The value of Twitter | Hacker News Reader

The value of Twitter

stuckk.net

16 pointsawans15 comments

I may be in the minority but I've pretty much stopped using Twitter entirely. I got sick of the weird code language everyone uses. I don't understand it. I find the trending topics are often pop-culture centric or just flat out cryptic. I don't understand probably 25-30% of the weird one sided conversations I see. It just seems like non-sense since I can't see it in context. Even with a very small number of people I was following I found a number of individuals posted so often that I would have to go back 3 or 4 pages just to catch-up. On top of that 90% of my followers were SPAM so I just started ignoring the e-mails from Twitter about a new follower. Waste of my time to go find out it's yet another spammer or self-seriving individual who offers nothing but self promotion.

I'm not suggesting they're doomed or anything but just giving all the hypers a little perspective on why I find it to be basically unusable. Twitter has some major, massive, usability problems in my opinion. As it has grown it has become a mess -- the UI has not kept up with the inflation of users & posts. Content is not accessible due to arbitrary limits on posting that requires people to use excessive abbreviations and acronyms. There's a whole lexicon behind some of the most basic features that is not immediately obvious.

Do you think a threaded view would help? I find it can be tedious having to dive backward through a chain of "in reply to XXX" links.

Is anyone else getting tired of articles about "the value of twitter" or about what should twitter do next and so on?

I mean yeah, it's an interesting case-study, but shouldn't we be focusing on other stuff too instead of rambling on and on about a messaging service?

YES.

And a little longer, those that are not busy building stuff and innovating can't stop talking about the stuff that others are doing. I think part of the fascination here is that people think that by second guessing the guys that run twitter they can show how good they would be doing if 'given the chance', but that's like all the armchair quarterbacks out there that know everything about sports but couldn't run a mile if they had to.

If you are tired of it, ignore it. IMHO. Don't tell others what to do. Using your logic we've had to tell people to shut up about Apple, Google and Microsoft as well.

> Don't tell others what to do

Why not? Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)

> Using your logic we've had to tell people to shut up about Apple, Google and Microsoft as well

No, that's not the logic of my post. And yes, I would prefer if fewer articles were about established businesses or about business that haven't found a business model and there's none in sight ... and more about new ways of thinking, new algorithms, new technological breakthroughs and new business models (that are actually working).

Maybe Twitter is alluring because it is a simple, yet very popular service. But you're not going to implement the next Twitter and all the low-hanging fruits have already been taken.

"> Don't tell others what to do

Why not?"

Because it's rude, condescending and self righteous.

"Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)"

In German we say "how you shout into the woods so it echoes."

I won't argue with all the pessimism you uttered later but it's astounding how some people manage to deny even to most gigantic successes) A billion? Boooh!

The value of twitter is questionable at best. For example are people still quiting twitter at such large numbers? You don't see people quiting facebook all of a sudden.

I quit twitter about a day after friends got me to sign up, I used the real time search for a couple weeks after that. The problem I found was that real time search wasn't very useful (except for maybe mass panic about mj dying).

If twitter can someone grow and KEEP users then maybe they will have a business with worth but they are going to need a bigger pull than tweet what you. are doing/thinking or heard.

What's up with the disclaimer?

"stuckk.net is a blog by Andrew Wansley and Joe Huston. We are contractually required to post 750 words a week."

Anyone ever see that on a blog before?

Maybe they did it as a way to make sure they both contributed to the blog in a regular fashion?

It is properly the best guarantee that they will post regularly a new user can expect.

And I would love to hear the story behind it.

My initial reaction upon seeing that is that it sounds like an up front apology. Something along the lines of "Look I know that last post was unfocused drivel, but we had to get something, anything up by midnight or be in breach of contract".

(disclaimer I have not read the blog so I know nothing of its actual quality)

maybe it's sarcasm?

i think this article, like most, concentrates on the value of of using other people's tweets, but doesn't touch on the value of actually submitting tweets.

i can understand why submitting tweets might be valuable for celebrities and companies (to message a massive audience at once), but otherwise there isn't much value in using/switching to twitter as a platform for which you communicate with friends.

I wonder why people still have to explain that Twitter has value. After all this company is worth at least 1 billion $. Unless we're all have been abducted by aliens and brainwashed to use it there must be some value otherwise the billion wouldn't be there to back it up.

People who want to convince us that Twitter has no value wanted to tell us the same thing about Facebook a year ago. Now they earn money already, one year earlier than planned.

To me this sounds like envy. Everybody believing that s/he has the best startup idea out there but instead something "value-less" like Twitter is worth a billion. Get over it and try to copy the Twitter business model instead and make some money.

There were people who didn't believe that airplanes would ever fly. They're too heavy! The same kind of mentality abounds when it comes to Twitter critics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com