Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 648 posts

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

#251

Post by genericpseudo »

grandalf wrote: post #167
eropple wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do not stifle political speech And when that political speech threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or people? 'Cause I'm not saying you're conflating the two, but a whole lot of people for whom this is an axe they grind really kind of constantly do .

> threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or people I see no reason why having a clear, public record of such communications is worse than forcing those involved to use a different messaging system. It's just words. The simple answer is press the "unfollow" button, or follow it, read it, and act in your best interests based on it.

There is no such thing as "just words". That's a position only sustainable from privilege.

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

#252

Post by LordHumungous »

xiaoma wrote: post #177
jamesk_au wrote: post #142

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…

Wow. He cites himself 9 times and cites himself citing himself at the end.

Gotta get that SEO juice baby

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

#253

Post by ProfessorLayton »

1. Remove senior management. They do not know what they're doing.

2. Experiment and find the right point between monetizing users and those that get the most value out of Twitter. Right now users' eyeballs are being bled dry, and getting their experience ruined with tons of ads, and timeline shuffling. It feels like those with tons of followers are getting a free ride at the expense of everyone else.

3. Introduce meaningful timeline features such as: 3a. Ability to follow #hashtags/topics instead of just people and companies. Curated "Moments" are a weak substitute. 3b. Follow geographical areas of interest (e.g. Top Tweets in Oakland, SOMA etc.) 3c. Ability to explore Twitter geographically. Again, I feel this is a huge and untapped. Heard something crazy happen over your neighborhood? Pull up an map and explore what people are saying around there.

4. Actually do something about trolls (Perhaps a reputation system?)

5. Clamp down on bots. Why is it even possible to follow 300k or a few million people?

6. Slim down the workforce, by a lot, unfortunately. I don't think a sustainable Twitter can ever be a large as it is today.

7. Bigger focus on live TV + discussion

8. Fix search: Its awful and nearly useless unless you put in a ton of effort in "advanced search". Top results are often times just the same retweets and news articles over and over again.

I could keep going...

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

#254

Post by lcnmrn »

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. Sublevel has a limit of 640 characters, but it didn't start like that. First it was set at 256 and people kept complaining. Then I set it at 512 and people kept hitting that limit. So I go for 640 and voilà, nobody is complaining any longer.

You can call that pure A/B testing. So Twitter should aim for at least 500 more characters.

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

#255

Post by monknomo »

pvg wrote: post #143
dotBen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe research tools for long tail targeting content creators?

I could see paying for a tool that helped collect, filter and organize what the top people are saying and pain points in general.

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

#256

Post by haasted »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #243
haasted wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Allow companies to purchase moderation rights to a hashtag for a limited time. This might actually make advertisement campaigns asking people to share using a hashtag a viable thing.

I think that's a bad idea as people will loose trust in the info. Payed search results didn't work either.

Well, if the "sponsored hashtags" were clearly marked as such, like google's ads next to search result, I believe the loss of trust would be limited.

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

#257

Post by rapfaria »

LordHumungous wrote: post #246
lhnz wrote: post #79

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 benef…

Problem is journalism is a crap market. No one wants to pay for it.

I can't remember the last time I have read a Forbes article.

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

#258

Post by naravara »

There are several options. I guess Twitter could go with one or all of them.

As a backend service it would be nice if they focused on making your Twitter account into a sort of “internet driver’s license” to identify you anywhere and everywhere online through a sort of trust chain. I never want to have to sign up for an account again unless it pertains to my finances. I so desperately wish I could manage all my various subscriptions and accounts for random services from a central place that is highly secure and easy to access. I should be able to sign-on seamlessly, unsubscribe effortlessly, and never have to remember a username or password. This would also allow a central place for me to set privacy preferences so we can dictate exactly what the downstream services should and shouldn’t be able to see. If Twitter can just let me two-factor authorize with a token+pin and have this let me into just about any account online (aside from maybe my main email and financial accounts in the interests of not having all the eggs in one basket) that’s a service people would indispensible. (So much so that maybe ICANN should just work on something like it as a public utility?)

On the more user-facing end, Twitter’s niche has always been people who are keen on promoting themselves and making announcements (new paper published, new product announced, press releases, etc.), so maybe they should just fill into what Facebook was before it became a NewsFeed. They could give you an About Me page and a status-bar. This basically is what Twitter is now, but they lack the focus to design it around that stuff as a central purpose for the service. They focus more on the “Status Bar” than the “About Me,” this would really just a difference in design language and emphasis. Make it into an RSS feed for people.

Or, as a third option. . . they could just make Twitter into an RSS reader. Maybe even add Wordpress/Medium style pages for long-form writing and feed that all through the same “feed” paradigm.

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

#259

Post by scalesolved »

criddell wrote: post #191
scalesolved wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 people? Could you list what sort of team breakdown you are seeing for this? I'm really struggling to see how to maintain/develop and work on such a complex problem at that scale with a team of only 30.

When Facebook bought Instagram, weren't they running with something like 15 people?

Sure I guess they were small but their problem space seems to be similar to a more standard CRUD. I could be wrong but the one to many and many to one relations within Twitter seem much harder (at least from my perspective).

Both are super tough at the scale they run :)

Post reply on HN