Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 236 posts

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#61

Post by pjc50 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #28
unethical_ban wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses would have to get some kind of value-add (honey) otherwise literally everyone would tweet as "Owner at Business" and just happen to tweet about their business all the time. Regulating that would be a nightmare.

if you are not a business nor journalist/celeb you cant tweet more than x links a day.

That ruins it: the businesses and celebs are mostly posting pictures, or some businesses are using it for tech support, while some of the most interesting accounts are just streams of links from random people.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#62

Post by mxschumacher »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #9

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" che…

I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it.

Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.

Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day - sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam - select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")

Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):

https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#63

Post by mox1 »

yttrium wrote: post #48
mox1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean interact is a strong term here. You send 0-140 characters towards them and they get to send 0-140 back. Yes I'm sure sometimes meaningful conversations happen, but I doubt that is the norm. I get to interact with a rock star if I hang out near the exit door after the concert. I can shout at them and (s)he might say something back. If I'm lucky and it's a cool musician we might be able to have a brief conversat…

I mean - this seems like you don't actually use the service. I do JS development, and I can pretty reliably get someone like Dan Abramov or other JS 'rockstars' to look at/comment on an issue if it's required. Additionally, I can see these people interact with their peers and discuss ideas. Fundamentally, twitter has become a platform for idea exchange and conversation that has professionals on it, discussing things…

So for your JS example, why would you attempt to reach them on Twitter when something like Github would be so much better? Create an issue on Github, point to the exact line of code that is a problem and wait for a response?

How do you ask a meaningful question about source code / software development in 140 characters? How do you get a meaningful response in 140 characters?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#64

Post by fwn »

fgandiya wrote: post #26

> Twitter began investing heavily in video, aiming to draw a more mainstream set of users and premium advertising deals What's with this whole "pivot to video" trend among websites? Why is it preferred to text which is probably easier to write, needs less network and is more accessible than a large number of videos (which don't have captions)?

Twitter can embrace video, which is a new format, without the need to alter their foundation, the text fragment feature.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#65

Post by nothis »

skewart wrote: post #14

Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Reply threads are a pain. Tweetstorms get old. And all too often there is way too much spam. However, there are amazing communities of people sharing interesting content and having great conversations. Twitter needs to realize that there value prop is the community using it and not the app itself. They need to make radical design and product changes to make for a better…

>Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use.

Amen to that. I still don't fully get the logic of what Twitter decides to display and what to hide when I click a multi-tweet reply or something. Connected tweets (which happen so often that I feel like the 140 char limit is more hindering than helpful) run bottom-up in the time line. You can't maximize embedded youtube videos. Why? When you click an image and then "back" in a long scroll, it sends you back to the start of the page. I also have to click an image like three times to get to the source. I don't get how those split-views of multiple images are supposed to work, they always open a random one. An annoying delay/stutter whenever you scroll down because of how goddamn infinite scroll loads images. No proper search, but I'm already getting used to that in modern websites. "Just google it", right?

EDIT: I just checked and a few of these things have been changed. Am I nuts or did they have differently sized fonts for tweets at one point and reverted that by now?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#66

Post by pjc50 »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #9

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" che…

Politics is kind of ruining it. As is the fallout from politics - harassment. You can never be sure whether saying something and getting visibility is going to result in being quote-retweeted by a hostile party sending their followers to have a go at you. Some of whom seem to be bots, or multi-purpose Trump/Brexit promotion accounts.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#68

Post by pjc50 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #6

Twitter needs to: 1. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise to Twitter anyway. 2. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with no links. 3. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interac…

> causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads

I suspect a higher-than-average proportion of twitter users have simply blocked all the ads.

Personally I'd favour a payment model a bit like the "reddit gold" one, where users can pay for other users to have better features. It's a network effect. I want the people I like following to have a better time on the service so they keep using it.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#69

Post by mox1 »

jerrylives wrote: post #36
mox1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean interact is a strong term here. You send 0-140 characters towards them and they get to send 0-140 back. Yes I'm sure sometimes meaningful conversations happen, but I doubt that is the norm. I get to interact with a rock star if I hang out near the exit door after the concert. I can shout at them and (s)he might say something back. If I'm lucky and it's a cool musician we might be able to have a brief conversat…

You've clearly never used the product in a while because you can DM more than 140 characters. Who is to say the value of "meaningful" is dependent on the number of characters? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go to a speech? What if you're in another country? What if their email isn't publicly available? What if they prefer to communicate via twitter precisely because its so low-stakes and informal? I kno…

I guess I don't have a formal proof for you, but in general the more characters/words a response contains the more significant, relevant, important, consequential, telling or material it is. Of course you can find counter examples, but considering the New York times still publishes articles and hasn't moved fully to Tweeting (yet anyway) I would say more often than not it's difficult to convey or articulate things correctly in 140 characters.

If a communication method is "low-stakes,informal and brief" how often do you expect to be meaningful? To me those things are diametrically opposed to me.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#70

Post by Rjevski »

wongarsu wrote: post #16

My primary reason for not using twitter is the lack of a Windows client that I like. All I want is to see tweets from people I'm following in a compact, not screen-filling, undistracting way. Just something simple to keep up with the tweets of a handful of people. All such clients I could find are discontinued and broken by now. The current clients are either are oriented at power-users (Tweetdeck & co) or turn what…

I really miss Metrotwit. I used it in 2013 back when I was very active on Twitter.
Post reply on HN