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Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

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Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#81

Post by dpweb »

Many things come to mind.

I love Twitter, but it becomes less of a platform for personal expression and more of a machine operated tool for propagandists and spam garbage when you just widely allow botnets. For instance, do a little digging into some of the accts that constantly retweet Trump (Dems are no better). Maybe they tie back to alt-right blog-nets - not humans - which also managed to hijack the search engines to some extent. That ain't personal expression.

If they can't generate some new excitement, the BUMMER is, messaging is the future. I'll argue FB and everyone else will be known as messaging platforms - not a face book or social news feed.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#82

Post by ndespres »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #39

Get rid of censorship. They had a good idea with live streaming video and whatnot, but they're beat to everything by Instagram and Snapchat. As it stands now, I deleted Twitter simply because it's nothing but corporate accounts, overly aggressive SJWs posturing over every damn thing, and the only content I actually cared about was reposted from Instagram (apart from a few people I know who live streamed, but have sin…

I'm not exactly sure what people mean when they reference "aggressive SJWs" but many would prefer stricter moderation on Twitter. Racists and targeted harassment is a big problem. I doubt that there is a pattern of "social justice warriors" who are seeking out and harassing those with mildly opposing viewpoints.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#84

Post by magic_beans »

dotBen wrote: post #18

Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time. It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online…

This is literally the only time I ever use twitter: to see, in real time, what people are saying about a certain event. (The Oscars, Presidential Debates, the Superbowl, the début of Stranger Things, etc).

But the app brings in so much clutter, and the interface is poor for quickly incoming tweets...

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#85

Post by donpark »

herge wrote: post #65
donpark wrote: post #59

I tweeted this few months ago: 1) Add golden heart 2) Sell golden hearts to users. 3) Reward some golden hearts daily to users, perhaps based on tiered ranking. 4) Allow advertisers to gift golden hearts to users. 5) 'Promote' tweets with golden hearts and display them in Moments. In short, allow peer promotion. Red hearts are currently being wasted as weak social signals and nods. This change blurs the line between…

How's that working for reddit?

I didn't know about Reddit Gold and don't use Reddit enough to answer this.

Even if mechanism is same, I think result will be different for Twitter.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#86

Post by jdminhbg »

divbit wrote: post #69
jedi_stannis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could try an antenna - most of the things you mentioned are broadcast over the air

That would also require purchasing a TV I guess.

No, it would require purchasing an antenna. You can plug that into a computer.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#87

Post by sergiotapia »

mindcrash wrote: post #24

* Remove Jack from CEO position * Let Evan return as CEO (merge with Medium) ... this will restore Twitter management to the situation around 2010, then ... * Reform or cancel the Trust & Safety council * Restore open API access and app ecosystem * Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab) * Reverse the timeline changes * Stop pandering to far left ideologues Something like that?

Saudi investment money means none of that is ever ever going to happen. Twitter ain't ever going back from regressive left ideologies. If anything they're going to double-down.

The fact that Feminist Frequency is on the "safety council" should tell you enough about it and how useless it is.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#89

Post by chasing »

CM30 wrote: post #49

Well, for starters I would: 1. Focus on making the company profitable by cutting down on staff and resources. Seriously, Twitter doesn't need thousands of employees, a large HQ and all that other fancy stuff. I think a team of about 30 people could probably run it fine. 2. Get developers on board again. Open up API access, stop shutting down/blocking projects, etc. Make people feel like they could start a business on…

> It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech...

There's this idea that I hear mostly from the "right" that "freedom of speech" means "let people be assholes to one another with impunity."

We need to fight back when the government attempts to abridge free speech. That's what the ACLU is good at. But Twitter is a community -- a community under no legal obligation to include toxic users.

"Freedom of speech" gives people who don't fit in at Twitter the right to go build their own community that's as toxic as they want amongst themselves.

As a Twitter user, I don't want to have to worry about being attacked or experiencing floods of toxic responses to something I might say. Thankfully I don't. But I do see toxic content directed at people fairly regularly. Toxic content meaning: Stuff that attempts to make no point, just attempts to spread hate or fear.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#90

Post by colinplamondon »

- Focus and elevate video content. Entire TV episodes are sometimes made public on Twitter - there's no way to surface this. When The Expanse has a new episode, it should go into a tab that's YouTube on Twitter.

- Pay video creators out the ass to get them to dual-publish from YouTube, and create auto-sync features that let them publish in both locations. Build in live-streaming functionality to compete with Twitch.

- "Async realtime". When watching a show, make it possible to replay Homeland tweets from the time you start. If you watch an Apple Keynote later, make the realtime tweets replay, and make it possible to add your own.

- Allow different engagement models. If someone has a whiff of abuse in their feed, make it trivial for them to see only verified + low risk users. The moment someone sends an @message to someone they've never conversed with with a single abusive word, crank the risk on them. If someone wants to engage with the firehose, make that the default.

- Make it easy to "import" feeds. I've had at least 3 friends ask me who to follow, and then we spend 15 minutes scrolling through my follow list, they manually look them up. When a new user registers on Twitter, I should be able to pick 3 people I'm most interested in following, and it should then recommend the people they like the most.

- It should be one-click to "super follow" someone, and get all their follows into my feed. Make it trivial to get an awesome, active feed. And trivial to reduce noise when I'm not interested in something.

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