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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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181–190 of 236 posts

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#181

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 isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation

I also don't like it for news because a single piece of news will appear a thousand times in my feed.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#182

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 haven't been able to use Twitter since the election.

I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook.

People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again.

I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#183

I'm wondering why they're getting more and more adamant that people register an account, even though a lot of people don't care about having an online persona outside of Facebook and wouldn't ever contribute anything to the platform. I honestly believe that could do much better by providing a good experience to people that just want to stay up-to-date and follow a few people that they find interesting.

Gotta pump up those numbers. Can't show growth without people signing up for accounts.

I don't buy it.

At least two core products of the biggest advertisement company in the world have no problem providing you value and generating ad-revenue without you having to be logged in. Google and YouTube would be nowhere near the success they are if they'd force you to log in.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#184
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I honestly don't know. I heard mutterings that they can become profitable if they become more lean (layoffs and less office extravagance).

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#185

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…

On any platform which allows curating feeds: Block fuckwits.

If someone isn't doing it for you, unfollow.

1,000 is almost certainly too many.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#186
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…

>Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use.

I think so much of it comes down to trying to put too much content in a small space. Twitter was a lot less annoying when it was only 140 characters and no embedded media since the information density was appropriate for a phone screen. Now it's just absurd how much one needs to scroll just to use it. It's almost more of a scrolling app than an information app.

One quick fix would be to have an option to show tweets one at a time with next and previous buttons at the bottom for rapid digestion of tweets.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fav from that list is FermatsLibrary, always love their visualizations.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#188

My primary reason for not using twitter is the lack of a Windows client that I like. All I want is to see tweets from people I'm following in a compact, not screen-filling, undistracting way. Just something simple to keep up with the tweets of a handful of people. All such clients I could find are discontinued and broken by now. The current clients are either are oriented at power-users (Tweetdeck & co) or turn what…

just go to https://mobile.twitter.com/home

This is what I get[0] which is much worse.

[0]http://i.imgur.com/sJ6qAQE.png

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#190
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter should fix lists, and make them collaborative.
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