I think one of the biggest challenges for Twitter is on-boarding new users.
With regards to the platform itself: it would be nice if Twitter would had some sort of article quoting mechanism. It's not uncommon to see a Tweet with text from an online article included as a picture. I also do this myself sometimes, since it seems to me people are more eager to click a link if they get a much better grasp the linked content and 140 characters is just too little for this purpose.
This is worse than ever, they invest most of their effort in getting you to follow their cherry picked celeb users for your country. Then they spend the rest of their effort trying to ban you.
- Don't give us an email > account locked
- Don't give us a phone number > account locked
- Don't change your egg avatar > shadow banned
Also they don't lock out your account because of a lack of an email or phone number - you just need 1 of those to signup.
From there it follows that Twitter might prepopulate a few tabs with News, Entertainment, Video Games, etc. for new users the same way reddit does a default front page.
How does that work? Were you in social marketing? If not, a term-of-the-employment-agreement required this? If the latter, that's the most horrendous thing I've heard today (other than, you know, assault, rape, murder, mayhem, and war)
I would think this functionality is removed from the site by now. After all, employees might state things on their personal Twitter profile that the company does not agree with.
These days I try to keep my Twitter account more or less anonymous, so I can be free to say the things I believe or want to say. I make sure my Twitter account can not be linked to my LinkedIn / StackOverflow / Github profiles.
My problem with twitter is exactly the opposite. Each tweet might be brief, but there are _so many_ tweets to scroll through, multiple sources as they can repeat themselves or retweet. Then you add in _personal stuff_ that gets thrown in from these key players adding more noise.
I just don't have time nor willing to put in the "effort" to make twitter work. It is just not worth it to me to be on the cusp of breaking news vs being slightly behind with a curated reddit. Even better is making use of multiple focused multireddits like:
/me/m/code/, /me/m/sports/, /me/m/games/, /me/m/news/.
To me, that is true brevity in my goal of getting a glance at current events in my fields of interest.
But all this has since languished, as neither their site nor their official apps makes it easy to show lists.
For me I follow about 30 ppl and remove the too talkative ones inorder for the feed to stay manageable and provide the right amount of signal. That's about 10-20 tweets/day. I think people that follow a lot of accounts must use lists or something else.
What I have done is use Twitter as a real time newsfeed, and do not read all the tweets I missed. I open twitter and look at the current tweets, possibly scrolling back a few hours. If I missed something, who cares. If it was important it will likely show up here or some other aggregating new site I frequent.
Twitter is also great for real-time reactions when watching an event on TV. It's akin to people watching the Super Bowl for the commercials. For some shows, the tweets are better than the show and offer an additional level of entertainment.
Perhaps it's just a different way of getting news. If there's a topic that is interesting, it's much easier to find a niche subreddit to follow or go straight to the source. I don't know what experts or subject areas avoids the inevitable "now let's show how clever we are", "share our personal life incessantly", or "argue with some Internet idiot over something really dumb with 140 characters".
If one of those experts has something really interesting to say, it's not the Tweet, it's a blog post, it's a site, etc that will bubble up through other sources already curated and Twitter can be skipped. Again, it's very possible there are specific subjects where it's great, but personally have yet to find them. I've never seen a Tweet that had value by itself and the site adds nothing of value to my Internet experience. I hate it when people link to tweets because you wonder what can really be said in that medium which isn't just some witty retort.
Do people just consume the net differently?
It's also quite useful for up to date information. If I'm trying to find updates about what's happening at an even - especially if I'm trying to find information from multiple sources - Twitter is often the best venue. If I'm trying to find a summary of what happened days later, yeah, a blog post or article would probably be better.
Of course, you can emulate some of the functionality of what Twitter does on other platforms. But the same can be said for most of the web. Blogs are a good example - I'd argue that it'd be much easier to use a personal web page from 1994 to emulate what a blog does than it would be to use a blog to emulate what Twitter does.
Subreddits are fine but they are also sometimes fraught with a subreddit specific bias that might be seriously off-putting.
The market for news tickers isn't as large as it is for some other types of social networks. People need to move beyond user count.
Likes are similar to retweets.
Seems like such an absurd distinction.
Twitter is also fast and snappy compared to obese FB. It's basically noble in comparison.
Hacker News is a niche product. Should it branch out into celebrity news to grow their audience?
Man, I would pay 10x as much for that!
I use my main Twitter feed for development news and info sec stuff so the people I follow are pretty visible in those industries.
My news feed is done through feedly, which includes more mainstream news, celeb gossip, architecture and other random topics I'm interested in.
If I combined the two, I'd go nuts in a day trying to sort through it all. I've learned over time to curate my own feed and to never "cross the streams" if you know what I mean. It works well and instead of trying to filter thought so much cruft, I have specific apps for the topics I want to keep up on.
Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all warrens. Twitter is a plaza.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the...
Even 5 years ago it wasn't clear whether warrens or plazas would win. They were betting human behavior would change under different constraints -- maybe we'd move beyond our tiny friend networks, come out of our warrens, and have a global party in the plaza. It looks like either we're not ready for that yet, or we'll never be ready for it, because it's suboptimal.
That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren.
This Google dataset puts it as the 5,109th most frequent word, between cached and slip
https://github.com/first20hours/google-10000-english/blob/ma...
This one from the British National Corpus puts it 7,702nd between "pro" and "frontier"
Loads of little hidiholes of separate content that are connected by a larger network.
>That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren.
Reddit (plaza) is 7 on alexa. Well below Facebook's 3rd place ranking, but high enough that I don't think we can say anything meaningful about the warren/plaza distinction outside the simple fact that facebook has implemented user engagement extremely well. Twitter (plaza) is 10th.
But note the average time on the site. Reddit outranks Facebook. So I'm not sure that each individual could be said to be spending most of their time in a warren.
Of course I think all this doesn't include hits from mobile apps which is probably the majority of the time for all of these sites so you can probably ignore this whole post.
You're mixing metaphors. This discussion is using plaza/warren as defined by GGP's linked block post:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the...
"A warren is a social environment where no participant can see beyond their little corner of a larger maze... A plaza is an environment where you can easily get to a global/big picture view of the whole thing. "
You cannot see any content you would like on facebook; hence it is a warren. You can look at almost any subreddit on Reddit, hence it is a plaza. By the blog post's definition.
Cathedral/bazaar is ESR's metaphor for [F]OSS software development happening either behind closed doors or in the open.
>They're like old-school programmer forums - if you just jump in as a non-member and try to engage you may well be told to GTFO or lurk more.
That's not my experience on any subreddit so I can't agree on this part. But maybe I'm in an echo chamber so I no longer see the distinction. Do you have any tips to see if I'm in an echo chamber? Or does this just involve intentionally crossing norm boundaries and how is it distinct from trolling? /semi-rhetorical
> A social network needs to be social, feel social, and make you feel like you have friends who want to listen to your drivel on it.
Completely agree. I see people I follow reply to each other, but when I comment on theirs, they don't. They aren't even celebrity, just engineers from various tech companies. I feel like all I can do is either retweet or like. I feel cold. I go on FB, comment, I usually get more replies from strangers I don't know but care enough to comment.
This is sad.
Have you tried clicking it? Because that's it..
Not saying it is good but it kinda works for my purpose on the site anyway.
That was the end of his Twitter journey.
How many potential new users fit this pattern, are caught by the 'bot' filter, and are shut out of the platform, I wonder?
Also Twitter sucks, that's why it won't grow, it's mostly bots anyway. (I would know, I wrote tons for it, laughably easy to grow massive accounts under their nose)
1) Twitter requiring a phone number during signup
2) Twitter having a lot of bots
in the same message? How are they supposed to curb bot registrations if not by checking email/phone combo? I get it that it's trendy to complain about Twitter, but why employing self-contradictions for that?
I think the author of the OP has good points, but with the huge rush to monetize as fast as possible in 2012 I doubt there would ever be patience to achieve the goal - nor do I think they've used their engineering resources wisely. I don't think a single person on HN can tell you what the hell their 5000 something engineers actually do (may be wrong number), given the frankly very limited usages of the site and the apps, and the lack of features over time.
I actually found it far more interesting overall than Facebook (hah! says a lot about my social network) and Reddit.
First, switching contexts between subjects I'm deeply interested in was exhausting. I need categories, or even different accounts to group them.
Second, my borderline OCD has a hard time not reading everything, so I wound up curating my list of follows to "reasonable" accounts,and not spammy one that post every few minutes and take over the feed. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of those.
Third, I thought -- what I HOPED -- would be true is that the platform would allow me to respond to all these great posters, and get a response in return, but this hardly ever happened. I'm sure I was buried in their feeds, even if my response was worth a reply.
So I was going to reply pointing out how this is impossible. No single person can address the stream of hundreds or thousands of people who want to reply and/or ride your coattails to Twitter fame.
When it occurred to me there's a decent opportunity here for someone who wants a machine learning project; given a stream of replies to a tweet from a celebrity, what's the 3 most popular questions/sentiments being expressed? (Or whatever number.) After a while, even a human secretary wouldn't be able to perform that function, it just gets to be so much, but you can't tire a machine.
Twitter's got the data streams you need already.
Of course, it still isn't necessarily going to satisfy you from the individual questioner's point of view, but maybe you feel like it at least contributed to the stream.
There should be a way to throttle heavy posters / group their posts.
The people I really care more about hearing from get drowned out, and the rest, while interesting is less so... and twitter's attempts at promoting populist articles on top exacerbates the issue, at least for me. I liked it better where I mostly saw the most recent stuff on top. Not to mention their weird content filters, where certain posts just aren't even visible... sometimes when you're looking at your own timeline.
There is no brand/person that I find so "interesting" that I would want to "follow" them. Whilst I do have a twitter account, I used it to log into an airport wifi once; I don't follow anyone I don't know.
I even find the word "follow" uncomfortable, maybe even an anathema, as it suggests that I'm not as good as they are, and yet another something to confirm their brand celebrity.
Now I appreciate not everyone is trying to be a brand on twitter, and if someone could have multiple channels I could subscribe to, then I might be able to monitor someone's business world (but of course, I have LinkedIn), my family and friends' pictures (which are all on Facebook or Google+), and even seek advice for things to do and places to eat (like on Yelp, but just kidding, I use Facebook for this as well), all inside Twitter, but that's simply not how it's set up.
Indeed, the only suitable use seems to be the thing I have no interest in whatsoever.
So maybe I just don't understand how twitter can be interesting or useful, but if it is just another celebrity/gossip magazine, or some kind of entertainment news/television replacement, then it's stagnation shouldn't be surprising: There are plenty of players in this space, and there will be another.
The counterpoint here is that for all platforms what this is true. If I post something on Instagram I typically get no interaction, same with snapchat, same with Twitter.
Why? I don't have that many people who want to interact with what I post apparently. I'm also not a super frequent poster, don't go around commenting and liking etc...like super users do.
I find Twitter to be at least as engaging as the rest of the platforms, so I think it's just that other platforms happened to be where the culture was.
Note also that for all of the current major social platforms: Snapchat, Facebook and to a lesser degree Instagram, they all got their huge dedicated user base from people under 18. Twitter never had a youthful start - it was almost all tech people from the TC post to the SXSW boost, and an older demo from the start.
That's an important distinction that I think is overlooked.
However, what you're saying fits in quite nicely with the thesis of the argument: If Twitter had seen itself as a platform for capturing and analyzing "the real-time state of the world" instead of a "social network" or a "media company," its opaque product would likely have been less of an issue.
If Twitter accepts the role as a news outlet, they're still in an awkward position. Conventional news networks are already grasping to maintain relevance in a world increasingly self-connected. If Twitter overtly embraced that as its primary value proposition, all of its support from media companies, which are really what propped it up IMO, would vanish overnight.
In fact, with nearly 320 million users, media companies already believe they need to be on Twitter to reach their audiences. With a billion users, it would only be more true.
Twitter's only incentive is its use as a broadcast platform for people who are, in general, otherwise famous. People hop on to interact with and read content from them. If large numbers of this group decided that Twitter represented competition and not an asset, they'd dump it and the attraction would go away.
For years the only place I heard of Twitter was television channels desperately begging people to get online and tweet them. It has finally penetrated to the point where most fairly tech-savvy people have started an account and issued 3-4 tweets, but that took years of constant pushing by mainstream outlets.
Twitter is for what I care about, relative to the general drivel that FB thinks I value. My friends on FB certainly don't necessarily share my interests with what I like to read about in my spare time.
Of course, actually doing this in 2010 would have been extremely ambitious, given that sentiment analysis was an up-and-coming field having recently overtaken by extreme hype (just look at the edit wars on the Wikipedia article [2] in their effort to revert marketing drivel). It was a far more sure bet at the time to pivot towards display ads and a more locked-down ecosystem, and about new user onboarding [7] and content curation [8], than the even more vague promise of being able to mine useful data out of aggregates of Tweets (preferably in near-real-time).
This particular bet may have been the wrong one, as the next year academic papers were coming out by the dozens about sentiment analysis on Twitter; by this time the company had doubled down on display ads and keeping more users inside the application with embedded videos, a captive shortener, a captive image host, the acquisition and relaunch of native mobile clients, and the like.
After yet another year, in 2012 Facebook smoked them with their ad onslaught [3] and also bought Instagram for good measure. Twitter acquired Crashlytics in 2013 and then the ad network MoPub and reworked it into an embeddable Twitter SDK that app makers would want to use [4], then bought a machine learning startup and I finally was sure the omnipresent sentiment mining Twitter would materialize [5] but this ship sailed at last when they sold most of that to Google after all [6] to focus on their 'core product', which isn't growing... a problem the article, despite its title, doesn't offer a solution for.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083782 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sentiment_analysi... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/2012-... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11914620 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11942293 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13429179 [7] https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/a-new-version-of-t... [8] https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/12/08/why-twitters-disco...
What they really need is a place to share their press announcements or agenda. They could do it on their own blogs/sites, but it's easier to follow Twitter.
The only "normal" people (people without following) who use (in a sense write/tweet) Twitter are trolls. What else can you do with 140chars if not either promote something, share a link, or troll/be snarky/harass? And Twitter at the same time is trying to get rid of the people who actually use their product besides famous people.
The argument the writer makes is a valid one but just a hypothesis. You can't say for sure if that was the reason. Developers are not sprinting to build apps on Instagram and Snapchat but both are growing like wildfire. A social network needs to be social, feel social, and make you feel like you have friends who want to listen to your drivel on it.
For all you know, Ev might have turned it into a "pulse of the planet" and it would've still failed to be social and/or make money. Also, we're talking of a 2009 meeting that talks of his ambition, that's |7| years ago - ample time for it to have gone astray in a different direction.