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Comment by mikegioia | Hacker News Reader

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it.

Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking. They're sitting on a search goldmine yet they're trying to convert signups and popular celebrity post clickthroughs.

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I've long wondered this. I haven't followed the evolution of Twitter's homepage, but I'd be really shocked if they hadn't tested this to death.

The thing is, this keeps causing me to miss moments to engage with them. Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE!

While I do of course have an account, if I were a non-user, I'd keep thinking "why would I sign-up when I have no idea if it is worth my time to be nagged by you via email?"

There's a well understood notion that on user-generated content sites like Twitter, Reddit, etc. the number of content producers is relatively low compared to the number of content consumers. While I don't have data to support my hypothesis on this yet, my gut tells me that you have a better chance of converting people to content producers if you can get them hooked on being a content consumer. Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical. If I felt like I was really missing out on all the cool stuff going on within Twitter, I might be more inclined to sign up if I hadn't yet, and exposing that data lowers the barrier to entry.

But again, I'd be shocked if they hadn't tested that to death.

Three answers, one of which makes me feel shamefully too much of an asshole.

1) I think optimizing the naive-to-twitter experience is something which can't really be done through incremental A/B testable changes.

2) They have had technical capability limits which prevent them from surfacing great content for users based on what anyone else would call "ad tech". These are both technical and organizational/philosophical (which, over a long enough timescale, are the root cause of technical limitations in a $20b company).

3) (the obvious one involving the quote about clown cars and gold mines).

It's not just "not logged in", it's "haven't been an active user for a long time". If one of my friends joins and JUST follows me, Twitter is boring/useless as can be. Their "recommend to follow" thing is utterly inadequate. Compare this to Facebook which is fucking awesome from your first interaction.

On Facebook you're generally connected to people you know in real life. So if a new person joins Facebook and connects with you, the FB recommendations are likely people the new person also knows. You frequently follow people on Twitter you only know from Twitter. Even if they follow you back, your friend just signing up may not know who the hell they are. So recommendations are more difficult.

Absolutely - Twitter has a harder problem to solve. Facebook also capitalized on the benefits of rich media earlier (biggest photo site in the world, now borging YouTube).

> Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE!

If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very big.

> Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical.

The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not the login process. It's the content itself, which is only a couple of sentences. It's not editing a video, or writing a short article, or creating an image, or managing a forum. It's just 'spurt out what I'm thinking right now in one sentence'. Login processes are not the barrier to content creation, effort required is.

Anecdotally, I've never bothered to sign up for Twitter, and the experience for logged-out users has contributed to that. Instead of thinking "wow all my friends and important people are on there so I guess I'll sign up," I think "well this isn't very engaging, but I still technically got the content I came for, so I'm not really incentivized to go further."

And I disagree in general - login processes are often a huge barrier. People don't want to create accounts everywhere; it used to be cool and novel, now it's a burden.

I do agree that login processes can be a huge barrier. Slack got to be a gorilla by making onboarding buttery smooth, whilst its competitors had a fairly vanilla approach, clunky by comparison.

But, in terms of content creation that the GP mentioned (rather than content consumption), login processes are not the problematic part.

I think one of the mistakes may be that they focus on a wrong metric. I alway read signups/users as a cited metric. It would be way wiser to focus on improving more active metrics (engagement stuff). The start page is a good example...sure right now it seems to optimize for account creation but I'd say it would be more of a win if users actually engaged with the twitter stream. If it's useful they'll sign up.

[alas I hope all of this was discussed and tested to death already]

I assume that metrics are why every site I go to has a glossy landing page with a huge "Sign Up" button, and then the "sign in" link is hidden in the corner. I'm sure that passes all the A/B tests but it gives me the impression that returning Web users just aren't that important.

A site I signed up for recently at least lets you log in by typing your existing username and password into the huge sign-up form. That was a breath of fresh air.

This. I get that they want sign-ups, but it's hard to sell the service with that page.

I don't even need a search. Just give me a "Trending on Twitter" view. Then as I read through it, make the "Follow" button more obvious. As soon as I click "Follow" then sign me up (or get me to log in).

Even when you go to a tweet from an external link when not logged in, 20% of the vertical height is taken up by a big blue "Sign up for Twitter (or log in)" thing.

Just give me the content and lure me into hitting the "Follow" button.

The moment a topic becomes trending, it gets overrun with spam and shitposts by attention-seekers who know exactly where to find attention. That's not the best first impression.

Yep and sometime you just want the cliff notes on that trend without the spam.

This was why I put together our trending search feature @ http://theenginuity.com on the front-page.

We compile a list of social trends from our indexes of social data and make it easy to instantly figure out what's going on based on your language / region settings.

Well then, that's another problem they've got to fix.

but would a search engine approach be any more effective at conversions? I use google and wikipedia, but it doesn't mean i have a blog or edit.

That to me is the problem, that for some reason conversions is the sole metric with which success is measured. Why is that though? I don't have to be a GMail/Google user to get value out of Google search, yet Google generates most of its revenue from search.

If Twitter knows what everyone likes, or is talking about (especially the influencers), then that would be a good source of search results if I'm looking for something to buy or do. Its an entirely different search engine than Google or even Facebook.

That prompts a question as to whether Twitter can best grow its future value more through user signups / conversions, or through maximizing one-way consumption as a broadcast medium.

I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads.

I consume ESPN one-way. They have no idea who I am and never will. It's worth $50 +/- billion to Disney (per Forbes and others).

Why can't Twitter maximize that potential? Most of Google's global users don't have or don't use a G account, and are not signed in when they search (even if Google builds a profile on them anyway). That doesn't detract from Google's ability to monetize based on interest and intent. Twitter's intent will never be as valuable, but it wouldn't take much given we're talking about Google's intent being worth $100 billion in advertising sales in the near future.

My point being, perhaps Twitter's biggest mistake is in trying to be Facebook and worrying about users. Instead they should focus on maximizing output of high quality sources, and boosting total consumption.

How do you read nytimes "all the time" with the paywall?

Edit: I'm confused by the downvotes. I wasn't trying to turn it into a discussion about whether paywalls are right or wrong, I was just drawing out that either the parent was not reading nytimes all the time, or they were evading the paywall, or they were paying for access. They're talking about how Twitter should get value from giving readers access and using nytimes as an example - but it seems like a terrible example, given that nytimes actively tries to prevent people from reading more than 10 articles/mo for free.

Open links in an incognito window

As another comment mentioned, Google the title. Also, some parts of their site and some articles are not paywalled. I probably also burn the article limit per month without paying attention. Add it all up, and I can't remember the last time I was blocked out of reading an article on their site.

Google the article title, click the link.

> I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads.

How do you know you're not being tracked through cookies on other sites that you have logged into, or ad networks that interact with those sites? When I load nytimes.com and view the network trace, I see about 50 different domains appear there:

  pagead2.googlesyndication.com
  s.tagsrvcs.com
  <number>.fls.doubleclick.net
  px.dynamicyield.com
  beacon.krxd.net
  pixel.tapad.com
  c1.rfihub.net
  tags.w55c.net
  p.rfihub.com
  secure.quantserve.com
  d.xp1.ru4.com
  ...

I'll stop there. I assume that these sites can track my persona whether or not I'm logged in, and probably with a pretty good chance even if I use an incognito window.

I'm giving away my secrets here, hopefully this is buried enough that NY Times won't see it and won't change. :)

1) use Firefox 2) use NoScript, don't allow Javascript on NY Times or any other domains it pulls in 3) set Firefox -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear history when Firefox closes -> clear all items except browsing history

To access NY Times (or really any website) first QUIT Firefox. Then restart. Now there are no cookies, caches, etc in existence. Then when you go to nytimes.com, all those other domains don't see any existing cookies. It's all new. Let them track you all they want.

When done reading, quit Firefox. Now none of the domains mentioned above can track you via cookies. Their tracking has accomplished nothing. They've all seen your single session on nytimes.com and nothing else!

Side effect from using NoScript is no paywall limits on number of articles.

One possible complaint is that I clear caches every time I exit Firefox. But I never notice any delays when starting, using a decent speed connection means the caches reload quickly. Also, I happen to have a knack for remembering passwords, so I don't mind re-entering on those sites that need them. But nytimes.com does not need a password in the scenario I just presented. (BTW I rarely re-use passwords across different sites).

I can still be tracked by IP address. Not much I can do about that other than force Comcast to give me a new one every once in a while. But that's merely a palliative, since a determined tracker can probably reestablish who I am from other information (c.f. panopticlick.eff.org).

My next step will be to get Squid running on my firewall, to help sanitize my HTTP headers, etc. But I've been meaning to do that for at least 10 years and haven't gotten around to it yet. So my paranoia does have its limits. :)

Using Firefox profiles might make simplify some of your separation goals. I create and destroy profiles regularly, and also have a few long-lived ones. Some are site-specific.

Search should be part of it. But they could create a pretty compelling logged out page of trending topics.

That's part of it. Another is a lack of good curation features, as Chris Sacca has written about (http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...)

I also thought about this when I started building Testimote. A lot of interesting things are being said (positive things about companies in my case), and are drowning out there in the great torrent coming from the firehose. I think there's room for both Twitter and outside companies to continue to build out curation ideas around this, as the data set is quite rich (and Twitter - at least recently - has been fairly generous with their basic APIs with things like rate limits [though I think lower cost plans would be fantastic for higher rate limits, rather than big money for the full hose].)

A combination of better curation and rebuilt developer relations could really help - maybe not user growth, per se, but certainly with service usage. What about web sites and mobile apps giving people a way to give feedback to the company (something as simple as a Tweet box that says "give instant public feedback") that simply tweets out the message using their account? People would start using Twitter without doing anything more than filling in a form and supplying an email address (for first-time users.) There's a lot of untapped potential around this. I think it also helps to think of Twitter as a giant, sometimes overlapping set of IRC channels and DMs, but with the ability to tap into it all. Like with IRC bots that would catch stuff, and put it in a database. Interesting conversations happening, not much being done with it. Twitter could encourage people to do more with it from the outside, and help everyone, including themselves.

It still has tons of potential if cards are played right.

Twitter blocked Flattr from providing micropayments based on favoriting, then failed to fill that gap in the market. There are so many gaps which could have been filled by 3rd-party developers, but Twitter's API posture scared away investors from building on their API.

Hopefully, they'll reconsider some of those policies now. We know the data (including certain event data, like favoriting, like you say) is probably their most valuable asset, but opening the valve on it a bit more would be in everyone's interest, I think.

What can they do to regain the lost trust though, even if they do open the gates to the city again?

Some ideas: make public commitments to better developer-related policies that they promise to not renege on, outreach, reopen formerly closed APIs, lower-cost API plans so that incentives with small and medium-sized developers/companies are better aligned (developers pay something so Twitter doesn't feel like all value is being sucked out of it for free, less likely to shut things down.)

I sometimes wonder if there is a large disconnect between two types of twitter users - those that use it as a sort of "news-gathering" medium, and those that use it as a conversation medium.

Twitter, as a company, seems to assume that the former is the default. I don't know if the majority of their users are actually like that. The vast majority of my tweets is replies to other people, and for most people I know it is the same, but of course, self-selection would do that. The analogy as twitter being unrolled IRC is, for me, definitely how I've been thinking of it for years.

I agree, but one point against that is that the web experience with Twitter is probably the worst - it's clunky. I hate using it.

I use the phone app (simple, OK) and the OS X app (neglected, but a great way to use Twitter IMO). In those two apps, there isn't a logged out front page. They could improve both to create a useful equivalent though.

It's terrible. I recently started to use it and I'm shocked at how poor it is. Scroll down, see something interesting. Click. Now I've lost where I was, no way back. Going back reloads the entire page (slow) then, since content is loaded in after scrolling, scrolls one page down and stops. They're basically saying "don't engage too long with Twitter, just keep it quick and then stop".

How they have 3000 employees and no one that has fixed their main product is very strange.

If it was the only way to access Twitter, I would've given up. And Twitter is my favoured social network - just so frustrating to see how they're flailing around. Yet to see a single ad that was remotely relevant to me. Keep quitting the "While you were away" and acknowledging that I don't like it, but they keep showing it. Insane.

Have you used Tweetbot? I find it to be an incredible desktop (and mobile) twitter client. Even syncs your scroll position between the two.

No, I haven't. Probably the sort of thing Twitter should have in their own stable though.

They should have better app options for content creators IMO. Not every user in a news-dominated social network is going to be a passive reader.

I don't think a product Tweetbot can exist in Twitter's stable because it cuts all the cruft out of the modern Twitter experience, and is likely the opposite of the direction Twitter would like to go.

It has kind of happened already — Twitter bought Tweetie, which was a well-liked desktop client, and then let it languish.

Twitter isn't some fly-by-night company that has to hard-sell what it is. It's a well-known product that has independent mentions in media left, right, and centre. News shows, current affairs shows, morning TV, newspaper websites... all of these mention twitter constantly, as they use it as a lazy source of react quotes. Even talking-head panel shows have runners at the bottom of the screen showing what's happening with twitter. Twitter doesn't have a problem with people understanding what it's about.

I can know exactly what twitter is and still not want an account. I can get what I want out of twitter, and twitter can get access to my eyeballs by just showing me things when I want to see them.

Don't get me wrong. I loathe twitter, and I don't have an account. My point is that twitter doesn't need to do the hard sell on what it is anymore - as far as the public is concerned, it's almost a utility like power or water. It's everywhere, through everything, and it's "just assumed" that you use it, whether you actually do or not.

My point is that if people are online and looking at the twitter homepage, they know what twitter is already. The exceptions to the rule would be a vanishingly thin slice of netizens.

I can't count the number of times I clicked a link to read a news story (even on news outlets like Al Jazeera) and the "article" was basically "Here's what twitter users had to say" followed by a dozen or so tweet cards

It's not that much different to this when logged out:

https://www.facebook.com/

In fact, they are remarkably similar (and bland). No public search for Facebook either, which does not seem to be hurting them.

To be honest in a Google/search-dominated Net, I firmly believe homepages are irrelevant. You can see that in how little effort these large companies are investing in them: they only represent a tiny percentage of their total traffic.

I think its actually because you don't need Twitter to get the information that is there. Anything worth knowing that happens on Twitter is on every other main stream outlet. They have a unique problem in that powerful people use their platform but anyone can get that information and re-post it anywhere. Probably for that reason I've signed up for Twitter a few times and both times lasted no longer than a week, realizing it just isn't useful to the normal person.

I fully agree.

If I remember correctly they recently announced a public homepage, and said they will be slowly rolling it out in the US.

My honest guess is they are freaking scared to change their website.

Another problem with a public homepage is scrapers. It is something they seem to be very careful about.

> Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine?

From my perspective (a developer who has leveraged the API from 1.0 on), search has always been 'different'.

At first, it didn't exist. So some company (Summize) created it. Then, Twitter acquired them (actually their first acquisition).

Some time later the search method was absorbed into the Twitter API. The syntax hasn't changed since.

It always felt like they just re-deployed the Summize app and proxied an API path to it. Though it's quite likely it's been rewritten many times by now.

Farfetched, but I guess I'm saying it may be a cultural thing.

The mobile one is worse. Nothing but a full-screen splash of "sign up" and "log in". Zero content.

Not to mention their spam emails - "You should follow this celeb or that celeb". No, I shouldn't thanks.

Why isn't every site's homepage not search? I've been beating G+ up over this for years. Throwing a barricade and nag straight off the top is fucking stupid.

I've got a G+ account, but still hit the site unauthenticated fairly often.

There is a search icon in the upper left of the landing page for me. It opens up a search bar.

I know that and I use it, but the problem is bigger because that homepage has no idea what it is or what it's trying to do. Search is an afterthought and I'm suggesting that search should be their primary focus for this page.

Logged in, yea you can get your feed and do whatever you want. But this logged-out page has absolutely 0 value for anyone who isn't a Twitter user.

Wow, I had no idea.

I've gone to the twitter website (on my phone, especially) several times in the past to try and look up "local, now" things -- e.g. I hear a big bang/explosion, or there are fire/police in force nearby, or I thought there was a tremor, or there's a big storm.

And every time, I've sighed and been disappointed that (as I thought) I couldn't search tweets without being logged in, and I rarely ever log in to any services on my phone. And so then I clicked away, opened up facebook/NYT/boston.com/etc. instead.

This. Huge missed opportunity.

Nodding my head in agreement, only to realize I'm agreeing with an IRL friend.

The question (for Twitter) is why are people like you hitting their homepage logged-out instead of logged-in? You gain growth by getting people to try your service, you build value by offering something that brings people back continuously.

Imagine if Google required you to be logged in before searching... do you think their revenue numbers would be anywhere near what they are?

"Whoa there, matey! You're not logged in. We can't just let you see our advertising-laden stream, click on it, and create revenue for us without an account, you know... Please jump through a sign-up process, that's going to mean looking for a username you like that isn't taken, giving us your email address, logging into that to find the email confirmation link, and then coming back here, and then you can finish that search you were doing on a whim."

Why should it matter whether someone is logged out or logged in? If the service is valuable, they don't need an account to keep them coming back.

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