Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

The act of whittling down a tweet to fit inside the (increasingly ridiculous) 140-character limit is the exact kind of tedious, repetitive thing a game designer would instantly recognize as a "grind":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming)

And free-to-play mobile games have demonstrated that lots of people, when presented with a grind, are very willing to pay real money to skip past it. So: give Twitter users the option to buy extra characters, usable whenever they're needed, at some price point low enough to be attractive as an impulse buy. A penny per character, say, or 40 characters for a quarter, or 120 for 99 cents. The marginal cost to Twitter of shipping 141 characters over the wire instead of 140 is essentially nothing, so whatever you charge would be almost 100% pure profit.

A user with a bag of such extra characters in hand would now have the ability, if they wanted to, to skip editing down every tweet and just post on the fly. Which could be a real time-saver, if you're one of the media-type power users who spend all day on Twitter! And how much it costs you depends entirely on how often you want the luxury of not having to edit yourself. If you only need it occasionally, it's cheap; if you're compulsively logorrheic, well... consider it a tax on the burden you're placing on your followers' attention.

But wouldn't it ruin Twitter, you ask, if people weren't forced to be terse? I don't see how. When people use the extra space wisely, it makes their life easier, costs you nothing and generates revenue that can subsidize freeloaders like you. When people abuse the extra space, you can always unfollow them -- and when the abusers notice their follower counts crashing, they'll be encouraged to rein themselves in. Nobody logs on to Twitter in the morning with the objective of losing followers. The system would correct itself.

So: Twitter makes money, power users enjoy using it more, regular users get their freight paid for by the whales, everyone has access to longer-form expression with a mechanism already in place to still encourage brevity. It's a win all around.

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2. Fix the mess of UI. I still don't understand how to engage in conversations to this day. Convoluted modal boxes, overlaying other screens, that then expand out to more replies, and so on and so forth. It's WAY too confusing.

Basically turn it into an online Newspaper stand where I can read gated content without having to give out my personal info. or remember a username/password (to anything but Twitter.)