Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again

Interesting point about Politics though, I've been using it as my #1 source of that for now. But if you don't follow people that share such content do you still see it?

I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

Similar thing is happening with Pocket. It's great at curating articles. It's just that at some point, it got hijacked by politics.

>I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader.

RSS still exists even though Reader doesn't. I use Feedly although I admit that I don't carefully curate a large number of feeds any longer because, outside of a relative handful of people/sites I want to follow, I figure news will find me through Twitter and other sources.

[0]: https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624

Not good time but there are some communities and social graphs active there that you cannot avoid if you work in specific fields. For example, computer security.

Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.

Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day - sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam - select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")

Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):

https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following

Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17

While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.

My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.

Twitter is great for that, but it's of course the way Twitter desperately doesn't want to be used.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032

Also a good way to connect with people professionally, but less formally than LinkedIn.

The major downside is that is that a tight group or individual can get put on blast to the whole of twitter, and then just get ignorant vitriol thrown at them and that kind of ruins the whole experience. Happened to me not long ago. Not that big of a deal in the end. Just take a week off and come back and the hive will have found something else to attack. The Twitter universe has a pretty short attention span - even if it has a long memory.

and still love it.

I think it's key to always prune and trim the people you are following and keep the number low and relevant. If someone tweets several times about things I'm not interested in, I unfollow.

I unfollowed some high profile tech people because of their stream being full of politics.

"(Current count is 1000)"

This seems much too high, I follow 500 and this already looks too high for me (some trimming needed).

I think the problem Twitter has is two fold. It wants people to come and stay on Twitter but it also wants those same people not fight with each other. The solution the developers picked was shadow banning. This banning where the user isn't aware that their tweets aren't visible to others who don't follow you and those who do follow you won't be notified of your tweets either (they only see them on their time line). The most common way this happens right now is someone uses of well known curse words. Right now, I'm shadow banned for whatever reason despite not tweeting at verified accounts often enough to run afoul their automated system. So this is the climate that new users experience where Twitter promises to help them engage with other users (especially verified users of notably celebrities and the like) but if you do anything vaguely hostile in their view then you lose the freedom to interact with anyone even those who follow you mutually. All I can say is that's probably a major contributing factor in the decline of Twitter at present. They just refuse to hire moderators to do proper moderation and to make the rules for banning or shadow banning clear and objective. Basically, it's what happens when you let technophiles try to solve a non-technological problem.

Twitter used to feel like a good party, with a great range of people with stories and opinions and hopes to talk about. That's definitely over now.

I'm really enjoying mastodon.social though, it feels like how the internet used to

Following the NBA on twitter is actually an awesome experience.

I wish they would stop comparing twitter to other social media networks + focus on what is good about it (live, sports, entertainment) and double down on that & figure out how to make money by offering more services in that space.

I did this and twitter is now useful again. I

I also don't like it for news because a single piece of news will appear a thousand times in my feed.

I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook.

People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again.

I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.

If someone isn't doing it for you, unfollow.

1,000 is almost certainly too many.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...

I keep on trying to shift over to Mastodon. It's not quite at critical mass of enough of my friends being there, but it's slowly growing.

Mastodon has a system of 'content warnings'; a user can mark their toots to be hidden, and give any arbitrary reason. 'Politics' is very much considered to be one of the reasons you should put a content warning on a toot, along with other reasons like 'NSFW', 'moping', 'spoilers for the latest episode of Gamey Throney', or 'raw unadulterated shoe-lust'.

It's also got a 500 character limit, a distributed architecture, a tendency for people running servers to crack down on jerkwaddery, and is pretty much supported entirely by Patreon right now rather than pouring venture capital down a hole while trying to chase advertising dollars.

Maybe it's just my innate crotchety-ness, but I feel like a lot of people think about Twitter like owning a boat: fun in theory but a big PITA that probably won't be missed except once or twice a year.

Of course, this is all imbued with my own personal gripes and prejudices with social media, so take it as a commiserating vent :)

[1] tweetdeck.twitter.com

Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.

I remember there being a kerfuffle about Twitter placing limitations on it, but is it still possible to make a custom client that unifies, say, Twitter and Mastodon?

Amen to that. I still don't fully get the logic of what Twitter decides to display and what to hide when I click a multi-tweet reply or something. Connected tweets (which happen so often that I feel like the 140 char limit is more hindering than helpful) run bottom-up in the time line. You can't maximize embedded youtube videos. Why? When you click an image and then "back" in a long scroll, it sends you back to the start of the page. I also have to click an image like three times to get to the source. I don't get how those split-views of multiple images are supposed to work, they always open a random one. An annoying delay/stutter whenever you scroll down because of how goddamn infinite scroll loads images. No proper search, but I'm already getting used to that in modern websites. "Just google it", right?

EDIT: I just checked and a few of these things have been changed. Am I nuts or did they have differently sized fonts for tweets at one point and reverted that by now?

Facebook is similar, except without any of the temptation to actually join in the first place.

I don't know if that's still the case or not. After that rather awful experience trying to sign up, I've lost all interest in trying again.

I'm not surprised they're having trouble growing when they impede the ability of people to sign up! There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.

I think so much of it comes down to trying to put too much content in a small space. Twitter was a lot less annoying when it was only 140 characters and no embedded media since the information density was appropriate for a phone screen. Now it's just absurd how much one needs to scroll just to use it. It's almost more of a scrolling app than an information app.

One quick fix would be to have an option to show tweets one at a time with next and previous buttons at the bottom for rapid digestion of tweets.

I get to interact with a rock star if I hang out near the exit door after the concert. I can shout at them and (s)he might say something back. If I'm lucky and it's a cool musician we might be able to have a brief conversation...

As a professional, if I wanted to interact with a leader in my field on a meaningful level I would e-mail, write them, attend a speech by them, etc. etc.

This is hardly ridiculous.

EDIT: and moreover this is a situation that has existed for multiple quarters now, adding to the reasonableness of the frustration and lack of trust in the future of Twitter.

From an advertising industry standpoint, the space has quickly become consolidated such that Google and FB own the vast majority of ad inventory in the market. Advertisers, particularly large advertisers who contribute a substantial portion of this revenue.

As a buyer, I can state from a position of experience that managing an ad buy at scale is just as important as potential performance. If I'm an agency for example, and I can reach massively more people on FB than Twitter, I'm likely going to focus my efforts there even if ROI may suffer from diminishing returns to some extent. A big part of the reason for that is it would take significantly more hours to setup, manage and report on Twitter (or any other ad platform) separately than it would to just focus on FB in that case.

So from a business level, the overhead of managing multiple ad platforms can often be a critical deciding factor in addition to just the actual ad performance. Time is money, and lots of people hours cost lots of money, particularly those people who have the technical specialization to effectively manage digital media campaigns at scale.

All of that is to explain why total ad spend is increasingly consolidating around FB and Google. And that is REALLY bad news for Twitter from an investor standpoint because it puts a big cap on their growth potential.

Why is this bad for users?

There is a simple (but limited) solution: simple binary classifier, trained by signals from the user. It would quickly learn what to exclude.

I suspect a higher-than-average proportion of twitter users have simply blocked all the ads.

Personally I'd favour a payment model a bit like the "reddit gold" one, where users can pay for other users to have better features. It's a network effect. I want the people I like following to have a better time on the service so they keep using it.

At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us that love it.

And for other people, they'd look at it once a day, and the next day might be exactly the same. So what's the point in visiting constantly?

It's done to hide how active or inactive your social graph actually is.

Compare that to say...video hosted on YT/FB where, when embedded, can still include ads that allows those platforms to monetize people sharing their content offsite.