Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#151

Post by cwyers » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

> A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That number stands at 328 million monthly active users -- the same as in the prior quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement Thursday. Revenue fell 4.7 percent and the company’s net loss also widened, affected by a $55 million writedown of the value of its investment in SoundCloud, the German music streaming service.

This is insanity. This is utter insanity. Twitter is at over 300 million monthly users. How have we created a system where that's not enough? Twitter is incredibly relevant. The president's Tweets are basically driving the news cycle now. And yet it needs to grow? Why? (Okay, okay, I understand why -- to feed all the VCs that invested in it. I just... ugh.)

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#152

Post by abiox » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:53 PM UTC

twitter's core interaction mechanism was always ripe for trolling, brigading and other abuse. the ui in general is pretty bad.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#153

Post by edw519 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

Nice list! Thanks for the gift to the community, Max. I bet this took a lot of work to curate.

I'm following you. Better yet, I'm following who you follow.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#154

Post by kosievdmerwe » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:55 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #151

> A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That number stands at 328 million monthly active users -- the same as in the prior quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement Thursday. Revenue fell 4.7 percent and the company’s net loss also widened, affected by a $55 million writedown of the value of its investment in SoundCloud, the German music streaming service. This is insani…

Because at the end of the day companies are supposed to make a profit and Twitter isn't managing that. They also aren't managing growth, which people believe is a good reason to delay profitability in favor of a future larger amount of profit.

This is hardly ridiculous.

EDIT: and moreover this is a situation that has existed for multiple quarters now, adding to the reasonableness of the frustration and lack of trust in the future of Twitter.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#155

Post by davidbwire » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:55 PM UTC

Twitter is it's own enemy. There's no way to adjust video quality for a smoother streaming experience. Twitter Lite has a horrible user experience; you have to manually click on each image to load and the images seem to be full quality which defeats the purpose of data saving. Why can't they build an app like Facebook Lite? Facebook lite is small in size to download (less than 1.5MB) and has nicely compressed images and videos.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#156

Post by iandanforth » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

I use twitter's web app primarily with heavy editing with uBlock origin. I don't see trends, or suggestions or moments.

I block 99% of accounts that show up as 'promoted'.

I always click 'show less often' for 'In case you missed' and 'Who you should follow'.

With all that, I love it. It's indispensable for keeping up with machine learning news.

The core product is the best curated news feed around, but you have to do the curation. Almost all the content twitter itself pushes is noise.

To survive twitter needs to start serving ads that are extremely tailored to me and my feed. Just like with google, the quality of ad results needs to match or exceed the quality of organic results.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#157

Post by AznHisoka » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #106

AznHisoka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is an elephant in the room. most people simply do not produce any useful content. they just auto tweet links or comment on something random and specific that is uninteresting.

But on twitter, it doesn't bother me if most people aren't interesting. I only follow the people I want to follow.

but there aren't that many interesting ppl with interesting stuff to say. So less of those ppl to follow.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#158

Post by cwyers » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #154

cwyers wrote: post #151

> A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That number stands at 328 million monthly active users -- the same as in the prior quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement Thursday. Revenue fell 4.7 percent and the company’s net loss also widened, affected by a $55 million writedown of the value of its investment in SoundCloud, the German music streaming service. This is insani…

Because at the end of the day companies are supposed to make a profit and Twitter isn't managing that. They also aren't managing growth, which people believe is a good reason to delay profitability in favor of a future larger amount of profit. This is hardly ridiculous. EDIT: and moreover this is a situation that has existed for multiple quarters now, adding to the reasonableness of the frustration and lack of trust…

Could Twitter be profitable if they weren't spending so much money on new customer acquisition?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#159

Post by altotrees » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

They brought on the global creative director from Beats by Dre. He had a hand in some interesting campaigns, but clearly it didn't do the trick.

Twitter is still insanely enmeshed in the American cultural fabric right now. Any newscast or radio show usually mentions it, businesses and publications fight for impressions, etc. There have Been multiple times I think Twitter is finally on it's way out, but it somehow remains relevant.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#160

Post by tomjen3 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 5:16 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…

Add 'Trump' to your blocked words. That removes most political bullshit. Then take every account that can't handle responsible retweeting and remove retweets from that account (which is now possible while still following the account).

I did this and twitter is now useful again. I