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Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

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

#581

Post by unchaotic »

jdeibele wrote: post #559

Only show me content that's been re-tweeted more than X times, where X is something that I can set. I don't want to read about what somebody had for lunch and I wouldn't expect it to be re-tweeted. But something thoughtful or interesting or funny would be. Yes, there would be problems with fake accounts re-tweeting but that should be solvable.

I wrote a chrome extension to solve something similar i.e. filter out by keywords and then sort my timeline to see popular tweets that I shouldn't miss.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...

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

#582

Post by mnmlme »

prawn wrote: post #503
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

I could see a version of Twitter that is similar in a way to the latest Instagram release (allowing for up to 10 images per post). So on Twitter you could have up to 10 tweets in a single post. Each still 140 char. Only the first one shows up in everyone's feed (just like it does today) and you swipe/scroll/page to the side to see additional pages. If the first 140 is intriguing enough people will scroll sideways to read more.

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

#584

Post by ManlyBread »

jraines wrote: post #101

- Get rid of modals for everything. Especially: when clicking on a tweet to view replies, open a new page with better threading of replies, pagination, and no reordering (or optional "quality" reordering). Twitter is a forum on speed; take some good ideas from forums. Right now it's a forum on speed and acid. - Have more options for blocking, including "block this person and everyone who follows them or followed them…

>Identify "sleeper cell" bots -- accounts inactive for a long time that suddenly become active, usually around a single topic, concurrent with many similar bots, and aggressively ban them.

Why? I use twitter maybe once in a few months, why should I get banned for that?

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

#585

Post by pvg »

dotBen wrote: post #326
pvg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money, or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.

"But it is a thing" If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.

Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money

Thanks for explaining that to me.

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

#586

Post by grandalf »

eropple wrote: post #578
grandalf wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. I don't use phrases like "proto-fascists" because I don't think the term really has meaning. > as a means of control by whoever's in power at the time. This is exactly right. When we allow liberties to be taken away, they are likely gone for good, even when the context for their removal goes away.

The self-described white supremacists (since you don't like "protofascist") who plague the mentions of women who dare to comment on politics or make video games are not deprived of liberty because Twitter decides to show them the door. They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves. Put those goalposts down. You're going to pull something.

> They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves

We can all imagine what Twitter would be like if created by a church group. Certain, virtuous tweets would be promoted, and tweets containing sinful thoughts would be banned.

This system would be fine, but not really any better (or different) than a phpbb system maintained by that same group. It would be a walled garden with very clear limits to the kind of speech and expression it wished to foster.

Twitter can be this too, but by doing so it lowers itself to the status of simply a large phpbb board with a righteous troupe of moderators keeping order.

Some people (such as yourself) seem to prefer this, and seem not to tolerate certain kinds of views being expressed, even when users are not forced to consume those views.

The drive to create a heavily censored/curated environment is exactly the opposite of the drive to create a platform.

Viewed as a worldwide platform, Twitter would have to maintain a ridiculous ratio of censors to users in order to provide adequate levels of totalitarian censorship of unapproved ideas.

If Twitter's massive censorship bureaucracy is causing it to flounder and face a loss of credibility with investors, it ought to correct for this rapidly by adopting a firm no-censorship stance.

Coca-Cola could easily ask to advertise only to people who have not viewed (for whatever reason) a white-supremacist tweet in the last 30 days.

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

#587

Post by kbody »

In reality closing-down their API, hindered a lot of innovation that could happen, they missed a lot of devs working for free to create a product on top of the raw data that twitter is in a sense. (which they could easily acquire)

Imo you should keep the core stable until you construct an alternate route, so any new direction should be an extension and not replacement until established (see: not making a Digg v4 etc.).

So I'm of the opinion that at the current product monetization is at the edge of starting to damage the product, ad aggression from users will become an issue if they start to hunt for profits that way.

There needs to be monetization through another product. When talking about tweets and especially on a scrolling list of tweets that is quite minimal it's tricky. You have to expand it on another product-version.

Personally I would attack the inefficiency and problem of scaling (following a lot of users fails exponentially), with some tools that will drive up the quality of experience and increase user activity.

Secondly, I would try to embed a patron-like feature in a big way and take a cut from the earnings.

As a dev, having a big product idea for twitter's case, their past and current behavior of hindering its API use through walls and dealbreaking rate-limits, will make it really hard to give it a try again.

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

#588

Post by tmalsburg2 »

yellow_postit wrote: post #336
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you should consider the possibility that you and your coworkers are not representative of academics more generally. In my research field Twitter is quite matter of factly really big. Also note that this was just an example showing that there are more areas where Twitter is doing really well than those that OP listed.

Shouldn't you consider the same, that your group is a set of outliers? Comparing anecdotes will get us nowhere.

I'm talking about tens of thousands of people not individual cases. Pretty much every university, non-university research institution, and funding agency have active Twitter accounts. In my experience, most departments, and labs also have twitter accounts, not to speak of individual researchers. Jobs are found on Twitter, careers are made, new collaborations start there. I'm talking about tens of thousands of people who are highly active on a daily basis, whereas /u/kleiba was referring to himself and some unspecified coworkers which I interpret to be his lab mates.

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

#589

Post by apricot13 »

1. Make a bigger deal of lists. Add the lists tab to the top of the page, show the list of lists a person is in next to their name. For new users its a great way to find people with similar interests. For existing users they let you unfollow people but still check in on them every now and then so your timeline isn't so insane.

2. Add the option of removing inline images/quoted tweets from the timeline it looks ugly

3. redesign, I find twitter so difficult to read its so cluttered.

4. when I say I dont want to see the 'while you were away feature' I do not want to see the 'while you were away feature'

5. Allow me to write private notes about a user or look up all our previous interactions on one page.

6. Allow me to star users - these users tweets are highlighted in some way on my time line

7. when I clikc the tweet permalink why is it a popup then when I go directly to a page its not styled like a popup - this is confusing to some users who think they've loaded a seperate tweet

8. I'd like a daily email of a select group/list/my timeline if 9. Bookmark where I was last. I dont like to miss any tweets.

10. allow me to send group DM's

11. dissappearing tweets. I know this is cipying snapchat/instagramstories/whatsapp but tweeting a phtoo/text which dissappears after a custom amount of time (1 month/year/day/hour/minute) would be brilliant.

12. bring back the third party apps. they made twitter.

13. make trending hashtags easier to see/browse. News articles are always saying x is trending but I never see this.

14. allow me to search tweets nearby. Useful for conferences.

15. Dont include URLS in character count, I think this was supposed to have been added but I've not noticed it working.

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

#590

Post by lazyjones »

cortesoft wrote: post #423
aphextron wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

Well, the original reason for the 140 character limit was because you could get tweets via SMS, which at the time had a character limit.

> because you could get tweets via SMS

could? You still can:

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170004

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