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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?

#491

Post by jsemrau »

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…

>5. [...] become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor

On a related note, we built a bot that recommends an event based on your tweet+profile. The amount of times we got banned what could be a useful service is off the charts. Twitter needs to engage more with devs rather than block them whenever they can.

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

#492

Post by piedpiper_ »

untog wrote: post #196
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…

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.

blendle is taking the wrong approach, but the idea of micropayments is the way of the future

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

#494

Post by jsemrau »

closeparen wrote: post #105
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…

It sounds like Twitter is the new RSS reader.

...sounds about right. At least this is how I use it.

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

#495

Post by nsajko »

davycro wrote: post #338
coffeemug wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you recommend 5-10 leaders in emergency medicine to follow? (I'm trying to build up a good follow list outside of my usual domains, and I find recommendation graphs to be really useful)

@EMcardiac (Badass south african doc) @EMNerd_ (Great research commentaries) @M_Lin (Program director at UCSF, posts lots of clinical pearls) My favorites though are docs I know from away rotations and the wards. They aren't famous, but their opinions especially matter to me. Also follow @medicalaxioms

I am intrigued by people on HN who study bio, med, etc.

Are you involved with software development in an amateur or professional capacity? Are you interested in startups? How did you find HN?

Do you have CS/Math (or related) education in addition to being a student of medicine?

Hope I'm not too intrusive ;)

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

#496

Post by nsajko »

tgokh wrote: post #264
coffeemug wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you recommend 5-10 leaders in emergency medicine to follow? (I'm trying to build up a good follow list outside of my usual domains, and I find recommendation graphs to be really useful)

Depends on what content you're looking for, but off the top of my head, here's a variety of type of EM-related people/accounts. The first two are teaching resources. The rest are active (both clinically and on Twitter) clinicians or EM-focused students. @emcrit @epmonthly @MDaware @precordialthump @seth_kelly @mcsassymd anything tagged #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education – often has an EM focus)

Would you mind taking a look at the question I asked your sibling poster?

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

#497

Post by kbenson »

platz wrote: post #473
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.

The stratechery folks have said something akin to that Twitter is unsalvageable that this point from a growth perspective because they've already lost most of their potential customers. People who tried their product and walked away. If these were fresh potential customers it would be one thing, but convincing someone to come back who already tried your product is much harder

It doesn't help that those of us that walked away still continuously hear stories about how Twitter can be a cesspool.

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

#499

Post by takeda »

Twitter should never have succeed, it is a solution for a problem that never existed. It used funding money to artificially manufacture the need for it, to a point that news station started using it as a news source, which is IMO ridiculous.

I think it should just die. I never had a Twitter account and never thought that I'm missing something.

The only utility that twitter was providing was already solved by RSS feeds.

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

#500

Post by K0SM0S »

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.

> to push people to register

Which is an admission of weakness in the first place. If the product is good enough, they wouldn't need to resort to anything special to enroll users beyond a sign up button up top.

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