Twitter is struggling, probably because normal people don't know how to use it | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is struggling, probably because normal people don't know how to use it

theguardian.com

50 pointsprostoalex70 comments

Twitter is rather easy for "normal people" to use, in theory. You follow the people you want to hear from. Its a collection of RSS feeds in small 144 character packets. Sometimes you needs some help and tweeting at a company seems to get a better response than sitting through a long phone call or navigating the crappy website.

People know how to use it, Twitter itself keeps changing things to make it more difficult. The whole "out of order", moments, "what you missed", etc. make it harder to sit down and catch up. Show me where I left off last and let me scroll to now and I'll (and I expect a lot of "normal people" will be happy). Hell, their official client practically makes you read your timeline in reverse order after you hit "more tweets". I'll skip the whole shadow banning of people and hashtags since most won't notice.

They killed client innovation because they wanted to control the experience. Sadly, they really needed to concentrate on getting paid. They've gone so far that "foreign" media (e.g. Instagram) cannot display inside the tweets in their client.

Hashtags, retweets, etc. were not Twitter inventions. When they threw out the clients, that killed outside innovation.

Wasn't the instagram thing because instagram opted out of that, as they wanted to drive traffic to their own properties?

I thought it fit in with this answer and also not display stuff for other social networks:

https://twittercommunity.com/t/displaying-tweets-amongst-oth...

I'm a normal person, and I can't figure it out. Every time I see a link to twitter, I can't tell who is responding to who. It looks like snippets of conversations, but I can rarely figure out the context. I don't think I'm looking at a timeline view, just a particular tweet.

That's basically the problem with twitter's web client and not a problem with you understanding of what Twitter is. You expected to click on the link and get a conversation which it is[1], its just displayed horribly. The problem isn't your understanding, its the UI.

1) Its amazing how many people can keep up with group SMS, but run into something very close to it on Twitter and hit a wall because of the crappy way Twitter zooms into a conversation. I got a couple of ideas for UI (one I actually prototyped for my own amusement), but there is no way I'd spend the time to make a working client. I'm pretty sure there are other people who probably have had the same thoughts and they are all shelved.

This. PLENTY of normal people know how to use it. Many normal people can even use Twitter better than the engineers who work on it - "normal" people created some of Twitter's core features! [1]

For me (a non-famous Twitter user with a moderate following), Twitter is the best place to find interesting conversation. It's probably just a matter of following the right people for me, and it took me several years to really curate my list. I'm sad that Twitter would rather muck things up for current users rather than make onboarding/discovery better.

[1] http://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retwee...

I think the problem with Twitter is that normal people don't need it. I don't have a single friend on Twitter and maybe one co-worker who tweets once in a blue moon. These are normal folks who do normal things and have no interest sharing them with strangers.

Twitter is mainly for consumption, not creation, for the average joe. This is one of the many reasons Twitter should not be compared to Facebook whatsoever.

Today it might be best for consumption. But when it started and had it's character limited by the size of an SMS, it was very much meant (and used!) for creation and communication.

Twitter's market or demographic is recreational lynch mobs. It amplifies people's worst natures. The sooner it implodes the better the world will be.

Thats basically social media in general, nothing unique to twitter.

Even Google may be culpable, seen as they sort search results based on your "profile".

I would rephrase it slightly as "Twitter is predominantly a push platform for celebrity".

I read somewhere on the internet that Twitter is a "write-only medium". As in, you write to expect feedback or exposure, but really don't care about other's tweets.

Anecdotal, but that's the opposite of how everyone I know uses it. In my experience people register to get access to real time news and "intimate" exposure to celebrities. No one tweets themselves.

This is exactly it. I just don't feel like shouting out into the ether...

Honestly, twitter to me feels... pointless.

There was a time, when people kept nagging me to enter the social world to pump my startup and whatnot, and I even learned how to install several software to help me manage it (including some that Twitter bought and killed, something I consider a serious mistake of theirs).

I twitted prolifically, got several followers, managed to sometimes interact with famous people, then after all the difficulties in using their service after they killed the clients they bought, I started to forget more and more, until I wans't using it anymore.

Then now years later, I noticed... it made no difference, the only different between using twitter, and not using twitter, is that by not using twitter I save time to do other more useful things, and also more entertaining things, twitter is not good to get useful information, not good to entertain, and not a IM, in fact I have no idea what twitter is for.

So to me, twitter is pointless... Also extremely hard to use (ie: some people obviously saw some effect from twitter, but... HOW? I even used some tracking apps to help, like Klout and whatnot... I scored my "brownie points" a bit, but I always felt lost, what I should write, and why? And to who?

If I as user, don't figure why I am reader other people stuff, how as content producer I figure what I am writing, and to who?)

Twitter makes for an easy way to publish and consume status feeds. And I like the shortform. There are other ways to do the same, but the tools weirdly are still not ready for mass consumption.

For me Twitter is a way to speak directly to public figures in a public way.

My only interaction with twitter is through the weekly "Popular in your network" emails I get every few days. I actually do find them useful; I don't follow anyone extraneous and so the items are almost always directly related to content I am interested in.

I am not a producer of content, so for me, Twitter will always be a one-way street. What that means is that it competes with any other news/content source such as Google News, HN, Reddit, etc. If it weren't for those periodic, curated, but extremely relevant emails, twitter wouldn't be on my list of news sources. I imagine they will start injecting sponsored messages on those emails and then I might have to reconsider.

Only my "nerd" friends are even remotely active on Twitter, and even then roughly 50% of my "nerd" friends don't even have a Twitter account, and zero of my friends who are outside tech ever use it at all.

To me Twitter has always felt like primarily an echo chamber for Silicon Valley hipsterdom, which eventually added-on a sub-culture of celebrity narcissism.

The media love it for the lazy journalism it allows them to produce based on twitter storms or whatever is trending.

Twitter struggles because of the sharp divide in its 2 types of users: those with high ratio of people following them vs. those they follow (read influencers/celebs), and everyone else.

For the first group, the creation function is phenomenal, interactive/engaging and not suffering the signal to noise problem.

For everyone else, they struggle with a)consumption only (that's me), b) bad signal to noise rate (follow too many), or low engagement/interactivity (not enough follow them).

So to truly make the platform work for you, it is a longer cultivation to become somewhat of an influencer. By definition this cannot be a mass market appeal in terms of all users fully realizing the platform's potential.

Instagram has a similar structure but has overcome these problems with simplifying the media/content type into pictures and limiting links. This makes the signal to noise ratio better, and allows for the creation function of non-influencers to go farther.

This is why I agree Twitter should embrace being smaller, and focus its efforts into helping the 2 user types in parallel, and also help users cross from being consumers to influencers more. They can take cues from YouTube in all of their creator programs and rev sharing to work on that part of it.

Am not an expert, but think Twitter is struggling because the signal to noise ratio has deteriorated significantly.

Solving this isn't just a matter of some UX tweaks, it literally speaks to the heart of a very hard problem...how to you structure relatively unstructured information in a way that enables machines to help humans navigate it

Crazy thing is that Twitter have a way to deal with that noise right in their system, lists.

They first came to be via Tweetdeck, as a client side sorting of the timeline.

Then Twitter implemented official support for them in their API, and later bought Tweetdeck.

But since then the lists have largely withered on the wine.

To access them in the official client you have to jump thought a menu and list just to see a single one, when the power of lists in Tweetdeck was that you got them as columns you could see side by side.

Various third party clients have this, but most of them run into the hard cap Twitter have on free API access.

Frankly watching Twitter on Android tablets devolve into a wide phone UI, when i can fire up a third party app and have 3+ columns of topic sorted tweets is deeply worrying. This because it indicates something about where the focus of the company is.

> lists have largely withered on the wine.

Should be "vine". "wine" would make it, I don't know, some sort of malapropism (looking for the right word here), or grammatically incorrect pun? Entertaining, nonetheless :)

Update: Looked up malapropism, seems my use of it is correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism

or at least close (which would be another malapropism :)

yes yes yes. My brain do that more often than i like. Sometimes i end up typing whole different words than i formulated, simply because the finger movements are so similar (or i type the incorrect word more often).

You are not alone. Seen it happen here and there, including me too. One guess I have is that it is related to information overload that is prevalent these days.

I have around 40 small lists 5 to 30 members, and search based on hashtags that's the secret of not going mad scrolling Twitter feed.

Exactly. I got on twitter to follow certain people. Most of the time its great but honestly what sucks is there is so much noise I just ignore everything.

And I'm a technical person willing to put up with a lot of BS. But I can't be arsed to prune my list because while say someone I follow posts GREAT things relating to libc internals, they also post things that are very much not what I care about.

I can't tell twitter to: don't show me stuff like this from this person, or better say show me more of stuff like this, hide the rest unless i ask to see it from this user.

That is a hard problem to solve. I don't envy twitter but honestly their "platform" hasn't moved for years. This whole mess is entirely of their own lack of doing.

I always thought the "Planet" sites did a decent job of aggregating posts by topic. planet.gnome.org, planet.kernel.org, planetkde.org etc.

THIS, the most important thing for me.

If I follow a guy who tweets about Databases, I don't need to know or read his thoughts about politics, his new born daughter, his outrage about X or Y or all that bullshit. I want to hear only about Databases, DB management and not the rest. I need to be able to follow @userX with #topicY exclusively.

You get that problem no matter what mode you follow them, unless its by way of paid for articles in the trade press. Be it blogs, Tiwtter, or some other unedited outlet, you are going to get that person raw and unfiltered.

With a blog, one would normally follow the RSS feed of a specific tag, not the entire blog.

That depends on how well tagged things are.

Exactly. Why can't the database guy add categories to his account (databases, politics, personal) and assign a category from his list each time he tweets? His followers could choose which categories to follow.

That would avoid alienating his followers, but still allow him to tweet on any topic he likes, knowing that only people who are interested in that topic would see those particular tweets.

This would be better for all parties.

I think one of the core aspects that attracts people to social media is feeling like they are in the loop. Twitter is very good at creating that feeling by encouraging its users to send lots of short messages containing real time information. But the problem is exactly this: There is way too much noise. The users receive all of these messages that make it seem like they are wired in, but in reality they are bombarded with lots of vacuous nonsense. It's similar to reading celebrity news: It may seem like you are getting important information, but in reality none of it actually matters.

I think most can use it fine, but don't see the point. For the whole ten years or however long it's existed, they don't see the point. With one exception - it's useful for yelling at large companies who are failing at customer support or warranty etc.

It has a horrible signal to noise ratio, and always has. So unless you're willing to spend a ludicrous amount of time searching and curating a feed to weed out the marketers yelling louder than each other, the SEO types etc you're left with a few celebs and personalities to follow. It really isn't worth the effort. As everyone is reduced to 140 chars searching gives little to no idea of how meaningful their output is, so go read back everyone's page.

Or add five celebs, and some personalities and stop using it after a week or two. Log in every year or so to see why Tesco messed your order up.

For meaningless banter I'll do that in the coffee shop, or direct via SMS or message app.

Twitter is a Swiss army knife for both consumption and communication. People that think it useless because you cant explain it in 5 words are missing the point of Twitter. It is what you make out of it and it can be a lot of different things for different people depending on your needs. This means that not everyone needs it or are willing to learn to use it. If they try and dumb it down and please as broad group as possible to attract the masses it will eventually be useless to everyone and die a slow death. It is not for everyone and it will never compete with Facebook. I wish they would accept that. Not very likely though.

This quote from the article is spot on, "It’s just an enormous time-suck for the amount of information you get from it.”

I like and use Twitter, but I don't see the value for most people. While I like it, it don't suggest others use it.

Does anyone else feel like this is trying to soften the ground to demand the algorithmic feed?

Quotes like this make me believe that is the goal:

> It’s just an enormous time-suck for the amount of information you get from it.

There is a little mention about it being hard to consume one's feed. And that you have to do a lot of work for little information.

I remember a few years back, there was talk that web tools that employed good filtering would be the next big thing.

I only use the default web twitter client, which does make it very difficult to consume the data. I page down on my feed a couple of times and that's about it.

How do other clients let you interact with your feed?

Even flashcards of tweets that I've missed wouldn't be that bad.

The client I use, Tweetbot, starts me where I left off reading, and gives me a number of intuitive ways to either skip ahead to "now" or read everything I have missed.

For me Twitter is 100% consumption. It is a way to discover new articles & views from the 400 people or so that I follow. It could be Bill Gates latest views. Maybe a couple of comedians. A couple of athletes. Probably a bunch of Entrepreneurs. It is just another stream that I check out for 10-15 minutes a day to discover new interesting stuff in niches that I am interested in. This use case is never mentioned. Are there so few people using Twitter like this?

Same for me. It's a great way to stay up-to-date with a topic of interest... Anything relevant will spark conversation on Twitter.

Same.

Most of my friends don't regularly use Twitter.

But I don't care. Writers ranging from William Gibson to influencers like Edward Snowden to editors like Nate Silver to basketball reporters like Zach Lowe populate my feed. What's not to like? I get way more value from Twitter than Facebook or Reddit.

I think Twitter is great, but I don't know how they can monetise it. Also it's for the digital literate.

My older, barely literate relatives taught themselves how to use Facebook no problem, but can't get their head around Twitter. When they start it looks empty because they don't know whom to follow, then when someone adds some followers for them it looks like a wall of noise because all the people they are following are constantly talking.

(or have no need for it)

(Or have no desire to)

I wish I could post the tweet where I said something like, "the beginning to the end of the twitter." That was right after their anti-developer community $hit. That's what happens when your in-house product team is insecure about the brilliance of the community.

Ok probably little harsh there. But I used to love this service and its potential. Now it's meh.

I agree. They should of let the community flourish and strategically partner/buy what the community produced.

The whole comments thread here sums it up perfectly. You have a bunch of people praising Twitter for its utility to discover interesting content (which includes me), and a bunch of people condemning it for bad signal-to-noise ratio and abusive subcommunities.

And frankly, if I had control over Twitter, I'd just be okay with that. The only change I'd make is identify more clearly which usecases create actual value for users, and advertise these more clearly. The biggest problem I'm reading from the article is that people misunderstand what Twitter is good for.

Case in point: "How do I get followers?" Uhm, how about posting interesting things? This is not Facebook. People don't follow you just because you're a distant relative or happened to go to the same school once. People follow you because they find your tweets funny, insightful, or in another way a valuable target of their attention.

Its funny to consider how much Twitter has morphed.

It started out as a SMS "broadcaster" with a web accessible log.

Now the SMS part, that got the whole thing started and set the 140 character size limit, is largely useless. Most tweets are full of hashtags and urls that only make sense on custom clients or on the web site.

well, and no one uses sms any more

I'd have to say the same for Facebook. More and more people are leaving Facebook. About 50% of people that had facebook 4 years ago no longer have it.

I'm 100% certain Twitter will not be around in 4 years. 95% certain Facebook will not be around in 10 years.

The reason is that these companies have created insane valuations that they can't justify during tough economic times. The userbase are hostile to any attempts at targeted advertising and it's something these large companies rely on for revenue.

I predict a decentralized, free, twitter and facebook alternatives that more or less mimic the UI except it's not managed centrally by a corporation. The application runs on multiple computers. A committee of volunteers influence it's future development and they are paid in some sort of cryptocurrency and people are paid for helping host this giant distributed app in cryptocurrency. People using the free application engage in market based economies in which the platform gets a small commission just enough to sustain the development and maintenance of the project.

It is at this point we will have enough wifi enabled devices to form effective peer to peer mesh network that doesn't require any ISP. You will still need to physically travel of a disconnected mesh network and authenticated by a concensus of existing incumbents in this independent mesh network in remote places separated by large geographical barriers and these networks will likely depend on ISP. However, this disconnected networks create effective means for them to thrive. You are limited by geography but not by the hazardous nature of human trust in a profit-incentive scheme.

The closest thing is Ethereum but I don't think it will be The One. there will be multiple 'Ethereum' attempts before a truly standalone, distributed, peer to peer applications takes shape and becomes deeply embedded in our social structure and bring about income and social equality.

This is sort of the future I have in mind, post-SV, China in permanent economic stagnation, and rise of cryptoanarchy all within the next 40 years.

The reason people leave Facebook is because Facebook is full of acquaintances that have little to no impact on your life. If they figure out how to make the relationships you do have work better (Instagram, Whatsapp, see a pattern?), the Facebook company will most definitely be around.

> About 50% of people that had facebook 4 years ago no longer have it.

Their own and third-party data (Comscore, Nielsen) seems to indicate otherwise, what's your source on this?

> I predict a decentralized, free, twitter and facebook alternatives that more or less mimic the UI except it's not managed centrally by a corporation. The application runs on multiple computers. A committee of volunteers influence it's future development and they are paid in some sort of cryptocurrency and people are paid for helping host this giant distributed app in cryptocurrency.

I predict that wishful thinking won't come to pass, because wishful thinking about utopias has basically never come to pass.

Happy to make payment in galactic credits if I'm wrong.

One things about Twitter is that it gets way less post engagement than Facebook or Instagram. Its a big firehose, if you tweet, and don't get anything back -- you wounder if its worth it.

100% agreed. And this goes back to the argument between an algorithmic feed and a simple time based feed.

I tweet some things that get 0 engagement, but maybe if they were shown to my close friends when they checked Twitter 5 hours later they would get engagement, but alas I am reminded that content creation is futile unless I am a Twitter celebrity.

Maybe it's just past due? Communities die over time. Twitter was innovative back when the options were limited. Now days I get a better experience from other options like the rooms in Whatsapp. The only thing they seem to have going is the amount of "celebrities" that maintain an account. Though I dont know how sustainable that is over time.

Seeing as I and most of my friends have families, it's rare that we can all get together to watch our favorite sporting events. I use Twitter as sort of my "can you believe that call?" way of chatting with others during a game. For the most part, it's noise or mindless distraction.

I used to use Twitter. I stopped, because it didn't fit in my life anymore. I have a fixed amount of attention every day, and more critical things use almost all of it. None of my friends use Twitter anymore, and news aggregators bring me up-to-date in much less time than my tweet feed.

There's no problem with twitter - there's a problem for twitter's investors and people who want to make money from Twitter. They can go solve their rich people problems all day :)

As a user, I've always liked it - it's nice and simple.

I miss the RSS feeds. It feels like the only way to know what people are saying is to log into Twitter everyday. It feels tedious like a chore just to get information that should be in my rss reader.

I find Twitter fairly pointless, as I am sure many do. I am sure the fact it is easy to data mine trends is the only reason it does get so much media attention.

Couldn't agree more .. i've been on Twitter for over a year now and i still have difficulties tracking a conversation between two people.

I'm into tech. I don't use or consume Twitter. May it ever be that way.

it blows my mind there are people who don't know how to use twitter... they living under a rock?

No. We just don't care for such a crap platform.

One of my co workers goes on the same rant anytime someone says the word Twitter. He's only a few years older than me but sounds very "get off my lawn!"

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