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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?

#401

Post by jonathansizz »

1. Allow limited following of accounts. Right now, when you follow someone, it's either all (default) or nothing (if you mute/unfollow). But in many cases, I'm only interested in a subset of someone's tweets, on certain topics. For example, I'd follow many more scientists if I could just see their tweets on science, but not see their political or personal or sports-related tweets, which add too much noise to my feed. This would also be good for tweeters, as they could freely tweet about anything they like without risk of alienating followers.

Maybe Twitter could use the hashtag system to accomplish this?

2. Make replies work better. Relax the character limit for replies to several hundred characters, make replies threaded, make low-quality replies go away, and high-quality replies float to the top (just like HN). Remove the line noise by having @ and # symbols not show up in the feed. Hashtags and mentions also shouldn't use up any characters. If all this happens, it will become reasonable to have actual conversations on Twitter.

3. Stop showing me duplicate tweets. Once I've seen a tweet, I shouldn't see it again if it's reposted (something many media outlets tend to do frequently).

Actions like this will make Twitter a better experience for regular users, and should help to kickstart growth.

4. Charge whales (those with the most followers, who disproportionately benefit from using Twitter) actual monthly fees.

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

#402

Post by deong »

grandalf wrote: post #364
lostphilosopher wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

> Twitter has a profit incentive not just to censor content, but to make as much of the content as possible paid ads.

The latter implies the former. I promise, Coca-Cola is never going to advertise on Gab. You're never going to see a paid spot for Budweiser on an 8chan board. There is simply no demand from marketers for prime placement alongside death and rape threats, photos of people outside their homes with crosshairs overlaid, etc.

> focus on what I think is the core value prop of twitter -- its infrastructure as a broadcast platform.

Yes, but every successful broadcast platform I'm aware of imposes some standards on the content they carry. I'm not sure why you think Twitter needs to break from that model.

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

#403

Post by yanilkr »

Current advertising model of Twitter is not suited for the product. They tried to emulate google and facebook model of ad revenue by programmatically showing the user what might be useful to them and it did not work so well. People developed blind spots for such content. Twitter should really look into micro payments to reward users who increase engagement.

Some of our friends are good at recommending a movie or a restaurant and their opinions matter at a micro level similar to celebrity endorsements matter at a macro level. They would do more of it if they get paid like celebrities do but at a proportional rate. Take the burden out of complicated algorithms to match ad content to users and instead let users do it in between their conversations and pay for the content of their tweets. Make the normal user to be their spokesperson for the product/idea. Twitter is a very good medium for this.

This is native advertising at a whole new level. Financially rewarding users who are influential in their small circle might be difficult to implement. Take the ad money from businesses, local and global and share it with users who say nice and constructive things about their campaign to their followers. It could be as simple as rewarding a user for retweeting a well designed ad. Many users will get creative and make endorsements from their daily lives if it meant their followers liking it. Its like design crowd mixed with advertising. Brands would pay for this model because its driven by results.

Understanding user tweets and matching them to a business campaign and fairly allocating the reward to top/all contributors might be a much harder computer science problem but I think this model of advertising has a potential to work well for twitter. There is so much for user to tweet about. Local restaurants, to movies to their brand loyal purchases etc in exchange their tweets get financial reward based on how many people read them and engage with them.

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

#404

Post by jldugger »

jraines wrote: post #101

- Get rid of modals for everything. Especially: when clicking on a tweet to view replies, open a new page with better threading of replies, pagination, and no reordering (or optional "quality" reordering). Twitter is a forum on speed; take some good ideas from forums. Right now it's a forum on speed and acid. - Have more options for blocking, including "block this person and everyone who follows them or followed them…

> - Fix trending topic spam. Seriously, how is this so bad? Free advice: for every trending topic a tweet mentions over 1 in a single tweet, the probability that it's spam asymptotically approaches 1.

At the very least, the topic attribution should be divided into separate buckets, the way search engines tried(do?) with meta-tags.

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

#405

Post by deong »

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.

What would those tools look like exactly? If you tell your 50,000 followers where I live and that what I really need is a bullet in the head, what does the tool do? Hide it from my feed? Super. When the armed militia appears on my lawn, at least I will have been spared the stress of reading about it first, I guess.

That's a serious question. What anti-abuse tools do you think they should deploy that don't actually prevent people from posting or seeing the abuse?

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

#406

Post by DigitalSea »

1. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow employees to remotely work if they want.

2. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to go. Realise this wouldn't be popular, but Twitter is spending way too much cash.

3. Reduce the size of the ridiculous buffet they have for lunches, make it a fixed menu with 3 or 4 meals to prevent food waste. Get rid of the free alcohol and soft drink they seem to offer.

4. Actually, embrace developers, make the API limits more generous and allow developers to build cool things like the early days of Twitter.

5. Raise the character limit (even make this a premium feature, double it to 280 characters).

6. Get rid of Jack as CEO, it's not working. Twitter is losing money, they're not innovating and they keep focusing on things like video which most don't care for.

7. Focus on the core product and get rid of the Google-like dream products.

The way I see it, Twitter isn't a complicated idea. It's somewhat predictable size text strings being shown in a feed. Twitter is the kind of app you clone when you're learning a framework like Ruby on Rails, it's not a complicated idea from a technical standpoint. There is no reason to be spending two-billion per year.

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

#407

Post by Apocryphon »

DigitalSea wrote: post #406

1. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow employees to remotely work if they want. 2. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to go…

In a different world, Twitter would be headquartered in Brisbane:

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2011/01/twitter...

https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/twitter-considers-moving-i...

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

#408

Post by marssaxman »

david-cako wrote: post #319

Making the UX not shit is a great start. Twitter is really an unpleasant site to use for following discussions of any sort. When I click a thread-view for a post, I want to see a clear tree-view of all of the posts and replies like any other sane website, not the current flat-layout bullshit wherein you have no clue what the chronology of anything is, or who is responding to what. There are a lot of good ideas in thi…

I've never been a twitter user myself, but every now and then I end up following a link to a Twitter discussion, only to bounce right off again because I can't figure out what's supposed to be happening. Who is saying what to whom, in what order, in response to what? I can't tell. I imagine that there must be some context-literacy I don't have, which regular Twitter users somehow pick up on; or, possibly, Twitter only makes sense if you're following the stream of posts in real time.

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

#409

Post by returnbuyer »

burkaman wrote: post #390
returnbuyer wrote: post #384

They're not weakening twitter by weakening western society. If anything, weakening the society with divisive gender war and identify politics empowers twitter. The western economy suffers and more people become reclusive and stay inside all day on the internet. It's basic culture warfare and it's been happening for decades. Listen to some Yuri Besmenov [1] if you don't know what I'm talking about. Basically my point…

Can you point me to some reading that will help me understand why egalitarianism is destructive to civilization?

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitari...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tnPGJnOhDY

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

#410

Post by throewai »

Apocryphon wrote: post #407
DigitalSea wrote: post #406

1. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow employees to remotely work if they want. 2. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to go…

In a different world, Twitter would be headquartered in Brisbane: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2011/01/twitter... https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/twitter-considers-moving-i...

Got excited and thought it might be Brisbane, AU.
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