Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around? • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by joelrunyon » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:16 PM UTC

calchris42 wrote: post #98

Grue3 wrote: post #77

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 repl…

> Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap. +10 to this. The signal to noise on Twitter is terrible. Pretty sure I'm using it "wrong", but my likelihood of following someone on Twitter is generally inversely proportional to their number of tweets per day.

Uh...so stop following "crap" accounts?

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

#142

Post by jamesk_au » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

This analysis from Ben Thompson (Stratechery[1]) just yesterday would be a great place to start:

"Imagine a Twitter app that, instead of a generic Moment that is little more than Twitter’s version of a thousand re-blogs, let you replay your Twitter stream from any particular moment in time. Miss the Oscars gaffe? Not only can you watch the video, you can read the reactions as they happen, from the people you actually care enough to follow. Or maybe see the reactions through someone else’s eyes: choose any other user on Twitter, and see what they saw as the gaffe happened.

What is so powerful about this seemingly simple feature is that it would commoditize “live” in a way that is only possibly digitally, and that would uniquely benefit the company: now the experience of “live” (except for the shock value) would be available at any time, from any perspective, and only on Twitter. That such a feature does not exist — indeed, that the company’s stated goal is to become more like old media, instead of uniquely leveraging digital — is as good an explanation for why the company has foundered as any."

[1] https://stratechery.com/2017/twitter-live-and-luck/

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

#143

Post by pvg » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

dotBen wrote: post #114

davycro wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community. As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers. I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at s…

It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money, or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.

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

#144

Post by andrepd » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

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?

* Reform or cancel the Trust & Safety council

Why.

* Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab)

Whose tools are that?

* Stop pandering to far left ideologues

I'm not aware of any such pandering. Care to give some examples?

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

#145

Post by bad_user » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

Grue3 wrote: post #77

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 repl…

> 1. Remove post length limit

That post length limit is what made Twitter interesting for me. This is being identified as a problem, however there's always Facebook and Google+ that don't have a limit. Twitter will not succeed by copying competitors.

> 2. Limit the number of tweets per day instead. 3. You can pay to remove the above limit.

People will never pay for removing such limits. They'll simply switch service once it gets annoying enough. This is the flaw in the logic of people that are anti ads as a business model. Basically people will not pay up unless there's scarcity and artificial scarcity doesn't really work.

Such a strategy would also be really unwise, because from my own observations, a majority of Twitter users are fairly silent, being content consumers rather than producers. So alienating those users that produce content for you is not the best strategy.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

unstatusthequo wrote: post #8

Charge $0.01 per tweet and this also suggest people be more succinct and thoughtful in their posts to make the service a little better

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by divbit » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #86

divbit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would also require purchasing a TV I guess.

No, it would require purchasing an antenna. You can plug that into a computer.

Huh. TIL.

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

#148

Post by joshwcomeau » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

Other than some small optimizations (When I reply to my own tweets, it should be visible without a page refresh), I would change nothing.

Granted, I am answering a different question: from the CEOs perspective, they _need_ to do something because they aren't growing fast enough.

But as a user, Twitter is more enjoyable when it's niche. I have a circle of developers that share their projects and thoughts on software dev, and it's delightful.

Someone else said that it's a great resource for the medical community, I know that the hiphop scene is big on twitter, there's whatever the hell Weird Twitter is...

Twitter makes more sense as a series of specialized clusters based around specific communities, not as a Facebook where it's everything for everyone.

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

#149

Post by timdellinger » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

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…

I think that Twitter and Facebook have similar problems - the choices that users make tend to ruin the experience for those users. People choose to follow (and continue following) folks who clutter up the feed.

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

#150

Post by xiaoma » Tue, Feb 28, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

chasing wrote: post #89

CM30 wrote: post #49

Well, 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…

> It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech... There's this idea that I hear mostly from the "right" that "freedom of speech" means "let people be assholes to one another with impunity." We need to fight back when the government attempts to abridge free speech. That's what the ACLU is good at. But Twitter is a community -- a community under no legal obligation to include toxic…

Twitter is anything but a community. It's a platform with a multitude of communities and individuals, many with conflicting goals.