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Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

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

#371

Post by NumberCruncher »

dustinlocke wrote: post #355
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…

I love this. Publications could choose whether to be pay-per-view ($0.10/article) or included in some base-level subscription with profits shared based on how many clicks you get.

Publications worth reading have already a pay per view medium. It is called book.

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

#372

Post by silvestrov »

danielhooper wrote: post #345
mrb wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

50 countries with 200 persons each?

I'd say more than 10.000 in just USA alone. Even if you up it to $5 a month. Twitter is used a lot by those who use twitter.

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

#373

Post by andromeduck »

aphextron wrote: post #369
mrb wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then charge per character and ramp it up as it gets longer.

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

#374

Post by sfgeek »

danielhooper wrote: post #345
mrb wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Me. If I still used Twitter. Heck, I tweet maybe 5 times a month and I'd pay that. $1 a month is so cheap I would notice.

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

#375

Post by gregmac »

aphextron wrote: post #369
mrb wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People already hack around this by posting images of text, or using several tweets (usually annotated with "1/" "2/" etc, or merely by replying to their own tweets).

The images hurt accessibility, and the streams make it harder to share the discussion (which is partly the purpose of being a social app to begin with).

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

#376

Post by IshKebab »

uncletaco wrote: post #293
untog wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there much evidence to suggest that people are willing to pay for individual articles, though? Blendle has been around for a while and hasn't set the world alight. There are plenty of free news sources to compete with.

Probably not, but I think there could be a "twitter wallet" that the user pays into. Let's say I add $5 a month to this wallet and twitter pays it's content partners based on the percentage of click through received by me. It would work like Brave browser's wallet. The problem with this though is it would probably encourage more junk content and instead of annoying ads we'll get more clickbait.

That idea is as old as the web and I don't see why Twitter doing it will suddenly make it work.

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

#377

Post by davidiach »

I would have a product recommendation. Twitter missed the change to be a player in the chat space, but it could still offer a chat experience that other services can't.

Imagine Twitter would start offering users the possibility to create group chats where only the invited users can write in but that others could follow in real time.

So lets say there is an Apple keynote and @BenedictEvans, @asymco and @gruber start a group chat where they comment the event. I get a notification that this group chat started and I can go and follow it (the same way I could follow a live video). I can't comment myself, but I can follow their conversation (and maybe hit the like button from time to time). Because it's a chat, the participants will write much more than they would if they would be only limited to tweeting.

It's crazy that in 2017 we can see celebrities interacting with each other via video, tweets,snaps, Facebook comments and so on, but there is no option to follow a real time chat between them.

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

#378

Post by sfgeek »

x0x0 wrote: post #334
artursapek wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I never understood why their home page is so basic. Is it just to reduce load on their servers from lurkers?

A guess: to push people to register. For several reasons: (1) they are judged on that every quarter; (2) a hypothesis that this makes the experience better for users, and hence more likely to contribute to MAUs; (3) a hypothesis this improves ad targeting.

Agreed on 1 and 2, but how does that work for improving targeting.
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