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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#131

Post by boyce »

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…

It's awful

Twitter used to feel like a good party, with a great range of people with stories and opinions and hopes to talk about. That's definitely over now.

I'm really enjoying mastodon.social though, it feels like how the internet used to

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#132

Post by freeflight »

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #101
jim_d wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Better threading for sure. The current interface is pretty good, but it makes it hard to keep track of multiple back-and-forths and oftentimes drops tweets from threads.

Indeed, navigating any discussion on Twitter feels like a complete mess. Imho some quirks it has in a browser are really annoying, like closing the conversation you are looking at when you click somewhere outside of it.

Happened to me plenty of times that I misclicked and closed a discussion which I had been very deep in, so I had to open it again and scroll&click my way back to where it originally closed, way too much wasted time over a simple wrong click.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#133

Post by xxpor »

epoch1970 wrote: post #118
mschuster91 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 enfo…

> 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. I don't buy that. There are other similar services that allow an email address to optionally be provided later, for password-resetting purposes. I believe reddit is like that, as is this site. This site gives me a "Please put a valid address in the email field, or we…

Anon users are the worst part of twitter. They should be completely banned. HN doesn't have this problem because it's sufficiently niche, but the Nazi trolls and other assorted idiots have to be dealt with on twitter.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#134

Post by mxschumacher »

heymijo wrote: post #129
mxschumacher wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to, e.g. "software engineers", "authors", "investors" etc, but imo the feature is completely unusable as there is no batch editing. Definitely has a lot of potential, especially when combined with filters: "Give me Silicon Valley people minus politics and hyperlocal info"

I get that. Twitter has a lot of usability imperfections. Lists is one, but I still use them. Anywhere from 0 - 200 people, depending on how much they post, is about the maximum I can handle in any one stream. So I segregate into lists. I see you have about 400 people you follow, which would overwhelm me if they were all in my main feed.

Most of those people are have a low tweet frequency though.(it would be great if Twitter provided better statistical insight into these matters)

if people start spamming or their signal/noise ratio goes down I unfollow them quite quickly.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#136

Post by RodericDay »

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…

1k is an absurd number of people. Try <100.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#137

Post by SonicSoul »

nailer wrote: post #123
SonicSoul wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it's a great platform and does what it does extremely well. Interesting point about Politics though, I've been using it as my #1 source of that for now. But if you don't follow people that share such content do you still see it?

I've followed people because they're influential in tech and discovered they're Antifa members that openly advocate for political violence towards anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders.

wow! seriously? so in a way you learned things about them that are probably relevant to following them :)

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#138

Post by kps »

glastra wrote: post #41
SonicSoul wrote: post #22

side point, but i really hope Twitter doesn't try to mimic FB type algorithms that serve content im likely to click vs content as is from people I follow. This includes withholding updates so that users keep pulling the lever to get a trickle of content. I hate it so much when i F5 on a window in Facebook (or hit the back button) and completely different front page loads.

This is probably happening already. The feed itself is no longer sorted by date (you get some highlights that you can dismiss but hey, here they are again), and then even content liked (not retweeted) by people you follow shows up. This makes absolutely no sense for the user, as it happens on Facebook. I assume it's a way to tackle the lack of original content generated from individual users / content consumers (e.g.…

What I would like is a simple list of followed users with four columns of tickboxes: [] tweets [] replies [] retweets [] likes.

What I get is an unpredictable mishmash that seems deliberately designed to drive me away.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#139

Post by tormeh »

kasey_junk wrote: post #55
tormeh wrote: post #38

Twitter is amazing, but it needs to ditch the 140 chars, improve discoverability, and get more modest in its expectations. Twitter is an interest network, where you follow interesting people and read what they write, re-tweet what they write and sometimes interact with them. Given that a lot of people don't have that much interest in things that can be expressed in Twitter form, Twitter has a low ceiling on how big i…

I think I'd probably stop using Twitter (the only social network I use) if they ditched the 140 character format. I don't want to see long form facebook style posts there, its literally their differentiation.

I would say that their differentiation of Twitter is that all posts are public and connections are uni-directional.

They could implement 140+ using the same kind of GUI that's already there for text-as-picture, which is already widely used.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#140

Post by skoocda »

This comes up semi-regularly when Twitter is mentioned on HN, but I've moved all my Twitter attention over to Nuzzel and have enjoyed the change. Twitter started to feel like such a poor return on my time due to the format- having an aggregator makes a huge difference. It partially solves the clutter problem of having hundreds of Twitter followees, and partially solves the problem of not wanting to check Twitter perpetually.

What I don't understand is why Twitter hasn't implemented more direct methods to see the generally/statistically good content. Anyone remember 'Texts from last night' and 'Fuck my life' and the like? They had this _incredible_ feature that allowed you to sort by top posts of the week, or even, can you believe it- the month! Nuzzel provides this as well, but it doesn't have much effect unless you follow enough people to decimate your normal Twitter experience.

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