

Twitter's Dilemma - davidbarker
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/

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acheron
I would like a social network where I can choose people to "follow", and then
I can see when those people post things. That means:

1) Don't show posts from people I don't follow 2) Don't hide posts from people
I do follow

Facebook gave up on that years ago, and that's probably one of the reasons
I've mostly stopped using it. Now Twitter is following in the same footsteps.
More and more I'm getting posts showing up in my Twitter timeline that are not
from people I follow and weren't retweeted, they are just "person X follows
this account, so here's a tweet from it". No! If I cared, I'd have followed it
myself.

And now all this talk about showing "important" tweets that Twitter thinks I
"missed". Stop it! You don't know what I think is important. Again, this is
what drove me away from Facebook.

(Not even talking about ads/"sponsored tweets" here, though that doesn't help
either.)

~~~
stevesearer
As a publisher this is the reason I have put quite a bit more effort into my
email newsletter rather than Twitter or Facebook.

Twitter is much more about real-time updates and conversation, so it makes
sense that it isn't the best medium for letting people know what was recently
published. Facebook though seems like a good medium, but apparently the people
that like my page don't interact with the content so they don't get to see it
in their feeds.

Email newsletters are great because people can easily subscribe/unsubscribe at
their leisure and I know who is reading them whereas it is pretty much a
mystery on other services.

From a readers perspective, your comments are exactly why I love instagram so
much. I can easily follow/unfollow people and my newsfeed is only filled with
posts from people I followed plus the occasional ad. And if I want related
material, I can go to the browse page which has posts that are popular in my
network.

EDIT: I'd love a service that was like a combination of instagram + RSS reader
where I could subscribe to both blogs and people and can easily
follow/unfollow, and have it not be so fast moving but still see all of the
updates that are posted.

------
silentmars
Not a single thing about harassment. Why? Does Twitter's technical leadership
think the problem is that irrelevant that it's not worth putting on the
roadmap? Does the media care so little about it that they don't ask the
questions?

My view is that Twitter has a big problem with harassment. I want to know what
Twitter plans to do about it.

~~~
hayksaakian
I don't mean to be cynical, but mass harassment is a problem for a very small
percentage of twitter users.

From a business perspective what is the incentive for twitter to solve such a
problem?

~~~
nemo
"From a business perspective what is the incentive for twitter to solve such a
problem?"

From a business perspective, being perceived as a platform for trolls and
harassment is really bad for the brand - even if its a minority of users who
are causally throwing out rape threats and other abusive garbage at other
users, they are incredibly toxic.

------
currywurst
Dear Twitter, could you please do away with the "insane for 2015"
140-character limit?

(Anyone who mentions "legacy clients" can forever hold their peace)

~~~
hayksaakian
Maybe someone already mentioned this to you, but 140 characters is pretty much
the only unique thing that makes twitter recognizably twitter

~~~
currywurst
I wonder if that's just a UX issue though. There are already many services
which post the first 100-odd characters before continuing onto a link with the
full text.

Would it be so difficult for Twitter to come up with a native card for longer
tweets ?

