Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decay of Twitter

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–139 of 139 posts

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#131

Post by ufo »

drumdance wrote: post #13
samsolomon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Twitter, but the burden is on the user to make the experience—it's entirely dictated by who you follow.

That's a really good point. A friend of mine who wants to be a forensic pathologist follows a coroner who posts autopsy photos and asks people to guess the cause of death. She has something like 500k followers. It's amazing all the micro-celebrity that's possible, but as a user you have to know where to find it.

I'm curious... Do you have know the link for that?

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#132

Post by mstade »

danielrakh wrote: post #92
johnward wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.

I've actually recently designed a concept around the interest graph of Twitter that I think would be a step in the right direction. Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a

Isn't this what lists are, albeit perhaps more prominent?

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#133

Post by jmadsen »

Seriously, a tech company that can't even shut off the stupid "While you were away..." feature when I tell them repeatedly I don't want to see it?

That only lets you hide images, mute hashtags, etc on mobile, not from a regular browser?

Where every answer to "why doesn't this work normally?" is suggestions to go buy a third-party tool?

Twitter is unfortunately "annoyingly useful" but I would love to see a different, open source solution gain decent traction

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#134

Post by baudehlo »

Jtsummers wrote: post #51
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with using Twitter to meet people IRL. It seems weird to force those artificial boundaries on your social networks.

Perhaps I've just missed it, but my problem with twitter is this: Is there a way to send messages to just these 10 people, and not all 100 followers? That's what I need from a social network. I need a public (everyone can see) channel, and I need channels (that I control) that are visible to specific individuals and groups. My soccer team (in general, some overlap obviously) doesn't need to know about my ballroom dan…

Facebook messenger has group messaging. Just use that. You can message people who you aren't "friends" with.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#135

Post by vlehto »

phrogdriver wrote: post #42
benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

>I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. The really interesting part of this problem is the network value, not the individual value. The fact that "the network is valuable enough to you that you would be willing to pay" is precisely because of the value provided by the other nodes. Many of those nodes are present only because they do not have to pay. Demand curves are downward sloping b…

The only reasonable way to monetize twitter is to find someone who is already making money out of it. Then get a slice of that pie. They still make a profit, so you aren't wiping out nodes.

I think there are two groups doing making some money. Advertisers and reporters/data analysts. The fist wants more visibility, the latter wants analyzing tools. How you separate businesses from power users? Beats me.

Going the "premium account with premium price" route may work good for a while. But you are practically scripting how your competitor could overtake you. All they have to do is give that premium content for free. This happened here in Finland. We had popular service called "irc-galleria" which was quite close to facebook. You needed premium account to befriend people. When facebook came, irc-galleria took about year to fall into obscurity.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#136

Post by simonswords82 »

benten10 wrote: post #100
ogurechny wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”? Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent. Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happe…

That is a ridiculous hyperbole, haha. I'm rolling my eyes. I can justify: I do not have to 'actively' go out to seek for information that I might be interesting/relevant to me: it comes to me. It's better than reddit because I see posts only by people vetted by me, so that's my 'filter'.It's better than email, because it's open conversation, and it's better than RSS because it's a 'social-network'. The network effect…

Twitter does not do a good enough job of curating the huge amount of high-quality content it holds for new Twitter subscribers. You said it yourself:

> If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter.

> Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them.

> I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months

All of the above steps are time consuming, and a lot of people (including me) simply can’t be bothered or don't have the time, or both!

Last time I created a new account I entered some basic details and in return a bunch of well-known Tweeters were offered up, none of whom I was actually wanted to follow. That was the sum-total of the on boarding experience and I was left with nothing useful. So what do I do? I start posting content and following people - adding more content almost randomly in a hope that something sticks.

Twitter absolutely nailed the input side of their user experience. Adding content is almost too easy, hence the amount of bullshit “here’s what I ate this morning” tweets. Imo their next mission should now be to help new and existing users discover high-quality content.

Reddit does a better job of this using their sub-reddit approach and it’s entirely because this curation is perfumed for me that I return there more regularly than Twitter.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#137

Post by jessaustin »

mikeyouse wrote: post #85
jessaustin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit of an accounting smell, isn't it? Obviously Twitter should have some costs other than R&D, like labor and servers. Even if we say the rest is going to R&D, that's kind of a black box. It doesn't prove that they aren't simply recording reasonable recurring costs correctly while hiding bizarre business-killing recurring costs in R&D.

They're a publicly traded company with a "big-4" auditing firm to make sure that doesn't happen. The law is very clear on what counts as CapEx and OpEx. Obviously, companies occasionally outsmart (or team up with) their auditors to defraud the public, but the vast majority follow GAAP and succeed or fail on the merit of their business.

It's OpEx either way, right? Ideally the firm would be able to point at x, y, and z innovative and profitable new services, and say that's why we spend so much on R&D. It's not clear to me that Twitter can do that. So, an investor would be justified in suspecting that not all R&D expenditures are valid.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#138

Post by onewaystreet »

benten10 wrote: post #14

I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells. I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, b…

> I really hope twitter somehow makes money.

Twitter made $502.4 million this last quarter. Wall Street's problem with Twitter isn't a lack of revenue, it's a lack of growth.

> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.

Twitter would make less than it does now if it switched to a subscription model. How many people would be willing to pay $50 a year for Twitter? Lets be ultra generous and say a million. That's only $50 million a year in revenue.

Re: The Decay of Twitter

#139

Post by rsync »

cperciva wrote: post #129
rsync wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter." I am very interested in this ... We did a (roughly) 6 month long experiment here (rsync.net) in advertising on twitter - on paper it seemed like a very good id…

That's because all of your ad impressions were being shown to Tarsnap users! In all seriousness, I've had a lot of people say they keep seeing rsync ads on twitter and ask me if you're trying to poach my customers. I always tell them that you're a good guy and I'm sure you wouldn't do that.

Interesting - I actually had one or two people email rsync.net and complain about the exact same thing - they thought I was camping on tarsnap specific keywords...

We also have a lot of people who don't even know that there are sponsored tweets (ads) on twitter and thought we were blatantly spamming them ... so they blacklisted/ignored us and sent complainy emails.

Post reply on HN