Open up the API again and let third parties integrate live-streaming features. If you have thousands of people already watching and livetweeting a new Netflix release, facilitate that and make it easier. Imagine if everyone could watch the Superbowl while live-tweeting it in the same interface... you'd likely broaden user adoption
Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
41–50 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#42Sell Twitter to Microsoft
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#43Layoff everyone except for the bare minimum to keep the company operational (~100-200 people), take it private and print money for 10 years then let it naturally sunset itself.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#44Put more effort to engineering. Facebook isn't great because of how it looks, but because they have React, hiphop (or what's the name now), things like that; and that allows them to scale and build and iterate more quickly. Twitter had Bootstrap and that was great investment IMO... now the Bootstrap guys all left. Why?
Previous comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13225000.
Twitter's built Aurora, large parts of Mesos, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, Scalding, Finagle, and Finatra. A lot of these exist so they can build things quicker.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#45Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online…
I totally agree with this.
I've seen other posts mentioning timeline changes, protocol changes, and opening up the API ecosystem, but I don't see any of these changes actually affecting Twitters bottom line.
Twitter is a great place to discuss what's going on right now. Whether it be sports, a natural disaster, political debate, news, etc. Twitter needs to be the place to go when you want social commentary / news on what's happening RIGHT NOW.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#46Get rid of Quote Tweet. Its primary current use case is to facilitate pointless "gotcha" games. I'd say it contributes more to the current poisonous atmosphere more than any other feature.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#47I 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.
Twitter sort of has this functionality via lists. During football season I only look at my 'NFL List' which is comprised of football analysts, beat writers, other media folk and 'regular' but smart football fans.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#48I consider myself pretty tech oriented but I've never understood twitter, this is probably just my own stupidity but I've tried several times and it never makes sense. I mostly just see replies to other conversations and I don't understand the context. Scrolling through the timeline I can't parse structure, it just seems chaotic. Barely anyone I know uses twitter. It just seems to be a way to follow celebrities and p…
> I'm probably missing something here.
Definitely. I had the same opinion, couldn't really figure out why it had any value. At some point I created a politically-oriented (anonymous) profile to interact before one of our local elections. I followed enough of the people who used it well (media, some politicians, various individuals) to pick up the value in it.
Killed that profile, created my own, still enjoy it. I don't follow too many people, I prune noise by either unfollowing or muting. I still don't care to be one of the chatteratii but it's great.
Some journalists (usually serious ones), some startuppy people, some friends, some investors. I often read stuff long before it hits the news, I see what journalists say on a less-scripted platform. Find opinions you value, follow them. Use e.g. Tweetbot.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#49Well, for starters I would:
1. Focus on making the company profitable by cutting down on staff and resources. Seriously, Twitter doesn't need thousands of employees, a large HQ and all that other fancy stuff. I think a team of about 30 people could probably run it fine.
2. Get developers on board again. Open up API access, stop shutting down/blocking projects, etc. Make people feel like they could start a business on Twitter's platform, without the rug being pulled out down the line.
3. Get rid of the Trust and Safety Council. It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech, which groups like the ACLU suspiciously absent.
4. Improve moderation. Kick out terrorists and nutcases on the 'left', stop looking for every excuse to ban right wing users and generally treat everyone with respect all around.
5. Try and make the Android app more usable. Because at the moment, it's really awkward to use and gets rather slow at times.
6. Stop using verification and unverification as a punishment. Really, it's like Twitter is being as confusing as possible here.
7. Have the timeline set to how it used to be. Remove the 'show best tweets first' crap from any accounts unfortunate enough to still have it enabled.
8. Make things like URLs not count towards the character limit. I think Gab already does this, and it's very useful.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#50Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with? Right now you can turn on notifications for a user's tweets, but that gives you push notifications for all of their tweets which is…
> Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with?
100% agree. Twitter needs to be in the game of maximizing signal-to-noise for their users. In my experience, there's just /way/ too much noise when you're trying to follow along with a live event. I almost never want to see content from a random account with 10 followers. Nor do I want to see a d-list celebrity hocking skin care products. What I really care about is how the conversation is shaping itself over time.
There are many ways of fixing this that don't spoil Twitter's free-speech mission. Personally, I think the answer is in clustering tweets based on topic and sentiment, then presenting a really intuitive filtering UI. You could expose options that would help you understand the broader conversation, but also dive into it at a super granular level.
Getting this right would be in the hard-but-possible realm. Given how many engineers Twitter has stockpiled, I think it's worth trying. Solving the noise problem would necessarily cut down on abuse, too.