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Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

reuters.com

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Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#211

Post by mftb »

rsync wrote: post #194

After all of these decades ... After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet, livejournal/myspace/facebook ... I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text discussions looks like this ! What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think of this ? It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.

Unfortunately having been through a similar evolution, I feel the same, but when I talk to younger people, they think it's great.

I specifically agree with the part about barely-usable garbage. Whenever I'm linked to a Twitter thread it's a dumpster fire. Baffling.

Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#213

Post by ARandomerDude »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #160

As a heavy twitter user who mostly enjoys it (I'm very particular of who I follow), I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. Their product has been incredibly stagnant for years save for the occasional feature here and there and some styling. They've screwed over devs trying to build on their APIs and eroded all trust along the way. New features have been rolled out haphazardly, and they totally…

> I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time.

There was that one time in 2017 when they increased the character limit.

Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#214

Post by el-salvador »

asdff wrote: post #23
xwdv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, Twitter seems to be mostly a social network for bots and people’s scripts to talk to each other. Very few real humans posting original thoughts. Maybe celebrity types use it as an easy way to get a word out, but not the common man. Fascinating.

I wouldn't be surprised if most celebrity tweets are just written up in advance by their spokesperson and doled out throughout the week with a script.

I think that even political speeches are written in a way that they can easily be twitted.

Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#216

Post by stewx »

YouTube and TikTok pay people who have popular videos, which gives "creators" an incentive to put a lot of work into what they do.

You can argue that the payouts are a pittance for the large number of views those YouTubers get, but in comparison, the only thing Twitter has done to reward its users is provide a virtual tip jar.

Not only that, you can't pay to remove ads on Twitter.

Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#217

Post by wongarsu »

atorodius wrote: post #178
meerita wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What killed me it was Twitter killing developers apis: no more interesting apps than theirs. It sucks big time. They're also screwing the chronology, sometimes you get the latest tweets (most interesting) and sometimes they switch you to Recommended, which, normally, it sucks. Let me browse chronologically as it was in the old days.

I recently wondered about this, from another angle. In a way it was "weird" that they had an API, given our times. I.e., it was different: imagine if FB/Instagram/WhatsApp had an API. (I think it would be awesome, but it puts into perspective that it was weird that they had one imo)

Instagram has an API [1][2], Facebook used to have a decent API back in the days, Reddit still has an excellent API.

But somehow Youtube and Twitter are the only services where I prefer 3rd party clients.

1: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api

2: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-basic-display...

Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#218

Post by tootie »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #160

As a heavy twitter user who mostly enjoys it (I'm very particular of who I follow), I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. Their product has been incredibly stagnant for years save for the occasional feature here and there and some styling. They've screwed over devs trying to build on their APIs and eroded all trust along the way. New features have been rolled out haphazardly, and they totally…

I honestly don't get it. My company gets a lot of traffic from Twitter apparently so I signed up to get some perspective. I mostly follow journalists and publications as well as some business and tech folks I like. I see so many context-free messages of people arguing about topics I'm out of the loop on or posting links to news I already saw in a better aggregator. Maybe once or twice a week do I see an interesting bit of insight but it's drowning in an ocean of gibberish. And as far as I can tell that's the entire premise of the platform.

Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#219

Post by dematz »

dgellow wrote: post #207

I don’t understand why platforms like Twitter don’t make money the easy way: let people pay for visual customizations, like a different profile shape (octogonal instead of a circle), or a special banner or label, or any other cosmetics. That has been very successful for multiplayer games since more than a decade, people love to pay to show their cool new cosmetic. Let people pay for cool set of emotes. Or different c…

It should be increasingly expensive and time consuming to add more sides to your profile shape, eg pentagon->hexagon is a step up. Adding enough sides to be a circle, or indistinguishable from one on a pixelated screen, would be very prestigious. Of course, this dimension might be disrupted by block...

Re: Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

#220

Post by teddyh »

shmatt wrote: post #175
teddyh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number. I have repeatedly heard it said that Twitter does this for every single new account as a matter of course. Twitter wants your phone number, but don’t want you to bounce right at registration.

I would guess it started as a reaction to the many botnets used by companies and countries trying to maximize certain opinions On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers

> reaction to the many botnets

Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at registration. Delaying it like this, claiming “suspicious activity” is hard to see any other way than how I described it.

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