Ask HN: How should Twitter win back Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should Twitter win back Wall Street

5 pointserjjones20 comments

Let users pay for the service.

I'd happily pay $10/month for a 'pro' level or whatever they want to call it. I use Twitter constantly, but have always preferred third party apps - Tweetbot is by far the best.

If the pro level killed ads, increased data privacy somehow, and fully opened up every API to third party clients that would be more than worth it IMO. For example, I'm tired of Tweetbot kicking me to the mobile site to view moments.

Would you foresee the "pro" level to add in controls to minimize the "abuse" issue that Wall Street often points at?

I think that's tricky. If Twitter is perceived to be charging users to not be abused, that's obviously crappy. Paid accounts or not I think there should be better first-party options for controlling who you see and who sees you.

At the same time, if the APIs are fully open, third party clients would be able to build more powerful filtering features. In effect that would allow anyone to build entire sub communities on top of Twitter. This is starting to sound more and more like app.net...

So in essence you end up with the #channels being filtered by third parties? How would those third parties get noticed. Would Twitter offer them some kind of sub domain or special alias?

We would have Twitter the API, and Twitter the umbrella network. You might want to promote a sub group into the larger network, or you may not - similar to reddit in a way.

I imagine invite only groups, time-limited groups for concerts/conferences/sporting events, location-locked groups that you dynamically join and leave as you move around.

I may just be describing iMessage or Slack at this point.

I would definitely like the idea of being able to add a private channel whenever I wanted one. Something like #{myusername}-private-{whatever} and then I could approve or add users to the channel

Video blogging (vlogging). People don't want to type anymore, it's all about video updates. A lot of companies failed trying to offer a platform for video updates years ago (wrong timing). Thanks to Youtube, in 2017 it's the perfect year for that, look at instagram/snapchat stories. They shutdown vine which I think was the future of twitter. They should have replaced the 140 characters by a 15s video.

Twitter, if you're looking to hire someone to drive this switch, contact me.

So add "veets", video tweets

It could still be a tweet, but in a video format.

Use machine learning and limit the number of spoken characters to 140 :O

Twitter already does video really well IMO. I use video in tweets all the time, and I watch videos from my timeline all the time. Why can't they continue both?

Yes they shut down Vine, but Periscope is making some interesting moves to mimic youtube and facebook live, but with the benefit of first-party blessing in the official apps and on the web.

I'm not a big believer in live video. Viewers and content creators have to be online at the same time on the same platform. You get less traffic and zero flexibility. People end up looking at replays of a live events. This is not where the money is...

By switching %100 to videos Twitter will avoid bulling and anonymous messages/accounts. Users will have to put their faces out there. Plus it's the hottest topic in 2017... video updates. That might piss off a lot of users at first but will bring in a bunch of new sign ups. Twitter needs a real face lift.

a) 5-6 years ago, devs loved them and were building all kinds of creative software on top of their platform. Twitter got too greedy and wanted to have it all and squashed that. Don't know if they can somehow get devs to trust them again, but that was an ideal situation for them IMO that they ruined.

b) Run Twitter like a business. Focus on making profit and piss off with the social justice warrior crap. Have a system in place to report abuse? Sure, that's great and necessary. But stop blocking random accounts just because of political correctness, throttling accounts, etc. All of the engineering and design effort Twitter places on this endless virtue signaling could be dropped and their workforce could shrink and they can actually try and make money. Run it like a business, because that's what it is.

They really need to make their promoted tweets cheaper. I attached a credit card with $100.00 to spend on ADs and Twitter burned through it in a week for a few paltry 'promoted tweets' that had very little engagement or views.

Let free speech be free?

Too difficult. That means competing ideas must be compared on their merits.

Far easier to ban or throttle them. The extra time can then be spent congratulating oneself on being a platform of expression.

Too difficult? You literally don't do anything to achieve it.

I was being sarcastic.

Yes to free speech but how do they clean up the abuse and still keep it "free".

http://www.businessinsider.com/disney-twitter-acquisition-tr...

What about adding some kind of market place on their platform?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com