Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#501

Post by amagumori » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:06 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #497

platz wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stratechery folks have said something akin to that Twitter is unsalvageable that this point from a growth perspective because they've already lost most of their potential customers. People who tried their product and walked away. If these were fresh potential customers it would be one thing, but convincing someone to come back who already tried your product is much harder

It doesn't help that those of us that walked away still continuously hear stories about how Twitter can be a cesspool.

In what ways do people see twitter as a cesspool? Im just genuinely curious because I get a lot of value out of twitter. It's a great way for me to be exposed to new work from artists, finding circles of people with overlapping niche interests, reading political dialogue and analysis, funny stuff...etc

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#502

Post by K0SM0S » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:06 AM UTC

NumberCruncher wrote: post #385

AliAdams wrote: post #37

My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or important updates from companies I'm interested in. I see a secondary value from twitter by people contributing to a conversation around an event, be that a sports game, a site outage, a traffic…

>> those whose who have something worth saying tend to ...write books. It was never so easy buying books like today, so I don't get why I should waste my time reading #random #unimportant #stuff written by some social media managing intern from Bangalore.

No but seriously... so much this. Pardon my casualness.

Whenever we strive for both 'quality' (of information, talk/debate, etc.) and 'brevity', we end up with the exact opposite of books: traits d'esprit as they say in french, #randomWordPlays of the empty kind that made Levi Strauss hypothesize that humans didn't really form sentences but rather patched together chunks of expressions they had memorized (he was proven wrong by linguistics later on, but damn was his assumption so impeccably fitting much of the anthropological data). See any bland instance of "cheesy jpeg + logically flawed pensum" boasting thousands of likes/reshares circa 2017 to prove this point.

It's nothing new either, for as long as documented human societies existed, mind-numbing memes apparently were part of the landscape. For about as long, some (always much fewer) people prefered reading books. Or even writing them.

I don't think Twitter can ever be anywhere but at the far opposite side of books and quality discourse. Or it would become something else. Twitter is meant for remarks, quick-shot killer moves, and plugs. It's basically an ad board for opinion, and you've made a sale when someone likes/shares your tweet. Some people might defigure the sacred columns with a Shakespeare quote here and there, but vandalizing its culture is the only way to make a smart tweet.

I think it's OK that Twitter is 'dumb', as in non-filtering. Neutral towards speech, unpurposed. We need that too, just like we need curated libraries. It's fine that people have a place to vent and unwind. So long as they don't mistake that for an actual forum of opinion, let alone representative of anything but the few 'influencers' and their circles.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#503

Post by prawn » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:10 AM UTC

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #471

Godel_unicode wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia". There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.

Because it was originally SMS messages which were limited to 160 characters. 140 for the text and 20 for user name.

"Why is exactly 140 still the right length?"

That's common knowledge. They were asking, why is it STILL the right length?

If Twitter want to encourage short form content, there are other ways to do it. Either hide 141 onwards behind a [+more] link or style the long ones differently so they have less impact.

Better yet, create multi-panel tweets so content is still presented bite-sized, but in a way that people can delve as deeply as they like.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#504

Post by K0SM0S » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

xiaoma wrote: post #177

jamesk_au wrote: post #142

This analysis from Ben Thompson (Stratechery[1]) just yesterday would be a great place to start: "Imagine a Twitter app that, instead of a generic Moment that is little more than Twitter’s version of a thousand re-blogs, let you replay your Twitter stream from any particular moment in time. Miss the Oscars gaffe? Not only can you watch the video, you can read the reactions as they happen, from the people you actually…

Wow. He cites himself 9 times and cites himself citing himself at the end.

It may sound egotistic, but it's also a solid way to build something akin to a 'book' albeit in a discrete blogged form: you tend to quote yourself not to make the same point over and over again in so many different phrasings. It makes the arguments consistent, and rewards thoroughness, paying attention to each post (coherency, wording, etc.) Eventually it builds up a coherent, cohesive corpus of ideas that hopefully, should the theme be well-defined, is a book.

Usually when going for publication, you'd replace these quotes with references to previous chapters, typically in footnotes.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#505

Post by K0SM0S » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

xemdetia wrote: post #187

Aggressively use twitter to eat Yahoo Finance. There is a type of consumer that cares about twitter only in context to market/happenings and they have one of the best feeds for it. I don't want it to look like twitter, it should just be a totally separate product that takes advantage of being a primary user of twitter's data without being external. Make it a freemium service where the premium is looking at data more…

I think you're onto something with domain-oriented real-time feeds. Finance is one huge cake, perhaps not the only one. Sports, politics come to mind.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#506

Post by riffic » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #435

1. Lay off half the employees. 2. Improve their ad product. That's it really. It doesn't do anything now that it didn't in 2014, and the workforce is significantly larger. It'd be a decent, profitable company. Or, make it a non-profit. It's in the public interest.

  make it a non-profit. It's in the public interest.

No, a walled garden webapp is not a public utility.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#507

Post by zeteo » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'

Twitter generally needs to get a lot better at predicting what you'll be interested in (think Pandora.) Just based on the IP they should be able to tell a lot. Tweets that have been recently favorited, retweeted etc. in just your area would make a very decent default view (band coming to town! metro closure! the mayor is a jerk! etc.). Once you create an account they should also be able to predict a lot based on your activity. Oh, and please give us a Hide Tweet button. There are talkative people I'd still like to follow - but maybe a little less.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#508

Post by jijji » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:24 AM UTC

1) remove the 140 character limit. It was not a problem when you wrote it, and it definitely was not a problem today. 2) two factor phone verification should be removed. It makes people want to leave. Allow it to be turned on as an option, but don't force it in your users. 3) allow users to user your service without having an account. 4) increase the number of data analytic tools available for public use, tools that can explore relationships between social networks and postings 5) remove the whole ghost-tweet feature. No one hates it more when a site says Yes this message was posted, and then you look back and it really wasnt. It frustrates users, it also will make them leave, by the millions. 6) stop censoring speech and removing accounts for trivial behavior through speech. If anything replace it with a user voting feature so that posts can be flagged for different types of bad content and reported. The whole censoring option needs to be toned down about 1000%. No one will use your service if you keep doing this. Why should they? If you don't allow them to publish, one of the other 50 twitter clones will.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#509

Post by riffic » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:24 AM UTC

naravara wrote: post #258

There are several options. I guess Twitter could go with one or all of them. As a backend service it would be nice if they focused on making your Twitter account into a sort of “internet driver’s license” to identify you anywhere and everywhere online through a sort of trust chain. I never want to have to sign up for an account again unless it pertains to my finances. I so desperately wish I could manage all my vario…

  So much so that maybe ICANN should just work on something like it as a public utility?

Look at OStatus for a model for this:

https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

Note that there hasn't been a lot of traction here, although there are a few interesting implementations with active userbases.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#510

Post by riffic » Wed, Mar 01, 2017, 2:27 AM UTC

__jal wrote: post #367

1. Rebuild Twitter as an open, federated, decentralize service. 2. Write RFCs. 3. Shut down the massively dysfunctional company that should have been a protocol from the beginning so everyone involved can go get jobs doing something useful.

Twitter at the very least should adopt a standard and work with standardization bodies to improve the ability to federate and "self-host" your own Twitter on your own infrastructure.