Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#61

Post by nhangen » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 3:33 AM UTC

ZitchDog wrote: post #60

nhangen wrote: post #57

Meh...get over yourself Marco. Just because you aren't interested in these topics does not mean others are not. That's why they are trending in the first place.

He made a somewhat interesting point around this -- that even if you do hapen to be interested in a trending topic and select it, a bunch of mostly unrelated spamish tweets will be there to greet you when you select the topic.

That happens on search.twitter.com also, so it's not limited to the trending topic bar.

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#62

Post by whoisnicole » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 3:34 AM UTC

The "dickbar" is offensive because it needs to be. Costello knows that we'll hate whatever sneaky scheme to redirect our attention so he's probably giving us something to complain about first so that when they release the intended concept, it'll feel less offensive. Feeding ads into the stream would cause an uproar. Adding a banner will generate banner blindness. What better than to overlap the add with something we'd find useful but still sideband?

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#63

Post by Duff » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 3:42 AM UTC

slig wrote: post #44

Skroob wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen before. Why shouldn't Twitter target trends at me? They know my tweets, and tweets of the people I follow. They could target trends, and ads for that matter, that I'd actually like to see.

> Why shouldn't Twitter target trends at me? Maybe they can't. They sure lack some core competence by not being able to block obvious spam accounts (Newly created accounts that: posts trend spam, do mass following and mass @mention, etc).

Knowing nothing about it, it seems to me that you could curate a semi-automatic solution pretty quickly.

(ie. Look, this guy follows Cisco's Datacenter Twitter account... let's show him stuff from Juniper's datacenter team, etc)

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#64

Post by alexqgb » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 4:06 AM UTC

panacea wrote: post #28

DanI-S wrote: post #16

I'd be interested to hear what 'normal', non-power users of Twitter think. The 'mouth-breathing buffoons' that Jeff Rock so denigrates (and evidently make up most of Twitter's users) may actually like this UI feature. Viewing the world through nerd-tinted spectacles makes many things seem horrible that are perfectly OK to a regular person.

Surely "mouth-breathing buffoons" is short-hand for 'not my niche/circle of interest apes'. We're all primates with our own monkey-sphere, and our inner circle of orangutans will be most important to us. Some of us choose to read Daring Fireball ( http://bit.ly/60LKTH ) and follow John on twitter. But twitter is telling us in the most prominent position they have that we should be interested in this: http://bit.ly/1F…

If you're on HN, you're probably a nerd, which means your Twitterstream (if you have one) is probably pretty interesting. Just for fun, click on the hashtag for any given trending topic. Note the (extraordinary) difference in quality, tone, and general signal:noise ratio.

You will realize that (a) Twitter can provide amazing filtration (b) this filter is 100% necessary and (c) the filter is exactly what the #dickbar undermines.

It's like an airplane engine that fails on purpose.

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#65

Post by alexlawford » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 4:36 AM UTC

I think that many of the same people offended by the Quick Bar would be the same people that are willing to (and often do) pay for a client. What reasons could Twitter have for being averse to a freemium model in this area of their business? $1/month to go advertising free? I'd pay it. Since they introduced it, I've always found the trending topics area of Twitter to be the worst thing about it. I, like so many others, object to having it stuck in my face every time I open their app.

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#66

Post by ceejayoz » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 4:45 AM UTC

slig wrote: post #44

Skroob wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen before. Why shouldn't Twitter target trends at me? They know my tweets, and tweets of the people I follow. They could target trends, and ads for that matter, that I'd actually like to see.

> Why shouldn't Twitter target trends at me? Maybe they can't. They sure lack some core competence by not being able to block obvious spam accounts (Newly created accounts that: posts trend spam, do mass following and mass @mention, etc).

I'd love to hear someone from Twitter explain why the service seems to lack even basic automated spam detection. The only mechanism that seems to exist is the "report as spam", which takes so long to suspend an account I wouldn't be surprised if the process was manual.

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#67

Post by ceejayoz » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 4:48 AM UTC

nhangen wrote: post #57

Meh...get over yourself Marco. Just because you aren't interested in these topics does not mean others are not. That's why they are trending in the first place.

Sure, but Twitter should be able to fairly reliably detect that someone like Marco isn't interested in the global trends, and serve him stuff more likely to be of interest.

What Twitter's currently doing is akin to Google text ads on HN for Justin Bieber-themed desktop wallpapers - it's completely untargeted.

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#68

Post by ceejayoz » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 4:51 AM UTC

john2x wrote: post #55

I'm no iPhone user so I'm curious as to why this is such an issue? As far as I can tell it's just ads in a free app? (unless, it's not free then it makes more sense)

Many of us paid for $3 Tweetie (and $3 for Tweetie 2) because it was by far the best Twitter client for iOS. It's free now, but we paid for it.

The statements from Twitter that people shouldn't build new Twitter clients coming out in the same week made the backlash worse, too.

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#69

Post by ceejayoz » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 4:53 AM UTC

cygwin98 wrote: post #45

jonursenbach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also create mobile clients for everybody to use. And don't forget about an API.

I don't think this will be an issue if he manages to maintain the same API as Twitter.

How many Twitter clients support third-party API endpoints?

Re: Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

#70

Post by mattgreenrocks » Mon, Mar 21, 2011, 4:58 AM UTC

daveman692 wrote: post #14

Am I mean for just not caring what's currently trending on Twitter? Feels like a similar problem to showing ads on blogs. I'm there for the content and the ad has to be exceptionally good in order to get any of my attention.

I find the trends offensive; as they seem to suggest that it'd be better if I talked about a certain topic, which is often terribly banal and uninteresting. Mostly because I believe the last thing the world needs is yet another mechanism to shove popular culture into people's faces: if it was so good, it wouldn't have to be hyped as much.