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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#91
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…

> 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 do (and any service basically). You don't want to run a large-scale service without having some way for your users to self-reset their passwords.

> They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.

That requirement is recent and I believe comes from law enforcement / politicians as they want to be able to track "hate speech" (that's the official speech, but rather I believe it's about dissidents, YPG supporters etc) to real persons. Many left-wing German accounts had them frozen until entering a phone number, for example. Facebook is easier because many people use their real name and photographs or other personal details from which law enforcement can identify them.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#92
post #32
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…

Scrolling is very inefficient on Twitter - to read the equivalent of a single screen on reddit or HN means to scroll 20x more on T. When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost. Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.

Is there a platform where you can filter political stuff? Anyway Twitter lets you hide tweets with certain keywords. You can cut down on noise dramatically that way.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#93
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn't know about the mute words feature. Thanks! Apparently I'm not the only one who had that thought.

I'm not sure Reader and the death of various blogs is necessarily cause and effect. My impression is that, to some degree, personal blog content has just shifted to Medium, podcasts, Facebook, etc.--or just gone away after it became less of a "thing" to do.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#94
post #60
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?

Twidere on Android allows you to access Twitter and Mastodon accounts in a UI similar to TweetDeck

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#95
post #89
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

That's not me. But likely because he doesn't enjoy the constant "do you use React?" and "why not React?", since I believe Pieter doesn't use frameworks. Honestly, sometimes the questions on his tweets are annoying so I bet he gets fed up with the constant questions from people who want to emulate him thinking it will make them successful.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#96
post #88
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

You can't use DM image/video send from any API client, you can't send polls and I believe you can't display them too.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#97

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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#98

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 do enjoy twitter, but I sort the people I follow into lists. E.g. "Actual friends", "People who post cool art", "People who just post random things", etc. Then use Tweetdeck to view all lists at the same time.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#99
Discovery for new content/people to follow on Twitter's iOS app (Explore tab) is appallingly bad. Its astonishing that they made so little improvement in this area after so many years. Its sad when you compare with what you get on Weibo, its China clone.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#100

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 now has the ability to hide tweets containing certain words. All you need to do is add a few major politicos and buzzwords and you'll see a lot less noise :)

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032

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