twitter is the lack of a Windows client that I like. All I want is to see tweets from people I'm following in a compact, not screen-filling, undistracting way. Just something simple to keep up with the tweets of a handful of people.
All such clients I could find are discontinued and broken by now. The current clients are either are oriented at power-users (Tweetdeck & co) or turn what could be 8 lines of text into a screen-filling experience that you have to dedicate time to to follow (official Twitter windows client & co). I don't care enough to code something myself, so I just don't bother with Twitter.
Their usability keeps going downhill. This showing me other people's favorites thing is one step too far. I know they must feel a bit putout that the community invented the retweet, but making favorites act like retweets is just dumb.
Also, the amount of data the service uses is obscene. The auto-play even if I have the preference not to is a cell plan killer.
This comes up semi-regularly when Twitter is mentioned on HN, but I've moved all my Twitter attention over to Nuzzel and have enjoyed the change. Twitter started to feel like such a poor return on my time due to the format- having an aggregator makes a huge difference. It partially solves the clutter problem of having hundreds of Twitter followees, and partially solves the problem of not wanting to check Twitter perpetually.
What I don't understand is why Twitter hasn't implemented more direct methods to see the generally/statistically good content. Anyone remember 'Texts from last night' and 'Fuck my life' and the like? They had this _incredible_ feature that allowed you to sort by top posts of the week, or even, can you believe it- the month! Nuzzel provides this as well, but it doesn't have much effect unless you follow enough people to decimate your normal Twitter experience.
What I don't understand is how can they burn so much money to still not be profitable despite millions of users.
Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?
Twitter has something like 3000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of where they are. Before I heard this number, I would have guessed they had 300 employees (based on Instagram having 20 employees when Facebook bought them).
At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us that love it.
I'm wondering why they're getting more and more adamant that people register an account, even though a lot of people don't care about having an online persona outside of Facebook and wouldn't ever contribute anything to the platform.
I honestly believe that could do much better by providing a good experience to people that just want to stay up-to-date and follow a few people that they find interesting.
I guess i'll be the only contrarian here and say that Twitter has become the preferred communication platform for some notable political figures (including the current Sitting US President). On that simple premise alone, I can't for good reason work up the nerve to use it anymore.
There was a time when I relied on Twitter to get details about life in a rather medium-sized city. We had tweetups and I even used it for business networking. As it grew bigger, I felt less interested as the value increased on other platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn. Even now, I still find dedicated Subreddits more valuable than Twitter.
To me, Twitter is now a space for low effort comments and input on media. I'm sure it works well for others, and good for you. But I have no time to cultivate relevant trends, and it seems philosophically wrong to suggest a platform should enable or mandate the culling of an audience. Especially since by design, Twitter is supposed to be the cross section of humanity (with its inherent downsides).
Autoblocking list bots going crazy can't hardly be a good thing for growth. Facebook with their groups concept feels like a better model than the free-for-all model Twitter uses.
And I've always felt that text-only and limiting to 140 chars is a great way to ensure there's misunderstanding between people.
[+] [-] intoverflow2|8 years ago|reply
Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers.
I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" checkbox in settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and politics from elsewhere.
Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly.
Edit - Mass replying to the careful follow question: I already choose who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it's really tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're all people who actually do things outside of comment online.
To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst (Political hot takes).
[+] [-] mxschumacher|8 years ago|reply
Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.
Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day - sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam - select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")
Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):
https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following
[+] [-] flohofwoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|8 years ago|reply
Also a good way to connect with people professionally, but less formally than LinkedIn.
The major downside is that is that a tight group or individual can get put on blast to the whole of twitter, and then just get ignorant vitriol thrown at them and that kind of ruins the whole experience. Happened to me not long ago. Not that big of a deal in the end. Just take a week off and come back and the hive will have found something else to attack. The Twitter universe has a pretty short attention span - even if it has a long memory.
[+] [-] jsnell|8 years ago|reply
My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.
[+] [-] dmix|8 years ago|reply
I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook.
People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again.
I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.
[+] [-] krapp|8 years ago|reply
I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)
[+] [-] norea-armozel|8 years ago|reply
I think the problem Twitter has is two fold. It wants people to come and stay on Twitter but it also wants those same people not fight with each other. The solution the developers picked was shadow banning. This banning where the user isn't aware that their tweets aren't visible to others who don't follow you and those who do follow you won't be notified of your tweets either (they only see them on their time line). The most common way this happens right now is someone uses of well known curse words. Right now, I'm shadow banned for whatever reason despite not tweeting at verified accounts often enough to run afoul their automated system. So this is the climate that new users experience where Twitter promises to help them engage with other users (especially verified users of notably celebrities and the like) but if you do anything vaguely hostile in their view then you lose the freedom to interact with anyone even those who follow you mutually. All I can say is that's probably a major contributing factor in the decline of Twitter at present. They just refuse to hire moderators to do proper moderation and to make the rules for banning or shadow banning clear and objective. Basically, it's what happens when you let technophiles try to solve a non-technological problem.
[+] [-] heymijo|8 years ago|reply
Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17
While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.
[+] [-] ezekg|8 years ago|reply
[0]: https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624
[+] [-] levesque|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Codemonkeyism|8 years ago|reply
and still love it.
I think it's key to always prune and trim the people you are following and keep the number low and relevant. If someone tweets several times about things I'm not interested in, I unfollow.
I unfollowed some high profile tech people because of their stream being full of politics.
"(Current count is 1000)"
This seems much too high, I follow 500 and this already looks too high for me (some trimming needed).
[+] [-] Angostura|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skewart|8 years ago|reply
Twitter needs to realize that there value prop is the community using it and not the app itself. They need to make radical design and product changes to make for a better user experience if they want to grow. The vast majority of internet products evolve significantly as they grow, surfing the wave of changing user behavior and taste as they reach new markets.
[+] [-] visarga|8 years ago|reply
Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.
[+] [-] nothis|8 years ago|reply
Amen to that. I still don't fully get the logic of what Twitter decides to display and what to hide when I click a multi-tweet reply or something. Connected tweets (which happen so often that I feel like the 140 char limit is more hindering than helpful) run bottom-up in the time line. You can't maximize embedded youtube videos. Why? When you click an image and then "back" in a long scroll, it sends you back to the start of the page. I also have to click an image like three times to get to the source. I don't get how those split-views of multiple images are supposed to work, they always open a random one. An annoying delay/stutter whenever you scroll down because of how goddamn infinite scroll loads images. No proper search, but I'm already getting used to that in modern websites. "Just google it", right?
EDIT: I just checked and a few of these things have been changed. Am I nuts or did they have differently sized fonts for tweets at one point and reverted that by now?
[+] [-] epoch1970|8 years ago|reply
I don't know if that's still the case or not. After that rather awful experience trying to sign up, I've lost all interest in trying again.
I'm not surprised they're having trouble growing when they impede the ability of people to sign up! There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
Facebook is similar, except without any of the temptation to actually join in the first place.
[+] [-] bluthru|8 years ago|reply
I think so much of it comes down to trying to put too much content in a small space. Twitter was a lot less annoying when it was only 140 characters and no embedded media since the information density was appropriate for a phone screen. Now it's just absurd how much one needs to scroll just to use it. It's almost more of a scrolling app than an information app.
One quick fix would be to have an option to show tweets one at a time with next and previous buttons at the bottom for rapid digestion of tweets.
[+] [-] Macsenour|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|8 years ago|reply
I remember there being a kerfuffle about Twitter placing limitations on it, but is it still possible to make a custom client that unifies, say, Twitter and Mastodon?
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dforrestwilson|8 years ago|reply
Clearly the company has some value, but how they fix the business model is a big question mark. I wonder if the Microsoft-LinkedIn complex would be the most natural home for Twitter at this point.
[+] [-] cwyers|8 years ago|reply
This is insanity. This is utter insanity. Twitter is at over 300 million monthly users. How have we created a system where that's not enough? Twitter is incredibly relevant. The president's Tweets are basically driving the news cycle now. And yet it needs to grow? Why? (Okay, okay, I understand why -- to feed all the VCs that invested in it. I just... ugh.)
[+] [-] byuu|8 years ago|reply
How many more times do they have to listen to exactly what their users want and add things like more complicated reply-to functionality that most can't seem to figure out still, live auto-playing sports video on the frontpage regardless of your interests, temporary automatic bans for using adult language in replies to verified accounts when yours isn't, moments, reordering your timeline so that it's no longer chronological, hiding tweets behind "show more replies" (with no opt-out), hiding even more tweets behind a second "show even more sensitive replies" (still with no opt-out), invading others' discretion and flooding your timeline with other peoples' likes, replacing the dreaded egg avatar with a person silhouette, etc before the platform starts to grow? /s
[+] [-] AznHisoka|8 years ago|reply
1. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise to Twitter anyway.
2. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with no links.
3. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interact with other users. in other words, throttle those bots and broadcasters.
I believe the noise problem is a huge issue in twitter. it gradully causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads.
i would even go as far as banning apps like Buffer and social schedulers from Twitter. They are a net negative for users (note: I said users not marketers)
[+] [-] unethical_ban|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
I suspect a higher-than-average proportion of twitter users have simply blocked all the ads.
Personally I'd favour a payment model a bit like the "reddit gold" one, where users can pay for other users to have better features. It's a network effect. I want the people I like following to have a better time on the service so they keep using it.
[+] [-] nothis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OzzyB|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|8 years ago|reply
There is a simple (but limited) solution: simple binary classifier, trained by signals from the user. It would quickly learn what to exclude.
[+] [-] na85|8 years ago|reply
Why is this bad for users?
[+] [-] fgandiya|8 years ago|reply
What's with this whole "pivot to video" trend among websites?
Why is it preferred to text which is probably easier to write, needs less network and is more accessible than a large number of videos (which don't have captions)?
[+] [-] swiley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|8 years ago|reply
For example the 140 characters limit which was a novelty at the launch is more of a nuisance than anything. It's very common that users are replying to themselves to be able to say more.
The other big problem is noise. For example I recently started following one of the NPM devs and my feed was flooded with LGBT content. This is not Twitter's fault, but the way its users are using Twitter has become part of the culture.
Twitter could probably solve those two problems, but at the same time it would destroy what Twitter is about for its current users.
The only solution for Twitter is to realise it can't really cater to a mainstream audience and to become profitable it needs to lower its costs.
[+] [-] iandanforth|8 years ago|reply
I block 99% of accounts that show up as 'promoted'.
I always click 'show less often' for 'In case you missed' and 'Who you should follow'.
With all that, I love it. It's indispensable for keeping up with machine learning news.
The core product is the best curated news feed around, but you have to do the curation. Almost all the content twitter itself pushes is noise.
To survive twitter needs to start serving ads that are extremely tailored to me and my feed. Just like with google, the quality of ad results needs to match or exceed the quality of organic results.
[+] [-] tormeh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xj9|8 years ago|reply
every time they make a serious mistake and alienate users, the federated timeline on my private mastodon server is flooded with new people. quite beautiful actually. fun to see how people show up ready to fight only to find that there are a lot more ways to interact with people, if you can believe it. fights break out. people show up to try to cool the situation down. some people decide to stick around. lovely.
https://joinmastodon.org
https://cybre.space
https://ephemeral.glitch.social
https://sunshinegardens.org
[+] [-] wongarsu|8 years ago|reply
All such clients I could find are discontinued and broken by now. The current clients are either are oriented at power-users (Tweetdeck & co) or turn what could be 8 lines of text into a screen-filling experience that you have to dedicate time to to follow (official Twitter windows client & co). I don't care enough to code something myself, so I just don't bother with Twitter.
[+] [-] protomyth|8 years ago|reply
Also, the amount of data the service uses is obscene. The auto-play even if I have the preference not to is a cell plan killer.
[+] [-] skoocda|8 years ago|reply
What I don't understand is why Twitter hasn't implemented more direct methods to see the generally/statistically good content. Anyone remember 'Texts from last night' and 'Fuck my life' and the like? They had this _incredible_ feature that allowed you to sort by top posts of the week, or even, can you believe it- the month! Nuzzel provides this as well, but it doesn't have much effect unless you follow enough people to decimate your normal Twitter experience.
[+] [-] akilism|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rjevski|8 years ago|reply
Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?
[+] [-] criddell|8 years ago|reply
At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us that love it.
[+] [-] unsoundInput|8 years ago|reply
I honestly believe that could do much better by providing a good experience to people that just want to stay up-to-date and follow a few people that they find interesting.
[+] [-] thrillgore|8 years ago|reply
There was a time when I relied on Twitter to get details about life in a rather medium-sized city. We had tweetups and I even used it for business networking. As it grew bigger, I felt less interested as the value increased on other platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn. Even now, I still find dedicated Subreddits more valuable than Twitter.
To me, Twitter is now a space for low effort comments and input on media. I'm sure it works well for others, and good for you. But I have no time to cultivate relevant trends, and it seems philosophically wrong to suggest a platform should enable or mandate the culling of an audience. Especially since by design, Twitter is supposed to be the cross section of humanity (with its inherent downsides).
[+] [-] Flow|8 years ago|reply
Autoblocking list bots going crazy can't hardly be a good thing for growth. Facebook with their groups concept feels like a better model than the free-for-all model Twitter uses.
And I've always felt that text-only and limiting to 140 chars is a great way to ensure there's misunderstanding between people.
[+] [-] richardknop|8 years ago|reply
It seems like push notifications from other social apps are more relevant, notifications from Twitter rarely are about something I care about.