Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

>Charge $0.01 per tweet

Guaranteed to kill twitter within a year.

Are corporate accounts free or do they cost? I've always thought that they should charge every big corp that is using their platform as a marketing / customer service tool.

Does CNN pay Twitter every time they read someone's tweet on the air? I'm not talking about a "newsworthy" tweet (for example one from a politician's account), but CNN occasionally says, "Let's see what a random person on the internet thinks about this development." Then they prominently focus on a couple tweets. I think CNN (or who ever) should pay for that content.

Developers, developers, developers. I would open up the apps store and the API -- embrace developers once again. The media companies trajectory that they're currently on seems like that which Yahoo was on, and it did help Yahoo much.

1. Remove post length limit. 2. Limit the number of tweets per day instead. 3. You can pay to remove the above limit.

This solves the problem of timeline being unreadable once you subscribe to enough people. Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap. Once everyone is rate-limited, everyone can easily digest their timeline. Without length limit, tweets become more thoughtful.

4. Fix the UI. Make it easy to view replies. Make it easy to view embedded images. Make it lean and fast. That would give Twitter advantage over similarly bloated services.

5. Anti-trolling measures. This one is really obvious! There should be no indication that you're blocked by another person, they just don't see you anymore. If the blocked person doesn't know they're blocked, they don't get the satisfaction of being blocked, and they don't know when they need to create another account to annoy you. This should be the basic rule when you implement a blocking feature.

6. Open up API. This one is obvious.

I would try to eat journalism.

I would create a system where subscription to News on Twitter helps to automate payment for individual articles.

  1. The lede or quote gets pulled into the tweet.
  2. http://t.co becomes a payment-debiting gateway (402 Payment Required).

Basically, you would monetise the audience on behalf of the publishers who would be able to make their paywalls more porous.

Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement:

  - Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions.
  - Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share.
  - Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to
    coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops.

Edit: If anyone in Twitter wants to do this, please hire me - I'd be super interested to work on it. Wouldn't even need to be the CEO. ;)