
Usage Stalls for Twitter; Shares Drop - constantinum
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/technology/twitter-user-growth-quarterly-earnings.html?ref=technology&_r=0
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tacoman
“The lack of growth there comes from Twitter’s relative lack of innovation,”
said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester who studies social media. “The
experience on Twitter today is the same experience people have always had on
Twitter.”

I don't need innovation, I just want it to work sensibly. I stopped using
twitter on my phone because I found it distracting. I decided to try and use
it on the web only, but there are two really big problems I see.

1\. Each and every time I login, it doesn't remember where I left off, so I
have to scroll down to about where I think I was and go from there.

2\. Once in a while, I'll leave it open, then see the notification "xx new
tweets." I then click on that and it takes me to the most recent tweet, not
where I was in the timeline before I loaded all the new tweets.

I can't figure out if these are really big oversights or I'm not using it as
it was intended. As it is, it certainly isn't a consistent experience with the
mobile client.

~~~
tedunangst
3\. Every time I click an image, it shows up in an overlay. Ok, great. I press
esc to hide it, and the page rescrolls all the way to the top. What jackass
thought this up?

~~~
spullara
Sounds like you have a browser that isn't a major one? Doesn't happen on
Safari/Chrome/Firefox.

~~~
hippiehippo
That annoying scroll-to-top happens to me too and I use the latest Firefox
version on Ubuntu. I first noticed it several months ago.

Also, some time ago, when you clicked a message to view it's context, Twitter
would expand the message list inline. Now it takes you to a new page and when
you return you're back to top.

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Mithaldu
Given that they effectively killed off a number of useful and popular clients,
like Tweetdeck, by changing their TOSes, or straight-up buying them and
rereleasing different (neutered) software under the same name, i'm not
surprised to see a drop in usage.

When they did that twitter for me went from a thing i had running all day on a
second screen to a thing i look at whenever it emails me that someone talked
at me.

~~~
mattupstate
Doesn't look killed off to me [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweetdeck-by-
twitter/id48581...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweetdeck-by-
twitter/id485812721?mt=12)

~~~
Elepsis
TweetDeck falls into the "bought and released a totally redone but worse app
under the same name" bucket.

------
city41
I'm a pretty casual Twitter user, but over the years I have made several
valiant attempts to make Twitter _useful_ and I've never succeeded.

Twitter is a nice real time pulse on what the entire internet is up to.
Tweetdeck is a decent way to get a feel for how things you are interested in
are trending. But "decent" is the keyword here, Tweetdeck really isn't great
at this at all. I still have no really good way to aggregate large numbers of
tweets, find out what the current buzz is from that, then drill into specifics
as I see fit.

After all these years I still think Twitter is just noisy and mostly a waste
of time. I'd love for them to change my mind.

~~~
keyle
I only use Twitter for indie game development. Because it's fun to watch
certain tags and screenshots, keep up with news and what people are doing.

Beyond that, I completely agree. I couldn't give a damn about someone being
somewhere eating something. Or what the CEO of Oracle said this week.

------
xngzng
Issues with Twitter for iOS:

\- Main timeline screen: you can swipe left/right for your time line, discover
and activity. It is bad UX choice when you try to read your timeline with one
hand scroll down the page. Many once in a while your swipe down gesture will
trigger the swipe left/right and is utterly annoying.

\- It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is
displayed as link and not shown.

\- The load more tweets implementation is broken. After tapping "Load More
Tweets", it brings you to any tweet in your timeline, and you are lost to
where were before.

\- It does not support GIF natively.

Other issues:

\- Follow named brands are a waste of time on Twitter as they repeatedly tweet
the same news.

\- Twitter is major pain-in-ass email spammers. There are 7 email
notifications type you receive from just Twitter for marketing. The options
should be off by default. Why give users a chance to hate you?

Irony is Twitter is pushing to be the mobile app platform of choice but they
don't have the best mobile client.

~~~
gsharma
>It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is
displayed as link and not shown.

This is because of Instagram/Facebook and not Twitter. IG/FB chooses to drive
the traffic back to their web property rather than embed the images in Tweets.

------
jostmey
Social media websites to me are like TV series. They are entertaining for a
few years and then a new series comes out. It is my guess that the most
popular social media websites have the staying power of the longest running TV
shows (~20 seasons).

------
jarcane
Maybe users will stop leaving when Twitter starts putting some actual effort
into policing it and dealing with the abuse and harassment that is rampant on
the network, instead of actually making it even _harder_ for people to do
anything about it or even adequately report it.

~~~
hippiehippo
The problem is that anything is "abuse" nowadays. When you have a cohort of
people brought up with a daily dose of "you're perfect", "you're a winner",
"all of you are the smartest kids in the world", a single tweet of
disagreement with them is ABUUUSE!!!

It reminds me of Atheism+'s Block Bot which had people's accounts blocked
because, once some enlightened atheist plus added that account to their block
list, then all the bots' subscribers added it to their's automatically,
triggering Twitter's account blocking feature.

To fight against trolls, maybe Twitter shouldn't have public messages anymore
and, instead, only allow users to view messages published by people who they
follow and people who these people follow, like Facebook's friends and
friends-of-friends. This way, if a troll publishes crap about you, only the
people who follow that troll and their followers will see them.

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mqsiuser
I am from Germany. Today I am perfectly fluent in english including idioms,
puns (somewhat) and _understanding_ american/english culture. To me Twitter
feels like making sense to (native) english speakers (only). 140 characters
and the english language go very well together, especially for expressing sth
in an interesting way without putting yourself into too much responsibility
(in case of doubt/trouble, you just say: "I mean 140 chars are just too short
for being acurate"). I can clearly see there are (still) a lot of ppl from the
UK (e.g. jumping into, when it comes to topics like "in Europe"), but _imho_
Twitter has a language problem:

Twitter is a native / highly fluent english speaker.

~~~
eropple
It may be suboptimal for German, but in addition to English it seems to work
very well for Spanish, French, and Arabic.

------
bennettfeely
Whoever can shove in your face the most information the fastest wins the great
social network race right now. People aren't tweeting enough? Twitter decides
to include tweets that are favorited by people I follow. Twitter beat Facebook
long ago at this race, Snapchat also competes, but YikYak sees new content
faster than I can pull to refresh.

People say that Facebook would survive against Twitter because it's such a
different service (e.g. people are not capable of saying what they want to say
in just 140 characters). However, In my experience, people are capable of
adapting. People are quick to try new things. People go where their friends go
and when a service loses it's shine and and starts doing things that are un-
cool, people move on.

Twitter is one of the few big websites and apps I use regularly which I can
honestly say the design and UX has gotten far worse over the years.

Search on Twitter has always been a horrible struggle. If I want to follow a
friend I know personally, I have to carefully and exactly type their handle
in. I could try to type in their name or username, but again I'm left doing
the heavy work sorting through 90 John Smiths. Why can't Twitter order people
search results taking in consideration the people I follow?

Don't even get me started on Direct Messages. Insanely bad.

More an more my Twitter feed resembles my current Facebook feed, full of
advertisements, clickbait, and crap I just don't care about, stuff that isn't
interesting. And it's not coming from exclusively the people I follow.

------
adventured
I predict in an act of desperation as usage goes from stalling out, to
falling, Twitter will begin to relax their character limit. That's when you
can be certain they're going the MySpace way.

Twitter was supposed to be a messaging platform. They lost that war, big time.
Twitter became a heavily one-sided broadcast platform instead. As the WhatsApp
etc. world eats Twitter's usage, all they'll have left are heavy broadcasters,
celebrities, and so on (and those people will abandon the increasingly
unpopular platform).

The reality is, Twitter doesn't serve enough of a stand-alone purpose any
longer. Too many pieces of its value have been stolen away by competing
products. Not to mention, nobody really cares about their social network on
Twitter, there's minimal value to that (versus eg Facebook), so there's next
to no barriers protecting them from erosion in that regard.

Simply put: Twitter isn't the best social network; Twitter isn't the best at
photos / images / media / video; Twitter isn't the best blog platform; Twitter
isn't the best messaging platform.

It's not the best at anything, and it will lose in part because of that.

------
prawn
I use Twitter (most) and Instagram, but not Facebook. I've noticed a few
friends who were on Twitter previously have abandoned it but maintained
activity on Instagram.

I suspect this is because, in their case, Instagram is personal. You post
pictures of what you're up to and you're always up to stuff. Twitter seems
more for business, building a brand or talking about news. Those are things
you might cull if busy, or if you change jobs or don't have the energy to
promote.

And because the community tools are so meagre (flat comments, for one),
Twitter maintains minimal goodwill with its users. I feel like if I could take
my Twitter ecosystem with me to another service, I would. I don't feel that
way about Instagram - it works largely as I need it to work.

FWIW, I use the official OSX and iOS apps but no longer touch the web version
at all.

------
DAddYE
I was a fan of twitter damn in love with it but I agree that over the time is
getting worse day by day. The UX is just meh. Apps at least on iPhone are kind
of okay, however... the "timeline" today is now even worse then facebook. I
don't complain about ads, I work with them and I understand somehow they need
to make money, but WTF decided that I have to see in my timeline things
totally unrelated like tweets (not retweets) of my friends's followings. Wut?
I constantly press "dismiss this tweet" in the hope some kind of machine
learning will understand that they must fire the guy who decided to go with
this absurd direction. IMHO they did all the best to kill an awesome service.

------
curiousDog
Any chance Twitter could be taken over by Facebook? Looks like they've figured
out the monetization side of things and TWTR is now at a modest market cap.

~~~
robomartin
Facebook has problems. They are forcing page and group owners to advertise in
order to reach their fans by manipulating organic reach and preventing direct
communications with page fans. For the most part you can only expect single
digit percent reach of page posts to page fans. Boosting posts --paying-- is
the only way to reach them all. Page owners don't like this. Many page owners
are slowly devising strategies to take their fan base outside of FB. This is
particularly problematic when you spend money inside or outside FB to build an
audience that, ultimately, FB does not allow you to own. And, again, they make
you pay again and again to reach them.

Then there's the issue of fake likes or paid likes that fall outside your
campaign specifications. You pay for likes from the US and get a barrage of
likes from Bangladesh.

The next issue is engagement. People like pages because they like the pictures
or something else in the ads. After that they have zero engagement with the
page.

This, coupled with limited reach of posts on your page, means that your posts
might reach a bunch of people who are utterly irrelevant to your mission
(Bangladesh) or absolutely disengaged (love the pictures). We advertised for a
page, reached hundreds of thousand of people and received a real education as
to the minefield that FB can be. I am absolutely convinced that the same
amount of cash would have produced vastly better results had we spent it on
Google ads. We would end-up with a list we could communicate with, groom and
grow rather than a page with people who's relevance, targeting and engagement
are in question. And, to add insult to injury, we have to pay dearly to reach
with each and every message.

Yes, to answer the question, we are transitioning our list away from FB as
quickly as possible and will not advertise at all after that. Live and learn.

We've heard that Twitter can be far better than FB in many regards in terms of
reaching and connecting with your audience. I'm sure we'll learn all about
that in the next few months.

~~~
cinquemb
> _We 've heard that Twitter can be far better than FB in many regards in
> terms of reaching and connecting with your audience. I'm sure we'll learn
> all about that in the next few months._

Twitter has been pretty great for the lab I'm at. We wrote some code that
looked for search terms, and then based on words associated with feelings or
intent related to the term, we send people a message with a link to get them
to go where we want them to go (to sign up for a service/app related to their
search term, and gives us more subtle experience sampling data compared to
typical psychological studies). We're actually planning on using it to recruit
for a larger study soon. It's kind of amazing the kind of engagement you can
get from bot's reaching out to people.

~~~
robomartin
That's really interesting. Anything one could read publicly about this
approach?

~~~
cinquemb
Not really, we haven't written about anything yet, but we probably will in the
next year or so.

------
InclinedPlane
I recently created a new twitter account for testing, the experience was
horrid. I suggest they fix that as a first step.

------
guelo
Too bad they killed their developer ecosystem which was creating lots of free
innovation for their platform.

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_almosnow
I was never hooked into twitter, and could never understand what is up with
some people wanting to advertise everything they do through there. However,
for a lot of time I've used twitter for something that I felt it was really
valuable and unique: news.

Whenever I got stuck on some unusual traffic jam I could have just open
twitter and immediately see what was happening and sometimes even get some
piece of advice like 'take this other route instead' that was very valuable
for me. I wouldn't had mind to see a few ads along there or even pay in
exchange of that service that I was getting from them. The whole 'real-time
updates from people around you' is really good.

All in all really useful until a year or so, when they started 'filtering'
their firehose of tweets. Now it's completely useless. I've found out that at
major events (even when I click to see 'all' tweets) only a few tweets per
second appear, which is completely implausible. The last few times that I
tried to look something there I've found absolutely nothing but bs.

Example: Looking for 'ambulance OR police car at NEIGHBORHOOD' (because I want
to know what happened) Tweet results are: @ladygaga - DOWNLOAD THE NEW SINGLE
AMBULANCE FROM LADY GAGA - 4,397 Retweets 5,322 Favorites @someguy - OMG
AMBULANCE IS AMAZING! LADY GAGA ARMY! - 200 Retweets, 20 Favorites ...

So long, twitter.

~~~
nzealand
I for one am glad you are no longer using twitter to check traffic while
driving...

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notastartup
There will be a major market correction where business valuation purely on
userbase will vanish.

