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Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#71

Post by QAPereo »

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…

Every time I try to get into it, usually as the result of a particularly entertaining comedian or insightful scientist, I'm driven away by all of the things you're describing. I tolerate the bad parts of Reddit, I used to do the same for Usenet and Irc, but Twitter is too much.

Facebook is similar, except without any of the temptation to actually join in the first place.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#72

Post by kps »

levesque wrote: post #37
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…

Follow people that only tweet about stuff that interests you. Don't hesitate to unfollow or mute people. You can tweak your follows and end up with a pretty low signal to noise ratio.

I have no problem controlling noise but Twitter seems incapable of delivering the signal. It seems impossible to have it show all the content from people I follow; instead it delivers some seemingly random subset.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#73

Post by yttrium »

mox1 wrote: post #63
yttrium wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it's not just about issues - I don't exclusively want someone to interact with me in a setting that's centered around the content. I would preferably like the experience to be more free form and open to a wider audience. Incidentally, I don't think the 140 character limit has ever really bothered me. Most of the time I text shorter strings than that - if I want to have a longer conversation I'll either send multiple tweets, or move to DM/chat.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#74

Post by heymijo »

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…

Yes, #mtbos - The Math Twitter Blogosphere

Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17

While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#75

Post by jsnell »

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…

You just need to be brutal about pruning. Someone retweets politics twice in a row? Mute retweets from them. Someone posts more politics than things you want to read? Unfollow.

My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#76

Post by Rjevski »

What I don't understand is how can they burn so much money to still not be profitable despite millions of users.

Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#77

Post by jerrylives »

mox1 wrote: post #69
jerrylives wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

>but in general the more characters/words a response contains the more significant, relevant, important, consequential, telling or material it is

Yep because the longest books are the most important...lol fuck outta here

There are NYT articles that are just tweet embeds with some of their language around it to make it seem like the journos did work. Hell half of their articles about the Trump white house are tweets for pols.

And again, the 140 character limit is for public tweets only. DMs can be very long and involved.

>If a communication method is "low-stakes,informal and brief" how often do you expect to be meaningful?

Lol dude you must be the worst to work with. So you can't derive any meaning unless it's high stakes, formal, and involved?

Meaningful can be "Derived value" from - so if you tweet at a dev "hey is it possible to do X in your library" and they just reply "No, you can't sorry"...was that not meaningful? Did they not just save you a few hours of digging through code with a short reply?

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#78

Post by eb0la »

euroclydon wrote: post #3

Twitter’s business troubles contrast with its increased profile in the political world, as U.S. President Donald Trump frequently uses the platform to reach the public in an unfiltered manner. Despite his daily fusillade of tweets, Trump hasn’t helped Twitter’s growth in its home country.

Maybe he is one of the reasons 2mm users left the platform... Not the only one, but one factor.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#79

Post by AznHisoka »

glastra wrote: post #41
SonicSoul wrote: post #22

side point, but i really hope Twitter doesn't try to mimic FB type algorithms that serve content im likely to click vs content as is from people I follow. This includes withholding updates so that users keep pulling the lever to get a trickle of content. I hate it so much when i F5 on a window in Facebook (or hit the back button) and completely different front page loads.

This is probably happening already. The feed itself is no longer sorted by date (you get some highlights that you can dismiss but hey, here they are again), and then even content liked (not retweeted) by people you follow shows up. This makes absolutely no sense for the user, as it happens on Facebook. I assume it's a way to tackle the lack of original content generated from individual users / content consumers (e.g.…

this is an elephant in the room. most people simply do not produce any useful content. they just auto tweet links or comment on something random and specific that is uninteresting.

Re: Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

#80

Post by [deleted] »

icebraining wrote: post #58
jerrylives wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personal attacks are not allowed in HN. Your last line crosses over what's acceptable here.

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