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

marco.org

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

#91

Post by notahacker »

bryanh wrote: post #71
danilocampos wrote: post #32

Marco nails it. The whole value proposition of Twitter, historically, has been that you can make it whatever you would like it to be . Are you Captain Nerd? Load up that stream with the finest of curated nerds and be soaked in their wisdom, go! Are you nuts about celebrity culture? Sports? Food? Just want to keep up with your friends and colleagues? You're covered. The Dickbar is a violation of that understanding tha…

Targeted ads are so obvious that I don't understand why they haven't implemented it. Google did it successfully. Facebook did it successfully. In fact, if someone would have said to me a year ago "Twitter will totally ignore their massive pool of user specific data in favor of blanket ads!" I would have literally laughed in their face. "Twitter isn't that thick!" I'd say. It reminds me of the time I tried to partner…

Isn't the other major problem that "promoted tweets" simply take people to a stream of tweets with that hashtag, which could include smart competitors?

I'd assume it isn't that difficult to write a bot that autoposts with that hashtag each time a "trending topic" vaguely relevant to their area of business shows up. Certainly not compared with the SEO dance.

And if spammers are optimising their ads better than you..

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

#92

Post by stringbot »

revorad wrote: post #87
ugh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, then, where is the entitlement you are sensing? I couldn’t find any.

He's raising a stink about a company's (poor) attempt at making money by causing its users the slightest inconvenience. That ad uses what, less than 10% of the screen space? Now, you can criticise how bad or ineffective the ads are. But, no, the dude is offended! He feels entitled to get even more from Twitter than what he's paying for, which is $0. It's like if I got offended for Instapaper charging money for a prem…

He didn't raise a stink about Twitter trying to monetize, he raised a stink about them making a well-designed app ugly and less relevant to its users.

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

#93

Post by stringbot »

revorad wrote: post #87
ugh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, then, where is the entitlement you are sensing? I couldn’t find any.

He's raising a stink about a company's (poor) attempt at making money by causing its users the slightest inconvenience. That ad uses what, less than 10% of the screen space? Now, you can criticise how bad or ineffective the ads are. But, no, the dude is offended! He feels entitled to get even more from Twitter than what he's paying for, which is $0. It's like if I got offended for Instapaper charging money for a prem…

He didn't raise a stink about Twitter trying to monetize, he raised a stink about them making a well-designed app ugly and less relevant to its users.

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

#94

Post by robryan »

jasonkester wrote: post #77

It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse. That actually sums up Twitter as a whole. Try as I might, I've never been able to shift my perception of Twitter beyond that and into something that could ever be useful to me in any way. Look at the bottom…

For me the only appeal is connecting in line with my work and interests rather than my circle of friends and friends of friends on Facebook. If the kind of people I follow (use that losely I guess because I only look at it occasionally miss a heap of Tweets) moved to a platform which allowed longer form conversation and better image/video/link support I would have no problem moving on.

As it stands the threaded, no character limit format on hacker news is far better for getting insights on topics I care about than Twitter.

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

#95

Post by robryan »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #2

It's not just the dickbar that's offensive - it's the fact that its release along with the announcement that Twitter is going to try to limit the development of other clients against their API that really makes it distasteful. I understand that they have a need to monetize - I get it, but to do so in such a ham-handed way really bothers me.

Was just thinking about this, it would be great if they did do targeted advertising and did it through an API, so 3rd party clients could choose to include ads and both Twitter and the 3rd party takes a cut, or allow them to continue without advertising but ban other advertising meaning that they can only monetise by selling the app or including Twitter ads.

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

#96

Post by robryan »

mryall wrote: post #88
johns wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without hashtags, you can still do most of this with regular ol' keyword searches. So I think search is your real enemy here, not hashtags.

Yeah, folks at my company follow discussions about our products on Twitter and it doesn't matter whether the person uses a hashtag or not. What you need is a distinct product name though, to only discover relevant tweets.

Hashtags make it easier, sometimes people don't provide enough context or use the same words you would for a product or service, if people start using a common hashtag it makes it a lot easier.

An example of this that I used a bit in my thesis (admittedly not product based) was the #ausvotes hashtag for the Australian elections. There were plenty of Tweets that would have been very hard to identify as related to the election without that hashtag because they were mostly thoughts or opinions without context.

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

#97

Post by tofumatt »

ceejayoz wrote: post #69
cygwin98 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ironically, I believe Tweetie 2 used to, before Twitter bought it. It allowed a lot of advanced customization.

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

#98

Post by MatthewPhillips »

alexlawford wrote: post #65

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 other…

That would be a huge mistake. Doing that kills the value of their product to advertisers. You've just taken away the customers most desirable to advertisers (those willing to spend money). Ad pricing falls off the cliff.

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

#99

Post by ceejayoz »

tofumatt wrote: post #97
ceejayoz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Twitter clients support third-party API endpoints?

Ironically, I believe Tweetie 2 used to, before Twitter bought it. It allowed a lot of advanced customization.

It actually still does, for now. I wonder if the #dickbar shows up on third-party timelines...

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

#100

Post by nhangen »

ceejayoz wrote: post #67
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.

There's a different between being a poor service and being offensive.
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