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Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

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Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#61

Post by J_Darnley »

debaserab2 wrote: post #42
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade. At least the results of the previous generations research went (largely) unused, whereas the results of ad clicking research is targeted against and used on people on a daily basis, to their considerable detriment. An upgrade? If so, it seems kind of dubious at best.

Only on HN would someone compare starting a nuclear war to click advertising.

Global nuclear war sounds immensely more fun than the present.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#62

Post by simonswords82 »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #58
simonswords82 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wondered this too. Twitter's app is broken - numerous complaints by power users that they should be addressing but instead they're busy buying companies?

I think probably team of people who develop and fix bugs on the app aren't the same team that buys companies, so Twitter can probably do both.

Obviously it has the resources to do both. The point I'm making (badly) is that if their core product is broken perhaps buying other companies should be put on hold until they fix it.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#64

Post by rogerfernandezg »

Alexey_Nigin wrote: post #38

This is very sad news. The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts from people I followed, arranged in chronological order. Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how many people here get angry about…

In some way, I felt the same some time ago, so I created http://preciousdigest.com to filter relevant tweets in my timeline.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#65

Post by tacos »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #58
simonswords82 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wondered this too. Twitter's app is broken - numerous complaints by power users that they should be addressing but instead they're busy buying companies?

I think probably team of people who develop and fix bugs on the app aren't the same team that buys companies, so Twitter can probably do both.

Worked great for Yahoo.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#66

Post by Negative1 »

This is amazing to me, not because it's a great purchase but rather because of the absolute tone deafness that Twitter is demonstrating.

People are not using Twitter because of many reasons and bad image compression is probably not one of them. Unless Twitter is planning some massive pivot what they should have spent their M&A budget on companies that will help them improve their growth situation directly (in my opinion).

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#67

Post by abakker »

ben_jones wrote: post #49
rqebmm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the last few generations used weapons research to fund scientific advancements, I guess this is progress after all!

Don't mind the huge military-industrial complex that has helped derail education, health care, retirement-funding, ...

Remember that the US military Active Duty + civilian jobs makes it probably the largest employer in the US. Not everything they do is great, but they pay salaries and benefits.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#69

Post by rconti »

Alexey_Nigin wrote: post #38

This is very sad news. The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts from people I followed, arranged in chronological order. Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how many people here get angry about…

I can't laugh hard enough at this. I agree I (sorta) hate the Facebook filtering algorithm, but I find Twitter even more impenetrable. It's just impossible to figure out what's going on. Here's my timeline, just opened it up for this comment:

* Account I follow, 15s ago.

* PROMOTED post from 5 days ago. (here I've already run out of browser real estate on a 27" display because the tweets take so much damn room. Scroll down a page)

* While you were away: post from 3 days ago

* While you were away: post from 4h ago

* While you were away: post from 1 day ago

* While you were away: post from 3 days ago

* While you were away: post from 6h ago

* While you were away: retweet from 2 days ago

* While you were away: post from 1 day ago

* Actual twitter post from user I follow, 2h ago.

* PROMOTED from 18 days ago

For all intents and purposes, the Twitter feed is less chronological, less useful, and less content-dense than Facebook, and that's saying something considering that Twitter is supposedly a 140char service.

I had to scroll through 3 pages of crap before I got to the actual chronological twitter you speak of.

Also, they have this horrible habit of making tweets with a white background, then a tiny grey divider between tweets so it can be hard to tell at a glance when you've moved from one section of content to another -- much like when GMail went from colored message threading to all-monochrome.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#70

Post by hkmurakami »

niftich wrote: post #7

Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"! As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of…

Frankly, the majority of the absolute very best minds of my generation are now tenure track associate professors. They received offers from substantially all of the best research institutions in the country.

Much of the very very good minds are thinking of ways to make us click more on ads.

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