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

341–350 of 648 posts

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

#341

Post by davycro »

DINKDINK wrote: post #228
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…

You might want to check out Figure1 which is a social network for medical professionals and very twitter like but has a user base that's full of very people. https://figure1.com/

I have. Figure1 feels too noisey and not specific to my interests. Twitter is more personal with better quality.

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

#342

Post by RyanZAG »

Add a down vote button so people can down vote the trolls. You'd see an enormous uptake in regular people using the service if every reply wasn't some random insult with a picture attachment of something disgusting.

Twitter is easily the most negative place on the internet, and that's including madness like the Something Awful forums or 4chan. A downvote option would hopefully push the constant arguments out of sight too.

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

#343

Post by yumaikas »

Offer Twitter Gold: A gilded account can post tweets that are 288 (144*2) characters long. Add other nice, but slightly costly features as they make sense.

Occasionally do "announce" tweets that explain "well-known" twitter features to help people be able to set it up better. Twitter could learn from Slack or Discord in this regard.

Others have suggested cleaning up the engineering org, that seems like a good organizational idea, but is going to be tricky to pull off.

Implement a feature or set of features to discourage bandwagon-hating. Twitter has been instrumental in destroying a non-trivial amount of careers, sometimes over things that were mere bad taste. Perhaps a limit on the number of responses a tweet can have, or rate limiting on how fast a negative tweet loads, or something. I'm not sure, but having them put some serious UX research into this problem would be a great reputation boost, if we know they are doing it.

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

#344

Post by tyingq »

nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

>8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter

That's a great one. The current process is very clunky from the user end. I can't imagine how clunky it is from the business side. Probably like a ticket system with no priorities, dates, state [open/closed/etc].

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

#345

Post by danielhooper »

mrb wrote: post #330
nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

> how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly?

My guess is less than 10,000.

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

#346

Post by eropple »

grandalf wrote: post #311
pjc50 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not coming from the people that users follow, it's coming from strangers who either @ them directly (e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/lily-allen-stillbir... ), or use twitter to forment violence against persons or people who aren't even on twitter. Milo was banned not because of anything he said directly against Leslie Jones, but because he drove a hate mob against her. Twitter really needs to give…

> Twitter really needs to give people the anti-abuse tools they demand. I strongly agree with this. It's a far better solution than censorship.

The people who actually harass (and are the ones who primarily bleat about "censorship" on private services) have been bleating about tools like BlockTogether and similar being "censorship"--how are "better anti-abuse tools" out of Twitter themselves any different? When--not if--these tools auto-block poisonous harassing protofascists from the default because they are poisonous harassing protofascists, how is that any different?

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

#347

Post by eropple »

grandalf wrote: post #304
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See grandalf's reply to eropple. In addition: No, it's not a position only sustainable from privilege. I'm fairly privileged - white, male, upper middle class, good job, good neighborhood. If someone threatened to kill me, that's just words - it's not the same as them showing up at my door with a gun in their hand. But I'd still have to think seriously about whether they were going to show up at my door, and what to…

Very true. My comment was not meant to suggest that I think Twitter should promote already illegal forms of speech like threats, etc. To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society. A non-privileged person is free to draw a cartoon of Trump that looks like Muhammed. In a totalitarian society nobody is free to draw cartoons of certain subjects.…

> To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society.

No, we're not. As a straight white guy, I can say "video games suck because X, Y, and Z" and people might call it stupid or call me a "cuck", but that's about it. A woman who say "video games are generally cool but have some problematic tendencies like X, Y, and Z" gets death and rape threats and have people post her personal information online. I know this happens because a friend did this, had it happen, and ended up crashing on my couch for a few days while she found a new apartment and moved because she feared for her safety, something which literally-literally does not happen to straight white men (though does happen, in varying but generally lesser quantities, to queer and minority men, and happens a lot more to trans people in general) who express similar opinions in that space.

Almost as if the numbers I drew in the genetic lottery has led to the privileged position of being able to speak in ways that others cannot without being literally endangered. How very strange.

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

#348

Post by marssaxman »

dotBen wrote: post #321
ungzd wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine one day I open Twitter to read my friends tweets and get greeted with message: "Hello! Today, to make world more disrupted with innovation, we pivoted Twitter to become a sports TV channel! All your tweets are gone, instead open a bottle of beer and watch this great game! 20 well-fit males kick the leather sphere! Isn't it impressive?" That will be day when I throw out my router to the window, flush smartph…

Foursquare managed to do this by migrating the original functionality to Swarm and pivoting the flagship product to something more monetizable. Arguably it saved the company from going under while still enabling the original functionality for those who wanted to use it. FWIW I'm not a sportsball fan either, but you can't argue that those of us with MS-DOS and Fidonet are in the minority. Sport is a super-majority con…

Did they actually manage that transition, though? I haven't heard anyone talk about Foursquare in years. My entire social circle effectively ran itself via Dodgeball when that was active; many of us remembered it fondly enough to give Foursquare a try, after Dodgeball's founders came back out of Google purgatory. It quickly became obvious that they really just wanted to become a cheap Yelp knockoff, though, and we all left. I don't remember hearing anyone propose a group migration to Swarm at the time, and I certainly haven't heard anyone talk about it since.

Checkin-based spontaneous social organization just... doesn't happen anymore, so far as I can see. Shame, because I really enjoyed it. If a new service came along which looked like it wasn't going to be evil, I might sign up and try to get my friends on board - but I wouldn't trust the foursquare people at this point.

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

#349

Post by hellcow »

nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

I love #7. A lot of people would pay a monthly fee to maintain a checkmark on their profile as a part of a "Twitter Pro" account. That fee could cover the manual verification of the user via scanned photo-ID and become a profit center for the company. Think of it like Twitter's version of an EV SSL cert.

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

#350

Post by jamestnz »

iamatworknow wrote: post #332
nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

>7. let people pay to get a checkmark Isn't (or maybe "wasn't") the intention of the check mark to differentiate legitimate public figures from those who would attempt to create fake profiles and impersonate them? Lately it seems like anyone who has had any sort of notoriety has been getting one, but if you could just pay for it instead that would completely defeat the purpose.

I think both. Don't take away the need to be a public figure and to verify your identity. Just make them pay in addition to these things.

If you're a big enough public figure to want/need the blue tick, you're arguably making commercial use of twitter already, so you probably have a marketing budget that can sink a thousand bucks a year into maintaining your verified status with Twitter (in addition to proving your identity in usual ways).

If some famous person doesn't want to pay, that's fine: either quit using twitter's platform to market yourself, or continue but live without the tick.

Post reply on HN