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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?

#101

Post by jraines »

- Get rid of modals for everything. Especially: when clicking on a tweet to view replies, open a new page with better threading of replies, pagination, and no reordering (or optional "quality" reordering). Twitter is a forum on speed; take some good ideas from forums. Right now it's a forum on speed and acid.

- Have more options for blocking, including "block this person and everyone who follows them or followed them within last N days"

- Fix trending topic spam. Seriously, how is this so bad? Free advice: for every trending topic a tweet mentions over 1 in a single tweet, the probability that it's spam asymptotically approaches 1.

- Allow an unambiguous, never "played with", chronological timeline. Have a separate view that's your ML playground. The "In case you missed it" and "tweets you might like" features are good but I don't want them randomly appearing in my timeline.

- Allow alternate clients, even if you have to charge a fee.

- Similarly, create a separate free developer-focused API but clearly identify all tweets posted via that as "bot" and allow people to never see tweets posted by a bot, or tweets posted by a bot @ them. Tweets posted from the "alternative client" paid API would not be subject to this marking.

- Identify "sleeper cell" bots -- accounts inactive for a long time that suddenly become active, usually around a single topic, concurrent with many similar bots, and aggressively ban them.

- Do more and better things with Lists. Don't just show me 3 people to follow (usually clearly just based on the last person I looked at). Show me algorithmically curated suggested lists, popular lists, allow me to sort those by # of members, easily find lists that user X belongs to, etc., mark lists as low quality/harassment vehicles. Surface good content shared by my interest lists somewhere other than the timeline.

- My personal #1: give me the likestream of the people I follow. This is easily more interesting than their actual tweets, at least to me. Something like a quarter of my usage these days is visiting individual accounts "Likes" pages. At least use this data in the aforementioned algorithmic curation of Lists/suggested follows.

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

#102

Post by burkaman »

sergiotapia wrote: post #87
mindcrash wrote: post #24

* Remove Jack from CEO position * Let Evan return as CEO (merge with Medium) ... this will restore Twitter management to the situation around 2010, then ... * Reform or cancel the Trust & Safety council * Restore open API access and app ecosystem * Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab) * Reverse the timeline changes * Stop pandering to far left ideologues Something like that?

Saudi investment money means none of that is ever ever going to happen. Twitter ain't ever going back from regressive left ideologies. If anything they're going to double-down. The fact that Feminist Frequency is on the "safety council" should tell you enough about it and how useless it is.

How are you connecting Saudi Arabia to promoting feminism

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

#104

Post by mrtron »

jedi_stannis wrote: post #17
divbit wrote: post #5

I want to watch the superbowl from twitter: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/technology/with-nfl-deal-... I have no idea how to watch the superbowl and I tried several apps. I had cable tv for like 1 year of highschool, and haven't felt any reason to purchase for myself since, but some things, like the superbowl / Olympics / World Cup etc. would be really great to be able to watch - no I'm not going to deal with ca…

You could try an antenna - most of the things you mentioned are broadcast over the air

...on mobile.

Access to most live broadcasts on mobile is still an unsolved problem.

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

#105

Post by closeparen »

davycro wrote: post #96
dotBen wrote: post #18

Refocus 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…

"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics" Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of cou…

It sounds like Twitter is the new RSS reader.

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

#106

Post by tschellenbach »

Twitter in it's current form mainly appeals to power users. For every day users it's simply too much work to get value from Twitter. To fix that they will have to make some choices that will upset existing users though:

1. Move the chronological feed to the background, the feed should be sorted by relevancy not time. (If you're a power user you can click to the raw chronological feed.)

2. Right now you can only follow users and not interests. This makes it extremely hard for new users to get a sensible feed of content. If a mainstream user signs up for Twitter they are only going to spend a minute or so to set things up. Twitter needs to immediately add value for those users.

3. Use a machine learning approach to learn what a user is interested in based on email clicks. (Quora does a great job at that.)

4. Redesign all apps and simply. A good example is their settings screen. Another is the crazy behaviour that you have to put a . in front of your tweet. Get rid of all those power user features and settings and simplify.

5. Remove abusive bots and clearly mark bots as bots. Twitter is spending millions to facilitate people engaging in follow spam and other forms of spam.

6. Build up a dedicated team to make sure Twitter works for high profile users. (IE, do notifications and messages work if i have >10m followers). They need a team on top of that to keep those users happy.

7. Some general tips: https://getstream.io/blog/13-tips-for-a-highly-engaging-news...

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

#107

Post by m-j-fox »

AliAdams wrote: post #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…

Yeah. By becoming a big company, Twitter missed her calling as a profitable, sustainable, 5-person operation a la Craigslist. Celebrities and others trying to make a career on the platform ruined it as a small interest-group informal discussion side channel.

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

#110

Post by jondubois »

I would cut Selling/General/Admin expenses. It's costing them $1.2 billion per year which is about half of their total revenue and this cost has kept growing over the years.

I would cut back on research (or at least bring it in-house) - $713 million is too much. If they paid each of their researchers 200K per year, they could hire 3500 of them which is insane.

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