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

Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

thetwitcleaner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#61

Post by TheZenPsycho »

nashadelic wrote: post #57
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #46

What I find frustrating is that twitter has ignored /really obvious/ opportunities to monetize in a natural way, in favour of this strategy that involves backtracking on the things that makes twitter /twitter/. Opportunities that I see: -- Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. Remember Ashton Kutcher's race to be the first twitter user with 1 million followers? Yeah.…

> Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there. > Charge third party developers for increased API capacity. For the same reason as…

> You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there.

The celebrities in this case, are using twitter as an ADVERTISING platform. you said it yourself- would-be celebrities are trying to use twitter to "get the word out". is this now not an opportunity worth paying for? Would the fans, noticing they are unable to follow Ashton, blame twitter, for charging a reasonable price for that huge megaphone, or Ashton, for being unwilling to pay for this enormously powerful broadcast medium? I don't think, in this case, limiting growth is a serious issue.

> for the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook and stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill innovation. Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad for both the users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that most popular apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.

Apple charges $99 for an SDK. straight up flat fee, annual charge. Are you saying this has seriously harmed innovation for iOS?

What I'm proposing isn't even that. It's charging for say, having an app that has more than 10,000 simultaneous users. If you are charging money for this app (and many twitter clients do), is asking for a fee really as harmful as you claim? I don't think so.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#62

Post by TheZenPsycho »

dm8 wrote: post #58
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #46

What I find frustrating is that twitter has ignored /really obvious/ opportunities to monetize in a natural way, in favour of this strategy that involves backtracking on the things that makes twitter /twitter/. Opportunities that I see: -- Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. Remember Ashton Kutcher's race to be the first twitter user with 1 million followers? Yeah.…

Do you genuinely think they did not think about aforementioned approaches? They might have made money via subscription route but they will make more money via ads.

I genuinely think that twitter fails to think about quite a lot of things, and is actively hostile to those within its ranks who do. That is just my opinion though. My genuine opinion, based on their public behaviour.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#63

Post by waterlesscloud »

moocow01 wrote: post #43

It seems pretty obvious that Twitter is trying to become a business and these alienating changes are part of the strategy but the unfortunate part is that they seemingly have picked the completely wrong strategy around what their business should be. Twitter really from a tech prospective is a protocol and it seemed that Twitter as a business was in line with what they were providing. Twitter.com acted as the centrali…

"they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where their value is"

This seems incredibly obvious to me, and is what I meant elsewhere in the thread where I mentioned knowing what everyone in the world is thinking right now.

Yes, it is hard. But they've got the profile and the money to round up the talent for it.

Making money from ads is cute and all, but there's a whole other level they could be working on.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#64

Post by Qantourisc »

brownbat wrote: post #56

Do social networks tend to cannibalize themselves over time? Initially, growth is the most important part of a social network, so it makes sense to prioritize usability. Over time, pressures towards monetization mount (either internally or externally, among spammers). Monetization tends to degrade the user experience, creating opportunities for new entrants. Network effects can keep you going, but these aren't Ma Bel…

They saying goes that if you are not paying you are the product (or will become eventually). Wonder how much people are willing to pay? And what it would cost? But personally I fear the biggest road-bump will the paying itself.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#65

Post by [deleted] »

mkr-hn wrote: post #17
egypturnash wrote: post #16

I'm looking at the features and the future features this app has and wondering who the heck it's for. I've never gotten DM spam, I've never had to think about using a machine to unfollow junk accounts. I use Twitter to talk to some of my friends, share things I think are cool links, follow a few people whose work I admire, and occasionally tweet links to my own work. I don't follow back everyone who follows me; I bas…

Marketers, and people building an account for their business. Follow anyone who looks like they might be interested in what you offer, remove the spammers (TwitCleaner's main use for me), and unfollow people who don't follow back after some time has passed. You can build a Twitter account with real followers pretty quickly that way.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#66

Post by lancewiggs »

lancewiggs wrote: post #7

Once again I'm just sad to see the continued erosion from the awesomeness that was Twitter. Twitter are killing off the good and magnifying the bad, all in the pursuit of goals that seem to be forcing a continuous decrease in the quality of end user experiences. The dumbest thing about this is that monetizing Twitter is trivial, without changing anything else. Just put occassional and obvious ads in our streams, and…

Some other obvious approaches mentioned down the thread: Charge for API access, charge for exceeding API limits, charge for exceeding certain follower numbers, charge (at various levels) for analytics, charge for feature sets inside things like Tweetdeck, charge for access to certain API functions and so on.

It's hard to see $9 billion worth in these ideas, but that's only if we think in the short term.

Twitter could be genuinely worth that in 5 or 10 years, but only if it focussed on customers, and that's only going to happen if the founders vision trumps the very short term investor greed.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#67

Post by danmaz74 »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #63
moocow01 wrote: post #43

It seems pretty obvious that Twitter is trying to become a business and these alienating changes are part of the strategy but the unfortunate part is that they seemingly have picked the completely wrong strategy around what their business should be. Twitter really from a tech prospective is a protocol and it seemed that Twitter as a business was in line with what they were providing. Twitter.com acted as the centrali…

"they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where their value is" This seems incredibly obvious to me, and is what I meant elsewhere in the thread where I mentioned knowing what everyone in the world is thinking right now. Yes, it is hard. But they've got the profile and the money to round up the talent for it. Making money from ads is cute and all, but there's a whole other level they could be wor…

Interestingly, they actually made the conscious decision to leave analytics to others - it is clearly explained in the quadrants here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

I just hope that they'll stick to this announcement, as I'm building my hashtagify.me based on that...

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#68

Post by waterlesscloud »

danmaz74 wrote: post #67
waterlesscloud wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where their value is" This seems incredibly obvious to me, and is what I meant elsewhere in the thread where I mentioned knowing what everyone in the world is thinking right now. Yes, it is hard. But they've got the profile and the money to round up the talent for it. Making money from ads is cute and all, but there's a whole other level they could be wor…

Interestingly, they actually made the conscious decision to leave analytics to others - it is clearly explained in the quadrants here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api I just hope that they'll stick to this announcement, as I'm building my hashtagify.me based on that...

Huh.

It seems to me that the lower left quadrant is worth an incredible amount of money, but maybe I'm just wrong. It's been known ot happen.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#69

Post by danmaz74 »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #68
danmaz74 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, they actually made the conscious decision to leave analytics to others - it is clearly explained in the quadrants here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api I just hope that they'll stick to this announcement, as I'm building my hashtagify.me based on that...

Huh. It seems to me that the lower left quadrant is worth an incredible amount of money, but maybe I'm just wrong. It's been known ot happen.

I just guess that they think they can make much more money in the upper-right quadrant...
Post reply on HN