Twitter has a huge problem, and it’s in your head

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/29/twitter-has-a-huge-problem-and-its-all-in-your-head/

by sergeant3 • 11 years ago

48 69 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

pinaceae• 11 years ago

disagree.

Twitter's problem is that they invented a great communication channel with no clear way of monetizing it.

Like inventing email.

They're now trying to build walls around their protocol, shutting down APIs, etc. Imagine if the people behind email would have done it.

For me, Twitter is a great news reader. And Google shutting down their Reader product should explain the problem with this kind of products.

_dark_matter_• 11 years ago

No clear way of monetizing? They are grossing more than a billion on 300 million users. Seems like they are quite capable of monetizing.

hnnewguy• 11 years ago

Spending a dollar to earn $0.50 isn't sustainable.

I use Twitter daily, and would hate to see it disappear. But how much of current revenues are a product of companies still "experimenting" with the Twitter ad ecosystem? What happens if those channels provide less ROI than everyone expects? That's the way the trends appear to be heading.

apessoa• 11 years ago

Twitter's 'cost per impression' is much higher than Facebook's. This along with other downsides, such as the number of users, might not make it as attractive to advertisers.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

Imagine if the people behind email would have done it.

Email (which I assume is a reductionist placeholder for the sum of its protocols and implementations), to the best of my knowledge, was never built with "monetization" in mind, not more than any open standard or protocol is.

krisdol• 11 years ago

I don't think the parent is arguing that

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

Email is an interesting comparison.

Email itself is not monetized. RFC 5321 charges no license fees. Platforms built on top of email are monetized.

nosuchthing3• 11 years ago

You've got to be kidding, have you ever logged into twitter?

It's littered with sponsored tweets and advertisements EVERYWHERE.

Twitter analyzes your words and interests, your network, your locations, and sells you as a demographic to various businesses for targeted advertising.

bduerst• 11 years ago

They do conversion tracking and retargeting with tracking pixels as well, right?

They're pretty much an ads platform like Google Search or Facebook.

eropple2• 11 years ago

This is a weird "problem" to me. I follow about 300 people (@edropple) and never feel overwhelmed. I've never used lists or filters or anything. I dip in and out of Twitter as I please. Basketball game's on? Twitter's on. Working? Twitter's off. The best analogy I can think of is that it's portable bar chatter. You go when you want to bullshit with friends, you don't when you've got other things going on.

Maybe the problem is trying to follow the entire Internet and lacking the self-control to pick and choose.

Disruptive_Dave• 11 years ago

^this. It's only a problem for those who have given up on controlling their behavior, the information gluttons, if you will. And in this sense, that's anything but a problem for Twitter ('oh no, people can't stop opening our app and engaging with it').

CHaro2• 11 years ago

It is alot more stressful for content creators like youtube personalities who tweets out constantly instead of being a consumer. Because you have to make sure you don't miss any import people tweeting at you. And you have to make sure you make your audience happy. Most youtube stars hate twitter because it's such a burden to having to keep up with their audience.

Twitter can't afford to loose these people because they are the ones who create all the tweets most people come to twitter to consume.

tracker1• 11 years ago

+1 here... I feel the same way. The only down side, is with a handful of twitter accounts, I find the emails excessive and annoying... If I only got 2-3 a week for the summary emails that would be better for me.. but pretty much every day across 3 accounts, is too much, so I unsubscribed/disabled them.

Other than that, I pop in for a couple minutes a day, scroll through the most recent few hundred posts, and let it go.

post_break2• 11 years ago

I think Twitter's problem is that it somehow makes people turn into vile hate filled people. There is so much harassment on Twitter I just can't believe it. Sure it exists on 4chan, reddit, and others, but I think Twitter seems to channel it the most.

theorique• 11 years ago

Maybe that's true if you follow mostly troll accounts and angry political ranters. But since each user curates his own view of twitter, there is an easy solution: unfollow those whose tweets you don't like.

magicalist• 11 years ago

Tweet an opinion about gamers and label it with #gamergate and see what happens. Twitter it slowwwwly rolling out tools to help manage this analogous to the way you can manage who you follow.

x3n0ph3n3• 11 years ago

I think many of those people were vile, hate-filled people to begin with, and Twitter only gave them a platform to express that.

alexqgb6• 11 years ago

I've been on Twitter since 2008 (@alexqgb) and I've unfollowed a lot of people since then, but I can't think of one who lost my interest because they became a raging troll. Anecdotal, I know, but I've seen exactly zero evidence to support this theory.

My most common reasons for dropping feeds are fleeting interest passing, people's interests getting boring, and deeper interests diverging. But changing personalities? No. Personalities are remarkably stable things.

If you're an awful person on Twitter (a) you've probably been that way from the day you started and (b) it probably isn't limited to your online life.

post_break2• 11 years ago

I didn't describe it well. I think Twitter is like an echo chamber for SJW's and it seems to spawn digital riots, swattings, doxxing, etc. That's the problem I was trying to describe, the nefarious use of Twitter.

danso• 11 years ago

In the media, where joining Twitter is almost a requirement, I've met a few people who, while not enthused about having to be a part of Twitter, are obsessed with trimming their followings lists and making sure that they follow only worthwhile people who don't clutter their feed with "what i had for breakfast posts"...because these people feel that now they're on Twitter, they must keep up with all the important conversations that may be going on and read their timelines to completion for the day. It's kind of sad...these people have lived 20-40 years just fine without the need to see a realtime feed of random 140-character messages from the Internet, and now they feel like they have to bear the burden of constantly consuming it. If there's one thing I've learned from the Internet it's that there's always too much going on and you'll never be able to keep up with it...and when you do miss out on some piece of timely information, guess what, there's always plenty more where that came from, so no need to feel remorse about it.

(I guess this same thing could be made about Zero-Inboxers)

alexqgb6• 11 years ago

FWIW, obsessive focus on filtering for high quality information and "a realtime feed of random messages from the Internet" are basically the the opposites of one another.

But I will say this: without judicious policing, the channel does gets noisy, and fast.

Sevzinn2• 11 years ago

When I tried twitter, I found myself ignored and not hated and not loved. I stopped.

xtrumanx• 11 years ago

It may be that Twitter didn't list your tweets in the search results. That's what happened to my first tweet, which is apparently an anti-spam measure Twitter employs.

Knowing no one else who used Twitter, I had no other use for the service and promptly logged off permanently.

Sevzinn2• 11 years ago

Nope, tweets with all the right hash tags over a few weeks. I got a favorite and maybe a follower on somewhat random remarks, but usually nothing.

istvan__• 11 years ago

I love Twitter the most out of any social platforms. I think their problem partially is that the software stack is too expensive. This problem often missed because everybody is focusing on capabilities and features. Performance, and being efficient is a feature.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

As Lucy Jo Palladino, a psychologist who studies attention, explains, the brain is a muscle like any other, and it can’t run on empty.

Possibly the best mixed metaphor (I know it's not a metaphor, I don't know a better phrase) I've ever read in my life.

Retra• 11 years ago

It is a metaphor:

"A metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities[...]"

ctdonath2• 11 years ago

I have to smile at the revelation of this problem. Nearly 30 years ago I discovered Usenet - and I was able to follow & read every post. That lasted for about 3 days. For "there's too much on Twitter!" to suddenly be a news item is ... funny.

Since then, I've followed the rise & fall of dozens of social media sites & sources, watching each follow the same pattern: within about 7 years, each site started, caught on, became the place to be, sagged under the weight & dreck of everyone wanting to be at the place to be, the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed as meaningful content found a slimmer medium, the self-important/trolls/spam/etc piled on, and the site (still existing) vanished from the public awareness. Oh, sure, Usenet continues, AOL continues, MySpace continues, ... but seem flotsam of the past. I've no doubt Twitter, Facebook, etc - whatever the current cultural imperatives are - will carry on for some time, but will likewise fade into oblivion as interesting content finds fresher ground and the S/N ratio collapses.

HenryTheHorse• 11 years ago

..will likewise fade into oblivion..

In contrast, the humble email, which was to have died a brutal death in 1999, 2005, 2010 and now 2015 at the hands of various Goliaths, merrily continues to fill the days of our lives.

fpgaminer2• 11 years ago

Email isn't a community or platform, so I wouldn't lump it into the same logical pile as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Email is just a distributed means of communication, and isn't tied to any particular organization or community. So it won't suffer the same syndromes that platforms do. (note that I point out in particular that it isn't tied to a particular organization. Facebook messages are a form of communication, but they're tied to a platform/community. Thus it suffers the same cycles). But, e.g., email platforms suffer cycles. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.

fpgaminer2• 11 years ago

I'm curious why the S/N ratio collapses like that. Is it because those who contribute to the noise level are slower to move to new platforms? Is it because those who contribute to the signal are faster to move to new platforms and/or adverse to popular platforms? Perhaps a combination of both?

I suppose a part of me wonders if the answers to these questions could lead to a more stable platform. Yet that seems unlikely, since platforms don't seem to be holding traction longer than their predecessors.

It seems like Reddit might be at least one possible evolution that could lead to increased longevity. Their trick is to have user moderated sub-communities as a first class feature, and keep the churn high on those communities (subreddits). That seems to be a way to allow the cyclic birth and death of platforms/communities to occur, but still keep people within the overarching Reddit umbrella. Though I think ultimately Reddit will suffer the same fate as Digg; it's only a matter of time before management makes enough mistakes or corruption reaches critical mass.

ctdonath2• 11 years ago

When ongoing worthwhile conversation appears on a small board, the S/N ratio goes very high fast. Word spreads, and people are attracted to a high-interest low-noise signal. As more people join in, everyone can be heard ... but not everyone should be heard. The growing noise starts drowning out the signal, which gets frustrated and heads for less noisy grounds. The sheer mass & momentum of the noise sources keeps the place going for a while, but more "signals" leave over time, leaving a shrinking population. Various mechanisms are put in place to suppress noise, with varying degrees of success (HN's is pretty good).

"Freshness" is also a factor. After a while, each forum just starts showing its age, not keeping up with spiffy new forms & forums. People get bored and move on.

"Us vs them" is also a factor. A growing subgroup may decide they just don't want to be around the base. Prime example: Facebook and the alleged "kids don't use it because their parents are there".

Embrace the lifecycle. It's real; instead of fighting it, manage it with the understanding that it will eventually fade and users head to newer quieter forums.

SixSigma• 11 years ago

No paraphrase Yogi Berra :

Nobody posts on Twitter any more, there are too many Tweets.

mbesto• 11 years ago

I wrote about this almost 3 years ago and share very similar sentiments:

http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-sol...

wiremine• 11 years ago

I got on twitter on day two or three (I'm user 1019 I think) and... it was incredible boring back then. I mean really, really boring. I stopped using it immediately.

Eventually I picked it back up, once there were more accounts I found useful/interesting.

Today they have the opposite problem: too much disconnected content: my feed is filled with 100s of random, disconnected headlines, links to top 10 lists, random comments from fiends, etc.

I don't feel overwhelmed, but it's hard to _casually_ engage twitter and feel edified by the experience.

I think to win the long run, Twitter has to be more valuable than just a seemly chaotic feed of information rushing by. They have never solved this problem well. At least, not for the casual user.

If they did, I think they would see their user adoption rate increase. That doesn't solve the monetization problem alone, but it would sure would help.

Update: fixed some spelling.

Ras_2• 11 years ago

These best RT's of the day/week and other automated lists seem not unlike Facebook's excessive Game app messages. They were a proper nuisance until you became able to hide them. Twitter needs some tools for self-curating. For example some manual filter that you could teach which kind of messages to hide. Vast number of people will never adopt any third party options.

khorwitz• 11 years ago

A tool to help combat distractions like Twitter* and focus on one thing at a time: http://focusr.co.

*Although I'm pleased with Twitter's self-awareness here, and I'm not saying there's anything intrinsically wrong with services like these. You just aren't going to see many successful entrepreneurs wasting their time on these services (unless they're directly responsible for engaging users through it).

ErikAugust• 11 years ago

http://cronster.com - Working on similar concept, though not the same.

Threads revolve around chronological events created/added/managed by the user - think running race, wedding, conference, concert, etc.

push7joshi• 11 years ago

Totally agree with the post. It's like all data and we need platforms to derive information from the stream. Probably something like http://summly.com/ for your lists?

jusben1369• 11 years ago

What a strange post: "If its service is inherently cognitively stressful, it can’t possibly persuade new users to sign up."

How do new users know that until they use it? The problem this article discusses would seem to have nothing to do with getting new users (the problem discussed here) and everything about people stopping use of the service (churn) once they hit a tipping point of following too many people and getting tweet overload.

nlh• 11 years ago

The thing about Twitter that doesn't seem to get discussed that often is that it's a heavily unbalanced platform between content producers (tweeters) and consumers (readers), and there seems to be a perception problem with how it's supposed to be used.

The people I most often see talking about how amazing Twitter is are those that get to reap the benefits of having a large following -- sure, if you have 10,000 followers and you can just pop on and write "Hey Twitter - any suggestions on a new ...?" and you get flooded with responses, of course you're going to think the community is amazing.

Now, as a _consumer_, Twitter can also be amazing -- if you curate who you follow, and understand that you're basically there to read and consume.

But then these folks see that "tweet" button, and they dip in to being a producer, and they're effectively screaming into a crowded room. "Hey, nobody's paying attention to me - this Twitter thing sucks" and then they shrug and walk away.

So Twitter's biggest problem, it seems, is that Twitter is actually different things to different people, and it needs to better differentiate what its purpose is so expectations are set properly.

Ras_2• 11 years ago

Indeed. You need to ride on the coattails of the people who have followers for quite some time before you can expect activity for your own tweets. Engaging in a discussion that's already there is much easier than trying to start one.

MrBuddyCasino• 11 years ago

For comparison, 34 gigabytes = two times the memory of the entry-level iPhone.

Thats not very helpful. Can anyone tell me, if you were to print that out on paper on an inkjet, how much the ink would cost?

jay_kyburz• 11 years ago

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think between long @addresses and a few #hashtags, there is not enough characters left to say something interesting.

The result is cryptic gibberish.

I think @addresses and #hashtags should be moved out of the 180 char limit.

Also, web links should have their own field so you can say 180 characters of something interesting about the link.

Twitter has a huge problem, and it’s in your head

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