I like twitter. My biggest gripe is hashtags got so spammed by bots that by now they're pretty much useless.
Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
521–530 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#522Refocus 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…
Live sports rights are expensive. ESPN has been feeling the pain of having to pay the high prices while losing subscribers. Twitter wouldn't do any better with their ad-based monetization.
Live sports are likely soon to become cheaper when it is no longer viable to have millions of people who don't watch them paying for them anyway.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't help that those of us that walked away still continuously hear stories about how Twitter can be a cesspool.
In what ways do people see twitter as a cesspool? Im just genuinely curious because I get a lot of value out of twitter. It's a great way for me to be exposed to new work from artists, finding circles of people with overlapping niche interests, reading political dialogue and analysis, funny stuff...etc
To be fair, people using twitter don't generally call it a cesspool, and reading between the lines you know they must get value out of it if they continue to use it, but there's the constant "you have to have thick skin" statements from people about how it can occasionally be toxic.
As someone not in the social network, what it looks like is that there may be some value to me if I get involved, but I'll likely have to deal with bullshit to do so, and the perception is that the bullshit is much more assured than the value. Whether this is valid, or more specifically whether the relative assessments of each feature are accurate, is unknown, but that's how it feels.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#524I'm amazed they arent more profitable, given that Twitter has become Ground Zero for the daily (hourly? minutely?) news cycle.
Are stock exchanges highly profitable? Twitter has become the global exchange for real-time information. I suppose Twitter cant really charge a 'brokerage' fee for tweeting. That is not in their interest.
Please excuse my ignorance of Twitter's commercial offerings, but is access to the Firehose expensive? Or real-time summary of Firehose statistics relevant to your keywords? That just seems so valuable and such a singular offering....its not like there is a competing service.
I know I've misued the word minutely. But there needs to be a better word for 'minute-by-minute'.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
it's a mostly unmoderated public forum. the price of addressing the world is having to listen back.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
The very first Twitter clone I remember came up with the killer feature - infinitely long Tweets. How many times did I hear this dumb idea? It is not a sandwich, longer does not mean better! The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.
Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia". There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.
There is no technical reason. The reasons are all non-technical and irrational. Starting with the word-imagery: Have you ever heard a songbird go "tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet?" No, it ceases to be a tweet at that point. It's a squawk or scream or warble or something else. And probably it's annoying AF too. You probably think that's unimportant or has nothing to do with it.
Twitter is about the tweet. It's how they got big in the first place. It's the word they added to the dictionary. If you're thinking of pivoting away from what you are, you'd better consider it carefully and be sure it's not the main irreplaceable source of your claim to fame.
PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#527Engineering first.
Open API.
Turning Twitter into a federated protocol with 100% compatibility with GNU Social.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#528Product, product, product, product, product.
But with people with a track record of actually knowing and having done good products.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#529My 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…
> My 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. "He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know." I originally thought this was an Israeli saying, because that's the only people I've heard quote it (usually journalists, referring to bloviating politicians). Turns it it's originally Laozi.
...who had an awful lot of good stuff to say. :-)
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
@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 ;)
Not intrusive, thank you for the question. I'm a self-taught hacker/coder. Before medical school I made a Facebook application, when those were a thing, called Quiz Monster, which had about 3 million DAU for a few years. Thankfully earned enough through ad revenue to pay for my medical education. I see myself as a clinician first, but will always be a hacker and plan to return to software after residency.