I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, but make me explore the field in a much deeper level. Three of the fields that I have gotten 'into' because of twitter are Urban 'renewal' sort of projects (citylab, atlantic cities, etcetera), the book reviews circle, and a certain subfield of computer science I won't mention, because I'd probably be the only intersection of those fields. : P
Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them. Done. (This is however NOT a apology for all the awful harassment that does happen)
I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months, so it doesn't get out of hand, and it's worked perfectly for me. I can catch up with pretty much everything that appears on my timeline. I Like twitter because it doesn't 'curate' my content for me. The day it decides to get rid of the 'everything' timeline will be the day the 'decay' begins.
Perhaps my viewpoint is tainted, but in the past six years (that's how long I've been on it/using it), the number of twitter users has been growing (at least in terms of people I know), and their quality increasing. I realize harassment is still a huge issue, but despite that, Twitter is still a great community : )
Why do we never see the phrase “TCP/IP made me smarter”?
Smart people and your active search for them made you smarter, not “Twitter”. You explained it yourself. If Twitter had some technology tuned to solve your specific task for a freshly registered user, it could take the credit, but it's neutral and indifferent.
Also, I can't see much difference between good ongoing conversation and a good conversation that happened thousand years ago. Part of the problem, as described in the article, is that Twitter “community” matured and generally switched from using it for transitory chirps to gathering and organizing knowledge for a long term somehow. And, as we all know, Twitter is horrible in that regard. Enormous planetary-scale log file without tools to parse it is a giant step backwards.
That is a ridiculous hyperbole, haha. I'm rolling my eyes.
I can justify: I do not have to 'actively' go out to seek for information that I might be interesting/relevant to me: it comes to me. It's better than reddit because I see posts only by people vetted by me, so that's my 'filter'.It's better than email, because it's open conversation, and it's better than RSS because it's a 'social-network'. The network effect brings in the 'celebrities' (or, cool people, as I see it)
Yeah, twitter search sx ba*s. I'm hoping they make an agreement w google to figure out some sort of indexing. Regardless, it's pretty nifty. Highly recommend. Specially considering a lot of academic CS celebrities seem to be active there. (I do not come from SV eng background, so it might be a different community.)
Twitter does not do a good enough job of curating the huge amount of high-quality content it holds for new Twitter subscribers. You said it yourself:
> If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter.
> Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them.
> I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months
All of the above steps are time consuming, and a lot of people (including me) simply can’t be bothered or don't have the time, or both!
Last time I created a new account I entered some basic details and in return a bunch of well-known Tweeters were offered up, none of whom I was actually wanted to follow. That was the sum-total of the on boarding experience and I was left with nothing useful. So what do I do? I start posting content and following people - adding more content almost randomly in a hope that something sticks.
Twitter absolutely nailed the input side of their user experience. Adding content is almost too easy, hence the amount of bullshit “here’s what I ate this morning” tweets. Imo their next mission should now be to help new and existing users discover high-quality content.
Reddit does a better job of this using their sub-reddit approach and it’s entirely because this curation is perfumed for me that I return there more regularly than Twitter.
I doubt Twitter is going to share its database with anyone for free. Either way, it is still subject to the same rot everything else on the Net is (hardware failures, purged, deleted and reclaimed accounts, “private” data visibility, etc.)
Archaeologists sure have tools and methods to reconstruct life in Pompeii, but it's still nothing like real-life observation (and it citizens would probably prefer real-time seismic data to becoming a part of history, too).
No matter how “trending” some bustle is and how big the hubbub it generates (and how unbelievably important media want to present it), after a few weeks you can't practically “rewind” to it. Heck, you can't even find out what user wrote at some point in time! It's considered unimportant. Twitter may be praised for its countless virtues all the time, but, no matter what you do, single message's value rapidly declines to zero after a short period of time. You can organize them any way you want and post information as valuable as you can bring forth, it all returns to nothing. That's why I compared it to transport protocol: it knows nothing about the importance of of payload and doesn't interact with it, and delayed data is of little use.
…Who said “screenshots”? Seriously, no one would believe all the tech support stories about silly people sharing desktop screenshots in Word files would result in it becoming the acceptable way of spreading information in 2015.
A lot has already been written about global turn of the Web from more and more complex schemes of data organization to concept of mindless, useless infinite “stream” of half-finished minutiae (presented in pastel colors with rounded corners).
P.S. Of course, NSA seems to have the solution for this problem. I wonder if its data will be available sooner than in, say, 50 years GULAG prisoners waited to see their own cases declassified.
For the same reason we never see the phrase "TCP/IP made me a lot of money", true as it may be.
Twitter provided the mechanism for the parent to access the information from those people. You might as well be saying the same useless thing about RSS or blogs.
Twitter and facebook serve completely different purposes for me. Facebook is where I mostly interact with people I actually know in real life. I use twitter like you do, to follow interesting things. Then linkedin is people I have worked with. Each network serves a different purpose. I'd never pay for any of them though. I guess I should say I'd rather pay with my privacy.
So... an IRC channel? Feels like joining a Star Wars room wouldn't differ from `irc.Twitter #StarWars` other than platform. The creator of an IRC channel is the Op and can promote others to be Hops (moderators). IRC channels are generally based on what can be seen as the equivalent of a hashtag...
You'd have to find a way to sell this as something different than IRC, because I doubt the idea of "IRC on Twitter" has never crossed Twitter's mind. What differentiates it other than being hosted on Twitter?
Rooms is an interesting direction. Twitter is part RSS reader, part chat room. It would be nice to follow hashtags on a topic, but then spammers would flood the hashtags with ads.
That's definitely something to figure out. I have a few thoughts about it, I just didn't wanted to keep the post short(er). But yeah that's a great point.
Perhaps I've just missed it, but my problem with twitter is this: Is there a way to send messages to just these 10 people, and not all 100 followers? That's what I need from a social network. I need a public (everyone can see) channel, and I need channels (that I control) that are visible to specific individuals and groups.
My soccer team (in general, some overlap obviously) doesn't need to know about my ballroom dance plans or my BJJ tournament or my date this Saturday. And none of them need to know about my family reunion plans (zero overlap), though I may post some photos to the public channel.
If the adoption in my friend groups had been higher, G+ seemed perfect for this to me. FB with effort, making groups that I invite people to. But I want it to be transparent. I want you to see me, not me(soccer) and me(ballroom). If you happen to be in both, it's the same, not separate spaces.
Google+ does all this and more. How I wish Google hadn't tied the name to the youtube cleanup / real name policy.
My opinion is that real names policies mostly should die. Basically the idea that real names will cause people to behave is a fallacy for a number of reasons:
1. Trolls use fake accounts
2. Some people seems to honestly believe that "just nuke Iran/Syria/Israel/Gaza" is a smart comment
3. or they don't care about the consequences of posting dumb stuff.
The only people you stop with real names policies are those with dissenting opinions, who don't make fake accounts and who feel they have something to lose.
That seem like natural boundaries to me. That's what the platforms target. I wouldn't want the random people that follow me on twitter knowing the kind of things I post on Facebook.
It doesn't seem weird to me in the least, it's the nature of those two products that points in those directions. Sure Facebook wants you to make everything public, and sure Twitter offers private profiles and some private features like DMs, but in general they naturally gravitate towards the type of usage the GP describes.
I've used Twitter to meet like minded people, however, I think the main distinction is that I don't use Twitter (in general) for interactions with people I met outside of the Twitterverse
-->>I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
Bravo, Bravo. This can't be more true. I don't follow friends on twitter, just news sites twitter accounts and other interesting people that I don't know in IRL. Friends don't follow me on twitter, so I'm not trying to impress people with the latest family "staged" photo shoot.
I have always argued that Twitter is nicely organized RSS feed / generator.
Twitter, I believe is a very important in spreading news, in real time. Most of the time before main stream media. Remember the guy that inadvertently tweeted the Osama bin Laden operation? Finally, since it's only 141 characters, there isn't a lot of spin on news via twitter, just the facts. At that point you can chose which direction to go with the spin...
However the internet can be a cesspool, but I see twitter as the filter that cleans out.
This just sounds like a religious argument more than anything. I would have taken it more seriously if you said "I do not find Facebook to be useful for my needs".
Instead, you're actively angry about Facebook, which is really quite similar to Twitter in many ways.
I find value from Facebook and 0 from Twitter. I've tried many times over 5 years to find use out of Twitter, and I just can't.
That doesn't mean I want it to die in the hottest fires of hell. I just means I don't care.
Same here. I started using Twitter about a year ago. Before that I thought it was just silly status updates about what someone had for breakfast. I couldn't have been more wrong. It is the counterpoint to the decay of mainstream media, always my first stop when I want to know whats happening in the world.
I can understand why it doesn't have the same broad appeal as Instagram. My brother describes it as a bunch of people who take themselves too seriously ranting about some world problem or some academic concept that nobody understands. That's probably not far off, but that's also its appeal.
FYI - Twitter has already started adding tweets to the timeline from uses you don't follow. Seems like a curated timeline is inevitable.
>I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.
The really interesting part of this problem is the network value, not the individual value. The fact that "the network is valuable enough to you that you would be willing to pay" is precisely because of the value provided by the other nodes. Many of those nodes are present only because they do not have to pay. Demand curves are downward sloping but the value of the network is some function of the total nodes, probably the square of the nodes.
The only reasonable way to monetize twitter is to find someone who is already making money out of it. Then get a slice of that pie. They still make a profit, so you aren't wiping out nodes.
I think there are two groups doing making some money. Advertisers and reporters/data analysts. The fist wants more visibility, the latter wants analyzing tools. How you separate businesses from power users? Beats me.
Going the "premium account with premium price" route may work good for a while. But you are practically scripting how your competitor could overtake you. All they have to do is give that premium content for free. This happened here in Finland. We had popular service called "irc-galleria" which was quite close to facebook. You needed premium account to befriend people. When facebook came, irc-galleria took about year to fall into obscurity.
They didn't want my money and now I don't care anymore. Don't know about the current situation there but for a long time they only accepted credit cards. We in Germany don't use credit cards the same way US Americans do.
Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities? The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely. It sounds like you just use Twitter to bookmark the links and "soundbites" experts say. How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay? They are meant to be "soundbites", only telling part of a story.
You could have easily gotten into those other areas via Google or following their conversations on their online communities, no?
And yes, your viewpoint is tainted, because, as the article says, it hasn't added active US users in 2015.
It's the commentary that has the value. Reading a paper is a large mental investment. Reading a conversation is a conduit into 'maker' time. It gets the juices flowing.
I get lost on twitter just to see what the world has to offer, and sometimes I find something amazing.
0) Your arguments seem to be targeted at social media in general (eg. why I can't follow them on their sites, etc). Don't want to get into a conversation on benefits/disbenefits of social media
1) There was nothing in my comment to imply that my friends were from the U.S (they are not), but as I said, the user growth could be just for me.
2) >Why can't you follow the experts...
Twitter IS their online community. As everyone has mentioned, it's like RSS, where everyone is, and they let me know when their 'communities' are updated. Because I wouldn't want to check a hundred sites every day.
3) A tweet is 140 characters. All large tweeters post texts as images to get over the limit. People often engage in multi-tweet conversation. The 140 char limit is useful there because twitter shows how many tweets the user has in the conversation. If you're not interested, you don't encounter a wall of text: you see a tweet, and then bail out. Subtlety is lost in 140 characters, but if both parties are looking for a fair conversation, they usually engage in multiple tweets.
4) I do indeed use twitter to bookmark. I also use twitter as RSS. And to get to know people I don't know and follow them too. As a public social media. You could also have Googled 'arguments for and against twitter' and be done with this entire thing, but you chose not to. : ) Twitter is a community, and that's what people are there for.
With regard to point 2, isn't this what newsletters are for or email notifications? I get notifications of sites I have subscribed to via email. I find it is still a very reliable and good source because my email lists are curated to suit my needs all in one place. I get payment notifications, site update notifications, and correspondences to varying lengths with people. It's pretty great, actually!
As for point 3, text images seem like a poor way to digitise text, because it makes it very unsearchable and is prone to pixelation if you are writing a lot of it. It seems like a silly solution to something that was never a problem.
Actually, I sense a hostility in your response that I sense in Twitter users often when I bring up things I don't agree with. I am not at all attacking you, but rather find the way users use Twitter interesting, because it is something I no longer do. I know every single point you have made because I was a Twitter user for about 4 years -- I deleted my account last year.
Why would I Google arguments for and against Twitter when what I am interested is in your opinion? I would hate to put words in your mouth.
First para: I mention social network elsewhere. Give me group emails, with everyone replying to everyone else, and give me the ability to see only those emails that people I care about are sending, and give me a limit in the size of an individual emails so they don't get unwieldy, and you will have given me Twitter.
Yupp, text images are a poor way to digitize text. They're way backwards. And twitter has awful, almost non-existent indexing/search. And the bullying/harassment issue is out of hand. I still get utility from following people I follow.
I've been put in this position to defend twitter, and really man, I am not a particularly big twitter fanboy. It's a product that I enjoy using. I don't see a point in converting anyone ( I would, if it were MS vs Gmail argument). If you want to understand, just join in and follow people you aspire to be in conversations with. I follow popular professors, researchers, publications, celebs, etc, and I like it. You might too. That's all I can say.
I'm getting really tired of this argument because it's both wrongheaded, ignorant, and will not die.
Why can't you follow the experts in that field via their site or their online communities?
What's easier, entering your email address into every random person's website, or just clicking "follow" on their name on one website so you get notified when they post?
This sounds like the web service version of the "less space than a nomad" comment. Other people have different use cases, you know?
The depth of which they would go into their chosen subject would be much more enlightening, surely.
We've got this thing called hyperlinks - A headline and a URL easily fits in 140 characters. Of course nobody's reading academic papers on http://twitter.com, nor does anyone expect them to.
How much depth can a conversation that only allows 140 characters per response relay?
How much needs to be?
Twitter is not a primary communications medium - we have email for that. It's not meant to be a primary news medium, we have blogs for that. However, it serves very well as a pointer to those things. It's a centralized pub/sub notification system.
And if you want to have a "conversation" with someone on Twitter, you've got direct messages, which are not subject to the character limit.
I don't use Twitter for having in depth conversations in those fields I'm interested in. I use it for finding and sharing the sites and articles where you do go into depth. With the amount of people invested in Twitter, it's easy to find good posts on a regular basis.
A mediocre existence is no longer in Twitter's future. It's a massively overvalued public company now. There's no longer an opportunity for Twitter to take on Twilio's business model. Twitter can't pivot into a model that drops its market cap by an order of magnitude.
Never really saw the benefit or value in Twitter. People I care about are not on Twitter most of the time, or if they post, they don't post stuff I care about.
In general I found 140 character sentences are not just good enough to have a discussion (it ends up sounding curt and snippy). For links and all I just follow communities on forums (reddit, hn, github, their own sites, mailing lists etc).
> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain
Well, given that I don't see a value in it, I hope they start that too, because I think it will accelerate its downward trend and it will just be over sooner ;-)
Sorry, you are right, it was too harsh. I am sorry.
I thought I was sharing my perspective on it, I didn't think enough that it would hurt OP's feelings. I made the comment lightheartedly even added an ;-) but it didn't work obviously. Let me explain better then:
What I was trying to say is that I in large agree with how the market reacted to it. It is hard for Twitter to make money. There is a lot of HN armchair analyst advice around (which I engage in as well) such as "why doesn't Twitter just ... to make money". But presumably there are smart people working there and they probably thought of all those things. It has been compared to Google or compared or Facebook. But those offer a richer more comprehensive experience. I give Google access to my life and it helps me drive places, keeps my email, and calender and other things. I don't use Facebook but my relatives do and they like. Twitter is too narrow in that respect. So objectively looking at it, I think it is struggling and it makes sense to me why.
And I pointed out that Twitter for me in the past has been associated more with negativity -- spats, mis-understandings stemming from reading short 140 character replies as being curt and rude, which then snowball and turn into fights.
Now what sounded most mean was saying some services would die. Sometimes, it is better to just have a service / product that is going down to just go down faster, to maybe something better take its place. There were languages, products, platforms, I enjoyed and liked but they just didn't become popular. Hoping they would have an upswing sometimes is unrealistic. I wished and hope Thinkpads wouldn't suck and IBM would come back and start making them and install Ubuntu on them, but it just won't happen. It is better to just find something else. Anyway that is the sentiment where that comment came from.
But its not the service of Twitter that makes people smarter or better. Its the people there.
There is always another social network: Reddit, Usenet, Forums, IRC. Twitter is a place where we have conversations for now, but the "innovation" of fast-paced conversations can exist anywhere... and already exists anywhere.
But that's not really constructive because you could say the same about 99% of social-network businesses, no?
You could also say: "It's not always the physical structure of a country that makes it great but its people (culture, history, how it started, so on) " and that would be true too. The fact that different websites have different 'cultures' make all the difference, right?
I like the artificial 140-char limitation though, but it would be comically easy to enforce it anywhere else.
I agree. At the same time I have enough empathy to see where that comment comes from: It seems twitter has been hyped since its arrival but so far a lot of us cannot understand its appeal despite multiple year-long attempts. Just think what other companies/projects would have given for that kind of year long (and in manys eyes, undeserved) hype : )
The only reason for twitter instead of something else seems to be network effect. In a couple of paticular niches I use google+ and it is, believe me, a whole lot better as long as there are people there. (Of course I am annoyed by the fact that it doesn't have a working API etc etc but then again twitter has made that point mostly irrelevant.)
(OK, a few improvements have surfaced in twitter lately and I am once again interested.)
I don't know that I'd say "I want to see the service you enjoy die", but it'd be really nice if I didn't have to hear about it anymore. Alas, many of the same people who are interested in things I actually care about also like to talk about Twitter, so I end up hearing about it all the time even though I find the whole thing inexplicable and vaguely irritating.
Twitter made $502.4 million this last quarter. Wall Street's problem with Twitter isn't a lack of revenue, it's a lack of growth.
> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.
Twitter would make less than it does now if it switched to a subscription model. How many people would be willing to pay $50 a year for Twitter? Lets be ultra generous and say a million. That's only $50 million a year in revenue.
I'd really love to see Twitter implement something approximating the reverse of Google+ style circles. Sometimes people follow me because I'm a developer, but I feel guilty when I post stream-of-consciousness nonsense into their feed. It would be great if I could separate that out - subscribe to @me/dev and/or @me/nonsense.
Of course, such complexity might put off new users, which is the problem they already have.
That's a fair point. Facebook is very very related to the emotional/interpersonal side of things. There were groups devoted to more intellectual subjects but somehow I never felt it was a place for thoughts. Twitter can be 'topics' oriented. G+ has that too. I'm starting to think that it even appeared as a defect when compared to Facebook even though it's a bit 'apple to oranges'.
> I really hope twitter somehow makes money. I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain. Facebook, I'd rather see die in the hottest fires of all the hells.
Both are useful, but Twitter is sticking to its domain, while Facebook tries to lure the user into dependency on as many levels as possible.
it's possibly unfair, but when twitter started exerting strong control over the platform and user experience i went from enthusiastic supporter to "enh, whatever". i will be happy for them if they succeed, and i am glad that they are supporting a lot of valuable use cases, but i no longer have any emotional investment in them as a "space". their ongoing failure to address harassment properly is just the final nail in the coffin; these days, i see it as exactly equivalent to facebook - i use it because that's where the people are, but if it goes the way of myspace i'll switch to whatever replaces it without a backward glance.
So much of this. Twitter has made me become interested in InfoSec, so I follow a lot of interesting people there. I discovered Hacker News thanks to Twitter.
For example, @thegrugq and @tqbf tweet a lot of interesing things :)
Really? I recently tried Twitter and those 2 were the near the first ones I added along with Ken Popehat. There's so much RTing and noise I found it rather uninteresting. HN has a way, way, higher signal-to-noise ratio. Twitter feels like a constant competition to see who can write clever one liners.
Even with a few follows, it became entirely unmanageable. Plus the Twitter web UI sucks so much that trying to catch up is a nightmare. Clicking anything causes a saving throw vs bad engineering to determine if I'll be reset to the top of my stream. Plus it's slow (as in laggy UI).
Despite being super excited at first (hey, it's 2015 maybe I'll "get" Twitter this time around and find it as awesome as all these smart people do), I quickly ended up not using it at all.
Edit: I'll note that I think very highly of Thomas and Ken and other people I followed, and in other venues they seem to provide tons of reading value. Not that they should be obligated to do so on Twitter, of course! Just that if even high-quality folks don't make a compelling usecase for staying on Twitter, I'm not sure how I'd ever get value out of it.
Recently, within the past month, someone I follow either posted or retweeted a link to a survey about paracetamol use in accident and emergency departments in the Uk, and how it was about as effective as opiate meds for most people.
Today there are stories on HN where that link would be relevant. I would have posted a link to the tweet, and a link to the study mentioned in the tweet. But Twitter's search is not good enough for this kind of thing. I have no way of finding this tweet apart from just ploughing through the twitter streams of the four or five people who might have posted / retweeted this link.
Filtering trolls and harassers is still too hard.
Controlling what's on my feed is a bit tricky. Some people post nonsense but retweet useful to me info. Others do the opposite - the stuff they tweet is useful but the stuff they retweet is nonsense. I have limited options, and I usually just unfollow.
I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter.
"I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter."
I am very interested in this ...
We did a (roughly) 6 month long experiment here (rsync.net) in advertising on twitter - on paper it seemed like a very good idea:
- Target very specific linux/unix/backup/ZFS keywords - really low volume, hyper specific stuff - and show our rsync.net sponsored tweet.
Two things happened:
1. Zero actual results - nothing at all that could be quantified.
2. TONS of garbage/fake followers/retweets/favorites.
We tried. We couldn't make it work at all. Not for real, targeted customer acquisition. If you're pepsi and you just need people to see the word "pepsi" I'm sure it's great, but if you need to pay X and get Y customers ... difficult to see how you make that work.
That's because all of your ad impressions were being shown to Tarsnap users!
In all seriousness, I've had a lot of people say they keep seeing rsync ads on twitter and ask me if you're trying to poach my customers. I always tell them that you're a good guy and I'm sure you wouldn't do that.
Interesting - I actually had one or two people email rsync.net and complain about the exact same thing - they thought I was camping on tarsnap specific keywords...
We also have a lot of people who don't even know that there are sponsored tweets (ads) on twitter and thought we were blatantly spamming them ... so they blacklisted/ignored us and sent complainy emails.
You pointed out a huge problem to find the right people with highly specific needs. That's why we are working on an identification tool that automatically returns people according to their intent (stated interest, complains "e.g. if I only could..."). The grand idea is to turn around the annoying sales funnel who many preach is just the right thing to do. However, such a funnel produces a lot of waste, first the seller's money, second the prospects time and nerves.
http://sircular.rocks/zocialgraph.pdf
> Others do the opposite - the stuff they tweet is useful but the stuff they retweet is nonsense. I have limited options, and I usually just unfollow.
There's a [good IMO] solution for this already in place, turn retweets off for those people/accounts. You can turn off Retweets for a specific user if you don’t like what they share. Select Turn off Retweets from the gear icon drop-down menu on a user's profile to stop seeing Tweets they've retweeted.[1]
> I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me
I have actually thinking about this and some ideas come up. If you don't mind me asking... What would be your ideal non-introsive ads mechanism? Maybe a relevant mention to you on a recommended tweet?
There isn't a company that knows better what I am really interested in than Twitter, and yet they seem unable to recommend me anything even remotely interesting.
It wouldn't even need to be particularly evil stuff: I'm convinced that my public profile would be enough to sell me e.g. half a dozen good books per year.
Ads should allow me to opt out of any alcohol or gambling company's campaign.
If the ad network is slurping all my data they should use that info to serve ads that have some relevance to me.
I'm happy for stuff to end up in my twitter stream. I'm not happy for anything to sound like it's come from me, or has my endorsement or recommendation.
I'd actually be ok with explicitly endorsing something if it's something I really like (and not get a revenue cut). The sort of product/services where I'm a "Net Promoter" 9-10.
Could have a sort of "tinder for endorsements" built into the platform, refreshed once every week maybe, that lets companies request your endorsement for a particular ad/message.
You flip through with an endorse/don't endorse (and some granularity around "I'll never endorse" this) and have that tied to a custom decay function where your endorsement expires and needs to be requested again.
Maybe you have a paid sub to opt out of this system entirely. And for those who don't want to pay or endorse, ok, let's see if the other mechanisms are enough to support them too.
> What would be your ideal non-introsive ads mechanism?
I am not the OP but the answer to question is very close to my heart.
The pinnacle of non-intrusive online ads have been the original Google search ads. They were out of the way, clearly marked as ads - and hence could be visually filtered out. They were pure text, so could be neatly included as elements on the rendered page. And they were always targeting an INTEREST. Not an individual.
So I would take that as the minimum acceptable advertising behaviour. Not implying that it's perfect, but it's a clear set of ground rules. With that in mind, _my_ ideal, non-intrusive ads mechanism builds on the following rules:
* Ads must never be inline to page content
* Even when clearly out of the way, ads must not be allowed to mimic page content; they must be clearly marked as ads
* Text only.
* I might accept an image within the ad, provided it was always served from the content provider's system.
* As an extension to previous point: if the served image size would exceed a notable fraction of the page size, it must not be included in the output.
* No user tracking of any kind.
* No third-party javascript. Ever.
* At most 15% of display real estate allowed to be used by ads. Including the padding in the UI. (Counts as space denied from content.)
* Not allowed to affect page content load times. Ad material must be included at the end of the page code. If your service pushes ads from internal and separate system, hard timeouts must be imposed: if the internal system cannot serve an ad within an allotted time, the frontend must never be forced to wait. You just missed an ad impression. Tough.
* If clicking an ad takes a user through a bounce page, all identifiable information from the user must be stripped. Bounce page or redirect must not impose any further page loading delay.
* No beacons
Breaking even one of the rules automatically disqualifies you.
If you, as an advertiser, find these rules unacceptable - well, then we are in mutual disagreement. I find your ads equally unacceptable and treat them as a form of cancer.
However, as a genuine service to the user... please allow the user to search for ads that have been displayed to them. Preferably by display context. I would be glad to return to a subject at a later date and search for something I remember seeing earlier.
The above is still not ideal, but everything that behaved according to it would at least be palatable.
Here's the author's thesis, buried in the last paragraph with "little data to support" it:
In the final paragraphs of this article, let me assert something I have very little data to support: At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.” The public knows about conversation smoosh, and that constitutes, I think, a major problem for Twitter the Company.
I don't think I agree with the author's conclusions about "conversation smoosh" causing the decay of Twitter. Would love to hear any rethinkings/clarifications of the author's points, as I found them near inscrutable due to the convoluted structure and logic of the article.
Yeah, this was a poorly constructed article. Lost me at:
"To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the 20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong."
No, you really don't.
That said, Twitter's never made it easy to digest its content. Sure there are lists, and now moments, but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, and if you're not really careful about curating your own feed and follows reading twitter is like some sadist's idea of an exquisite corpse.
It could be that people don't feel comfortable with everyone having access to what they have to say. It could also still be as simple as not really caring what other people have to say.
>That's the problem I have with many of these articles
Perhaps Buzzfeed type listicles are more your speed then? Every time there's an article like this posted on HN, there's inevitably someone who posts, "Fewer words! More facts!" (Bonus points for you for getting in a dig about them useless Humanities!)
A thesis isn't right or wrong; it's presented and supported. It's an idea. This is literary journalism. Some people, myself included, enjoy it.
As someone who enjoyed the article and got some good insights, I think it's your loss that you "lost" yourself at that point. Maybe you don't like the writing style, but there were some fresh ideas in there that people don't normally talk about when they talk about Twitter.
I think the main point is that it is dangerous to engage in spoken-word type contexts publicly because there is no delineation between contexts that should be treated as conversational and those that should not. Conversations provide the context to say something dumb, realize it is dumb, and then learn from it without the public shaming and castigation. Tweets are eternal, whether through screens caps or similar preservation techniques.
The most compelling argument for me was about context collapse. Shifting between spoken-word contexts and written-word contexts is at the core of the issue that requires a feature like moments. Spoken-word contexts lack an explicit connection to the events they discuss and require manufacturing a context. I think moments has been great at doing this so far but its existence is a symptom of the bigger problem.
Why shouldn't Twitter have a feature common to other social media sites-like FB and G+ to allow selective followers to see each specific Tweet? Seems like a standard feature that wouldn't be too hard to implement.
Twitter is somewhat of a quantum state for me. It's a complete cesspool on the whole, but the academic community is absolutely outstanding.
I follow @Neuro_Skeptic, @StanDehaene, @practiCalfMRI, @sensorimotorlab, @davidpoeppel, among many others, and they certainly seem to squeeze a lot of insight into 160 characters.
In any case, everything I've been hearing relates to twitter not growing. I understand the pressure on investors, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to grow. The niche is saturated, and there's no problem, per se.
A friend of mine who wants to be a forensic pathologist follows a coroner who posts autopsy photos and asks people to guess the cause of death. She has something like 500k followers. It's amazing all the micro-celebrity that's possible, but as a user you have to know where to find it.
This gets posted every Twitter article. The burden is ALWAYS on the human to make the experience. Online, offline, with a lover, on vacation, while under duress, while rich, while broke.
It's a meaningless platitude. Because people will migrate toward a more pleasant experience. They will choose things that require less effort.
Even in regards to Twitter, the "who you follow" myth is particularly ridiculous. Know how one negative comment in a stream of 100 positives can ruin your day?
One friend on a bender can ruin your whole Twitter night. One sporting event can drown out your favorite intellectual writers. "Scope what I read by username, sort by time" is a fun but flawed concept.
I am being flippant here (see my other comment on this post), but giving out the people you follow on twitter would be an easy way to compromise your anonymity (assuming that those accounts don't have a large overlap of followers). Just wanted to raise awareness, and point out there are very likely companies that make money by identifying people by the accounts they follow.
Maybe it will seem as a dumb question, but how Twitter can be in the loss (in order of millions of US dollars) since day one, without (IMHO) clear path to profitability and not be bankrupt?
It is growing, but it still has huge losses. Do investors believe it will be hugely profitable 5-10 years from now?
To answer your question simply, yes, investors believe it will be hugely profitable in the future. That's the only reason to invest in any company that doesn't make a profit today.
It is not as unreasonable as you might think. Look at how fast Facebook's earnings are growing in the last 2-3 years. Investors hope Twitter can replicate this, even if it is at a smaller scale. Whether they are right or not is obviously up for debate, and you can take part in this debate by buying/selling/shorting Twitter in the stock market.
They've done a good job upping revenue over the last few years (somewhere north of a billion dollars/yr in 2014). And, IMHO, done so without the resulting ads being too obtrusive.
Their problem isn't that they can't make money. It's that their valuation means investors expect them to make a ridiculous amount of money. So all revenues are plowed back into R&D.
That's a bit of an accounting smell, isn't it? Obviously Twitter should have some costs other than R&D, like labor and servers. Even if we say the rest is going to R&D, that's kind of a black box. It doesn't prove that they aren't simply recording reasonable recurring costs correctly while hiding bizarre business-killing recurring costs in R&D.
They're a publicly traded company with a "big-4" auditing firm to make sure that doesn't happen. The law is very clear on what counts as CapEx and OpEx. Obviously, companies occasionally outsmart (or team up with) their auditors to defraud the public, but the vast majority follow GAAP and succeed or fail on the merit of their business.
It's OpEx either way, right? Ideally the firm would be able to point at x, y, and z innovative and profitable new services, and say that's why we spend so much on R&D. It's not clear to me that Twitter can do that. So, an investor would be justified in suspecting that not all R&D expenditures are valid.
Well, I think the recent 'Favorites' to 'Like' change is a bad omen with structural and community reverberations that will be felt over time. It's a gut instinct, but when 'established' brands and formats like Twitter or Reddit jiggle with the cords, there's backlash - deserved or not. It's the danger of making a tool for 'mobs of people' if you're okay with calling a user base that.
The "between a rock & hard place" I see happening is that the need to add new people tends to, well, bring out some bitterness from previous devotees. I saw it happen first-hand with Half-Life Deathmatch. Every patch that made significant changes (ex: tweaked splash damage, amount tau cannon could pierce walls, etc) seemed to favor getting more users to play the game, which did kind of breed a hostility from the 'old guard' to pillage, plunder, and destroy all the newcomers with abandon. After all, the changes were to make it easier, the learning curve smaller, and those who had made it to the next level(s) felt sold-out. It was a microcosm, and probably isn't too relevant, but it's about the best example I can think of that I witnessed first-hand.
I'm sure a lot of people had the thought or joke in mind, but changing the 'Star' to a 'Heart' might be pretty awkward if the company ever has to tweet out an announcement of a round of layoffs. These are minor edits, sure...but remember when Coca-Cola changed the recipe? That didn't go over so well.
I disagree with the change being a bad thing. It makes more sense to like a tweet than favorite it. Both imply some sort of agreement with the tweet, but favoriting always seemed to imply something more to me. If your goal is to get more user interaction, "like" seems like the better option.
As to user backlash, this happens with every change to a social media site and it almost always blows over. There's nothing out there to threaten Twitter's place and I doubt this has or is causing people to leave the platform. No one's going to drop it because there are now hearts instead of stars.
I very much doubt that will work. People will just install ad blockers instead. You'd be surprised what lengths many people will go to in order to avoid spending even $1. It isn't poor people either: in my experience the well-off who have time on their hands because they aren't busy living hand-to-mouth are more likely to spend a pile of their time instead of giving you that $.
In most cases it's just too unsimple/too expensive to pay $1, and especially recurring.
Look at how many people buy stuff in Free2play games, and it works because it's dead simple (enter your appstore password, click "confirm" and be done - and you can even disable the password verification). Time to buy literally less than 10s if done well.
Now compare this to a typical micropayment on a desktop site:
1) Payment provider forces autocomplete off => remember which email you signed up with
2) Payment provider disables password pasting => manually type in your secure 32 char password
3) Two screens of confirmations, if you're extra unlucky you have a two-factor stuff in the loop, too
4) Redirect to the original content (compared to mobile, where payment is an overlay)
Total time wasted: minimum 2-3min.
To make stuff worse: PayPal e.g. demands 20ct of 1€ transferred, and German VAT takes another ~15ct AND corporate taxes (assume them at 10ct, and even then it's low) - which means you're out 50% of the payment value after fees and taxes. Not very profitable...
Oh, and another thing I forgot: often enough even paying for a newspaper/service doesn't get rid of all adverts! In my eyes that's outright fraud. And even if services DO disable all ads, I have yet to see one that also cuts the data-milking tracker services. I paid for the product, so I'm NOT the product any more.
And it kills the values of the ads you do show, too, because suddenly the audience that sees them is limited to only people who can't afford or won't spend $1. Which is the exact opposite of the audience advertisers want to put themselves in front of.
Oh there will be some way of identifying them, surely?
If they are from people you have actively chosen to follow then the source isn't twitter anyway and you can just unfollow those users if you don't like what they post.
If they are extra items in your display then there will likely be some marker to pick up on. Even if not then someone somewhere will start a service where people can report advertising tweets so subsequent the plugin can remove those from the feeds of subsequent users who use the service... Or perhaps Bayesian filtering as used for email? Not perfect in either case but someone will try and have at least some success.
Of course if the paid posts are truly unidentifiable then presumably that look like they were posted/shared by someone they were not posted/shared by, in which case the service is completely untrustworthy and you should just stop using it because nothing it tells you na be relied upon.
Caveat: I don't use twitter and aren't particularly likely to in future, so I have no particular axe to grind here but might misunderstand how things work.
"As an information propagation device Twitter is peerless, but the Tragedy of the Commons - and in this case the commons is your time - is happening all over again.
When multiple individuals acting independently behave only in their own self-interest they will ultimately deplete a shared but limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen, as happened in the original Tragedy of the Commons over land usage".
Twitter never solved this problem and if you want to use it I'd suggest you have to spend a lot of time pruning who you follow and searching for people who are adding value to your life. Very time consuming....
I'm consistently disappointed at the (IMHO) mischaracterization of Twitter's woes by prominent writers. While I realize that they are experiencing some real stress, and yeah, it should get fixed, I think they're blind to Twitter's real problem.
Simply put: twitter is, for those without an audience, a strictly one-way medium. There is no social network or medium that is less interactive to the relatively anonymous, save perhaps a standalone blog. You're shouting into the vacuum, which is disheartening and eventually people just stop and eat their tweets.
The opposite of love is total indifference.
I would argue that twitter is actively encouraging this one-way-ness, which is going to be their downfall, because Twitter as a feed aggregator is high-noise and feature-poor. All of my "suggested friends" on Facebook (who got this right) are people who might reasonably care about anything I have to say. All of my suggested follows on Twitter are people who could not give one single fuck. (It's ok, I forgive you just this once Elon Musk. I'm not tearing your poster off my wall or anything. Although you're missing out on a goldmine here.)
It is a shame, because yet another news aggregator is highly unnecessary at this point in time, but number of two-sided social networks of Twitter's scope you could count on the fingers of one hand.
This article was trash. If the author thinks that Twitter's main function is finding out what your friends ate for dinner then he's an idiot and doesn't use Twitter. Twitter's problem is exactly this. The general Internet population thinks it's like Facebook but less useful and with a character limit. They have a branding problem
All the Twitter accounts I'd ever want to follow have fairly infrequent status updates so I just add them to my RSS reader and follow them that way instead of having to interact with Twitter's website or application in any way.
that's what I used to do, when google reader was still around.
Twitter also removed direct RSS support for tweet feeds, and I did't like the hassle of having a third party in between.
It'd be really awesome if there was a tweet-ish open standard that anyone could implement, ala email or RSS (but supporting encrypted/password protected feeds). I feel like Google would be the perfect company to do it, but they decided they don't want to pander the nerds, and instead force G+ down our throats. (G+ I like. I just don't like how no one else is there)
> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.
This is the key.
Twitter has a serious problem with abuse, and it's not the abuse that's usually talked about. At any point, anything you say -- no matter how anodyne -- can be ripped out of context by someone with malevolent goals and then used to trigger a global outrage storm. This has resulted in death threats or people even losing their jobs. I wouldn't post on Twitter any more than I'd take a shortcut through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. Why take the risk?
The only people who seem to be making money off twitter are journalists, who can now dash off a 1000-word "Thing trends on twitter" article in seven minutes without having to leave the office.
> In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation.
This seems to point to the main problem of Twitter: it's not clear who your audience is. Are you talking to your friends? To your family? To people with similar interests? To people you're trying to convince to agree with you on some position? Who? It's too... vague a medium to be useful for most kinds of communication.
You are completely right. In a sense, it is also what draws people to Twitter. There is a low barrier to entry if you want to make an account to just broadcast to your family, fans (if you are celebrity), advertise for companies, collect people for activism (whether political, economic, or social media activism), etc.
Then again, there are probably better mediums for this. If you want to talk to your friends, why not use Facebook? If you want to advertise your art, why not go on tumblr or Soundcloud? Nowadays, the only Twitter accounts that seem to get much traffic are celebrities and companies (I am thinking particularly Twitch as I don't go on twitter much) advertising.
About the only thing I have used Twitter for is writing topical one-liners related to the Comedy Central television show @Midnight's "Hash Tag Wars" segment.
It makes me think I'm funnier than I actually am. But I also have to sift through a lot of bad and mediocre humor in order to get a good laugh from all the amateur comedians that participate.
There may be future conflicts between the people using Twitter for casual socialization and jokey-jokes and those using it as a serious platform for news distribution, public relations, political activism, or announcements.
There's just no good way to keep your vaguely prejudiced or non-PC attempts at humor away from the social justice warriors that will pick it up, sharpen it to a razor edge, and cut your throat with it. If you're at an open-mic night, you just get booed. If you're on Twitter, you might get fired from your day job, too. But there's an upside. If you Tweet one of your baby steps on the long road to beating cancer to your 6 followers before going to bed, you might wake up the next morning to a Harpo Studios production assistant ringing your doorbell.
No one is really listening to you on Twitter, but anyone could be.
Richelieu's maxim: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Twitter's corollary: "If you give me 140 characters from the most unremarkable of feeds, I will find in them an excuse to dogpile upon the author."
I've recently heard Twitter described in a way I believe is accurate.
It's a broadcast platform; most people use it broadcast OUT, but very few people use it to consume. Sure, there is some conversation, but primarily, people read their @ replies/notifications. I often will go several hours or a whole day without checking Twitter; the reality is that there are tons of conversations I missed that just disappear.
But if someone hits me with an @ message, I will see it.
> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.
Unfamiliar with Damocles [1], I had to look it up. It seems to be quite a vividly pertinent metaphor. The brevity with which statements are made on Twitter delivers shortcuts for others to react, acting as the single thread of the horses tail that holds the sword.
> At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.”
That's always been the point with Twitter for me. There are very few things that I want to discuss in front of potentially every person in the world. I wonder why it took so long for people to realize it.
Writing this here is not the same as writing on Twitter, different size.
The best thing about having to keep things within 140 characters is that everyone else has to keep things within 140 characters. If I wanted to read their blog - I'd go read their blog. If I wanted Twitter to be like Tumblr, I'd have a Tumblr.
Thanks. I know that but it might help someone who hasn't realised it yet. I'm sure I've also read that some servers require the 0x prefix when searching by ID.
I don't exaggerate when I say this: twitter has made me smarter. If I'm interested in a new field, I just follow the experts in that field that are on twitter. The conversations and the discussions not only make me feel like an insider, but make me explore the field in a much deeper level. Three of the fields that I have gotten 'into' because of twitter are Urban 'renewal' sort of projects (citylab, atlantic cities, etcetera), the book reviews circle, and a certain subfield of computer science I won't mention, because I'd probably be the only intersection of those fields. : P
Sometimes, some people I follow tweet things I'd rather not hear. So I simply mute them. Done. (This is however NOT a apology for all the awful harassment that does happen)
I cull my 'following' list to get to 300 people once every couple of months, so it doesn't get out of hand, and it's worked perfectly for me. I can catch up with pretty much everything that appears on my timeline. I Like twitter because it doesn't 'curate' my content for me. The day it decides to get rid of the 'everything' timeline will be the day the 'decay' begins.
Perhaps my viewpoint is tainted, but in the past six years (that's how long I've been on it/using it), the number of twitter users has been growing (at least in terms of people I know), and their quality increasing. I realize harassment is still a huge issue, but despite that, Twitter is still a great community : )