Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

This (and the original post[0]) sum up how I feel about Twitter. Every few months (since joining in 2009), I jump on and attempt to curate my feed to only get stuff I care about. I stick around for a few weeks, then get overwhelmed by the deluge. So I constantly curate and trim and it all becomes very tiresome.

I want Twitter to be a feed of news and opinions from organisations and people I care about, but it is far too hard to jump in and see how a conversation started or evolved. It is far too hard to filter out the noise.

Honestly, my RSS feeds give me everything I need and they've been going strong for over 10 years. Sprinkle in a bit of Apple News to fill in the blanks and Twitter quickly finds itself in the "too hard" basket.

The financial state of Twitter highlighted by this article is mind-blowing. How on earth have costs crept up so much with no meaningful improvement in product? As a very astute tech-savvy person, I cannot see anything that Twitter has done in years that have made it better. That stands in stark contrast to Facebook.

I'm sad about this because Twitter has been such an integral part of the modern internet, in democratising information. It's role in the Arab Spring alone was world-changing. It's a pity it hasn't been able to harness this.

[0]http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twi...

The Arab Spring thing is hyperbole to the hilt.

If anything, Facebook and Twitter acted as pacifiers. While people could use them, they stayed inside rather than get involved in the streets.

Only when the authorities cut the connection did shit hit the fan, as the masses ventured outside to keep up what was happening.

Thinking about it, i suspect Twitter was an artifact of the US mobile market. It provided a way to do mass texts at a low cost.

But as people moved to smartphones and push IM platforms, twitter's reason to exist kinda evaporated.

On top of that they had basically handed the task of innovating over to third parties via their APIs.

I still recall seeing people use Tweetdeck on desktop Windows with multiple columns set up on different topics, hashtags, and people during large events. This to allow them to track the full breath of what was happening at a glance.

Crazy thing is that Twitter did integrate the "column" concept into their service, via lists. But neither their site nor their apps allow us to access those lists in any way similar to Tweetdeck. In contrast, most third party clients will support a column view these days.

a) twitter's reason to exist is as a communication system where the primary mode is individual > public, in short form. No other communication platform exists that has those characteristics. The web is the next closest thing, but the upstart costs and knowledge required to present information on the web are greater, and the expertise needed to make your content discoverable (SEO) is higher. Blogging services get close as well, but I think the short form is important because it both decreases the barrier to entry (simplicity and low threshold), and democratizes the communication itself—my tweet looks the same and has the same limits and capabilities as CNN's tweet, or the POTUS's tweet. There's something to that.

However, it takes far too long to really understand the value of the service—took me several years before I really "got" it and my curated feed was something I actually enjoyed reading and participating in.

Third, I don't believe twitter understands the value I described above. They've made no meaningful progress in line with that value in their product that would indicate they understand it or are interested in increasing the value, or even preserving it.

b) Twitter acquired Tweetdeck, to their credit, and it still works for exactly what you describe. They really should have innovated on lists more in the actual product, though, completely agree.

> However, it takes far too long to really understand the value of the service—took me several years before I really "got" it and my curated feed was something I actually enjoyed reading and participating in.

This for me, as I've mentioned before on HN, is the main reason that Twitter is a terrible service and losing so much money. The users (especially new users) have to invest far too much of their own time curating their feed in order to make the information Twitter provides enjoyable/useful, hell, perhaps even fun.

Contrast this with Reddit, Facebook or any other social media platform. The heavy lifting is done for you. You create an account and a large amount of interesting, neatly categorised and useful information is curated for you according to your tastes. These websites are instantly sticky, and keep their users coming back for more.

If Twitter can't get something as straightforward as a fucking onboarding user experience right, I dread to think what else lives under the hood that is a festering pile of dog shit.

Add to this that a large amount of the Tweets being generated these days are automated and you've basically got a platform of bots talking to one another, with no value for us humans who aren't prepared to spend half a day curating their twitter feed.

Very soon Jack and his shareholders are going to own 100% of nothing unless some drastic changes are made to the Twitter platform.

>But as people moved to smartphones and push IM platforms, twitter's reason to exist kinda evaporated.

Huh? Did you read the articles? Can you explain how this jives with the massive increases in revenue?

Reason to exist != mindshare.

By that time, big names and whatsnot was on Twitter and you have snowball effect going. And you can observe how the shift goes from sms backed to web and app backed.

But once you mostly interact via web and app, the whole thing about 140 characters goes out the window and you basically turn into a cramped "facebook" (or perhaps and RSS feed).

At the same time the main innovation was not happening at twitter hq, but in third party apps (Tweetdeck etc) that allowed people more control over just what part of the stream they wanted to pay attention to.

Twitter is effectively coasting.

The revenue comes from investors. A lot of those investors are saying the same thing you are: "Look at all this revenue, they must be doing well!" For those people it's a closed cycle: investors see revenue increase and invest because they see revenue increase, other investors see revenue increase and invest because they see revenue increase.

But this isn't a sustainable business, it's basically an unintentional pyramid scam. Businesses need to make a profit in order for people to receive a return on investment, and Twitter has never, not once, ever made a profit.

What do you mean the revenue comes from investors? That is by definition investment, not revenue.

What the heck? The only thing accurate in this post is that Twitter has not yet made a quarterly profit... The rest is pure nonsense, most of it being quite malicious, and some being uneducated misconceptions.

Investment is not revenue. Their revenue comes from advertising.

Businesses do not need to make a profit in order for people to receive a return on investment. People will always be willing to invest in a company that shows that it may have good growth in the future. Costs can be cut at any time, resulting in an easy profit. The investors care more about growth than profit, as it is a young company.

It's really not ok to accuse people of scams without any evidence just because you don't understand how businesses work.

Regarding the original piece, I felt it's a mistake for the writer to go, 'well I used the timeline years ago and the timeline looks the same in 2016.' They built out a major advertising and metrics system in the meantime that's keeping them afloat with billions of dollars.

That said, their product execution has definitely been lacking to say the least. There seems to be some sort of mis-management that is aborting a lot of products and work they're doing internally. For example, the new 'user curated Moments' thing is a good step but they had exactly that feature, called something like custom timelines or collections, many years ago but let it languish. The new algorithmic timeline is exactly similar in some respects to their Discover tab from many years ago. It seems like the product ideas and engineering talent is there, but something's slowing them down...

I would say maybe it's 'too many execs' but then without those execs building relationships maybe we wouldn't see so many Tweets on TV and have governments all over the world using Twitter. It's all very complicated, but yes the gist does seem to be "there are more people at the company than needed."

As somebody that actively campaigns for better cycle infrastructure in the UK, twitter has been phenomenally valuable, enabling me to establish connections with thought leaders in the UK and even, more vitally, from around the world. It has also enabled the communication of my own ideas nationally. Particularly this https://cyclebath.org.uk/map/ which has resulted in myself being asked to do workshops at conferences.

More importantly, twitter has evolved my thinking on urban design, housing developments, road design, and active travel/transport and am considered a bit of an 'expert' locally. I'm now looking at standing in local elections to become a councillor, with the ambition of becoming Cabinet Member for Transport and

I am aware I am standing in a big echo chamber and have crafted my twitter account to facilitate expanding my thinking in areas that I have a passion for.

Once in a while, I even tweet a picture of cats.

https://twitter.com/awjre

Yeah, that's one of the major benefits—it really can bring people together around specific topics, and democratizes and enables communication between people of all levels. I've connected with and formed relationships with experts via twitter to the point where we've met at conferences or talks and been able to strike up a conversation based on our latest twitter discussion; they knew who I was and were interested in talking to me. Not sure how I would have done that otherwise.

You're right it's an echo chamber, but echo chambers can help you be heard...

But not necessarily heard by people outside the echo chamber.

That's okay, I wouldn't be heard by them anyway :-)

Folks unironically using the term "thought leader" are one of the reasons people dislike Twitter...

You'd be surprised. In transport, urban planning, and architecture this really does exist e.g. https://twitter.com/BrentToderian

Even within IT we have people that many people look to for leadership. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

What has worked well for me is creating constant churn in who you're following: follow anybody that you come across in retweets or suggestions if you think they might be interesting. Then be ruthless to unfollow anybody when you see the (1st or 2nd) tweet you don't care about.

Sounds like a lot of work to me for little in the way of value. I don't understand why Twitter isn't doing more of this automatically for its users.

> That stands in stark contrast to Facebook.

Although I agree that Facebook might have changed more than Twitter I'm wondering myself the same for them. I use Facebook since 2008 or so, and the changes/improvements were very marginally for me. The biggest thing was timeline (already long ago). Since then I only discovered minor stuff ( like "yay, after several years I can finally select emojis in the chat bar", self-playing videos, different like-types, after years finally another search field, ...), but nothing which really answers why Facebook needs that amount and growth of engineers from a pure user perspective.

do you read any of the redef mixes?

https://redef.com/channel/media/feed https://redef.com/channel/media/mix

https://redef.com/channel/tech/feed

Twitters role in the Arab Spring and its new(ish) Saudi investors are not a coincidence.

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