Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 648 posts

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

#591

Post by aethertron »

1. Split notifications into two streams, high and low value. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12959003

2. Per-thread privacy and write control. When you post a new OP (non-reply) tweet, you get to choose who gets to see it, and post replies to it.

These options make sense to me: just you, your followees, mutually following accounts ('friends'), friends and friends of friends, or members of given lists, or anyone unblocked.

But I think they won't go that way because they want to be One Big Community. My proposal would lead to balkanisation.

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

#592

Post by dspillett »

DashRattlesnake wrote: post #515
dandare wrote: post #416

Earlier 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.

> The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader. Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc). I think it requires more attention to decode the messages of people trying to work around the character limits (with bad spelling and dropped punctuation, etc).

> Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc).

People would work around that by dropping punctuation so the algorithm would not see word boundaries. Or by writing in German...

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

#593

Post by qwertyuiopm »

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…

I disagree with 7(longer tweets).

The 140 character limit is what Twitter is most known for, and sets it apart from a typical social network. It's something like a body-mark of Twitter. It should stay.

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

#594

Post by dang »

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…

Please don't use this site for ideological battle. It's not what it's for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13758157 and marked it off-topic.

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

#595

Post by kalleboo »

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…

140 bytes to be more precise. An SMS client will cycle through 7-bit, 8-bit and UCS-2 encodings depending on the content, limiting the number of actual characters depending on the language.

The last time I tested it aaages ago, Twitter didn't enforce the encoding-based limitations, and if you sent a 140 character tweet full of unicode, it would actually send you several concatenated SMS.

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

#596

Post by EnderMB »

I don't think Twitter is doing "that" badly. It's a popular social network that loads of people rely on daily, and they are making some money, at least.

Either way, I'd make the following changes:

1. Open up the ecosystem again, and take advantage of the recent trend towards data science. Twitter have acquired a lot of startups relating to Twitter analytics, and to be honest I'd push to keep them separate, but a part of the company as a whole. Allow end-users to work with TV analytics, set up news aggregators powered by Twitter analytics, and push them as separate products on their platform. Twitter can separate themselves from the pack by being the ecosystem of choice for developers, and while it won't necessarily mean more money, it creates real value for their platform.

2. Add a cost to verified profiles. Nowadays, even people that work for magazines get a verified profile, because it's been pushed for by their sales department that deal with these people, and it provides otherwise ordinary people premium features. I'd create an "approved profile" flag to allow those that simply want to prove that they are who they are (i.e. press people, and moderately known people that may want to speak to everyone) and make verified profiles a paid-for feature for celebrities that want to ensure that the general population cannot contact them. Set this as a rolling cost per-month, and I think Twitter would make a fair bit of money from those that want to use its platform for commercial gain.

3. Drastically cut their costs by cutting sales/marketing. These departments are huge, and I think Twitter grew them out with the idea that they were going to become a media company themselves. Rather than make redundancies, I'd offer an opportunity for departments to separate from the main company and link up with outside investment, with the promise of access to the parts of the ecosystem they require.

4. Make a bigger deal of live events (i.e. sport, live shows, etc), but do it in a way that keeps them separate from the main product. This links to #3 in that a sales department that purely handles sport contracts could spin off into a separate service that utilises Twitter purely for sports events. Let people extend their Twitter profile on a separate site to indicate their sporting preferences, and allow Twitter to cater the experience for them. For example, I'm a Bristol City fan, so I could sign up to Twitter Sports as a Bristol City fan, and see highlights from the main Bristol City account, the trending hashtags around Bristol City, watch live games, and see what other Championship teams are up to. Essentially, it's making a more localised platform around sports.

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

#597

Post by dorait »

1. Charge a subscription fee one rate for consumers and a higher rate for businesses 2. Get rid of all inactive accounts 3. Charge a fee for tweetstreams 4. Fix the rate limit of APIs and create tools for developers 5. Add a features for event tweets/group accounts 6. Talk to developers, add features for Twitter app development 7. Fix the 140 character limitation

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

#598

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

this is exactly what a VC would say :D

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

#599

Post by lhnz »

zapt02 wrote: post #465
lhnz wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't own or display their content, nor would you set their prices (you merely give them the option to collect micropayments from a central wallet). Also, all social media companies already have data on their audience - that's just the way things are. All publishers with paywalls have massive bounce-rates due to people not wanting to subscribe. This would help them make more money.

Micropayments on that level are a race to the bottom. Why read The Times content when you can be presented with a similar article written by some blogger. And why would media companies give Twitter any percentage of the cut? Twitter already supplies them with free traffic, it's in their mutual interest. Facebook tried a similar approach with Instant Articles and the only publications that have jumped on it are the on…

  > Micropayments on that level are a race to the bottom.
  > Why read The Times content when you can be presented
  > with a similar article written by some blogger.
Because "Content is king" [0].

I'm not talking about the big companies that publish clickbait and make money through advertising at scale. I'm talking about smaller, niche, high-quality magazines and newspapers that need to show people that they're worth subscribing to. And that would like a more granular version of a subscription that allows more people to read them (instead of having to make their content freenium or free).

[0] You cannot talk about fungibility of publishers in one paragraph and then turn back on that to say 'content is king' in the next: you either believe one or the other.

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

#600

Post by dang »

skylan_q wrote: post #117
monochromatic wrote: post #53

I'd stop using it to suppress political speech that I disagree with. http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-her...

Don't like Clinton? Get silenced. Want to facilitate revolutions in other countries with the help of the CIA? That's cool. No problem.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and it's destructive of what it is for.

If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise to use the site as intended, i.e. for thoughtful conversation on stories that gratify intellectual curiosity.

Post reply on HN