Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#141

Post by freehunter » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #53

visarga wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost. That's also my experience - I have to be very careful not to click on anything, lest I lose my position on the thread. I don't understand how the developers themselves don't get frustrated about this, frankly.

You think the developers of Twitter use Twitter?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#142

Post by flohofwoe » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

jim_d wrote: post #86

flohofwoe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

- going back to a 'reproducible timeline', I want to see each tweet by each person I'm following, in the right order

- I don't want to see tweets by persons I'm not following, unless they are retweeded or part of a thread

- navigating the time line is a mess, sometimes the timeline scrolls to the top, and it's generally very hard to continue where you left

- better thread visualization

- clear distinction between tweets I've already seen vs 'unread tweets'

- some sort of bookmarking or 'read later' for tweets

- let me add tags to tweets and persons (I mainly want to add company or topic tags to people, for instance 'this is the WebGL guy at Apple')

[edit: formatting]

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#143

Post by joelrunyon » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

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 really good for sub-communities.

Following the NBA on twitter is actually an awesome experience.

I wish they would stop comparing twitter to other social media networks + focus on what is good about it (live, sports, entertainment) and double down on that & figure out how to make money by offering more services in that space.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#144

Post by freehunter » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:38 PM UTC

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.

The problem is, there's too much they're trying to show you. They can't fit it all, and users would get bored quickly if they tried. If I saw everything my 300+ "friends" on Facebook did every day, plus everything every page I followed said, plus everything that's recommended, plus every ad they wanted to show all shown in the same order they were posted in, I'd be scrolling for five minutes and only be a few moments back in time.

And for other people, they'd look at it once a day, and the next day might be exactly the same. So what's the point in visiting constantly?

It's done to hide how active or inactive your social graph actually is.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#145

Post by moocowtruck » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

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.

how is it the best knowledge exchange platform when most statements or arguments quickly end with "twitter isn't the best place for this convo"

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#146

Post by kasey_junk » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #139

kasey_junk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry let me rephrase. Its their differentiation to me. I don't want to see 140+ character posts. I like the terseness of the format.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#147

Post by byuu » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

And here we all really thought their recent redesign to add border-radius: 50% to literally everything on the site (avatars, text boxes, buttons, etc) and to strip all contrast away from the icons by hollowing them all out would bring about massive growth of the platform!

How many more times do they have to listen to exactly what their users want and add things like more complicated reply-to functionality that most can't seem to figure out still, live auto-playing sports video on the frontpage regardless of your interests, temporary automatic bans for using adult language in replies to verified accounts when yours isn't, moments, reordering your timeline so that it's no longer chronological, hiding tweets behind "show more replies" (with no opt-out), hiding even more tweets behind a second "show even more sensitive replies" (still with no opt-out), invading others' discretion and flooding your timeline with other peoples' likes, replacing the dreaded egg avatar with a person silhouette, etc before the platform starts to grow? /s

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#148

Post by mrkrabo » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #23

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…

Try Mastodon.

It's sooooo annoying to hear people trying to get you into an alternate platform. app.net, gab.ai, identi.ca, etc. Seriously just stop. You're just annoying.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#149

Post by mrkrabo » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:46 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #141

icebraining wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost. That's also my experience - I have to be very careful not to click on anything, lest I lose my position on the thread. I don't understand how the developers themselves don't get frustrated about this, frankly.

You think the developers of Twitter use Twitter?

That's actually one of my concerns. As a heavy Twitter user for like 8 years (I spend at least one hour a day in that app) it is obvious to me that those involved with Twitter do not use the product at all.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#150

Post by mrkrabo » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:49 PM UTC

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #67

[opens Twitter] EVERYONE: How dare you be a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white male?!?!??!?! ME: …Ok then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You're not following the correct people. I agree it's sad that almost everybody involved with tech is a die-hard liberal :P I'd love to get my tech news from Twitter but I simply don't like to be told how to think regarding politics, which tech people do all day. So I just read Hacker News...