Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

Its the best source for breaking news. If something is going on I can search a twitter hashtag and parse out the good stuff for myself. Scroll through quickly and find people on the spot who may be periscoping etc.

Also because of the twitter culture/brevity In my personal experience people are more apt to reply. I have hired and been hired etc just through tweeting. I think there is a sort of casual atmosphere that can be used to get people to respond who otherwise never would.

Just my 2 cents.

Ooh, I like this question.

1. Trim the fat. Reduce the number of employees dramatically. Obviously not a graceful change but I feel there should not be that as many people working there as there are now.

2. Focus on engagement, not growth. Twitter may not be growing in the way that the market wants, but the users that it does have are incredibly devoted to the platform. If I were to leave Twitter there's nowhere else I could go. If I leave Tinder or Snapchat there are many other platforms that can fill almost the same niche. Twitter needs to capitalize on that.

3. Make brands pay to have a page. In other words, if you're not an individual, you must pay to create an account. Savvy companies have realized that being on Twitter is a key part of a solid social media campaign. To not be on Twitter is to miss out on a huge opportunity to reach a very devoted audience, and you can't reach that audience anywhere else (#2). Some brands are already doing this well (e.g. Wendy's.) If the choice comes to paying for the opportunity to market on Twitter, and not market at all, companies will gladly pay. On the plus side, this could let Twitter reduce the interstitial ads on the timeline.

Everyone hates ads, but the way that brands have engaged with individuals on Twitter really humanizes them and makes people form more real relationships with them. It also forces brands to be more accountable and aware.

4. Bring back Vine. A huge part of Twitter's staying power is the unique culture it has created (#2). Staying power is what gives Twitter its greatest value to advertisers (#3).

5. Ramp up engagement on Periscope. Periscope being a part of Twitter makes a lot of sense because Twitter is all about stuff happening live. It's a great platform but I think it also needs a desktop client (with OBS support, the way Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content creation to go up.

6. Re-open APIs. Twitter has sown a bad seed with the dev community by making its API very restricted. Tweets make up a very interesting dataset on which other people could build very unique things on top of. Twitter should encourage this, not stifle it. "Look what cool things we can do with Twitter" will only serve to strengthen the image of Twitter as a unique, irreplaceable platform.

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These are the main issues I see as an everyday user of Twitter. Things like live sports/TV are good ways to grow but these are all secondary to Twitter strengthening its core platform for longevity and meaningful sustainability.

I'd like to get involved, but a lack of capital is going to make it very difficult.

1) Focus on capturing value from "Twitter as realtime newsfeed" -- creating products for non-Twitter-posting-users to see what's going on at a longer timescale. This could be first party, or through partnerships with publishers.

2) All those Twitter developer/publisher services which Twitter recently sold were IMO the real value at Twitter, Inc. Unfortunately, Twitter has burned developers too many times to be trusted. I would have made them independent rather than selling, though.

3) Rather than randomly banning users, focus on better filtering tools, and tools to coalesce spam/multiple replies/etc. If you make a popular tweet, or are the target of an attack, there should be a single "click more" link, rather than hundreds of separate notifications.

Well, for one I would stop banning and restricting people for expressing their opinions. Your phone company wouldn't disconnect your service for leaving nasty messages on someone's mailbox, so Twitter shouldn't ban people for writing nasty messages to people. It's not their responsibility and I think society suffers from their judgement of what is allowed and what isn't - how can you promote understanding and bring people closer together when one side of the argument is being silenced and marginalized? People who break laws should be dealt with by the legal system. People that do not shouldn't have to worry about their ability to communicate with people being curtailed.

If you think this sort of thing doesn't happen, read this: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-her... , or http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157201503761/freedom-of-speech-... . He's had problems with this for months, because of his political blogging, and this is just one example. If it can happen to the guy who made Dilbert, it can happen to anyone.