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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#211

Post by MichaelGG »

tpaschalis wrote: post #206
MichaelGG wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

(Shameless self plug) You might be able to use http://tweetstream.space I created this tool, that isn't limited to 1-week-old tweets, uses the public feed, and outputs it to an easily parsed format.

Oh wow, neat. Are you using the JS "api" they use for Twitter.com? Like emulating a browser?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#212

Post by wott »

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.

I never know what is going to happen when I click somewhere. The only thing I know is that it is not going to be what I expect. So I dare not click anywhere...

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#213

Post by tpaschalis »

MichaelGG wrote: post #211
tpaschalis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shameless self plug) You might be able to use http://tweetstream.space I created this tool, that isn't limited to 1-week-old tweets, uses the public feed, and outputs it to an easily parsed format.

Oh wow, neat. Are you using the JS "api" they use for Twitter.com? Like emulating a browser?

Yes, it mimics the browser Twitter Search, with its scroll loader. (Excuse any hiccups you might experience under load).

It might not be ideal, but it works for the most part. Future plans include a proper API, as well as statistics and visualizations available to each search.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#214

Post by egypturnash »

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 have this habit of checking Twitter in the morning. Lately it's become a kind of Russian Roulette: is my timeline going to be 90% people screaming about whatever horrible thing Trump did today? Sometimes I join in that screaming, too.

I keep on trying to shift over to Mastodon. It's not quite at critical mass of enough of my friends being there, but it's slowly growing.

Mastodon has a system of 'content warnings'; a user can mark their toots to be hidden, and give any arbitrary reason. 'Politics' is very much considered to be one of the reasons you should put a content warning on a toot, along with other reasons like 'NSFW', 'moping', 'spoilers for the latest episode of Gamey Throney', or 'raw unadulterated shoe-lust'.

It's also got a 500 character limit, a distributed architecture, a tendency for people running servers to crack down on jerkwaddery, and is pretty much supported entirely by Patreon right now rather than pouring venture capital down a hole while trying to chase advertising dollars.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#215

Post by shostack »

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…

As an important comparison, Facebook just posted 2B monthly actives in Q2.

From an advertising industry standpoint, the space has quickly become consolidated such that Google and FB own the vast majority of ad inventory in the market. Advertisers, particularly large advertisers who contribute a substantial portion of this revenue.

As a buyer, I can state from a position of experience that managing an ad buy at scale is just as important as potential performance. If I'm an agency for example, and I can reach massively more people on FB than Twitter, I'm likely going to focus my efforts there even if ROI may suffer from diminishing returns to some extent. A big part of the reason for that is it would take significantly more hours to setup, manage and report on Twitter (or any other ad platform) separately than it would to just focus on FB in that case.

So from a business level, the overhead of managing multiple ad platforms can often be a critical deciding factor in addition to just the actual ad performance. Time is money, and lots of people hours cost lots of money, particularly those people who have the technical specialization to effectively manage digital media campaigns at scale.

All of that is to explain why total ad spend is increasingly consolidating around FB and Google. And that is REALLY bad news for Twitter from an investor standpoint because it puts a big cap on their growth potential.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#216

Post by shostack »

rchaud wrote: post #197

Every discussion on Twitter on HN talks about UX issues like the threaded comment layout, as though these are what's responsible for driving away Twitter's audience. I think the simple answer is that you don't actually have to ever visit Twitter to know what Trump, Nicki Minaj, Drake etc. are saying. Whatever is said on a tweet will be screen-capped and re-reported on your favourite gossip website, news site, Instagr…

That's a great point. Text and images are easy and damn near free to copy and distribute (unlike video). So it is very easy to copy content from Twitter and post it elsewhere (where those publishers can then monetize it themselves).

Compare that to say...video hosted on YT/FB where, when embedded, can still include ads that allows those platforms to monetize people sharing their content offsite.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#217

Post by krapp »

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #105
krapp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes. I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be…

> I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.) Much like how 140 characters usually isn't enough to capture ideas properly, I think there are a lot of exceptions to this that you haven't considered: - discussion topics, a la #DevDiscuss - real-time news, e.g. when AWS goes down - off-hand though…

Fair enough. I feel like we don't need a new thread whenever AWS, Github or whatever goes down, though.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#218

Post by MichaelGG »

tpaschalis wrote: post #213
MichaelGG wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, neat. Are you using the JS "api" they use for Twitter.com? Like emulating a browser?

Yes, it mimics the browser Twitter Search, with its scroll loader. (Excuse any hiccups you might experience under load). It might not be ideal, but it works for the most part. Future plans include a proper API, as well as statistics and visualizations available to each search.

Is Twitter adversarial about it, like so they try to prevent people from doing that?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#219

Post by urs2102 »

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…

Great list, really heavy overlap with mine although mine is even smaller (https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/following). I try to do the same thing, I aggressively unfollow people and try to keep the number around the Dunbar number.

I just started using Twitter about a month ago after having an account since 2009 and I'm really enjoying it (despite seeing a number of tweets about Twitter being broken). I've almost entirely stopped using Facebook (outside of events/messaging) and strictly used Twitter. It's a fun place to share programming thoughts and discuss things with people.

For the most part I've been able to share links and chime into discussions with people whom's work I'm interested in and keep the discussion around economics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science. I follow roughly the same rule as you - I look at the tweet frequency and then dig into actual tweets. I've actually made a couple friends in the Elixir community through Twitter which is actually fun.

The last thing I would recommend is to use lists. @patrickc's reading list is probably one of the best things I follow, as well as @pmarca's press list. You can actually check out the lists I follow as well.

https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/lists

I think for the most part, like you Max, if you try to keep it small - it works great.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#220

Post by Karunamon »

recursive wrote: post #162
Karunamon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Basically you're looking at a flattened tree. Anytime you see the lines, those are part of the same conversation sequentially. Once the lines stop, that's a new conversation.

http://i.imgur.com/02mm3YW.png

And an ASCII version:

    Tweet
    -----
    1.0 Reply to tweet
    |
    1.1 Reply to 1.0
    |
    1.2 Reply to 1.1
    ----
    2.0 Reply to tweet
    |
    2.1 Reply to 2.0
    |
    2.2 Reply to 2.1
    ---
    3.0 Reply to tweet
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