Signing up for a new Twitter account shows why the company is struggling to grow | Hacker News Reader

Signing up for a new Twitter account shows why the company is struggling to grow

owened.co.nz

65 pointsowenwil48 comments

I wrote this flow about 3 years, ago, and my face is still the Twitter teacher (see twitter.com/finkel). I haven't worked at Twitter for over a year.

A few things. At least when I wrote it, the very first step you'd see the friends who tried to connect with you, if you have any. I doubt that's changed, so this may be a special case.

After building this flow, I helped my team design multiple better/more modern flows, but all performed worse than my original when we measured for retention over time. It turns out it's much trickier than it looks to build a better flow, and it also hard to prove that it's better due to bots/spammers.

Even though this flow is far from perfect, I still take pride that my face has been shown to hundreds of millions of new users, and that it greatly outperformed its predecessor. But I just want to remind users here that it's easy to say: "This is crap, I could do better." When it fact, many other "better" things have been tried, and it's surprisingly harder and more nuanced than it looks.

With my knowledge now, I believe more of Twitter's energy should be spent improving the product, because the new user flow is much less important than the product people see when it's done.

You're right. Intuition isn't the same as data.

However I can see where the author is coming from as now I am engaged this is how I use Twitter too. Anecdotally it seems correct that people that get the best out of Twitter are those that interact publicly and productively with non-celebrity strangers.

One line seems to hit the nail on the head:

  > On Twitter, you interact with people you don’t know, 
  > and the friendship doesn’t have to be mutual. This is a 
  > good thing, but can be scary at first.

This is what makes Twitter great but it depends on growing your confidence and interacting inside communities where this is a norm. It can be quite socially dangerous to mess this up: some communities have high walls and aggressive in-group tendencies, and some people do not yet have the social skill required for global online communities.

The other day I read this great quote by Nick Szabo on Usenet and I think it holds true for Twitter, too:

  "Those who have never tried electronic communication
   may not be aware of what a "social skill" really is.
   One social skill that must be learned, is that other
   people have points of view that are not only different, 
   but *threatening*, to your own. In turn, your opinions
   may be threatening to others. There is nothing wrong
   with this. Your beliefs need not be hidden behind a 
   facade, as happens with face-to-face conversation.
   Not everybody in the world is a bosom buddy, but you
   can still have a meaningful conversation with them.
   The person who cannot do this lacks in social skills."

Twitter needs to connect like people to like people and slowly nurture positive, open conversation. But there are certain things you can't expect people to do with just a nice UX.

Perhaps they should be influencing with PR and education as well as UX.

Wow! Nice to meet you, Twitter teacher! Crazy that it's still the same three years on; I know what you mean that it's easier to talk about building a better flow than actually doing it, but I do think that it's fundamentally focusing on the wrong thing (from the outside in particular).

Perhaps this flow performs better than we think, but what I find most interesting about it is that instead of focusing on what you're interested in learning about/following, it instead just helps the bigger Tweeters get bigger/more famous, which is kind of sad, especially with many numbers suggesting that the average user has less than 100 followers.

I totally agree in terms of improving the product - it'll be interesting to see what Twitter delivers over the next year. I do hope that the focus shifts away from what it is now and more onto the intrinsic value of conversation/engaging with new people that in my experience seems to keep Twitter users active/proves the value to them.

Likewise. It amazes me how long it's lasted.

I agree with your sentiment about famous people. It feels really generic. I'm sure there's something better. We tested lots of interest-based versions, but they also underperformed.

Twitter is becoming more of a consuming platform for most users, so getting followers for the average user is much less important than finding great content.

I think you have to think of the twitter experience as a progression where you start with people that you know/have heard of/can relate to, and over time you discover new interesting people in areas of your interest to connect with directly. So I feel like it makes sense to first suggest following a list of people you may recognize and want to hear more from, and from them get drawn into using the service more deeply. This applies to recognizable celebs / media / etc as well as friends. the company can do a lot of analysis to only suggest celebs, etc that do a good job of hooking users over time.

That said, having worked on some even earlier versions of this process (and with Ben too) it is a constant work in progress and set of changes needed as more and more people join the network. Today's users are later to twitter and probably don't want to just start and get drawn in following individuals but probably want content quickly that is personalized to them and would be open to learn twitter from there. But following accounts may itself be too much work. Or the challenge is just that mobile Signup is so common now that no one gets the experience and starting point from the web. In any case, the biggest challenge and opportunity with onboarding is just to constantly be changing learning and trying to improve it.

Well said, Josh. It's about constant iteration and improvement.

The article sums up my experience well. I've had a Twitter account for years. I never use it. I have no idea how to use it. If I'm really bored I might take a look at Facebook, but never Twitter. I don't 'get' Twitter, but I want to (because I see many people I respect who apparently 'get' it), I just don't know how to.

My first thought was how you measure "better". You say "all performed worse than my original when we measured for retention over time". And this is not surprising - I doubt one flow works for all people. Did you ever try multiple flows to rescue stranded users like myself?

For example, whatever stats Twitter has on me right now shows that my engagement is zero. Would Twitter have better luck getting me to actively use their service if they tried re-engage me? Or do they think I'm a bot at this point? :)

I'm in the same boat. A lot of my friends love and use Twitter regularly, but I've never been able to get into it. I feel bad that I don't get it, because millions of people clearly find compelling use-cases for it, but my experience hasn't changed even after multiple attempts to figure out the missing piece.

Speaking of use-cases, I found this part of the article interesting:

> This is disappointing, as most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following celebrities. I suspect that many users sign up for the first time, follow mostly celebrities and then give up, since they never get much interaction.

It's funny because that's precisely how I use Twitter. I've been using it daily (hourly sometimes) for more than three years, and I have less than 150 tweets. But I follow a number of interesting people who post often, like webcomic artists I like, some indie game developers, some AAA game developers, some celebrities like deGrass Tyson and Alton Brown.

I follow a couple friends on there, but mostly I find them to be annoying noise. I don't really give a shit about baby photos or what beer you had at lunch today.

People really use Twitter to have conversations? That blows me away. I have trouble making two sentences fit into 140 characters, much less an entire conversation. What kind of conversation can you have in that space?

Seems that you use twitter as "rss with human faces attached"

Twitter actually makes it difficult to find value from it. You have to actually work at it. What Silicon Valley startup doesn't pull in a list of your friends that are already on its service?

Once you've followed your friends then how about your interests? If I'm interested in Formula 1 its possible I might want to follow a driver or team owner. Only if I'm interested in Hollywood or pop music would I be interested in Kate Winslet or Lady Gaga.

Twitter assumes just the opposite, we all care about celebrity to the exclusion of our friends and hobbies.

As has been mentioned in the post about the onboarding process, it gives you suggestions of who to follow when you sign up (first as a random list of celebs, followed by another list of big names in broad categories likes music/technology et) – but doesnt give you context for why.

To me twitter is an “interest” network, as in, I want to find out more about x or keep up with the latest on y etc – and I think this is the biggest failure of twitter ie not communication this aspect of its value proposition effectively. Ironically, Twitter themselves have called themselves an information network and not a social network.

So, if before making suggestions on people to follow if it were to a) position itself (better than it currently has) as a way to get massive value from keeping up on things of interest and b) ask users to type in, say, 5 things there were interested in – and then serve up suggestions of who to follow… … this would not only personalize the feed but be immediately relevant which should raise engagement/retention etc. I think such an approach would get users to their aha moment about twitter much quicker.

Add to this, the most powerful features of Twitter which most people still don't use/know about is Lists. So once you were onboarded and had say 10+ people you were following, if you were prompted to segregate these people into lists by topic, that would make consuming twitter 10x easier than it is.

It seems that at times twitter still behaves as if it was something only the technorati (early adopters) use – who will figure things out. That is clearly not the case anymore.

"What would a new user even do after signing up? Who should I search for?"

I agree that this is the problem with Twitter, but the signup process is unlikely to be the cause. Some people are just not interested in the 140 character mental garbage that others are spewing. I understand the author likes Twitter a lot and cannot fathom the idea that Twitter is just not useful or interesting to vast numbers of people.

This is disappointing, as most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following celebrities. I suspect that many users sign up for the first time, follow mostly celebrities and then give up, since they never get much interaction.

Agreed. What I'd like to see is for Twitter to do much more curation: select top users in very focused categories (for instance, "Technology Journalists", "Linux Experts", "Java Experts" and let users drill down through multiple categories to select the people they want to follow. Twitter already has something similar (it's step 2 in the sign up process) but the current categories are too overbroad and unfocused.

the current categories are too overbroad and unfocused.

OK. Then how do they narrow it down? Remember that they're not targeting any one narrow demographic, and don't necessarily have any demographic data on a brand new user.

It looks even worse than three years ago when I wrote a similar post:

http://diegobasch.com/why-twitters-growth-has-slowed-down-an...

No.

Signing up for a new twitter account shows why _you think_ the company is struggling to grow.

Without any insight into their acquisition, retention, or other core data that drove these decisions you have no idea what you are talking about.

Don't get me wrong - I think these are all good hypotheses. But without data they are just hypotheses.

Every article and blog post comes with this caveat. Pointing it out adds nothing of value to the discussion.

That's an excuse for low standards.

Not entirely. It's necessary to encourage any reasonably open and informal exchange of ideas. Upvotes should be enough to endorse and promote the minimally good ideas, or at least the well articulated ones, for discussion.

For what it is worth, I recently found a spam bot hacked into my unused twitter account. It was using my real name so I had to clean it up. I used a new email address to be able to move the bot tweets to new user name. When registering my original user name again the experience was as described in the article. Actually, in my case it was [frighteningly] accurate down to what the user thinks.

You get to a point where it tells you to follow a preselected set of celebrities and it wont take no for an answer. There is no skip button. (I'm sure there isn't one, it took me ages to not find it.)

What drove the decision?

I think what happens is that Google picks up the new twitter account, flags it as a duplicate and increases the celebrity page rank in stead of indexing yours. It seems a good trick to make bots less effective.

But I'm guessing of course.

Owen,

I would submit to you that an analysis of Twitter's, for lack of a better word, design decisions can't be made without putting more thought in re: who they are as a company and what their tendencies are.

What sticks out about Twitter is how deliberate and disciplined their decision-making tends to be. (To me, at least. FWIW, I've worked with a major telecom on their buyflow in both a business and technical capacity. I'm proud to say I'm the reason email/password is the fallback auth and address/pin-number (half of which was already taken care of in the previous step: determining service availability via address) is the default, rather than the other way around as per the original design. Given that the app is in Best Buy kiosks and whatnot, that was a pretty big one.) E.g., these guys track time-to-first-tweet. They're not not looking at what you're looking at. Hell, they're looking at it with a microscope. If they and I arrive at different conclusions, I ask what I'm missing, not what they're missing -- and I don't say that in a platitudinal sense; I'm an arrogant bastard who thinks everyone is wrong about everything. In case you hadn't noticed.

But think about how long, how many years TC, et al. chirped chirped chirped about Twitter's "inability" to monetize. Now those people-- if anyone would bother to look-- look like idiots. Twitter silently told everyone to go fuck themselves, we're going to spend like 4 years throwing away ideas, developing a very strong opinion on this, because a wrong decision could kill our company - not now, but 10 years from now. Compare and contrast: Fb ads, which have been (thoughtfully! and with data!) likened to Ponzi schemes.

Twitter suggests celebrities because they are broadly known quantities. Plus, Twitter knows absolutely nothing about you when you first sign up. While it would be nice if they would suggest some smaller niche people to follow, you may not recognize any of the people they suggest - and that would be even more frustrating...

If they don't know anything about me during sign up... maybe they can ask me?

Groan.

I too have a similar problem with twitter. Its not just the signing up process, but also the signing in process, especially on the mobile application. Every time I "sign in" the mobile applicatoon , I'm put through the same annoying process of being shown suggestions of who to follow, importing my contact list, tips I already knew when I signed up and some more suggestions. Once signed in, random twitter notifications come in which make no sense or which I have not signed up to (for example, x and x have favorited x tweet who I am not following)

To further add to this without trailing off topic, twitter is incredibly restrictive when it comes to sharing content through direct messages. As I find useful resources which may benefit a friend I am advising on his startup, twitter seems to think I am spamming him even if I send one link at the time.

All of this , including reasons others have mentioned in this thread ultimately drives away users slowly. I feel like I'm fighting the platform just to share content when Facebook, Google+ et al seem to let users easily share content.

This exactly describes my experience with Twitter. I've had an account for over five years and tried multiple times to find some value in it. For a time, I was subscribed to a channel (is that what they're called?) that published race results I cared about. Aside from that, I struggle to find anything relevant to me. How do people normally get engaged in some community?

Do you have friends who use Twitter? Maybe you should follow them for starters. Ask around on whatever social network you're on - "hey, I'm on twitter as @egypturnash, who're you?"

What's your hobby? Maybe see if there's anyone you follow who's involved in it on Twitter. I, for instance, am following a slowly growing number of comics people, because that's a thing I do.

If someone you're following keeps retweeting interesting stuff from a person, consider following that person.

I also found that Twitter didn't make a damn bit of sense until I had a smartphone, flipping through it is great to kill time on the bus or whatever.

You can also use it as a public chat channel, where you control who's in it by dint of who you follow.

Same experience as gp: Twitter for me today only has possible value as a news source.

Please correct me if I got this wrong but:

Posting just about anything to twitter means spamming most people that follow me with stuff they don't care about: programming? Everyone except the programmers couldn't care less. Java programming? Now it is just noise to about everyone. Etc.

Basically this means I should keep a few different twitter accounts, right?

I've tried using it as a news source as well. However I'm down to just hn + a web edition of one of the bigger local newspapers. Less noise.

You are pretty much correct. But you're missing something important: Twitter moves so fast that anyone following a decent number of reasonably active people will just shrug and skip over the stuff you say that's not interesting.

So, for instance, if you're mutually following some of your friends, they may not have a damn thing to say about your thoughts on Java programming, but if you're both Apple users you may find yourself chatting with them during the next keynote. If you live in the same city you may find yourself organizing impromptu get-togethers over Twitter. Hell, a while back I was playing Dark Souls on a 360 without a net connection and tweeting about places I got stuck, and my followers offered me some pretty useful advice.

People who follow me are not interested in everything I have to say. They may not even see everything I have to say. But they are interested in ENOUGH of what I have to say that they're continuing to follow me.

Multiple accounts can help: I have a public one that I use a lot, my blog auto-tweets new posts to that one. I also have a private one that is only accessible to my friends (and to the private accounts of my friends); these accounts see us griping about day job stuff we don't want public, talking about our marijuana intake, our sex lives, all kinds of stuff we don't want to share with the whole world. There's also an account for my comic, that emits a tweet every time a new page or blog post goes up. I pretty much never tweet manually as that one! A good twitter client can make it a lot easier to maintain multiple accounts, but honestly? Just start with one, ask your friends if they have a twitter account and follow them, say whatever you feel an urge to dump into the void and see what happens. Here's a conversation I had this morning: https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/480774881198358528

I find the best way to use Twitter is to stop thinking of it as a place you HAVE to be and turn it into a place you WANT to be. Twitter is where I chat with my friends and drop random nuggets of thoughts; I'll photograph something I think is interesting and make some comment about it that way, I'll mutter about some weird little social interaction I just had with a stranger and my friends will tell me that shit was fucked up or that it was perfectly normal and what rock have I been living under, I'll make some dumb joke and my friends will riff on it. Twitter is not where I Extend My Brand. Follow people, not entities. Not all people you know - I follow a bunch of leaders in my field (comics) - but if a bunch of them are your social circle, then Twitter becomes a place you WANT to go because it's where you can casually say hi to your friends and talk about what they're up to in an environment that welcomes both rapid responses seconds after the original statement, and ones a couple days later. (And I find that having it on my phone makes it much more attractive than having it stuck in a desktop machine - it's like I've got a bit of ALL MY FRIENDS present any time I want them around.)

Ultimately I kinda want to riff on Twitter's branding: Imagine a bunch of birds, hanging out in earshot of each other, singing to each other and working out just who's gonna mate with/intimidate/eat who. Follow your friends. They call it social media for a reason.

Are there professionals in your field who do really interesting or leading stuff? Start with them. People doing outstanding stuff in your areas of interest? Follow them. Just Google search their name + "Twitter".

I also recommend @newsyc20, @newsyc100, & @newsyc300 for following Hacker News.

@newsyc20 is a good filtered down version of the main list (2-5 tweets / hr)

@newsyc300 will let you know the most popular topics (2-5 / wk)

I generally don't follow friends on Twitter. It's mostly professionals who don't talk too much so the info remains relevant. I also keep a feed window open on my desktop...

I think this is very true. Creating a Twitter account is like being force-fed the experience. They should move away from the step-by-step wizard idiom and instead do a tutorial mode... after creating your account in one step, they should just show little inline tips for getting started and then have a button to permanently stop showing the tips.

Having worked on various versions of this flow, I think this is backwards. Taking the user step by step to follow their first people teaches them the important of following and starts them on the path of that as a long term habit. Simply dumping them into the product with a few pointers and tips is a much worse experience. Most companies miss the power of onboarding as a teaching experience by walking new users step by step through the actions that will matter long term in using a product

> Taking the user step by step to follow their first people teaches them the important of following

This bugs me about post-2010 Twitter and Facebook. Why do they now bias towards following instead of leadership?

i don't understand this comment. I was referring to following others on Twitter as a way to get information.

Interestingly enough, I had just about the opposite experience when I signed up for twitter.

I created my account around 2 yrs ago I think... maybe a little longer.

When I signed up, I remember the onboarding process being a bit similar in terms of requiring you to follow at least 5 people, except for me, the users it listed out were incredibly relevant.

It was to the point where I almost felt like my privacy had been breached. My understanding was that basically twitter looks at the IP address (or maybe it's with cookies?) of everyone viewing every page on the internet that has a twitter "tweet" button on it.

Since I read lots of blogs, articles, etc. around the web... twitter then had at the very least a starting point for the users that I would be interested in (based on the tweet buttons they put on their page).

Perhaps the code was different back then, but I remember the initial follow recommendations being really good.

I agree the on-boarding process when registering an account is painfully bad on the desktop. I'm wondering what the breakdown is on desktop vs mobile account creation.

Added this to the post - it's actually even worse. Two steps, no on boarding at all.

Twitter: the greatest one to many communications platform since radio and they haven't spent a dime marketing their "channels". Onboarding isn't as big an issue as ignorance of the product. Anyone still buying Star Magazine or Time hasn't figured out how to leverage Twitter to get the same info but real time. Twitter... If you are going to do a good job, take credit for it man!

> most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following celebrities

Are you sure?

Would Twitter be allowed to import contacts from Facebook or Google+? AFAIK they disallow the exporting of the social graph to other social networks to lock users into their network.

Yes, they keep asking me to import my Gmail contacts.

I think it's possible through oauth

Twitter is struggling to grow because they failed at achieving the purpose they were created for.

WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik, FB Messenger, et al. have accomplished what Twitter was supposed to.

Now Twitter is just a mostly one-way broadcast for famous people. That's why such a small percentage of their user base actually shares anything, much less on a regular basis.

There is no reason for Twitter to exist. What they do is being better served by other platforms. This will become very painfully obvious in the next few years, their active user base will shrink.

Those are all messaging apps, for sending messages to an individual or to a specified, small group. Twitter is a microblogging system, for sending messages to an indefinite, large, group. They have very little in common.

It's worth pointing out that it's hard to have any kind of non-shallow discussion when you're limited to 140 characters. They will inevitable turn to disagreement, lack of context, and flame wars.

Twitter is more commonly used as RSS for normal people than a chat app

The 1:10 ratio of producers of content to consumers is common to every publicly facing community.

As a frustraded Twitter ex-user I'm interested in hearing your experience.

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