Wall Street Is Giving Up On Twitter
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
Which means that different people in different communities choose different communication tools for reasons that are not obvious.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble Twitter: https://twitter.com/Scobleizer
Of note for Scoble is that there's much more room to talk on Facebook than twitter. I wonder if that's a similar reason that Torvalds uses G+
I think that may be my biggest issue with G+ (despite so few people using it)... they keep changing it. Facebook evolves much more slowly, so it's much more predictable and comfortable to the distracted and comfort-seeking social media user like myself. G+ is constantly experimenting and I can't easily pin down exactly what it is...
Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing.
Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas.
OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there.
In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends.
Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent.
And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation.
If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
I didn't know Tim O'Reilly was on G+ but ALL these recent posts are pop-politics and ugly at that! I thought you were referring to all Google services being tied in.
I don't spend too much time in Plus. Brin has had a lot of political stuff, recently, although he's a bit mixed and individual in his opinions and they do tend to tie back to points modeled in his sci-fi writing.
O'Reilly I see less frequently. I suppose he's getting more "elder statesman", too.
Torvalds actually addresses some tech stuff. Though he has personal stuff, too -- he does not use it as a "tech blog".
Reminds me some of Tim Bray's "Ongoing" blog -- self-hosted -- that I haven't been to in a while. A personal take, on both tech and other stuff in his life. Whatever the topic, informed, intelligent, and thoughtful. Creative, too.
I don't think Plus is in any kind of a steady state. Even what I wrote about, may well be in decline. Maybe it was better a few years ago.
Regardless, this year's politics have really shocked a lot of people, and this is spilling over into erstwhile non-political venues.
Twitter might have value, but no route to profitability.
Edit: Y'all are super salty about Twitter falling apart. Sad!
You can be the best platform in the world, and if you don't make money, you're going under.
Massive mailing list. Web enabled. Trivial cost. Deep links possible to share. EDIT: And more than 160 characters! Hallelujah! A format an actual discussion can take place in.
I compare the two because I'm old, tech is cyclic, and everyone reinvents the wheel. Twitter is, clearly, not special, and can't justify its valuation.
Just joking around. But, not completely. The value you speak of is really the ability to spend your time on something potentially more worthwhile. People forget social media has an opportunity cost.
You just aren't going to ever have that with a mailing list. If you could we would be doing it.
Because "current news" are so interesting/relevant/important to one's everyday life and/or politics?
It's mostly a bunch of noise -- with plenty of BS and lies on top.
If you want to know what's happening, better read a "not instant", more analysis/depth outlet.
I read WaPo and the NYT for that, Twitter is for breaking news and info from reporters real-time when they are questioning folks.
That said, is this page representative of what you're talking about or am I missing a better UI? http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2017-February/threa...
Obviously it could be styled differently/"better" for mass consumption, but that aside, it still exposes private emails and full names of the participants.
And I think the character limit is part of what makes it valuable...I don't really want to read an essay, the forced concision is great for a lot of the use cases. And getting back to Elon, he probably doesn't want to engage in deep discussion with all those randoms, he wants to drop a juicy tidbit, build excitement and let the discussion happen elsewhere. When he has something more to say, he writes a blog post and tweets a link.
I'm actually not defending Twitter's valuation or business prospects, just the value or uniqueness of the service relative to something like a mailing list. I'm still not convinced they're so similar.
People have to sign up for a mailing list; and people who aren't signed up generally don't get your content. This is a stark contrast with Twitter, where content is shared at a significantly higher rate. I don't necessarily have to subscribe to a certain source to get content from them, if someone in my network decides to share that content. When was the last time you received a message that was sent over a mailing list that someone forwarded to your inbox?
I don't follow Elon Musk, but if he puts out an important tweet someone I follow will retweet him putting his content in my feed. An Elon tweet with some big announcement easily reaches an audience of millions. No mailing list has that kind of reach.
I don't have the time or energy to consume the firehose that my Twitter feed has become - so I just don't use it anymore.
More like broadcast to their fans.
Which is something of a strength and weakness of Twitter. It can be used for conversations but the 140 character limit makes it tough. As a result, Twitter is generally best used for people who are broadcasting things to a group of interested followers. If that doesn't describe you (either as a follower or a followee) then you're probably not going to find Twitter very useful.
Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.
I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right?
Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.
http://www.sandstormgold.com/_resources/policies/SSL_Stock_T...
https://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Definition_of_...
The most direct version is here:
> In 1983, Switzer was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an alleged civil violation of the laws prohibiting "insider trading" of securities. He defended himself as having innocently overheard the information while lounging on the bleacher behind some corporate insiders—at a stadium where Switzer was watching his elder son compete in a track meet. The case was tried in Oklahoma City United States District Court (before a special U.S. District Judge appointed from Kansas). The case was dismissed at the conclusion of the Government's case for its failure to demonstrate that there had been any purposeful disclosure to Switzer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Switzer#After_coaching
https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/1986/062086grundfest.pdf#pag...
Do you have a source that says otherwise?
The situation is even more clear for Twitter. If I'm a marine biologist making the world's most detailed measurements of the ocean, I can clearly use this info to buy or sell stock in a fishing company, even if I don't release that info publicly. Likewise, I can sell that info to someone else who makes the trades.
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
Can you talk more about this? I was always under the impression that newspapers and newsrooms were always for-profit enterprises.
What newspapers had was a lock on the business now owned by Craigslist, with the transport and fulfillment network (newsagents and delivery vans!) being the key asset. Once that went away they were no longer businesses.
They didn't see it that way, but that's because their core business was so good they could afford to delude themselves - it didn't matter that they didn't know what they were really doing, the business model was that powerful. Google is remarkably similar in many ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrOqjS9ZyA
But trying to do a little research on it, the best I could come up with for proof is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_Access_Rule
Still a good show though.
By 1987, a number of factors - changes in ownership for the big 3 networks, upstart FOX network, the increasing importance of celebrity anchors on ratings, deregulation of media ownership laws and other factors - caused a mass shift towards looking at news as profit centers.
Ken Auletta's "Three Blind Mice" is excellent. (At least on recollection. It profoundly changed my understanding of the media when I read it 25 years ago.)
Newspapers have never had such constraints but there were laws limiting the concentration of ownership aimed at making sure people had diverse influences in any one market. For instance, TV channels could not be owned by the same company that owned a newspaper in the same market. I don't know enough off the top of my head to expand more usefully on that.
Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.
Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.
Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
Wow. I didn't even know he tweeted.
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place.
I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed.
I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
I still email links, and receive links by email, all the time ..
The President of the United States, for instance.
No. I was proposing a thought experiment. Chill out, dude.
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
I don't have this problem, but the only people that follow me are typically my friends who may be interested in the things I have to say.
One interesting comment during the debate was that many (liberal) journalists use Twitter as a side platform on which they feel comfortable voicing more personal views. While it is an acceptable practice in their circles, conservative readers often point to those tweets as evidence of liberal bias in the industry. Regardless of the professional ethical consensus, it may be a cause of distrust, and suggests a general problem of liberal journalists preaching to the choir.
A final thought as well, I think, whatever your politics, that much of the liberal bias talk from the right, especially the now unmasked far right, was simply language policing. It was an attempt to set the terms of the debate and pull the frame as far right as possible, which seemed to have been largely successful in my opinion. Thanks for the link and the comment, I'll check it out!
I've found that twitter has gotten close to replacing email for sending a message to a "stranger" (software dev, journo).
I post stuff more for myself. I get sad when my clever tweets don't get looked at, but just writing is fun too.
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
My sentiment as well, why I never got into Twitter at all.
There is no discussion possible on Twitter, as the "threads" quickly devolve into an unintelligible mess.
You say something to the public, then you're done. It's purely a channel for viral marketing (also called "push", that word says it all).
It's always been the fluff which drew the ads; the lifestyle and sports content.
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
It's an amazing way to connect, but ultimately it's a loudspeaker for loudmouths. It needs to die.
Trump doesn't do Snapchat videos. He does 3AM tweets.
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...
Last I heard numbers, it was something like 80% of the population checked Facebook at least once a week.
Here most politicians and other "influential people" will take to Facebook when they want to be heard.
From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.
Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.
I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.
I thought that the immutability of tweets is a feature, to be honest.
personally i find the editing almost as important as the content(o)
seeing what people change and when can illuminate context that would be hidden from a first thought best thought adherence
(o) http://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/yal.00049.001_...
Many would also be pissed if after they retweet something, the original tweet changes in a meaningful way.
allow respeak an immutable quality, keep the respeak as is and have a flag signaling the original underwent an edit
the interest is in more clarity and transparency
2) Charge developers for API access based on usage.
3) Incorporate some sort of single payment solution to facilitate ease of charging users for payment without users needing to give credit card details to developers (e.g. like Apple does with the AppStore).
4) Let third party developers worry about how to get users to pay by providing things of value (for various definitions of value).
You're welcome.
I really like(d) Twitter. I feel it has played a huge role in democratizing public opinion, so that I don't just create my opinion based on what media houses throw at me. For me, it narrowed the gap between so called "celebrities" and normal people. It made possible for me to interact with and get insights from people whose work I care about.
I feel so bad about the poor execution on their product side. They get free marketing - they are all over the tv, news websites etc. So many popular people use Twitter to share information. What more can they ask for?
There are so many things that Twitter could've done first just because it was in a position to like no-one else:
1. Media sharing: absolutely ridiculous experience to the point that people share images/video on some other platform and end up posting the links in tweets. Even then, for an consuming user, the browsing experience is shit. WTF twitter?
2. Content sharing: twitter as a platform has way more relevant content (URI's, first person messages etc) than any other news/media platform. What do they do with it? They do nothing. Twitter can learn so much about my interests from so many signals that I (used to!) give them - they do nothing to help me read content that interests me.
3. Live: there is no better place than twitter to potentially learn about what's happening right now. How do they facilitate live content sharing? By having a completely different app for video (periscope) which creates a fragmented user experience.
4. Fun: they had vine - they kept it as a separate app (again creating fragmentation) and eventually killed it. How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
5. Spam: for all the attention that fake news is getting right now, Twitter has been in a unique position to innovate in this area. Unfortunately, afaik, it has done nothing.
</rant>
This is definitely true. They don't at all try to get the young demographic while FB always makes small changes to keep it fun(video profile pics, reactions etc).
| The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
| Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.
- paul graham 09'
The invention of hashtags was an attempt to add adhoc pub-sub channel support (not, as they are seemingly sometimes assumed to be, a metadata/folksonomy thing or an opportunity for a pithy closing phrase.)
All this is easy to duplicate. Is any of it even patented by Twitter?
Was this true in '09? It doesn't seem like it has been true in a long time.
They should get very lean. Their platform has real value, which is why they're not disappearing in terms of use. There is also no replacement for what they provide and how they provide it, as of now.
At $2.4 - $2.6 billion in annual sales, they should be generating $600 to $800 million in net income. It's an absurdity of mismanagement that they're not. Their margins should be extremely high. At that level of net income, they can sustain a ~$20 billion market valuation and remain fully self-sustaining while they focus on growth + product.
They built Twitter as if it was going to be a juggernaut with high perpetual growth. They've been scaling back that structure very slowly, which is a mistake. They need to pull the band-aid off a lot faster, the crazy growth days are over.
If Wall Street doesn't give them a reasonable multiple on their new highly profitable structure, they should then work with perhaps a Ballmer + private equity + other insiders, to take Twitter private, where it can get out from under the Wall Street quarterly rat race.
Of course, it's easy to suggest. I have to wonder though - what could really be the need for so many expenses? Is it impractical to cut down significantly and ride the success of the tech itself and sustain it with a much smaller set of teams?
The price is set by people betting their money based on all available information INCLUDING stock analyst opinions. Any stock analyst's opinions are ALREADY factored in the price. Unless you have a reason to believe either that the market is irrational or that you have a more informed opinion, there is no more reliable prediction that you can make of future stock prices than current ones.
And remember, there are many, many, many billions of dollars looking for any market irrationality or lack of information so that investors can profit off of mistakes in current stock prices.
Twitter is an important platform for open communication.
oh? and how did they turn out for everyone?
Interesting idea, in theory. In reality, the "thought leaders" will simply move to another platform that is "free". Is Twitter markedly different than Facebook/G+/Instagram/Snapchat/email?
You are a thought leader - you'd want to have your immediate 10k followers to retweet your message to their groups.
If you absolutely needed more leverage, you'd pay for the privilege.
Twitter has a multitude of opportunities to monetize their user base. Their management has just done a poor job.
Twitter in neither a threat to anyone, nor a strong candidate for a defensive purchase [2][3][4]. The two companies are hardly comparable.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11914620 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12420732 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083975
I've been led to believe that is the exact opposite of the truth. Isn't the consensus most bullish at the top and most bearish at the bottom? Its almost self evident that a stock is most hated when it is low and most liked when it is high. That's not to say that it can't go lower and so from a short term trading perspective it might not be good, but at some point the sellers will be exhausted and shorts will have to be covered and the trend will reverse. Unless Twitter they are so broke that they are going out of business, at some point it will become a good buy.
I'm still not sure how to judge this. The stock is essentially at the same place it was last year. There was some growth through Sept, Oct (hmmm...election??) but then it came back down to the mid-teens.
At this point, the stock is trading higher than expectations, which I think could be a good thing.
I didn't know about the earnings call when somebody mentioned Twitters disastrous stock price yesterday, I took some of that to be due to Snap filing, and investors looking at the market realising that much of Twitter's revenue will be moving over to Snap. That has probably already happened, but putting an IPO out likely raises a few eyeballs.
Even though they have a lot of users and some $/sub - without the growth it won't justify the valuation multiple.
So they have to get priced more like a normal company, with normal growth rates.
Which is the 'bubble burst' that so many post-IPO companies have to face. There's a few that can keep it going, or make up for it in other ways ... but not Twitter.
I feel Snap may be in the same category: their offer at least today is somewhat nichy. My mother uses Facebook, but will never use Snapchat as it is today.
Snapchat is completely covered in sponsored content now. Unless you have dozens of people you follow, ads make up the majority of the experience.
Snapchat is in possibly a weaker situation: they are not making any money - and in order to justify their valuation, they really do have to grow for a long period of time.
I believe that Snap is 'similar to Twitter' in that Snap will not become like Facebook - i.e. 'ubiquitous and incumbent'.
I believe that Snap will likely 'hit a wall' in growth at some point.
The greater risk is that Snapchat may be a fad.
Twitter 'was a fad', but when the hype died down - they are still kind of a broadly usable tool for media, celebs - Tweets are used extensively in reporting coverage. This gives a lot of stickyness to the platform.
Snap ... is the 'zen cool' thing for 18-26 year olds ... but that could change very quickly. There's no reason that their user base can just switch to FB messenger (where everyone else is), SMS or whatever to do 'regular communication' when they are too old to be 'sharing irreverent stories'. And the 14-year-olds today, when they turn 18-ish may have some other cool thing to do.
So if we can separate the 'fad' and 'utility' parts of the platform - Facebook has a good deal of 'utility' that applies to a very broad base. Twitter has some 'utility' to a narrower base.
I'm weary that Snapchat just doesn't have the kind of 'utility' that it needs to survive after the 'fad' dies down.
That said, they have been good at innovating and 'staying cool'. A lot of brands manage to 'stay relatively cool'. They could adapt/evolve into something consistently cool, or consistently useful. Possibly. But there's nothing on the roadmap that says they would.
Which is why I think there is risk in this.
$/sub is revenue per subscriber.
$/sub, sub growth, 'cost of acquisition' of each sub, (and assumptions about margins) is what 95% of the valuation is based on.
Now that they are 'going IPO' they're not going to be judged so much on 'lofty ambitions' and 'intangible market opportunities' - they are going to be judged mostly on 'how much free cash flow' they can generate over time.
So, $/sub (minus the cost to acquire each sub) and some assumptions about operating margins gives you the how much free cash flow per customer they can expect. This is widely different on different platforms.
Sub growth tells you how many customers investors can expect over time.
Hence profits.
Obviously it's very crude, and there's a lot more to it - but that is the most essential, basic economic equation that investors will look at to determine a valuation.
Snaps $/sub right now is negative at the 'net' level - i.e. after R&D, etc. - but the key metric people will be interested in is the 'gross' revenue (and profits) per subscriber. The idea being - one day, 'R&D' costs will stop growing so much, and customer base will still grow quite a lot. R&D and Operational costs are spread over an ever increasing user base, which will put the per-subscriber net margins into the positive.
Given Twitter's utility to the rich, famous and powerful why not introduce a follower limit of say 1000?
If you want to allow more people than that to follow you then Twitter will sell you an increase in that limit.
Twitter is a perfect example of something that could have worked as a small company with moderate expectations and a tight budget. Instead they presumed that "eventually" the money would catch up to their Fortune 500 ambitions, if they could just get enough eyeballs.
Welcome to the new "real world" of the "Long Tail," Twitter. Turns out that being the #2 social network, just like being the #2 music streaming service, the #2 ride-sharing network, or the #2 search result means a big step down in importance, reach, and profit potential in the Long Tail world (and being #50 puts you in a completely different zip code altogether).
Twitter created expectations that it cannot meet.
However, I don't even think they're number 2. Depending on how you count it, that's got to be WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, or LinkedIn.
Yes but in reality they can massively scale down, layoff hundreds and be a very profitable company. How many employees do you believe it really takes to run Twitter? Maybe 100?
After they do this, someone can buy it and take it private and print money for 10 years.
The article didn't mention him. He's not even in the top 25 most followed or active people on the site. Obama had more influence as #3! And yet, as I write this, every single comment in this damn thread mentions him. [1] Enough already! This is the first time I've wanted to flag an article for its comment section rather than the article itself.
So, it's not unfair to bring him up. It's also not inherently political to do so.
The only regular exposure I have to Twitter comes from seeing articles and/or social media posts about Donald Trump's tweets.
I never use or read Twitter directly either, nor do I see any reason for me to. I only see reports about what Trump has written on Twitter.
Some folks won't be satisfied until everybody is clearly aware that they're deeply, DEEPLY unhappy with the 2016 election results.
This will continue for another three years, at which point things will change to how Candidate X is so much better, and we'll hear about Candidate X in everything. If Candidate X loses the 2020 election, expect a repeat of the current situation.
I'm sure there's a cicada analogy here somewhere.
This is not the first time a member has mentioned wanting less politics. It's perfectly legitimate to want to be able to discuss articles without having politics added to it. The current submission makes no mention of politics in general or Trump in particular. Given how much discussion of politics is going on in other threads, it's understandable to want the bar to to drag it in to be higher. How much of what is being said is new?
And not only was that poster right, at the time it was written, it is a frigging epidemic everywhere right now. On HN, on Reddit, on every platform; if the topic at hand is not tightly focused and apolitical, somebody eventually will make a derogative Trump comment.
Some of it is purely for humor. Some of it is pure snark. Some of it is virtue signalling. But almost all of it is noise, not signal.
Trump uses Twitter, therefore any topic about Twitter is about Trump by proxy, or something.
This is precisely why lots of people were saying he should give up tweeting (at least on his personal account) once he took office, and rely on formal/official channels of communication for anything important. He has demonstrated a a preference for demonizing individuals and particular businesses and institutions, and where he leads, a mob of deplorables often follows.
You complain about being tired of hearing/seeing people talking about Donald Trump all the time, so presumably you feel unable to ignore it. It seems not to have occurred to you that people who dislike Trump are even more sick of hearing about and from him. Imagine being a Mexican person and hearing yourself and your family described as 'rapists, drug dealers and criminals' on an almost daily basis for the last 18 months every time you watch the news.
When noise drowns out signal, no amount of ignoring will help.
People being passive-aggressive about politics in a non-political venue are neither changing the political system nor contributing to the venue in which they comment.
I think that's entirely the wrong metric. Obama used/uses Twitter to duplicate content that is being released as a press release, TV appearance, etc. etc.
Trump does not. His thoughts are "first on Twitter", and the combination of that plus the fact that he is the President of the United States means that he is an absolutely integral part of the Twitter story, whether you like it or not.
Edit: do flag unwarranted injections of politics, because you're right that we're not here for that either.
Given the comment score over the past few minutes, this is a contentious issue, and not one I'm willing to risk my flagging privileges (or other backend consequences like slowdowns or post throttles) for.
"Commenting substantively" about Twitter does nothing about the political flamebait that always winds up in threads about the subject, yet the only tool I have to combat it could blow up in my face.
The reason services like twitter and snapchat are so dominate is because they're so easy to use and uniform across everything. It's why everyone now prefers slack/discuss to IRC and other legacy channels (among features aswell). Typical users don't have time to research and setup software, they simply just want to use it.
I understand that there's federated signup and all that, but the second you have to explain what any of that means to a user, you've basically lost them.
On the first listed GNU site:
This is the place for you who are tired of private companies controlling your conversations and contacts and selling them for profit.
i'm in the very early stages of building a meta-social network[1] thing on top of matrix that gives you bi-directional access to gnu/social, irc, reddit, nntpchan, &c.
while I care deeply about what this statement has to say, I don't think my ideals fall in line with the average twitter user. They simply don't care about who's profiting off of it, as long as they get to announce their next vlog.
put your money where your mouth is and help us[2] fix it.
Why can't twitter charge a certain fee to official verified accounts of famous people who do use the platform to engage with their followers. And to justify their fee they can provide them with more tools at hand. I am not a very heavy twitter user but it is one social network product that has the power to do good and bad in real world.
1) Offer ad freedom. Twitter has IIRC 300M users - if only 10% of these pay 1€ a month, that's 30M a month or 360M a year. Way more than enough to keep the lights on, and maybe even enough to replace lost ad revenue.
2) Open up the app ecosystem again - allow third party clients features like DM pictures and polls. Many people are fed up with the official mobile client.
3) Donald J. Trump. About 25M people follow him, and ad slots on his account should fetch a boatload of money. Not to mention that people sign up for Twitter just to read his latest brain f.rts... these could all be "upconverted" to full-on engaging Twitter users.
Here is one survey I found, which states that ~10% of people said they would pay at least 10$ / year for ad-free Facebook: http://marketingland.com/survey-ten-percent-would-pay-at-lea...
Surveys greatly overstate such figures because it is much easier to say "yes I want to pay" than to actually hand over money. Also, I would argue that Facebook is more important for most users than Twitter (their central problem).
Even if they show ads to remaining users, most of the paying users are going to end up being avid users of the service who are probably more valuable for ads.
Not to mention most use in in native mobile apps, a further hinderance to ad blocking.
Note this is not the client filtering them out (they'd be banned in an instant) it's just that the API only returns what's actually in my timeline.
Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.
Huh? On Android I have three accounts and at least that works fine (given various exceptions, but generally it's OK). Not sure about iPhone client.
> Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.
TweetDeck is a horrible mess for multiple accounts, from a UX perspective...
Twitters problem isn't that they don't make money. They make a lot of money. Their problem is that their stock-valuation means that in the future their investors expect them to make ridiculous amounts of money, and they don't have any obvious way to get there.