Twitter Needs New Leadership
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
- Photos are very badly cropped and clicking on the tweet does not diplay them full size anymore. We have to click a second time on the photo.
- Photos are now displayed above the text which somehow makes the bad cropping even worse.
- People who want to post photos have all moved to Instagram anyway. Twitter is an actor, not a victim, of this move. They seem to consider photos as a feature for advertisers, not for users.
- Embedded tweets (retweets with a comment) don't have functionnal links. Clicking them opens the tweet's page in a way that ruins the auto-scrolling of the main stream. The trick against that is to right-click on the embedding tweet's time and open the link in a new tab. WTF, designers?
- If one wants to post a longer text, Twitter leads them to create an account elsewhere. Twitter could easily just display the title and hide the longer text behind a click. WTF, strategists?
Twitter definitely needs a new leadership.
Your first three points are about photos, and then the third point says anybody who wants to post photos is already on Instagram. This is ironic considering most of the people I follow post their Instagram photos - on Twitter.
I do agree however on the embedded tweets. In a world where apps go to great lengths to minimize the amount of clicks people have to make to get to their content, it seems Twitter is incredibly behind the times in this regard.
As for longer tweets, I've read several interviews with the founders and they said they will steadfastly defend a limit on the amount of characters for posts. They say this is what separates Twitter from other social media platforms. As a user, if I have something I need to write about, I never do it on Twitter, there are an abundant other options to do this.
I do agree they need new leadership. As other social media platforms have morphed to keep pace with the changes their users want, Twitter has effectively done nothing to help make their platform any better than when I joined almost five years ago.
It seriously took me years of careful tweaking to get my feed (and lists) where I want them. Now Twitter is absolutely incredible; Twitter lets you be in a room with anybody in the world you want to. That's really, really cool. For me, that's startup legends and tech geniuses. I not only get to see what they're saying, but often what they're reading and thinking about. Because of that I wanted to see the feeds of some of the top tech investors look like, so I created them in lists. They're fascinating to watch (lists are here http://theireyes.austenallred.com/pages/viewlist)
But I look at so many of my friends who don't use it, or who have an account and don't log in, and it's almost always because they haven't taken the time to follow the right people. That's hard to do. Facebook is easy - my grandma knows me so she'll accept my friend request. Twitter, by its nature, forces you to be proactive in creating and culling that list. That's an action that most people don't take.
So Twitter is trying something new - what if we put together lists of what people want and had those available as the logged-out homepage, letting people quickly get involved? It's an admirable effort, but look at the categories available: It recommends I search for stuff like #NationalDayOfPrayer or #BadBloodMusicVideo. The top categories right now are literally politicians, high-end fashion designers, nascar drivers, and hotels/travel agents. I get that they're trying to show you variety, but talk about shots in the dark.
I don't know what the solution is. But I think Twitter's biggest problem is that it simply takes too much work before anyone gains value from Twitter. There are a lot of people on this planet who will never put that much work in before expecting something of value back out of a service.
Having said that, I do agree with your statement regarding friends having accounts that don't use them. I have a hard time convincing people to create a Twitter account.
My dad (60+) and my sister (30+) both recently signed up for Twitter, and despite following less than 10 people each immediately found value. Their first follows were someone they knew, or wanted to follow for a specific reason.
Not sure how many sign up without any intent - but I thought I'd share this counterpoint.
"JOIN OUR SWEEPSTAKES TWEET US FOR A FREE IPHONE #apple #gameofthrones #facebook #mylittlepony #android #sex"
That already happens now when the only incentive is to hit some random searcher. When you're guaranteed millions of eyeballs instantly? Twitter's spam-detection services are not up to the task, and that's not even counting the non-spam but over-eager users.
It seems too much of a no-brainer feature to have so there has to be a technical reason why they haven't.
Twitter really is what you make it. A self-curated news/information source. That being said, Twitter just needs to make that user experience as easy as possible - during the on-boarding process.
It could be as simple as figuring out your actual interests and recommending lists.
Instead, Twitter asks me to follow Taylor Swift. They also do some geolocation stuff - asking me to follow the City of Colorado Springs. That is slightly better.
But, what if, the "quickstart" prompted me to enter my interests? I would just type "#coding" - and @DHH, Carmack, and some others came up available as a list of Code Giants? I would be ensnared, instantly.
I recently created a new twitter account (in addition to the one I've had since 2007), and the onboarding process is over-the-top frustrating. It almost forces you to choose celebrities, etc. that you're interested in, it nags you constantly to add more people, it even e-mails you about it. If I didn't know what Twitter was or why I wanted it, it would drive me away within the hour.
Plus, they're showing favourites in your feed now, as if they were retweets, which means that your feed is getting cluttered with things that people didn't mean to share to you, that you may not want to see, whether you like it or not. Then if you visit someone's page on Twitter, it's no longer a simple list of tweets. There are older tweets that Twitter's algorithm likes more, then their more recent tweets, and they're all different sizes to draw your attention to the tweet Twitter thinks you should read, rather than whatever you might want to read.
All in all, it reminds me of Facebook's non-chronological timeline. I look at my feed on FB, and I see a post from last week, then yesterday, then an hour ago, then two weeks ago, then last Tuesday, etc. It's a mess. I once refreshed my feed and saw two posts, back-to-back, from the same company. One talking about their livestream 'tomorrow' from the day before (i.e. the livestream was today), and one talking about how their hour-long livestream was starting in 'ten minutes' (from two hours ago). These were two items that were highly relevant and time-sensitive, and which didn't show up in my feed until after it was too late to do anything about them.
On top of that, it often fails to show me content from people I care about (e.g. my wife) but shows me lots of 'someone-you-know commented on someone you've-never-heard-of's selfie'. It shows me three things that someone, whose posts I've never interacted with, posted today, but nothing my wife, whose posts I comment on, like, share, etc. all the time, posted today. Then, out of the blue, it 'surfaces' content from last week back to the top of my feed again.
And this is what Twitter seems to be trying to do: figure out what we 'should' be looking at to 'drive engagement'. Because they can't create a sane onboarding procedure that accomplishes any of this, they're just going to start doing it to everyone, even non-logged-in users, in the hopes that the users they attract will be of higher value than the users they drive away.
They're driving their own service in to the ground. It's really sad.
Hell, I still don't check Twitter that often. Too much upsetting drama.
F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen explains data mining and Twitter's ad targeting at re:publica 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbF0sVdOjRw&t=12m42s
Here are two recent ads ("promoted tweets") on Twitter:
weev tells white people they need to stand up and defend yada yada. White supremacy is apparently a-ok with Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ReginaSmall/status/595211478648651776
Apple has an ad in Swedish. It's gibberish. Here is my best shot at translating it (if it makes no sense, my translation is good):
"the good news is for the inhabitants of Sweden now can get iphone 6 set price at 10 kr, beatings not until late"
https://twitter.com/ehsanfadakar/status/596304927724548098
Let me just say I'm not surprised if it doesn't work out for Twitter financially, 'cause if they have all that data Mikko is talking about, and they can't do better than spreading nazism and basically 419 scams, they deserve bankruptcy, so as to make room for someone who can do it right. That's how, I understand it, capitalism is supposed to work.
Twitter is slowing because it's just not "the thing" anymore. Facebook also, though both services have millions of users, they're not attracting the younger users anymore. They've already moved on. I predict that in less than 10 years, both services will be seated at the "MySpace" table in internet history.
There's only so many ways you can create interest in a proprietary package around "sending notes and pictures to friends" which is all these services really offer the average user as a value proposition. As soon as it becomes too heavy, too bloated, too ad-infested, or "what my parents use" then the next batch of users moves on.
The "value of the graph" which is what these services claim is the true value, is meaningless to the average user. They don't give a shit about the graph, beyond their own little piece of it. And if the users go elsewhere, the graph ceases to have any value beyond academic.
Maybe it makes less money and grows slowly, but I check Twitter every day and can't see myself stopping. On the other hand, Facebook is a ghost town. Many social networks explode into the scene but most burn out quickly.
It's nice to find a way to make a quick buck, but I think they should be thinking of the long-term, too.
But that's the fear—that they'll mess up too much right now, and kill their 20 year prospects.
As soon as a reasonable competitor comes along, I'll gladly jump ship.
My Facebook feed on the other hand is full of more information on family, friends and my local neighborhood than I can reasonably process in a day.
That advice works both ways doesn't it?
On Facebook, the opposite. Hence why I'm an avid Twitter user, but don't have a Facebook account.
Just saying. I do understand your point though.
Aside from anything else, I value the past content I have on Facebook - photos, mainly. By contrast, Twitter content is almost all ephemeral.
The stock being mispriced has nothing to do with the "value" or viability of the business, just the lifespan of the current management team.
I also hate, hate, hate the cult-of-the-CEO viewpoint here. It could be that Twitter's CEO role is so central that a) all the issues trace back to its current occupant,and b) all problems can be solved by installing a new occupant. But if that's really the case, then I'd call that a very badly designed system. In what software would replacing 1/4000th of the code solve all the performance and user interface problems? It seems like the model is less, "creative, involved, self-directed workforce" and more "3rd-world cult-of-personality banana republic".
Note also that there's an enormous difference between leadership and direction. MLK for example led many people but directed few of them. I think the former is important but rarely happens precisely because CEOs can just direct people and get apparent compliance.
This might have made sense in a 1950s corporation, where the work was relatively stable and manual, where you needed armies of people to perform repetitive actions. But most of Twitter's people are engaged in what is essentially creative work.
When I talk to friends at large software companies, I hear a lot about top-down reorgs and other central-planning issues. Given that primates are always looking for dominance hierarchies, maybe we really can't do much better than organizations where replacing the CEO is the main way to solve problems. But I hope for something better.
What do you guys use it for? What's the target market for this exactly? I certainly don't expect people to follow me, some random guy on the internet, so there's no incentive for me to tweet myself. Besides news articles, what interesting things do you read from tweets?
It's also a good way to get news from very high quality sources. Lots of domain experts and freelance journalists tweet, and their feeds can be far more informative and timely than regular media coverage.
Peter Nickeas at the Trib does real-time crime reporting from the South Side of Chicago; @peternickeas
I get a pretty constant feed of Middle East stuff that I don't see elsewhere from Laura Rozen (though I'm uncertain of her ideological tilt, she pulls in lots of random other sources); @lrozen
There are a couple court reporters in Chicago that I've picked up.
Saved You A Click does a pretty good job of condensing most of modern journalism into a short Twitter feed; @SavedYouAClick
M&A/corpdev comings and goings in the Valley, startupland's "Weddings Section", that's @pinboard.
Of course, there's @scotusblog.
There are lots of kinds of news that Twitter is just a lot better at delivering than websites or (gag) RSS. Since it's so easy to compose twerps, especially once you get the hang of it, it seems like it draws a lot of reporters in who would not do real-time reporting so aggressively in a different medium, but will do it so long as the expectation is set that they only have to tap out 140 characters an hour.
This is also an advantage Twitter has over Facebook.
That's Twitter.
Thanks for the explanation though!
When Twitter started it was a geek medium and dominated by nerd types. Back in 2007 it was almost a guarantee that I could follow any one and find interesting (to me) conversations and topics. For someone with poor social skills and living in a part of the world with no tech scene, it was an amazing opportunity to meet people and be part of a nascent community.
I'm pretty sure that if I have a career in tech today is in part due to my early involvement in Twitter.
With time, as its usage broadened, it became more and more difficult to find who to follow. Twitter seemingly tried very hard to divorce itself from the nerd community and became pop culture. Once it became Obama's and Justin Biever's medium it was pretty much ruined.
Today, it's still possible to find interesting communities buried within the nonsense but it's getting more and more difficult to do so.
(Non native speaker, sorry if something does not make sense)
But these people curate a retweeting session which I find interesting :
https://twitter.com/HuddersfieldBiz : Use #HuddersfieldHour every Thurs 8-9 PM to discuss #Huddersfield, Promote your business & find out what's going on!
I have also found value in connecting with other community groups in the locale.
So, for me, it offers geographically related content which I don't seem to find elsewhere
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/tweets-mov...
So, I follow a bunch of breaking news accounts and stuff like my power utility, my hosting providers' status accounts, etc.
Prior to Twitter, the fastest medium for newsy information was web forums; Fark.com in particular was always very fast with breaking news. Twitter is faster.
The other value is all the folks you can follow. It's good for entertainment--I highly recommend the @pinboard account for amazing tech industry satire.
But it's also a great way to learn. I want to learn more about data visualization, so I started following accounts related to that. I started with Mike Bostock (D3.js author), and then looked at who he was retweeting, etc. And Twitter is not bad at suggesting accounts to follow once you move into a new area.
It is likely that with a change in leadership these policies will also change and Twitter will become another Facebook/Reddit.
The second most nagging prob for Twitter is the blurring line between its FB page-like accounts and real/personal ones. Both unfortunatey stand on an equal footing in the platform unlike the situation on Facebook where everything is distinct and clear and the line is drawn quite obviously between groups, pages, personal accounts ...etc
([0]: I like that it way as I am not in favor of FB's authoritarian policy of curating/dictating what content should I consume. I'm very OK with rationing and having full control of my TW time the way I see fit)
- http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...
- http://john.do/twitter-quit/
- http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma
- https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/
- http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engage...
- http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulo...
Like an optout for ads, because let's face it I won't be buying a Porsche because of an Instagram photo or a tweet. Ads are just fucking annoying, and it sorta works for pay tv.
I thought fancy car ads weren't supposed to net new customers so much as comfort those who have just shelled out money for one. The ROI comes in the form of reduced returns / resells not increased sales.
TL;DR: because you're willing to pay the ten bucks, you're worth far more than ten bucks. It'll never happen.
google search as case in point, banner ads, etc., all broken promises.
why not do what linkedin does? offer paid premium accounts. the 'verified' badge is already much coveted, so mark affluent users. re-sell short, unused twitter handles. cap the number of followers at say 500, above needs to be premium. want to persist your tweets longer than x months? premium. want to connect an official 3rd party app? premium. remove fucking ads? guess...
and i am not talking about making this expensive, it does not need to be. earn enough money to keep the lights on with premium users.
twitter has the best content on the net, so they're like HBO - but trying to make money like network TV.
tl,dr: build a premium and 3rd party connector paid system, a mix of LinkedIn and Slack's models.
don't like my idea? discuss.
But I think search-related ads are a different thing. When people are actively looking for something, telling them about relevant somethings can create value instead of destroying it. So I'm fine with Google search, but less fine with Twitter's in-stream ads.
I think premium accounts could be great, but it's a tricky thing to get right. Part of the value of Twitter is audience, so anything that might reduce the audience is dangerous. You list several premium features that might have worked from the beginning, but now would be perceived as a loss by non-premium users, surely driving some from the platform and creating a wave of negative comment.
Can you explain how twitter's in-stream ads are any different? You can apply any number of arguments that are identical to your Google one. "If I'm following News Outlet XYZ, telling me about News Outlet PQR can create value as they might have another take on this particular story". "If I'm following Pop artist M, telling me about similar Pop artists Q might be useful". You can also apply the other argument - "I know what I'm looking for just feed me the data and get out of the way" to both scenarios.
You can break the activities down to - 1) Are you 'exploring' or 2) Are you just wanting to 'go to a particular data source X'. If you're exploring, of course you're going to be more open to other inputs, and in that scenario, ads - well not ads - but recommendations, are useful.
If I am reading a newspaper, I am actively trying to follow the writing on a topic. Somebody trying to sell me something is a distraction from that goal.
Scanning newspaper headlines is in theory in between, in that I am searching for something interesting to read. But in practice, I am scanning a particular set of headlines chosen by particular editors who have an understanding of relevancy and story quality that is similar to mine. Paid advertising bypasses that judgment. So again, it works against my goal and for the goal of the advertisers.
Twitter's in-stream ads are similar to that last case. I have carefully curated list of people whose words I want to read. If I am interested in some brand, I can just follow them. If I might be interested in something not in my feed, I can search for that something or ask people who follow me for help. Ads specifically bypass my meta-editorial judgment in hopes of manipulating my purchasing behaviors.
I understand the theory that ads are providing new, relevant information, but I think it's mainly false in practice. We live in an age of effectively infinite free information with everybody able to publish, edit, and meta-edit. I've already selected a group of people who are telling me what I think I need to hear.
Twitter is inserting the ads not because people are saying, "Hey, I need more relevant stuff." They're getting it whether they want it or not. If ads were really all that valuable, there would be sites where you could just get lots of ads, an online equivalent of the coupon circular. But ads instead mainly intrude on the content that you actually want, and there's no way to get rid of them, because places like Twitter realize that people don't actually want them.
Twitter needs to learn how to let me, as a small company advertise at affordable prices. Facebook learned this, even though we all know bots click on "Boosted" posts. Give us, millions of small companies lots of amazing tools and charge for it. (Start with multi user support for the corporate handle, buy Buffer and get back to respecting developers)
https://ads.twitter.com/login?ref=gl-tw-tw-twitter-advertise
I have on a very small scale so I can't speak to the effectivene4ss, but it's (advertising options) been available for quite some time.
Is there a path for an efficient social network that has the right buyers and sellers on it transacting in highly efficient ways, but which isn't beholden to conquer-the-world MAU metrics that have it scrambling to attract the masses at the lower end of the Facebook curve (e.g., old high school acquaintances who find it the perfect outlet to display their self-betraying views on conspiracies, politics and race?)
Not only that, but I'm quickly realizing that having a public record of short little quips I've made is actually a really bad idea.
There is clearly not enough advertisement on twitter, no wonder the users are running away.