Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

When Facebook bought Instagram, weren't they running with something like 15 people?

I think Twitter could only be improved by removing all the garbage they've added since it's inception. It was perfect on day 1 except for scaling issues. If they didn't get greedy and just took the money for access to the real-time stream of data and maybe some advanced analytics, a few people could be making a ton of money instead of a ton of people making no money.

Something like this works:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDM76ZW/

but you'll probably need a better directional antenna to have good reception (depends on the specific part of the world for how strong the signal is).

Once you're used to fast internet you won't want any of that though. Streaming HDTV on a 50Mbps+ internet connection ends up being a better experience since you don't have to go through all the setup hassle to make this work equivalently (installing the antenna, connecting it to a dongle on your own server, installing some kind of head end software, streaming from that server over your own network). I've done both and the antenna setup is now fully deprecated.

Turn the entire business model 180 degrees. This might be very radical, but hear me out.

1) Creating a twitter profile (with tweeting privileges) costs $5. Profiles without tweeting privileges are free.

2) Once you have 10000 followers, you need to pay additional $$ per year. This fees increases exponentially as you gain more followers. Eg. Famous people pay a lot. Unless this $ is paid, the follower count caps up and the follow button disappears from the profile.

3) Stop considering no of active user profiles as a metric entirely.

4) Regular non-famous people can create profiles (that do not have option for others to follow), but can follow famous paying users for free.

5) If a normal non-famous person wants to chime into the conversation, they pay a one-time fee of $5 to become a paid user. Now they can tweet and have followers. If they ever get too famous, they might have to pay again to unlock ability to have 10000+ followers.

This way you try to charge the users who actually have the money to spend. Let's admit, people with high follower counts like politicians do gain a lot from twitter, and would probably pay for un-mediated access to the population.

This also fixes the problem of junk / troll accounts.

Regarding #1, #2, and #3.

So what happens if instead of having 1,000 x 140 char tweets cluttering your timeline, you instead wind up with 100 x 1400 char tweets? Do you have time to read all that?