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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

Does Twitter have to be Facebook to not be "fucked"?

I don't understand these statements that "Twitter is fucked". Twitter could improve filtering and safety but if it never changed I'd probably still get my news from it for the rest of my life. I just can't think of a better app for my use cases. I often like Twitter Moments, like something funny or some pop culture stuff I wouldn't have picked up on.

Every time there is breaking news Twitter carries it first.

I don't want longer tweets. That's what URL's are for. If you want to discuss really distill your thoughts and thread them. I'm on here to scan for stuff that lights up my brain not have an Op-Ed shoved in my face taking up the whole screen.

I just don't understand. I love twitter.

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The main reason Twitter is screwed, isn't that they don't have a product people like. So what if Pokemon Go has more daily users? It's not really the same type of product.

Twitter can be successful, at the same type that Pokemon, Facebook and other are successful. These companies aren't mutually exclusive.

The reason Twitter is screwed is because they created a popular product and absolutely no idea on to make money on it. Just freaking charge the users $10 per year after the first year and $250 for business accounts and be done with it. If people truly love Twitter, as much as they claim, it shouldn't be a problem.

While I would have no problem paying $10 for a year of Twitter, I think it would kill it.

For a brief moment, I thought Google had a chance with Google+. The discussion model is better, the moderation tools are better, but it just doesn't have the users. I wonder if they had launched with a read/write API and good developer libraries, would Google+ have achieved critical mass? I'd still love to see Google try this since they really have nothing to lose at this point.

The marketing was all wrong. The rate at which Google admitted new users to the platform left many potential users feeling alienated. It took several days for me to get an invite and I'm pretty saavy.

When they launched all the talk was focused on the social network. The focus should have been on the primary product which is that they introduced an account system. The social network just simply came with it for free. You could use it or not use it.

Google accounts meant you no longer needed to use your Gmail accounts to sign up for Google services.

Could bind everything, Gmail, any other Google services all to the same Google account. When Google then pushed to get people onto the new accounts system people thought Google was trying to shove the social network down their throats.

The social network again, though was secondary to the account system. Google+ likely would have been better received had people been properly informed on the benefits of creating a Google account.

Google accounts actually came out several years before Google+. I remember that Google already had a unified account system across all products before I started working for them; I think they rolled it out in 2008. Google+ didn't launch as a destination site until 2011.

As far as I can remember Google services required a Gmail account before Google+. Here is Schmidt commenting about the release of Google+ as an identity service.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/08/29/googles-e...

My point is that Google's had a unified login system across all products (except legacy Blogger and YouTube accounts) since at least 2008. It doesn't really make sense to call it a GMail account - GMail was one of the services that it gave you access to, but it also was your account for AdWords, Analytics, Google Voice, Blogger, Reader, Docs, etc. You can find references to it on the web from 2009 onwards, as well as reports that the Chinese hacked it in 2010:

http://blogoscoped.com/forum/164385.html

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2517360/security0/repor...

The "G+ is just an identity layer on top of Google" was a common soundbite reported by executives at the time, and perhaps they even believed it, but my engineers-level view as someone who worked with the G+ codebase was that this was mostly marketing speak to differentiate us from Facebook and deflect criticism of "Well, if G+ is a new social network, why would I use it over Facebook?" By saying it's the identity layer for Google, they can then say "Well, you use Google already, this is just the social layer that ties all Google products together." On a technical level a "G+ account" was just a bit set in your Gaia record that indicated whether you had opted in to G+ features.

Google fucked it up by hogtying everything from the Play store to Youtube to that G+ account. Thus if you violated the G+ TOS you suddenly found yourself locked out of everything the account tied to.

Then again, the guy responsible for the mess was an ex-MS exec that continued the mentality of mentally tying his fief with everything else. Sadly Google is taking forever to untangle the knot (likely because it is unsexy maintenance work).

> I don't want longer tweets. That's what URL's are for.

This right here.

Medium, PostHaven, Wordpress, blog services, etc. All of those products exist for an extended thought. I always believed that where Twitter excels is in micro-sharing/blogging.

I am not willing to read, let alone comment on a 500+ word Facebook status post. But I'm certainly willing to enjoy/participate in a discourse over a 160 character thought.

If I am in the 500+ word reading mood, I goto Medium or PostHaven or the equivalent blog-platform. Where there's a forum, there's an audience. And Twitter's quick digestible tweets cultivates an insane amount of diverse discourse.

Sure, there's harassment. Sure there's spam. But there's a lot of gems on Twitter.

The tension is that Twitter wants to be both a place for both news in the moment and for actual conversations. It's fine for the former but terrible at the latter. That itself isn't terrible -- they could just drop or de-emphasize conversation functions and call it a day. But Twitter is a public company that, rightly or wrongly, feels the need to boost engagement and you don't get great numbers if your users only log in when something big and important is happening.

They could have gotten the conversation right when they introduced the quote system (put a link to the tweet you are responding to and the client/site will embed the tweet body inside yours), but instead managed to break the existing system they had where a client could include a tweet id number to indicate what tweet someone was replying to when using @username.

End result is that rather than have the potential to build a conversation chain, readers have to manually drill the "tree".

Never mind that they never implemented support for merged SMS (introduced all the way back in the 90s!), so you are constantly stuck at 140 characters.

All in all it is a quintessential US company with the classic US mobile network blinders firmly fitted.

People love to hate Facebook and Twitter, but they ain't going anywhere. The service they provide is too useful, and after so many years they are ingrained in people's social lives.

Exactly. They fill a need. These Monday morning quarterbacks should march up to sand hill with a prototype and build their own. Leave my twitter alone.

Well the actual quarterbacks, in the form of its owners, are selling. Today it's down 14%. It's lost 1/2 its value in 12 months. It's not profitable.

Now maybe they just haven't discovered, or innovated, a business model that'll at least stop them from taking on more water. Nevertheless, I'm curious how much it's worth to you, in dollars, per day, per month or per year. Because $0 isn't working, clearly.

Exactly, people in the tech world just have to get rid of their own unrealistic expectations of infinite growth - which doesn't exist anywhere else either. Twitter may be useful for some people. For others like me, it's as pointless as Facebook.

As far as I'm concerned, the only useful service Facebook provides is event scheduling. I don't have a Twitter account. Most of the "needs" they fulfill are either entirely imaginary, or aren't fulfilled in any sensible way. (I.e. the whole notion of "staying in touch" with people via Facebook is a sham. It's more of a simulation of staying in touch.)

If you use popularity as the main measure of usefulness then yellow press is useful too.

I'm feeling the exact same feelings. All Facebook seems to provide anymore is a way of tracking your friends, not engaging or socializing with them. The platform is engineered to maximize clicks, not foster meaningful social interactions.

I'm just waiting for the rest of the world to realize this so I can dump Facebook Messenger without looking like an idiot.

Facebook is profitable, Twitter isn't.

But you're right, just perhaps not in the way you mean, Twitter isn't going anywhere. $11 billion market cap is nothing to sneeze at, however it's lost about that much value in one year. So is it a going concern? Sure it'll probably still be here in a year, but my confidence level beyond 12 months is weak at best. Five years? shrug 50/50. If it's not profitable, how does it continue to function at a certain point? At what point is it functionally on life support?

agree. all these "fixes" are to change what twitter is. twitter is a short-form, _immediate_ publishing platform. it's great for what's happening _now_. i don't want to read long-form pieces that took 2 days of editing.

i think moments and periscope are good steps. not perfect, but they emphasize _now_.

There's a big spectrum in-between an essay that took two days to write and a tweet. Hacker News is a good example of messages that are long enough to say something useful and short enough to not require any commitment by the reader.

I dislike the way the article uses the word "violence". Nothing that happens on Twitter is violent. The definition of violence right from a Google search for "define:violence" is

behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something

Nonetheless, the author articulates the reasons I do not use Twitter myself. The amount of drama that site creates seems, to a non-user, to be far in excess of the amount of insight it generates. I have never heard of a really great conversation or unique, insightful idea emerging on Twitter. I have heard, a lot, about idiotic fights that escalate into real world problems. I agree that the 140 character limit is the cause of such problems.

Yep.

I can understand that he wants to make a distinction between aggressive word usage, and non-aggressive. But calling it "violence" is hyperbolic, and dangerous to free speech.

Threats of and exhortations to violence are universally considered unprotected by free speech. So people who dislike other peoples speech have an incentive to call it "violence".

"Mental anguish" and "harassment" (which is also a a crime, and not protected) are a much better terms for things that are not a threat of actual physical violence. However, trying to dismiss all of this as simply hyperbole is... well... dismissive. See http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-of-hara... This is a woman who gets vile harassment and actual death threats for doing academic critiques of video games.

Let's be honest here. These tweets aren't a discourse. It's a mob.

A death threat is a threat of violence in the tradtional sense. It might not be violence, but it sure as hell is wrong, illegal, and not protected free speech.

I feel a more accurate way to put it would be that Twitter the $11b, 4,000 employee juggernaut is fucked, but Twitter the niche, 100 employee, 100 million dollar site for news junkies still has a chance

Time to pivot.

I agree. The entirety of the linked article is self-righteous and vapid. In fact, it probably could have been summarized in 140 characters.

This guy speaks for me. I read this piece thinking that all the reasons he thinks Twitter sucks (minus the harassment issue) are all the reasons I like it.

You have to manage Facebook. Twitter is just a way to convey thoughts and ideas, occasionally with things turning into a discussion. That is an important service with a definite need that Facebook has never filled.

I don't think it needs to be Facebook to not be fucked, but I agree with OP that it could change it's user metrics to better affect behavior. Maybe similar to rep here on ycombinator.com where you get downvoted by the community if you are an ass or not adding productively to the conversation. Combining rep with privileges like stackoverflow.com where a user can't DM until they hit a certain rep, or can't cause a notification on other's devices when they tweet would curtail sock-puppeting and other trollish behavior that plagues Twitter.

As for up to date news, I follow Google's top 10 searches in Feedly (where I follow hundreds of sites) and it works as a pretty decent up-to-date top news trend that gets updated every hour or so. I can appreciate if every hour or so is too slow for some folks though. I'm not in media, and don't really care if Rihanna fell of the stage a few minutes ago during her concert, but I totally get it if others do.

Googles news is based on typical journo sites mostly. Twitter provides unfiltered live on-scene coverage and commentary, statements by police often are Tweeted as the press conferences are happening or in lieu of them. Ever since Sully landed a plane in the Hudson news on Twitter has just been a different beast and I love it. Nothing else is "good enough" for me.

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