Hacker News Reader

Comment by davycro | Hacker News Reader

"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics"

Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of course). They also post opinions on the latest research publications. Twitter has become my best way to stay current in medicine.

Other apps targeted for doctors have attempted this. Doximity and Figure1 are examples. But twitter has done the best job.

View on HN

That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.

As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers.

I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at super-serving your community. Is Twitter's ephemeral nature, mixed in with non-medical updates, really the best way for you to spot trends and identify useful links? If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?

It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money, or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.

Maybe research tools for long tail targeting content creators?

I could see paying for a tool that helped collect, filter and organize what the top people are saying and pain points in general.

"But it is a thing"

If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.

Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money

Thanks for explaining that to me.

That's called the "Long Tail"... individual users/customers have a niche interest, but together they form a center of gravity approximately as large as the largest use cases.

http://www.thelongtail.com/conceptual.jpg

You have to think a little differently to design for the long tail. You can't just design one consistent experience, you have to design tools that can be used in many scenarios.

Yes, I'm familiar with the long tail ;) The problem is that Twitter has proven that it's incredibly hard to monetize this kind of content at a level that the public markets demand.

The reality is Twitter has failed as a business more than anything and this is about repositioning Twitter as a business that can be monetized.

> That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.

Although it's niche, you could substitute almost anything else for 'medical' and have it work. There's an equally good and thriving literary Twitter, arts Twitter, gay Twitter, black Twitter, politics Twitter, dev Twitter.

Turns out that people like their news and sports mixed in with other ephemera anyway - it's a secret that TV networks have known for decades with late night TV and 'and finally' segments on network news.

For me the point where Twitter really lost its way is when it decided to focus on being a 'media company' and drawing attention to tweets from 'public figuresrather than finding better ways to enable people to tap into and contribute to communities that matter to them.

I think this is kind of my point, actually...

The monetization Twitter has been able to achieve from this niche content hasn't met expectations and that niche content has also seen stalled growth.

Ephemera is what makes a sport/news/politics-aligned Twitter a much more interest proposition that routes around the negatives of the product and the value proposition on that front.

> If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?

One thing that's always bugged me about twitter - its so transient. when you log on you only get a snapshot of what's happening at that moment - scrolling back through the days or weeks traffic is next to impossible because of the sheer volume of content.

But in this way, the OP of this thread is correct - Live is most definitely where twitter is king.

Yes, it's a niche but how many niches in a similar vein exist on Twitter?

What I heard davycro describe above sounds a lot like the K-12 mathematics community on Twitter dubbed the MathTwitterBlogosphere #MTBoS. It connects everyone from kindergarten teachers in France to university professors and has been a source of tremendous professional development for me over the past four years.

Are there enough other communities like us out there to be material to Twitter's business? I don't know, but the #MTBoS derives great value from having Twitter as a gathering place.

The long tail arises from niches in aggregate.

Twitter also has incredible utility in terms of the InfoSec and Quant communities. All the latest papers and exploits are posted regularly, something that exists nowhere else. It also extends across borders, I follow numerous Chinese, Italian, and Middle Eastern hackers who post code and associating write-ups regularly.

The same goes for stock traders, the network offers incredible insights.

It sounds like Twitter is the new RSS reader.

...sounds about right. At least this is how I use it.

Definitely agree with this. Figure1 is great for focused learning, but Twitter has allowed me to hear about random clinical pearls, interesting cases, the latest research, and the ensuing discussions between active clinicians.

I have seen WhatsApp being use that way in India. Closed doctor groups where lot of info (photos/info etc) gets shared/commented on.

Twitter's open communication channel might not be suited for such infoshare. Telegram/Whatsapp has potential in that area.

That's one of the reasons I built GroupTweet. To facilitate private group communication on Twitter with any number of participants that can persist through permanent Twitter accounts (instead of temporary Group DMs that are limited to 20 people).

Would love any feedback or suggestions on how it could be improved.

Happy to offer free use to anyone on this thread looking to test out the service.

You might want to check out Figure1 which is a social network for medical professionals and very twitter like but has a user base that's full of very people.

https://figure1.com/

I have. Figure1 feels too noisey and not specific to my interests. Twitter is more personal with better quality.

That was the original use case: "micro blogging". There is a case to be made for improving that interface and expanding the way people interact with Twitter for that. Curated follower lists for example.

Could you recommend 5-10 leaders in emergency medicine to follow? (I'm trying to build up a good follow list outside of my usual domains, and I find recommendation graphs to be really useful)

Depends on what content you're looking for, but off the top of my head, here's a variety of type of EM-related people/accounts. The first two are teaching resources. The rest are active (both clinically and on Twitter) clinicians or EM-focused students.

@emcrit

@epmonthly

@MDaware

@precordialthump

@seth_kelly

@mcsassymd

anything tagged #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education – often has an EM focus)

I know Seth, he's awesome.

Would you mind taking a look at the question I asked your sibling poster?

My undergrad degree's in biomedical engineering, and I've been a self-taught coder since middle school. I'm currently pursing my PhD in engineering in addition to my medical degree, and working on using computational simulations and analytics to improve our understanding of how electrical abnormalities occur in the heart. I've always been interested in startups but haven't actively been involved in one. My goal is to work in a academic setting where I do both clinical medicine and research, and hopefully help translate research work to the clinic by working with startups that are my or other people's research findings.

@EMcardiac (Badass south african doc) @EMNerd_ (Great research commentaries) @M_Lin (Program director at UCSF, posts lots of clinical pearls)

My favorites though are docs I know from away rotations and the wards. They aren't famous, but their opinions especially matter to me.

Also follow @medicalaxioms

I am intrigued by people on HN who study bio, med, etc.

Are you involved with software development in an amateur or professional capacity? Are you interested in startups? How did you find HN?

Do you have CS/Math (or related) education in addition to being a student of medicine?

Hope I'm not too intrusive ;)

Not intrusive, thank you for the question. I'm a self-taught hacker/coder. Before medical school I made a Facebook application, when those were a thing, called Quiz Monster, which had about 3 million DAU for a few years. Thankfully earned enough through ad revenue to pay for my medical education. I see myself as a clinician first, but will always be a hacker and plan to return to software after residency.

You have just described "news".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com