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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?

#31
- Go private. Twitter is a simple product and will be increasingly difficult to monetize enough to satisfy shareholders' desire for ever-increasing profits.

- Keep it simple. Stop trying to be Facebook and Snapchat and Youtube all at once.

- Better AI / search to enable/improve things like custom timelines and notifications.

- Optional paid accounts with appropriate benefits. Keep the cost low and don't penalize unpaid accounts.

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

#33

I would add a feature that is similar to goole+ circles: allow the user to view the tweets of a subset of sources. I think it makes sense for twitter: one circle for each interest/ point of view.

Circles sort of make sense from a design point of view, but suck from a UX point of view. They are too time-consuming to maintain for a user. I think adding some sort of tagging system could be a better system, so I could use tags to say "this tweet is 'tech' related" or "'sports' related" and then followers could decide if they only want to follow a subset of my tweets by tag. Would make search/discovery easier too.

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

#35
I wouldn't become the CEO of Twitter. If I were, I would resign. I think the business model of these "free services but you pay with your data and advertisements" is despicable. I would much rather spend my time creating and popularizing FOSS protocols for communication if I am to work in this area.

I think Twitter has always been a completely ridiculous service and it's a poster child for this misguided iteration of Internet companies. If we just get enough users, we HAVE to make a profit! Turns out that isn't the case. The only thing I've seen Twitter accomplish is poisoning our collective consciousness with false information and a bad model of reality provided by an unsustainable system.

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

#36
1) Offer a premium Ad Free model 2) Create a Reddit Gold type of economy to open up "premium features" ... e.g. Unfollow Tools and/or deeper analytics - this would tie into the Ad Free model 3) Allow for the creation of Groups. 4) Make Video more of a top-tier content experience, not some side-bar hand-wavy experiment (at the same level as Moments). The next Twitch could be Twitter-based. The community is already there. (note: expensive, but potentially very lucrative CPMs)

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

#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 jam or an unfolding natural disaster.

Filtering out / systemically discouragingly a lot of the countless low-value/self promotional posts alongside a better hashtag (channel) view would be a great start.

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

#38

They can continue doing what they're doing already: - Suspending accounts for no reason at all. - Shadow banning users by hiding their replies (they refer to certain users as "low quality"). - Aggressive censorship of alternative opinions.

> Aggressive censorship of alternative opinions.

I feel like you're probably including instances of harassment here, which is generally unfair.

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

#39
Get rid of censorship. They had a good idea with live streaming video and whatnot, but they're beat to everything by Instagram and Snapchat.

As it stands now, I deleted Twitter simply because it's nothing but corporate accounts, overly aggressive SJWs posturing over every damn thing, and the only content I actually cared about was reposted from Instagram (apart from a few people I know who live streamed, but have since switched platforms). So now I only use Instagram.

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

#40
Systematically delete accounts which might contribute bad press and lower ad revenue.

Add a feature that allows users to censor their feeds / remove @replies from "trolls".

Decrease engineering staff, increase outbound sales people.

Establish syndication rights with NFL.

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