Sell it to Trump.
[deleted]
Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
361–370 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#362Commit seppuku.
Seriously, Twitter can't be saved. They fucked up when they alienated every developer out there by making their API too damn strict. There's no way back from this.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#363Quit.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they use that platform to gather followers under the direct purpose of separating the white race from the blacks or the Jews or whoever the hate-object-of-the-week is I find the sort of speech you describe highly unsavory, but I also disapprove of many other messages. Many people would advise Twitter to suppress the speech of gay people or immigrants, all the groups they hate. The point of speech being speech is th…
I'm not sure why Tweets and free speech are so closely intertwined in this sort of discussion. Twitter is a for-profit business that isn't profitable. The OP asks what would you do to turn it around (which I'm taking as "make it profitable"). Some suggest better prevention of perceived harassment. My Uber driver has the free speech right to tell me 'my father smells of elderberries,' but if they do it's reasonable to…
Broadly censoring accounts based on a subset of the content those accounts have posted is like Uber deciding not to do pickups / dropoffs near mosques.
Twitter has a profit incentive not just to censor content, but to make as much of the content as possible paid ads.
My suggestion to Twitter was to focus on what I think is the core value prop of twitter -- its infrastructure as a broadcast platform.
I realize many people prefer the approach Facebook takes where everyone is required to enter their real name and accounts are linked to credit scores and social security numbers, and login is required to view the content so that an ad can be served.
But I think the most promising social media infrastructure is something more like an unfettered Twitter. Simply a medium for exchanging ideas and broadcasting to the world without big media budgets or high production costs.
Yes, this gives some prejudiced jackass (or presidential candidate or ISIS) the same facility as highly credible organizations, but I think it's for the best.
Twitter's strength is an addressing scheme and non-reciprocal follow graph which allows a lot of expression to happen that would not likely occur otherwise.
The challenge for Twitter is to think of itself as an infrastructure company but not think of its product as ads.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#365Develop TweetDeck for all platforms & make it a paid product.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#366Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online…
Could be an interesting case. reddit is already doing this for 'real time' conversations (via F5 refresh) in respective subreddits during games, speeches, conferences, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#3671. Rebuild Twitter as an open, federated, decentralize service.
2. Write RFCs.
3. Shut down the massively dysfunctional company that should have been a protocol from the beginning so everyone involved can go get jobs doing something useful.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#368have the chan zuckerberg initiative buy it and turn it into a non-profit utility for instant short form information
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#3691. 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.
>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message.
The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#370My 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…
So much this. I manage (using Echofon) by muting large numbers of people and casting them into 'talkative' and 'very-talkative' lists, which I glance at occasionally. The less frenetic tweeters then make up my main always-on feed. But it's a horrible hack for something that is so fundamental to the user experience.
Twitter could be so much better by fixing a few low-hanging UX fruit like this. Three others:
* let me zoom in on a picture without having to right-click and "Open image in new tab". I can't believe I actually have to point this out.
* text docs as attachments (like pics/videos). A stream of tweets from the same author, replying to each other is kinda cute once, not so much the next n000 times.
* it would be nice if any videos actually played in my incredibly weird rare browser (some thing called Chromium)