Not Even Twitter Understands Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Not Even Twitter Understands Twitter

baekdal.com

48 pointshuphtur59 comments

Twitter's problem is that they don't even have the basic understanding of why they're successful. In the past several years there hasn't been a single change they've implemented that has improved things. The goal I guess has always been to attract the non-user.

But when I really study things most of the stuff that people think as fundamentally part of the service was instead added by the community and initially rejected by those running Twitter like use of the pound sign.

In fact when you look at when Twitter really slowed its growth was when they turned their back on that very community, especially developers. Anyone here actually believe that their experience with Twitter wouldn't be far better if there were still independent clients?

Twitter imho would be far better served to improve the service for those using it than randomly try throwing stuff at the wall in an attempt to broaden its appeal.

Yes, there has been a single change that has improved things. Changing stars to hearts. The data shows that it's an improvement, presumably to engagement (as stated in the Twitter blog post).

Now, whether you consider that an improvement, is just your irrelevant (irrelevant to Twitter) opinion. I think we really need to draw a distinction between opinions that are thrown around and decisions that are backed up by data, and give benefit of the doubt.

I think the real core value prop of Twitter is the niche communities people can build around their interests. It's about the interest graph. I posted this in another article on the front page today, but I'll do it here also. I think they need to double down on growing communities within Twitter. It's just too hard right now.

Here's my proposal:

Twitter Rooms: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a

What Twitter is lacking more succinctly is a thought pg expressed when talking about startups:

Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Twitter's strategy is to have lots of people to like it rather than to have a smaller group love it.

I really do hesitate to say this, but this looks an awful lot like IRC.

Twitter itself reminds me a lot of IRC actually, albeit with a fancy interface draped over it and a a low character limit.

In what sense are they successful? I mean, they've never turned a profit. Maybe the time has come to declare the experiment a failure.

Newer stuff I like:

  * The “While you were away” list of tweets
  * Auto showing images
  * The analytics being available for everybody
  * Muting accounts 
  * Blocking retweets (but allowing normal tweets) from specific accounts.

However I note that the Trends list on the main web interface no longer was a short summary of what each trend is. I guess whoever was doing that got let go.

Completely agree. Twitter needs a real user perspective, not a Facebook or non-user one.

> Or what about hashtags. This is a brilliant concept invented by Chris Messina, which allowed people to group tweets from many different people into a single collection.

Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this article.

Are bookmarks really not a thing anymore? Is such basic browser functionality, such as back buttons and bookmarks passé today? I mean, I guess we all collectively forgot IRC ever existed. Or Usenet. Or RSS. Why not forget bookmarks exist as well. Oh right. None of that can be monetized.

The internet is fucking doomed. We've moved from the promise of open networks, federated protocols, and decentralization to centralized services, advertising everywhere, and tracking your every movement to sell to the highest bidder. And people are worried Twitter might die. Yeah, it's really so sad they won't live another day to track you or sell you useless shit. Sob story of the eyeball economy, right there folks.

    <comment class="snarky;humorous">

Anyone who thinks that hashtags are equivalent in form or function to IRC channels is missing a few IQ points themselves. :)

A hashtag is a way of grouping messages together, not a discrete conversational area with its own topic, access rules, and administrators.

Can I reply back to an RSS feed? No? Then I guess that's not identical either.

Can I access usenet without clunky, ancient software? Is it mobile friendly at all? No? Then I guess that's also not equivalent.

They aren't identical, but the grandparent's argument wasn't dependent on the premise that they are.

You simply can't argue there wasn't a solid history predating Twitter, across RFCs of using @name for users and #name for topics -- whether or not a topic (channel) in IRC resembles a hashtag.

Also, the bit of the grandparent's rant about the decline of open channels and standards for communication (which definitely has happened) isn't diminished by adding on an explanation for why it occurred (there's no money in creating a sufficiently polished mobile UX for a decentralized service and protocol that nobody owns).

I'm not sure there's another way to read "IRC channels never existed then" that isn't a comparison between IRC and hashtags...

Sure, there's a superficial resemblance inasmuch as a channel and a hashtag are words prefixed by a #, but that is where the similarities end.

The reason open standards for communication are in decline is because nobody uses them when technically better alternatives exist. Pretty much all of Hipchat/Slack's marketing copy is a laundry list of things that IRC simply cannot do without either hacky workarounds, or at all because the protocol doesn't support it.

(rant mode)

Remember that vaguely-disparaging comment here when Dropbox was announced, about how you could set up the same thing with some scripts and VCS repo?

We're nerds, that's fine. We're perfectly okay with getting our hands dirty.

Nobody else wants to do that when there's a much simpler alternative. Including nerds, because there's a lot better way to spend our time than reinventing, the hard way, something that someone else already did.

There is a need, IMO, for a nonprofit foundation that makes things like Dropbox, Hipchat, etc. but more importantly, makes them with polish, and speaking as an engineer of sorts, that means that it can't be designed by engineers. It needs to be designed to solve problems that actual users have in the way that actual users work

If you have to do things like edit .conf files, twiddle services, and so forth, you've already lost. That's plenty sysadmin friendly, but krptonite to users.

I think you might misunderstand my comments. I don't think you and I disagree much.

You seem to be reading a lot into my comment and the grandparent's, I'm not sure what agenda you might suppose we have. I don't intend to point out the (sure, we can call it superficial) use of # to denote a topic to decry Twitter in any way or glorify IRC. It's pretty devoid of any kind of emotional investment.

I'm not saying Twitter really owes anything to IRC, or that IRC is somehow a superior Twitter or even resembles it at all, nor do I think the grandparent did. I'm not saying that # denoting a topic is very profound.

I'm not saying that existing open/distributed/standard services that exist are obviously superior to the closed/centralized/proprietary ones that exist (in most cases it's pretty obviously not true).

Nor did I even espouse the opinion in this thread that given two theoretical services which are equal but that one is open/distributed/standardized and the other is closed/centralized/proprietary that the former is superior (that was the grandparent). That said, I do hold that opinion for reasons I feel are pretty self-evident. If we all communicate on fragmented channels that are owned by people with interests other than facilitating our communication, we aren't in very good hands, we miss out on lots of opportunities to communicate (there are friends I've fallen out of touch with because I've lost track of which instant messaging protocol they are most likely to respond on, I think most of us have some of these).

Communication apps and protocols and services backed by commercial interests will of course have better invested in user experience. Admittedly, user experience is a higher priority of mine than openness, so I use Slack and Hangouts and Skype like anyone. I'm not going to judge anyone for their choices here. I'm just not going to ignore the fact that in making that choice, I'm giving up something.

Ad hominem with a smiley doesn't make you less of an asshole ;)

> A hashtag is a way of grouping messages together

Like IRC channels.

> not a discrete conversational area with its own topic, access rules, and administrators.

And?

> Can I reply back to an RSS feed? No? Then I guess that's not identical either.

I never made any such claim.

> Can I access usenet without clunky, ancient software?

Uh. Yes? That's the beauty of RSS, IRC, and Usenet. You get choice in the clients that you use.

140 character limits and SMS aren't clunky and ancient?? Really???? The article even mentions the torture of posting links. Such modern software, that crumbles under the mighty URL.

> Is it mobile friendly at all?

Of course Usenet is "mobile friendly". You fetch news when you have internet and can read it off-line at your leisure. If anything, it's the most "mobile friendly" protocol in existence.

So where's the mobile friendly usenet clients that are accessed by appreciable numbers of users?

Let me save you the time: They don't exist, and there's a reason for that.

Stop being intentionally obtuse.

> Why not forget bookmarks exist as well. Oh right. None of that can be monetized.

Pinboard would disagree with you

> Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this article.

Huh? Hashtags are only superficially related to IRC channels. For one, you don't need to be "joined" to a hashtag to see messages on it.

I always liken them to reverse IRC channels.

Plus IRC channels existed in a bounded scope which kept them relevant to the interests of their participants.

Twitter hashtags are global in scope which makes many of them useless due to dilution.

I encountered a particular Twitter hashtag the other day: #fog

Imagine every global reference to fog being tagged thus. It's a mess.

> Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this article.

The only common thing between IRC channels and hashtags is that they’re prefixed by a hash character. That’s all.

  When you favorite a tweet, you mostly do so for your
  own consumption. It is a way for you to tell yourself
  that this tweet is something you want to get back to,
  or remember for later use.

That sure ain't how I use it. Two reasons. (1) Favorites are public. (2) I don't need to get back to a tweet or remember it for later use; they're short, so I remember them in my brain.

I saw the article was much longer, but the author lost me at that point.

"Favorite" sounds like a bookmark, but it behaved like a Facebook "like".

But the fact that its name sounded like a bookmark means lots of people used it that way anyway.

Given that one of the things you can easily do with Favorites is review a list of them, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say it behaved like a bookmark. I certainly used it for this purpose.

Most bookmarks don't inform the site that you've bookmarked it, or let that site keep a very public counter of the number of bookmarks to it, or keep a public record of your bookmarks (delicious(however it was punctuated) not withstanding). It actually behaves very much like Tumblr's "Like" functionality in all of those regards.

I agree, it acted at least a little like a bookmark, but not more than it acted like a "like".

Most of my tweets are things I find interesting, that I often look back to. If it's interesting to me, I'll retweet.

That's just me though, and I don't GAFF if it's public.

Same here. Who is this Thomas Baekdal to tell me what I mean what I favorite a tweet?! Maybe that's why he does it, but how does he know about me?

I favorite a tweet to tell the tweeter that I liked what they said. I know they're gonna get an email saying I favorited their tweet.

I've totally forgotten that someone could use favoriting as a bookmarking system; I'm too busy to go back and look at lists of bookmarked tweets.

This does seem to divide people. My own instant response to the favourite system was that it was obviously a means of expressing approval, without bombarding your followers' timelines with other people's stuff. "This tweet is a favourite of mine" = "I like this tweet". Eventually somebody favourited one of my tweets and I got an email telling me they'd done it, which just reinforced this idea for me.

Then after about 4 years somebody pointed out that it actually stored your favourites. And that meant you could use them as a kind of bookmark. Well! Who'd have thought? (I don't use Internet Explorer, which is my excuse for not spotting the favourite = bookmark connection.)

I disagree with the statement that people don't use it for chitchat. That is also something people use it for: I have a lot of friends on Twitter who tweet whimsical things (and whom I tweet whimsical things to).

But this still makes Twitter very different from Facebook. On Twitter, I follow people who tweet about interesting things or who share some common interest with me. Facebook, on the other hand, is something I use to talk to the people I met at high school and Uni. Thus Twitter is always a fun place to go to, filled with content that will appeal to me. Facebook, on the other hand, is mostly lowest-common-denominator plagiarised content and life updates I probably don't care much about.

Facebook is a place that represents some of your existing relationships. Twitter is a place where you make new ones.

Twitter moments could be so awesome, I have a feeling they will get it right, but its not quite there yet.

Especially for sports, when I'm watching a game I usually have twitter open to see people's jokes & analysis. Sometimes, I look at the moment the day after just cause I'm curious, but the moment doesn't reflect my game experience at all.

Here is the twitter moment for the 1st day of the NBA season. https://twitter.com/i/moments/659130295396896768 -- its mostly just pictures from official nba and team accounts. There are no jokes, and there is very little analysis. It has some random highlights from games. But the biggest highlight of the night ( game winning block on Lebron ) is missing for some reason.

Same with this moment on the most recent GOP debate: https://twitter.com/i/moments/659492422137827328?lang=en There are no jokes at all. There had to have been at least 1 donald trump joke out there that should have been included.

I think they are working on curation tools so anyone can curate moments, and I think that will really help if enough interesting people take the time to do it. But I really think it could be the newspaper or the 'reddit' of a lot of topics.

They changed it because people were using them as likes rather than favourites.

I originally used them as "favourites" (for links that I was interested in but didn't have time to read now) but others didn't. Twitter catered for the majority and made the list of your favourites harder to get at and started putting things you favourite into other people's timelines.

Whilst I preferred how it was originally it is clear to me that this change was motivated by how the community at large used the feature.

I should include a disclaimer to this comment that despite attempting to use Twitter multiple times, I still cannot find a use for it, so I would not consider myself a "Twitter user". That said, the criticism of the favorite -> like change makes no sense to me.

> Favorite (old) = neutral statement related to the importance of the tweet for you. It's mostly a bookmark, not really an endorsement.

> Favoriting a tweet didn't mean it was her favorite (as Twitter apparently believes)

Oh yeah? If that's true, that's a terrible UX. Any time you have to say "xxx doesn't actually mean xxx", you should stop and think extra hard about what you're saying. "Favoriting" a tweet should mean exactly what it says it means.

And considering how favoriting a tweet notifies the recipient, and a person's favorites are public, I don't buy that favoriting a tweet was a neutral reaction to a tweet. If I got a notification that said Bob favorited tweet yyy, I would take that to mean endorsement.

Just because some users are using it as a bookmarking service doesn't mean that's what most people use it as or what Twitter intends it to be used as.

Ironically, Not even this guy understands how people (other than marketers like himself) use Twitter. It's rare to see anyone favoriting a tweet to "reference" it later. Most people use favorite as a token of acknowledgement (I saw this and approve). Favorites are not endorsements either, since it doesn't get broadcasted to my followers.

It's not that rare. This study from last year shows about a 3:1 ratio of "liking" to "bookmarking". http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszmw/pubs/icwsm2014-favouriting.p...

I do what he does. I see something interesting about design or development posted by someone else, I'll favorite it so I can find it easier later, not to endorse it (although usually I would endorse that it's worth checking out).

That being said, I've used 'like's' in that way too, so I don't particularly care about this change.

> It's rare to see anyone favoriting a tweet to "reference" it later.

A lot of broad statements being thrown around by both the author of this article and the people in this thread. I used favorites in exactly this way, and I'm not a marketer.

Twitter succeeds because it takes a feature everyone already likes - chatroom - and breaks down the walls. Hash tags serve to group users into "rooms", following groups users, favorites (<3) invite users into your conversation. The brilliance is in making it universal so everyone clicks Twitter's Ruby.

A realisation I just had: Twitter and Tumblr are similar in many respects. Both are microblogging (though the former more micro) services, both are interest-based networks, both work fairly similarly (retweets/posts, hashtags/tags, etc.). The demographics are different (Twitter's is broader than Tumblr's, which is largely just young people), but they're not fundamentally different services.

Yet their corporate masters differ. Tumblr, the company, totally gets Tumblr, the community. They understand why the site is popular, what people want. Twitter, though, believes it is Facebook.

Twitter is only interesting because it happens to be the current iteration of instant messenger / community chatroom. Kik, AOL IM, ICQ, IRC.. there's no particular innovation from Twitter keeping users there. It just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and right now it seems as though anything with a half decent design UI and interesting set of features could sprout up to draw migration from twitters core/casual userbase.

Not having people use your product the way you expected it is not a problem. This is in fact the greatest lesson from Twitter history: you don’t make your product; your users will.

The problem here is that Twitter is slow to respond to these usage patterns; we don’t really know if they realize how people use their product and they seem to try random things to satisfy investors and/or users.

Some people consider the fav button as a marker, the expression of feeling is not necessarily what they want. I understand this UX change might bring more users because it made others subconsciously feel being endorsed, but personally I don't like it, it's like twitter claims that I have something which I don't.

Are people still complaining about the icon change that has no functional differences whatsoever? Star, heart, whatever, it saves the tweet in a list for later access.

There is a pretty big semantic difference, that the OP explains very thoroughly. Could you explain how you disagree?

I'm not clear on what the semantic difference is between favoriting and liking. Publicly doing either carries a connotation of approval, and the function is unchanged.

Is anyone really, actually, demonstrably confused by this change?

Facebook added options to their "Like" button because "Liking" a post about your best friends' husband dying isn't something many people felt comfortable with doing even with understanding what "liking" something does.

I've favorited nothing since the heart change. Because many of the things I favorite are not things I "love" - which is what the heart implies.

>Is anyone really, actually, demonstrably confused by this change?

I'm confused why they felt the need to change it at all. So you can lump me in with people being actually, demonstrably confused.

I've favorited nothing since the heart change.

Why? You know what the function does, and the way you worded your comment implies that there are still things you want to like/favorite, so why not?

Imagine the icon would change to a skull, or some kind of symbolic cross, without changing the functionality at all. Do you think people would use it as before? The heart icon implies a certain emotion, and many people feel that emotion to be stronger than what they feel towards the tweet.

You're not thinking about the user. Star is the symbol for bookmark in many, many places, including all major browsers (except Safari).

Is there a list of my Facebook likes for later access? I don't know, I've never even thought about it before because I don't "like" things that I want to access later, I do it to show others that I like the post.

This just reinforces my belief (and I'm a broken record on this) that Twitter would have been far better as a protocol than as a company.

Best article I've read in awhile. How many points will there stock fall Monday?

I'm confused. The article apparently thinks that it's fine to favorite something you don't actually think is your favorite, contra twitter. But then why not heart something you don't actually like? The logic doesn't seem to work out.

The meaning of "Favorite" with a star icon has long been diluted by many apps to the degree of simply representing bookmarking for later use and not have any strong connotations of promotion or endorsement.

People can -- and do -- use "favorites" (or "likes" or "upvotes") for all kinds of reasons in all kinds of environments and there is no stopping that.

(I sometimes use them as "read receipts" because I am excessively social and this causes me serious problems online. Faving something tells the person who wrote it that I saw it without me having to actually talk to them. This reconciles my need to communicate with my need to reduce the degree to which my chattiness routinely used to make me the center of some shitshow for reasons beyond my ability to fathom.)

When you add your online banking site to your browser favourites is it really because it's your favorite site on the internet?

When I favorite my banking website, a notification isn't sent to the website telling them I favorited them, nor are my browser favorites public for anyone to see. The semantics, and thus the meaning, are totally different.

Chrome doesn't even use the term favorites. It uses the (more accurate, imo) term bookmarks.

Can I heart this?

This post is spot on.

You can't 'heart' this but you can 'upvote' it. Which I think it quite an interesting thing; we have 'likes', 'favourites', 'upvotes' and more, across different sites and they serve different purposes. But often, users conflate them and use them incorrectly. A good example of this would be the 'upvote' and 'downvote' on reddit and HN. Many users will use these buttons to express agreement or disagreement, even though that is explicitly wrong as defined by the owners of the site.

It's a journey, I think, that developers and users are taking right now. We're both searching for the right language to express ourselves, a language that we can use to our advantage. Are we converging on a common language between startup owners and users? No I don't think we are - but perhaps we should be.

Maybe, and I don't claim to have a design in mind for this, but maybe we could start to see the functions of different social networks integrated with every piece of content on the Internet. We don't have to immediately post or share the piece (even if an article has Facebook share buttons I copy and paste the link anyway).

An upvote and a like and a favorite (heart?) all serve different needs across networks, but they generally mean the same thing within a network.

I think for a system like this to make sense, there should be some amount of conditioning. On HN, for example, I abhor downvotes without context, especially when it's clear that the downvote is more an expression of disagreement rather than an indication that the comment detrimented the conversation.

> Many users will use these buttons to express agreement or disagreement, even though that is explicitly wrong as defined by the owners of the site.

Interestingly enough, downvoting to express disagreement is not against the hacker news guidelines[1].

A few subreddits I visit pop up a message right next to the comment when you downvote it, saying you should only do so when it does not contribute to the discussion. I think that's a pretty good solution for educating users about the intended purpose of downvoting. I also think HN's idea of only letting older users downvote is a healthy idea.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From the article:

"Last year it had a revenue of $1.4 billion, but it's [sic] operational costs was [sic] $1.9 billion"

How on earth could it cost 1.9 Billion to run "Twitter"? 50 WhatsApp engineers and 100 Elixer servers could handle everything. That's just insane. They need to cut costs NOW.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com