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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?

#461

Post by rcraft »

redindian75 wrote: post #267
davycro wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I have seen WhatsApp being use that way in India. Closed doctor groups where lot of info (photos/info etc) gets shared/commented on. Twitter's open communication channel might not be suited for such infoshare. Telegram/Whatsapp has potential in that area.

That's one of the reasons I built GroupTweet. To facilitate private group communication on Twitter with any number of participants that can persist through permanent Twitter accounts (instead of temporary Group DMs that are limited to 20 people).

Would love any feedback or suggestions on how it could be improved.

Happy to offer free use to anyone on this thread looking to test out the service.

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

#464

Post by rtkwe »

metaphorm wrote: post #412
rtkwe wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's massively open for abuse: Find someone you don't like or want to harass and get lots of people to hate follow them. Costs them money or forces them to use some Twitter moderation tool to cull followers. Second thought with any social media feature should be how can an asshole use this to be an asshole easier.

I don't understand your criticism. How do you propose a bad-actor could control such a large number of accounts? even supposing this malicious figure had that much influence, the problem is just one of how Twitter bills its users. It is the platform's responsibility to determine how it bills and whether or not it is billing fairly. this is a technical implementation detail of the platform, which is beyond the scope o…

A couple different ways but bots or just a large group of people getting angry at someone are the simplest, the second is already pretty common and a problem with Twitter as it stands. Next the billing is an integral part of the discussion. If it's impossible to accurately bill something it's a terrible feature. Finally there are massive number of people who use twitter completely noncommercially but might wind up with this problem. Charging anyone who isn't trying to sell something for reach is a pretty much guaranteed way to shed tons of users.

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

#465

Post by zapt02 »

lhnz wrote: post #328
zapt02 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pretty much combines the three things big media companies hate: - Someone else owning and displaying their content. - Someone else owning data on their viewers. - Not being able to set their own prices. For those reasons, I don't see any chance of serious publishers being interested in this sort of deal. There's just very little in it for them.

You wouldn't own or display their content, nor would you set their prices (you merely give them the option to collect micropayments from a central wallet). Also, all social media companies already have data on their audience - that's just the way things are. All publishers with paywalls have massive bounce-rates due to people not wanting to subscribe. This would help them make more money.

Micropayments on that level are a race to the bottom. Why read The Times content when you can be presented with a similar article written by some blogger. And why would media companies give Twitter any percentage of the cut? Twitter already supplies them with free traffic, it's in their mutual interest.

Facebook tried a similar approach with Instant Articles and the only publications that have jumped on it are the ones that are desperate for revenues. Big media companies are playing the long game. Content is king.

Regarding bounce rates, this is not as big of a deal as you think. There are many examples where paywalls have increased the overall revenue. https://medium.com/@getdrizzle/paywalls-are-on-the-rise-with...

In the end, news is a business like any other. The number of users doesn't matter, it's the size of their wallet that does.

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

#466

Post by rcraft »

AliAdams wrote: post #37

My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say. I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or important updates from companies I'm interested in. I see a secondary value from twitter by people contributing to a conversation around an event, be that a sports game, a site outage, a traffic…

Honest question - why not just unfollow those people that incessantly tweet worthless information?

I'm not saying its easy to find quality Twitter users to follow - but its certainly easy to unfollow bad users.

Twitter could certainly improve their algorithms that recommend people to follow, surface good content, etc.

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

#467

Post by TillE »

grandalf wrote: post #436
eropple wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 som…

> 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. Many people would say that exact thing if Twitter decided to censor content that was about gay marriage, etc. You are giving Twitter an easy out. Just censor everything that doesn't go over well in the suburban zipcode that best mirrors the target audience of Coca Cola.

> Many people would say that exact thing if Twitter decided to censor content that was about gay marriage, etc.

Well, since we're talking about Twitter:

https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312

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

#468

Post by eldavido »

ISL wrote: post #126
ProAm wrote: post #43

Layoff everyone except for the bare minimum to keep the company operational (~100-200 people), take it private and print money for 10 years then let it naturally sunset itself.

Came here to say cost-cutting. I'm not sure that Twitter will sunset itself. Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen. Twitter is a protocol, and an excellent one. If it continues to serve as a backbone of public-domain discourse, it can remain relevant for the foreseeable future. WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition, with 0.5B monthly users. Twitter currently has 0…

Just don't. Seriously. Let it fall another 50% before you go even close.

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

#470

Post by rcraft »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #253

1. Remove senior management. They do not know what they're doing. 2. Experiment and find the right point between monetizing users and those that get the most value out of Twitter. Right now users' eyeballs are being bled dry, and getting their experience ruined with tons of ads, and timeline shuffling. It feels like those with tons of followers are getting a free ride at the expense of everyone else. 3. Introduce mea…

Some thoughts on item #3:

Offering the ability to follow hashtags in their current form would simply lead to more hashtag spam.

However I agree with your basic premise that following topics and geographical Tweets would be very useful. One of the main reasons I built GroupTweet. Allow people to form and manage "group" topical or location based accounts with any number of contributors while giving some admin controls like limiting approval to all or only select participants, moderation, etc.

Would love any feedback and suggestions on how we could improve to make your suggestions more of a reality.

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