[opens Twitter] EVERYONE: How dare you be a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white male?!?!??!?! ME: …Ok then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Change who you follow and block every single on of those words (well maybe not male, too many false positives).
Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
161–170 of 236 posts
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 conte…
I hear this complaint often and still don't understand it. Twitter has had threaded conversations for a while now and they flow just as easily as HN comments.
Counterpoint: I can easily understand the treading on HN. Whenever I see a threaded conversation on twitter, I cannot tell what is a response to what. I'm not sure if threaded is even the right word, but you used it first.
For instance: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/49800848655150694...
There are a ton of replies to things, but I can't tell where anything fits logically.
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#163Anyone 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…
That is an absolutely fabulous list! I took the time to follow each one manually. I was surprised to recognize at least 25% of the names from off Twitter.
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Follow people that only tweet about stuff that interests you. Don't hesitate to unfollow or mute people. You can tweak your follows and end up with a pretty low signal to noise ratio.
I have no problem controlling noise but Twitter seems incapable of delivering the signal. It seems impossible to have it show all the content from people I follow; instead it delivers some seemingly random subset.
As I was digging I found that Twitter started an algorithmic feed a while ago, and they optimize some metrics for interaction in order to show you the posts which are more relevant to you. IMHO, any form of feed filtering is prone to do unwanted things unless it can be explicitly controlled (Google+ was a good example of giving users control over their feed, but it didn't take off). The metrics optimized to decide which post to show or not show can never be completely correlated with user interest, that is one of the dangers of optimization.
Luckily for you, the people at Twitter have added a way to opt-out of the algorithmic timeline. Go in your options and uncheck the "Show best tweets first".
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
i don't necessarily agree, but regardless if i did, i'd rather view the content i signed up for in a true chronological way
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#166Anyone 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 seems like a lot of people are trying to solve your problem, but I'll just answer the direct question as a data point. Yes, I am still having a good time on Twitter, and I have been since shortly after it launched. It has definitely changed in many ways, good and bad, but overall I still use it a lot and enjoy it. That doesn't mean you have to :)
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no problem controlling noise but Twitter seems incapable of delivering the signal. It seems impossible to have it show all the content from people I follow; instead it delivers some seemingly random subset.
As I was digging I found that Twitter started an algorithmic feed a while ago, and they optimize some metrics for interaction in order to show you the posts which are more relevant to you. IMHO, any form of feed filtering is prone to do unwanted things unless it can be explicitly controlled (Google+ was a good example of giving users control over their feed, but it didn't take off). The metrics optimized to decide wh…
I did that when that particular change was announced; it still doesn't show everything and still often differs between loads. There should be a simple per-account selection of tweets, retweets, replies, and likes.
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#168Earlier 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…
The search API is limited to 7 days. You can get a 1% firehose feed, too, so you can tell the relatively frequency of hashtags and stuff. All this is free and you don't need user auth. User auth gives you extra rate limit increase (a separate bucket per user).
https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limits
The big number for app auth is you can do 450 searches/15 minutes, with up to 100 tweets each. So last 10k on "honey" is easily doable (it's only 100 searches) so long as those 10K are within the last week.
For everything else they want you to buy their Gnip product.
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#169Twitter's problem is that they let Ev Williams walk away from the company, and then he goes and creates Medium. Medium could have been a product of Twitter Inc., and then no one would be talking about their lack of growth.
Isn't Medium struggling in its own ways, cutting costs & laying people off? If it was a Twitter product, I imagine the stockholders would want it shut down, seeing it as a distraction to the main Twitter product.
I think Medium's financial problem is that they aren't charging for their services. My blog is hosted by Medium at my own custom domain, and the only thing they charged me for was the SSL certificate. They ought to charge for that like Wordpress.com does.
But yeah, Medium has some problems and a long way to go, but it has so much potential. One of their problems in my opinion is that most of the articles that show up in your feed at Medium.com have a BuzzFeed like quality to them. They should integrate some sort of RSS functionality into the feed, and start adding all of the best blogs, regardless of whether or not they happen to be hosted on Medium. But that's just what I would do, not that anyone cares ;)
For example, if you follow the "startups" tag on Medium, you ought to get cool stuff in your feed like IndieHackers. They could include IndieHackers and great blogs like it in their feed, and if people happen to click on those stories, they could just redirect people to those sites. So it would be sort of like Reddit, but instead of people submitting links, the editors at Medium would currate what gets added from other sites, and Medium.com users could obviously add blogs to their own personal feeds via RSS.
Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again
#170Anyone 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 have a simpler tactic I don't follow anyone I search for hashtags, so my experience is not person driven is subject driven. I also have a couple of lists that I sometines look at tweets.