Disconnecting from twitter was one of the best moves I ever made. Being subjected to a high volume/low quality stream of garbage is not good for the mind.
There certainly is too much noise but lists solve that very nicely.
Fixing Twitter
81–90 of 139 posts
Re: Fixing Twitter
#82I think the disaster that is Twitter is a product of its culture. If you read the history of the business, it started with a group of people who really arrived in the business quite randomly. There wasn't much thought given to building a balanced team or a strong culture. Effectively, twitter was an accident that came out of another business.
Most worryingly, the founders couldn't agree on what the purpose of Twitter was, and illuminatingly people in this discussion still don't have a clear idea of its purpose. Is it a news broadcast system, to follow current events? Or is it about sharing your personal life with your friends?
From a technical point of view, I find Twitter very confusing. I read that they were at over a million users before having any kind of backup strategy. They rewrote their systems from Java to Scala, but then seemed to regret that decision, their decisions on shutting down API access to third parties have been really nasty... this kinda thing makes me worry that they don't have clear leadership.
And then there's the politics of infighting, and some of their executives being "overthrown" over time... I can't see how you can create a good culture when people at the top are behaving like that. It's hardly rocket science - just focus on the product and your users.
I think creating a culture from the beginning is a lot easier than changing an engrained culture, so my view is that Twitter is screwed. Failing a Jobsian turnaround, the best they can do is sell and sell fast. I can seriously see Twitter losing out to a startup. Any thoughts on whether they will survive?
Re: Fixing Twitter
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes). I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it." (Think of the economics for a tou…
I don't know, as much as the growing money from events being made by musicians is great for music as a whole, I wish we could put money's incentivizing focus back on album production, like the recording companies' golden days. What if, taking this supporter/fan model (which is also more generally available in something like Patreon), we sell tiers for fans to peek into the production of the album at different stages.…
P.S. I like how my grand parent comment had -1 score before you replied but is now recovering well.
FWIW, it's easy to read that as a reddit-esque throwaway oneliner, which HN doesn't really encourage, rather than serious commentary about social media optimization for a musician. When I have a comment like that, and I do occasionally, I generally thicken it out a bit to signal "No, wait, actual thought happened." (An example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177005 was originally just the first two sentences, which taken alone read like middlebrow dismissal, so I added a bit of supporting detail.)
Re: Fixing Twitter
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's impossible to have meaningful conversations with that kind of limit. You end up having to use "1/N" over and over again. That limit has always left me wondering how Twitter even got started...
most incredible news you've had in your life can be shared in 140 characters. most of the worst, most useless content you've ever written to anyone would be several paragraphs. that's why it worked.
What you're saying is inherently incorrect. "Usefulness" of content is always going to be more limited by 140 characters than it would otherwise be.
It worked, not because people want to "share" less, but because they want to read less. Same reason a lot of people browsing Reddit for example only browse it by glimpsing the headlines. The more news there is, the less people are interested in the details of the news - they want to let their brains fill in the details.
Say, for example (and please don't read too much into the example), you read an article that says "Police shoots an innocent civilian". Then a few days later, you read another article very similar to it. Then another. At some point you stop reading the article and you just glimpse the headline - filling in the details yourself, even if they are wrong. You do this for every article you come across, and you enter a cycle where everything you read ends up fitting your own learned narrative. Your brain autocompletes the content of every article... and if there is no match, you can just ignore it.
This sort of behaviour is something you see a lot of on Reddit. People are attracted to short snippets of information they can autocomplete. Most don't want to spend a lot of time on something they might be reading on the toilet, or on the subway. It's the same reason mobile toilet games are racking in millions, while the PC gaming market is taking a major hit.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#85Thats funny, if followed it seems these advices would transform twitter into facebook
So, yeah..
Re: Fixing Twitter
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes). I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing it." (Think of the economics for a tou…
I don't know, as much as the growing money from events being made by musicians is great for music as a whole, I wish we could put money's incentivizing focus back on album production, like the recording companies' golden days. What if, taking this supporter/fan model (which is also more generally available in something like Patreon), we sell tiers for fans to peek into the production of the album at different stages.…
>> something like Ableton Live, musicians could literally share/stream their workflow and assets for people to toy around at home
Ableton have built this: https://blend.io/
Note the remixes competitions listed further down the page. AFAIK it doesn't have much traction, although I think their execution was very good.
There have been quite a few online collaboration products built into sequencers. Rocket Network back in 2000: http://www.1000tracks.ru/remembering-rocket-network/
Re: Fixing Twitter
#87My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I get more and more bot 'followers' and more ads in my timeline. The signal / noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.
I have a very high signal/noise ratio but that's because I did the work to follow interesting people. But its also true that the noise is encroaching and we as users have to do work to find more signal.
So one of the core problems of twitter is that you are required to do that; it's work. That's fixable.
Certainly the front page for a new visitor should be rich with content.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#88Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese "copy" of twitter (hint: it's not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that's ahead of twitter in many respects.
Just off the top of my head, weibo has:
- the "event" grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping system ("micro topics")
- rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are very popular)
- payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw
- properly threaded conversations, easy to follow
- a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to connect companies to the system
I'm aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at what they're doing seems like a pretty good starting point.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#89Parts of this are a little off, at least in how I use twitter.
"There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses."
Maybe true for the 1mm+ follower people, but ironically, this is 90+% of how I actually use Twitter. I tweet at a mid-high volume (100k->500k) individual, and occasionally get a response, more often get a fave, and ever so often get a retweet.
For Also, I love looking at the responses to tweets - and often respond to those responses, and get a thread going with the responder - often dropping out the original person who tweeted altogether.
I'm not saying all is well in twitter world - but I quite enjoy (perhaps too much) the back and forth/threading/responding that twitter offers. I really, really don't need any more.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#90"Nothing great is Built On Twitter"
That quote sums it all up.
Most of Dustin's suggested extensions are things other people should have built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton's App.Net plan where Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on ensuring the backbone stays in place.
Funny enough, that is how twitter originated. Others built their clients and they focused on the core. They lost that direction and wanted to "own it all" like Facebook. But they took that direction rather too early.
Take Tweetstorming as an example which is a niche need. My team built a tweetstorming app http://writerack.com. It pulls and pushes all it's content from and to Twitter. In an ideal case, Twitter should support it and similar ones rather than making Twitter.com more convoluted with the aim of doing everything themselves.
If Twitter had supported third patrty developers, someone/people would have built a killer app for using twitter to follow and interact live events. That would have brought another set of people into the platform and that extends to other use cases too.
Hopefully, Twitter gets it right because I have come to really find Twitter useful.