
Twitter has a huge problem, and it’s in your head - sergeant3
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/29/twitter-has-a-huge-problem-and-its-all-in-your-head/
======
ctdonath
I have to smile at the revelation of this problem. Nearly 30 years ago I
discovered Usenet - and I was able to follow & read _every_ post. That lasted
for about 3 days. For "there's too much on Twitter!" to suddenly be a news
item is ... funny.

Since then, I've followed the rise & fall of dozens of social media sites &
sources, watching each follow the same pattern: within about 7 years, each
site started, caught on, became _the_ place to be, sagged under the weight &
dreck of everyone wanting to be at _the_ place to be, the signal-to-noise
ratio collapsed as meaningful content found a slimmer medium, the self-
important/trolls/spam/etc piled on, and the site (still existing) vanished
from the public awareness. Oh, sure, Usenet continues, AOL continues, MySpace
continues, ... but seem flotsam of the past. I've no doubt Twitter, Facebook,
etc - whatever the current cultural imperatives are - will carry on for some
time, but will likewise fade into oblivion as interesting content finds
fresher ground and the S/N ratio collapses.

~~~
fpgaminer
I'm curious why the S/N ratio collapses like that. Is it because those who
contribute to the noise level are slower to move to new platforms? Is it
because those who contribute to the signal are faster to move to new platforms
and/or adverse to popular platforms? Perhaps a combination of both?

I suppose a part of me wonders if the answers to these questions could lead to
a more stable platform. Yet that seems unlikely, since platforms don't seem to
be holding traction longer than their predecessors.

It seems like Reddit might be at least one possible evolution that could lead
to increased longevity. Their trick is to have user moderated sub-communities
as a first class feature, and keep the churn high on those communities
(subreddits). That seems to be a way to allow the cyclic birth and death of
platforms/communities to occur, but still keep people within the overarching
Reddit umbrella. Though I think ultimately Reddit will suffer the same fate as
Digg; it's only a matter of time before management makes enough mistakes or
corruption reaches critical mass.

~~~
ctdonath
When ongoing worthwhile conversation appears on a small board, the S/N ratio
goes very high fast. Word spreads, and people are attracted to a high-interest
low-noise signal. As more people join in, everyone can be heard ... but not
everyone _should_ be heard. The growing noise starts drowning out the signal,
which gets frustrated and heads for less noisy grounds. The sheer mass &
momentum of the noise sources keeps the place going for a while, but more
"signals" leave over time, leaving a shrinking population. Various mechanisms
are put in place to suppress noise, with varying degrees of success (HN's is
pretty good).

"Freshness" is also a factor. After a while, each forum just starts showing
its age, not keeping up with spiffy new forms & forums. People get bored and
move on.

"Us vs them" is also a factor. A growing subgroup may decide they just don't
want to be around the base. Prime example: Facebook and the alleged "kids
don't use it because their parents are there".

Embrace the lifecycle. It's real; instead of fighting it, manage it with the
understanding that it will eventually fade and users head to newer quieter
forums.

------
eropple
This is a weird "problem" to me. I follow about 300 people (@edropple) and
never feel overwhelmed. I've never used lists or filters or anything. I dip in
and out of Twitter as I please. Basketball game's on? Twitter's on. Working?
Twitter's off. The best analogy I can think of is that it's portable bar
chatter. You go when you want to bullshit with friends, you don't when you've
got other things going on.

Maybe the problem is trying to follow the entire Internet and lacking the
self-control to pick and choose.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
^this. It's only a problem for those who have given up on controlling their
behavior, the information gluttons, if you will. And in this sense, that's
anything but a problem for Twitter ('oh no, people can't stop opening our app
and engaging with it').

~~~
CHaro
It is alot more stressful for content creators like youtube personalities who
tweets out constantly instead of being a consumer. Because you have to make
sure you don't miss any import people tweeting at you. And you have to make
sure you make your audience happy. Most youtube stars hate twitter because
it's such a burden to having to keep up with their audience.

Twitter can't afford to loose these people because they are the ones who
create all the tweets most people come to twitter to consume.

~~~
eropple
And those people won't use Highlights.

~~~
CHaro
If highlights brought them all their most important fans tweets so that they
only had to check their twitter feed once a day why woudln't they want to use
it?

Granted they would still use it to promote their stuff. But they wouldn't have
to check their feed which is the cause of stress and info overload

------
pinaceae
disagree.

Twitter's problem is that they invented a great communication channel with no
clear way of monetizing it.

Like inventing email.

They're now trying to build walls around their protocol, shutting down APIs,
etc. Imagine if the people behind email would have done it.

For me, Twitter is a great news reader. And Google shutting down their Reader
product should explain the problem with this kind of products.

~~~
_dark_matter_
No clear way of monetizing? They are grossing more than a billion on 300
million users. Seems like they are quite capable of monetizing.

~~~
hnnewguy
Spending a dollar to earn $0.50 isn't sustainable.

I use Twitter daily, and would hate to see it disappear. But how much of
current revenues are a product of companies still "experimenting" with the
Twitter ad ecosystem? What happens if those channels provide less ROI than
everyone expects? That's the way the trends appear to be heading.

~~~
Yhippa
Can Twitter disappear? If they can't find a way to monetize can they just shut
the thing down and return money to investors? At this point Twitter seems to
be used by a lot of organizations and government to communicate important
information. I wonder if they decided to fold if they would be sued and forced
to figure out how to monetize.

~~~
lbotos
Excuse my ignorance but have other businesses been "sued into existance"?
Seems a little far fetched.

~~~
Yhippa
Not that I know of.

------
danso
In the media, where joining Twitter is almost a requirement, I've met a few
people who, while not enthused about having to be a part of Twitter, are
obsessed with trimming their followings lists and making sure that they follow
only worthwhile people who don't clutter their feed with "what i had for
breakfast posts"...because these people feel that now they're on Twitter, they
_must_ keep up with all the important conversations that may be going on and
read their timelines to completion for the day. It's kind of sad...these
people have lived 20-40 years just fine without the need to see a realtime
feed of random 140-character messages from the Internet, and now they feel
like they have to bear the burden of constantly consuming it. If there's one
thing I've learned from the Internet it's that there's always too much going
on and you'll never be able to keep up with it...and when you do miss out on
some piece of timely information, guess what, there's always plenty more where
that came from, so no need to feel remorse about it.

(I guess this same thing could be made about Zero-Inboxers)

~~~
alexqgb
FWIW, obsessive focus on filtering for high quality information and "a
realtime feed of random messages from the Internet" are basically the the
opposites of one another.

But I will say this: without judicious policing, the channel does gets noisy,
and fast.

------
nlh
The thing about Twitter that doesn't seem to get discussed that often is that
it's a heavily unbalanced platform between content producers (tweeters) and
consumers (readers), and there seems to be a perception problem with how it's
supposed to be used.

The people I most often see talking about how amazing Twitter is are those
that get to reap the benefits of having a large following -- sure, if you have
10,000 followers and you can just pop on and write "Hey Twitter - any
suggestions on a new ...?" and you get flooded with responses, of course
you're going to think the community is amazing.

Now, as a _consumer_, Twitter can also be amazing -- if you curate who you
follow, and understand that you're basically there to read and consume.

But then these folks see that "tweet" button, and they dip in to being a
producer, and they're effectively screaming into a crowded room. "Hey,
nobody's paying attention to me - this Twitter thing sucks" and then they
shrug and walk away.

So Twitter's biggest problem, it seems, is that Twitter is actually different
things to different people, and it needs to better differentiate what its
purpose is so expectations are set properly.

~~~
Ras_
Indeed. You need to ride on the coattails of the people who have followers for
quite some time before you can expect activity for your own tweets. Engaging
in a discussion that's already there is much easier than trying to start one.

------
wiremine
I got on twitter on day two or three (I'm user 1019 I think) and... it was
incredible boring back then. I mean really, really boring. I stopped using it
immediately.

Eventually I picked it back up, once there were more accounts I found
useful/interesting.

Today they have the opposite problem: too much disconnected content: my feed
is filled with 100s of random, disconnected headlines, links to top 10 lists,
random comments from fiends, etc.

I don't feel overwhelmed, but it's hard to _casually_ engage twitter and feel
edified by the experience.

I think to win the long run, Twitter has to be more valuable than just a
seemly chaotic feed of information rushing by. They have never solved this
problem well. At least, not for the casual user.

If they did, I think they would see their user adoption rate increase. That
doesn't solve the monetization problem alone, but it would sure would help.

Update: fixed some spelling.

~~~
Ras_
These best RT's of the day/week and other automated lists seem not unlike
Facebook's excessive Game app messages. They were a proper nuisance until you
became able to hide them. Twitter needs some tools for self-curating. For
example some manual filter that you could teach which kind of messages to
hide. Vast number of people will never adopt any third party options.

------
istvan__
I love Twitter the most out of any social platforms. I think their problem
partially is that the software stack is too expensive. This problem often
missed because everybody is focusing on capabilities and features.
Performance, and being efficient is a feature.

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-
feature/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/)

------
Sevzinn
When I tried twitter, I found myself ignored and not hated and not loved. I
stopped.

~~~
xtrumanx
It may be that Twitter didn't list your tweets in the search results. That's
what happened to my first tweet, which is apparently an anti-spam measure
Twitter employs.

Knowing no one else who used Twitter, I had no other use for the service and
promptly logged off permanently.

~~~
Sevzinn
Nope, tweets with all the right hash tags over a few weeks. I got a favorite
and maybe a follower on somewhat random remarks, but usually nothing.

~~~
nosuchthing
Just because you yell into a cave full of people doesn't mean you'll solicit a
response.

Maybe you could easily have engaged conversation with other people on twitter?

On this point, twitter is not designed to facilitate conversations. Twitter is
a wall of announcement megaphones sort of thing it seems.

------
jay_kyburz
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think between long @addresses and a
few #hashtags, there is not enough characters left to say something
interesting.

The result is cryptic gibberish.

I think @addresses and #hashtags should be moved out of the 180 char limit.

Also, web links should have their own field so you can say 180 characters of
something interesting about the link.

------
jusben1369
What a strange post: "If its service is inherently cognitively stressful, it
can’t possibly persuade new users to sign up."

How do new users know that until they use it? The problem this article
discusses would seem to have nothing to do with getting new users (the problem
discussed here) and everything about people stopping use of the service
(churn) once they hit a tipping point of following too many people and getting
tweet overload.

------
post_break
I think Twitter's problem is that it somehow makes people turn into vile hate
filled people. There is so much harassment on Twitter I just can't believe it.
Sure it exists on 4chan, reddit, and others, but I think Twitter seems to
channel it the most.

~~~
alexqgb
I've been on Twitter since 2008 (@alexqgb) and I've unfollowed a lot of people
since then, but I can't think of one who lost my interest because they
_became_ a raging troll. Anecdotal, I know, but I've seen exactly zero
evidence to support this theory.

My most common reasons for dropping feeds are fleeting interest passing,
people's interests getting boring, and deeper interests diverging. But
changing personalities? No. Personalities are remarkably stable things.

If you're an awful person on Twitter (a) you've probably been that way from
the day you started and (b) it probably isn't limited to your online life.

~~~
post_break
I didn't describe it well. I think Twitter is like an echo chamber for SJW's
and it seems to spawn digital riots, swattings, doxxing, etc. That's the
problem I was trying to describe, the nefarious use of Twitter.

~~~
nemo
If you use the term "SJW" you really might want to look in a mirror before
accusing others of being "vile hate filled people."

~~~
talmand
But what if there are vile hate-filled people on the internet who do self-
identify as SJW?

~~~
alexqgb
Nobody self-identifies as an SJW, unless they're being extremely ironic. The
term was coined by overt misogynists as an expression of abuse, derision, and
hate and nothing's removed its nasty connotations since then.

~~~
talmand
I think the term SJW has been around a bit longer than you think it has, been
used more often in more situations than you seem to think, and I don't think
it was necessarily started by misogynists as an insult to feminists.

~~~
alexqgb
Then maybe not coined, but certainly adopted and popularized. Point being that
whatever more benign associations may have been associated with it at one
point have been permanently altered by GamerGate.

~~~
talmand
Well, I appreciate your opinion on the matter but I simply disagree. As a fan
of such disagreements, I find them quite educational about ideologies, I have
seen the term used many times in several ways for years now.

For example, urban dictionary has entries from four years ago with the very
definition described. You may disagree with the usage of the term but don't
change its history.

It was not popularized by GamerGate and many would say it was adopted by the
hashtag because it describes many people within that debate.

------
oldmanjay
>As Lucy Jo Palladino, a psychologist who studies attention, explains, the
brain is a muscle like any other, and it can’t run on empty.

Possibly the best mixed metaphor (I know it's not a metaphor, I don't know a
better phrase) I've ever read in my life.

~~~
Retra
It _is_ a metaphor:

"A metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same
as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the
similarities[...]"

------
MrBuddyCasino
> For comparison, 34 gigabytes = two times the memory of the entry-level
> iPhone.

Thats not very helpful. Can anyone tell me, if you were to print that out on
paper on an inkjet, how much the ink would cost?

------
khorwitz
A tool to help combat distractions like Twitter* and focus on one thing at a
time: [http://focusr.co](http://focusr.co).

*Although I'm pleased with Twitter's self-awareness here, and I'm not saying there's anything intrinsically wrong with services like these. You just aren't going to see many successful entrepreneurs wasting their time on these services (unless they're directly responsible for engaging users through it).

~~~
ErikAugust
[http://cronster.com](http://cronster.com) \- Working on similar concept,
though not the same.

Threads revolve around chronological events created/added/managed by the user
- think running race, wedding, conference, concert, etc.

------
push7joshi
Totally agree with the post. It's like all data and we need platforms to
derive information from the stream. Probably something like
[http://summly.com/](http://summly.com/) for your lists?

