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Comment by drstewart | Hacker News Reader

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/30/23430008/elon-musk-twitt...

>He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and news stories, according to employees familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Before, visiting Twitter’s homepage while logged out showed only a sign-up form,

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Interesting commentary on this from someone who used to work at Twitter:

- https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/1586812933043933184

> Changing the logged out home page of Twitter to show more content is likely one of those “easy fixes” that has symbolic effect but very little to no metrics effect. I ran A/B tests on this in 2010. Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first

Technical people, especially engineers and those on HN, hate sign up forms but having grown a product to X thousand users, the more you push the sign up form, the more people sign up. You can even plot a linear relationship between the two, which I've done before.

This seems shortsighted. It's optimizing for what's easy to measure (sign ups) over what's hard to measure (brand, customer satisfaction, word of mouth).

Sign ups were directly correlated to revenue, at least in my case, and likely most others, such as in @joegahona's comment about publishing. That is to say, the customer satisfaction decrease in popups did not decrease revenue, and that is assuming there even was a satisfaction decrease at all; again, most technical users vastly overestimate how many people actually care about popups, most non-tech people simply click the X to make it go away, and a percentage of all visitors will sign up.

This may be true in the short term but eventually more of these decisions begin to accumulate and cause more dissatisfaction. Each one on its own has barely any impact on the bottom line, it's just one more cut among a hundred cuts. In the end you end up with a product that is overall annoying to use. And the whole time you could be going along, measuring each decision and thinking that you're doing okay and no mistakes are being made. But measuring today with yesterday is not the same as measuring today with 3 weeks ago + 13 decisions reversed, 5 decisions reversed, 1 decision reversed.

Agreed, just following data can be a dangerous path. You have to build things because they’re the right thing to build. You need a cohesive vision not scattershot A-B tests. Unless you only care about short term profit, of course.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. That’s why the Facebooks die and the Apples and Googles last.

So what kind of experiment do you run to capture that dissatisfaction? Doesn’t have to be a/b. Just anything qualitative that doesn’t boil down to making decisions purely based on feelings.

Talking to people.

Lol, best of luck.

> most non-tech people simply click the X to make it go away, and a percentage of all visitors will sign up.

This is likely true, but only if there's an X. Facebook's growing sign-in box as you scroll down is not easily clicked away from.

Generally when running these kinds of tests you measure for further down the funnel metrics than sign ups. It's obvious sign ups would increase. In all the tests I've done around this, you look either at revenue or engagement over a longer term.

This is a technique called "getting the foot in the door".

You see videogames employing these psychological tactics constantly nowadays to completely min-max human behavior into spending money.

I think when you're really good at using a computer, you expect things to be easy. When you get a sign up form instead, it's extremely frustrating. We're used to it being easy to use a computer and can see that someone is making it hard for their own benefit. And then we think, if it's hard for us, it's even harder for someone without a lot of skills.

And I think that's probably true! But the person without much computer skills comes in with an expectation that stuff is gonna be hard. The egregious signup page isn't a surprise in that sense, it's just one of the many things they have to struggle with to use a computer.

An A/B then doesn't show any benefit for removing the signup page, only downside, because an A/B test only tests what happens if one feature changes. Our intuition can still be right; if we could do all the work to make it so a website is actually easy to use for someone without a lot of skills, like how Apple radically simplified the state of affairs with the iPod, that will positively defy peoples' expectations and make the app more accessible -- even if just simplifying any individual component doesn't do that.

I noticed the same thing in the world of publishing (both print and online). It's the reasons pop-ups have never gone away -- they work. It's the reason those annoying inserts in print magazines that fall in your lap have never gone away -- they work.

But that's also reduce ads for unlogged visitors.

Are ads for logged-in users so more profitable that it's worth it?

I do like the change, i can't even sign up with my email to twitter - most likely because it is a custom domain.

I've had no issues making accounts with my custom domains, fwiw.

Did get a phone-number nag that I was able to ticket myself out of.

If it has no effect on metrics but removes as major annoyance for users, why would you not have done that in the first place?

Oh he ran A/B 12 years ago. I guess it's settled then.

Yeah this is unlikely to be positive on revenue and very well might be negative. It's extremely unlikely that Twitter put that registration wall in place without extensive testing and micro-optimization. Musk is just throwing his weight around and declaring himself smarter than everyone else.

> Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first

Call me crazy, but maybe a site should be designed so people actually enjoy using it, rather than always optimizing for "growth".

That change is welcome. The previous setup was really obnoxious.

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