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Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

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Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#151

Post by nitinics »

1. Customer Service - Provide enterprise solutions for customer service and charge $$$ per transaction. The live nature of this would prove a lot of value for feedback mechanisms for enterprise when they go through their change management.

2. Live Interaction with Events, Games, Television, Radio etc. e.g. Polls, QnA, Sentiment etc.

3. Open Access to Developers to build Apps on real-time content.

4. Enable fact-check score methodologies on every tweets. Don't completely wipe out the trolls. As weird as it may sound - trolls make twitter interesting.

5. The Ultimate messaging platform that replaces SMS/Texts with an identity that is not numbers.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#153

Post by amalag »

kneel wrote: post #23

I consider myself pretty tech oriented but I've never understood twitter, this is probably just my own stupidity but I've tried several times and it never makes sense. I mostly just see replies to other conversations and I don't understand the context. Scrolling through the timeline I can't parse structure, it just seems chaotic. Barely anyone I know uses twitter. It just seems to be a way to follow celebrities and p…

That is true, the timeline is fragments of multiple conversations or popular statements. You are right that it is difficult to parse the feed, because your brain has to context switch between all the conversations. Whereas for instance a hacker news feed gives you exclusively top level headlines with a place to go for discussion.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#154

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

davycro wrote: post #96
dotBen wrote: post #18

Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online…

"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics" Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of cou…

You have just described "news".

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#155

Post by maxerickson »

austincheney wrote: post #152

Allow private tweet capabilities and charge for it. This is really all you can do. Twitter is largely a broadcast system and echo chamber, which perfectly explains the type of people who gravitate to it most directly.

Accounts can be marked protected at which point tweets are only shown to confirmed followers:

https://support.twitter.com/articles/14016

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#156

Post by tmalsburg2 »

dotBen wrote: post #18

Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online…

> Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics

What's the evidence for this claim? In academia, Twitter is super important, much more than Facebook or any other social platform. Academics are addicted to Twitter and I think you could charge them, e.g., for tweets longer than 140 characters.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#157

Post by rrggrr »

1. Let users charge for more rapid access to tweets and share revenue (eg. instant tweet access versus delayed access).

2. Let users pay to DM certain accounts.

3. Mesh-networked solution.

4. Launch 'labs' version as sandbox for developers and users to experiment with (eg. encrypted tweeting, blockchain embedded messaging, proxied messages, etc.)

5. Twitter comms OS embedded on hardware.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#159

Post by grandalf »

I think Twitter is already pretty great. My suggestions are below:

- Twitter is a platform, open it up to allow any clients first class access.

- Stop political censorship immediately. It's fine to prevent scams and bot-nets, but do not stifle political speech.

- Lower burn rate. Cancel all of the product-oriented projects that are expensive, simply focus on building the infrastructure to make Twitter's platform as inexpensive as possible to maintain. I'd estimate 10% of Twitter's employees are actually needed.

- Be very cautious about ads. Do not compare yourself to Facebook for ad revenue generation. This is a long-term decision that will require adequate funding to undertake.

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