Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#191

Post by niccaluim » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 8:39 AM UTC

harlanlewis wrote: post #147

sloanesturz wrote: post #142

I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service. At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years. Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!?

This exactly captures why Twitter is so disappointing. From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wil…

For the past five years Twitter engineering has been focused on two things: rebuilding the infrastructure and building an ad platform. They nailed both of these. But unfortunately that left little time for product engineering. Add in the revolving door of heads of product and it's no surprise there hasn't been much substantive change to the product.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#192

Post by reasonishy » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 8:51 AM UTC

mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

Not to mention their spam emails - "You should follow this celeb or that celeb". No, I shouldn't thanks.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#193

Post by aikah » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 8:51 AM UTC

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #169

sloanesturz wrote: post #142

I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service. At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years. Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!?

Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!? They're all too busy passing joints and/or bongs around to really care about HN or about their product. :-) Peter Thiel: Twitter Executives 'Probably' Smoke Too Much Pot, And That's Why It's A 'Horribly Mismanaged Company' http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-executives-smoke-too-...

Pot Driven Development is fine , what is not is them shutting you down when you write a successful product based on their api. That's the stupidest policy ever.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#194

Post by reasonishy » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 8:54 AM UTC

sloanesturz wrote: post #142

I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service. At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years. Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!?

> At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years.

I thought they just figured out a revolutionary code change that allows them to support messages over 140 characters! That's real progress...

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#195

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 10:11 AM UTC

mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

Why isn't every site's homepage not search? I've been beating G+ up over this for years. Throwing a barricade and nag straight off the top is fucking stupid.

I've got a G+ account, but still hit the site unauthenticated fairly often.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#196

Post by halcy » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 11:29 AM UTC

digisth wrote: post #67

mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

That's part of it. Another is a lack of good curation features, as Chris Sacca has written about ( http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2... ) I also thought about this when I started building Testimote. A lot of interesting things are being said (positive things about companies in my case), and are drowning out there in the great torrent coming from the firehose. I think there's room for both T…

I sometimes wonder if there is a large disconnect between two types of twitter users - those that use it as a sort of "news-gathering" medium, and those that use it as a conversation medium.

Twitter, as a company, seems to assume that the former is the default. I don't know if the majority of their users are actually like that. The vast majority of my tweets is replies to other people, and for most people I know it is the same, but of course, self-selection would do that. The analogy as twitter being unrolled IRC is, for me, definitely how I've been thinking of it for years.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#197

Post by brainflake » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 12:17 PM UTC

JacobAldridge wrote: post #134

brainflake wrote: post #131

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same. Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc. Twitter is jus…

I know that "intelligently improving my feed" was the final straw for me leaving Facebook, and if Twitter forced it on me it would probably end my Twitter fetish as well. AND I know that I'm likely not the ideal client for Facebook and their efforts probably enhance the experience for said clients. I'm not sure who Twitter's ideal client is...

I think it'd be pretty easy to offer both. A simple switch to turn on/off 'curation' or whatever.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#198

Post by mikaraento » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 1:12 PM UTC

rezashirazian wrote: post #57

Aleman360 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a step back, what's the advantage to society of every company growing into a conglomerate? Why not just let a company live and die on its core business? Do we really want to allow all that power to be consolidated into company boards and executives?

In all honesty how far can you take microblogging? Twitter's core business is something any half decent developer can build over a weekend and polish over a few months. There is so much you can do to attract and keep your users engaged with Twitter's core business. For the growth Twitter investors are looking, twitter needs to expand beyond its 140 character tweets and look for possible innovative ideas that can cult…

It looks like a weekend project but isn't. Scaling it up took Twitter a long time. Showing your feed is a very expensive operation (there are users with a large number of followers and users who follow many others) and syndication and clients amplify the number of operations.

Source: I was one of the developers of Jaiku, which had a very similar model.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#199

Post by brainflake » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 1:22 PM UTC

runevault wrote: post #133

brainflake wrote: post #131

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same. Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc. Twitter is jus…

I find it interesting you mention the improved feed, people I've talked to (obviously this is anecdotal but it is all I have to go on) HATE it, and especially the fact it always defaults to it instead of staying with most recent as they prefer.

Well, I think it probably depends on the demographic and/or how many friends you have. I would imagine the younger ones hate it but older professional types who don't log on as much appreciate it. And likewise the larger the size of your network the more you might appreciate it, but who knows...

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#200

Post by quesera » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 1:45 PM UTC

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #165

Pyxl101 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads. How do you know you're not being tracked through cookies on other sites that you have logged into, or ad networks that interact with those sites? When I load nytimes.com and view the network trace, I see about 50 different domains appear there: pagead2.googlesyndication.co…

I'm giving away my secrets here, hopefully this is buried enough that NY Times won't see it and won't change. :) 1) use Firefox 2) use NoScript, don't allow Javascript on NY Times or any other domains it pulls in 3) set Firefox -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear history when Firefox closes -> clear all items except browsing history To access NY Times (or really any website) first QUIT Firefox. Then restart. Now there…

Using Firefox profiles might make simplify some of your separation goals. I create and destroy profiles regularly, and also have a few long-lived ones. Some are site-specific.