Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/twitter-s-revenue-tops-estimates-monthly-user-growth-evaporates

by kgwgk • 9 years ago

169 216 9 years ago

crispytx2• 9 years ago

Twitter's problem is that they let Ev Williams walk away from the company, and then he goes and creates Medium. Medium could have been a product of Twitter Inc., and then no one would be talking about their lack of growth.

JonFish85• 9 years ago

Isn't Medium struggling in its own ways, cutting costs & laying people off? If it was a Twitter product, I imagine the stockholders would want it shut down, seeing it as a distraction to the main Twitter product.

CM302• 9 years ago

Yeah, Medium's having trouble finding a good business model itself:

https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be

It's got the same general issues as Twitter has. No clear business model, a more limited audience than the creators of the service want it to have and a severe with too much noise and hostility (especially when you go away from recommended articles to random ones).

crispytx2• 9 years ago

I think Medium's financial problem is that they aren't charging for their services. My blog is hosted by Medium at my own custom domain, and the only thing they charged me for was the SSL certificate. They ought to charge for that like Wordpress.com does.

But yeah, Medium has some problems and a long way to go, but it has so much potential. One of their problems in my opinion is that most of the articles that show up in your feed at Medium.com have a BuzzFeed like quality to them. They should integrate some sort of RSS functionality into the feed, and start adding all of the best blogs, regardless of whether or not they happen to be hosted on Medium. But that's just what I would do, not that anyone cares ;)

For example, if you follow the "startups" tag on Medium, you ought to get cool stuff in your feed like IndieHackers. They could include IndieHackers and great blogs like it in their feed, and if people happen to click on those stories, they could just redirect people to those sites. So it would be sort of like Reddit, but instead of people submitting links, the editors at Medium would currate what gets added from other sites, and Medium.com users could obviously add blogs to their own personal feeds via RSS.

untilHellbanned• 9 years ago

Medium will get acquired by twitter in next few years.

euroclydon• 9 years ago

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.

eb0la2• 9 years ago

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

dforrestwilson• 9 years ago

Twitter is such a fascinating platform. I use it on a professional basis and I really enjoy it. I get the opportunity to interact with the rock stars of my field. These are people whom I would probably never have the chance to ping otherwise. I consume more media on TWTR than FB at this point because I trust the people I follow to be great "taste makers".

Clearly the company has some value, but how they fix the business model is a big question mark. I wonder if the Microsoft-LinkedIn complex would be the most natural home for Twitter at this point.

mox12• 9 years ago

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 conversation...

As a professional, if I wanted to interact with a leader in my field on a meaningful level I would e-mail, write them, attend a speech by them, etc. etc.

yttrium3• 9 years ago

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 professionally! It doesn't really get more meaningful than that.

visarga4• 9 years ago

That's what amazes me as well. In a single day I got replies from two or three of the most important people in DL. How is it possible to get even one second of their time?

sickbeard• 9 years ago

Maybe the audience is already grown? I mean it's being used by presidents and heads of states and is a major communication tool for businesses and governments. Maybe it's just not hip anymore.

AznHisoka4• 9 years ago

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 interact with other users. in other words, throttle those bots and broadcasters.

I believe the noise problem is a huge issue in twitter. it gradully causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads.

i would even go as far as banning apps like Buffer and social schedulers from Twitter. They are a net negative for users (note: I said users not marketers)

unethical_ban• 9 years ago

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.

AznHisoka4• 9 years ago

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

na85• 9 years ago

and as a result less attention to ads

Why is this bad for users?

OzzyB• 9 years ago

1.b. Those businesses that promote and display their Twitter handles on public broadcasts (ahem CNN etc) $2000/month/user.

visarga4• 9 years ago

I believe the noise problem is a huge issue in twitter.

There is a simple (but limited) solution: simple binary classifier, trained by signals from the user. It would quickly learn what to exclude.

nothis2• 9 years ago

How do you filter "businesses" from individual users, small, non-commercial groups or anything else, really? Ask people to register their identity with the government and then double-check? Good luck!

pjc503• 9 years ago

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.

eb0la2• 9 years ago

Q1 and Q2 MAU are the same: 328 million worldwide. Only in the US -2 million MAU less than in the first quarter. Not tragic, in my opinion.

wongarsu2• 9 years ago

And 328 million is 4.5% of all humans. That sounds like a pretty solid audience.

johannes1234321• 9 years ago

... but how many of those 328 million are in fact bots?

grenoire• 9 years ago

And those are not all humans.

intoverflow22• 9 years ago

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" checkbox in settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and politics from elsewhere.

Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly.

Edit - Mass replying to the careful follow question: I already choose who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it's really tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're all people who actually do things outside of comment online.

To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst (Political hot takes).

Angostura• 9 years ago

I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.

heymijo4• 9 years ago

Curious, what part of education? I've found a few UK people I enjoy following (once I learned the UK education lingo).

flohofwoe2• 9 years ago

Best knowledge-exchange platform for tech-people I've seen so far. With some careful selection of who to follow it even has an ok signal-to-noise ratio. Every single feature Twitter has implemented in the past few years made it worse for this type of audience though.

jim_d• 9 years ago

what types of features do you think would make it more useful for this use case?

AndrewKemendo2• 9 years ago

Agreed with this. There are too many individual sites to keep up with things, twitter makes that easier.

moocowtruck• 9 years ago

how is it the best knowledge exchange platform when most statements or arguments quickly end with "twitter isn't the best place for this convo"

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

Try Mastodon.

mrkrabo4• 9 years ago

It's sooooo annoying to hear people trying to get you into an alternate platform. app.net, gab.ai, identi.ca, etc. Seriously just stop. You're just annoying.

SonicSoul4• 9 years ago

I still think it's a great platform and does what it does extremely well.

Interesting point about Politics though, I've been using it as my #1 source of that for now. But if you don't follow people that share such content do you still see it?

nailer• 9 years ago

I've followed people because they're influential in tech and discovered they're Antifa members that openly advocate for political violence towards anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders.

krapp3• 9 years ago

I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes.

I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

visarga4• 9 years ago

There are excellent conversations carried out by Twitter. They can also act as comments to the linked content. Sometimes you get more from a 20 word comment than from a full article.

joatmon-snoo2• 9 years ago

I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

Much like how 140 characters usually isn't enough to capture ideas properly, I think there are a lot of exceptions to this that you haven't considered:

- discussion topics, a la #DevDiscuss

- real-time news, e.g. when AWS goes down

- off-hand thoughts/responses, e.g. when @antirez asks for Redis dev ideas

- announcements that don't get press releases, e.g. when Chris Lattner left Tesla

fgandiya2• 9 years ago

Yeah, in getting annoyed with all the (US centric) politics on my feed.

Similar thing is happening with Pocket. It's great at curating articles. It's just that at some point, it got hijacked by politics.

influx• 9 years ago

I moved to https://feedbin.com/ after Google killed Reader and stopped supporting me as a customer. Feedbin supported the use case I had which was nicely aggregating my RSS feeds. YMMV.

levesque2• 9 years ago

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.

kps3• 9 years ago

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.

ghaff2• 9 years ago

If Twitter's looking for a business model, I'll be the first to raise my hand to pay for filtering out tweets that have certain names in them.

I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader.

RSS still exists even though Reader doesn't. I use Feedly although I admit that I don't carefully curate a large number of feeds any longer because, outside of a relative handful of people/sites I want to follow, I figure news will find me through Twitter and other sources.

intoverflow22• 9 years ago

Basic word filtering was added recently https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

I'm hoping one day there is something smarter.

I know RSS still exists but it feels like Google Readers death killed a lot of the blogs I followed off too. The new posts just got less and less and eventually stopped.

ezekg2• 9 years ago

You should start muting people who talk politics and Twitter also allows you to block tweets containing keywords/phrases[0]. Honestly, I've started to enjoy Twitter so much more now that my feed is void of politics and sexism/sjw arguments.

[0] https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624

colept• 9 years ago

Why are you blocking "react?"

wslh• 9 years ago

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service?

Not good time but there are some communities and social graphs active there that you cannot avoid if you work in specific fields. For example, computer security.

mxschumacher6• 9 years ago

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

heymijo4• 9 years ago

Do you use lists?

edw519• 9 years ago

Nice list! Thanks for the gift to the community, Max. I bet this took a lot of work to curate.

I'm following you. Better yet, I'm following who you follow.

ghostbrainalpha• 9 years ago

That is an absolutely fabulous list! I took the time to follow each one manually. I was surprised to recognize at least 25% of the names from off Twitter.

tedunangst• 9 years ago

Annoyingly, Twitter doesn't let you view that list without logging in. It's possible to browse tweets by individuals without logging in, or even many individuals given a collection of names, but viewing the list? Not in my garden, pal.

urs2102• 9 years ago

Great list, really heavy overlap with mine although mine is even smaller (https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/following). I try to do the same thing, I aggressively unfollow people and try to keep the number around the Dunbar number.

I just started using Twitter about a month ago after having an account since 2009 and I'm really enjoying it (despite seeing a number of tweets about Twitter being broken). I've almost entirely stopped using Facebook (outside of events/messaging) and strictly used Twitter. It's a fun place to share programming thoughts and discuss things with people.

For the most part I've been able to share links and chime into discussions with people whom's work I'm interested in and keep the discussion around economics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science. I follow roughly the same rule as you - I look at the tweet frequency and then dig into actual tweets. I've actually made a couple friends in the Elixir community through Twitter which is actually fun.

The last thing I would recommend is to use lists. @patrickc's reading list is probably one of the best things I follow, as well as @pmarca's press list. You can actually check out the lists I follow as well.

https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/lists

I think for the most part, like you Max, if you try to keep it small - it works great.

unchaotic• 9 years ago

My usage is similar but I follow about twice the number of people. To keep things manageable i.e. consume twitter in about 30 minutes/day, I wrote a small chrome extension to rearrange my feed (sort by likes/retweets, give different weights to users and sort the feed/list).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...

pjc503• 9 years ago

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.

heymijo4• 9 years ago

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.

jsnell• 9 years ago

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.

Bartweiss• 9 years ago

Twitter is great as a site I exclusively use by following links. I check tweets when a source I like points me to one, or I need to check outage notifications for work.

Twitter is great for that, but it's of course the way Twitter desperately doesn't want to be used.

Asooka• 9 years ago

I do enjoy twitter, but I sort the people I follow into lists. E.g. "Actual friends", "People who post cool art", "People who just post random things", etc. Then use Tweetdeck to view all lists at the same time.

Mad_Mac• 9 years ago

I have the same kind of system. Otherwise it's just impossible to follow everything after you start to follow more people.

Karunamon4• 9 years ago

Twitter now has the ability to hide tweets containing certain words. All you need to do is add a few major politicos and buzzwords and you'll see a lot less noise :)

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032

kalleboo• 9 years ago

Yes I am having a good time. But I am not American, don't live in the US and the few Americans I do follow mostly keep out of the long rambling kind of politics.

moultano• 9 years ago

I do feel like I get value from politics Twitter, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood, and really wish I could filter it down to scicomm twitter easily.

bybjorn• 9 years ago

Use "Muted words" - you'll find it under Settings. Add Trump, Republican, etc. :)

AndrewKemendo2• 9 years ago

For me it's basically an RSS feed with comments. Very valuable for learning about and keeping up to date with narrow industry news/trends.

Also a good way to connect with people professionally, but less formally than LinkedIn.

The major downside is that is that a tight group or individual can get put on blast to the whole of twitter, and then just get ignorant vitriol thrown at them and that kind of ruins the whole experience. Happened to me not long ago. Not that big of a deal in the end. Just take a week off and come back and the hive will have found something else to attack. The Twitter universe has a pretty short attention span - even if it has a long memory.

_Codemonkeyism• 9 years ago

I'm @codemonkeyism on Twitter https://twitter.com/codemonkeyism

and still love it.

I think it's key to always prune and trim the people you are following and keep the number low and relevant. If someone tweets several times about things I'm not interested in, I unfollow.

I unfollowed some high profile tech people because of their stream being full of politics.

"(Current count is 1000)"

This seems much too high, I follow 500 and this already looks too high for me (some trimming needed).

nilkn• 9 years ago

I think you're probably following too many people. 1k is workable but it requires a lot of investment to make sure you're consistently only following quality posters. Also, as you suggest, even many high-quality posters also tend to sometimes churn out bursts of low-quality content. With 1k accounts subscribed to, that's a lot of opportunity for low-quality bursts.

norea-armozel• 9 years ago

I think you have to pick who you follow better to get at the good content on Twitter. Whether it's Weird Twitter or just following a bunch of artists (SFW or even NSFW) there's plenty of content out there on Twitter.

I think the problem Twitter has is two fold. It wants people to come and stay on Twitter but it also wants those same people not fight with each other. The solution the developers picked was shadow banning. This banning where the user isn't aware that their tweets aren't visible to others who don't follow you and those who do follow you won't be notified of your tweets either (they only see them on their time line). The most common way this happens right now is someone uses of well known curse words. Right now, I'm shadow banned for whatever reason despite not tweeting at verified accounts often enough to run afoul their automated system. So this is the climate that new users experience where Twitter promises to help them engage with other users (especially verified users of notably celebrities and the like) but if you do anything vaguely hostile in their view then you lose the freedom to interact with anyone even those who follow you mutually. All I can say is that's probably a major contributing factor in the decline of Twitter at present. They just refuse to hire moderators to do proper moderation and to make the rules for banning or shadow banning clear and objective. Basically, it's what happens when you let technophiles try to solve a non-technological problem.

boyce• 9 years ago

It's awful

Twitter used to feel like a good party, with a great range of people with stories and opinions and hopes to talk about. That's definitely over now.

I'm really enjoying mastodon.social though, it feels like how the internet used to

RodericDay• 9 years ago

1k is an absurd number of people. Try <100.

joelrunyon• 9 years ago

It's really good for sub-communities.

Following the NBA on twitter is actually an awesome experience.

I wish they would stop comparing twitter to other social media networks + focus on what is good about it (live, sports, entertainment) and double down on that & figure out how to make money by offering more services in that space.

tomjen32• 9 years ago

Add 'Trump' to your blocked words. That removes most political bullshit. Then take every account that can't handle responsible retweeting and remove retweets from that account (which is now possible while still following the account).

I did this and twitter is now useful again. I

zippergz• 9 years ago

It seems like a lot of people are trying to solve your problem, but I'll just answer the direct question as a data point. Yes, I am still having a good time on Twitter, and I have been since shortly after it launched. It has definitely changed in many ways, good and bad, but overall I still use it a lot and enjoy it. That doesn't mean you have to :)

elmar• 9 years ago

I have a simpler tactic I don't follow anyone I search for hashtags, so my experience is not person driven is subject driven. I also have a couple of lists that I sometines look at tweets.

r0fl• 9 years ago

Donald trump seems to be having the best time on Twitter. If he stops using the service the stock will plummet 10-20%

acchow• 9 years ago

Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation

I also don't like it for news because a single piece of news will appear a thousand times in my feed.

dmix• 9 years ago

I haven't been able to use Twitter since the election.

I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook.

People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again.

I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.

dredmorbius• 9 years ago

On any platform which allows curating feeds: Block fuckwits.

If someone isn't doing it for you, unfollow.

1,000 is almost certainly too many.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...

egypturnash• 9 years ago

I have this habit of checking Twitter in the morning. Lately it's become a kind of Russian Roulette: is my timeline going to be 90% people screaming about whatever horrible thing Trump did today? Sometimes I join in that screaming, too.

I keep on trying to shift over to Mastodon. It's not quite at critical mass of enough of my friends being there, but it's slowly growing.

Mastodon has a system of 'content warnings'; a user can mark their toots to be hidden, and give any arbitrary reason. 'Politics' is very much considered to be one of the reasons you should put a content warning on a toot, along with other reasons like 'NSFW', 'moping', 'spoilers for the latest episode of Gamey Throney', or 'raw unadulterated shoe-lust'.

It's also got a 500 character limit, a distributed architecture, a tendency for people running servers to crack down on jerkwaddery, and is pretty much supported entirely by Patreon right now rather than pouring venture capital down a hole while trying to chase advertising dollars.

natecavanaugh• 9 years ago

I have to agree with you, but I don't think I've ever had a "good time" on twitter. It's not optimized for conversation, and it doesn't even optimize for thoughtful condensation of ideas; it just optimizes for the quickest brain diarrhea you can squeeze out in 140 characters). Sure, I get its use as a broadcast platform, but it's not even flattening the world all that much in that regard. The lions share of attention still goes to those who probably need that kind of reach the least (granted, what social sphere is there where that's not really the case?)

Maybe it's just my innate crotchety-ness, but I feel like a lot of people think about Twitter like owning a boat: fun in theory but a big PITA that probably won't be missed except once or twice a year.

Of course, this is all imbued with my own personal gripes and prejudices with social media, so take it as a commiserating vent :)

karzeem• 9 years ago

The key is don't follow accounts that tweet about politics. I filtered mine down a few years ago and have loved it ever since.

ivcha• 9 years ago

yes, me... please refrain yourself from starting your replies like that...

vxNsr3• 9 years ago

I think I just realized how everyone who uses twitter regularly actually uses it[1]. I had no idea this existed (maybe others did...) but it's honestly 1000 times better than the official website and you get the old timeline back and following conversations is much easier, stays on one page.

[1] tweetdeck.twitter.com

skewart• 9 years ago

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 user experience if they want to grow. The vast majority of internet products evolve significantly as they grow, surfing the wave of changing user behavior and taste as they reach new markets.

visarga4• 9 years ago

Scrolling is very inefficient on Twitter - to read the equivalent of a single screen on reddit or HN means to scroll 20x more on T. When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost.

Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.

icebraining• 9 years ago

When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost.

That's also my experience - I have to be very careful not to click on anything, lest I lose my position on the thread. I don't understand how the developers themselves don't get frustrated about this, frankly.

sp3322• 9 years ago

Is there a platform where you can filter political stuff? Anyway Twitter lets you hide tweets with certain keywords. You can cut down on noise dramatically that way.

Eridrus2• 9 years ago

Does anyone know what the status of the Twitter API is?

I remember there being a kerfuffle about Twitter placing limitations on it, but is it still possible to make a custom client that unifies, say, Twitter and Mastodon?

TekMol• 9 years ago

Haven't used it in a while, but:

I think if you use it via user auth, it still works. So if a user of your app is approving your app to act on their behalf, you can do most things the user could do manually.

I think the limits mainly regarded application auth. So if your application wants the last 10k tweets about "honey" it will not get them unless you pay.

I could be wrong though. Would love to hear more from people in the know.

jgroszko• 9 years ago

Twidere on Android allows you to access Twitter and Mastodon accounts in a UI similar to TweetDeck

nothis2• 9 years ago

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?

QAPereo• 9 years ago

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.

epoch19702• 9 years ago

When I last tried to sign up, they requested a phone number, I assume as some sort of an attempt to make it harder for spammers to sign up. I don't think they have any legitimate reason for that sort of information, so I didn't provide it. I don't remember the specifics, but either I couldn't finish creating the account, or it was created and then automatically locked/suspended a few minutes later. The end result was that I couldn't sign up and use the service in any meaningful way.

I don't know if that's still the case or not. After that rather awful experience trying to sign up, I've lost all interest in trying again.

I'm not surprised they're having trouble growing when they impede the ability of people to sign up! There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.

mschuster912• 9 years ago

There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address.

They do (and any service basically). You don't want to run a large-scale service without having some way for your users to self-reset their passwords.

They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.

That requirement is recent and I believe comes from law enforcement / politicians as they want to be able to track "hate speech" (that's the official speech, but rather I believe it's about dissidents, YPG supporters etc) to real persons. Many left-wing German accounts had them frozen until entering a phone number, for example. Facebook is easier because many people use their real name and photographs or other personal details from which law enforcement can identify them.

Macsenour• 9 years ago

I'm sure we're not, but Twitter still feels like it's at the 1.0 version of the user experience.

bluthru• 9 years ago

Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use.

I think so much of it comes down to trying to put too much content in a small space. Twitter was a lot less annoying when it was only 140 characters and no embedded media since the information density was appropriate for a phone screen. Now it's just absurd how much one needs to scroll just to use it. It's almost more of a scrolling app than an information app.

One quick fix would be to have an option to show tweets one at a time with next and previous buttons at the bottom for rapid digestion of tweets.

wongarsu2• 9 years ago

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 could be 8 lines of text into a screen-filling experience that you have to dedicate time to to follow (official Twitter windows client & co). I don't care enough to code something myself, so I just don't bother with Twitter.

nimchimpsky3• 9 years ago

just go to https://mobile.twitter.com/home

vxNsr3• 9 years ago

This is what I get[0] which is much worse.

[0]http://i.imgur.com/sJ6qAQE.png

Rjevski2• 9 years ago

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

akilism• 9 years ago

328 million monthly active users and still not happy.

CM302• 9 years ago

I read somewhere that the issue with Twitter is that its platform doesn't have the level of mainstream appeal the likes of Facebook or Instagram have. It's good for journalists and influencers sure, but for the average Joe it's not as intuitive to use.

SonicSoul4• 9 years ago

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.

glastra• 9 years ago

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. friends you follow).

AznHisoka4• 9 years ago

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.

kps3• 9 years ago

What I would like is a simple list of followed users with four columns of tickboxes: [] tweets [] replies [] retweets [] likes.

What I get is an unpredictable mishmash that seems deliberately designed to drive me away.

mrkrabo4• 9 years ago

They are doing similar stuff already, not that bad, but it's getting worse every month. It was always a chronological feed, but these last years they just shuffle thing around when they see fit.

freehunter2• 9 years ago

The problem is, there's too much they're trying to show you. They can't fit it all, and users would get bored quickly if they tried. If I saw everything my 300+ "friends" on Facebook did every day, plus everything every page I followed said, plus everything that's recommended, plus every ad they wanted to show all shown in the same order they were posted in, I'd be scrolling for five minutes and only be a few moments back in time.

And for other people, they'd look at it once a day, and the next day might be exactly the same. So what's the point in visiting constantly?

It's done to hide how active or inactive your social graph actually is.

fgandiya2• 9 years ago

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)?

swiley• 9 years ago

Firefox/chrome is the new television. People don't want to read they just want to scroll and watch videos and get emotional.

Eridrus2• 9 years ago

Video ads pay much more.

kasey_junk4• 9 years ago

And autoplay video jukes the stats to make it look like the consumers are more engaged in video ads than they are in banners.

fwn• 9 years ago

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

tormeh2• 9 years ago

Twitter is amazing, but it needs to ditch the 140 chars, improve discoverability, and get more modest in its expectations. Twitter is an interest network, where you follow interesting people and read what they write, re-tweet what they write and sometimes interact with them. Given that a lot of people don't have that much interest in things that can be expressed in Twitter form, Twitter has a low ceiling on how big it can get. Most sports fans would rather watch sports than following an athlete. I think Twitter should try being better at what their users use it as.

kasey_junk4• 9 years ago

I think I'd probably stop using Twitter (the only social network I use) if they ditched the 140 character format. I don't want to see long form facebook style posts there, its literally their differentiation.

tormeh2• 9 years ago

I would say that their differentiation of Twitter is that all posts are public and connections are uni-directional.

They could implement 140+ using the same kind of GUI that's already there for text-as-picture, which is already widely used.

pzone• 9 years ago

Well if they remove the 140 character limit I'll start using Twitter again. Looks like they're breaking even.

Tistel• 9 years ago

Twitter owns https://www.mopub.com an ad exchange too. I think its one of the bigger ones. Ad exchanges are the things that provide revenue to app devs. Basically, when you open a free(mium) app there is a market bidding for the right to show you an ads. There is all kinds of tech trying to characterize you based on your phone's id so you see relevant ads. Having an audience of 320+ million people and ad tech powering a significant portion of the app world seems like nice problems to have.

yttrium3• 9 years ago

Part of the problem is the sheer amount of racism and harassment. How many times do twitter eggs and other hate speech peddlers get reported without anything happening? Why does Twitter drag their feet over this? Nobody will miss the neo-nazis.

j_s• 9 years ago

Are there any desktop or self-hosted tools designed to archive my Twitter feed? Every time I remember seeing something useful it is nearly impossible to get back to.

yakshaving_jgt• 9 years ago

[opens Twitter]

EVERYONE: How dare you be a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white male?!?!??!?!

ME: …Ok then.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mrkrabo4• 9 years ago

You're not following the correct people. I agree it's sad that almost everybody involved with tech is a die-hard liberal :P I'd love to get my tech news from Twitter but I simply don't like to be told how to think regarding politics, which tech people do all day. So I just read Hacker News...

librvf• 9 years ago

I don't mind die-hard liberals who are actually open-minded believers in individual rights and equality.

The whole white, het, cisgender stuff is coming from intersectional feminism, which is anything but a liberal philosophy.

tomjen32• 9 years ago

Change who you follow and block every single on of those words (well maybe not male, too many false positives).

Rjevski2• 9 years ago

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"?

criddell2• 9 years ago

Twitter has something like 3000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of where they are. Before I heard this number, I would have guessed they had 300 employees (based on Instagram having 20 employees when Facebook bought them).

At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us that love it.

dirtyaura2• 9 years ago

Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that

- ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers)

- ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, researchers, and related managers)

- ~1000 in Sales and Marketing

- ~500 in general & administrative (finance, legal, H&R, IT support, management, misc)

If you compare to e.g. Google, this sounds pretty similar split.

jaxondu• 9 years ago

Discovery for new content/people to follow on Twitter's iOS app (Explore tab) is appallingly bad. Its astonishing that they made so little improvement in this area after so many years. Its sad when you compare with what you get on Weibo, its China clone.

AlwaysRock• 9 years ago

I got off twitter because it felt like they were constantly changing the app to make it worse / more covered in ads but mostly because I didn't like the way it was changing my thinking. It's the first app I've felt the pull to compulsively check and I really didn't like that.

richardknop• 9 years ago

I have just deleted Twitter app from my mobile phone today. I am getting fed up with constant push notifications I don't care about.

It seems like push notifications from other social apps are more relevant, notifications from Twitter rarely are about something I care about.

kbullaughey• 9 years ago

Is there any way to deduplicate tweets? Some accounts seem to have the same tweets scheduled over and over again.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

Maybe it's naturally limited from it's format and doesn't need to grow more.

- I like the website for quick feed and "real time" data - I wished the logic was thinner, it's still a heavy site in a way - maybe a 3 real columns UX would make the thing blossom

overcast• 9 years ago

Twitter should just focus 100% on real time news. That's the only time I've ever seen anything valuable come from it. If a major site is down, it's generally on there instantly. If some event just happened in the world, it's on there instantly.

All this other nonsense, interacting with celebrities, businesses, or coding "rockstars" is just noise.

Overhaul the horrendous UI, focus on world news ONLY.

xj9• 9 years ago

keep up the failure twitter! i love it.

every time they make a serious mistake and alienate users, the federated timeline on my private mastodon server is flooded with new people. quite beautiful actually. fun to see how people show up ready to fight only to find that there are a lot more ways to interact with people, if you can believe it. fights break out. people show up to try to cool the situation down. some people decide to stick around. lovely.

https://joinmastodon.org

https://cybre.space

https://ephemeral.glitch.social

https://sunshinegardens.org

protomyth• 9 years ago

Their usability keeps going downhill. This showing me other people's favorites thing is one step too far. I know they must feel a bit putout that the community invented the retweet, but making favorites act like retweets is just dumb.

Also, the amount of data the service uses is obscene. The auto-play even if I have the preference not to is a cell plan killer.

Flow• 9 years ago

But is it a safe space yet? :)

Autoblocking list bots going crazy can't hardly be a good thing for growth. Facebook with their groups concept feels like a better model than the free-for-all model Twitter uses.

And I've always felt that text-only and limiting to 140 chars is a great way to ensure there's misunderstanding between people.

Overtonwindow• 9 years ago

What if a company like Amazon bought Twitter? They could also charge for accounts. Something like more than 100 followers you need to pay.

cJ0th• 9 years ago

Instead of focusing on growth they should focus on their business model. More users cause more noise first and foremost. How is noise going to help long term sustainability?

skoocda• 9 years ago

This comes up semi-regularly when Twitter is mentioned on HN, but I've moved all my Twitter attention over to Nuzzel and have enjoyed the change. Twitter started to feel like such a poor return on my time due to the format- having an aggregator makes a huge difference. It partially solves the clutter problem of having hundreds of Twitter followees, and partially solves the problem of not wanting to check Twitter perpetually.

What I don't understand is why Twitter hasn't implemented more direct methods to see the generally/statistically good content. Anyone remember 'Texts from last night' and 'Fuck my life' and the like? They had this _incredible_ feature that allowed you to sort by top posts of the week, or even, can you believe it- the month! Nuzzel provides this as well, but it doesn't have much effect unless you follow enough people to decimate your normal Twitter experience.

byuu• 9 years ago

And here we all really thought their recent redesign to add border-radius: 50% to literally everything on the site (avatars, text boxes, buttons, etc) and to strip all contrast away from the icons by hollowing them all out would bring about massive growth of the platform!

How many more times do they have to listen to exactly what their users want and add things like more complicated reply-to functionality that most can't seem to figure out still, live auto-playing sports video on the frontpage regardless of your interests, temporary automatic bans for using adult language in replies to verified accounts when yours isn't, moments, reordering your timeline so that it's no longer chronological, hiding tweets behind "show more replies" (with no opt-out), hiding even more tweets behind a second "show even more sensitive replies" (still with no opt-out), invading others' discretion and flooding your timeline with other peoples' likes, replacing the dreaded egg avatar with a person silhouette, etc before the platform starts to grow? /s

cwyers2• 9 years ago

A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That number stands at 328 million monthly active users -- the same as in the prior quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement Thursday. Revenue fell 4.7 percent and the company’s net loss also widened, affected by a $55 million writedown of the value of its investment in SoundCloud, the German music streaming service.

This is insanity. This is utter insanity. Twitter is at over 300 million monthly users. How have we created a system where that's not enough? Twitter is incredibly relevant. The president's Tweets are basically driving the news cycle now. And yet it needs to grow? Why? (Okay, okay, I understand why -- to feed all the VCs that invested in it. I just... ugh.)

kosievdmerwe2• 9 years ago

Because at the end of the day companies are supposed to make a profit and Twitter isn't managing that. They also aren't managing growth, which people believe is a good reason to delay profitability in favor of a future larger amount of profit.

This is hardly ridiculous.

EDIT: and moreover this is a situation that has existed for multiple quarters now, adding to the reasonableness of the frustration and lack of trust in the future of Twitter.

cwyers2• 9 years ago

Could Twitter be profitable if they weren't spending so much money on new customer acquisition?

shostack2• 9 years ago

As an important comparison, Facebook just posted 2B monthly actives in Q2.

From an advertising industry standpoint, the space has quickly become consolidated such that Google and FB own the vast majority of ad inventory in the market. Advertisers, particularly large advertisers who contribute a substantial portion of this revenue.

As a buyer, I can state from a position of experience that managing an ad buy at scale is just as important as potential performance. If I'm an agency for example, and I can reach massively more people on FB than Twitter, I'm likely going to focus my efforts there even if ROI may suffer from diminishing returns to some extent. A big part of the reason for that is it would take significantly more hours to setup, manage and report on Twitter (or any other ad platform) separately than it would to just focus on FB in that case.

So from a business level, the overhead of managing multiple ad platforms can often be a critical deciding factor in addition to just the actual ad performance. Time is money, and lots of people hours cost lots of money, particularly those people who have the technical specialization to effectively manage digital media campaigns at scale.

All of that is to explain why total ad spend is increasingly consolidating around FB and Google. And that is REALLY bad news for Twitter from an investor standpoint because it puts a big cap on their growth potential.

abiox• 9 years ago

twitter's core interaction mechanism was always ripe for trolling, brigading and other abuse. the ui in general is pretty bad.

davidbwire• 9 years ago

Twitter is it's own enemy. There's no way to adjust video quality for a smoother streaming experience. Twitter Lite has a horrible user experience; you have to manually click on each image to load and the images seem to be full quality which defeats the purpose of data saving. Why can't they build an app like Facebook Lite? Facebook lite is small in size to download (less than 1.5MB) and has nicely compressed images and videos.

iandanforth• 9 years ago

I use twitter's web app primarily with heavy editing with uBlock origin. I don't see trends, or suggestions or moments.

I block 99% of accounts that show up as 'promoted'.

I always click 'show less often' for 'In case you missed' and 'Who you should follow'.

With all that, I love it. It's indispensable for keeping up with machine learning news.

The core product is the best curated news feed around, but you have to do the curation. Almost all the content twitter itself pushes is noise.

To survive twitter needs to start serving ads that are extremely tailored to me and my feed. Just like with google, the quality of ad results needs to match or exceed the quality of organic results.

altotrees• 9 years ago

They brought on the global creative director from Beats by Dre. He had a hand in some interesting campaigns, but clearly it didn't do the trick.

Twitter is still insanely enmeshed in the American cultural fabric right now. Any newscast or radio show usually mentions it, businesses and publications fight for impressions, etc. There have Been multiple times I think Twitter is finally on it's way out, but it somehow remains relevant.

pier25• 9 years ago

The problem with Twitter is that it has an identity crisis. It wants to be as massive as Facebook but the way it works is only attractive to a minority.

For example the 140 characters limit which was a novelty at the launch is more of a nuisance than anything. It's very common that users are replying to themselves to be able to say more.

The other big problem is noise. For example I recently started following one of the NPM devs and my feed was flooded with LGBT content. This is not Twitter's fault, but the way its users are using Twitter has become part of the culture.

Twitter could probably solve those two problems, but at the same time it would destroy what Twitter is about for its current users.

The only solution for Twitter is to realise it can't really cater to a mainstream audience and to become profitable it needs to lower its costs.

StreamBright• 9 years ago

Should not be a big surprise, Twitter has an absolutely questionable policy when it comes to content filtering.

dkrich• 9 years ago

To me it seems that Twitter is less of a back-and-forth engagement platform like Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram, and more of a platform for anointed experts/celebrities to use as a megaphone to anyone who will listen.

Accepting that, I wonder why Twitter doesn't charge people to use the service to either have a verified account or beyond some # of followers after which it's capped? Celebs obviously get a great deal of value from the service and have the means to pay, so why not charge them? I refuse to believe that there would be a noticeable decline in accounts if you had to pay some fee per, say, 30k followers.

unsoundInput2• 9 years ago

I'm wondering why they're getting more and more adamant that people register an account, even though a lot of people don't care about having an online persona outside of Facebook and wouldn't ever contribute anything to the platform.

I honestly believe that could do much better by providing a good experience to people that just want to stay up-to-date and follow a few people that they find interesting.

talmand• 9 years ago

Gotta pump up those numbers. Can't show growth without people signing up for accounts.

unsoundInput2• 9 years ago

I don't buy it.

At least two core products of the biggest advertisement company in the world have no problem providing you value and generating ad-revenue without you having to be logged in. Google and YouTube would be nowhere near the success they are if they'd force you to log in.

thrillgore• 9 years ago

I guess i'll be the only contrarian here and say that Twitter has become the preferred communication platform for some notable political figures (including the current Sitting US President). On that simple premise alone, I can't for good reason work up the nerve to use it anymore.

There was a time when I relied on Twitter to get details about life in a rather medium-sized city. We had tweetups and I even used it for business networking. As it grew bigger, I felt less interested as the value increased on other platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn. Even now, I still find dedicated Subreddits more valuable than Twitter.

To me, Twitter is now a space for low effort comments and input on media. I'm sure it works well for others, and good for you. But I have no time to cultivate relevant trends, and it seems philosophically wrong to suggest a platform should enable or mandate the culling of an audience. Especially since by design, Twitter is supposed to be the cross section of humanity (with its inherent downsides).

patrickg_zill• 9 years ago

Twitter has been actively banning various accounts, usually alt-right but some even satirical in nature. They banned GodfreyElfwick for instance.

Each time that happens, Twitter loses some of its appeal.

They could very easily put more filtering power in the hands of their users, but don't (to give me more control over whose tweets show up as response to my tweets, which is the main complaint people have about accounts they vehemently disagree with).

blister• 9 years ago

Twitter has caused serious harm to myself and my family. I'm a big fan of the platform, but I've been "doxxed", harassed, and was even SWATed once by different people trying to get me to give them my username.

I'd release it, except that'd be almost as big of a pain. I'd have to release a new edition of my book, change all my websites. Ugh. People are dicks. I wish I'd picked a less desirable handle.

rchaud• 9 years ago

Every discussion on Twitter on HN talks about UX issues like the threaded comment layout, as though these are what's responsible for driving away Twitter's audience.

I think the simple answer is that you don't actually have to ever visit Twitter to know what Trump, Nicki Minaj, Drake etc. are saying.

Whatever is said on a tweet will be screen-capped and re-reported on your favourite gossip website, news site, Instagram page, reddit, etc. That's what you get with a 140-character limit. Whatever you said or pic you snapped can easily be reproduced on a different medium in its entirety.

shostack2• 9 years ago

That's a great point. Text and images are easy and damn near free to copy and distribute (unlike video). So it is very easy to copy content from Twitter and post it elsewhere (where those publishers can then monetize it themselves).

Compare that to say...video hosted on YT/FB where, when embedded, can still include ads that allows those platforms to monetize people sharing their content offsite.

good_vibes• 9 years ago

I follow 44 accounts, a mixture of Eastern philosophy, interesting entrepreneurs/economists, Quanta/Nautilus, Patagonia, one design showcase, a few people in tech industry.

Twitter is mostly noise, little signal. Social media in general is to be honest. I get a little value from each of the major platforms. Reddit and Instagram are my two favorites.

Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

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