
Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore - mkr-hn
http://thetwitcleaner.com/blog/goodbye
======
lancewiggs
Once again I'm just sad to see the continued erosion from the awesomeness that
was Twitter. Twitter are killing off the good and magnifying the bad, all in
the pursuit of goals that seem to be forcing a continuous decrease in the
quality of end user experiences.

The dumbest thing about this is that monetizing Twitter is trivial, without
changing anything else. Just put occassional and obvious ads in our streams,
and charge us to upgrade to see an ad-free steam.

~~~
xnxn
That doesn't sound trivial to me. Many would just use a client/extension that
doesn't render said obvious ads.

On the other hand, that is the status quo of the web (cf. AdBlock) and it
mostly works.

~~~
Retric
I suspect if they made it a terms of service violation to block adds they
could fairly effectively police smartphone apps. If nothing else it would be
interesting to see them try.

I am also of the opinion that a vary cheap add blocking option say 1$/month
would prevent most people from jumping though many hoops for add-block
software.

~~~
BlackJack
I agree with what you're saying, but you really don't have to "jump through
hoops" to get ad-block software. It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-
blocking extension.

I think the better argument is that most people don't know/care for ad-
blocking software. I think AdBlock and its alternatives are prevalent in the
tech community, but we're just a small part of total users.

~~~
phillmv
>It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension.

I'd be willing wager that those 30 seconds of barrier would deter like 70-80%
of the computer using population. Very few people as a whole know or are
comfortable with browser extensions.

~~~
mst
If it was only a dollar or two per month and not a -complete- pain in the ass
to sign up for, I'd probably pay anyway.

I wonder if you could encourage the people who hate ads but would happily take
a legitimate option by detecting ad blockers and instead of haranguing them
for it, put up a polite advert for how to legitimise their ad free usage?
(thinking in general, not just for twitter)

~~~
PebblesRox
That's a good idea. Just the other day I turned off Ad-Block on the Let's Play
Archive (<http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/>) because they had
a little banner message that asked me nicely if I would consider it.

------
moocow01
It seems pretty obvious that Twitter is trying to become a business and these
alienating changes are part of the strategy but the unfortunate part is that
they seemingly have picked the completely wrong strategy around what their
business should be.

Twitter really from a tech prospective is a protocol and it seemed that
Twitter as a business was in line with what they were providing. Twitter.com
acted as the centralized hub and the developers were invited to build upon and
enrich the Twitter protocol. The goal was the more tweets and users the better
no matter where they were coming from.

Then they realized they need to start making money.

It seems that from the business folks the reaction has been to strong arm
users back to using Twitter controlled products with the assumption that they
can start to serve ads. I don't blame them necessarily in that this is the
standard business model for a social network but I think it will fail
specifically for Twitter. In my opinion advertising will cannabalize their
business - they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where
their value is. Yes its harder, less proven but they are just destroying
themselves with their current strategy. Im sure nobody wants to see ads on
Twitter and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody really wants to serve ads in
that Twitter is exceptionally noisy and the functionality is very streamlined.
On the other hand the value of real-time trends or the licensing to do so is
exceptionally valuable to just about every company. Perhaps its not as easy of
a business model as ads but at least its seemingly more scalable with their
ecosystem.

~~~
waterlesscloud
"they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where their
value is"

This seems incredibly obvious to me, and is what I meant elsewhere in the
thread where I mentioned knowing what everyone in the world is thinking right
now.

Yes, it is hard. But they've got the profile and the money to round up the
talent for it.

Making money from ads is cute and all, but there's a whole other level they
could be working on.

~~~
danmaz74
Interestingly, they actually made the conscious decision to leave analytics to
others - it is clearly explained in the quadrants here:
<https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api>

I just hope that they'll stick to this announcement, as I'm building my
hashtagify.me based on that...

~~~
waterlesscloud
Huh.

It seems to me that the lower left quadrant is worth an incredible amount of
money, but maybe I'm just wrong. It's been known ot happen.

~~~
danmaz74
I just guess that they think they can make much more money in the upper-right
quadrant...

------
TheZenPsycho
What I find frustrating is that twitter has ignored /really obvious/
opportunities to monetize in a natural way, in favour of this strategy that
involves backtracking on the things that makes twitter /twitter/.
Opportunities that I see:

\-- Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers
of followers. Remember Ashton Kutcher's race to be the first twitter user with
1 million followers? Yeah. Having that many followers is valuable to the
person with the followers, and caused actual strain on twitter's
infrastructure. Why didn't they charge money for that?

\-- Charge third party developers for increased API capacity. It's obvious
that this is a pain point. Why not just provide the option to pay to remove
this pain point? Maybe they are planning to? who knows

\-- Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the
features offered by tweet deck.

And yet we have them pursuing this artificial advertising strategy. sigh.

I can only think that the strategy they are pursuing is that they see twitter
as a passive medium for celebrities to transmit messages to their fans. Like
it's a text based TV, that they can run ads next to. Perhaps they have the
user demographics to back this up. Us weirdo geeks that use it as a a many-to-
many communications medium are the vast minority.

~~~
nashadelic
> Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers
> of followers.

You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans.
Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be
celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the
word out there.

> Charge third party developers for increased API capacity.

For the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook and
stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill innovation.
Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad for both the
users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that most popular
apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.

> Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the
> features offered by tweet deck.

This is a good approach and is the LinkedIn model. I'm sure they're thinking
of doing this with talk of 'lightweight analytics' etc so long as they don't
make the paid users too powerful and disenfranchise existing users.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
> You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans.
> Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-
> be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get
> the word out there.

The celebrities in this case, are using twitter as an ADVERTISING platform.
you said it yourself- would-be celebrities are trying to use twitter to "get
the word out". is this now not an opportunity worth paying for? Would the
fans, noticing they are unable to follow Ashton, blame twitter, for charging a
reasonable price for that huge megaphone, or Ashton, for being unwilling to
pay for this enormously powerful broadcast medium? I don't think, in this
case, limiting growth is a serious issue.

> for the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook
> and stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill
> innovation. Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad
> for both the users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that
> most popular apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.

Apple charges $99 for an SDK. straight up flat fee, annual charge. Are you
saying this has seriously harmed innovation for iOS?

What I'm proposing isn't even that. It's charging for say, having an app that
has more than 10,000 simultaneous users. If you are charging money for this
app (and many twitter clients do), is asking for a fee really as harmful as
you claim? I don't think so.

~~~
Jaigus
I think this makes sense. Even besides the celebrities on twitter, there are
many party promoters, news outlets, bloggers, merchandisers, etc. that use
twitter to advertise to their followers, and it provides a far more efficient
advertising medium than the alternatives. The service charge for having a huge
following would probably be well worth it (perhaps even negligible) to certain
major account holders.

------
shocks
I dislike this new trend of linking to 'meme' like images within a blog post.
It really detracts from the post and gives it a childish feel. I clicked those
links expecting hard evidence about Twitter's bad API, instead I get
irritating comics and stop signs.

No thanks.

~~~
itafroma
What gets me is that they aren't even re-hosted: they're hotlinks to other
websites' imagery. Besides being _incredibly lazy_ , leaching off of other
people's bandwidth without giving them credit or placing the imagery in their
original context by linking to the pages they appear on is just a low move.

~~~
hcho
Leeching bandwidth? Really? This is not 1999 anymore, no one cares if their
images are hot linked anymore. Be ready to be surprised, people found ways of
making money from hot linked images.

~~~
pavel_lishin
In 2012, I replaced an often-hotlinked image with a picture of something
gross, just on principle.

Be ready to be surprised, the next link to a meme you click could be a gore-
fest.

~~~
pfraze
sheez man

------
throwaway420
Bad companies start getting really obsessive about being the only ones who end
up profiting through their platform. They view another company getting traffic
and making even a little money through their platform in the same backwards
way that music executives consider pirated albums to be lost sales.

They always end up lashing out at the wrong people - in this case smart
developers who are giving them free promotion and creating value for their
users.

It's sad because Twitter had by far the best platform to build innovative
software off of, but now I wouldn't touch Twitter's API with a 10 foot pole.
There's too much risk that I'll spend lots of time putting something together
and then getting shut down.

The worst part about it is that spammers still easily use the Twitter API but
legitimate software gets rate limited or shut down. It's really sad given the
potential that Twitter had.

------
sbarre
Could this be rebuilt for, or ported to, app.net? Seems like a good place for
the author to continue what is obviously a project he cares about.

~~~
sidawson
It would depend on app.net's data policies - how much (and how fast) we could
get information out of them.

Of course, they own the field, so they could change the rules at any time,
thus (once again) killing the project.

From a technical basis, 90% of the effort was building a robust system atop
Twitter's. The actual core behavioural categorisation engine was relatively
trivial.

Ie, it would require a major rebuild, without lessening the risks at all.

------
brownbat
Do social networks tend to cannibalize themselves over time?

Initially, growth is the most important part of a social network, so it makes
sense to prioritize usability. Over time, pressures towards monetization mount
(either internally or externally, among spammers). Monetization tends to
degrade the user experience, creating opportunities for new entrants.

Network effects can keep you going, but these aren't Ma Bell's network
effects. Users can install competing social apps next to each other using
almost no time and less money. They get to keep the more established network
as a fallback, then spend most of their time using the one with better
features or more "exclusivity." Even if this doesn't lubricate transitions
enough for established users, network effects are basically nonexistent among
new cohorts (read: the young, emerging international markets).

If this is correct, it would explain why no one under 20 actually uses
Facebook (or email, for the matter), and why every move from Twitter smacks of
desperation.

So, I don't know, all hail snapchat? (At least until something displaces that
in five years...)

~~~
Qantourisc
They saying goes that if you are not paying you are the product (or will
become eventually). Wonder how much people are willing to pay? And what it
would cost? But personally I fear the biggest road-bump will the paying
itself.

------
waterlesscloud
It's feeling more and more like the people at the top of Twitter have lost the
thread.

At one point I thought there mission was to "Know what everyone in the world
is thinking _right now_ ".

Obviously useful, obviously valuable.

Instead....well, I don't really know where they're going, and I don't think
they do either.

~~~
ihuman
"How can we make money off of what everyone in the world is thinking right
now?"

------
stuartmemo
It's not fun anymore _for developers_. Of course it isn't, but do normal users
care? I can't say I've enjoyed using twitter any less since they introduced
the API limit.

~~~
Karunamon
I can say I've all but stopped using twitter altogether since their
purchase/bastardization of tweetdeck. That client was nearly perfect..
multiple networks support, persistent searches...

Twitter is not important enough for me to have to run a separate application
for it.

------
btipling
You don't have to make calls to get the rate limit left, it comes in the API
response HTTP header.

<https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting>

Look for these headers:

X-FeatureRateLimit-Limit

X-FeatureRateLimit-Remaining

X-FeatureRateLimit-Reset

~~~
dewski
The author is talking about application/rate_limit_status which is also rate
limited. The headers are great if you keep track of them from the response on
your other calls, but if you want to see your rate limit status across all
endpoints you can use:

[https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/application/rate_li...](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/application/rate_limit_status)

------
tectonic
I'm sad to see the Twitter ecosystem collapsing. There are a couple of
projects that I'd like to do involving Twitter, but I've backburnered them
because it doesn't seem like a safe place to play.

------
webwielder
Almost every single feature of Twitter (including its logo!) was created by
third party devs or users. Not surprising that when the API is severely
restricted, the fun stops.

~~~
itafroma
This is misleading-to-false, particularly regarding the logo.

The logo was created by Simon Oxley. It's misleading because while Oxley is a
Twitter user, he didn't create it for Twitter: he created as stock imagery,
and Twitter purchased the rights to use the image via iStockphoto:
<http://www.wired.com/business/2009/03/twitter-designe/>

It gets into false territory because subsequent versions of the logo were
developed by designers either Twitter employed or contracted with.

Even if you're talking about the "T" logo variant, it's also not true: the "T"
logo was simply the "T" from Twitter's original wordmark, which was simply the
Pico Alphabet font designed in 2001 by a Japanese design firm, Maniacker's
Design: <http://www2.wind.ne.jp/maniackers/pico.html>

~~~
protomyth
buying doesn't equal creation, so webwielder would seem to be correct. Derived
versions of the logo are new creations, see all the arguments or derived works
and software licensing. Also, "original artwork" and "simply the Pico Alphabet
font designed..." doesn't match either.

To go for functionality, the hashtag and retweet were developed by users not
Twitter.

~~~
itafroma
The sense I meant "original wordmark" (not artwork) was that it was the first
wordmark, not that it was novel. It was not created by a Twitter user or dev:
it's just the name "Twitter" in the Pico font, which predates Twitter by
several years.

Moreover, it's misleading to claim the bird logo was created by third-party
Twitter users (or devs): the fact that Simon Oxley has an account on Twitter
played no part in the acquisition of the rights to use his work. They
purchased the rights to use stock imagery.

That is to say, its association with Twitter is due to Twitter buying the
rights to the image and using it in their branding, not due to Oxley's
involvement in the Twitter community or his offering it up as a community take
on Twitter branding (which he did not). It's not in the same category as
borrowing from or being inspired by the Twitter community as was the case with
hashtags and retweets.

The subsequent logos were created by internal Twitter designers or
contractors. While I'm sure they are Twitter users, they are definitely not
third party Twitter users and their usage of Twitter is incidental to their
design work.

------
zaidf
I've suggested before that we should explore an independant organization that
rates companies and their treatment of devs who use their API. If a company
has a history of constantly trimming usage limits, it should be documented. At
some threshold, recommendations could be made to avoid or be weary of certain
APIs.

We are returning back to the 90s where API access came from BD deals and the
rest of us did dirty parsing to make things work.

For a while we got the illusion those days may be gone. And why not, it sure
felt like that. But now we are getting to a stage it's almost worse for
services to have public or free APIs at all.

------
mickaelkel
There is also a "Hitler : The fall meme" about Twitter API restrictions. Based
on a true story.... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1LnLH1N7ow>

~~~
lukehorvat
No.

------
egypturnash
I'm looking at the features and the future features this app has and wondering
who the heck it's for. I've never gotten DM spam, I've never had to think
about using a machine to unfollow junk accounts.

I use Twitter to talk to some of my friends, share things I think are cool
links, follow a few people whose work I admire, and occasionally tweet links
to my own work. I don't follow back everyone who follows me; I basically
regard Twitter as a sort of IRC channel where I get to choose who's in it.

How do people who actually need this kind of tool use Twitter?

~~~
mkr-hn
Marketers, and people building an account for their business. Follow anyone
who looks like they might be interested in what you offer, remove the spammers
(TwitCleaner's main use for me), and unfollow people who don't follow back
after some time has passed.

You can build a Twitter account with real followers pretty quickly that way.

------
rschmitty
TFA is about the API, but when I read the title prior to clicking my immediate
reaction was "it was never fun"

I'm in my 30s so I don't feel that "get off my lawn" old, but I just never
"got it" I guess. Any tech person I want to follow normally has a blog because
you are limited to the character limit.

I wish twitter had built in filters, what drove me away was all the pictures,
the "lolz", and food/drink shots in exchange for a few tech links that aren't
on the persons blog and if I were not following them I might not have known.

Twitter feels like reddit to me while RSS is akin to HN. HN is super focused,
and while some funny OT stories make it to the front page, for the most part
it is solid tech news. reddit you get _everything_

If twitter could somehow provide "channels" or something like
professional/personal I'd really see the value. Not everyone is going to
hashtag their tech only stuff or personal only stuff

Am I doing it wrong?

~~~
jt2190

      > HN is super focused, and while some funny OT stories 
      > make it to the front page, for the most part it is solid 
      > tech news. 
    

Interesting: My perception is the complete opposite, and I've actually found
myself using Twitter (with Tweetbot) for tech news much more than HN lately. I
think this is because Twitter uses the people I choose to follow to decide
what to show me, whereas HN uses everybody, and to make a story popular with
everybody it generally has to make people angry/mad/happy. That means that HN
seems to have more and more polarizing stories reaching the front page,
whereas Twitter seems more focused.

------
FuzzyDunlop
My faith in this post continually diminished as I clicked to links I thought
contained relevant facts. Instead, they were just image macros.

They could easily have been embedded direct, for what little value they offer.
As it stands, it's just frustrating and really poor writing.

~~~
sidawson
[author here]

The post was intended to be stand alone commentary Not a bulletproof thesis.

All I'm saying is my opinions etc after a long stressful week.

Ignore the links, they're just there to lighten the story.

~~~
GhotiFish
Ok, that's fine. You want to lighten the mood.

but personally, I recommend _against_ fart jokes during a eulogy.

~~~
sidawson
The images are gone now. As per recommendations by other hn users above. The
only links remaining are to directly pertinent or explanatory information.

------
NZ_Matt
It's a shame that Twitter themselves don't seem to be doing anything to clean
up the spam. I use to enjoy following twitter during sporting events but these
days every trending topic is immediately swamped by automated spammers.

------
onlyup
I'm not a fan of Twitter and never have been but as you concluded at the end
of your post: "Never play football when someone else owns the field."

Was it making you money?

------
shurcooL
Speaking of twitter API, is there any efficient way of getting just the single
latest tweet from all the users someone follows?

~~~
sidawson
Ha!

No. Off hand, it'd require batching the users into groups of 100 and using an
API call (/users/lookup) for each group. That gives you a user object each
(which you don't care about), but also the latest tweet.

The limit is 180/15 mins, ie a max of 18k in any 15 minute window.

~~~
shurcooL
Thanks!

That beats my first naive attempt, which was an API call
(/statuses/user_timeline/<id>.json?count=1) per user.

Hmm, I just noticed there was also (now deprecated) GET statuses/friends which
did what I want. It is deprecated in favour of your suggestion.

------
fencepost
The only question I'd have is whether Twitter would be interested in
purchasing it to run themselves as a paid premium service.

------
OGinparadise
Twitter is trying to go public and everyone holding shares is thinking of the
possible riches. After that, they can leave to start their own thing, stay or
possibly retire.

What we/others say is a distant second. Right now they need to show growing
revenues and that's it.

------
celticbadboy
Not surprised at all. One could argue it was the API that attracted so many
people to Twitter in the first place. It seemed really smart to me at first to
create such a great ecosystem, but maybe there's more behind that scenes that
I don't know about?

Either way it's sad to see this service go. The guy seems nice and provided a
good service, but clearly he's not going to spend a bunch of his own time and
money if it's not rewarding anymore.

