341–350 of 369 posts
What I want are separate feeds for "firehose" and "friends". My friends have better things to do than to post to Twitter 20 times per day. A bunch of firehose feeds (NYTimes news updates, for example) or Twitter celebrities (Nicole Cliffe) will make it impossible to see the signal. A simple UI change (a "I don't plan to make any more tweets for 4 hours" button) should make this filtering trivial to accomplish.
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That's not an issue of Twitter, but of human nature. I don't think technology can do anything about it. That is just wishful thinking about "future people" who spend their time learning and improving their skills 24/7, instead of slacking and having fun. Unrealistic - presumably people simply need time outs. You could argue that Twitter actually does well with that problem: after all, if you follow a robotics enthusi…
It's most definitely issue of how Twitter ranks and promotes the content. To make content more visible, you must be popular in first place. To be popular, you must have your content more visible. It's a virtuous cycle 99.9% users cannot possibly break without winning random virality lotteries. I agree Pareto's law and exponential distribution applies in all social networks but for Twitter this is not only skewed by a…
What I mean by human nature is that humans will always follow celebrity sneezes, and seek to slack off.
I don't think Twitter could invent a ranking that would give the robotics enthusiast a following of 10 million people and weed out the celebrity person. They could do that - but people would stop using the service and switch over to Instagram.
One major issue, once social networks introduce ranking, is the question who they rank for. If the algorithm tries to maximize engagement, it will happily promote the celebrity sneezes. Of course algorithms could optimize for other things (personal development or whatever), limited by people actually keeping to use the service.
In the early days afaik Twitter had no ranking and filtering at all.
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That's not an issue of Twitter, but of human nature. I don't think technology can do anything about it. That is just wishful thinking about "future people" who spend their time learning and improving their skills 24/7, instead of slacking and having fun. Unrealistic - presumably people simply need time outs. You could argue that Twitter actually does well with that problem: after all, if you follow a robotics enthusi…
There are plenty of things that technology can do about this. For the nuclear option, complete anonymity would resolve this problem instantaneously. Comments would only be driven by the merit of themselves rather than by the merit of who's saying them. There is an obvious argument against this in that you'd ostensibly much prefer to hear from a nuclear physicist than an english major on topics of nuclear physics, and…
If you are talking social networks in general, OK, then perhaps you'd have some options.
You also need people who want to use your network, though.
Google Plus.
Now excuse me while I shed no tears for Jack.
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There are plenty of things that technology can do about this. For the nuclear option, complete anonymity would resolve this problem instantaneously. Comments would only be driven by the merit of themselves rather than by the merit of who's saying them. There is an obvious argument against this in that you'd ostensibly much prefer to hear from a nuclear physicist than an english major on topics of nuclear physics, and…
But that wouldn't be the Twitter model of people following accounts and having followers. If you are talking social networks in general, OK, then perhaps you'd have some options. You also need people who want to use your network, though.
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> Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. You guys on HN keep saying this. I keep paying. I pay for the local newspaper that I disagree wildly with. I pay for one of the big national ones (that I could mostly read for free anyway). I pay for Spotify, for Linux magazines, a couple of donations to the Guardian and sometimes I pay for Netflix as well (rarely have time t…
Maybe that should be more narrowly read as “Twitter users will never pay” or “Facebook users will never pay” which is probably true because the simple reality is that these services offer low-value content that is cheap to produce and easy to consume. It’s not valuable so readers won’t pay. Consumers do pay for valuable content like Netflix, New York Times, books, etc., because they actually take effort to produce an…
I do think there is a segment of users who would pay though - those who use the platform to broadcast and want to have a bit more control over their feeds/profile/comments.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your…
What I really dislike is the spam in the notifications section. If someone likes my tweet, replies to it or retweets it, that's relevant. I don't however want to see a notification for something Tweeter deems interesting under other people you follow liked/retweed this as a notification.
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I guarantee Twitter’s data scientists are using more than just “amount the user is clicking” to decide whether a UI or ranking change is beneficial.
it's hilarious that your main defense of twitter's design decisions is an appeal to twitter's own authority. "twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!" case closed my circular dude
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I guarantee Twitter’s data scientists are using more than just “amount the user is clicking” to decide whether a UI or ranking change is beneficial.
it's hilarious that your main defense of twitter's design decisions is an appeal to twitter's own authority. "twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!" case closed my circular dude