The Twitter Contradiction | Hacker News Reader

The Twitter Contradiction

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45 pointsjshen58 comments

The grumbling around Twitter is about its continued quarterly losses and how it's not fulfilling the expected ROI from the $2.8 billion invested.

Not relevant to puzzling out the losses is explaining all the other "cool" things about Twitter such as "giving people a voice" or "a broadcasting platform for journalists/celebrities/revolutionists/politicians". That's emotional analysis instead of financial analysis.

The common defenses of Twitter often has the same flaws in writing structure:

1) Ignore the billions invested and repeated losses on the balance sheet

2) Then point out some amazing feature or undeniable human benefit that stirs the emotions and imagination

Examples...

I don't get the narrative and negativity about Iridium/Motorola satellite phone service?! Who wouldn't want the ability to make global phone calls from the middle of the ocean, Antarctica, and Mt Everest?! Humanity needs a phone like that! Well, all those cool things don't matter, the company went bankrupt.

I don't get the narrative around the Concorde supersonic airplane? Who wouldn't wouldn't value the ability to fly New York to London in 3 hours instead of 6?! Well, the airlines cancelled the program after financial analysis showed it barely broke even or lost money.

Idea for blog quality improvement: Instead of talking up the positive features of whatever company product, explain how the monetary numbers can work out.

I agree, but beware the sunk-cost fallacy. What matters is whether Twitter could turn a profit today. If so, the original investors may lose money and the company might even go bankrupt, but the service should still survive.

(This is why Iridium is still around but the Concorde isn't.)

> The grumbling around Twitter is about its continued quarterly losses

That, plus how hard it is to use. Twitter is the only product of the social era that ever interested me, but I almost only ever read things. Every time I think about actually posting to it, I'm daunted. It's Byzantine.

It seems unfair to me, though, that they don't get to count read-only users as active for purposes of demonstrating growth. I'm definitely an active user, but (an ex-Twitterer explained to me) apparently people like us don't count. That seems seriously wrong, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture).

I feel like I must be missing something, because I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it. How is it too hard to post? You type the words you want to say into the box, and click the button.

I saw the "missing manual" article that went around the other day, and I agree they have way too many bizarre and undocumented behaviors, but you can ignore that stuff 99% of the time and be fine.

Edit: I should add, this is a genuine question. I really do want to understand what people find hard about posting on Twitter.

Being a "read-only" Twitter user, I don't think it's about the technical difficulty of posting to Twitter (definitely if you're posting to Hacker News, you're not going to have problems knowing how to post to Twitter), but rather, the futility of it.

Twitter, to me at least, seems like a platform for relatively influential people / people who have a pretty unique insight on something happening real-time to post. If I post on Twitter, I get maybe a few likes and retweets, and nothing else. On facebook, or reddit, or even here, I'm far more likely to feel like a part of a conversation rather than a lone voice yelling into a sea of a million people.

This definitely resonates with me. I've been a Twitter user since the very early days. Early on, I could tweet something (even something mundane) and get dozens of replies. More if it was something interesting. These days, no matter how interesting the Tweet, I'm lucky to get 2-3 responses (including likes). Clearly I'm not an unbiased judge of the quality of my Tweets, but by any measure I'm finding it MUCH harder to get responses these days.

One easy thing to do is to start a discussion with someone non-famous who responded to someone you read. Often you'll get a nice conversation out of it.

I'm sure there's strategies and whatnot that can help you grow your audience / influence. And if you're using Twitter for marketing purposes, then great.

The point is that I, and I'm sure a lot of people, aren't interested in that. I want to have interesting conversations, and I'm going to gravitate to posting on platforms that allow those conversations to happen without having to do unnatural things to start them off.

[this is a tweet]

[@zippergz this is a tweet]

[this is a tweet for @zippergz]

I have no idea if these are different. I know my followers get to see the first example. But do they get to see the others?

I have no idea what happens if I post these as a reply to a tweet that you posted. Do I need to keep the @ handle in there? Or is it being a reply sufficient to trigger an alert on your end?

I just now got followed by a porn account. So, I'm not interested in the porn they produce, and I'm never going to tweet to them. Either they're spammers who are just following everyone, or they've seen some sex industry relevant tweets I've retweeted (because another person I followed researches the sex industry) and thought I'm worth following. I have no way of knowing. So do I block them? Or just ignore them?

a friend who recently took up twitter ran into this exact thing. here's what happened, they had figured out that you just write stuff in the text box and press enter. great. simple. done!

here's what happened though, they started a tweet with @nameoffriend and noticed that unlike their previous tweets that were just words, this new tweet they wrote and sent didn't show up in their timeline like the others.

so she wrote another, thinking that for some reason it hadn't been successful. nope. again, it didn't show up.

so after the fourth duplicate message which started with @nameoffriend she gave up in exasperation and said, this is stupid!

she was later informed that all her messages which started with @nameoffriend had in fact been sent but she wasn't seeing them until she clicked on the tab tweets and replies category

it is this sort of thing that makes twitter's UX just atrocious for the average person

of course, many people on HN will read the above and chuckle but you have to understand that the average person out there is not nearly as tech savvy or nearly as invested. they will not commit to dedicating 100's of hours to learn the intricacies of a specific UI. no way!

if it is badly designed and made so that they can't use it in the first or second try, they get frustrated and just leave, and go where they can interact without the UI tripping them up, which is what you're seeing in twitter's stats

Oh yes, the typing something into the big box and publishing it part is obvious, but that's part of my problem.

The interface seems Byzantine to me in general. As long as I'm just reading, I do the two or three things I know how to do and leave the rest of it be. When I think about actually posting something, though, the stakes are higher (since if I do something dumb it will now be public), and that pre-existing general discomfort causes me to back down.

I'm sure I'd feel the same way about a power tool that had lots of complicated switches and might kill me.

you would think a VC - out of the average person out there - would, you know, kinda sorta pay attention to the numbers, maybe?

but it seems they just throw stacks of bills at targets and hope that one of them sticks

you would think a non VC - compared to a seasoned professional with a great track record - would, you know, kinda sorta pay attention to what the seasoned professional says, maybe?

But it seems they just throw out unthoughtful comments and hope that someone falls for it.

If you're a celebrity, its a must-use product.

If you're a normal person, nobody cares about you on Twitter. You get virtually no feedback on the content you produce. It's a one sided tool for following, not sharing or creating.

This is it, Twitter is the best ad model and mechanism of the modern day internet. It's your 15 second commercial break of the web.

And it's a bad product for following. I didn't see any of the NBA player tweets that he mentioned. I didn't know they existed before this article. And it's something I would be interested in, I just wasn't on Twitter in the few seconds where that topic was relevant.

ESPN published an article the day after with about 10-12 tweets surrounding the victory. You didn't need to be on Twitter to see it, just on ESPN the day after to realize what you missed.

But Twitter didn't capture that economic value -- ESPN did.

But Twitter created the value -- and that is the twitter contradiction.

You didn't see them, I don't even know them.

Would celebrities love it as much if they had to pay to use it as their publicity platform? Lots of people are using Twitter for free and gaining from it. Except the people actually running the service don't appear to gain as much.

That hasn't been my experience. I've organized events in Chicago purely from Twitter.

You are arguably internet famous.

If that's a thing, then we're all famous, and famous doesn't mean anything.

Is there any media in which a random person can shout content out into the void and expect immediate uptake?

You have 16K followers, you're not a normal person.

> Is there any media in which a random person can shout content out into the void and expect immediate uptake?

Not into the void, no. But that's not how other social media platforms work, only Twitter.

I have that many followers because I'm noisy, have been on Twitter for a long time, and very occasionally post original content to Twitter before I post them elsewhere. Patrick has more followers than I do; how'd he get there? Blog posts and Bingo Card Creator.

It's true that if you're LeBron James everyone will pay attention to you instantly, and if you're a random programmer it will take an investment of time and energy to get anyone to pay attention to you at all, but that doesn't seem like a flaw in the platform so much as a description of how the world works.

It's a flaw in the respect that if Twitter wants people to use it, it shouldn't take the amount of effort you've put into it to be noticed. I mean, I feel like I've put a lot of effort into it and I only have 600 followers.

Think about it like this. How long does a typical tweet live "above the fold" (where the user doesn't have to scroll down to see it)? It varies of course depending on how many people you follow and how frequently those people tweet. But on average the stream moves pretty fast, right?

Let's say, for the sake of discussion, it lasts 10 seconds. I'd be willing to bet the average is much lower than that, but whatever. You, tptacek, tweet something and you have 16,000 people who MIGHT see that within that 10 second window. The typical person with 50 followers or less needs one of their 50 followers to be looking at Twitter within that 10 second window... or their Tweet will never even be read by anyone, let alone commented on.

Don't you at least see how that leads to a negative-feedback loop that makes people not want to use the platform?

Well, right there you're missing an insight into how to use Twitter effectively. If you're trying to communicate something important, where you want uptake, you need to broadcast it repeatedly; the trick then is to find ways to do that without annoying your followers too much.

Most of my Twitter posts are hoping for serendipity; like at best, someone generating a funny reply to me. But if I want to set the date/location for the next ChiSec post, I'll post multiple times per day.

Right, using Twitter is a lot of work. This is the complaint; it shouldn't be :)

I agree with all your points. Maybe Thomas' "repeat yourself" suggestion makes Twitter more like 24-hour news. If you don't have the interest or resources to run your own brand channel, just follow as you watch TV? If you do, go for it.

> that doesn't seem like a flaw in the platform so much as a description of how the world works

I think that is the flaw and issue that troubles Twitter most today. You shouldn't need to 'prime the pump' per se with activity because one day in the future you may want to use it for real. Especially a social media pump where one accident, typo, bad joke may ruin your life (I admit this is a reach, but certainly possible). This flaw make it mainly useless for the common man.

It is how the world works, but it makes Twitter almost useless for 99% of it's users.

So how should Twitter work so that it doesn't have this problem?

That's the billion dollar answer that Twitter is looking for as we speak. A way to tune your incoming stream and to get your posts in front of eyes that matter is the answer, but how I have no clue. I don't know if Twitter tunes their stream like Facebook does their timeline, but something along the lines of that may help (without subscribing to specific hashtags).

I honestly don't know if its the 'right' answer for Twitter's survivability. I've always felt Twitter was a more evolved advertising medium, and they should pursue building out that product. It's in essence a 30 second commercial, in between interesting content for the user, and is why I view it as best used by celebrities.

> Patrick has more followers than I do; how'd he get there? Blog posts and Bingo Card Creator.

In other words, because he too is Internet Famous.

Facebook, for one.

The audience is definitely different, for sure. But if I post a question or thought to Facebook, I'm way more likely to get some response and an interesting conversation. Granted, it's just within my friend base, but if anything that just proves the point that actually posting to Twitter is a futile exercise for the "average user".

I think it can be useful if you have the interest or means to run it as your personal brand channel, and have clout/followers. You personally likely have the followers or interest to do that.

But you can have 200-1,000 followers, tweet something you feel is interesting, and get nothing in response. No replies, no retweets, barely clickthroughs on a link. It can feel like a wasteland.

If it feels like a wasteland trying to participate when you have 800ish followers, it must be seriously demotivating when you've just joined.

I think following can be hugely valuable though. Just look at this tête a tête between a number of angel investors: https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/704310775448510464?s=09

Where else are you going to see this kind of discussion in public where you can take notes and/or jump in?

Right, exactly- Twitter has always been a circle jerk, the people who use it are the large investors, celebrities, politicians and in general moneyed people, which leads them to think that twitter is valuable, since they "use it themselves" and "all their friends use it". These people are somewhat detached from reality.

But the advertising money and growth is in the massive numbers of ordinary people that click on ads, including those Snapchat and Instagram users that Twitter is actually loosing.

Access to what "large investors, celebrities, politicians and in general moneyed people" are thinking and discussing has some value, no?

That is redundant- 80% is already covered by the media however

I think there's value in Twitter being a primary source, but I guess YMMV.

If you don't watch news on TV, or don't read newspapers, social media is usually a key source for you. The redundancy is irrelevant.

Yeah, Twitter's got tons of potential. It did a lot to realize that potential back during the Arab Spring, when it was used as the primary communications platform among activists. Twitter was proud of that, being such a huge part of social and political progress.

But that's not the Twitter of today. Now I more often read about how they've censored this or that. A trending hashtag that they disagree with will be removed from the trend list. Political activists that Twitter disagrees with will see their accounts de-verified or even outright banned.

They used to champion freedom of speech, now they are one of the internet's most prolific censors. To me, that is the Twitter Contradiction.

This is something that I hope DeRay McKesson can rectify now that he is part of Twitter's board.

I would argue that Twitter's potential is realized every time someone posts frontline reportage on it. Every time someone captures police brutality and spreads awareness via tweeting, that is the power of Twitter. It can be an incredibly empowering platform. It definitely still is the backbone for a lot of activists and organizing today

riiiiight, beyond cherry picked anecdotal evidence, I guess that explains the MAU numbers, because errrybody is on twitter twatting away incessantly

twitter was an interesting novelty a few years ago but you can't sustain a worldclass communication platform when the user can't figure out how to use it effectively or how to keep track of and follow conversations

when the average user has to become a developer or a UI expert in your own freakish cult of UI to be able to use your product... well, don't be surprised when they leave in a confused herd

this isn't rocket science, old fashioned bboards and forums up to now have this stuff figured out

but twitter came along and said, F* that! what we need are MODAL windows out the yin-yang to confuse the hell out of each and every user until they leave and go use something with better UI

Think the real contradiction is.. that something so valuable is something that is so hard to monitize.

From the comments section on avc.com:

"Twitter isn't a social network. It's a real-time publishing engine and consumer-customizable distribution network."

I couldn't agree more. For me it's a news reader and occasionally a content marketing channel.

Twitter is like "RSS for the rest of us." I've long wondered whether Twitter could have grown into a more approachable Google Reader product. When major news services are tweeting links to their articles even though they need to use unprofessional tweet-speak, then you know there is value here for publishers to reach readers.

This highlights my biggest complaint about twitter. I use it largely as your quote describes, to get publish events from people/organizations I'm interested in. In short, I use it like a modern RSS feed. The problem is that a whole bunch of people see twitter as something different, including twitter if their plan to increase the tweet limit to 10,000 happens. Some use it as a commenting system. Some use it as a medium (think tweet storms), etc.

And this leaves me with the question, what is twitter trying to be? I honestly can't figure it out, and that's my issue with twitter.

AFAIK, the 10k limit change is intended to enable a publisher to include their content (article, etc) in an expanded version of their tweet. So instead of you clicking a headline in your RSS feed and getting the story, you'd hit the tweet and get the story.

Yes, Twitter absolutely is and will continue to be (for the near future) a very important part of the online ecosystem.

But. With every change to put more ads in the faces of users, every change to control the feed and get rid of the real-time nature of it, Twitter is killing itself. Once Twitter moves to a fully-controlled feed model, Mr. Wilson will no longer see those tweets from LeBron and DeMar and Kristaps in real-time, because his feed will be showing him stuff from an hour ago that is "hot" or that is sponsored or otherwise generates money for Twitter. Something with autoplaying video from a "sponsored submitter". Something without clickable links so it won't take you out of the Twitter sandbox.

There's a stench of death about Twitter. It's not dead, definitely not. But its owners are clearly intent on killing it.

That aroma is real and it's only getting stronger.

Twitter have a problem with trolls and noise for more popular users, but it's still compelling enough for someone like Paul Graham to publish tweets like this and continue using the platform: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/703705844614094848 and, as the article states, for the popular and the notable to use it as a broadcast platform and others to use it as a way of consuming the zeitgeist.

I think the replies to that pg tweet are the perfect distillation of all that is glorious and depressing about twitter - an open conversation with everyone in the world leads to repeated questions from the crowd punctuated by spam and trolls, and amidst the cacophony serendipitous discoveries and some interesting responses, for there is in twitter all that life can afford.

The kids all use Insa and Snapchat, but the vast majority of people use Twitter to disseminate / find information and written content. Snapchat and Instagram are both more intended as "social networks" in its purest definition while Twitter (and FB to a degree) is a social network more geared towards written content and more in-depth conversations relating to this written content.

I sometimes feel like Twitter is morphing to where the PR flacks come to say something. Which perhaps is good enough. I don't follow any of the a16z partners on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.

Everyone knows it's true.

No matter how well-meaning or in how much sincerity this post was written, these guys have a vested interest.

Once (or IF) Twitter goes 15-40% over it's original IPO price again, these guys will cash out and forget what Twitter ever was.

At the moment I'm writing this, the very first line of the post is:

>So everyone around here knows I’m bullish on Twitter and we own a lot of stock. So take all of this in that context please.

Twitter isn't going away. But will it make money in the same way that, for example, buying $10 billion of real estate and renting it out would make money?

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