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Twitter's Fucked

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Re: Twitter's Fucked

#331

Post by devishard »

abeppu wrote: post #316
devishard wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, as a game developer with Free-To-Play development PTSD, I think this rule rests on an implied-but-important condition: People are already using and loving the service. No, that's exactly not what I'm saying. Uber did just fine starting as a pay service as do a great many games, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, etc. > Imagine that some shiny new app called Spark launches tomorrow and vaguely promises to be Twitter 2.0…

> Uber did just fine starting as a pay service as do a great many games, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, etc. I think that's an unfair comparison for two reasons: (1) People were already comfortable with the idea of paying for cabs, cable, games, books/electronics in the old world. Whereas the current norm is _not_ to pay for social media services. (2) A transportation service, game, streaming video service, e-retailer can del…

> I think that's an unfair comparison for two reasons: (1) People were already comfortable with the idea of paying for cabs, cable, games, books/electronics in the old world. Whereas the current norm is _not_ to pay for social media services.

Of course; this is because cabs, cable, games, books/electronics all provide value. Most social media services don't, at least not enough value for people to pull out their credit cards.

> (2) A transportation service, game, streaming video service, e-retailer can deliver value to their first customer. A social network is only valuable if others are using it. If Spark / Twitter 2.0 launches tomorrow, even if they can provide a bunch of product improvements over Twitter 1.0, the first users have no reason to pay b/c they're joining an empty / worthless conversation, so at launch it's almost necessary to allow people to join for free. And this creates the norms described in (1).

I disagree, I think the norms described in (1) exist because Twitter/Spark provide very little value to their users.

You're describing a first-to-market advantage, but that's not really relevant. If that were a signifiant deciding factor, Twitter could simply institute a subscription fee and be profitable by tomorrow. But they can't: if they did that, they'd lose all their users overnight.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#332

Post by fusiongyro »

devishard wrote: post #238
fusiongyro wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App.net briefly tried to be a paid-for Twitter clone. I guess they've sort of pivoted from that model but it was an interesting idea at the time. And obviously it didn't work, because free is cheaper than non-free.

Yeah. But even if they both charged the same amount of money, I think they'd just both go out of business, because nobody is going to pay for what either has to offer.

I want to disagree with you, but I paid for app.net and then didn't use it... so I guess I can't.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#333

Post by devishard »

virtualwhys wrote: post #310
devishard wrote: post #116

My rule is that if nobody would pay for your service, you probably don't have a worthwhile business. If Google instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use Google search, people would line up to pay it. They don't have to, because their business model works differently, but they could do that, and it would work. I'd probably pay for an account. If Facebook instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use that, a lot of people would do…

> there would be a clone written in a more scalable architecture Curious, what would be more scalable than Twitter's existing JVM based architecture? 3 years ago[1] they were able to handle upwards of 140 (edit) thousand tweets per second without any latency -- that's pretty ridiculous. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...

I didn't explain that well--initially Twitter was on RoR and sharded MySQL, which wasn't scalable. Obviously they have done a lot of scaling work and can handle their load now.

If I were implementing Twitter today, I'd probably do Elixir and Cassandra. I don't generally leap to go NoSQL but Twitter's structure is particularly suited to Cassandra. Elixir gives the ease of development I associate with Ruby with the scalable, decentralizable BEAM. I'd also consider going with Erlang straight up--it may not be as pretty as Elixir, but there's a lot to be said for maturity in a language.

But I'm saying this because I have the benefit of newer technologies and having seen Twitter's mistakes. From a technical perspective, I think Twitter is pretty well done.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#334

Post by hasenj »

ivraatiems wrote: post #3

Yep. Yep, yep, yep. And Twitter's response is to ban some, but not all harassers, using the algorithm of "whoever is high profile and we don't like politically." That gives said harassers surprisingly legitimate reasons to claim censorship by Twitter as a company, despite the fact that they were in clear violation of Twitter's ToS and deserved to be banned. I refer of course to the Milo Yiannopoulos situation (edit:…

> The only "safe" way to use Twitter now is as an echo chamber - only follow people you like, only talk to people who think the same way you do. That's a waste.

Which is what Facebook is right now.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#335

Post by simonswords82 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #330
harryh wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line?

Up until earlier this year, WhatsApp actually had a for-pay business model: it cost $1 per year. They stopped charging in January, evidently, in theory to remove a barrier to entry. (Being owned by Facebook now probably helps them make that move, though.) I've wondered how Twitter would have been different if they'd taken a similar approach: $1 per account per year. They'd certainly be smaller than they are now, but…

The problem is that Twitter delivers very little real value to the majority of the people who use it. If it was switched off tomorrow how many people would really miss it? I suspect the answer is just their core user base, which is a very small % of all accounts Twitter has.

IMO had Twitter tried to charge their demise would have been even faster than the current slow but steady decline we're all watching.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#336

Post by hsod »

braythwayt wrote: post #101
atemerev wrote: post #33

People are tired from crybullies. We need a place where freedom of speech still matters. Freedom of speech doesn't include invading someone's privacy (this is illegal; doxxing, stalking etc. should be banned and actively fought against). But if you can't handle insults, it is not anyone's job to prevent them. There's always "Block" button, and then, there's always "delete account" button.

First, I don't think you speak for "People," just the kind of people who are just like you. For example, I have never used the expression "crybullies," and if I did, it would probably be to describe the kind of white male who gets on a place like HN and cries that his freedom to be a raging asshole in somebody else's privately owned medium is being trampled by moderation. But back to your point, I will argue with it…

> For example, I have never used the expression "crybullies," and if I did, it would probably be to describe the kind of white male who gets on a place like HN and cries that his freedom to be a raging asshole in somebody else's privately owned medium is being trampled by moderation.

This is an unnecessary escalation into racial/gendered personal attack.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#337

Post by csixty4 »

EGreg wrote: post #185
csixty4 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can open up your DMs so anybody can message you now.

I believe you are wrong: https://cl.ly/0a2C3d432i1W https://support.twitter.com/articles/14606 It does say If you are sending Direct Messages to accounts that do not follow you, you may need to verify your phone number. and I did verify my phone number - still nothing.

It's not on by default. TBL probably doesn't have it enabled. It's on the Security settings page[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/settings/security

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#338

Post by Kequc »

nostrademons wrote: post #258
Kequc wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marketing was all wrong. The rate at which Google admitted new users to the platform left many potential users feeling alienated. It took several days for me to get an invite and I'm pretty saavy. When they launched all the talk was focused on the social network. The focus should have been on the primary product which is that they introduced an account system. The social network just simply came with it for free.…

Google accounts actually came out several years before Google+. I remember that Google already had a unified account system across all products before I started working for them; I think they rolled it out in 2008. Google+ didn't launch as a destination site until 2011.

As far as I can remember Google services required a Gmail account before Google+. Here is Schmidt commenting about the release of Google+ as an identity service.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/08/29/googles-e...

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#339

Post by specialist »

snaky wrote: post #233
specialist wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Notorious progressives Bush and Cheney gave us "free speech zones": http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/free-speech-...

Bush and Cheney were much more progressives than conservatives.

Now I'm curious. Who do you consider conservative, Conservative, or both?

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#340

Post by jjnoakes »

forloop wrote: post #209
jjnoakes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, missing one mention equates to not reading the entire article? Amazing indeed.

> Wait, missing one mention equates to not reading the entire article? Amazing indeed. See nardi's comment. Amazing indeed!

Keep reading the discussion. Amazing indeed!
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