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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?

#451

Post by bigiain »

bthallplz wrote: post #353
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.

> Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore. I do, yet I still think this should be experimented with. If an account I follow tends to post longer messages, I can deal with seeing only the first line of them.

I suspect the intersection of a) people who care about Twitter, b) who use twitter via sms, c) people who do not have phones that hide/abstract away multipart sms so they've got 300+ character messaging - is so small it'd be less expensive for Twitter to buy all three of them a new iPhone every 2 years instead of hold one meeting trying to solve the problem ;-)

(Note: I'm not convinced long-tweets are "the killer idea" others seem to think - like someone else put it, the reader's attention is the limited resource, not the service's ability to publish characters. I don't scroll thru Wordpress/LiveJournal/LongReads on the train or while waiting for coffee...

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

#452

Post by warcher »

sverige wrote: post #439
warcher wrote: post #417

There are a few camps of people using twitter, which want different things and are mostly being badly served. 1) Trolls love twitter. The legion of racist eggs sowing destruction for no other reason than their own nihilistic enjoyment is an existential threat to the business and must be culled. The company and the trolls cannot live together in peace. One or the other will die. It feels like twitter hasn't figured ou…

>1) Trolls love twitter. ... They gotta go. I've been hearing this since trolling was invented on Usenet. No one is going to rid the Internet of trolls unless all of the big players enforce RealName™ and we all know how well that ended. "Culling the trolls" means different things to different people, and probably almost every one of us has at some time in our internet lives posted something that another group would c…

You'll never get all of them, it's true. It's a never ending war.

And you're right-- there's a haircut that's got to happen at twitter. I don't know whether they'll survive it, but it's going to happen either way.

Revenue is driven by usage. Actual usage. They sell eyeballs. They can defraud their customers (the purchasers of said eyeballs), but only for a time. I think, as an article of faith admittedly, that you're better off being straight about it, but I've never piloted a ship that big, so what do I know?

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

#454

Post by acdha »

ruipgil wrote: post #352
RyanZAG wrote: post #342

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…

You can't fight negativity with negativity. Let the good and positive boil to the top. Anyway, that would certainly not save twitter. They seem to be lacking better management and focus on their core product.

> You can't fight negativity with negativity. Let the good and positive boil to the top.

How does that work? Someone organizes a hate mob and you're getting tons of horrible messages. How do you “let the good and positive boil to the top”?

That's a huge problem for Twitter because every time someone, usually a woman, is harassed off of the service, other people notice and adjust their actions accordingly whether that is switching to a system, reducing what they post, making their account private, etc. — all of which cuts into the engagement they need to keep the service growing.

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

#456

Post by peterhunt »

I believe Twitter's key problem is that they do not take enough product, monetization, and growth risks, either because they are too afraid to, or their org can't execute quickly enough.

1. Pay as much cash as you need to (even if it means laying off a few people) and hire one or two of FB's monetization and growth leaders, preferably away from a team like Instagram. Give them the freedom and resources to grow the team they want.

2. Based on what Twitter has done with the product over the past few years (i.e. not a lot), the product management team is too risk-averse. I would fire them and acquire a few startups to build a more aggressive PM team that knows when to listen to users/metrics and when to ignore them.

3. Partnerships team seems to be great. I would incentivize them to stay.

4. Twitter should invest in experienced engineering management to refocus the team. They have open-sourced four (four!) separate message brokers, and I heard that they had five internally recommended JS frameworks at one point. They should standardize on one boring stack for all new development and move all new development to the cloud.

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

#458

Post by derefr »

theoh wrote: post #445
cortesoft wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the original reason for the 140 character limit was because you could get tweets via SMS, which at the time had a character limit.

Via a single SMS message. The size of SMS messages is still fixed at 160 characters, but now they can be transparently chained to send longer texts. This is quite unlike IP protocols which have much larger maximum packet sizes. Whether Twitter should ever have taken a cue from SMS is moot: apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic c…

> apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice.

It'd be interesting to see a Twitter clone where people could only communicate in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code (i.e. a code + its predefined strongly-typed parameters.)

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

#459

Post by m-p-3 »

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.

> Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

And RCS is being deployed. Eventually the character limit will be irrelevant anyway.

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

#460

Post by grok2 »

Charge celebrities (anyone who has above a certain volume of users) to use twitter.

Provide additional analytics as a paid service for marketing. Charge for add-on services (like delayed/periodic publishing etc, running polls, etc).

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