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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?

#511

Post by iopq »

chasing wrote: post #138
ndespres wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not exactly sure what people mean when they reference "aggressive SJWs" but many would prefer stricter moderation on Twitter. Racists and targeted harassment is a big problem. I doubt that there is a pattern of "social justice warriors" who are seeking out and harassing those with mildly opposing viewpoints.

Yeah, most of the "freedom of speech" / "get rid of censorship" stuff I see seems to be code for "let people be assholes." Which, okay. But there's a line where you're just being too toxic for the community and need to be shown the door.

Twitter is not a community. It's a platform. There's a difference.

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

#512

Post by SeanBoocock »

epoch1970 wrote: post #478
nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

I don't know if it's still like this, but when I last tried to create a Twitter account it required a phone number and some kind of verification by phone. That's something I refuse to do. I can sort of understand requiring that to try to combat the creation of spam accounts, for instance. But it made the service pretty much unusable for me. Unless it's as easy to create an account there as it is to create one here or…

That feels like a vestige of Twitter's origins as a heavily SMS focused service. Even if that is true, though, odd to have such a high friction element to the registration flow for what is now a niche use case.

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

#513

Post by gnicholas »

potatolicious wrote: post #447
euyyn wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doing it has friction, both for the writer and for the readers. If you remove the friction, you get more of it.

This feels like maybe a [citation required] thing. Facebook doesn't have any particular length limit on posts, and anecdotally vast screeds are quite rare on my feed, and most posts are pretty terse regardless. Is there data to suggest that people will just rant all the time if they're permitted to? [edit] Anecdotally, my current top 20 posts in my FB feed: 17 under 140 chars, 3 greater than 140 chars.

Does this include adding 23 chars for a link, and possibly also for images (which I think used to count as extra but no longer do)?

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

#514

Post by Trundle »

thisnotmyacc wrote: post #489

Set a goal of $1 billion yearly profit by 2020. That places the value at PE of 20 PE (2/3rds of Alphabets 29.9) at ~$20 billion, which is ~2 times their current valuation. Assuming 5% YoY growth in revenue, which is about 2% growth in users combined with a 2% better yield, both of which are imminently doable, the current $2.5B revenue grows to about $3B. According to their 2016 financial statement, http://files.share…

Cutting sales and marketing by 40% doesn't seem conductive to growth in users at all.

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

#515

Post by DashRattlesnake »

dandare wrote: post #416
aphextron wrote: post #369

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.

The very first Twitter clone I remember came up with the killer feature - infinitely long Tweets. How many times did I hear this dumb idea? It is not a sandwich, longer does not mean better! The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.

> The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.

Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc).

I think it requires more attention to decode the messages of people trying to work around the character limits (with bad spelling and dropped punctuation, etc).

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

#516

Post by emodendroket »

theincredulousk wrote: post #422
aphextron wrote: post #369

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.

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 mean…

Well if it makes people just stop using Twitter then it hurts the one thing they have going for them, a big userbase.

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

#517

Post by spo81rty »

thisnotmyacc wrote: post #476
nikcub wrote: post #128

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video pa…

FTFY > 1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year Really, is Twitter doing poorly? $2.52 billion in 2016 is more than enough revenue, I'd wager, to maintain a solid company. Twitter seem to me to have an explosive-growth mentality - spend like crazy and grow our way to success - in a post-explosive-growth reality. Fix the cost structures, and make ~$1 billion in profit, and you have a solid compan…

I share your sentiment. They can grow slowly like most normal companies and have an amazing business.

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

#518

Post by pandesmos »

I worked for a major gaming company for almost a decade and based on that, I think it should be paid for by its corporate users.

Not from the angle of paying to use the service to tweet, but paying for access to tweetdeck. I know there are some fees associated with that, but from my understanding most of those revolve around "customization" and "reports". I think it should straight up be "if you want to see your mentions, you pay".

We dedicated multiple units of headcount in multiple departments. One department was treating it straight up as an additional contact channel and scheduled almost 24 hour coverage on it. One department devoted a whole TV to tweet deck to watch the various mentions. There were multiple instances where customer services issues were caught and handled before they blew up because we saw them emerge on twitter before we saw it on any of our internal tools.

This was especially true for regional/smaller issues. I was in the department with the TV for tweetdeck, and a phenomenal value came from being able to see the "burst flow" as an issue emerged. Each individual tweet wasn't really important, but flurries = issues that need to be addressed, and specific tweets can be dug into for specifics if needed.

I imagine this would be valuable to almost any "always on" type corporation, and there should be enough of them, doing well enough, that they could foot the bill.

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

#519

Post by azernik »

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…

> 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.

"He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know."

I originally thought this was an Israeli saying, because that's the only people I've heard quote it (usually journalists, referring to bloviating politicians). Turns it it's originally Laozi.

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

#520

Post by smoyer »

I wouldn't bother ... it's the:

- Talk radio of our time

- A complete waste of mental bandwidth

- Too full of negativity

If you could somehow filter out the most important parts, pack them into a digest and send them to me once a day, I'd invest 20 minutes into reading through the information just to keep up-to-date. This sounds curiously like the newspaper we used to have delivered to our door.

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