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

Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 236 posts

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#11

Post by Angostura »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #9

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" che…

I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#12

Post by CM30 »

JonFish85 wrote: post #7
crispytx wrote: post #2

Twitter's problem is that they let Ev Williams walk away from the company, and then he goes and creates Medium. Medium could have been a product of Twitter Inc., and then no one would be talking about their lack of growth.

Isn't Medium struggling in its own ways, cutting costs & laying people off? If it was a Twitter product, I imagine the stockholders would want it shut down, seeing it as a distraction to the main Twitter product.

Yeah, Medium's having trouble finding a good business model itself:

https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be

It's got the same general issues as Twitter has. No clear business model, a more limited audience than the creators of the service want it to have and a severe with too much noise and hostility (especially when you go away from recommended articles to random ones).

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#13

Post by mox1 »

dforrestwilson wrote: post #4

Twitter is such a fascinating platform. I use it on a professional basis and I really enjoy it. I get the opportunity to interact with the rock stars of my field. These are people whom I would probably never have the chance to ping otherwise. I consume more media on TWTR than FB at this point because I trust the people I follow to be great "taste makers". Clearly the company has some value, but how they fix the busin…

I mean interact is a strong term here. You send 0-140 characters towards them and they get to send 0-140 back. Yes I'm sure sometimes meaningful conversations happen, but I doubt that is the norm.

I get to interact with a rock star if I hang out near the exit door after the concert. I can shout at them and (s)he might say something back. If I'm lucky and it's a cool musician we might be able to have a brief conversation...

As a professional, if I wanted to interact with a leader in my field on a meaningful level I would e-mail, write them, attend a speech by them, etc. etc.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#14

Post by skewart »

Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Reply threads are a pain. Tweetstorms get old. And all too often there is way too much spam. However, there are amazing communities of people sharing interesting content and having great conversations.

Twitter needs to realize that there value prop is the community using it and not the app itself. They need to make radical design and product changes to make for a better user experience if they want to grow. The vast majority of internet products evolve significantly as they grow, surfing the wave of changing user behavior and taste as they reach new markets.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#15

Post by unethical_ban »

AznHisoka wrote: post #6

Twitter needs to: 1. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise to Twitter anyway. 2. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with no links. 3. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interac…

Businesses would have to get some kind of value-add (honey) otherwise literally everyone would tweet as "Owner at Business" and just happen to tweet about their business all the time. Regulating that would be a nightmare.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#16

Post by wongarsu »

My primary reason for not using twitter is the lack of a Windows client that I like. All I want is to see tweets from people I'm following in a compact, not screen-filling, undistracting way. Just something simple to keep up with the tweets of a handful of people.

All such clients I could find are discontinued and broken by now. The current clients are either are oriented at power-users (Tweetdeck & co) or turn what could be 8 lines of text into a screen-filling experience that you have to dedicate time to to follow (official Twitter windows client & co). I don't care enough to code something myself, so I just don't bother with Twitter.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#17

Post by na85 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #6

Twitter needs to: 1. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise to Twitter anyway. 2. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with no links. 3. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interac…

>and as a result less attention to ads

Why is this bad for users?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#18

Post by flohofwoe »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #9

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" che…

Best knowledge-exchange platform for tech-people I've seen so far. With some careful selection of who to follow it even has an ok signal-to-noise ratio. Every single feature Twitter has implemented in the past few years made it worse for this type of audience though.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#20

Post by CM30 »

I read somewhere that the issue with Twitter is that its platform doesn't have the level of mainstream appeal the likes of Facebook or Instagram have. It's good for journalists and influencers sure, but for the average Joe it's not as intuitive to use.
Post reply on HN