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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#221

Post by natecavanaugh »

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 to agree with you, but I don't think I've ever had a "good time" on twitter. It's not optimized for conversation, and it doesn't even optimize for thoughtful condensation of ideas; it just optimizes for the quickest brain diarrhea you can squeeze out in 140 characters). Sure, I get its use as a broadcast platform, but it's not even flattening the world all that much in that regard. The lions share of attention still goes to those who probably need that kind of reach the least (granted, what social sphere is there where that's not really the case?)

Maybe it's just my innate crotchety-ness, but I feel like a lot of people think about Twitter like owning a boat: fun in theory but a big PITA that probably won't be missed except once or twice a year.

Of course, this is all imbued with my own personal gripes and prejudices with social media, so take it as a commiserating vent :)

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#222

Post by nimchimpsky »

vxNsr wrote: post #188
nimchimpsky wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

much worse than what ?

Its simply the tweets of the people you follow - no fluff.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#223

Post by karzeem »

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…

The key is don't follow accounts that tweet about politics. I filtered mine down a few years ago and have loved it ever since.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#224

Post by unchaotic »

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…

My usage is similar but I follow about twice the number of people. To keep things manageable i.e. consume twitter in about 30 minutes/day, I wrote a small chrome extension to rearrange my feed (sort by likes/retweets, give different weights to users and sort the feed/list).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#225

Post by tpaschalis »

MichaelGG wrote: post #218
tpaschalis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't really know, to be honest. Last time the app was on HN, there was a spike in usage, plus a few steady users each day, but I haven't noticed any restrictions yet.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#226

Post by recursive »

Karunamon wrote: post #220
recursive wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So where does a reply to 1.1 go?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#227

Post by Karunamon »

recursive wrote: post #226
Karunamon wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So where does a reply to 1.1 go?

Right where 1.2 is. If you wanted to see the direct responses to that, you'd click on that tweet, and then be looking at a new subthread. It's all predicated on whose message the reply-er clicked the reply button on.

    First Tweet
      Reply 1
      Reply 2
You only see the first two levels of the main tweet you're looking at. The first tweet, its replies, and the immediate children of those replies. Some indenting would make this a lot more intuitive.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#228

Post by recursive »

Karunamon wrote: post #227
recursive wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where does a reply to 1.1 go?

Right where 1.2 is. If you wanted to see the direct responses to that, you'd click on that tweet, and then be looking at a new subthread. It's all predicated on whose message the reply-er clicked the reply button on. First Tweet Reply 1 Reply 2 You only see the first two levels of the main tweet you're looking at. The first tweet, its replies, and the immediate children of those replies. Some indenting would make thi…

That is basically my complaint then. I have 1920 horizontal pixels available, but for some reason twitter is intent on only using a small fraction of that.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#229

Post by ivcha »

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…

yes, me... please refrain yourself from starting your replies like that...

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#230

Post by dirtyaura »

criddell wrote: post #104
Rjevski wrote: post #76

What I don't understand is how can they burn so much money to still not be profitable despite millions of users. Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?

Twitter has something like 3000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of where they are. Before I heard this number, I would have guessed they had 300 employees (based on Instagram having 20 employees when Facebook bought them). At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us t…

Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that

- ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers)

- ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, researchers, and related managers)

- ~1000 in Sales and Marketing

- ~500 in general & administrative (finance, legal, H&R, IT support, management, misc)

If you compare to e.g. Google, this sounds pretty similar split.

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