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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?

#621

Post by blisterpeanuts »

prawn wrote: post #503
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was originally SMS messages which were limited to 160 characters. 140 for the text and 20 for user name.

"Why is exactly 140 still the right length?" That's common knowledge. They were asking, why is it STILL the right length? If Twitter want to encourage short form content, there are other ways to do it. Either hide 141 onwards behind a [+more] link or style the long ones differently so they have less impact. Better yet, create multi-panel tweets so content is still presented bite-sized, but in a way that people can de…

It's also common knowledge that arbitrarily changing a standard costs money. They have to educate hundreds of millions of users, re-jigger their databases and services, and forego a well known trademark feature of their product. Why bother? Everyone's memorized that it's 140 characters, and people have adapted pretty well to 140-character microblogging. Would 1,000 have been better? Possibly, possibly not. I think Twitter's fundamental problems run deeper than the SMS limitation; apart from some celebrity accounts with tens of millions of followers such as @RealDonaldTrump etc., they are starting to lose relevance compared to Facebook and other, more dynamic services.

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

#622

Post by kbart »

marssaxman wrote: post #408
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 onl…

Exactly the same for me. Every time I wanted to use Twitter I ended up confused by all that mess and closed it. Is it so hard to add tools (filters, permissions etc.) for more advanced users to create the experience they want? Twitter makes a wonderful media to follow interesting persons and getting breaking news, but probably 99.9% of its content for me is spam or uninteresting, annoying mess that I have no convenient way to avoid.

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

#623

Post by pc86 »

aphextron wrote: post #369
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.

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

I haven't seen any evidence of thought on Twitter for a long time, condensed or otherwise.

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

#625

Post by rdiddly »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #575
rdiddly wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 twe…

The core problem is that the length of a tweet should be "one concisely-stated thought", but that's hard to write into an API's documentation :) > PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply. Not in the real world no, although people are nostalgic for the pre-crash US, but on the Internet I think it definitely is. Put another way, if you changed Twitter into Medium people wou…

Well, that's why I said "hardly" and not "not." :)

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

#626

Post by emodendroket »

toyg wrote: post #576
emodendroket wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if it makes people just stop using Twitter then it hurts the one thing they have going for them, a big userbase.

As long as the previous mode remains free, I don't see people moving away.

If what you liked was that everything was short but now it isn't maybe you'd just get on Facebook or whatever.

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

#627

Post by Finnucane »

I'd definitely try to follow in the footsteps of many of our great 'turnaround' CEOs: 1) Insist on a 'golden parachute' clause in my contract that gives me a big payout on exit, 2) run the company into the ground, 3) jump ship before the explosion.

And I could do it for less than, say, Bob Nardelli or Carly Fiorina.

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

#628

Post by fragmede »

ISL wrote: post #126
ProAm wrote: post #43

Layoff everyone except for the bare minimum to keep the company operational (~100-200 people), take it private and print money for 10 years then let it naturally sunset itself.

Came here to say cost-cutting. I'm not sure that Twitter will sunset itself. Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen. Twitter is a protocol, and an excellent one. If it continues to serve as a backbone of public-domain discourse, it can remain relevant for the foreseeable future. WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition, with 0.5B monthly users. Twitter currently has 0…

> Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen.

Is it? It's a private company and so is not subject to the same disclosure rules as a public company, so no one outside the company can actually say how they're actually doing.

Meanwhile, as a publicly traded company, TWTR is required to publish all sorts of information about the site's popularity, for critics to play armchair CEO with.

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

#629

Post by reitanqild »

Happy to not be their CEO in 2017. That said, here are my thoughts:

Either:

Slowly turn it into Google+, only with users and API. (Including pseudonyms, groups and circles)

Or:

Make it a communication tool instead of a spam distribution machine sometimes used to communicate. Charge for API access above personal usage quotas (i.e. news organisations , company accounts etc).

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

#630

Post by fragmede »

SeanBoocock wrote: post #512
epoch1970 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's still like this, but when I last tried to create a Twitter account it required a phone number and some kind of verification by phone. That's something I refuse to do. I can sort of understand requiring that to try to combat the creation of spam accounts, for instance. But it made the service pretty much unusable for me. Unless it's as easy to create an account there as it is to create one here or…

That feels like a vestige of Twitter's origins as a heavily SMS focused service. Even if that is true, though, odd to have such a high friction element to the registration flow for what is now a niche use case.

It's intentional, in an attempt to reduce spammers and trolls. Gmail also includes receiving an SMS in the signup flow.
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