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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?

#571

Post by ericdykstra »

1. Privitize the company

2. Unemploy 90% of staff from all departments to stop bleeding money

3. Remove all feed filtering and return to a purely chronological timeline; highlights can hide somewhere else.

4. Increase character count to 200, don't count mentions against the limit, and reduce prominence of image posts so they don't overwhelm text-only posts.

5. Throw away all KPIs and remove all features done to service KPIs

6. Organize a small product team dedicated to making the API open and good again

7. Organize a larger product team that works on issues around custom mention/interaction filtering

8. Sell API access for business volume and use cases

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

#572

Post by Godel_unicode »

aphextron wrote: post #560
Godel_unicode wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia". There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.

>Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Why are youtube videos mostly 5 to 7 minutes? Why are pop songs 3 minutes long? Why are sitcoms 30 minutes long? Forms of expression are defined by their constraints. I think of twitter's relationship to prose as analogous to a haiku.

> twitter's relationship to prose

I think we read very different Twitters :)

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

#573

Post by warcher »

thisnotmyacc wrote: post #480
warcher wrote: post #417

There are a few camps of people using twitter, which want different things and are mostly being badly served. 1) Trolls love twitter. The legion of racist eggs sowing destruction for no other reason than their own nihilistic enjoyment is an existential threat to the business and must be culled. The company and the trolls cannot live together in peace. One or the other will die. It feels like twitter hasn't figured ou…

This never has any numbers to support it, which is unfortunate. Also, in a world of bubbles, how is a less free an open Twitter better? Is a Twitter with no controversy, with no argy bargy, really worth visiting? I think Twitter's problem with trolls is minuscule compared to the problem of making it more entertaining, and easier to switch in and out of thoughts. If I like the NBA, cricket and South African politics,…

I think the trolls attack the public figures, which make the public figures less likely to attract the little fish, and the little fish are your audience, who need to be both entertained and interacted with, lest they decamp for a more robust social network like reddit or facebook. Both of which are far, far harder on trolls, bots, and spammers than twitter, not coincidentally. They recognize the fight to the death they're in, and are by and large winning.

Twitter was fine and good and groundbreaking at one point, but the naive implementation of a social network they cling to as a moral stand is obsolete for a billion dollar company. One who is more than large enough to game for profit or lulz.

They're going to adapt or they're going to die. Possibly both.

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

#574

Post by grandalf »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #485
eropple wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refusing to associate with people is not "censorship" of ideas or anything else. Damaging, abusive people can be kicked out of one's place of business and it ain't a problem . I will not cede the ground of basic language to protofascists and you shouldn't either.

So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood your last paragraph). grandalf sees blocking that speech as protofascism (more or less - he doesn't use that word). I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech as if it were violence - no…

Well put.

I don't use phrases like "proto-fascists" because I don't think the term really has meaning.

> as a means of control by whoever's in power at the time.

This is exactly right. When we allow liberties to be taken away, they are likely gone for good, even when the context for their removal goes away.

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

#575

Post by Godel_unicode »

rdiddly wrote: post #526
Godel_unicode wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia". There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.

There is no technical reason. The reasons are all non-technical and irrational. Starting with the word-imagery: Have you ever heard a songbird go "tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet?" No, it ceases to be a tweet at that point. It's a squawk or scream or warble or something else. And probably it's annoying AF too. You probably think that's unimportant or has nothing to do with it. Twitter is about the twe…

The core problem is that the length of a tweet should be "one concisely-stated thought", but that's hard to write into an API's documentation :)

> PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.

Not in the real world no, although people are nostalgic for the pre-crash US, but on the Internet I think it definitely is. Put another way, if you changed Twitter into Medium people would be talking about "the old Twitter" with nostalgia.

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

#576

Post by toyg »

emodendroket wrote: post #516
theincredulousk wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as the previous mode remains free, I don't see people moving away.

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

#577

Post by eropple »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #485
eropple wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refusing to associate with people is not "censorship" of ideas or anything else. Damaging, abusive people can be kicked out of one's place of business and it ain't a problem . I will not cede the ground of basic language to protofascists and you shouldn't either.

So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood your last paragraph). grandalf sees blocking that speech as protofascism (more or less - he doesn't use that word). I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech as if it were violence - no…

Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech? I'm saying that private organizations should choose not to be associated with white supremacists and their ilk. Twitter's not the government. The protofascists and their broheims can go hang out on Gab dot AI for all I care. But they don't want that, because that means there aren't any targets for them to assault. Which they do, en masse, as part of a planned and intentional strategy to silence and shut up women and minorities across a wide range of topics.

Twitter does not need them. Twitter does not benefit from them. Twitter will actively lose users by pursuing these jackals as customers. And so Twitter should show them the door. But I certainly haven't said a word about the government prohibiting speech.

(I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.)

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

#578

Post by eropple »

grandalf wrote: post #574
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood your last paragraph). grandalf sees blocking that speech as protofascism (more or less - he doesn't use that word). I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech as if it were violence - no…

Well put. I don't use phrases like "proto-fascists" because I don't think the term really has meaning. > as a means of control by whoever's in power at the time. This is exactly right. When we allow liberties to be taken away, they are likely gone for good, even when the context for their removal goes away.

The self-described white supremacists (since you don't like "protofascist") who plague the mentions of women who dare to comment on politics or make video games are not deprived of liberty because Twitter decides to show them the door. They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves.

Put those goalposts down. You're going to pull something.

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

#579

Post by snowwrestler »

aphextron wrote: post #560
Godel_unicode wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia". There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.

>Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Why are youtube videos mostly 5 to 7 minutes? Why are pop songs 3 minutes long? Why are sitcoms 30 minutes long? Forms of expression are defined by their constraints. I think of twitter's relationship to prose as analogous to a haiku.

YouTube videos can be as long as you want.

Songs can be as long as you want.

TV shows can be as long as you want.

You think you're arguing the value of constraints, but you're actually arguing that different media formats have different points of cultural optimization.

If that's true, then is there any need to enforce an artificial length limit on tweets? If shorter, pithier tweets are better, then most tweets will be short and pithy--naturally.

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

#580

Post by tajen »

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…

Twitter is also a public discussion platform. It's a cog for democracy.

But after the 140 limit, Twitter's other annoyance is how public your comments are. You can't remove them and you're extremely liable for them. Making them private (actually, that option exists) would make it look like Facebook, so it isn't the solution, and making them anonymous won't solve trolls.

Liability on twitter currently doesn't prevent stupid people from harassing others, while a lot of clever people avoid using it because they understand the consequences of a mistake. That's pretty much the opposite of what we want. Twitter should think about reducing liability while moderating trolls better. A bit like on HN, where we have much less liability, but many more CEOs.

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