Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fixing Twitter

dcurt.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 139 posts

Re: Fixing Twitter

#101

Post by tombrossman »

dombili wrote: post #91
harryh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care about keeping an authentic follower list? I'm honestly curious because I've never really understood this phenomenon.

My main reason is that I don't want to write to an audience of bots. I'm using twitter semi-anonymously so none of my real life friends follow me there (I don't have a separate account for this), so people who follow me and I follow are the people I'd talked to before on twitter. If I'm followed by more bots than actual people, I feel like the social feeling of twitter would fade away. I have a small number of follow…

I have a very similar attitude towards bot accounts. Early on, they were instantly recognizable and took no time to identify and block. Now that I'm doing it for a while, I feel obliged to continue and I've discovered that some bot accounts look semi-legit at first (Twitter's 'uncanny valley') but that dragging their profile image into Google's reverse image search would give them away. Same image, loads of different accounts all almost normal but when viewed as a group they were obvious fakes. Curating your Twitter followers list is just a matter of personal preference, nothing more.

And I'm definitely a 'tweet deleter' after reading this article[0] and agreeing with the premise that Twitter messages aren't that important to preserve. I'd rather deny data miners the ability to better profile me than keep old messages. The article's linked-to Ruby script to archive & delete messages stopped working recently but I found a newer one[1] which works very well. Set it up as a cron job, set the preferred threshold for RTs, favorites and time, and it keeps your feed tidy. If that old message was so great your followers will mark it as such and the script will preserve it. The rest disappear after X days.

[0]http://fusion.net/story/50322/meet-the-tweet-deleters-people...

[1]https://github.com/mikemcquaid/TwitterDelete

Re: Fixing Twitter

#102

Post by sreejithr »

> The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team.

This is THE ONE THING they've done right. I'm come on Twitter to read what people wrote about stuff. Last thing we need is an emotionless machine generated feed.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#103

Post by zokier »

egypturnash wrote: post #16

> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that. > Second–and…

I strongly suspect you are in a small minority there. Most people do not have network of friends actively posting interesting content on Twitter. To overcome critical mass/network effect issues Twitter needs to make the experience enjoyable for rest of us.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#105

Post by justincormack »

wingerlang wrote: post #94
egypturnash wrote: post #16

> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that. > Second–and…

> It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. Except no one is discussing anything and topics change every other tweet. I follow ~20 people and even that I cannot keep up with. But then again maybe I simply don't use Twitter enough to know how to use it well.

Don't try to "keep up". Its fine if stuff gets lost. You need to follow more than that for it to be interesting I think.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#106

Post by dombili »

tombrossman wrote: post #101
dombili wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main reason is that I don't want to write to an audience of bots. I'm using twitter semi-anonymously so none of my real life friends follow me there (I don't have a separate account for this), so people who follow me and I follow are the people I'd talked to before on twitter. If I'm followed by more bots than actual people, I feel like the social feeling of twitter would fade away. I have a small number of follow…

I have a very similar attitude towards bot accounts. Early on, they were instantly recognizable and took no time to identify and block. Now that I'm doing it for a while, I feel obliged to continue and I've discovered that some bot accounts look semi-legit at first (Twitter's 'uncanny valley') but that dragging their profile image into Google's reverse image search would give them away. Same image, loads of different…

That's my reasoning behind deleting tweets as well. They just aren't worth preserving. I only tweet about the things I'm passionate about, which are human rights, privacy and politics so I can and do tweet impulsively to vent from time to time. I almost always regret those tweets and I don't want them be on my timeline permanently.

Data mining is a concern, though not a big one because I'm pretty sure twitter keeps my deleted tweets anyway. If I don't want to say something I don't want to be found on the internet, I just don't say it.

I don't tweet a lot, so I've been deleting them manually. Which isn't a big hassle for me. I wanted to use scripts to automate the process but they all require API tokens and twitter doesn't let you have them without giving them your phone number, so I decided not to use them. I try to keep my account as anonymous as possible. If I had been tweeting a lot more, I would've definitely used them but currently they're not for me. Thanks for sharing it though. I'll bookmark it just in case I need it in the future.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#107

Post by mdpopescu »

geofft wrote: post #27
egypturnash wrote: post #16

> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that. > Second–and…

> Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. That's very true, and I'm surprised I didn't remember that while reading this article. There are news stories that I've seen first on Twitter, and had trouble finding an actual news article. Of course, it's not going to cov…

Yeah, this was how I found out about the weird "blue dress" thing.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#108

Post by tempodox »

Your word in Twitter's ear!

I seem to recognise a pattern where Twitter & Apple's AppStore fail in the same way: Failing to give end losers (er, users) intelligent filters so they can decide what they want to see, and equally important, what they do not want to see. The conspicuous absence of those options speaks loud & clear as to the platform owner's intentions.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#109

Post by randomsearch »

niccaluim wrote: post #97
randomsearch wrote: post #82

I think the disaster that is Twitter is a product of its culture. If you read the history of the business, it started with a group of people who really arrived in the business quite randomly. There wasn't much thought given to building a balanced team or a strong culture. Effectively, twitter was an accident that came out of another business. Most worryingly, the founders couldn't agree on what the purpose of Twitter…

The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala, though far more importantly, it was a re-architecting . And there are zero regrets. Without it, Twitter wouldn't exist anymore.

>The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala

Sorry, you're exactly correct. It was Ruby -> Scala and Java.

To be precise, according to Tony Pritezis from Twitter, Scala is the main language, Java is next, Ruby was still in use in 2014 but migrating away, C/C++ and Python for some specific tasks. He did also talk about some of the problems of using Scala, and I seem to recall someone saying that Scala may be less favoured at Twitter in the future.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#110

Post by pizu »

geofft wrote: post #19

> Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses. This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for "@justinbieber" (click on "live") or look at any of his tweets, and you'll see innumerable 16-year-old fangirls who have found some inc…

It's a form of lottery. Rewarding one in a million. Keeps the machine churning.
Post reply on HN