What Twitter Can Be • Hacker News Board

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#51

Post by learnstats2 » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:51 PM UTC

moey wrote: post #27

Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything? http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z I value the service, and am wondering what other people value it at. I will post the results here after set number of people vote. UPDATE Initially I was going to wait a little longer, but after looking at the results from this sample, the…

I am a Twitter user but only because of social network inertia. If they charged me $0.01 once, I'd happily take the opportunity to leave.

On the other hand, I would happily pay (today) for something that gave me full control over my content.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#52

Post by minthd » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:51 PM UTC

azazo wrote: post #43

austenallred wrote: post #7

Twitter’s biggest problem is that Twitter increases or decreases in value along with user’s willingness to curate their feed. Many will never do that. So Twitter tries to do the work for you, but guessing exactly who/what you’d be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible. The closest they can get is the current logged-out homepage: “Here are a bunch of random categories. You like the NBA? Maybe cele…

I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also. Twitter is my favorite app, but it's because I have spent five plus years curating my feed. There is a fundamental problem with the way they onboard new users and this is why so many people don't stick around. The onboarding process asks you to select interests and then recommends people to follow based on those interests. However, they often recommend celebrities…

That's true. Most of the recommendations are crap. Got any recommendations to finding high signal/noise users or lists ?

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#53

Post by minthd » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #40

Twitter lists (especially in combination with Flipboard) are useful for filtering/curation, but have seen few improvements and remain unavailable in the mobile app. Lists could exhibit business value comparable to Pinterest curation, if Twitter paid any attention to the feature. They are micro-social networks that amplify the value of Twitter's main accomplishment: a directory of pseudonymns for writers, marketers, s…

How do you combine twitter list with flipboard?

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#54

Post by ohitsdom » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:53 PM UTC

sirbetsalot wrote: post #35

of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the staine…

Unusable? I'm sure there's a lot of noise for people that have a decent following, but I think most people don't have these problems. Certainly not to the extent that the entire platform is unusable.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#55

Post by normloman » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

I used to be on twitter. Left because nobody talks with you, just at you. And when you do actually get a conversation going, it's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations. The hashtag doesn't do much to foster conversation either. Merely a way to label slogans. This dichotomy between being a public feed but also being a place for conversations is at the core of why twitter sucks.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#56

Post by GurnB » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

hagope wrote: post #50

One of the best use cases of twitter for me is customer service, a few complaints about @comcast is way more effective than calling and waiting on the phone for 20 minutes and fighting with the customer service agent... I was able to resolve my issue with a few back and forth DMs with @comcastcares ... I don't think many people have enjoyed this experience, it's like night and day.

I admit that I have used @Amazon to make a Smart Alec comment about a missing/delayed delivery and was pleasently surprised that I was contacted within an hour to DM them the details so they could resolve the matter.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#57

Post by notahacker » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #23

"Shortcomings in the direct response advertising category have resulted in the company coming in below the financial community’s quarterly estimates." Well, yes. The problem with all social networks is that ads interfere with the "social". Ads are a big annoying guy getting in your face when you're trying to talk to someone. Or worse, they're your (soon to be former) "friends" who've been tricked into "sharing" (i.e.…

The direct effect of Twitter ads isn't that bad; by the standards of web advertising it's hardly intrusive. It's the probable side effects of optimising for that revenue stream that are the trouble. One of Twitter's virtues from an advertiser's perspective is that most recent Tweets are often barely more compelling than than whatever message or link they're trying to promote. Streams which efficiently filter out irrelevance mitigate against that[1]. Reverse chronological order with ads interspersed is probably a local optimum for ad discoverability, and I bet the marketing guys test that....

Same goes for the risks of allowing any old third party to build the next successful Twitter platform on their API when they know "filter out the ads" is going to be a much-requested feature.

Being more controversial, I still can't help thinking that whilst Twitter has long made a virtue of brevity, 140 characters is just too restrictive for the average non-regular user. It's often not enough to convey the reason why people should go to an obfuscated link, never mind enough for a person not used to truncating their thoughts to express a view that doesn't involve an image or a third party site. I'm not interested in receiving Tweets by SMS, but would find Twitter streams a whole lot more engaging if they tended to be 250-400 characters.

[1]of course this is what the portal promoters thought in the pre Google era. But since then Facebook and LinkedIn's heavily polluted streams have been highly successful, and Twitter has even less potential to become primarily a search tool rather than a way to stumble over moderately interesting content, some of it promoted.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#58

Post by forgottenpass » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

sirbetsalot wrote: post #35

of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the staine…

The idea of an everyone-can-talk-to-everyone social network is initially appealing. You can write (and there were) thousands of articles about twitter extolling the virtues of the "internet community" or "the conversation" and "personal brands." It was all very 1995 internet enthusiasm with a new coat of paint. Then everyone tried it, and it turns out nobody wants to hear from everybody.

Trolls/abuse/whatever aren't the problem. They're the most extreme manifestation of the real problem: everyone wants to broadcast themselves to as many people as possible but nobody actually wants to listen to anyone but a subset of the people they've already decided to hear from.

But twitter can't restructure as an RSS reader for worthless thoughts (and links to worthwhile thoughts) for those with short attention spans. Maybe they can clamp down on abuse, it might give the flash in the pan a few more years of life.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#59

Post by eclipxe » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 8:01 PM UTC

brador wrote: post #24

themagician wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried that. It didn't stick. You have to remember that in the early days Twitter and a log of competition. Jaiku, Pownce, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, etc.. Then you had the open source versions: Laconi.ca, Status.net, Friendi.ca, GNU Social, Twister, etc.. Say what you will about Twitter, but it's the only thing that ever got traction or had any sticking power.

How did Twitter get traction and sticking power where the others failed? What was it doing differently?

Celebrities, media, "normals".

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#60

Post by mcdougle » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 8:01 PM UTC

azazo wrote: post #43

austenallred wrote: post #7

Twitter’s biggest problem is that Twitter increases or decreases in value along with user’s willingness to curate their feed. Many will never do that. So Twitter tries to do the work for you, but guessing exactly who/what you’d be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible. The closest they can get is the current logged-out homepage: “Here are a bunch of random categories. You like the NBA? Maybe cele…

I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also. Twitter is my favorite app, but it's because I have spent five plus years curating my feed. There is a fundamental problem with the way they onboard new users and this is why so many people don't stick around. The onboarding process asks you to select interests and then recommends people to follow based on those interests. However, they often recommend celebrities…

How did you go about curating your feed?

I tried to get into Twitter for a while and ultimately stopped using it.

Part of the problem I think is I have kind of a wide range of interests -- sports, software, entrepreneurship, etc. So Twitter probably can't gauge my interests very well. I ended up with a lot of those self-promotion feeds and ESPN writers, but nothing ultimately with substance (except for certain people that I found via other sources -- like if I follow their blog, I'd follow their Twitter too).

It'd be better if it was easier to categorize the feeds I'm following and view by category depending on what I feel like at the moment. I know they have lists, but I only just found that a little bit ago -- and it's so hidden that I actually have to type the URL into my address bar because I can't get there from a link on the homepage. Viewing by category should be, if not the default, then one big link away from the initial page.