
Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again - kgwgk
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/twitter-s-revenue-tops-estimates-monthly-user-growth-evaporates
======
intoverflow2
Anyone still _actually_ having a good time on this service?

Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping
from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my
timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers.

I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed
Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" checkbox in
settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and
politics from elsewhere.

Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way
into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or
gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of
politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly.

 __Edit __\- Mass replying to the careful follow question: I already choose
who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it 's really
tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're
all people who actually do things outside of comment online.

To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting
interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst
(Political hot takes).

~~~
mxschumacher
I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter",
but now I love it.

Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high
granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I
would not want to miss.

Selection criteria I use: \- don't pay too much attention to profile, better
to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science
people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day \- sane tweet
frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just
noise/spam \- select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is
suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")

Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they
have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes
minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):

[https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following](https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following)

~~~
edw519
Nice list! Thanks for the gift to the community, Max. I bet this took a lot of
work to curate.

I'm following you. Better yet, I'm following who you follow.

~~~
wcummings
Twitter should fix lists, and make them collaborative.

------
skewart
Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Reply threads are a pain.
Tweetstorms get old. And all too often there is way too much spam. However,
there are amazing communities of people sharing interesting content and having
great conversations.

Twitter needs to realize that there value prop is the community using it and
not the app itself. They need to make radical design and product changes to
make for a better user experience if they want to grow. The vast majority of
internet products evolve significantly as they grow, surfing the wave of
changing user behavior and taste as they reach new markets.

~~~
visarga
Scrolling is very inefficient on Twitter - to read the equivalent of a single
screen on reddit or HN means to scroll 20x more on T. When reading comments I
have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed
and position lost.

Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain
specific stuff.

~~~
icebraining
_When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the
column because it gets closed and position lost._

That's also my experience - I have to be _very_ careful not to click on
anything, lest I lose my position on the thread. I don't understand how the
developers themselves don't get frustrated about this, frankly.

~~~
freehunter
You think the developers of Twitter use Twitter?

~~~
rhizome
Not heavily, no, and definitely not on Android (at least), where they have
some algorithm to reflow the timeline both at random times, and after viewing
a specific tweet. Click the back button to continue reading your timeline and
they insert 5-20 tweets in between the one you just read and the one you were
about to read, or they pop you up to the top of your timeline.

It's truly a bizarre UX, and the only charitable way I can interpret it is
that they're using Continuous Delivery, implementing features in a piecemeal
fashion, using users as alpha testers, and basically moving slow and breaking
things.

------
dforrestwilson
Twitter is such a fascinating platform. I use it on a professional basis and I
really enjoy it. I get the opportunity to interact with the rock stars of my
field. These are people whom I would probably never have the chance to ping
otherwise. I consume more media on TWTR than FB at this point because I trust
the people I follow to be great "taste makers".

Clearly the company has some value, but how they fix the business model is a
big question mark. I wonder if the Microsoft-LinkedIn complex would be the
most natural home for Twitter at this point.

~~~
mox1
I mean interact is a strong term here. You send 0-140 characters towards them
and they get to send 0-140 back. Yes I'm sure sometimes meaningful
conversations happen, but I doubt that is the norm.

I get to interact with a rock star if I hang out near the exit door after the
concert. I can shout at them and (s)he might say something back. If I'm lucky
and it's a cool musician we might be able to have a brief conversation...

As a professional, if I wanted to interact with a leader in my field on a
meaningful level I would e-mail, write them, attend a speech by them, etc.
etc.

~~~
yttrium
I mean - this seems like you don't actually use the service. I do JS
development, and I can pretty reliably get someone like Dan Abramov or other
JS 'rockstars' to look at/comment on an issue if it's required. Additionally,
I can see these people interact with their peers and discuss ideas.
Fundamentally, twitter has become a platform for idea exchange and
conversation that has professionals on it, discussing things professionally!
It doesn't really get more meaningful than that.

~~~
mox1
So for your JS example, why would you attempt to reach them on Twitter when
something like Github would be so much better? Create an issue on Github,
point to the exact line of code that is a problem and wait for a response?

How do you ask a meaningful question about source code / software development
in 140 characters? How do you get a meaningful response in 140 characters?

~~~
yttrium
Because it's not just about issues - I don't exclusively want someone to
interact with me in a setting that's centered around the content. I would
preferably like the experience to be more free form and open to a wider
audience. Incidentally, I don't think the 140 character limit has ever really
bothered me. Most of the time I text shorter strings than that - if I want to
have a longer conversation I'll either send multiple tweets, or move to
DM/chat.

------
cwyers
> A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That
> number stands at 328 million monthly active users -- the same as in the
> prior quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement Thursday.
> Revenue fell 4.7 percent and the company’s net loss also widened, affected
> by a $55 million writedown of the value of its investment in SoundCloud, the
> German music streaming service.

This is insanity. This is utter insanity. Twitter is at over 300 million
monthly users. How have we created a system where that's not _enough_? Twitter
is incredibly relevant. The president's Tweets are basically driving the news
cycle now. And yet it needs to grow? Why? (Okay, okay, I understand why -- to
feed all the VCs that invested in it. I just... ugh.)

~~~
kosievdmerwe
Because at the end of the day companies are supposed to make a profit and
Twitter isn't managing that. They also aren't managing growth, which people
believe is a good reason to delay profitability in favor of a future larger
amount of profit.

This is hardly ridiculous.

EDIT: and moreover this is a situation that has existed for multiple quarters
now, adding to the reasonableness of the frustration and lack of trust in the
future of Twitter.

~~~
cwyers
Could Twitter be profitable if they weren't spending so much money on new
customer acquisition?

~~~
kosievdmerwe
I honestly don't know. I heard mutterings that they can become profitable if
they become more lean (layoffs and less office extravagance).

------
byuu
And here we all really thought their recent redesign to add border-radius: 50%
to literally everything on the site (avatars, text boxes, buttons, etc) and to
strip all contrast away from the icons by hollowing them all out would bring
about massive growth of the platform!

How many more times do they have to listen to exactly what their users want
and add things like more complicated reply-to functionality that most can't
seem to figure out still, live auto-playing sports video on the frontpage
regardless of your interests, temporary automatic bans for using adult
language in replies to verified accounts when yours isn't, moments, reordering
your timeline so that it's no longer chronological, hiding tweets behind "show
more replies" (with no opt-out), hiding even _more_ tweets behind a second
"show even more sensitive replies" (still with no opt-out), invading others'
discretion and flooding your timeline with other peoples' likes, replacing the
dreaded egg avatar with a person silhouette, etc before the platform starts to
grow? /s

------
AznHisoka
Twitter needs to:

1\. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business
and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise
to Twitter anyway.

2\. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall
popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with
no links.

3\. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interact
with other users. in other words, throttle those bots and broadcasters.

I believe the noise problem is a huge issue in twitter. it gradully causes
people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to
ads.

i would even go as far as banning apps like Buffer and social schedulers from
Twitter. They are a net negative for users (note: I said users not marketers)

~~~
unethical_ban
Businesses would have to get some kind of value-add (honey) otherwise
literally everyone would tweet as "Owner at Business" and just happen to tweet
about their business all the time. Regulating that would be a nightmare.

~~~
AznHisoka
if you are not a business nor journalist/celeb you cant tweet more than x
links a day.

~~~
pjc50
That ruins it: the businesses and celebs are mostly posting pictures, or some
businesses are using it for tech support, while some of the most interesting
accounts are just streams of links from random people.

------
fgandiya
> Twitter began investing heavily in video, aiming to draw a more mainstream
> set of users and premium advertising deals

What's with this whole "pivot to video" trend among websites?

Why is it preferred to text which is probably easier to write, needs less
network and is more accessible than a large number of videos (which don't have
captions)?

~~~
Eridrus
Video ads pay much more.

~~~
kasey_junk
And autoplay video jukes the stats to make it look like the consumers are more
engaged in video ads than they are in banners.

~~~
silverbax88
Autoplay ads/videos are the fraudulent lie that corporations are attempting to
use to inflate their ad impressions. It will come back to bite them.

------
pier25
The problem with Twitter is that it has an identity crisis. It wants to be as
massive as Facebook but the way it works is only attractive to a minority.

For example the 140 characters limit which was a novelty at the launch is more
of a nuisance than anything. It's very common that users are replying to
themselves to be able to say more.

The other big problem is noise. For example I recently started following one
of the NPM devs and my feed was flooded with LGBT content. This is not
Twitter's fault, but the way its users are using Twitter has become part of
the culture.

Twitter could probably solve those two problems, but at the same time it would
destroy what Twitter is about for its current users.

The only solution for Twitter is to realise it can't really cater to a
mainstream audience and to become profitable it needs to lower its costs.

------
iandanforth
I use twitter's web app primarily with heavy editing with uBlock origin. I
don't see trends, or suggestions or moments.

I block 99% of accounts that show up as 'promoted'.

I always click 'show less often' for 'In case you missed' and 'Who you should
follow'.

With all that, I love it. It's indispensable for keeping up with machine
learning news.

The core product is the best curated news feed around, but you have to do the
curation. Almost all the content twitter itself pushes is noise.

To survive twitter needs to start serving ads that are extremely tailored to
me and my feed. Just like with google, the quality of ad results needs to
match or exceed the quality of organic results.

------
tormeh
Twitter is amazing, but it needs to ditch the 140 chars, improve
discoverability, and get more modest in its expectations. Twitter is an
interest network, where you follow interesting people and read what they
write, re-tweet what they write and sometimes interact with them. Given that a
lot of people don't have that much interest in things that can be expressed in
Twitter form, Twitter has a low ceiling on how big it can get. Most sports
fans would rather watch sports than following an athlete. I think Twitter
should try being better at what their users use it as.

~~~
kasey_junk
I think I'd probably stop using Twitter (the only social network I use) if
they ditched the 140 character format. I don't want to see long form facebook
style posts there, its literally their differentiation.

~~~
tormeh
I would say that their differentiation of Twitter is that all posts are public
and connections are uni-directional.

They could implement 140+ using the same kind of GUI that's already there for
text-as-picture, which is already widely used.

~~~
kasey_junk
Sorry let me rephrase. Its their differentiation to me. I don't _want_ to see
140+ character posts. I _like_ the terseness of the format.

------
xj9
keep up the failure twitter! i love it.

every time they make a serious mistake and alienate users, the federated
timeline on my private mastodon server is flooded with new people. quite
beautiful actually. fun to see how people show up ready to fight only to find
that there are a lot more ways to interact with people, if you can believe it.
fights break out. people show up to try to cool the situation down. some
people decide to stick around. lovely.

[https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)

[https://cybre.space](https://cybre.space)

[https://ephemeral.glitch.social](https://ephemeral.glitch.social)

[https://sunshinegardens.org](https://sunshinegardens.org)

------
wongarsu
My primary reason for not using twitter is the lack of a Windows client that I
like. All I want is to see tweets from people I'm following in a compact, not
screen-filling, undistracting way. Just something simple to keep up with the
tweets of a handful of people.

All such clients I could find are discontinued and broken by now. The current
clients are either are oriented at power-users (Tweetdeck & co) or turn what
could be 8 lines of text into a screen-filling experience that you have to
dedicate time to to follow (official Twitter windows client & co). I don't
care enough to code something myself, so I just don't bother with Twitter.

~~~
nimchimpsky
just go to [https://mobile.twitter.com/home](https://mobile.twitter.com/home)

~~~
vxNsr
This is what I get[0] which is much worse.

[0][http://i.imgur.com/sJ6qAQE.png](http://i.imgur.com/sJ6qAQE.png)

~~~
nimchimpsky
much worse than what ?

Its simply the tweets of the people you follow - no fluff.

~~~
vxNsr
Much worse than the desktop version, I can only see two tweets the info
density is terrible.

~~~
nimchimpsky
Its only two tweets if each tweet has a picture attached. And I can only read
one thing at a time, I prefer scrolling than being bombard with ads and other
shit.

------
protomyth
Their usability keeps going downhill. This showing me other people's favorites
thing is one step too far. I know they must feel a bit putout that the
community invented the retweet, but making favorites act like retweets is just
dumb.

Also, the amount of data the service uses is obscene. The auto-play even if I
have the preference not to is a cell plan killer.

------
skoocda
This comes up semi-regularly when Twitter is mentioned on HN, but I've moved
all my Twitter attention over to Nuzzel and have enjoyed the change. Twitter
started to feel like such a poor return on my time due to the format- having
an aggregator makes a huge difference. It partially solves the clutter problem
of having hundreds of Twitter followees, and partially solves the problem of
not wanting to check Twitter perpetually.

What I don't understand is why Twitter hasn't implemented more direct methods
to see the generally/statistically good content. Anyone remember 'Texts from
last night' and 'Fuck my life' and the like? They had this _incredible_
feature that allowed you to sort by top posts of the week, or even, can you
believe it- the month! Nuzzel provides this as well, but it doesn't have much
effect unless you follow enough people to decimate your normal Twitter
experience.

------
akilism
328 million monthly active users and still not happy.

------
Rjevski
What I don't understand is how can they burn so much money to still not be
profitable despite millions of users.

Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted
tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough
profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning
through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?

~~~
criddell
Twitter has something like 3000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of
where they are. Before I heard this number, I would have guessed they had 300
employees (based on Instagram having 20 employees when Facebook bought them).

At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much
done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention.
Make Twitter better for those of us that love it.

~~~
dirtyaura
Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that

\- ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers)

\- ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, researchers, and related managers)

\- ~1000 in Sales and Marketing

\- ~500 in general & administrative (finance, legal, H&R, IT support,
management, misc)

If you compare to e.g. Google, this sounds pretty similar split.

~~~
criddell
Every one of those numbers sounds an order of magnitude too big to me. Is it
wrong to compare Twitter at 3000 people with Instagram at 20?

~~~
dirtyaura
Yes, I think it is wrong to compare them directly. I think Twitter has room to
cut employee count, but not by order of magnitude.

Instagram had 20 at the time of acquisition, I bet it's much bigger now. They
had a single product, no ad tech platforms, no working business model. Twitter
has multiple products and several (acquired, partly failed) ad platforms. Also
Instagram were able to build on top of modern cloud technologies and scalable
infrastructure services like AWS. Twitter was launched same year that AWS, so
I think Twitter has paid a price by building it's own infrastructure.
Instagram likely used a lot of outsourced people too to run all non-core
things. Both Instagram and Whatsapp were clearly amazing, well-functioning
technology teams to be able to execute with such small teams, but they were
still very early in developing their revenue engines.

I think employee count and costs are not Twitter's biggest problem per se.
They still have quite good financial situation, $4B in cash and equivalents,
IIRC. The problem is that they haven't found a working ad model. Performance
marketing has made both Google and Facebook the revenue engines that business
has never seen before. Twitter could still do something similar but on the
smaller scale.

------
unsoundInput
I'm wondering why they're getting more and more adamant that people register
an account, even though a lot of people don't care about having an online
persona outside of Facebook and wouldn't ever contribute anything to the
platform.

I honestly believe that could do much better by providing a good experience to
people that just want to stay up-to-date and follow a few people that they
find interesting.

~~~
talmand
Gotta pump up those numbers. Can't show growth without people signing up for
accounts.

~~~
unsoundInput
I don't buy it.

At least two core products of the biggest advertisement company in the world
have no problem providing you value and generating ad-revenue without you
having to be logged in. Google and YouTube would be nowhere near the success
they are if they'd force you to log in.

------
thrillgore
I guess i'll be the only contrarian here and say that Twitter has become the
preferred communication platform for some notable political figures (including
the current Sitting US President). On that simple premise alone, I can't for
good reason work up the nerve to use it anymore.

There was a time when I relied on Twitter to get details about life in a
rather medium-sized city. We had tweetups and I even used it for business
networking. As it grew bigger, I felt less interested as the value increased
on other platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn. Even now, I still find dedicated
Subreddits more valuable than Twitter.

To me, Twitter is now a space for low effort comments and input on media. I'm
sure it works well for others, and good for you. But I have no time to
cultivate relevant trends, and it seems philosophically wrong to suggest a
platform should enable or mandate the culling of an audience. Especially since
by design, Twitter is supposed to be the cross section of humanity (with its
inherent downsides).

------
Flow
But is it a safe space yet? :)

Autoblocking list bots going crazy can't hardly be a good thing for growth.
Facebook with their groups concept feels like a better model than the free-
for-all model Twitter uses.

And I've always felt that text-only and limiting to 140 chars is a great way
to ensure there's misunderstanding between people.

------
richardknop
I have just deleted Twitter app from my mobile phone today. I am getting fed
up with constant push notifications I don't care about.

It seems like push notifications from other social apps are more relevant,
notifications from Twitter rarely are about something I care about.

------
SonicSoul
side point, but i really hope Twitter doesn't try to mimic FB type algorithms
that serve content im likely to click vs content as is from people I follow.
This includes withholding updates so that users keep pulling the lever to get
a trickle of content.

I hate it so much when i F5 on a window in Facebook (or hit the back button)
and completely different front page loads.

~~~
glastra
This is probably happening already. The feed itself is no longer sorted by
date (you get some highlights that you can dismiss but hey, here they are
again), and then even content _liked_ (not retweeted) by people you follow
shows up. This makes absolutely no sense for the user, as it happens on
Facebook. I assume it's a way to tackle the lack of original content generated
from individual users / content consumers (e.g. friends you follow).

~~~
AznHisoka
this is an elephant in the room. most people simply do not produce any useful
content. they just auto tweet links or comment on something random and
specific that is uninteresting.

~~~
sp332
But on twitter, it doesn't bother me if most people aren't interesting. I only
follow the people I want to follow.

~~~
AznHisoka
but there aren't that many interesting ppl with interesting stuff to say. So
less of those ppl to follow.

~~~
SonicSoul
i don't necessarily agree, but regardless if i did, i'd rather view the
content i signed up for in a true chronological way

------
dkrich
To me it seems that Twitter is less of a back-and-forth engagement platform
like Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram, and more of a platform for anointed
experts/celebrities to use as a megaphone to anyone who will listen.

Accepting that, I wonder why Twitter doesn't charge people to use the service
to either have a verified account or beyond some # of followers after which
it's capped? Celebs obviously get a great deal of value from the service and
have the means to pay, so why not charge them? I refuse to believe that there
would be a noticeable decline in accounts if you had to pay some fee per, say,
30k followers.

------
blister
Twitter has caused serious harm to myself and my family. I'm a big fan of the
platform, but I've been "doxxed", harassed, and was even SWATed once by
different people trying to get me to give them my username.

I'd release it, except that'd be almost as big of a pain. I'd have to release
a new edition of my book, change all my websites. Ugh. People are dicks. I
wish I'd picked a less desirable handle.

------
euroclydon
_Twitter’s business troubles contrast with its increased profile in the
political world, as U.S. President Donald Trump frequently uses the platform
to reach the public in an unfiltered manner. Despite his daily fusillade of
tweets, Trump hasn’t helped Twitter’s growth in its home country._

~~~
eb0la
Maybe he is one of the reasons 2mm users left the platform... Not the only
one, but one factor.

------
agumonkey
Maybe it's naturally limited from it's format and doesn't need to grow more.

\- I like the website for quick feed and "real time" data \- I wished the
logic was thinner, it's still a heavy site in a way \- maybe a 3 real columns
UX would make the thing blossom

------
CM30
I read somewhere that the issue with Twitter is that its platform doesn't have
the level of mainstream appeal the likes of Facebook or Instagram have. It's
good for journalists and influencers sure, but for the average Joe it's not as
intuitive to use.

------
jaxondu
Discovery for new content/people to follow on Twitter's iOS app (Explore tab)
is appallingly bad. Its astonishing that they made so little improvement in
this area after so many years. Its sad when you compare with what you get on
Weibo, its China clone.

------
crispytx
Twitter's problem is that they let Ev Williams walk away from the company, and
then he goes and creates Medium. Medium could have been a product of Twitter
Inc., and then no one would be talking about their lack of growth.

~~~
JonFish85
Isn't Medium struggling in its own ways, cutting costs & laying people off? If
it was a Twitter product, I imagine the stockholders would want it shut down,
seeing it as a distraction to the main Twitter product.

~~~
CM30
Yeah, Medium's having trouble finding a good business model itself:

[https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-
focus-98f374a960be](https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-
focus-98f374a960be)

It's got the same general issues as Twitter has. No clear business model, a
more limited audience than the creators of the service want it to have and a
severe with too much noise and hostility (especially when you go away from
recommended articles to random ones).

------
rchaud
Every discussion on Twitter on HN talks about UX issues like the threaded
comment layout, as though these are what's responsible for driving away
Twitter's audience.

I think the simple answer is that you don't actually have to ever visit
Twitter to know what Trump, Nicki Minaj, Drake etc. are saying.

Whatever is said on a tweet will be screen-capped and re-reported on your
favourite gossip website, news site, Instagram page, reddit, etc. That's what
you get with a 140-character limit. Whatever you said or pic you snapped can
easily be reproduced on a different medium in its entirety.

~~~
shostack
That's a great point. Text and images are easy and damn near free to copy and
distribute (unlike video). So it is very easy to copy content from Twitter and
post it elsewhere (where those publishers can then monetize it themselves).

Compare that to say...video hosted on YT/FB where, when embedded, can still
include ads that allows those platforms to monetize people sharing their
content offsite.

------
Tistel
Twitter owns [https://www.mopub.com](https://www.mopub.com) an ad exchange
too. I think its one of the bigger ones. Ad exchanges are the things that
provide revenue to app devs. Basically, when you open a free(mium) app there
is a market bidding for the right to show you an ads. There is all kinds of
tech trying to characterize you based on your phone's id so you see relevant
ads. Having an audience of 320+ million people and ad tech powering a
significant portion of the app world seems like nice problems to have.

------
davidbwire
Twitter is it's own enemy. There's no way to adjust video quality for a
smoother streaming experience. Twitter Lite has a horrible user experience;
you have to manually click on each image to load and the images seem to be
full quality which defeats the purpose of data saving. Why can't they build an
app like Facebook Lite? Facebook lite is small in size to download (less than
1.5MB) and has nicely compressed images and videos.

------
j_s
Are there any desktop or self-hosted tools designed to archive my Twitter
feed? Every time I remember seeing something useful it is nearly impossible to
get back to.

------
patrickg_zill
Twitter has been actively banning various accounts, usually alt-right but some
even satirical in nature. They banned GodfreyElfwick for instance.

Each time that happens, Twitter loses some of its appeal.

They could very easily put more filtering power in the hands of their users,
but don't (to give me more control over whose tweets show up as response to my
tweets, which is the main complaint people have about accounts they vehemently
disagree with).

------
altotrees
They brought on the global creative director from Beats by Dre. He had a hand
in some interesting campaigns, but clearly it didn't do the trick.

Twitter is still insanely enmeshed in the American cultural fabric right now.
Any newscast or radio show usually mentions it, businesses and publications
fight for impressions, etc. There have Been multiple times I think Twitter is
finally on it's way out, but it somehow remains relevant.

------
overcast
Twitter should just focus 100% on real time news. That's the only time I've
ever seen anything valuable come from it. If a major site is down, it's
generally on there instantly. If some event just happened in the world, it's
on there instantly.

All this other nonsense, interacting with celebrities, businesses, or coding
"rockstars" is just noise.

Overhaul the horrendous UI, focus on world news ONLY.

------
eb0la
Q1 and Q2 MAU are the same: 328 million worldwide. Only in the US -2 million
MAU less than in the first quarter. Not tragic, in my opinion.

~~~
wongarsu
And 328 million is 4.5% of all humans. That sounds like a pretty solid
audience.

~~~
johannes1234321
... but how many of those 328 million are in fact bots?

------
good_vibes
I follow 44 accounts, a mixture of Eastern philosophy, interesting
entrepreneurs/economists, Quanta/Nautilus, Patagonia, one design showcase, a
few people in tech industry.

Twitter is mostly noise, little signal. Social media in general is to be
honest. I get a little value from each of the major platforms. Reddit and
Instagram are my two favorites.

------
kbullaughey
Is there any way to deduplicate tweets? Some accounts seem to have the same
tweets scheduled over and over again.

------
Taylor_OD
I got off twitter because it felt like they were constantly changing the app
to make it worse / more covered in ads but mostly because I didn't like the
way it was changing my thinking. It's the first app I've felt the pull to
compulsively check and I really didn't like that.

------
yakshaving_jgt
[opens Twitter]

EVERYONE: How dare you be a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white
male?!?!??!?!

ME: …Ok then.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
mrkrabo
You're not following the correct people. I agree it's sad that almost
everybody involved with tech is a die-hard liberal :P I'd love to get my tech
news from Twitter but I simply don't like to be told how to think regarding
politics, which tech people do all day. So I just read Hacker News...

~~~
librvf
I don't mind die-hard liberals who are actually open-minded believers in
individual rights and equality.

The whole white, het, cisgender stuff is coming from intersectional feminism,
which is anything but a liberal philosophy.

------
cJ0th
Instead of focusing on growth they should focus on their business model. More
users cause more noise first and foremost. How is noise going to help long
term sustainability?

------
Overtonwindow
What if a company like Amazon bought Twitter? They could also charge for
accounts. Something like more than 100 followers you need to pay.

------
StreamBright
Should not be a big surprise, Twitter has an absolutely questionable policy
when it comes to content filtering.

------
abiox
twitter's core interaction mechanism was always ripe for trolling, brigading
and other abuse. the ui in general is pretty bad.

------
sickbeard
Maybe the audience is already grown? I mean it's being used by presidents and
heads of states and is a major communication tool for businesses and
governments. Maybe it's just not hip anymore.

------
yttrium
Part of the problem is the sheer amount of racism and harassment. How many
times do twitter eggs and other hate speech peddlers get reported without
anything happening? Why does Twitter drag their feet over this? Nobody will
miss the neo-nazis.

