Charge to hyperlink a URL. Maybe it costs $100 per year to have hyperlinks in your tweets. There are tons of businesses that rely on Twitter for distribution and twitter makes nothing off those businesses. You could still post a URL to a tweet for free, but hyperlinks cost some nominal amount.
Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
631–640 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
But doing it has friction, both for the writer and for the readers. If you remove the friction, you get more of it.
This feels like maybe a [citation required] thing. Facebook doesn't have any particular length limit on posts, and anecdotally vast screeds are quite rare on my feed, and most posts are pretty terse regardless. Is there data to suggest that people will just rant all the time if they're permitted to? [edit] Anecdotally, my current top 20 posts in my FB feed: 17 under 140 chars, 3 greater than 140 chars.
Nobody's arguing people will rant all the time. A lower frequency of longer texts is expected, even if Facebook didn't show it.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#633I would kill all the apps and the twitter.com front-end, and focus on the back-end, making Twitter an open platform again.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood your last paragraph). grandalf sees blocking that speech as protofascism (more or less - he doesn't use that word). I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech as if it were violence - no…
Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech ? I'm saying that private organizations should choose not to be associated with white supremacists and their ilk. Twitter's not the government. The protofascists and their broheims can go hang out on Gab dot AI for all I care. But they don't want that , because that means there aren't any targets for them to assault. Which they do, en masse, as part of a planned and inte…
> Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech?
> And so Twitter should show them the door.
Um, you just said something about prohibiting speech. I agree, Twitter's not the government, so it's not a First Amendment issue for Twitter to do this. Nevertheless, you are calling for Twitter to block speech.
> I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.
I will not engage with you with regards to "threats are violence", because you're trying to change the definition of words, and then say that those who disagree are silly. You should be better than that, or at least better than your "argument" in the last paragraph.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
yes, speakers of agglutinating languages would be able to shove in a few more words, but a) they'd be looked at strangely by their compatriots for using some strange new combo word and no-one wants to have to decipher megawords like that b) (this should be obvious) switching to a different language means that the people who follow you can't read anything you say. So no, people will not switch to German, or any other…
You already have something similar with the current system. Languages like Chinese have more semantic load per character, so I'd imagine Chinese tweeters can tweet more complete thoughts.
A better (but more opaque) system might try to estimate the "quantity" of semantic content in a language-specific way.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe the code base contains a bunch of edge cases where they assume 140 and trying to do anything else causes crashes or other poorly defined misbehavior. (Not what you were talking about but also a legitimate but unfortunate answer)
being a devloper myself this is the dumbest comment I ever read.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
My undergrad degree's in biomedical engineering, and I've been a self-taught coder since middle school. I'm currently pursing my PhD in engineering in addition to my medical degree, and working on using computational simulations and analytics to improve our understanding of how electrical abnormalities occur in the heart. I've always been interested in startups but haven't actively been involved in one. My goal is to work in a academic setting where I do both clinical medicine and research, and hopefully help translate research work to the clinic by working with startups that are my or other people's research findings.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#638Making 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…
Shameless plug: I wrote a Chrome extension to provide a tree view: https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse/ (It's more a visualization style than a reddit-like threaded conversation interface, but it might accomplish what you are referring to)
Thanks for sharing - this is pretty good.
I'd recommend including the actual text next to or below the user's avatar instead of in a separate view.
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#639As ceo of Faveeo a startup active in this space since 2012, I've ben thinking a lot about these issues; and the main problems of twitter are also what motivated me to launch several products since the inception of our own company.
I'll try to post my 2c here :
1) I think there is a paradox on twitter, which is that the more you follow people (the more you use and invest yourself in the tool; the harder it gets to use and to extract value from.
The thing is; for more people it's already hard enough to actually take the time to find the right people to follow (and to actually find them, curate your followings, etc) butthe end result if often times am overload of information which begs the question : how can a app that rewards engagement with negative outcomes can succeed in the long run?
The concept of twitter is just awesome and they invented a whole new medium; but I'm quetionning the concept of following people one by one.
One thing we built at Faveeo is called Horizons, and it enables to show the system some examples of people you like and trust; and our tool will automatically uncover and follow the best links posted and shared by those users.
We call it uncovering and following a trusted network at scale and we're having quite a success with it especially with people who want to tap into twitter without spending their life managing their twitter experience.
Twitter is absolutely full of great content, it's too hard to find.
Twitter could do a massive consumer facing app enabling people to follow topics and trusted bundles of it's own users AND surfacing their best links and content and I'm quite sure it would reach up to a billion users as more and more people are looking for content outside of their own bubble...
Also, twitter should care much more about the content of the links people share; then ONLY caring about the tweets themselves, which to be fair they do with media inserts now.
Happy to discuss this and have a look at http://horizons.social to try our twitter network discovery approach. (self promotion but for once there is a topic I'm actually an expert on :))
Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?
#640[deleted]