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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#81

Post by heymijo »

mxschumacher wrote: post #62
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'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it. Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss. Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science peop…

Do you use lists?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#82

Post by heymijo »

Angostura wrote: post #11
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.

Curious, what part of education? I've found a few UK people I enjoy following (once I learned the UK education lingo).

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#84

Post by krapp »

visarga wrote: post #40
krapp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes. I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be…

There are excellent conversations carried out by Twitter. They can also act as comments to the linked content. Sometimes you get more from a 20 word comment than from a full article.

That's true, but I feel Twitter isn't really structured to handle the flow of conversations well. I've seen good conversations on Youtube, as well, but like Twitter that seems to happen in spite of the restrictions of the platform, not because of it.

Also, the quality of Twitter comments doesn't seem to translate to HN, so much as the quality of the posts. Which, when those posts are emotive and lack sufficient context, tends to lead to poor threads here. And most of the rest of what's posted from Twitter seems to be HR and press releases, which are kind of uninteresting.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#85

Post by intoverflow2 »

ghaff wrote: post #44
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…

If Twitter's looking for a business model, I'll be the first to raise my hand to pay for filtering out tweets that have certain names in them. >I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. RSS still exists even though Reader doesn't. I use Feedly although I admit that I don't carefully curate a large number of feeds any longer because, outside of a relative handful of people/sites…

Basic word filtering was added recently https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

I'm hoping one day there is something smarter.

I know RSS still exists but it feels like Google Readers death killed a lot of the blogs I followed off too. The new posts just got less and less and eventually stopped.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#86

Post by jim_d »

flohofwoe wrote: post #18
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.

what types of features do you think would make it more useful for this use case?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#87

Post by epoch1970 »

skewart wrote: post #14

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…

When I last tried to sign up, they requested a phone number, I assume as some sort of an attempt to make it harder for spammers to sign up. I don't think they have any legitimate reason for that sort of information, so I didn't provide it. I don't remember the specifics, but either I couldn't finish creating the account, or it was created and then automatically locked/suspended a few minutes later. The end result was that I couldn't sign up and use the service in any meaningful way.

I don't know if that's still the case or not. After that rather awful experience trying to sign up, I've lost all interest in trying again.

I'm not surprised they're having trouble growing when they impede the ability of people to sign up! There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#88

Post by TekMol »

Eridrus wrote: post #60
skewart wrote: post #14

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…

Does anyone know what the status of the Twitter API is? I remember there being a kerfuffle about Twitter placing limitations on it, but is it still possible to make a custom client that unifies, say, Twitter and Mastodon?

Haven't used it in a while, but:

I think if you use it via user auth, it still works. So if a user of your app is approving your app to act on their behalf, you can do most things the user could do manually.

I think the limits mainly regarded application auth. So if your application wants the last 10k tweets about "honey" it will not get them unless you pay.

I could be wrong though. Would love to hear more from people in the know.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#89

Post by colept »

ezekg wrote: post #46
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…

You should start muting people who talk politics and Twitter also allows you to block tweets containing keywords/phrases[0]. Honestly, I've started to enjoy Twitter so much more now that my feed is void of politics and sexism/sjw arguments. [0]: https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624

Why are you blocking "react?"

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#90

Post by Bartweiss »

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…

Twitter is great as a site I exclusively use by following links. I check tweets when a source I like points me to one, or I need to check outage notifications for work.

Twitter is great for that, but it's of course the way Twitter desperately doesn't want to be used.

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