Jack in a Box: Can Twitter Be Saved? | Hacker News Reader

Jack in a Box: Can Twitter Be Saved?

newyorker.com

35 pointsdonohoe42 comments

Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g. third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels).

Twitter has so much untapped potential, a bit of which you can see in the new Moments. For comparison, Facebook is doing a fantastic job IMHO at highlighting stories, groups, events, and friends that I want to see.

> Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g. third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels).

Wouldn't this have a huge impact on their ability to monetize the twitter stream with ads and richer content? Of course this is developer friendly, but does it help them make real money?

They can make showing their ads a condition for API access.

Twitter has been ruined by the tech bull market. Their valuation went too high too fast, and now they are constrained by Wall Street's lack of imagination and being measured by Facebook's chosen KPI.

Does a monthly active user of Facebook equal one on Twitter? Public conversation happens on Twitter—it is where celebrities and intellectuals put ideas into the public sphere. When you watch television news you constantly see tweets mentioned, when have you ever once seen a Facebook post? Twitter is like the Beat Generation, and Facebook is like a scrapbooking club. Even if Facebook wanted to make themselves relevant for public discourse (which they don't because Wall Street doesn't have a metric for that), it is incompatible with their current rent-seeking post promotion model and feed tax.

Meanwhile, no one, even within Twitter, can quite define what it is. Wall Street hates that, but what it really means is that there is still untapped potential there. Last I checked Twitter was 1/5th the size of Facebook. It's a bloody travesty that being 20% the size of the biggest social network ever is not considered viable, especially when it has so much unexplored potential.

Twitter would have fared much better in a bear market where they managed costs, and let the API flourish. Who knows what apps could have come out in 2015, 2020, 2025 if the fucking bankers hadn't gotten their mitts all up in the oven before the baking was done.

Meanwhile, no one, even within Twitter, can quite define what it is.

I must try: Twitter is RSS Feed. Twitter is a notification app for updates.

With ads

Come on. If message brokers were conceived of today, the elevator pitch would be "twitter for servers.".

Fair, but surely Twitter itself bears some responsibility for having decided to go public in the first place? (Or, if you believe the rumors, for having taken on enough investors to have been forced to go public.)

We should keep in mind that the bankers got their mitts in the oven because Twitter opened the oven door.

Wow, is there nothing you won't blame on the "fucking bankers"?

Guess what? No banker forced Twitter to go public. In fact, I'm sure Twitter approached the bankers to represent them in an IPO. And when you go public, you have certain obligations to your shareholders by law. So why go public? Oh yeah, the early Twitter investors wanted to get filthy rich, before the "baking was done". And they did.

If anything has been "ruined" it is the public sphere. Does the Kardashians really have anything to contribute to humanity? Twitter is a plague and it will be better for all of us when it implodes.

I always ask this question when re-opening of the API is brought up: "What reason do we have to trust that Twitter will not take it away once their business objectives for opening up the API have been met?"

Earning back that trust is much harder than the corporate decision regarding the API itself, imo.

I don't think Twitter is going to shut down anytime soon.

I do think though that they've overscaled (employee and spending wise) hugely though.

Remember kids, cashflow.

I've never been able to understand whether twitter is a service for me to talk back and forth with other people or if I am supposed to just follow famous people. I also wish there was a way to see "whats going on in the world right now" that was more intuitive than trends where I feel as if you need pre-existing inside knowledge to understand why something is trending. Moments is perhaps a step in the right direction but I don't feel like it's exactly what I'm looking for.

I would also be more inclined to use it if I could include a link without having to shorten the URL, aka, let users include a link or photo without counting against 140 characters and also don't make @mentions count against the count. Or retweet titles for that matter. So it would be link + mentions + retweet text + (insert your text here 140 characters or less) It's just too difficult to say anything real and by the time I've messed around with shortening sentences and deleting punctuation to make it fit I'm pissed off and don't end up sending the tweet.

People have said all of these things before and they seem to have no interest in changing so I don't know, it might be too late for me to take a real interest in using Twitter seriously.

The 140 characters forces concise communication. It suits people who like to read and write witty one-liners and those who like to share URLs. It's fast to read. Change the limit and you will also change the site's core appeal to many.

I could use like 5 more characters though :)

I once suggested that they should just start charging for extra characters. Like, charge a penny per character, or sell a block of 100 to be used across as many tweets as you want for 90 cents. The marginal cost to them of shipping 141 characters instead of 140 is so small as to be practically nonexistent, so it'd be more or less pure profit.

Would anyone actually buy them? I think maybe they would, as long as they were priced low enough to be impulse-buyable. For the power users who live on Twitter, it could easily be worth the time it would save them over constantly having to edit their posts to get them under the 140 character limit. It could be to Twitter what in-app purchases are to "free-to-play" games like Candy Crush -- a way to skip out of a grind.

A penny per character?

This is overpriced by several orders of magnitude and would instantly spark a huge user revolt.

Artificial scarcity as a business model, ugh.

> It could be to Twitter what in-app purchases are to "free-to-play" games like Candy Crush -- a way to skip out of a grind.

Intentionally design your user experience to suck, but it gets better if the user pays.

I don't like your ideas.

It seems like Twitter has been stuck in a bind for the past 5 years between pissing off its "core users" and becoming more useful to more people and simultaneously more lucrative. The specific improvements mentioned by your parent – removing link text and @mentions from the character limit – would not affect concision and would make things far less frustrating for the vast majority of people. That they have been unable to get even this sort of simple stuff done is what makes people worry about their ability to dig themselves out of the hole they've found themselves in.

I'm not saying change the 140 character limit. As it stands there is usually a limit of 0 characters because by the time I fit a link, mentions, and a retweet into a tweet I am over the limit. Make these things not count against that limit and instead always allow for the user to input 140 characters of their own text

I agree with you. But it's likely they will extend the character limit to much more, and that will change the nature of the service.

It might be interesting to see Twitter modify their core service on some variation of what I posted, but also reopen their API and serve as a backbone for real time messaging applications that other developers can use either at the cost of money, or allowing Twitter to populate their feed with ads and subsequently share part of the profit with the app maker.

I see a lot of potential for what Twitter has in their hand but the fact that that potential has not been utilized already makes me wonder if it will ever be used/if there is some kind of organizational disfunction going on that is preventing them from acting nimbly. Things like twitter polls and moments seem like bandaids to cover a slashed artery. They're designed to restore faith in the company so they don't get destroyed by timid investors but they don't add any real value to the company as I see it.

Periscope is a step in the right direction also and I think that it adds some real value but I am left wondering why they didn't just acquire Meerkat. Still, either one is an early stage risky bet that isn't going to save Twitter within the next year or two which is what I think they will need. It's essentially a one product company.

The problem is that they appear to have hit the ceiling on the audience that appeals to, and it's just not a big enough audience to justify the enormous amounts of capital that have been plowed into Twitter over the years. So they have a tricky tightrope act to pull off: come up with a way to reach enough new people to make those investments pay off, without losing the users they already have, and without spending so much more of other peoples' money to do so that they just end up digging the hole deeper.

140 characters also allowed Twitter to fit a tweet into an SMS text message, which was a USP. The brevity (which is the soul of wit) was an attractive by-product.

The problem now is that whatever Twitter does to its system will probably -- yet again -- make it more like Facebook. And while I understand the HN audience's hostility to Facebook, that looks to me like a losing strategy.

The can't change it, because 160 chars is the limit of a single SMS and you need some for overheads.

"...there have been multiple other apps that required me to use my Facebook credentials to log in. Facebook, it seems, is now core to the mobile Web experience."

Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't, and for that modicum we pay with our privacy. Personally, I don't think the convenience of OAuth is worth what the networks earn from selling my data. I wonder what'll happen to their market share when smartphone OS developers start including authentication layers in their kernels.

  Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't

Except, of course, the core reason social networks are: the baked-in audience of all your friends and family who are pushed all of your updates.

"I like it, too, but, boy, does it need some rethinking—the visual dissonance between Moments and the Twitter Stream is deeply unsettling."

I agree. That's exactly what I aimed to remedy with my redesign: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/redesigning-twitter-moments-f...

> 2. Twitter Moments is trying to be everything but Twitter.

This is true, and I think it speaks to a deeper problem: nobody at Twitter really seems to understand exactly why the core product was successful, so they're afraid to evolve it out of fear that they'll somehow break the magic spell. When ancillary products like Moments are developed, though, the designers and developers feel freer to be bold, because there's no spell there to break. So when those products get bolted on to the side of the main product, they feel exactly like that -- bolted on.

Facebook has been much more fearless about changing their core product as their userbase has grown and changed -- remember when the News Feed was a controversial new thing? -- and as a result they can give their products a unified feeling that Twitter can't.

nobody at Twitter really has a feel for exactly why the core product was successful

My 2 cents...

When twitter launched, Facebook was still closed to the general public, personal "blogs" were popular but somewhat out of reach of the general public (setup complexity), and a lot of people realized that while they had things to say, those things weren't enough to fill a blog.

Twitter allowed people to converse publicly, put micro-blog style opinions out, and do it without needing to register any domains or customize a page (MySpace).

IMO, twitter primarily filled a time-sensitive gap that has now mostly been overtaken by aspects of Facebook, Linkedin, etc. Much of Twitter is kind of paparazzi-like, and if a company came along that really leveraged the celebrity and sports icon base Twitter would fade away to a bunch of "SEO and Marketing Experts" all tweeting pre-scheduled thinly-veiled promos at each other.

That might have been the spark that lit the fire but I believe that people who are NOT celebrities that tweet actively, do it to reach a broader audience and engage in conversation with others in their vertical. This is in stark contrast to the network you would have in Facebook which is much more intimate.

Twitter is the internets water-cooler conversation. Facebook is the conversation you have at home with your family and friends.

Remember Twitters original competition, or so they thought, was LiveJournal.

That's a great point. It's almost as if they're trying something new for the sake of trying something new rather than taking the risk to make the bold change where it could actually matter: their core product.

Moments fails because is misunderstands that Twitter is a real-time network and that its users see little value in curation. Curation is much more than just throwing a title onto some semi-random tweets and calling it a product. My two cents: http://newslines.org/blog/a-momentary-lapse-of-reason/

However, to say that Facebook is fearless about innovation is off base. They have bolted on so many parts to the core social network that it has become a Frankenstein's monster. Whatever new idea comes along every six months they bolt something new on, until the whole thing is just a big mess of competing ideas. What is needed is a rework of the social network at its core.

> to say that Facebook is fearless about innovation is off base

I didn't say that they were fearless, only that they were more fearless than Twitter. Which I'll admit is not exactly a high bar to clear.

You know how people claim Bin Laden won the war on terror by making us give up civil liberties and get into multiple useless wars that cost trillions of dollars?

Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients. Twitter reacted by squelching third-party clients.

Twitter has never known how to innovate, but they used to be open enough to let "the crowd" do that for them. Now?

> Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients.

Citation needed.

Sure. Livejournal is still going strong somewhere, after all.

Most people will eventually move on to the next thing, though, and the thing after that. Live by the network effect, die by the network effect.

Twitter isn't developer-friendly? Hmm, perhaps not to client developers.

But the wide variety of (non-spam) Twitter bots suggests they are quite friendly.

Twitter has no problems with developers who want to write data into their system. It's developers who want to read data out of it they needed to kill, because the only way to make an ad-based model work was to ensure that only they could determine where people see content from Twitter.

In other words, they turned it into a Roach Motel: data checks in, but it doesn't check out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc

Ah yes, I'm familiar with that. Not sure why it didn't come to mind when I was thinking about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw

could Twitter theoretically be a public benefit corporation? I would argue that they provide enough value to society yet they are having issues with pressure from the market

Twitter is not a public utility and you're mistaken if you believe a centralized service should function as one. I'd rather see a distributed model like SMTP, where organizations would run their own twitter-like service.

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