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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting

Have they, like, asked people?

Also, do they need more people to tweet? It's not like the platform is short of content. Isn't there a role for the comfortable lurker?

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I think there's a real concern on Twitter's end with the conversation being dominated by those who are "good with Twitter". That's a big problem because it's kind of a snoozefest to read tweets by a small in-group that you don't know and that won't interact with you. Twitter serves no purpose without interaction.

Which IMO is why Twitter allowing users to lock their replies is actually damaging to Twitter. Now people just Quote Tweet it instead of replying.

I understand the motivation behind allowing users to lock replies, but you don't need Twitter for that type of content. Twitter sucks for just about anything other than interaction.

What should I use instead of Twitter to just keep up with what people are talking about in my topics of interest?

Twitter also sucks for meaningful interaction, in my opinion.

Twitter started off as a low-effort life blog, and is now almost entirely a platform for amplifying celebrities and politicians. It definitely needs more normal people tweeting about normal things.

Twitter has loads of normal people tweeting about normal things, but they are down in the very, very long tail, and ~nobody follows them. Into the void they scream.

Exactly. And most importantly those normal people are not profitable. Even collectively, they do not outmatch the top 0.1% of posters in engagement.

They have to change; their market cap is much lower than the other "majors" and actually the usage level (and subscriber base) is lower too.

It's like the inverse of reddit: reddit has a very high Alexa score yet is invisible in the public media; Twitter is discussed endlessly by the nattering nabobs, called before congress etc, yet has trouble monetizing their infamy.

Most companies would envy this amount of "trouble monetizing": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/gross...

True, but compared to their peers they are a laggard.

Also, who's going to feel less anxiety when filming themselves vs. typing?

The idea worked for Instagram, where the aesthetic for regular posts ended up so forced nobody wanted to just make random everyday posts anymore.

For Twitter I didn't see the use, though posting a Fleet does bother people less than spamming, they're too hard to make without ending up ugly.

I'd rather see a change where the search doesn't let you stalk random people by searching for what they posted 3 years ago…

Makes me think (and shudder) about how one could make filters for text. I partially regret saying this and also still curious :-)

Microsoft already did it, it was called Word Art

No no, not for the visual appearance of the text, but rather the filter equivalent of "improving" the content.

Almost like applying a GPT-3 editor to spice up my tweets. I type X tweet and then use GPT-3 or something like that to modify my words/sentences to have more of a Shakespeare or Steve Jobs voice to it.

edit looks as if I found an experiment with GPT-3 to do exactly this: https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1287050253103968257...

Yes, they would definitely want more people to Tweet.

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