Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#101

Post by joatmon-snoo » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

jim_d wrote: post #86

flohofwoe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best knowledge-exchange platform for tech-people I've seen so far. With some careful selection of who to follow it even has an ok signal-to-noise ratio. Every single feature Twitter has implemented in the past few years made it worse for this type of audience though.

what types of features do you think would make it more useful for this use case?

Better threading for sure. The current interface is pretty good, but it makes it hard to keep track of multiple back-and-forths and oftentimes drops tweets from threads.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#102

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #84

visarga wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are excellent conversations carried out by Twitter. They can also act as comments to the linked content. Sometimes you get more from a 20 word comment than from a full article.

That's true, but I feel Twitter isn't really structured to handle the flow of conversations well. I've seen good conversations on Youtube, as well, but like Twitter that seems to happen in spite of the restrictions of the platform, not because of it. Also, the quality of Twitter comments doesn't seem to translate to HN, so much as the quality of the posts. Which, when those posts are emotive and lack sufficient conte…

I hear this complaint often and still don't understand it. Twitter has had threaded conversations for a while now and they flow just as easily as HN comments.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#103

Post by silverbax88 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #57

Eridrus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video ads pay much more.

And autoplay video jukes the stats to make it look like the consumers are more engaged in video ads than they are in banners.

Autoplay ads/videos are the fraudulent lie that corporations are attempting to use to inflate their ad impressions. It will come back to bite them.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#104

Post by criddell » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC

Rjevski wrote: post #76

What I don't understand is how can they burn so much money to still not be profitable despite millions of users. Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?

Twitter has something like 3000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of where they are. Before I heard this number, I would have guessed they had 300 employees (based on Instagram having 20 employees when Facebook bought them).

At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us that love it.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#105

Post by joatmon-snoo » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:03 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #27

intoverflow2 wrote: post #9

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" che…

I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes. I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be…

> I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

Much like how 140 characters usually isn't enough to capture ideas properly, I think there are a lot of exceptions to this that you haven't considered:

- discussion topics, a la #DevDiscuss

- real-time news, e.g. when AWS goes down

- off-hand thoughts/responses, e.g. when @antirez asks for Redis dev ideas

- announcements that don't get press releases, e.g. when Chris Lattner left Tesla

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#106

Post by sp332 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:05 PM UTC

AznHisoka wrote: post #79

glastra wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably happening already. The feed itself is no longer sorted by date (you get some highlights that you can dismiss but hey, here they are again), and then even content liked (not retweeted) by people you follow shows up. This makes absolutely no sense for the user, as it happens on Facebook. I assume it's a way to tackle the lack of original content generated from individual users / content consumers (e.g.…

this is an elephant in the room. most people simply do not produce any useful content. they just auto tweet links or comment on something random and specific that is uninteresting.

But on twitter, it doesn't bother me if most people aren't interesting. I only follow the people I want to follow.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#107

Post by AlwaysRock » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:07 PM UTC

I got off twitter because it felt like they were constantly changing the app to make it worse / more covered in ads but mostly because I didn't like the way it was changing my thinking. It's the first app I've felt the pull to compulsively check and I really didn't like that.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#108

Post by richardknop » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:08 PM UTC

I have just deleted Twitter app from my mobile phone today. I am getting fed up with constant push notifications I don't care about.

It seems like push notifications from other social apps are more relevant, notifications from Twitter rarely are about something I care about.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#109

Post by mxschumacher » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:11 PM UTC

heymijo wrote: post #81

mxschumacher wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it. Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss. Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science peop…

Do you use lists?

I would love to, e.g. "software engineers", "authors", "investors" etc, but imo the feature is completely unusable as there is no batch editing. Definitely has a lot of potential, especially when combined with filters: "Give me Silicon Valley people minus politics and hyperlocal info"

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#110

Post by kalleboo » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:15 PM UTC

intoverflow2 wrote: post #9

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" che…

Yes I am having a good time. But I am not American, don't live in the US and the few Americans I do follow mostly keep out of the long rambling kind of politics.