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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?

#421
post #378
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guess: to push people to register. For several reasons: (1) they are judged on that every quarter; (2) a hypothesis that this makes the experience better for users, and hence more likely to contribute to MAUs; (3) a hypothesis this improves ad targeting.

Agreed on 1 and 2, but how does that work for improving targeting.

They can start to profile you across devices more easily if you're signed up.

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

#422
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

Maybe holding this arbitrary line in the sand as if it were a commandment is why Twitter apparently needs to be "turned around". 280 characters isn't now extensive prose - it isn't fundamentally changing anything. It has been 10+ years and they are still losing a tremendous amount of money, I think it is time to lose the idealism if there is a win-win for users and revenue.

At some point "condensed" thought just means reduced quality of communication. If some users want to say more, let them pay a dollar. I doubt users would be rattled to their core because some people can put two tweets in one.

Bottom line, users don't care about what Twitter's agenda is regarding character limit. Nobody decided to use Twitter because they were excited about a 140 character limit, they use it in spite of the limit. Twitter should be focusing on what the "in spite of" reasons are, because those are the reasons that define the intrinsic value of their service, not the character limit.

I believe most people use Twitter because it gives them the attention of an audience. If you can acquire the same size (or redundant, since most are on multiple platforms) audience elsewhere, then what reason is left for a user to tolerate any annoyance or quirk of the service?

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

#423
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

Well, the original reason for the 140 character limit was because you could get tweets via SMS, which at the time had a character limit.

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

#424
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do not stifle political speech And when that political speech threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or people? 'Cause I'm not saying you're conflating the two, but a whole lot of people for whom this is an axe they grind really kind of constantly do .

Removing all the anti-hillary trending or pro-bernie hashtags really pissed me off during the election. Google does similar things with auto-complete. Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them? You can threaten people over anything, why conflate threats with political speech? There is real censorship on twitter over political ideas, and threats don't even enter into it…

> Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them?

Because it's not. The actions of actively authoritarian/alt-right political actors on Twitter are inextricably tied to the movement itself. Milo Yiannopoulos was not banned for the content of what he said. He was banned for saying things he knew would rile up his base of threatening, assaultive troglodytes into attacking someone based on their political priors. Coca-Cola is not going to pay Twitter if Twitter is a cesspool of people whose idea of political speech is threats. And, right now, a very large portion of it is. And given that free speech has the implication of free association, it's very fortunate that those poor benighted alt-righters who are so very censored have their own places to talk where nobody will get in their way--

--but, of course, it's not about talking about their political ideas at all. It's about forcing others to listen to them.

Twitter need not be an accessory to that. There is no great loss, either moral or financial, to the slow leakage of anime avatars and Twitter eggs.

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

#425
I mentioned this in another thread recently: let users have about 10K followers for free, and then charge them for followers after that. A lot of celebrities straight up profit from sending out a tweet endorsing a brand. Twitter should get a cut of that and I think this would be a fair and easy way to do so. People pay for their influence.

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love #7. A lot of people would pay a monthly fee to maintain a checkmark on their profile as a part of a "Twitter Pro" account. That fee could cover the manual verification of the user via scanned photo-ID and become a profit center for the company. Think of it like Twitter's version of an EV SSL cert.

They've had verified accounts for ages.

Yes, but you basically have to pass a notability test to get it (https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631). hellcow and nikcub are suggesting to just open it up to anyone who is willing to pay for it.

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

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

Then charge per character and ramp it up as it gets longer.

This makes sense, although I would keep it simple and just offer for example normal and extended messages (max 280 char) with extended costing for example $0.10-$0.50/each.

Condensing your thoughts to 140 characters takes effort. This would allow trading the effort to money. The per message fee would limit the usage of this feature, encouraging people to still keep things short and only use the extended feature when they really need it.

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

#428

1. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow employees to remotely work if they want. 2. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to go…

> Twitter is the kind of app you clone when you're learning a framework like Ruby on Rails, it's not a complicated idea from a technical standpoint.

That's quite a gross simplification. You could say the same about S3. It's no more complicated than a server with RAID hard disks in it.

Even the simple stuff becomes really complicated at scale.

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

#429

1. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow employees to remotely work if they want. 2. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to go…

I've never seen their HQ, much less their lunches, but is that really a thing?

And aren't they in the Tenderloin in SF? Wouldn't they normally be donating their excess food to shelters / the homeless / the poor?

I don't disagree with your points, it just strikes me as weird that the lunch menu would be such an issue.

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