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Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year

2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused.

3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams

4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view

5. drop the video passion-project nonsense. you don't need to own content to use twitter alongside it. strike deals with the content providers instead where tweets are shown alongside (this is already being done) and become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor

6. improve the core product for users. group messaging, longer tweets, only show replies from people who are authenticated or two degrees away from you by default, etc. etc. (and pro accounts, if you wish)

7. let people pay to get a checkmark, and then let users pay to flair tweets they like

8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter. let them pay to use it as a platform and properly authenticate their customers on twitter

9. ditto above but for marketing

View on HN

FTFY

> 1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year

Really, is Twitter doing poorly? $2.52 billion in 2016 is more than enough revenue, I'd wager, to maintain a solid company. Twitter seem to me to have an explosive-growth mentality - spend like crazy and grow our way to success - in a post-explosive-growth reality.

Fix the cost structures, and make ~$1 billion in profit, and you have a solid company. With continued YoY growth of say 5%, and a valuation of $20 billion in the near future, about double their current $11.33B, is not out of the realm of possibility. Sure, it isn't Google or FaceBook sized, but is a $20B company in anyway failing?

I share your sentiment. They can grow slowly like most normal companies and have an amazing business.

Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly?

Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

> how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly?

My guess is less than 10,000.

50 countries with 200 persons each?

I'd say more than 10.000 in just USA alone. Even if you up it to $5 a month. Twitter is used a lot by those who use twitter.

I'd say 10,000 from businesses in the USA alone. A lot of companies use twitter as their makeshift tech support and public image. $1/month for a company is completely irrelevant to their spending.

Me. If I still used Twitter. Heck, I tweet maybe 5 times a month and I'd pay that. $1 a month is so cheap I would notice.

You'd likely notice the first time it asks you for payment.

On iOS it takes a single TouchID auth and a few message prompts to sign up for a recurring subscription - you won't ever be asked for payment again. I'm certain Android is similarly streamlined.

You must be joking.

I think you're underestimating the number of businesses who could be convinced that $12 a year is like the marketing equivalent of Pascal's Wager.

> Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

I do, yet I still think this should be experimented with. If an account I follow tends to post longer messages, I can deal with seeing only the first line of them.

I suspect the intersection of a) people who care about Twitter, b) who use twitter via sms, c) people who do not have phones that hide/abstract away multipart sms so they've got 300+ character messaging - is so small it'd be less expensive for Twitter to buy all three of them a new iPhone every 2 years instead of hold one meeting trying to solve the problem ;-)

(Note: I'm not convinced long-tweets are "the killer idea" others seem to think - like someone else put it, the reader's attention is the limited resource, not the service's ability to publish characters. I don't scroll thru Wordpress/LiveJournal/LongReads on the train or while waiting for coffee...

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message.

The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

Then charge per character and ramp it up as it gets longer.

first 140 chars are free. 141st and subsequent costs $1 ea

This makes sense, although I would keep it simple and just offer for example normal and extended messages (max 280 char) with extended costing for example $0.10-$0.50/each.

Condensing your thoughts to 140 characters takes effort. This would allow trading the effort to money. The per message fee would limit the usage of this feature, encouraging people to still keep things short and only use the extended feature when they really need it.

People already hack around this by posting images of text, or using several tweets (usually annotated with "1/" "2/" etc, or merely by replying to their own tweets).

The images hurt accessibility, and the streams make it harder to share the discussion (which is partly the purpose of being a social app to begin with).

But doing it has friction, both for the writer and for the readers. If you remove the friction, you get more of it.

This feels like maybe a [citation required] thing. Facebook doesn't have any particular length limit on posts, and anecdotally vast screeds are quite rare on my feed, and most posts are pretty terse regardless.

Is there data to suggest that people will just rant all the time if they're permitted to?

[edit] Anecdotally, my current top 20 posts in my FB feed: 17 under 140 chars, 3 greater than 140 chars.

Does this include adding 23 chars for a link, and possibly also for images (which I think used to count as extra but no longer do)?

We don't need twitter to be another facebook.

Not sure why you've been down-voted. Twitter is so different from Facebook in terms of what it's primary use is, that it doesn't make sense to compare them, and while I wouldn't quite word my response this way, I agree with the sentiment that Facebook usage data doesn't tell us enough to predict Twitter usage under higher character limits.

Nobody's arguing people will rant all the time. A lower frequency of longer texts is expected, even if Facebook didn't show it.

Yeah, plus what happens now is you get these almost garbled, code-like sentences with emojis, inB4 type abbreviations, truncated URLS, hashtags, @ references and its unreadable/unscannable. I would totally prefer a 140 character block where the hashtags, @references and links fell outside and I coukd parse the tweet more naturally.

Yet, the people who like it, like it, and changing it would mostly make them leave, and the people who don't like it already left for something else and aren't coming back.

Its like daydreaming if the next version of Microsoft Word were reskinned EMACS with a new splash screen. Superficially that sounds pretty cool. But six months later everyone who wanted EMACS continued to use real EMACS and everyone who didn't want EMACS switched away from the MS Word clone of EMACS, leaving MS Word with zero users.

That's twitter's problem, the people who are really into "twitter 2016" are just going to leave if things are changed, yet the number of people into "twitter 2016" is seen as too small.

Perhaps their best bet is to abandon acting like a startup. Absolutely no one wants my local electric company to pivot into water and sewer services or open an office on Mars. There's nothing immoral or lower class about operating a respected public utility.

What twitter should be terrified about isn't finding the next billion users, but avoiding the 1970s CB Radio bust or the decline of BBSes in the 90s. The odds are much higher that twitter is going to be out of business and forgotten in 20 years than they're going to be ten times bigger in size/revenue/profit. Essentially twitter is a fad or a utility or in between and has to be monetized as a fad or a utility.

The very first Twitter clone I remember came up with the killer feature - infinitely long Tweets. How many times did I hear this dumb idea? It is not a sandwich, longer does not mean better! The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.

Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia".

There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.

Because it was originally SMS messages which were limited to 160 characters. 140 for the text and 20 for user name.

"Why is exactly 140 still the right length?"

That's common knowledge. They were asking, why is it STILL the right length?

If Twitter want to encourage short form content, there are other ways to do it. Either hide 141 onwards behind a [+more] link or style the long ones differently so they have less impact.

Better yet, create multi-panel tweets so content is still presented bite-sized, but in a way that people can delve as deeply as they like.

I could see a version of Twitter that is similar in a way to the latest Instagram release (allowing for up to 10 images per post). So on Twitter you could have up to 10 tweets in a single post. Each still 140 char. Only the first one shows up in everyone's feed (just like it does today) and you swipe/scroll/page to the side to see additional pages. If the first 140 is intriguing enough people will scroll sideways to read more.

I've posted about that concept before. I think it's a no-brainer and it baffles me that they're yet to do it, and that it took Instagram so long to have their equivalent.

Tweet storms are only getting more common in my experience. Further, entire newspaper articles could be presented as a series of bite-sized pieces. Just limit the first one to 140 IMO.

It's also common knowledge that arbitrarily changing a standard costs money. They have to educate hundreds of millions of users, re-jigger their databases and services, and forego a well known trademark feature of their product. Why bother? Everyone's memorized that it's 140 characters, and people have adapted pretty well to 140-character microblogging. Would 1,000 have been better? Possibly, possibly not. I think Twitter's fundamental problems run deeper than the SMS limitation; apart from some celebrity accounts with tens of millions of followers such as @RealDonaldTrump etc., they are starting to lose relevance compared to Facebook and other, more dynamic services.

There is no technical reason. The reasons are all non-technical and irrational. Starting with the word-imagery: Have you ever heard a songbird go "tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet?" No, it ceases to be a tweet at that point. It's a squawk or scream or warble or something else. And probably it's annoying AF too. You probably think that's unimportant or has nothing to do with it.

Twitter is about the tweet. It's how they got big in the first place. It's the word they added to the dictionary. If you're thinking of pivoting away from what you are, you'd better consider it carefully and be sure it's not the main irreplaceable source of your claim to fame.

PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.

The core problem is that the length of a tweet should be "one concisely-stated thought", but that's hard to write into an API's documentation :)

> PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.

Not in the real world no, although people are nostalgic for the pre-crash US, but on the Internet I think it definitely is. Put another way, if you changed Twitter into Medium people would be talking about "the old Twitter" with nostalgia.

Well, that's why I said "hardly" and not "not." :)

>Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280?

Why are youtube videos mostly 5 to 7 minutes? Why are pop songs 3 minutes long? Why are sitcoms 30 minutes long?

Forms of expression are defined by their constraints. I think of twitter's relationship to prose as analogous to a haiku.

> twitter's relationship to prose

I think we read very different Twitters :)

Oh, do you read a lot of poetry tweets?

YouTube videos can be as long as you want.

Songs can be as long as you want.

TV shows can be as long as you want.

You think you're arguing the value of constraints, but you're actually arguing that different media formats have different points of cultural optimization.

If that's true, then is there any need to enforce an artificial length limit on tweets? If shorter, pithier tweets are better, then most tweets will be short and pithy--naturally.

Maybe the code base contains a bunch of edge cases where they assume 140 and trying to do anything else causes crashes or other poorly defined misbehavior. (Not what you were talking about but also a legitimate but unfortunate answer)

being a devloper myself this is the dumbest comment I ever read.

> The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.

Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc).

I think it requires more attention to decode the messages of people trying to work around the character limits (with bad spelling and dropped punctuation, etc).

> Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc).

People would work around that by dropping punctuation so the algorithm would not see word boundaries. Or by writing in German...

yes, speakers of agglutinating languages would be able to shove in a few more words, but a) they'd be looked at strangely by their compatriots for using some strange new combo word and no-one wants to have to decipher megawords like that b) (this should be obvious) switching to a different language means that the people who follow you can't read anything you say. So no, people will not switch to German, or any other agglutinating language to beat a word limit.

You already have something similar with the current system. Languages like Chinese have more semantic load per character, so I'd imagine Chinese tweeters can tweet more complete thoughts.

A better (but more opaque) system might try to estimate the "quantity" of semantic content in a language-specific way.

Maybe holding this arbitrary line in the sand as if it were a commandment is why Twitter apparently needs to be "turned around". 280 characters isn't now extensive prose - it isn't fundamentally changing anything. It has been 10+ years and they are still losing a tremendous amount of money, I think it is time to lose the idealism if there is a win-win for users and revenue.

At some point "condensed" thought just means reduced quality of communication. If some users want to say more, let them pay a dollar. I doubt users would be rattled to their core because some people can put two tweets in one.

Bottom line, users don't care about what Twitter's agenda is regarding character limit. Nobody decided to use Twitter because they were excited about a 140 character limit, they use it in spite of the limit. Twitter should be focusing on what the "in spite of" reasons are, because those are the reasons that define the intrinsic value of their service, not the character limit.

I believe most people use Twitter because it gives them the attention of an audience. If you can acquire the same size (or redundant, since most are on multiple platforms) audience elsewhere, then what reason is left for a user to tolerate any annoyance or quirk of the service?

Well if it makes people just stop using Twitter then it hurts the one thing they have going for them, a big userbase.

As long as the previous mode remains free, I don't see people moving away.

If what you liked was that everything was short but now it isn't maybe you'd just get on Facebook or whatever.

Twitter is also a public discussion platform. It's a cog for democracy.

But after the 140 limit, Twitter's other annoyance is how public your comments are. You can't remove them and you're extremely liable for them. Making them private (actually, that option exists) would make it look like Facebook, so it isn't the solution, and making them anonymous won't solve trolls.

Liability on twitter currently doesn't prevent stupid people from harassing others, while a lot of clever people avoid using it because they understand the consequences of a mistake. That's pretty much the opposite of what we want. Twitter should think about reducing liability while moderating trolls better. A bit like on HN, where we have much less liability, but many more CEOs.

you very much CAN remove them. Tweets are deletable. You're no more or less liable for them than anything else you say in any other public environment. We have no less liability for our public statements here on HN. They're just harder to spread to the masses.

Well, the original reason for the 140 character limit was because you could get tweets via SMS, which at the time had a character limit.

Via a single SMS message.

The size of SMS messages is still fixed at 160 characters, but now they can be transparently chained to send longer texts. This is quite unlike IP protocols which have much larger maximum packet sizes.

Whether Twitter should ever have taken a cue from SMS is moot: apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS

> apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice.

It'd be interesting to see a Twitter clone where people could only communicate in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code (i.e. a code + its predefined strongly-typed parameters.)

140 bytes to be more precise. An SMS client will cycle through 7-bit, 8-bit and UCS-2 encodings depending on the content, limiting the number of actual characters depending on the language.

The last time I tested it aaages ago, Twitter didn't enforce the encoding-based limitations, and if you sent a 140 character tweet full of unicode, it would actually send you several concatenated SMS.

I would hate to have twitter SMS me.

> because you could get tweets via SMS

could? You still can:

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170004

I haven't seen any evidence of thought on Twitter for a long time, condensed or otherwise.

> Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

And RCS is being deployed. Eventually the character limit will be irrelevant anyway.

The stratechery folks have said something akin to that Twitter is unsalvageable that this point from a growth perspective because they've already lost most of their potential customers. People who tried their product and walked away.

If these were fresh potential customers it would be one thing, but convincing someone to come back who already tried your product is much harder

It doesn't help that those of us that walked away still continuously hear stories about how Twitter can be a cesspool.

In what ways do people see twitter as a cesspool? Im just genuinely curious because I get a lot of value out of twitter. It's a great way for me to be exposed to new work from artists, finding circles of people with overlapping niche interests, reading political dialogue and analysis, funny stuff...etc

To be fair, people using twitter don't generally call it a cesspool, and reading between the lines you know they must get value out of it if they continue to use it, but there's the constant "you have to have thick skin" statements from people about how it can occasionally be toxic.

As someone not in the social network, what it looks like is that there may be some value to me if I get involved, but I'll likely have to deal with bullshit to do so, and the perception is that the bullshit is much more assured than the value. Whether this is valid, or more specifically whether the relative assessments of each feature are accurate, is unknown, but that's how it feels.

Twitter, as Linkedin, suffers from a poor content to marketing ratio.

I do use it to follow some devs, but every time I step out the established circle into an hashtag or suggestion is nothing but marketing bots oneupping each other.

On the other social is easier to have real social interaction, while talking on twitter is more like people screaming in a crowd plus there are these big tv set all over the place loudness to the max splourting ads.

It was a nice way to grow an asymmetric network built on shared interest as opposed to shared connections when there where genuine people on it but I hardly even login anymore.

Some people find harassment in the form of deeply personal insults, doxxing, and death threats to be unpleasant enough that it's just not worth spending any time on Twitter.

This article is from August, but nothing has especially changed since then.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/a-honeypot-for-asshol...

it's a mostly unmoderated public forum. the price of addressing the world is having to listen back.

Trial 1c per character over 140.

So many prole would want to finish a sentence for a few cents that would hesitate for $1/mth. Then have a $3 (or something smaller) minimum so people instantly have credit for future use to train behavior for some time. This would also give credit cards for future organisation and easy purchases. For power users 100 character a month would be nothing so it would up earnings there.

Then initially launch with a 'charity' test month. This helps get people using and people accepting longer tweets with good will. Doing a charity month will help reduce the invariable haters of anything new, and offset bad-will if trial goes down like a lead balloon. And then monitise assuming trial goes well

The idea is interesting, but you a forgetting something. In cases of extremely low cost (like $1), sometimes the payment process itself is seen as more costly than the payment itself. In other words, people may be willing to spend $1 for an additional sentence, but would they be willing to get their wallet, pull out the card, type in the number, name, billing address and security code? I bet not.

Beyond that, using a card would force users to attach a real identity to their account, even if it's not public. A lot of people wouldn't like the idea of that.

> Beyond that, using a card would force users to attach a real identity to their account, even if it's not public. A lot of people wouldn't like the idea of that.

I think the majority of consumers have zero issues with it. And the people who do and ALSO care about identity/anonymity definitely could just get some pre-paid card.

Why not just 255?

>7. let people pay to get a checkmark

Isn't (or maybe "wasn't") the intention of the check mark to differentiate legitimate public figures from those who would attempt to create fake profiles and impersonate them? Lately it seems like anyone who has had any sort of notoriety has been getting one, but if you could just pay for it instead that would completely defeat the purpose.

For people maybe, but now that twitter is at scale it might not be for someone who cares about their brand

I think both. Don't take away the need to be a public figure and to verify your identity. Just make them pay in addition to these things.

If you're a big enough public figure to want/need the blue tick, you're arguably making commercial use of twitter already, so you probably have a marketing budget that can sink a thousand bucks a year into maintaining your verified status with Twitter (in addition to proving your identity in usual ways).

If some famous person doesn't want to pay, that's fine: either quit using twitter's platform to market yourself, or continue but live without the tick.

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the type of people verified on twitter. I mainly use twitter to follow comedians, and most of them don't make a ton of money (surely not enough to afford "a thousand bucks a year" -- one of my favorite comedians working today has said publicly that he made all of $16k in 2015).

And a few have become the victims of imposters who attempt to disrupt their careers by taking on their identity and messaging comedy clubs or TV networks or whatever. I don't think they are an untapped revenue stream.

>one of my favorite comedians working today has said publicly that he made all of $16k in 2015).

Who's that?

You can just request a checkmark from https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631.

"The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.

We approve account types maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas. If you believe your account is of public interest and should be verified, this article outlines information about submitting a request."

> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused.

I never understood why their home page is so basic. Is it just to reduce load on their servers from lurkers?

A guess: to push people to register. For several reasons: (1) they are judged on that every quarter; (2) a hypothesis that this makes the experience better for users, and hence more likely to contribute to MAUs; (3) a hypothesis this improves ad targeting.

Agreed on 1 and 2, but how does that work for improving targeting.

They can start to profile you across devices more easily if you're signed up.

> to push people to register

Which is an admission of weakness in the first place. If the product is good enough, they wouldn't need to resort to anything special to enroll users beyond a sign up button up top.

I love #7. A lot of people would pay a monthly fee to maintain a checkmark on their profile as a part of a "Twitter Pro" account. That fee could cover the manual verification of the user via scanned photo-ID and become a profit center for the company. Think of it like Twitter's version of an EV SSL cert.

They've had verified accounts for ages.

Yes, but you basically have to pass a notability test to get it (https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631). hellcow and nikcub are suggesting to just open it up to anyone who is willing to pay for it.

I don't know if it's still like this, but when I last tried to create a Twitter account it required a phone number and some kind of verification by phone. That's something I refuse to do.

I can sort of understand requiring that to try to combat the creation of spam accounts, for instance. But it made the service pretty much unusable for me.

Unless it's as easy to create an account there as it is to create one here or at reddit, I'll never bother with Twitter.

You don't have to give them a phone number. They will let you sign up without it.

Then flag immediately as a bot and refuse to let you do anything without a phone number.

Lame Twitter. Lame.

Yup I made an account several years ago to tweet to a support staff because I couldn't login. The next day my account was "suspended" or banned for something like "being a bot." Never looked back.

That feels like a vestige of Twitter's origins as a heavily SMS focused service. Even if that is true, though, odd to have such a high friction element to the registration flow for what is now a niche use case.

It's intentional, in an attempt to reduce spammers and trolls. Gmail also includes receiving an SMS in the signup flow.

>8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter

That's a great one. The current process is very clunky from the user end. I can't imagine how clunky it is from the business side. Probably like a ticket system with no priorities, dates, state [open/closed/etc].

I think a lot of companies use software that wraps twitter. My company makes contact center software, and "twitter" is just another media type like calls or email.

> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'

Twitter generally needs to get a lot better at predicting what you'll be interested in (think Pandora.) Just based on the IP they should be able to tell a lot. Tweets that have been recently favorited, retweeted etc. in just your area would make a very decent default view (band coming to town! metro closure! the mayor is a jerk! etc.). Once you create an account they should also be able to predict a lot based on your activity. Oh, and please give us a Hide Tweet button. There are talkative people I'd still like to follow - but maybe a little less.

Do they really spend $2B per year? That's just mind boggling.

>5. [...] become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor

On a related note, we built a bot that recommends an event based on your tweet+profile. The amount of times we got banned what could be a useful service is off the charts. Twitter needs to engage more with devs rather than block them whenever they can.

I disagree with 7(longer tweets).

The 140 character limit is what Twitter is most known for, and sets it apart from a typical social network. It's something like a body-mark of Twitter. It should stay.

There are other things that set it apart from a "typical social network"; for instance, the fact that it's floundering as a commercial enterprise.

Something has to change, and that something will necessarily not be held in common with Facebook.

>1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year

Which costs would you cut?

You forgot spending less time on favorite icon animations.

this is exactly what a VC would say :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com