
Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around? - bsvalley
If you were the CEO of Twitter, what would you do in 2017 to make Twitter great again?
======
nikcub
1\. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year

2\. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing
'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use
twitter at some point and just been confused.

3\. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams

4\. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view

5\. drop the video passion-project nonsense. you don't need to own content to
use twitter alongside it. strike deals with the content providers instead
where tweets are shown alongside (this is already being done) and become a
partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor

6\. improve the core product for users. group messaging, longer tweets, only
show replies from people who are authenticated or two degrees away from you by
default, etc. etc. (and pro accounts, if you wish)

7\. let people pay to get a checkmark, and then let users pay to flair tweets
they like

8\. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter. let them pay
to use it as a platform and properly authenticate their customers on twitter

9\. ditto above but for marketing

~~~
mrb
Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message.
[http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-
month...](http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month-to-
raise-the-limit-to-280-c/) Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many
would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly?

Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

~~~
aphextron
>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message.

The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of
thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

~~~
cortesoft
Well, the original reason for the 140 character limit was because you could
get tweets via SMS, which at the time had a character limit.

~~~
theoh
Via a _single_ SMS message.

The size of SMS messages is still fixed at 160 characters, but now they can be
transparently chained to send longer texts. This is quite unlike IP protocols
which have much larger maximum packet sizes.

Whether Twitter should ever have taken a cue from SMS is moot: apparently the
Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use
radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS)

~~~
kalleboo
140 bytes to be more precise. An SMS client will cycle through 7-bit, 8-bit
and UCS-2 encodings depending on the content, limiting the number of actual
characters depending on the language.

The last time I tested it aaages ago, Twitter didn't enforce the encoding-
based limitations, and if you sent a 140 character tweet full of unicode, it
would actually send you several concatenated SMS.

------
dotBen
Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of
live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real
time.

It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have
turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and
Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get
more comfortable with online distribution. Trump's tweets, the presidential
debates broadcast on Twitter and the fact people turn to Twitter during
breaking news make it a logical extension to move into news and possibly
finance too.

Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics
and the average joe has moved their engagement to more visual platforms like
Instagram and Snapchat where it is much easier to create and consume more
personal content and updates.

Twitter would also be able to focus their monetization and advertising efforts
around a much tighter content and audience niche. Plus consumers are used to
paying for some of this premium content, making monetization of a freemium
model even easier.

~~~
davycro
"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics"

Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year
medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency
medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases
reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-
identified to protect patients of course). They also post opinions on the
latest research publications. Twitter has become my best way to stay current
in medicine.

Other apps targeted for doctors have attempted this. Doximity and Figure1 are
examples. But twitter has done the best job.

~~~
dotBen
That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number
of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount
of monetization that can occur from that community.

As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers.

I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the
specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at super-serving your
community. Is Twitter's ephemeral nature, mixed in with non-medical updates,
really the best way for you to spot trends and identify useful links? If you
don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or
update?

~~~
pvg
It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who
are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful
as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money,
or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.

~~~
dotBen
"But it is a thing"

If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right
now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public
company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.

~~~
pvg
_Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money_

Thanks for explaining that to me.

------
lhnz
I would try to eat journalism.

I would create a system where subscription to News on Twitter helps to
automate payment for individual articles.

    
    
      1. The lede or quote gets pulled into the tweet.
      2. http://t.co becomes a payment-debiting gateway (402 Payment Required).
    

Basically, you would monetise the audience on behalf of the publishers who
would be able to make their paywalls more porous.

Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement:

    
    
      - Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions.
      - Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share.
      - Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to
        coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops.
    

Edit: If anyone in Twitter wants to do this, please hire me - I'd be super
interested to work on it. Wouldn't even need to be the CEO. ;)

~~~
untog
Is there much evidence to suggest that people are willing to pay for
individual articles, though? Blendle has been around for a while and hasn't
set the world alight. There are plenty of free news sources to compete with.

~~~
uncletaco
Probably not, but I think there could be a "twitter wallet" that the user pays
into. Let's say I add $5 a month to this wallet and twitter pays it's content
partners based on the percentage of click through received by me. It would
work like Brave browser's wallet.

The problem with this though is it would probably encourage more junk content
and instead of annoying ads we'll get more clickbait.

~~~
IshKebab
That idea is as old as the web and I don't see why Twitter doing it will
suddenly make it work.

------
jraines
\- Get rid of modals for everything. Especially: when clicking on a tweet to
view replies, open a new page with better threading of replies, pagination,
and no reordering (or optional "quality" reordering). Twitter is a forum on
speed; take some good ideas from forums. Right now it's a forum on speed and
acid.

\- Have more options for blocking, including "block this person and everyone
who follows them or followed them within last N days"

\- Fix trending topic spam. Seriously, how is this so bad? Free advice: for
every trending topic a tweet mentions over 1 in a single tweet, the
probability that it's spam asymptotically approaches 1.

\- Allow an unambiguous, never "played with", chronological timeline. Have a
separate view that's your ML playground. The "In case you missed it" and
"tweets you might like" features are good but I don't want them randomly
appearing in my timeline.

\- Allow alternate clients, even if you have to charge a fee.

\- Similarly, create a separate free developer-focused API but clearly
identify all tweets posted via that as "bot" and allow people to never see
tweets posted by a bot, or tweets posted by a bot @ them. Tweets posted from
the "alternative client" paid API would not be subject to this marking.

\- Identify "sleeper cell" bots -- accounts inactive for a long time that
suddenly become active, usually around a single topic, concurrent with many
similar bots, and aggressively ban them.

\- Do more and better things with Lists. Don't just show me 3 people to follow
(usually clearly just based on the last person I looked at). Show me
algorithmically curated suggested lists, popular lists, allow me to sort those
by # of members, easily find lists that user X belongs to, etc., mark lists as
low quality/harassment vehicles. Surface good content shared by my interest
lists somewhere other than the timeline.

\- My personal #1: give me the likestream of the people I follow. This is
easily more interesting than their actual tweets, at least to me. Something
like a quarter of my usage these days is visiting individual accounts "Likes"
pages. At least use this data in the aforementioned algorithmic curation of
Lists/suggested follows.

~~~
tyre
How would this help Twitter increase user count or revenue?

Turning Twitter around doesn't mean fixing annoyances for current users. I
agree with all of your points, but I'm already a user.

The problem:

1) Many people have already tried Twitter and gotten confused, then left. How
does Twitter get them to try again?

2) How do you increase revenue per user? How do you monetize on the massive
accounts (e.g. @POTUS)?

3) How do you improve engagement beyond news, politics, and internet
arguments?

~~~
jraines
I think my list does address #3, at least somewhat. I don't have answers for
#1 and #2, except hoping that if #3 is addressed people will give it another
try.

------
JumpCrisscross
I'd tear it apart until all that's left is a profitable, maintainable core.
Like Craigslist.

Twitter's payroll (to say nothing of its stock-based compensation expense) is
bloated. Slashing staff isn't a popular play. This is a textbook private
equity deal.

Twitter's habit of ringing in the year with $500MM losses could be single-
handedly cut with a 2/3rd staffing reduction (which costs lots in payroll and
$800MM in stock-based compensation expense). How much of Twitter's $2bn in
revenue would evaporate post-cuts. Over half? Still leaves $750MM of pre-tax
income before R&D ($800MM in the FYE 2015). Cut that R&D budget in half, say
you lose a further 25% of revenues, and you still have $160MM before taxes
yielding $100MM of net income. That's worth $1bn to $2.5bn.

If you can grow that to $500MM over 4 or 5 years, you could sell it for ~20x.
Discount back at 10% or 20% and you have an optimistic valuation of $4 to
$7bn.

Twitter's trading at just under $12bn. I suppose I'd bid $3.50 per share and
be willing to entertain someone talking just under $10 a share.

~~~
jy1
That's not a turn around scenario. It would be better to try to find a buyer
at the current price.

~~~
elgenie
That's just begging the question.

OK, so you've found a buyer; what's the buyer to do to turn Twitter around?

~~~
jy1
Not answering the question, I'm just saying his solution ends up at a
valuation at 50% of current, which isn't really a turn around.

~~~
clintonb
Perhaps the current valuation is too high given the lack of profit.

------
AliAdams
My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth
saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say.

I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or
important updates from companies I'm interested in.

I see a secondary value from twitter by people contributing to a conversation
around an event, be that a sports game, a site outage, a traffic jam or an
unfolding natural disaster.

Filtering out / systemically discouragingly a lot of the countless low-
value/self promotional posts alongside a better hashtag (channel) view would
be a great start.

~~~
NumberCruncher
>> those whose who have something worth saying tend to

...write books. It was never so easy buying books like today, so I don't get
why I should waste my time reading #random #unimportant #stuff written by some
social media managing intern from Bangalore.

~~~
K0SM0S
No but seriously... so much this. Pardon my casualness.

Whenever we strive for both 'quality' (of information, talk/debate, etc.) and
'brevity', we end up with the exact opposite of books: _traits d 'esprit_ as
they say in french, #randomWordPlays of the empty kind that made Levi Strauss
hypothesize that humans didn't really form sentences but rather patched
together chunks of expressions they had memorized (he was proven wrong by
linguistics later on, but damn was his assumption so impeccably fitting much
of the anthropological data). See any bland instance of "cheesy jpeg +
logically flawed pensum" boasting thousands of likes/reshares circa 2017 to
prove this point.

It's nothing new either, for as long as documented human societies existed,
mind-numbing memes apparently were part of the landscape. For about as long,
some (always much fewer) people prefered reading books. Or even writing them.

I don't think Twitter can ever be anywhere but at the far opposite side of
books and quality discourse. Or it would become something else. Twitter is
meant for remarks, quick-shot killer moves, and plugs. It's basically an ad
board for opinion, and you've made a sale when someone likes/shares your
tweet. Some people might defigure the sacred columns with a Shakespeare quote
here and there, but vandalizing its culture is the only way to make a smart
tweet.

I think it's OK that Twitter is 'dumb', as in non-filtering. Neutral towards
speech, unpurposed. We need that too, just like we need curated libraries.
It's fine that people have a place to vent and unwind. So long as they don't
mistake that for an actual forum of opinion, let alone representative of
anything but the few 'influencers' and their circles.

------
david-cako
Making the UX not shit is a great start.

Twitter is really an unpleasant site to use for following discussions of any
sort. When I click a thread-view for a post, I want to see a clear tree-view
of all of the posts and replies like any other sane website, not the current
flat-layout bullshit wherein you have no clue what the chronology of anything
is, or who is responding to what.

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread for how twitter can refocus and
monetize itself, but I think before all that you need to make it a site that
more people enjoy using beyond its original use case of "waiting at the
airport -- hmu".

~~~
marssaxman
I've never been a twitter user myself, but every now and then I end up
following a link to a Twitter discussion, only to bounce right off again
because I can't figure out what's supposed to be happening. Who is saying what
to whom, in what order, in response to what? I can't tell. I imagine that
there must be some context-literacy I don't have, which regular Twitter users
somehow pick up on; or, possibly, Twitter only makes sense if you're following
the stream of posts in real time.

~~~
kbart
Exactly the same for me. Every time I _wanted_ to use Twitter I ended up
confused by all that mess and closed it. Is it so hard to add tools (filters,
permissions etc.) for more advanced users to create the experience they want?
Twitter makes a wonderful media to follow interesting persons and getting
breaking news, but probably 99.9% of its content for me is spam or
uninteresting, annoying mess that I have no convenient way to avoid.

------
jamesk_au
This analysis from Ben Thompson (Stratechery[1]) just yesterday would be a
great place to start:

 _" Imagine a Twitter app that, instead of a generic Moment that is little
more than Twitter’s version of a thousand re-blogs, let you replay your
Twitter stream from any particular moment in time. Miss the Oscars gaffe? Not
only can you watch the video, you can read the reactions as they happen, from
the people you actually care enough to follow. Or maybe see the reactions
through someone else’s eyes: choose any other user on Twitter, and see what
they saw as the gaffe happened.

What is so powerful about this seemingly simple feature is that it would
commoditize “live” in a way that is only possibly digitally, and that would
uniquely benefit the company: now the experience of “live” (except for the
shock value) would be available at any time, from any perspective, and only on
Twitter. That such a feature does not exist — indeed, that the company’s
stated goal is to become more like old media, instead of uniquely leveraging
digital — is as good an explanation for why the company has foundered as
any."_

[1] [https://stratechery.com/2017/twitter-live-and-
luck/](https://stratechery.com/2017/twitter-live-and-luck/)

~~~
xiaoma
Wow. He cites himself 9 times and cites himself citing himself at the end.

~~~
K0SM0S
It may sound egotistic, but it's also a solid way to build something akin to a
'book' albeit in a discrete blogged form: you tend to quote yourself not to
make the same point over and over again in so many different phrasings. It
makes the arguments consistent, and rewards thoroughness, paying attention to
each post (coherency, wording, etc.) Eventually it builds up a coherent,
cohesive corpus of ideas that hopefully, should the theme be well-defined, is
a book.

Usually when going for publication, you'd replace these quotes with references
to previous chapters, typically in footnotes.

------
ProfessorLayton
1\. Remove senior management. They do not know what they're doing.

2\. Experiment and find the right point between monetizing users and those
that get the most value out of Twitter. Right now users' eyeballs are being
bled dry, and getting their experience ruined with tons of ads, and timeline
shuffling. It feels like those with tons of followers are getting a free ride
at the expense of everyone else.

3\. Introduce meaningful timeline features such as: 3a. Ability to follow
#hashtags/topics instead of just people and companies. Curated "Moments" are a
weak substitute. 3b. Follow geographical areas of interest (e.g. Top Tweets in
Oakland, SOMA etc.) 3c. Ability to explore Twitter geographically. Again, I
feel this is a huge and untapped. Heard something crazy happen over your
neighborhood? Pull up an map and explore what people are saying around there.

4\. Actually do something about trolls (Perhaps a reputation system?)

5\. Clamp down on bots. Why is it even possible to follow 300k or a few
million people?

6\. Slim down the workforce, by a lot, unfortunately. I don't think a
sustainable Twitter can ever be a large as it is today.

7\. Bigger focus on live TV + discussion

8\. Fix search: Its awful and nearly useless unless you put in a ton of effort
in "advanced search". Top results are often times just the same retweets and
news articles over and over again.

I could keep going...

~~~
rcraft
Some thoughts on item #3:

Offering the ability to follow hashtags in their current form would simply
lead to more hashtag spam.

However I agree with your basic premise that following topics and geographical
Tweets would be very useful. One of the main reasons I built GroupTweet. Allow
people to form and manage "group" topical or location based accounts with any
number of contributors while giving some admin controls like limiting approval
to all or only select participants, moderation, etc.

Would love any feedback and suggestions on how we could improve to make your
suggestions more of a reality.

------
warcher
There are a few camps of people using twitter, which want different things and
are mostly being badly served.

1) Trolls love twitter. The legion of racist eggs sowing destruction for no
other reason than their own nihilistic enjoyment is an existential threat to
the business and must be culled. The company and the trolls cannot live
together in peace. One or the other will die. It feels like twitter hasn't
figured out it's them or you. There can be no 1st amendment compromise here.
These guys are ruining you for fun. They gotta go.

2) Public figures. It's a good platform for them. Cull the trolls and they'll
stay, bringing an audience of

3) Regular people, who need a nice feedback loop of people interacting with
their tiny little voices. Twitter is pretty shitty at this right now-- if you
don't have an audience, you're shouting into the void and are eventually going
to figure out you're wasting your time and quit. This is shitty for engagement
and it's sinking twitter. Facebook figured this out already. Just copy them.

4) The last group is "brands" and for-profit companies who are your actual
customers, but who would like to free ride on the platform, soaking up the
attention of the regular people for free. If they want access, they gotta pay.
No free riding for non-people. Facebook also figured this one out. If you're
not a human, and not a public figure, and you want the attention of humans,
pay up. Twitter is also slowly figuring this out.

There's a virtuous cycle of engagement here, and Twitter is slowly getting it
straight, but they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and
that's going to hurt their monthly usage numbers. The management of that
haircut is probably over my pay grade, but it seems like they're slowly
getting it together with the algorithmic timeline. Had to be done. Livelock is
a real thing for people who don't tweet professionally.

~~~
sverige
>1) Trolls love twitter. ... They gotta go.

I've been hearing this since trolling was invented on Usenet. No one is going
to rid the Internet of trolls unless all of the big players enforce RealName™
and we all know how well that ended. "Culling the trolls" means different
things to different people, and probably almost every one of us has at some
time in our internet lives posted _something_ that another group would
consider trolling.

> they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and that's going
> to hurt their monthly usage numbers.

From the handful of times I've clicked on a link to a tweet and then wandered
around, I would bet that the trolls, spammers, and free riders make up
something like 98% of their users, so I'm not sure this would really solve
anything, since presumably their gross revenue is driven by the numbers of
users.

~~~
warcher
You'll never get all of them, it's true. It's a never ending war.

And you're right-- there's a haircut that's got to happen at twitter. I don't
know whether they'll survive it, but it's going to happen either way.

Revenue is driven by usage. Actual usage. They sell eyeballs. They can defraud
their customers (the purchasers of said eyeballs), but only for a time. I
think, as an article of faith admittedly, that you're better off being
straight about it, but I've never piloted a ship that big, so what do I know?

------
Grue3
1\. Remove post length limit. 2\. Limit the number of tweets per day instead.
3\. You can pay to remove the above limit.

This solves the problem of timeline being unreadable once you subscribe to
enough people. Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap. Once everyone is
rate-limited, everyone can easily digest their timeline. Without length limit,
tweets become more thoughtful.

4\. Fix the UI. Make it easy to view replies. Make it easy to view embedded
images. Make it lean and fast. That would give Twitter advantage over
similarly bloated services.

5\. Anti-trolling measures. This one is really obvious! There should be no
indication that you're blocked by another person, they just don't see you
anymore. If the blocked person doesn't know they're blocked, they don't get
the satisfaction of being blocked, and they don't know when they need to
create another account to annoy you. This should be the basic rule when you
implement a blocking feature.

6\. Open up API. This one is obvious.

~~~
calchris42
> Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap.

+10 to this. The signal to noise on Twitter is terrible.

Pretty sure I'm using it "wrong", but my likelihood of following someone on
Twitter is generally inversely proportional to their number of tweets per day.

~~~
bad_user
In the set of people I follow, the popularity of Twitter accounts is directly
proportional to the total number of tweets they have, which is a sample of
almost 400 people. I did an analysis a while back.

Of course, there are always counter examples, famous people that don't tweet
at all, or people posting dumb shit and not getting followers. That tweet to
follower ratio has some variation. Quality matters too and it helps if people
have a following outside of Twitter.

But still, I'd say that your likelihood of following someone is not
representative of other Twitter users.

------
mindcrash
* Remove Jack from CEO position

* Let Evan return as CEO (merge with Medium)

... this will restore Twitter management to the situation around 2010, then
...

* Reform or cancel the Trust & Safety council

* Restore open API access and app ecosystem

* Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab)

* Reverse the timeline changes

* Stop pandering to far left ideologues

Something like that?

~~~
sfeng
How is any of this gonna result in Twitter making more money?

~~~
Cyph0n
Absolutely nothing. It's just what OP wants Twitter to be I guess.

~~~
zo1
Or rather what they think is causing Twitter to lose users/engagement. Those
things directly affect whether Twitter will sink or swim within the next year
or so which I think are critical.

------
kneel
I consider myself pretty tech oriented but I've never understood twitter, this
is probably just my own stupidity but I've tried several times and it never
makes sense.

I mostly just see replies to other conversations and I don't understand the
context. Scrolling through the timeline I can't parse structure, it just seems
chaotic.

Barely anyone I know uses twitter. It just seems to be a way to follow
celebrities and politicians, I don't really care what they have to say.

I'm probably missing something here.

~~~
amalag
That is true, the timeline is fragments of multiple conversations or popular
statements. You are right that it is difficult to parse the feed, because your
brain has to context switch between all the conversations. Whereas for
instance a hacker news feed gives you exclusively top level headlines with a
place to go for discussion.

~~~
kneel
Oooohh that's why it's called twitter.

Like a giant flock of birds all chirping to their immediate neighbor with
slight variations on the same theme? Like a massive digital game of chinese
whispers.

I'm sticking to the tree branched nature of reddit/HN. The flock can go flap
their wings all they want.

------
miles_matthias
Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push
notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out
when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed
to know when there's interesting content to engage with?

Right now you can turn on notifications for a user's tweets, but that gives
you push notifications for _all_ of their tweets which is super annoying.
Also, 99% of users don't know that exists.

Their recent move to make trending topics and search more visible in the
iPhone app is a step in the right direction but they're a long ways off.

FOMO and live is how they're different from Facebook. I can always go back to
Facebook at any time and they'll show me what I missed and I can still engage
with it. With Twitter, the discussion has come and gone and I'm left out if I
don't know it's happening.

~~~
alexose
> Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged
> push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss
> out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you
> supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with?

100% agree. Twitter needs to be in the game of maximizing signal-to-noise for
their users. In my experience, there's just /way/ too much noise when you're
trying to follow along with a live event. I almost never want to see content
from a random account with 10 followers. Nor do I want to see a d-list
celebrity hocking skin care products. What I really care about is how the
conversation is shaping itself over time.

There are many ways of fixing this that don't spoil Twitter's free-speech
mission. Personally, I think the answer is in clustering tweets based on topic
and sentiment, then presenting a really intuitive filtering UI. You could
expose options that would help you understand the broader conversation, but
also dive into it at a super granular level.

Getting this right would be in the hard-but-possible realm. Given how many
engineers Twitter has stockpiled, I think it's worth trying. Solving the noise
problem would necessarily cut down on abuse, too.

------
divbit
I want to watch the superbowl from twitter:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/technology/with-nfl-
deal-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/technology/with-nfl-deal-twitter-
live-streams-its-ambitions.html) I have no idea how to watch the superbowl and
I tried several apps. I had cable tv for like 1 year of highschool, and
haven't felt any reason to purchase for myself since, but some things, like
the superbowl / Olympics / World Cup etc. would be really great to be able to
watch - no I'm not going to deal with cable / buying a TV just for 1-3 events
yearly.

~~~
jedi_stannis
You could try an antenna - most of the things you mentioned are broadcast over
the air

~~~
divbit
That would also require purchasing a TV I guess.

~~~
jdminhbg
No, it would require purchasing an antenna. You can plug that into a computer.

~~~
divbit
Huh. TIL.

~~~
pedrocr
Something like this works:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDM76ZW/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDM76ZW/)

but you'll probably need a better directional antenna to have good reception
(depends on the specific part of the world for how strong the signal is).

Once you're used to fast internet you won't want any of that though. Streaming
HDTV on a 50Mbps+ internet connection ends up being a better experience since
you don't have to go through all the setup hassle to make this work
equivalently (installing the antenna, connecting it to a dongle on your own
server, installing some kind of head end software, streaming from that server
over your own network). I've done both and the antenna setup is now fully
deprecated.

------
grandalf
I think Twitter is already pretty great. My suggestions are below:

\- Twitter is a platform, open it up to allow any clients first class access.

\- Stop political censorship immediately. It's fine to prevent scams and bot-
nets, but do not stifle political speech.

\- Lower burn rate. Cancel all of the product-oriented projects that are
expensive, simply focus on building the infrastructure to make Twitter's
platform as inexpensive as possible to maintain. I'd estimate 10% of Twitter's
employees are actually needed.

\- Be very cautious about ads. Do not compare yourself to Facebook for ad
revenue generation. This is a long-term decision that will require adequate
funding to undertake.

~~~
eropple
_> do not stifle political speech_

And when that political speech threatens violence or is intended to foment
violence against a person or people? 'Cause I'm not saying _you 're_
conflating the two, but a whole lot of people for whom this is an axe they
grind _really kind of constantly do_.

~~~
grandalf
> threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or
> people

I see no reason why having a clear, public record of such communications is
worse than forcing those involved to use a different messaging system.

It's just words. The simple answer is press the "unfollow" button, or follow
it, read it, and act in your best interests based on it.

~~~
genericpseudo
There is no such thing as "just words". That's a position only sustainable
from privilege.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
See grandalf's reply to eropple. In addition:

No, it's not a position only sustainable from privilege. I'm fairly privileged
- white, male, upper middle class, good job, good neighborhood. If someone
threatened to kill me, that's just words - it's not the same as them showing
up at my door with a gun in their hand. But I'd still have to think seriously
about whether they _were_ going to show up at my door, and what to do about
it. It's just words, and also it's not. My "privilege" doesn't insulate me
from the "and also it's not" part.

~~~
grandalf
Very true. My comment was not meant to suggest that I think Twitter should
promote already illegal forms of speech like threats, etc.

To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and
equally vulnerable in a free speech society.

A non-privileged person is free to draw a cartoon of Trump that looks like
Muhammed. In a totalitarian society nobody is free to draw cartoons of certain
subjects.

To assume that a person of lower social status is more likely to be
emotionally wounded from words is akin to claiming him/her to be less rational
(and thus less human) than others.

Speech is dangerous because it can incite passionate behavior while also being
nonviolent. That is why we must preserve our right to this freedom. It is far
better than the many coercive alternatives.

Information is powerful, and it can empower and inspire people to act. But the
idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed reminds me of the
embarrassing attempts during the 1980s by social conservatives to cast heavy
metal lyrics as satanic and deserving of censorship.

~~~
eropple
_> To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered
and equally vulnerable in a free speech society._

No, we're not. As a straight white guy, I can say "video games suck because X,
Y, and Z" and people might call it stupid or call me a "cuck", but that's
about it. A woman who say "video games are generally cool but have some
problematic tendencies like X, Y, and Z" gets death and rape threats and have
people post her personal information online. I know this happens because a
friend _did_ this, had it happen, and ended up crashing on my couch for a few
days while she found a new apartment and moved because she _feared for her
safety_ , something which literally-literally does not happen to straight
white men (though does happen, in varying but generally lesser quantities, to
queer and minority men, and happens _a lot more_ to trans people in general)
who express similar opinions in that space.

Almost as if the numbers I drew in the genetic lottery has led to the
_privileged position_ of being able to speak in ways that others cannot
without being literally endangered. How very strange.

~~~
grandalf
> does not happen to straight white men

There are many aspects of how society treats men and women differently that
are abhorrent to me. One of the most abhorrent is how a girl who struggles in
math is more likely to be encouraged to focus on other subjects, while a boy
in the same situation is more likely to be encouraged to achieve mastery.

We (as a society) can do so much better... but censoring ideas is not he
solution.

~~~
eropple
Refusing to associate with people is not "censorship" of ideas or anything
else. Damaging, abusive people can be kicked out of one's place of business
and _it ain 't a problem_.

I will not cede the ground of basic language to protofascists and you
shouldn't either.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood
your last paragraph). grandalf sees _blocking_ that speech as protofascism
(more or less - he doesn't use that word).

I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any
civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I
still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech _as if it were violence_
\- no matter how threatening the content of the speech - opens another door to
the fascists. You want it as a weapon to use against vile speech. But the
problem is, that weapon will be turned against _your_ speech soon enough.
_Your_ speech will be classified as "vile", "hateful", "violent", and banned.
Rationally, based on content? No, but as a means of control by whoever's in
power at the time.

~~~
eropple
Who's saying anything about _prohibiting speech_? I'm saying that private
organizations should choose not to be associated with white supremacists and
their ilk. Twitter's not the government. The protofascists and their broheims
can go hang out on Gab dot AI for all I care. But they _don 't want that_,
because that means there aren't any targets for them to assault. Which they
do, en masse, as part of a planned and intentional strategy to silence and
shut up women and minorities across a wide range of topics.

Twitter does not need them. Twitter does not benefit from them. Twitter will
actively lose users by pursuing these jackals as customers. And so Twitter
should show them the door. But I certainly haven't said a word about the
government _prohibiting speech_.

(I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't
violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech?

> And so Twitter should show them the door.

Um, _you_ just said something about prohibiting speech. I agree, Twitter's not
the government, so it's not a First Amendment issue for Twitter to do this.
Nevertheless, you are calling for Twitter _to block speech_.

> I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't
> violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.

I will not engage with you with regards to "threats _are_ violence", because
you're trying to change the definition of words, and then say that those who
disagree are silly. _You_ should be better than that, or at least better than
your "argument" in the last paragraph.

------
chintan
Make it a protocol. again.
[http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html)

~~~
radley
I think this is what we all want, but I'm skeptical developers will return
when it's implemented. Maybe if they focused on young devs? Give them an
alternative to Snapchat?

~~~
sksixk
that's interesting thought. i wouldn't be surprised if (big if) twitter opens
up again and young developers embrace it for the first time (and old devs come
back).

it clearly still has mindshare.

------
ProAm
Layoff everyone except for the bare minimum to keep the company operational
(~100-200 people), take it private and print money for 10 years then let it
naturally sunset itself.

~~~
ISL
Came here to say cost-cutting. I'm not sure that Twitter will sunset itself.

Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen.
Twitter is a protocol, and an excellent one. If it continues to serve as a
backbone of public-domain discourse, it can remain relevant for the
foreseeable future.

WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition, with 0.5B monthly users.
Twitter currently has 0.3B monthly users and 3860 employees.

I keep considering TWTR, even had a limit order open for a while, but keep
walking away.

~~~
fragmede
> Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to
> lessen.

Is it? It's a private company and so is not subject to the same disclosure
rules as a public company, so no one outside the company can actually say how
they're actually doing.

Meanwhile, as a publicly traded company, TWTR is required to publish all sorts
of information about the site's popularity, for critics to play armchair CEO
with.

------
pandesmos
I worked for a major gaming company for almost a decade and based on that, I
think it should be paid for by its corporate users.

Not from the angle of paying to use the service to tweet, but paying for
access to tweetdeck. I know there are some fees associated with that, but from
my understanding most of those revolve around "customization" and "reports". I
think it should straight up be "if you want to see your mentions, you pay".

We dedicated multiple units of headcount in multiple departments. One
department was treating it straight up as an additional contact channel and
scheduled almost 24 hour coverage on it. One department devoted a whole TV to
tweet deck to watch the various mentions. There were multiple instances where
customer services issues were caught and handled before they blew up because
we saw them emerge on twitter before we saw it on any of our internal tools.

This was especially true for regional/smaller issues. I was in the department
with the TV for tweetdeck, and a phenomenal value came from being able to see
the "burst flow" as an issue emerged. Each individual tweet wasn't really
important, but flurries = issues that need to be addressed, and specific
tweets can be dug into for specifics if needed.

I imagine this would be valuable to almost any "always on" type corporation,
and there should be enough of them, doing well enough, that they could foot
the bill.

------
OliverJones
Imposing a modest signal cost should improve the signal - to - noise ratio
substantially.

Charge for reach. Ask accounts with more than 50K followers to either pay for
all followers to receive tweets, or limit distribution to 50K followers,
randomly chosen.

It's the accounts with many followers that get the most benefit from the
platform.

And, a twitter crack could, in present circumstances, cause global political
instability. The accounts with > 50K followers, if compromised, are the
accounts that could cause this sort of problem. Why shouldn't the users of
those accounts shoulder at least some of the cost of securing the service and
making it fast?

Another possibiity: the Bloomberg Terminal biz model. Charge consumers of
twitter for timeliness, and delay messages to unpaid consumers and general
feeds. Allow originators of messages to purchase timeliness for their own
messages, even to unpaid consumers.

~~~
yesiamyourdad
I was hoping someone would say this!

I've been saying this for years, and I mean since 2007 or 2008, though I had
figured just price levels. If you have 100K followers, that's probably worth
some money to you. If you have 1M followers, that's worth even more. I was
saying in the 2008 elections that CNN should have an entire rack in the data
center sponsored by them, they were pushing their Twitter handles so hard.

One thing would be the fake followers, where you could DOS someone by creating
bot accounts to follow people and use up their slots. I like the idea of
randomly chosen followers, that's a twist I didn't think of; it also mitigates
the issue of the fake followers. You could also do the opposite, charge to
follow more than some number of accounts.

~~~
returnbuyer
That's what Facebook is doing. Lowering organic reach. It pisses tons of
people off. Basically you hand crafted this audience under the guise that
they're yours forever. You took time to post interesting content, you engaged
with your audience. You basically made the platform valuable in the first
place by creating value.

Now you're asked to pay to reach them? No way.

------
dylanhassinger
Get rid of the multimedia content types

Revert it back to pure text, which can include any type of url

Make the tweets always load chronologically

Make the interface faster loading and less JavaScripty

open up the API

basically, turn it back into #OldTwitter from 2010

~~~
benbristow
I'd leave the multimedia content types - they can be useful.

~~~
Raphmedia
Can they really afford it?

------
pjc50
Have this conversation on Twitter. Listen to the users!

[https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170](https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170)

USERS: we love twitter but it has problems

TWITTER: great we'll fix them

USERS: do you want to know what they are

TWITTER: absolutely not

(18k likes, 14k RTs)

USERS: could you at least look at addressing the pervasive harassment of women

TWITTER [twirling like Maria von Trapp]: M O M E N T S

\---

USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product

TWITTER: likes are now florps

USERS: what

TWITTER: timeline goes sideways

------
thehardsphere
Focus on the core business and aggressively eliminate any and all costs not
directly associated with it. It's ridiculous that they're one of the most
popular websites on Earth that makes ~$2bn/year, yet they manage to piss it
all away on things that don't noticably improve their service.

What Twitter really needs is to be bought up by some Wall Street type who can
look at their books and do just that, and not much more.

------
sumitgt
Turn the entire business model 180 degrees. This might be very radical, but
hear me out.

1) Creating a twitter profile (with tweeting privileges) costs $5. Profiles
without tweeting privileges are free.

2) Once you have 10000 followers, you need to pay additional $$ per year. This
fees increases exponentially as you gain more followers. Eg. Famous people pay
a lot. Unless this $ is paid, the follower count caps up and the follow button
disappears from the profile.

3) Stop considering no of active user profiles as a metric entirely.

4) Regular non-famous people can create profiles (that do not have option for
others to follow), but can follow famous paying users for free.

5) If a normal non-famous person wants to chime into the conversation, they
pay a _one-time_ fee of $5 to become a paid user. Now they can tweet and have
followers. If they ever get too famous, they might have to pay again to unlock
ability to have 10000+ followers.

This way you try to charge the users who actually have the money to spend.
Let's admit, people with high follower counts like politicians do gain a lot
from twitter, and would probably pay for un-mediated access to the population.

This also fixes the problem of junk / troll accounts.

~~~
edblarney
"1) Creating a twitter profile costs $5."

It's over then. 99% of users don't care about Twitter that much to pay a dime.

Can't charge old users, and growth is already small anyhow.

Only about 1% of these various service entities will pay.

And the number of 'truly famous people' on Twitter is very small.

Some kind of 'unit payment' scenario would be feasible, but only if it were
truly seamless, and no such paradigm exists yet.

The 'problem' is not with revenue, it's with growth and engagement.

~~~
sumitgt
Edited. I meant creating profiles with tweeting privileges will cost money.

I think sometimes we need to rethink what growth and engagement means. In my
model, Twitter does not rely on advertising.

Famous people might still be interested, because you allow them un-fettered
access to disperse their message directly to the population without any
filters and trolls bothering them.

------
itomato
\- Keep it as a pure and simple timeline. Don't show me tweets I may have
missed. Make me chase them down.

\- No character penalty for URLs

\- Let people play with the data and metadata, exposing fake accounts is good
for all

\- Encourage bots to be bots

\- Stump the chumps. Make this type of charade harder to pull off:
@rea1DonaldTrump vs. @realDonaldTrump

------
DigitalSea
1\. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of
living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs
of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow
employees to remotely work if they want.

2\. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work
for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to
go. Realise this wouldn't be popular, but Twitter is spending way too much
cash.

3\. Reduce the size of the ridiculous buffet they have for lunches, make it a
fixed menu with 3 or 4 meals to prevent food waste. Get rid of the free
alcohol and soft drink they seem to offer.

4\. Actually, embrace developers, make the API limits more generous and allow
developers to build cool things like the early days of Twitter.

5\. Raise the character limit (even make this a premium feature, double it to
280 characters).

6\. Get rid of Jack as CEO, it's not working. Twitter is losing money, they're
not innovating and they keep focusing on things like video which most don't
care for.

7\. Focus on the core product and get rid of the Google-like dream products.

The way I see it, Twitter isn't a complicated idea. It's somewhat predictable
size text strings being shown in a feed. Twitter is the kind of app you clone
when you're learning a framework like Ruby on Rails, it's not a complicated
idea from a technical standpoint. There is no reason to be spending two-
billion per year.

~~~
biztos
I've never seen their HQ, much less their lunches, but is that really a thing?

And aren't they in the Tenderloin in SF? Wouldn't they normally be donating
their excess food to shelters / the homeless / the poor?

I don't disagree with your points, it just strikes me as weird that the lunch
menu would be such an issue.

~~~
yihangho
> And aren't they in the Tenderloin in SF?

Nope, they're on Market St:
[https://about.twitter.com/company](https://about.twitter.com/company)

~~~
euyyn
Right across Civic Center, which overlaps and is not very different from the
Tenderloin.

------
colinplamondon
\- Focus and elevate video content. Entire TV episodes are sometimes made
public on Twitter - there's no way to surface this. When The Expanse has a new
episode, it should go into a tab that's YouTube on Twitter.

\- Pay video creators out the ass to get them to dual-publish from YouTube,
and create auto-sync features that let them publish in both locations. Build
in live-streaming functionality to compete with Twitch.

\- "Async realtime". When watching a show, make it possible to replay Homeland
tweets from the time you start. If you watch an Apple Keynote later, make the
realtime tweets replay, and make it possible to add your own.

\- Allow different engagement models. If someone has a whiff of abuse in their
feed, make it trivial for them to see only verified + low risk users. The
moment someone sends an @message to someone they've never conversed with with
a single abusive word, crank the risk on them. If someone wants to engage with
the firehose, make that the default.

\- Make it easy to "import" feeds. I've had at least 3 friends ask me who to
follow, and then we spend 15 minutes scrolling through my follow list, they
manually look them up. When a new user registers on Twitter, I should be able
to pick 3 people I'm most interested in following, and it should then
recommend the people they like the most.

\- It should be one-click to "super follow" someone, and get all their follows
into my feed. Make it trivial to get an awesome, active feed. And trivial to
reduce noise when I'm not interested in something.

------
collinglass
One thing for sure, I would remove posting privileges from the API.

Yes it is a bold move. It has a great platform ecosystem but the amount of
automation you can do is what removes the value from the platform. For
example, followers mean nothing anymore and auto-DMs from people I recently
followed is an Ah-NO moment.

Instagram and LinkedIn have kept POSTing out of their API for the most part.
One reason (of the many) they are thriving is because people know it's all
handmade engagement.

~~~
amalag
That is a nice idea. Make twitter focus on personal communication and
interactions.

------
johan_larson
Consolidate.

I'm guessing Twitter has about as many users as it can ever hope to have,
which means it's no longer about growth, it's about profits. That means it's
time to cut costs, largely in engineering. You need a far smaller team to run
a service and make incremental improvements than you need to grow a service
aggressively.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Fire almost everyone. Cease innovation and roll several things back. Open the
API up more. Limit spending to what you can afford and coast forever. Growth
is overrated.

------
jijji
1) remove the 140 character limit. It was not a problem when you wrote it, and
it definitely was not a problem today. 2) two factor phone verification should
be removed. It makes people want to leave. Allow it to be turned on as an
option, but don't force it in your users. 3) allow users to user your service
without having an account. 4) increase the number of data analytic tools
available for public use, tools that can explore relationships between social
networks and postings 5) remove the whole ghost-tweet feature. No one hates it
more when a site says Yes this message was posted, and then you look back and
it really wasnt. It frustrates users, it also will make them leave, by the
millions. 6) stop censoring speech and removing accounts for trivial behavior
through speech. If anything replace it with a user voting feature so that
posts can be flagged for different types of bad content and reported. The
whole censoring option needs to be toned down about 1000%. No one will use
your service if you keep doing this. Why should they? If you don't allow them
to publish, one of the other 50 twitter clones will.

~~~
mrep
Food for thought: press enter twice after each bullet/number point which acts
like starting a new paragraph (i don't know why they made that the format) but
it makes it easier to read.

------
donpark
I tweeted this few months ago:

1) Add golden heart 2) Sell golden hearts to users. 3) Reward some golden
hearts daily to users, perhaps based on tiered ranking. 4) Allow advertisers
to gift golden hearts to users. 5) 'Promote' tweets with golden hearts and
display them in Moments.

In short, allow peer promotion. Red hearts are currently being wasted as weak
social signals and nods. This change blurs the line between ads and peer-
promotion.

~~~
xanderstrike
So reddit gold.

~~~
mrtron
TotalFark

------
pycal
Systematically delete accounts which might contribute bad press and lower ad
revenue.

Add a feature that allows users to censor their feeds / remove @replies from
"trolls".

Decrease engineering staff, increase outbound sales people.

Establish syndication rights with NFL.

------
xemdetia
Aggressively use twitter to eat Yahoo Finance. There is a type of consumer
that cares about twitter only in context to market/happenings and they have
one of the best feeds for it. I don't want it to look like twitter, it should
just be a totally separate product that takes advantage of being a primary
user of twitter's data without being external. Make it a freemium service
where the premium is looking at data more than a week old for $/year.

~~~
K0SM0S
I think you're onto something with domain-oriented real-time feeds. Finance is
one huge cake, perhaps not the only one. Sports, politics come to mind.

------
zellyn
I agree with what Adrian Colyer wrote at
[https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/02/14/reducing-controversy-
by-...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/02/14/reducing-controversy-by-
connecting-opposing-views/)

\------

Dear Twitter,

You have it in your power to truly differentiate your platform and make the
world a better place by implementing controversial topic and filter bubble
detection (per the paper we looked at yesterday), together with letting users
see their polarity score (per today’s paper) and making controversy reducing /
filter-busting follower recommendations (also per today’s paper). This would
be something new and unique in the world of mass media consumption, and could
help to make Twitter great again.

How about it?

Regards, Adrian.

------
xtweeeteer
Lot of great ideas. The problem I see is execution (I'm an ex-employee).
Primitive versions of most of the ideas suggested in these comments are tried
and given up because they didnt really show huge difference in growth or other
engagement numbers - This is partly because one of the below: 1) primitive
implementation/design is very bad compared to the original idea. 2) There is
huge reward in Twitter for starting new projects. But no one follows through
to make sure project is well maintained/supported. 3) Cross team coordination
is not good

~~~
firebones
Your comment leads to what may be the core advice I have: get better metrics.

Twitter has always suffered from being in the wake of metrics that their
competitors excel at. That's led to an inability to manage investor
expectations and focus on features and project prioritization that doesn't
create long-term value.

------
dongslol
Twitter always makes me sad after going on. It also makes me resent people I
otherwise like, because I see them make nasty, jeering comments that they
wouldn't on, say, HN. It's not because they're nasty people who jeer. It's
hard not to when you have to pack criticism into 140 characters, because the
most concise way to do that is to tell a joke. That's lovely, but when
discourse consists of joke after joke, it gets pretty empty.

Debate never happens on Twitter. People take stabs at each other and retweet
snarky putdowns. When J.K. Rowling makes some witty comeback at some random
person spouting their mouth off, everyone applauds it. This kind of discourse
makes me nauseous. I often see tweets that make me go, _that 's wrong!_ And in
my head I start writing counterarguments. But I never get to make them, which
breeds resentment. And if by some miracle I do, I don't feel like my audience
is a quiet, thoughtful one that will reward me for making good points. I know
that's not an empty ideal, because I feel that on HN, and sometimes Reddit.

Twitter gets arguments started, but ends them abruptly. That's frustrating.

I keep going on, because there are a handful of famous people whose streams of
consciousness I'm interested in. If they moved their content to another
platform, I'd follow them there. But they don't, presumably because they also
use Twitter to follow other famous people's streams of consciousness.

------
jonathansizz
1\. Allow limited following of accounts. Right now, when you follow someone,
it's either all (default) or nothing (if you mute/unfollow). But in many
cases, I'm only interested in a subset of someone's tweets, on certain topics.
For example, I'd follow many more scientists if I could just see their tweets
on science, but not see their political or personal or sports-related tweets,
which add too much noise to my feed. This would also be good for tweeters, as
they could freely tweet about anything they like without risk of alienating
followers.

Maybe Twitter could use the hashtag system to accomplish this?

2\. Make replies work better. Relax the character limit for replies to several
hundred characters, make replies threaded, make low-quality replies go away,
and high-quality replies float to the top (just like HN). Remove the line
noise by having @ and # symbols not show up in the feed. Hashtags and mentions
also shouldn't use up any characters. If all this happens, it will become
reasonable to have actual conversations on Twitter.

3\. Stop showing me duplicate tweets. Once I've seen a tweet, I shouldn't see
it again if it's reposted (something many media outlets tend to do
frequently).

Actions like this will make Twitter a better experience for regular users, and
should help to kickstart growth.

4\. Charge whales (those with the most followers, who disproportionately
benefit from using Twitter) actual monthly fees.

------
rajeshp1986
I feel there are majorly 3 issues which Twitter can address right away and
increase their Revenue and user base. I am really pissed off that they are not
doing this and sitting on this since so long:

1\. Focus on getting more users onboard. Apart from Japan, where twitter has
lot of users, there are very few users in Asia & Africa. The Twitter sales
team in these regions are not working hard enough. They are focussing only on
business side of things. They should focus on getting more users use twitter.
Find innovative ways to draw more users onboard.

It's a simple math, the more users you have using the platform the more money
you can make. I can't believe no one at Twitter is thinking about this. They
have been mostly US centric.

2\. Ask your sales team to form partnership with other sporting events. They
are only focusing on livestreaming NBA. I would love to have live streaming of
football(Euro cup, English Premier League etc.) & Cricket(whole of India will
be using Twitter once you start live streaming cricket matches). This will
increase user engagement. Outside US no one follows NBA!!!

This again shows they are not thinking beyond US.

3\. Find other means of generating revenue, the advertising on twitter feed is
one way. Since twitter doesn't have lof of user data these ads are abrupt and
not highly personalized. Instead of advertising in feeds, monetize business
accounts and provide them premium features.

------
enknamel
I think Twitter could beat Reddit as the front page of the internet. They
could easily expand their trending information and turn it into automated
events and stories. It looks like they do this a little bit. But if they did
it a lot more it would suddenly become way more interesting. Group it by
hashtags or categories and you can suddenly see stories that really interest
you.

That's the draw of Reddit (and even Hacker News). You immediately see what's
really popular on the internet right now.

------
alistproducer2
Pivot to a NSFW platform. It already is but most people don't know that side
of it. I'm pretty sure porn is the only reason tumblr's still breathing so it
might work.

------
ncantelmo
There are two sides to this: usability and revenue.

On the usability side, there's lots of room for improvement in terms of
fostering meaningful discussion, which in turn would lead to stronger social
ties between users. Addressing that issue would probably have to start with an
effort to improve discoverability of accounts that engage thoughtfully with
other users. So people who reply to tweets that earn hearts might show up in
suggestions more often, etc.

I'd also work to discourage endless ICYMI repostings of big multimedia tweets
and go back to a chronological timeline. If there's too much noise in a
chronological timeline, that means too much clickbait/link spam is being
posted, and that's the real issue.

From a revenue perspective, there are a bunch of options worth looking at: a
Patreon model to encourage people with great insight to tweet more; more
accessible paid analytics, baked right into the app that could help non-
business users improve the quality of what they send out; an in-app store for
subscribing to third-party add-ons.

Basically, at some point it's worth realizing that plenty of mobile users will
spend some money for an improved experience. The constant focus on ad-based
revenue makes money, but ultimately incentivizes the company to do things that
make the overall product experience worse.

------
jacquesm
Turn back the clock to when Twitter was mostly a protocol and less of a web
application. Re-enable the API's that have been disabled, open up easier
access to the firehose.

Essentially making Twitter 'too big to fail'.

Tell shareholders that they're in for the long haul and that they can write
off any chances for quick bucks.

Most probably - unfortunately - cut deeply into the employee base because
there is no way Twitter could sustain the company size they are at today based
on the product that they have.

------
CM30
Well, for starters I would:

1\. Focus on making the company profitable by cutting down on staff and
resources. Seriously, Twitter doesn't need thousands of employees, a large HQ
and all that other fancy stuff. I think a team of about 30 people could
probably run it fine.

2\. Get developers on board again. Open up API access, stop shutting
down/blocking projects, etc. Make people feel like they could start a business
on Twitter's platform, without the rug being pulled out down the line.

3\. Get rid of the Trust and Safety Council. It's currently a bunch of left
wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech, which groups like the ACLU
suspiciously absent.

4\. Improve moderation. Kick out terrorists and nutcases on the 'left', stop
looking for every excuse to ban right wing users and generally treat everyone
with respect all around.

5\. Try and make the Android app more usable. Because at the moment, it's
really awkward to use and gets rather slow at times.

6\. Stop using verification and unverification as a punishment. Really, it's
like Twitter is being as confusing as possible here.

7\. Have the timeline set to how it used to be. Remove the 'show best tweets
first' crap from any accounts unfortunate enough to still have it enabled.

8\. Make things like URLs not count towards the character limit. I think Gab
already does this, and it's very useful.

~~~
chasing
> It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of
> speech...

There's this idea that I hear mostly from the "right" that "freedom of speech"
means "let people be assholes to one another with impunity."

We need to fight back when the government attempts to abridge free speech.
That's what the ACLU is good at. But Twitter is a community -- a community
under no legal obligation to include toxic users.

"Freedom of speech" gives people who don't fit in at Twitter the right to go
build their own community that's as toxic as they want amongst themselves.

As a Twitter user, I don't want to have to worry about being attacked or
experiencing floods of toxic responses to something I might say. Thankfully I
don't. But I do see toxic content directed at people fairly regularly. Toxic
content meaning: Stuff that attempts to make no point, just attempts to spread
hate or fear.

~~~
xiaoma
Twitter is anything but a community. It's a platform with a multitude of
communities and individuals, many with conflicting goals.

~~~
chasing
Of course.

"Community" meaning something people opt in to use, is what I meant.

But the company should have an over-arching set of community standard so
people know what's expected of them when they participate.

------
thisnotmyacc
Set a goal of $1 billion yearly profit by 2020. That places the value at PE of
20 PE (2/3rds of Alphabets 29.9) at ~$20 billion, which is ~2 times their
current valuation.

Assuming 5% YoY growth in revenue, which is about 2% growth in users combined
with a 2% better yield, both of which are imminently doable, the current $2.5B
revenue grows to about $3B.

According to their 2016 financial statement,
[http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/398748660...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/3987486600x0x886152/3FBBB0EC-
FDF0-41D2-9C4E-A06AE8B1D1E5/2016_Twitter_Annual_Report.pdf), Twitter spent
2.668B in 2016. So that means Twitter needs to cut costs by 20% by 2020 to hit
my goal of $1bn profit.

Twitter spent $800 million on each of their three big areas, which they list
as "Cost of revenue", "Research and development" and "Sales and marketing". If
you can shave off 40% from each of "Research and development" and "Sales and
marketing", costs hit $2Billion give or take, and goal achieved.

None of that is silicon valley swing for the moon sexy, and it seems pretty
unremarkable in a world of hype and excess. But $3B in revenue and $2bn in
costs seems achievable by 2020.

~~~
Trundle
Cutting sales and marketing by 40% doesn't seem conductive to growth in users
at all.

------
joeclark77
I agree they need to go back to the chronological ordering of tweets. It would
also be nice to have a couple levels of tweeting, like "conversational
message" versus "I really mean it this time", so followers could filter by
importance. I've unfollowed several great people because they just kept
tweeting nonsense comments throughout the day in between a couple of really
interesting posts.

------
davidiach
I would have a product recommendation. Twitter missed the change to be a
player in the chat space, but it could still offer a chat experience that
other services can't.

Imagine Twitter would start offering users the possibility to create group
chats where only the invited users can write in but that others could follow
in real time.

So lets say there is an Apple keynote and @BenedictEvans, @asymco and @gruber
start a group chat where they comment the event. I get a notification that
this group chat started and I can go and follow it (the same way I could
follow a live video). I can't comment myself, but I can follow their
conversation (and maybe hit the like button from time to time). Because it's a
chat, the participants will write much more than they would if they would be
only limited to tweeting.

It's crazy that in 2017 we can see celebrities interacting with each other via
video, tweets,snaps, Facebook comments and so on, but there is no option to
follow a real time chat between them.

------
redler
Is Twitter involved at all in the annotation web standard [1]? There was a
post and some discussion on HN a few days ago about it [2]. Seems like Twitter
would be a natural fit to become a major player or popularizer of annotations
and annotation infrastructure. Notwithstanding the decentralized nature of the
standard, it would probably evolve to have a few major structural providers.
If it takes off, one could imagine a future with billions of tweets and tweet
threads anchored to source material of every kind -- adding optional value to
the material, and driving traffic and value to and through Twitter.

[1]
[https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6156](https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6156)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525)

------
naravara
There are several options. I guess Twitter could go with one or all of them.

As a backend service it would be nice if they focused on making your Twitter
account into a sort of “internet driver’s license” to identify you anywhere
and everywhere online through a sort of trust chain. I never want to have to
sign up for an account again unless it pertains to my finances. I so
desperately wish I could manage all my various subscriptions and accounts for
random services from a central place that is _highly_ secure and easy to
access. I should be able to sign-on seamlessly, unsubscribe effortlessly, and
never have to remember a username or password. This would also allow a central
place for me to set privacy preferences so we can dictate exactly what the
downstream services should and shouldn’t be able to see. If Twitter can just
let me two-factor authorize with a token+pin and have this let me into just
about any account online (aside from maybe my main email and financial
accounts in the interests of not having all the eggs in one basket) that’s a
service people would indispensible. (So much so that maybe ICANN should just
work on something like it as a public utility?)

On the more user-facing end, Twitter’s niche has always been people who are
keen on promoting themselves and making announcements (new paper published,
new product announced, press releases, etc.), so maybe they should just fill
into what Facebook was before it became a NewsFeed. They could give you an
About Me page and a status-bar. This basically is what Twitter is now, but
they lack the focus to design it around that stuff as a central purpose for
the service. They focus more on the “Status Bar” than the “About Me,” this
would really just a difference in design language and emphasis. Make it into
an RSS feed for people.

Or, as a third option. . . they could just make Twitter into an RSS reader.
Maybe even add Wordpress/Medium style pages for long-form writing and feed
that all through the same “feed” paradigm.

~~~
riffic

      So much so that maybe ICANN should just work on something like it as a public utility?
    

Look at OStatus for a model for this:

[https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/](https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus)

Note that there hasn't been a lot of traction here, although there are a few
interesting implementations with active userbases.

------
yumaikas
Offer Twitter Gold: A gilded account can post tweets that are 288 (144*2)
characters long. Add other nice, but slightly costly features as they make
sense.

Occasionally do "announce" tweets that explain "well-known" twitter features
to help people be able to set it up better. Twitter could learn from Slack or
Discord in this regard.

Others have suggested cleaning up the engineering org, that seems like a good
organizational idea, but is going to be tricky to pull off.

Implement a feature or set of features to discourage bandwagon-hating. Twitter
has been instrumental in destroying a non-trivial amount of careers, sometimes
over things that were mere bad taste. Perhaps a limit on the number of
responses a tweet can have, or rate limiting on how fast a negative tweet
loads, or something. I'm not sure, but having them put some serious UX
research into this problem would be a great reputation boost, if we know they
are doing it.

------
bane
Twitter is a dumb pipe for notifications. It's slightly more than the content
equivalent of a bell going off when something interesting happens. Non-
conversation twitter posts are mostly references to somewhere else with a
longer form, and the conversation tweets are hard to follow.

If these things were decoupled, and a non-human readable version was
introduced, Twitter could become a defacto real-ish-time pub-sub, message bus
for web applications tied to users (instead of ips). I could sit at any
machine, anywhere, and my notification widget would get notifications for all
sorts of events. Or it could power internet game matchmaking, or I could
subscribe to reminders and have them scheduled and sent out to me wherever I
am rather than having to tie those things to my device or my calendaring app
or whatever. e.g. I could ask the local bbq competition to tweet-notify me
when the next competition is coming up and I'd just get pinged when it
happened instead of getting blasted by spam and or having to remember to put
it into my calendar and/or having to remember to read my twitter feed and
happen to catch the notice.

How about sub with parameters, only send me a deal making coupon notice if
it's for these restaurants and under $50? Okay, I bought some, now I'm
unsubscribing for now.

Let me write some tools on my own to tap the notification feeds and build some
home-spun IFTTT stuff. Like maybe I sub to a local meetup group, tell
everybody I'm putting a hike together but won't go unless I get 5 other people
to go, and then I don't get notified until I get a quorum. If I don't by a
certain date auto-send out a cancel-the-hike notice.

Conversations should be decoupled and turned into a web-based IM (same
character limits) but with easy references to human readable notifications and
machine-readable notifications.

Charge $10/year and guarantee a spam-free communication and notification
service for you and all your devices.

------
portman
Charge Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, and anyone else who has 1MM+ followers.
Charge them per tweet. They are the true economic beneficiaries of Twitter.

(Like any software company, offer lower pricing to charities.)

Use that cash to get rid of ads (they are not working) and invest in more
tools for publishers (who are now paying).

~~~
devmunchies
So charge the people who are responsible for twitter's relevancy? Other
companies would pay top dollar for that kind of viral marketing, and you
suggest charging them for it?

Thats like Nike charging Lebron James per point he scores if he wants to wear
their shoes. You have it backwards.

------
v4n4d1s
1\. Remove all bullshit features: "While you were away", Cards, Ordering. 2\.
Stop messing with the chronological order of the timeline. 3\. Do not monetize
it with in-timeline-ads, many people block all accounts serving ads. 4\.
Remove API limitations for 3rd party developers/apps.

------
rdl
1) Focus on capturing value from "Twitter as realtime newsfeed" \-- creating
products for non-Twitter-posting-users to see what's going on at a longer
timescale. This could be first party, or through partnerships with publishers.

2) All those Twitter developer/publisher services which Twitter recently sold
were IMO the real value at Twitter, Inc. Unfortunately, Twitter has burned
developers too many times to be trusted. I would have made them independent
rather than selling, though.

3) Rather than randomly banning users, focus on better filtering tools, and
tools to coalesce spam/multiple replies/etc. If you make a popular tweet, or
are the target of an attack, there should be a single "click more" link,
rather than hundreds of separate notifications.

------
joshwcomeau
Other than some small optimizations (When I reply to my own tweets, it should
be visible without a page refresh), I would change nothing.

Granted, I am answering a different question: from the CEOs perspective, they
_need_ to do something because they aren't growing fast enough.

But as a user, Twitter is more enjoyable when it's niche. I have a circle of
developers that share their projects and thoughts on software dev, and it's
delightful.

Someone else said that it's a great resource for the medical community, I know
that the hiphop scene is big on twitter, there's whatever the hell Weird
Twitter is...

Twitter makes more sense as a series of specialized clusters based around
specific communities, not as a Facebook where it's everything for everyone.

------
mrep
TRY NEW THINGS!!!

There are lots of ideas in this thread that are worth trying out. However,
despite being an early adopter, I have not once re-tried twitter after my
first attempt as there have never been any compelling reasons to. Everyone
hates on Google for shutting down failed products, but it is way better to try
and fail than sit on the product you have.

I'll quote Walter Isaacson's book on what Steve Jobs said: One of Jobs's
business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. "If you don't
cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an iPhone
might cannibalize the sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize the sales
of a laptop, that did not deter him.

------
arielm
In short - highlight what Twitter is really good at, which is delivering bits
of fleeting information and working in commerce.

The long version - ads are great, but they cause a misalignment between the
service users are happy with and the services necessary to monetize. In
addition (not instead), id bring payments into the platform so goods can be
discovered and purchased directly through the feed without the user having to
leave the platform.

This would require quite a few changes throughout, but when they all come
together I believe it'll bring the platform much closer to a Facebook-like
status, where users spend more time on the platform as opposed to it being a
"starting point" to finding interesting links.

------
dpweb
Many things come to mind.

I love Twitter, but it becomes less of a platform for personal expression and
more of a machine operated tool for propagandists and spam garbage when you
just widely allow botnets. For instance, do a little digging into _some_ of
the accts that constantly retweet Trump (Dems are no better). Maybe they tie
back to alt-right blog-nets - not humans - which also managed to hijack the
search engines to some extent. That ain't personal expression.

If they can't generate some new excitement, the BUMMER is, messaging is the
future. I'll argue FB and everyone else will be known as _messaging_ platforms
- not a face book or social news feed.

------
ijafri
I have no clue why they stopped developing it any further, in old days you
would eagerly wait for a new feature, every couple of month. That's also true
back then it didn't even have image upload.

I'd expect it be something between Facebook and twitter itself. Nope never
google+.

It needs a fresh look hmm! By fresh I meant the design as the aesthetics of
web Facebook messenger a modern, miminial, fresh look. That Facebook lacks.

I'd want to it be bit less minimal but not as much bloated as Facebook hence I
suggestrd earlier something between the Facebook and twitter itself.

It's stalled and boring, and at this point it looks like a driveless train
that could hit the dead end pretty soon.

------
__jal
1\. Rebuild Twitter as an open, federated, decentralize service. 2\. Write
RFCs. 3\. Shut down the massively dysfunctional company that should have been
a protocol from the beginning so everyone involved can go get jobs doing
something useful.

~~~
riffic
Twitter at the very least should adopt a standard and work with
standardization bodies to improve the ability to federate and "self-host" your
own Twitter on your own infrastructure.

------
ianamartin
Twitter has been chasing the explosive growth dream for years. It's not going
to happen for them.

If I were in charge, my number one goal would be to change expectations for
shareholders and investors.

Twitter has had all the rapid expansion it is going to have. From here on out,
it needs to focus on retaining users and slow, steady growth.

It needs to rebuild bridges with developers and become the platform it used to
be.

It needs to stop pretending that it can be a multi-billion user network and
focus on serving the several hundred millions of people who care about it.

I think a big part of the management thinking problem at twitter comes from
the fact that they suffered repeated outages early on. They invested a lot in
terms of people and infrastructure to make sure they they don't go down
anymore. And it worked. We almost never see the fail whale anymore.

I suspect that a lot of people inside twitter are sitting around in meetings
saying, "Look, we're ready for 3 billion users. We built it for that. Where
are the users?"

And perhaps some other people are saying, "Look, if we carry this monetization
scheme to 3 billion users, we would make x money. We have the infrastructure
for it. Let's bring the people and make the money."

The problem is that twitter's product just isn't that appealing to very many
more people than they already have active.

They hit the max of their growth potential very early in their time. Now it's
time to serve the users they have the best they can.

Twitter's number one problem is that they don't understand their market: it's
not now and not ever going to explode to the level of facebook use.

Fix #1: explain that clearly to all investors, stakeholders, employees.

Fix #2: cut costs. There's no way it should cost as much as it does to run
twitter.

Fix #3: stop trying to be Facebook lite.

Fix #4: repair your platform and relationships with developers. Developers
will drive traffic to you and help you generate ad dollars.

------
hellogoodbyeeee
Are corporate accounts free or do they cost? I've always thought that they
should charge every big corp that is using their platform as a marketing /
customer service tool.

Does CNN pay Twitter every time they read someone's tweet on the air? I'm not
talking about a "newsworthy" tweet (for example one from a politician's
account), but CNN occasionally says, "Let's see what a random person on the
internet thinks about this development." Then they prominently focus on a
couple tweets. I think CNN (or who ever) should pay for that content.

------
moomin
Don't know if it's even possible, but I'd start by having a good hard look at
the engagement stats. Twitter runs on those stats same way the police
departments in The Wire do. And, as a consequence, they've been loath to do
anything that dips those stats.

Trolls, harassers and other bad actors all show up as _positives_ in Twitter's
stats. Most of the UI features you hate probably cause upticks as well.

In practice, making a better Twitter might be a worse business plan than
continuing to flame out, so this is unlikely to happen.

------
gre
Twitter should buy the Sutro Baths, renovate them, and charge admission.

------
erickhill
1) Offer a premium Ad Free model 2) Create a Reddit Gold type of economy to
open up "premium features" ... e.g. Unfollow Tools and/or deeper analytics -
this would tie into the Ad Free model 3) Allow for the creation of Groups. 4)
Make Video more of a top-tier content experience, not some side-bar hand-wavy
experiment (at the same level as Moments). The next Twitch could be Twitter-
based. The community is already there. (note: expensive, but potentially very
lucrative CPMs)

------
kbody
In reality closing-down their API, hindered a lot of innovation that could
happen, they missed a lot of devs working for free to create a product on top
of the raw data that twitter is in a sense. (which they could easily acquire)

Imo you should keep the core stable until you construct an alternate route, so
any new direction should be an extension and not replacement until established
(see: not making a Digg v4 etc.).

So I'm of the opinion that at the current product monetization is at the edge
of starting to damage the product, ad aggression from users will become an
issue if they start to hunt for profits that way.

There needs to be monetization through another product. When talking about
tweets and especially on a scrolling list of tweets that is quite minimal it's
tricky. You have to expand it on another product-version.

Personally I would attack the inefficiency and problem of scaling (following a
lot of users fails exponentially), with some tools that will drive up the
quality of experience and increase user activity.

Secondly, I would try to embed a patron-like feature in a big way and take a
cut from the earnings.

As a dev, having a big product idea for twitter's case, their past and current
behavior of hindering its API use through walls and dealbreaking rate-limits,
will make it really hard to give it a try again.

------
Uhhrrr
Pseudo-federate it into separate sites with differing levels of moderation:
minors, special snowflakes, normal people, and anything-goes free speech fans.

Also, stop messing with my timeline.

------
riemannzeta
Twitter is the web interface for mobile messaging. The network effects have
carried it so far. "Turning around" is going to mean saying no to all of the
shiny new things both on mobile and on the web that have little to do with its
core value. That means no live video, no original content, nothing but
messaging on the web. Focus, focus, focus.

With that focus, I believe Twitter can return to growth in its user base.
There is more that could be done to make the experience more engaging, for
example, without interfering with the core experience. By mixing some
suggested tweets into my feed using machine learning, Twitter could increase
engagement. The new user experience would flow better with good use of machine
learning.

In terms of monetization, it's about the data. Twitter APIs should be
recognized as best-in-class, and access should be sold on a subscription basis
on a graduated scale based on frequency of access.

There is a natural scale to core Twitter, and it might not be much bigger than
it is right now. Sometimes we have to be content with what we've got -- which
in Twitter's case is nothing to sneeze at. They shouldn't be going all "New
Coke" getting into video and media in my opinion.

------
tschellenbach
Twitter in it's current form mainly appeals to power users. For every day
users it's simply too much work to get value from Twitter. To fix that they
will have to make some choices that will upset existing users though:

1\. Move the chronological feed to the background, the feed should be sorted
by relevancy not time. (If you're a power user you can click to the raw
chronological feed.)

2\. Right now you can only follow users and not interests. This makes it
extremely hard for new users to get a sensible feed of content. If a
mainstream user signs up for Twitter they are only going to spend a minute or
so to set things up. Twitter needs to immediately add value for those users.

3\. Use a machine learning approach to learn what a user is interested in
based on email clicks. (Quora does a great job at that.)

4\. Redesign all apps and simply. A good example is their settings screen.
Another is the crazy behaviour that you have to put a . in front of your
tweet. Get rid of all those power user features and settings and simplify.

5\. Remove abusive bots and clearly mark bots as bots. Twitter is spending
millions to facilitate people engaging in follow spam and other forms of spam.

6\. Build up a dedicated team to make sure Twitter works for high profile
users. (IE, do notifications and messages work if i have >10m followers). They
need a team on top of that to keep those users happy.

7\. Some general tips: [https://getstream.io/blog/13-tips-for-a-highly-
engaging-news...](https://getstream.io/blog/13-tips-for-a-highly-engaging-
news-feed/)

~~~
stevefeinstein
Relevance is relative.

------
RyanZAG
Add a down vote button so people can down vote the trolls. You'd see an
enormous uptake in regular people using the service if every reply wasn't some
random insult with a picture attachment of something disgusting.

Twitter is easily the most negative place on the internet, and that's
including madness like the Something Awful forums or 4chan. A downvote option
would hopefully push the constant arguments out of sight too.

~~~
ruipgil
You can't fight negativity with negativity. Let the good and positive boil to
the top.

Anyway, that would certainly not save twitter. They seem to be lacking better
management and focus on their core product.

~~~
acdha
> You can't fight negativity with negativity. Let the good and positive boil
> to the top.

How does that work? Someone organizes a hate mob and you're getting tons of
horrible messages. How do you “let the good and positive boil to the top”?

That's a huge problem for Twitter because every time someone, usually a woman,
is harassed off of the service, other people notice and adjust their actions
accordingly whether that is switching to a system, reducing what they post,
making their account private, etc. — all of which cuts into the engagement
they need to keep the service growing.

------
niftich
1\. Take it private

2\. Focus app and website around two concepts: 'Now' and 'Here' \-- temporally
local, and spatially local.

'Now' would surface what's happening in the world now: major entertainment
events, major political events, intermingling global, culturally-similar, and
local. Show a stylized zoomable map to show what's happening around the world,
so one can narrow or widen the locality of the world's pulse.

'Here' would invert this, showing everything that happened hyperlocal,
surfacing recent popular and random tweets from where you are now.

Bonus for some visual eye candy that shows, perhaps as a Venn diagram, when
'Here' and 'Now' get closer and closer together to where if you're at a sports
event, they're one and the same.

3\. Keep everything chronological. For a network like this, 'Fear of Missing
Out' is a feature, not a bug -- the anxiety should be palpable. For 'Now',
sell ad slots for exact rotating times, like TV. This will drive demand for
high-quality, high-cost brand advertising, instead of low-value mundane stuff.
For 'Here', sell the ad slot to local businesses.

4\. Open the API but charge a fee for access.

5\. Use ML, identity, hashtags, and context to classify tweets into a limited
number of categories/tags: breaking news, humor, insight, commentary, chatter,
feedback. Expose these as a user-controllable filter on top of any existing
view.

6\. Disable most notifications. Make users want to return to the app without
being nagged.

7\. Only allow replies and DMs from people you follow and verified accounts.

------
peterhunt
I believe Twitter's key problem is that they do not take enough product,
monetization, and growth risks, either because they are too afraid to, or
their org can't execute quickly enough.

1\. Pay as much cash as you need to (even if it means laying off a few people)
and hire one or two of FB's monetization and growth leaders, preferably away
from a team like Instagram. Give them the freedom and resources to grow the
team they want.

2\. Based on what Twitter has done with the product over the past few years
(i.e. not a lot), the product management team is too risk-averse. I would fire
them and acquire a few startups to build a more aggressive PM team that knows
when to listen to users/metrics and when to ignore them.

3\. Partnerships team seems to be great. I would incentivize them to stay.

4\. Twitter should invest in experienced engineering management to refocus the
team. They have open-sourced four (four!) separate message brokers, and I
heard that they had five internally recommended JS frameworks at one point.
They should standardize on one boring stack for all new development and move
all new development to the cloud.

------
yrryeruy
make it so that when you click on an image in a tweet, it gets bigger not
smaller

------
rocky1138
Engineering first.

Open API.

Turning Twitter into a federated protocol with 100% compatibility with GNU
Social.

------
overcast
1\. Looking at their financials, they could become profitable by just removing
half of their staff. I would start there before anything else.

2\. Fix the mess of UI. I still don't understand how to engage in
conversations to this day. Convoluted modal boxes, overlaying other screens,
that then expand out to more replies, and so on and so forth. It's WAY too
confusing.

------
yanilkr
Current advertising model of Twitter is not suited for the product. They tried
to emulate google and facebook model of ad revenue by programmatically showing
the user what might be useful to them and it did not work so well. People
developed blind spots for such content. Twitter should really look into micro
payments to reward users who increase engagement.

Some of our friends are good at recommending a movie or a restaurant and their
opinions matter at a micro level similar to celebrity endorsements matter at a
macro level. They would do more of it if they get paid like celebrities do but
at a proportional rate. Take the burden out of complicated algorithms to match
ad content to users and instead let users do it in between their conversations
and pay for the content of their tweets. Make the normal user to be their
spokesperson for the product/idea. Twitter is a very good medium for this.

This is native advertising at a whole new level. Financially rewarding users
who are influential in their small circle might be difficult to implement.
Take the ad money from businesses, local and global and share it with users
who say nice and constructive things about their campaign to their followers.
It could be as simple as rewarding a user for retweeting a well designed ad.
Many users will get creative and make endorsements from their daily lives if
it meant their followers liking it. Its like design crowd mixed with
advertising. Brands would pay for this model because its driven by results.

Understanding user tweets and matching them to a business campaign and fairly
allocating the reward to top/all contributors might be a much harder computer
science problem but I think this model of advertising has a potential to work
well for twitter. There is so much for user to tweet about. Local restaurants,
to movies to their brand loyal purchases etc in exchange their tweets get
financial reward based on how many people read them and engage with them.

------
kevwil
1) Go private. Twitter is a simple product that will be increasingly difficult
to monetize to appease the stockholders. Being public will either mutate it
into a video-ad nightmare or end up being shut down or sold.

2) Keep the timeline simple.

3) Better custom timelines, searches, and notifications.

4) Stop trying to copy Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc. and just be the best
Twitter possible.

------
baron816
I mentioned this in another thread recently: let users have about 10K
followers for free, and then charge them for followers after that. A lot of
celebrities straight up profit from sending out a tweet endorsing a brand.
Twitter should get a cut of that and I think this would be a fair and easy way
to do so. People pay for their influence.

------
jdeibele
Only show me content that's been re-tweeted more than X times, where X is
something that I can set.

I don't want to read about what somebody had for lunch and I wouldn't expect
it to be re-tweeted. But something thoughtful or interesting or funny would
be.

Yes, there would be problems with fake accounts re-tweeting but that should be
solvable.

~~~
unchaotic
I wrote a chrome extension to solve something similar i.e. filter out by
keywords and then sort my timeline to see popular tweets that I shouldn't
miss.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpomfloaidpdleeoegmpikjdchjf)

------
joantune
I came a bit too late to the party.

While I get the 140char limit, and they should stick with that, having
something like a 10k limit that was only shown when the tweet is expanded, is,
in my perspective, essential [for someone that comes from FB the 140 char
limit is ludicrous bad UX]. I get that longer formats should go on something
like medium, but asking people to change websites to do that is ludicrous.
It's putting the barrier too high for the input of content.

I know that the shareholders of Twitter that also are medium's wouldn't be
happy with the lifting of that limit, yet, for those read on:

Regardless of feasibility (as they are two distinct companies) more than
140characters would transform itself on a medium post and commentaries and
highlights could become tweets.

That's one of the two suggestions that I think would help twitter improve a
lot. Enough of texts as image and other crappy UX

------
dzink
As a user I struggle to stay engaged with twitter - the moment I try to read,
I am flooded with irrelevant content, yet the platform is the best place for
niche interest information and fast niche information. The Signal-to-Noise
ratio is too low. Here is how I would fix engagement and revenue:

1\. Consider twitter a user's portfolio of interest channels and let us tab
between our chosen channels immediately (multi-select box at the top where I
can pick VCs, medicine, Design, Oscars, whatever - and it blends my feed for
me)

2\. Encourage floods of content and monetise curators filtering for quality -
I can pay for subscription a feed of world news from WSJ, NYT, and other paid
sources, and my subscription fee is distributed to them based on consumption.
The best content wins and the quality editorials get rewarded for earning
loyalty, not writing clickbait.

3\. Enable paid advertising-free feeds.

4\. Enable premium, niche feed advertising that is hyper relevant (If I have a
spine medicine feed, an ad from Stryder would be very appropriate, but one
from herbal remedies providers would be irrelevant). Building the curation
mechanisms would draw top engineering talent in machine learning too.

5\. Allow co-watching experiences during media events.

6\. Allow me to filter out topics I want to avoid (and by doing that, you get
more engagement and better ad targeting capabilities)

7\. Open your developer ecosystem again and this time pay attention to what
works and provide guarantees that you won't kill developer efforts. Those
developers build bots for Facebook now and help their user engagement instead
of yours.

The gist of it is: make your revenue model reward and improve quality. The
moment you let advertisers lead you by the nose and dictate for obstructive
anti-user product decisions, you will permanently lose your market to Facebook
and others. I lead a hyper-niche collaboration network so happy to do a longer
brainstorming session with Twitter people.

------
Ologn
Allow me to publicly follow someone while privately ignoring them.

Allow me to easily and permanently get rid of "In case you missed it" thing
and read my feed on a strictly timeline basis.

I get a lot of junk in my feed that I don't want to see, and thus I don't go
to it much.

Facebook is not as bad, but they've gotten worse. Two of my friends "like"
some newspaper and then I start seeing the latest stories from that newspaper
in my feed all the time.

I want to go to these feeds once a day and read what those who publish once a
day or less who are my friends (Facebook) or friends/colleagues (Twitter) say,
in timeline order. Any deviation from that lessens my desire to read it. Some
of my friends publish to Facebook several times a day and I usually don't even
want to read that, never mind the other junk that both put in my feed.

------
d--b
Make people pay to tweet. something like the cost of a text message. That will
cut the garbage down a lot. It will reduce the costs by easing the
infrastructure. Increase quality of information by reducing the number of
bots/trolls/twitstorms and so on. Plus it will bring in some money in.

------
phn
Embrace the use of lists and its workflow (think tweetdeck). Side by side
lists. I insist on side by side because you don't want one particular list
stopping content from other lists to catch your eye.

Implement smart/personalized lists by interest and suggest them to users,
suggest new people to add to existing lists and/or tweets that may be relevant
to that list. A bit like spotify playlists and smart radios, but oriented to
tweets.

Basically, make it easier for people to find tweets and users they want to
follow, segmented by interest.

Display relevant non-intrusive ads based on the interests on that list. They
should take the hint from reddit regarding what "non-intrusive" means. Adding
something like Reddit Gold wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Apart from that, a nice interface to follow live events and their tweets would
be awesome.

------
codingdave
I'm not sure anyone outside of twitter has enough information to really answer
this. After all, they DO have revenue. So without knowing the intricate
details of their expenses, it is difficult to know whether the problem lies in
business strategy or just financial operations. Because the first step would
be to be sure they really are running their operations in a financially
effective manner. It is possible that a re-tooling of their internal
operations would result in profitability.

If that turns out to not be the case, then the strategy would depend on how
far from profitability they are -- are we talking about minor tweaks to the
business model? Or a major overhaul of entire company?

In short, how would I turn it around? I'd step in and do a large analytic
effort on the status quo, and then react to the result.

------
shp0ngle
Put more effort to engineering.

Facebook isn't great because of how it looks, but because they have React,
hiphop (or what's the name now), things like that; and that allows them to
scale and build and iterate more quickly.

Twitter had Bootstrap and that was great investment IMO... now the Bootstrap
guys all left. Why?

~~~
blackaspen
Previous comment of mine:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13225000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13225000).

Twitter's built Aurora, large parts of Mesos, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants,
ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, Scalding, Finagle, and
Finatra. A lot of these exist so they can build things quicker.

------
apricot13
1\. Make a bigger deal of lists. Add the lists tab to the top of the page,
show the list of lists a person is in next to their name. For new users its a
great way to find people with similar interests. For existing users they let
you unfollow people but still check in on them every now and then so your
timeline isn't so insane.

2\. Add the option of removing inline images/quoted tweets from the timeline
it looks ugly

3\. redesign, I find twitter so difficult to read its so cluttered.

4\. when I say I dont want to see the 'while you were away feature' I do not
want to see the 'while you were away feature'

5\. Allow me to write private notes about a user or look up all our previous
interactions on one page.

6\. Allow me to star users - these users tweets are highlighted in some way on
my time line

7\. when I clikc the tweet permalink why is it a popup then when I go directly
to a page its not styled like a popup - this is confusing to some users who
think they've loaded a seperate tweet

8\. I'd like a daily email of a select group/list/my timeline if < 50 followed
emailed to me daily/weekly Some of us dont have time to scroll through twitter

9\. Bookmark where I was last. I dont like to miss any tweets.

10\. allow me to send group DM's

11\. dissappearing tweets. I know this is cipying
snapchat/instagramstories/whatsapp but tweeting a phtoo/text which dissappears
after a custom amount of time (1 month/year/day/hour/minute) would be
brilliant.

12\. bring back the third party apps. they made twitter.

13\. make trending hashtags easier to see/browse. News articles are always
saying x is trending but I never see this.

14\. allow me to search tweets nearby. Useful for conferences.

15\. Dont include URLS in character count, I think this was supposed to have
been added but I've not noticed it working.

------
joeld42
Admit that it's a (better) chatroom and tailor it to that use case. It's not a
new thing. Go super-aggressively after abuse, bots, etc. even if it hurts your
bottom line short term, it will help it long term. Don't make statements about
addressing abuse, just do it. It will be noticed. Stop focusing on growth,
focus on quality of users. Make a tier of "verified" accounts that anyone can
get -- subscription is fine. They verify their real contact info with you,
they get a verified badge. Make eggs not able to dm or mention for two weeks.
Let me right-click to save animated gifs. Allow "extended" tweets that start
with 140 characters but you can click through to more, for when it's time for
some game theory. Shadowban the potus.

------
andrewfromx
relaunch it. have a countdown to the end of Twitter 2007-2017 and let everyone
know it's starting all over again. Rush to get your username. The new twitter
will be just like it was in 2008 but stable and working but get back to what
made it great in the first place.

------
sreenadh
The main thing I love about twitter is the 140 character limit. It's an
elevator pitch. Many times, when I am trying to communicate an idea, I put
them in 140 character chucks to better refine the idea. Especially in this
Trump era where people are confused by throwing too many words that do not
many any sense. Concise - that is the need and twitter is concise.

Twitter should stop comparing itself to facebook and compare more to
wikipedia. Twitter is an idea sharing platform. Journalist can use it to get
their articles to more audience where the gist of what the article is about is
given.

Let's not forget the role twitter played in Arab Spring.

140char should be ONLY for text. Links & embedded media should be excluded
from that limit.

------
ajamesm
Listen to what users are overwhelmingly saying: actually fix
harassment/spam/bots. Fix the opaque, unaccountable useless support processes.

Twitter is fine for what it is, and all it needs to do is stay consistent, not
suck, not burn money, not force opportunities

------
AlexDanger
I'm amazed they arent more profitable, given that Twitter has become Ground
Zero for the daily (hourly? minutely?) news cycle.

Are stock exchanges highly profitable? Twitter has become the global exchange
for real-time information. I suppose Twitter cant really charge a 'brokerage'
fee for tweeting. That is not in their interest.

Please excuse my ignorance of Twitter's commercial offerings, but is access to
the Firehose expensive? Or real-time summary of Firehose statistics relevant
to your keywords? That just seems so valuable and such a singular
offering....its not like there is a competing service.

 _I know I 've misued the word minutely. But there needs to be a better word
for 'minute-by-minute'._

------
tyre
A few ideas:

# Mass Monetization

1) Integrate payments and one-click purchasing, take a cut.

2) Host specific pages for live-stream events (not within tweets) like sports
games. Target the remaining pieces of cable TV: Live sports, ESPN, Awards
Shows, Olympics, Talk shows (e.g. Daily show, Colbert Report, etc.)

# Large Account Monetization

1) Charge for additional features, e.g. private/protected accounts,
verification, having more than XXX followers.

2) Build tools specifically for managing a) large accounts and b)
brands/customer service. Charge them for it!

# Data Monetization

1) Build API access for alternative clients that is free for a certain number
of users (~10k) then charges on a per-install basis.

2) Partner with marketing platforms (e.g. Salesforce) to build marketing
funnels from Twitter into CRM or marketing platform.

------
nevi-me
Make advertising more accessible/cheaper. I have a Facebook page where I can
spend ZAR210 a day and get value. Twitter costs way more for less perceived
value. Opening up advertising to more small projects like ours brings in more
revenue I think.

~~~
bbulkow
This. I have to hire another company, in order to monetize twitter, because
twitter doesn't give me the tools itself. The other companies do a good job.

------
ilamont
1\. Give people control over things that matter to them, whether it be length
of tweets, ability to enable/disable certain features, or see Twitter in
preferred modes (pure reverse chron, ad-free, image-free, no politics, only
sports, etc.).

2\. Charge fees for this stuff

3\. Make it easy to buy anything via Twitter

4\. Get rid of the bots and AI-obvious trolling/threats/TOS violations. I find
it astounding that despite years of promises to do something the situation
seems to be getting worse.

5\. Get a new fully-focused leader who can execute on these and other issues
without distraction of a second company, and can also bring down headcount.
This probably requires a reorg and a new board.

------
aethertron
1\. Split notifications into two streams, high and low value. Details here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12959003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12959003)

2\. Per-thread privacy and write control. When you post a new OP (non-reply)
tweet, you get to choose who gets to see it, and post replies to it.

These options make sense to me: just you, your followees, mutually following
accounts ('friends'), friends and friends of friends, or members of given
lists, or anyone unblocked.

But I think they won't go that way because they want to be One Big Community.
My proposal would lead to balkanisation.

------
_harry
\- fix abuse & troll problem

\- clarify community guidelines

\- threaded replies

\- upvotes

\- groups public/private

\- add channels

\- follow anything, focus on live

\- then I'd buy Reddit & Imgur.

------
nitinics
1\. Customer Service - Provide enterprise solutions for customer service and
charge $$$ per transaction. The live nature of this would prove a lot of value
for feedback mechanisms for enterprise when they go through their change
management.

2\. Live Interaction with Events, Games, Television, Radio etc. e.g. Polls,
QnA, Sentiment etc.

3\. Open Access to Developers to build Apps on real-time content.

4\. Enable fact-check score methodologies on every tweets. Don't completely
wipe out the trolls. As weird as it may sound - trolls make twitter
interesting.

5\. The Ultimate messaging platform that replaces SMS/Texts with an identity
that is not numbers.

~~~
philippz
There is a better "Twitter for Feedback" -> STOMT

------
bbulkow
Twitter does need to continue engineering. It needs to do exactly one thing:
re-order the timeline so that coming to Twitter becomes fun and engaging
again. Right now, when I open Twitter ( mobile or desktop ), I have a huge
flurry of random things I don't really want to read, or don't want to read
now.

Re-ordering the timeline promises the solution - but it doesn't work yet.

I would think you need "auto-group", which FB, Google, and others have tried
and failed at.

But in any case - twitter is the place I feel like I have to go, but don't
want to go, and I think I'm not the only one.

------
alexis_faveeo
As ceo of Faveeo a startup active in this space since 2012, I've ben thinking
a lot about these issues; and the main problems of twitter are also what
motivated me to launch several products since the inception of our own
company.

I'll try to post my 2c here :

1) I think there is a paradox on twitter, which is that the more you follow
people (the more you use and invest yourself in the tool; the harder it gets
to use and to extract value from.

The thing is; for more people it's already hard enough to actually take the
time to find the right people to follow (and to actually find them, curate
your followings, etc) butthe end result if often times am overload of
information which begs the question : how can a app that rewards engagement
with negative outcomes can succeed in the long run?

The concept of twitter is just awesome and they invented a whole new medium;
but I'm quetionning the concept of following people one by one.

One thing we built at Faveeo is called Horizons, and it enables to show the
system some examples of people you like and trust; and our tool will
automatically uncover and follow the best links posted and shared by those
users.

We call it uncovering and following a trusted network at scale and we're
having quite a success with it especially with people who want to tap into
twitter without spending their life managing their twitter experience.

Twitter is absolutely full of great content, it's too hard to find.

Twitter could do a massive consumer facing app enabling people to follow
topics and trusted bundles of it's own users AND surfacing their best links
and content and I'm quite sure it would reach up to a billion users as more
and more people are looking for content outside of their own bubble...

Also, twitter should care much more about the content of the links people
share; then ONLY caring about the tweets themselves, which to be fair they do
with media inserts now.

Happy to discuss this and have a look at
[http://horizons.social](http://horizons.social) to try our twitter network
discovery approach. (self promotion but for once there is a topic I'm actually
an expert on :))

------
ericdykstra
1\. Privitize the company

2\. Unemploy 90% of staff from all departments to stop bleeding money

3\. Remove all feed filtering and return to a purely chronological timeline;
highlights can hide somewhere else.

4\. Increase character count to 200, don't count mentions against the limit,
and reduce prominence of image posts so they don't overwhelm text-only posts.

5\. Throw away all KPIs and remove all features done to service KPIs

6\. Organize a small product team dedicated to making the API open and good
again

7\. Organize a larger product team that works on issues around custom
mention/interaction filtering

8\. Sell API access for business volume and use cases

------
aembleton
\- Remove advertising

\- Charge for longer tweets in the following way

    
    
      - 200 chars -> $10/year
    
      - 500 chars -> $10/month or $100/year
    
      - 1000 chars -> $100/month or $1000/year

------
p0nce
\- for the longest time I've wished to tweet to a subpart of my followers;
Then only way to have that is multiple account right now. Let me follow
"person X + #hashtag".

\- support multiple accounts on the website

\- Twitter ads do not seem as valuable as other ad services, there is not
enough reason to buy them.

\- remove the bots

\- Twitter need a way to lessen noise from talkative people. Something between
muting and following. See point 1.

\- order the tweets by most recent, like it was previously. Ordering by
popularity ensures your tweets are dwarfed by the popular GIF of the day.

------
petergatsby
Stop rewarding the most hyperbolic, sensational content by propagating it the
furthest, fastest. Turn tweets into "ice-berg tips"; user taps on tweet to see
more, nuanced info.

------
redthrowaway
1\. Lay off most of the workforce. There is absolutely no justification for
them to have as many employees as they do.

2\. Start charging people based on how many followers they have. Twitter isn't
worth much for the average consumer, but it's hugely valuable for people with
massive reach. Charge them for it.

People are giving lots of product suggestions, but the product itself isn't
the biggest issue. Twitter spends too much and makes too little. Patch the
holes in the boat before you try to row faster.

------
Mikeb85
Get rid of censorship. They had a good idea with live streaming video and
whatnot, but they're beat to everything by Instagram and Snapchat.

As it stands now, I deleted Twitter simply because it's nothing but corporate
accounts, overly aggressive SJWs posturing over every damn thing, and the only
content I actually cared about was reposted from Instagram (apart from a few
people I know who live streamed, but have since switched platforms). So now I
only use Instagram.

~~~
ndespres
I'm not exactly sure what people mean when they reference "aggressive SJWs"
but many would prefer stricter moderation on Twitter. Racists and targeted
harassment is a big problem. I doubt that there is a pattern of "social
justice warriors" who are seeking out and harassing those with mildly opposing
viewpoints.

~~~
chasing
Yeah, most of the "freedom of speech" / "get rid of censorship" stuff I see
seems to be code for "let people be assholes." Which, okay. But there's a line
where you're just being too toxic for the community and need to be shown the
door.

~~~
iopq
Twitter is not a community. It's a platform. There's a difference.

------
vcool07
Have two accounts for regular(free) users and enterprise(paid) users:

1\. Free/Regular user - Restricted to 'x' tweets a day, 'y' tweets a month or
ad served etc. Not applicable for enterprises, marketing firms etc.

2\. Paid/Enterprise user - No restrictions on tweets per day. Enterprises need
to pay 'z' amount on a monthly/yearly basis. No ads are served to the account
holder. More privacy, backup options. Tweets are promoted based on keywords
etc.

------
pratyushag2
Twitter should own the utility of being a messaging forum for the public. This
means a communication layer that can be easily used by many different services
for different purposes. From there on, it should open up this message level
integration as easily embrddable feature for websites and to app developers.
Monetization potential will increase with engagement and engagement to a forum
using twitter should be made as easy as text messages.

Cut costs and cut it by a lot!

------
smacktoward
Take a page from mobile gaming and let people buy extra characters.

The act of whittling down a tweet to fit inside the (increasingly ridiculous)
140-character limit is the exact kind of tedious, repetitive thing a game
designer would instantly recognize as a "grind":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_\(video_gaming\))

And free-to-play mobile games have demonstrated that lots of people, when
presented with a grind, are _very_ willing to pay real money to skip past it.
So: give Twitter users the option to buy extra characters, usable whenever
they're needed, at some price point low enough to be attractive as an impulse
buy. A penny per character, say, or 40 characters for a quarter, or 120 for 99
cents. The marginal cost to Twitter of shipping 141 characters over the wire
instead of 140 is essentially nothing, so whatever you charge would be almost
100% pure profit.

A user with a bag of such extra characters in hand would now have the ability,
if they wanted to, to skip editing down every tweet and just post on the fly.
Which could be a real time-saver, if you're one of the media-type power users
who spend all day on Twitter! And how much it costs you depends entirely on
how often you want the luxury of not having to edit yourself. If you only need
it occasionally, it's cheap; if you're compulsively logorrheic, well...
consider it a tax on the burden you're placing on your followers' attention.

 _But wouldn 't it ruin Twitter,_ you ask, _if people weren 't forced to be
terse?_ I don't see how. When people use the extra space wisely, it makes
their life easier, costs you nothing and generates revenue that can subsidize
freeloaders like you. When people _abuse_ the extra space, you can always
unfollow them -- and when the abusers notice their follower counts crashing,
they'll be encouraged to rein themselves in. Nobody logs on to Twitter in the
morning with the objective of _losing_ followers. The system would correct
itself.

So: Twitter makes money, power users enjoy using it more, regular users get
their freight paid for by the whales, everyone has access to longer-form
expression with a mechanism already in place to still encourage brevity. It's
a win all around.

------
dzonga
Btw I made an app[0] last year as my first iOS app which centers conversations
around Live events using hashtags.

Based on comments on this thread, with some UX improvements the app could meet
a lot your requirements. Will gladly accept feedback, and willing to iterate.

[0]: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/event-
is/id1141185734?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/event-
is/id1141185734?mt=8)

~~~
vuyani
Honest question, are you a software developer?

Wonder how did you get your app review approved with screenshot demo text such
as "appStoreTestApp"

But anyways. You might have a good idea, but that app doesnt do it justice.
Poorly designed and implemented. Also, one screenshot?!?

~~~
dzonga
just a senior CS Student, though not a valid excuse the first attempt is not
something I'm proud of....but yeah I will work on the UX and give it an update

------
stevefeinstein
I would work with the US post office, and any other countries postal service
to turn the service into a public utility run by the people for the people
under the same idea that the post office delivered physical messages, it would
be in the public interest to deliver electronic messages as well. Stop trying
to be profitable, not all useful things need to make money. Some things are
worth funding because they are of public benefit.

------
gtsteve
Nice try, Jack Dorsey.

------
CephalopodMD
A sane, open, paid API:

I would pay serious money to use their historical data. It's a goldmine for
machine learning research, finance, market research, news, politics, etc. I'm
sure anybody could find a legitimate use for that much data from a social
network.

Instead, I have to hack together a way to constantly collect tweets from
within the past 2 weeks or use 3rd parties to access their data in any sane
way.

Sell me your data! I want to buy your data!

~~~
tosser5392
They already do this through Gnip:
[https://gnip.com/historical/](https://gnip.com/historical/)

------
daveid
Twitter as a company needs to think about how to be profitable. Twitter as a
way for people to talk to each other and broadcast important events needs to
be neither commercial nor centralized [1]

[1]: [https://hackernoon.com/the-power-to-build-communities-a-
resp...](https://hackernoon.com/the-power-to-build-communities-a-response-to-
mark-zuckerberg-3f2cac9148a4)

------
kevwil
\- Go private. Twitter is a simple product and will be increasingly difficult
to monetize enough to satisfy shareholders' desire for ever-increasing
profits.

\- Keep it simple. Stop trying to be Facebook and Snapchat and Youtube all at
once.

\- Better AI / search to enable/improve things like custom timelines and
notifications.

\- Optional paid accounts with appropriate benefits. Keep the cost low and
don't penalize unpaid accounts.

------
LordHumungous
Allow users to pay to "boost" tweets and expand their exposure. I.e. you can
pay $5 in boost credits to increase the reach of the tweet promoting your
website or whatever. (Or maybe much more if you are a corporate account- not
sure how the pricing model should work). The boosts should be invisible to
other users.

Basically, monetize the one thing that every wants to do on twitter, which is
go viral.

~~~
chambo622
This already exists - promoted tweets

~~~
LordHumungous
Yeah but make it transparent to users

------
maxdemarzi
Take Twitter and add a sprinkle of Groupon. Let brands sell direct via a
Tweet. I click buy, boom I paid for it. For what exactly? Anything you can buy
on Amazon, discount movie tickets, buy one get one free burger at mcdonalds,
pre-order video games, etc. SELL STUFF. Add limits, like only 500 of x, or
tweet will self destruct in x seconds. Imagine Black Friday/Cyber Monday on
Twitter...

------
dumbfounder
Bring back the app ecosystem and this time make a blood oath to protect the
apps instead of destroying them all. If apps want to monetize they need to use
Twitter's methods of monetization and share the data they generate back to
Twitter. Make the rules mutually beneficial, sign that blood oath (an actual
public, binding contract), and people will come back and build cool things
again.

------
PTPells
Make profiles more robust. Features could include: • Event creation • A
forum/group tab so followers of a specific account could more easily
communicate with each other • Expanded "About" section • Custom calls-to-
action (i.e. "Sign Up," "Message," "Shop," etc.)

Allow people to publish more content natively. Such as: • Long-form writing •
Long-form video

~~~
PTPells
My thinking...

Public figures post on Twitter first. As a result, it's where news breaks.
However, due to the constraints Twitter has placed on how people are able to
represent themselves (i.e. limited profiles) and communicate with their
audiences (i.e. inability to publish long-form written content natively),
these people are driven to other platforms (i.e. Facebook) to do things they
might've otherwise done on Twitter.

Instead of trying to compete as social utility in the way that Facebook,
Instagram and Snapchat have positioned themselves, why not cater explicitly to
the newsmakers who are already defaulting to their platform, giving them fewer
reasons to go elsewhere and attracting non-Twitter users in the process?

------
jasonkostempski
I think Twitter could only be improved by removing all the garbage they've
added since it's inception. It was perfect on day 1 except for scaling issues.
If they didn't get greedy and just took the money for access to the real-time
stream of data and maybe some advanced analytics, a few people could be making
a ton of money instead of a ton of people making no money.

------
metaphorm
new economic model: users pay on the basis of how many followers they have.
the first 1000 followers are free. pricing begins for accounts with over 1000
followers. the more followers you have the more you pay.

this places the payment model in alignment with who the actual beneficiaries
of twitter are. it's a mass broadcast advertising/propaganda platform. let the
propagandists pay for it.

~~~
rtkwe
That's massively open for abuse: Find someone you don't like or want to harass
and get lots of people to hate follow them. Costs them money or forces them to
use some Twitter moderation tool to cull followers.

Second thought with any social media feature should be how can an asshole use
this to be an asshole easier.

~~~
metaphorm
I don't understand your criticism. How do you propose a bad-actor could
control such a large number of accounts? even supposing this malicious figure
had that much influence, the problem is just one of how Twitter bills its
users. It is the platform's responsibility to determine how it bills and
whether or not it is billing fairly. this is a technical implementation detail
of the platform, which is beyond the scope of this discussion.

finally, suppose those are "malicious followers". who cares? you pay for
reach. if all those supposedly malicious followers stay as your followers
they're still seeing your tweets. isn't that the point? I don't see how this
is an abuse of the system. A view is a view. Are we suppose to now distinguish
between friendly vs. hostile views? This is getting ridiculous.

~~~
rtkwe
A couple different ways but bots or just a large group of people getting angry
at someone are the simplest, the second is already pretty common and a problem
with Twitter as it stands. Next the billing is an integral part of the
discussion. If it's impossible to accurately bill something it's a terrible
feature. Finally there are massive number of people who use twitter completely
noncommercially but might wind up with this problem. Charging anyone who isn't
trying to sell something for reach is a pretty much guaranteed way to shed
tons of users.

------
DanBC
Fix the abuse problem. Lilly Allen recently had some horrific trolling on her
page about her stillborn child.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39095000/lily-allen-
wa...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39095000/lily-allen-was-attacked-
online-after-revealing-she-suffered-from-ptsd-after-stillbirth)

------
dorait
1\. Charge a subscription fee one rate for consumers and a higher rate for
businesses 2\. Get rid of all inactive accounts 3\. Charge a fee for
tweetstreams 4\. Fix the rate limit of APIs and create tools for developers
5\. Add a features for event tweets/group accounts 6\. Talk to developers, add
features for Twitter app development 7\. Fix the 140 character limitation

------
unstatusthequo
Charge $0.01 per tweet and this also suggest people be more succinct and
thoughtful in their posts to make the service a little better

~~~
adtac
>Charge $0.01 per tweet

Guaranteed to kill twitter within a year.

------
jondubois
I would cut Selling/General/Admin expenses. It's costing them $1.2 billion per
year which is about half of their total revenue and this cost has kept growing
over the years.

I would cut back on research (or at least bring it in-house) - $713 million is
too much. If they paid each of their researchers 200K per year, they could
hire 3500 of them which is insane.

------
smoyer
I wouldn't bother ... it's the:

\- Talk radio of our time

\- A complete waste of mental bandwidth

\- Too full of negativity

If you could somehow filter out the most important parts, pack them into a
digest and send them to me once a day, I'd invest 20 minutes into reading
through the information just to keep up-to-date. This sounds curiously like
the newspaper we used to have delivered to our door.

------
accountface
Open up the API again and let third parties integrate live-streaming features.
If you have thousands of people already watching and livetweeting a new
Netflix release, facilitate that and make it easier. Imagine if everyone could
watch the Superbowl while live-tweeting it in the same interface... you'd
likely broaden user adoption

------
EdSharkey
Open up a cloud services arm that uses the Twitter infrastructure to host
long-running business processes with broadcast-ability. Offer twitter feed
integrations, human workflow steps, workbaskets/inboxes, and external partner
API calls.

Low latency seems to be Twitter's thing, cash in on that and make some speedy
low latency workflow thing.

------
powera
Here's my take from a few months ago:
[https://medium.com/@8a42aa2c33c2/870d096a64e5](https://medium.com/@8a42aa2c33c2/870d096a64e5)

Very roughly:

1) Stop abuse. 2) Find something new for engineers to work on. 3) Sell to a
media company. 4) Don't waste time on BS like streaming NFL games.

------
rrggrr
1\. Let users charge for more rapid access to tweets and share revenue (eg.
instant tweet access versus delayed access).

2\. Let users pay to DM certain accounts.

3\. Mesh-networked solution.

4\. Launch 'labs' version as sandbox for developers and users to experiment
with (eg. encrypted tweeting, blockchain embedded messaging, proxied messages,
etc.)

5\. Twitter comms OS embedded on hardware.

------
Finnucane
I'd definitely try to follow in the footsteps of many of our great
'turnaround' CEOs: 1) Insist on a 'golden parachute' clause in my contract
that gives me a big payout on exit, 2) run the company into the ground, 3)
jump ship before the explosion.

And I could do it for less than, say, Bob Nardelli or Carly Fiorina.

------
ChicagoDave
I'd make accounts 3-tier:

1\. anonymous, free, limited use (300 tweets per month) 2\. consumer, verified
identity, paid, $10/month (1500 tweets per month) 3\. commercial, verified
identities, paid, $25/month per user (3000 tweets/month) 4\. commercial,
verified identities, paid, $100/month per user (unlimited tweets)

------
mark_l_watson
I would offer a paid service with no 'promoted tweet' advertisements. Also, I
liked it better as text only.

------
nodesocket
If I had the nuclear option I'd create a new account type, Twitter Business.
Twitter Business has special features directly linked with their advertising
core. A twitter Business handle costs $9.99 a month and includes "premium"
business features such as engagement analytics, brand tracking, etc.

------
ptrptr
As much as i'm not a fan of Anil Dash his synapis of this problem is IMO
correct [https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-billion-dollar-gift-
for-t...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-billion-dollar-gift-for-
twitter-8b3d541b9e1e#.3jw3txw27)

------
valeg
It's profitable business based on 140 characters messages. Why Twitter is
regarded as a disaster just beyond me.

What I add to the mix of Twitter features:

1\. Twitter for Newsrooms (like "Facebook for work" but more specified). More
precise tracking of twits and streams.

2\. Hashtag following

3\. Twitter's instant articles

And character limit must be preserved no matter what.

------
reitanqild
Happy to not be their CEO in 2017. That said, here are my thoughts:

Either:

Slowly turn it into Google+, only with users and API. (Including pseudonyms,
groups and circles)

Or:

Make it a communication tool instead of a spam distribution machine sometimes
used to communicate. Charge for API access above personal usage quotas (i.e.
news organisations , company accounts etc).

------
jreeder
Charge to hyperlink a URL. Maybe it costs $100 per year to have hyperlinks in
your tweets. There are tons of businesses that rely on Twitter for
distribution and twitter makes nothing off those businesses. You could still
post a URL to a tweet for free, but hyperlinks cost some nominal amount.

------
robbyking
Change the culture in-house. I've only known a couple people who've worked at
Twitter, but both hated it and said they felt constant pressure to participate
in extracurricular activities like after hours movies and games.

You're never going to be innovative if your employees dread coming to work.

------
usrusr
Cut back all monetization projects that don't produce a ROI already, hire out
the technical talent as a consultancy specializing on Twitter-scale
scalability problems and keep the pipes running as the mother of all reference
projects. It would be like hiring Noah to design your yacht.

------
tyingq
Maybe too late for these specific examples, but figure out how to use their
existing tech to take over new markets as they pop up. They currently have all
their eggs in one, low margin product.

They should have been able to release, for example, competitive offerings
against Disqus, Signal, and Slack.

~~~
arbirk
Excactly. Or they could just buy Disqus and in an instant be the webs primary
commenting platform

------
yoodenvranx
I would sell hats for the user avatar. It worked in TF2 and it also works in
CSGO, Pokemon and LOL. The typical Twitter and Instagram user is so full of
vanity that tons of people would invest tons of money into getting that one
very rare hat on their profile pic.

------
dkrich
I don't think it can be turned around in the sense that it can be made into a
profitable business.

I think of Twitter the same way I think of highways. It fulfills a huge market
demand that the market isn't willing to pay for itself, so has to be
subsidized in other ways.

------
amorphid
Open up the platform to third parties again, and creating a binding agreement
to keep it open.

------
dejawu
Ooh, I like this question.

1\. Trim the fat. Reduce the number of employees dramatically. Obviously not a
graceful change but I feel there should not be that as many people working
there as there are now.

2\. Focus on engagement, not growth. Twitter may not be growing in the way
that the market wants, but the users that it does have are incredibly devoted
to the platform. If I were to leave Twitter there's nowhere else I could go.
If I leave Tinder or Snapchat there are many other platforms that can fill
almost the same niche. Twitter needs to capitalize on that.

3\. Make brands pay to have a page. In other words, if you're not an
individual, you must pay to create an account. Savvy companies have realized
that being on Twitter is a key part of a solid social media campaign. To not
be on Twitter is to miss out on a huge opportunity to reach a very devoted
audience, and you can't reach that audience anywhere else (#2). Some brands
are already doing this well (e.g. Wendy's.) If the choice comes to paying for
the opportunity to market on Twitter, and not market at all, companies will
gladly pay. On the plus side, this could let Twitter reduce the interstitial
ads on the timeline.

Everyone hates ads, but the way that brands have engaged with individuals on
Twitter really humanizes them and makes people form more real relationships
with them. It also forces brands to be more accountable and aware.

4\. Bring back Vine. A huge part of Twitter's staying power is the unique
culture it has created (#2). Staying power is what gives Twitter its greatest
value to advertisers (#3).

5\. Ramp up engagement on Periscope. Periscope being a part of Twitter makes a
lot of sense because Twitter is all about stuff happening live. It's a great
platform but I think it also needs a desktop client (with OBS support, the way
Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content creation to go up.

6\. Re-open APIs. Twitter has sown a bad seed with the dev community by making
its API very restricted. Tweets make up a very interesting dataset on which
other people could build very unique things on top of. Twitter should
encourage this, not stifle it. "Look what cool things we can do with Twitter"
will only serve to strengthen the image of Twitter as a unique, irreplaceable
platform.

\---

These are the main issues I see as an everyday user of Twitter. Things like
live sports/TV are good ways to grow but these are all secondary to Twitter
strengthening its core platform for longevity and meaningful sustainability.

~~~
chambo622
> [Periscope is] a great platform but I think it also needs a desktop client
> (with OBS support, the way Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content
> creation to go up.

You can broadcast from OBS with Periscope Producer -
[https://help.periscope.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/260029...](https://help.periscope.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/2600293-what-
is-periscope-producer)

------
wildpeaks
I would gladly play to remove sponsored tweets and just display _all_ tweets
from the people I follow, _in chronological order_ (because even with the
preference turned off, I still see tweets being moved around in the timeline
x.x)

------
ctdonath
Ability to limit distribution. I'm dropping use of Twitter because I don't
want crossover between compartments in life; political rants shouldn't go to
business contacts, dark humor shouldn't go to religious contacts, etc.

------
budu3
Developers, developers, developers. I would open up the apps store and the API
-- embrace developers once again. The media companies trajectory that they're
currently on seems like that which Yahoo was on, and it did help Yahoo much.

------
arcticbull
1\. Lay off half the employees.

2\. Improve their ad product.

That's it really. It doesn't do anything now that it didn't in 2014, and the
workforce is significantly larger. It'd be a decent, profitable company.

Or, make it a non-profit. It's in the public interest.

~~~
riffic

      make it a non-profit. It's in the public interest.
    

No, a walled garden webapp is not a public utility.

~~~
arcticbull
Not because it's a walled-garden web-app, because of what's in it. Public
utilities aren't determined by their structure.

------
npezolano
Sell to Bloomberg:

1) Twitter is already used for financial news and real time financial trading
of events.

2) Bloomberg has a huge financial data and news business.

3)Bloomberg would then be the sole provider of twitter data and the revenue
from that alone could keep the product afloat.

------
Entangled
Put one ad at the top. Serve one billion a day.

You can't just turn a business around from your core competency, which in the
case of Twitter is short bursts of emotions. You can't turn it into a Medium
or Facebook, you'll fail miserably.

------
heygrady
Release a new text-based product that sits in the area between Medium,
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Shift focus away from likes and followers and
towards the content. Make a bold announcement about how it will combat fake
news.

------
GiorgioG
1\. Fire all the CXO level people. All of them.

2\. Fire all the rent-seekers.

3\. The 5 people that are left, keep the lights on.

4\. Profit!

------
quangv
Have people pay to read longer tweets (videos/photos) with portion of proceeds
goes to tweeter.

Twitter is the best way to connect directly with thought leaders. Perhaps
cater to them with tools to help them connect with their followers.

------
lngnmn
Sell it to Trump.

~~~
BillyParadise
Totally. Ban him or Sell it to him. Deescalation or scorched earth. Enough of
this pesky middle-ground.

------
grok2
Charge celebrities (anyone who has above a certain volume of users) to use
twitter.

Provide additional analytics as a paid service for marketing. Charge for add-
on services (like delayed/periodic publishing etc, running polls, etc).

------
austincheney
Allow private tweet capabilities and charge for it. This is really all you can
do. Twitter is largely a broadcast system and echo chamber, which perfectly
explains the type of people who gravitate to it most directly.

~~~
maxerickson
Accounts can be marked protected at which point tweets are only shown to
confirmed followers:

[https://support.twitter.com/articles/14016](https://support.twitter.com/articles/14016)

------
leroy_masochist
Get rid of Quote Tweet. Its primary current use case is to facilitate
pointless "gotcha" games. I'd say it contributes more to the current poisonous
atmosphere more than any other feature.

------
MichaelMoser123
I would add a feature that is similar to goole+ circles: allow the user to
view the tweets of a subset of sources. I think it makes sense for twitter:
one circle for each interest/ point of view.

~~~
40acres
Twitter sort of has this functionality via lists. During football season I
only look at my 'NFL List' which is comprised of football analysts, beat
writers, other media folk and 'regular' but smart football fans.

------
jraedisch
\- Remove all videos and images, or at least require an extra click to reveal
them.

\- Remove the possibility to follow people while blocking their submissions.

\- Provide an ad-free premium Subscription.

\- Keep and enforce the message length limit.

------
tekromancr
Paid API Access. Provide a way for businesses to build tools on top of
Twitter, while also removing the fears that Twitter will kill your business if
they decide to build a competing feature.

------
foxhedgehog
1\. design the service around topic lists, make it easy for users to create
lists of accounts and filter twitter's view by list. make curated lists
sharable and easily discoverable.

2\. delete nazis

~~~
foxhedgehog
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13003197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13003197)

------
ronreiter
Make Twitter both more social and more publisher oriented.

1) Twitter's ability to have a good experience around discussions around a
group of friends like Facebook is

2) Twitter can be a huge publishing platform

------
blazespin
Duplicate facebook (private feeds) and sell adds like facebook. Facebook is
just going to keep growing their pages and take over twitter anyways, so they
don't have a choice.

------
whalabi
Cut costs and lose the millions of bots! It's disheartening to be followed and
messaged by bots all the time. You feel like you're in a echo chamber for
crazy people.

------
m52go
Develop TweetDeck for all platforms & make it a paid product.

------
postscapes1
1) Let SMBs pay to get a social graph of particular users, fnd influencers,
etc

2) Merge with Medium and jump on their token content payment system

3) Acquire Nuzzle and team to make Moments not a pile of crap

------
babesh
For new users have them auto follow tweets nearby. This will be familiar to
them and from there they can learn to follow and unfollow. Make following a
lot more accessible.

------
known
Please check
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13751727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13751727)

------
fjordan
Pitch it to Amazon as a proper monitor for their AWS Cloud.

------
uladzislau
The twist - one of Twitter executives asking this on HN...

------
Bamberg
Limit restrictions on free speech as much as possible.

------
hkmurakami
I'd first take it private with PE money (a la Dell), cut workforce/costs, then
go from there. Fresh start without Wall Street pressure.

------
ededdeddie38
SEPARATE "celebrity and news sources" FROM "friends and family"

You need limitless thumb scrolling energy to find tweets from friends.

------
austinjp
Charge 1¢ per tweet.

The details are friable, eg maybe don't charge for private DMs, maybe only
charge per first comment per user per thread.

But charge for use.

------
jbpetersen
Merge it with Square to confuse the investors a while longer and/or take over
the social payments space in a one fell swoop.

------
wheaties
Go the Yammer route: they already have messaging down. Might as well make
"rooms" that you can tweet "in."

~~~
rtkwe
Hashtags are basically adhoc rooms to begin with. They kind of suffer from the
same discoverability problems that an IRC room like system does too, sorting
through the chaff to find and interesting tag/room requires largely knowing
what you're looking for when you start.

------
skdotdan
I would kill all the apps and the twitter.com front-end, and focus on the
back-end, making Twitter an open platform again.

------
EnderMB
I don't think Twitter is doing "that" badly. It's a popular social network
that loads of people rely on daily, and they are making some money, at least.

Either way, I'd make the following changes:

1\. Open up the ecosystem again, and take advantage of the recent trend
towards data science. Twitter have acquired a lot of startups relating to
Twitter analytics, and to be honest I'd push to keep them separate, but a part
of the company as a whole. Allow end-users to work with TV analytics, set up
news aggregators powered by Twitter analytics, and push them as separate
products on their platform. Twitter can separate themselves from the pack by
being the ecosystem of choice for developers, and while it won't necessarily
mean more money, it creates real value for their platform.

2\. Add a cost to verified profiles. Nowadays, even people that work for
magazines get a verified profile, because it's been pushed for by their sales
department that deal with these people, and it provides otherwise ordinary
people premium features. I'd create an "approved profile" flag to allow those
that simply want to prove that they are who they are (i.e. press people, and
moderately known people that may want to speak to everyone) and make verified
profiles a paid-for feature for celebrities that want to ensure that the
general population cannot contact them. Set this as a rolling cost per-month,
and I think Twitter would make a fair bit of money from those that want to use
its platform for commercial gain.

3\. Drastically cut their costs by cutting sales/marketing. These departments
are huge, and I think Twitter grew them out with the idea that they were going
to become a media company themselves. Rather than make redundancies, I'd offer
an opportunity for departments to separate from the main company and link up
with outside investment, with the promise of access to the parts of the
ecosystem they require.

4\. Make a bigger deal of live events (i.e. sport, live shows, etc), but do it
in a way that keeps them separate from the main product. This links to #3 in
that a sales department that purely handles sport contracts could spin off
into a separate service that utilises Twitter purely for sports events. Let
people extend their Twitter profile on a separate site to indicate their
sporting preferences, and allow Twitter to cater the experience for them. For
example, I'm a Bristol City fan, so I could sign up to Twitter Sports as a
Bristol City fan, and see highlights from the main Bristol City account, the
trending hashtags around Bristol City, watch live games, and see what other
Championship teams are up to. Essentially, it's making a more localised
platform around sports.

------
imlina
\- Slot in Ads that are 140 characters or less. \- Merge Medium and Twitter.
Everyone can be a news reporter/editor

------
Yhippa
Charge users a cent per tweet or some other amount.

I hate doing this but maybe they need to consider a "freemium" model where you
get basic tweets at a certain rate limit for free but to do things like post
long videos or images directly in the tweet you can pay to do that.

Consider charging for different types of searches a user can do.

Offer researchers and people using Tweets as a dataset for sentiment or other
analysis a fee for real-time and direct access to data.

------
nav
have the chan zuckerberg initiative buy it and turn it into a non-profit
utility for instant short form information

------
ttam
Product, product, product, product, product.

But with people with a track record of actually knowing and having done good
products.

------
keyle
I like twitter. My biggest gripe is hashtags got so spammed by bots that by
now they're pretty much useless.

------
michaelalexis
If there was a "boost" button for every tweet like on FB page posts, then we
would use it all the time.

------
arete24
Add real ways to block online harassment.

~~~
flukus
So a white list? Even that wouldn't be perfect.

------
orasis
Fix the bot problem. Beyond headline testing, I'll never advertise on Twitter
again due to bot clicks.

------
isanganak
Sell it to enterprises as a collaboration tool, charge based on number of
users, kinda like #slack.

~~~
scrame
Like yammer?

------
LeicaLatte
Launch a new but simpler product. Its the most difficult thing but very
rewarding when done right.

------
maytc
Make the twitter feed relevant my modeling the presentation and curation like
reddit topics.

------
Havoc
I wouldn't.

This is a fireball. It's shining bright no doubt, but it's a fireball all
right.

------
vezycash
Twitter's money issues can be solved by adsensing popluar / celebrity
accounts.

------
benaadams
Show what advertising offers/reach etc prior to asking for payment details.

------
EnjoyTomato
Remove the character limit and stop banning/censoring political opponents.

------
cja
Allow rich text attachments to Tweets. Instantly it's a blogging platform.

------
piedpiper_
I wouldn't, I'd build something better (disclaimer, working on it).

------
jkaljundi
Threads.

------
misterbowfinger
I'm surprised Twitter didn't become the newer, better Reddit.

------
riffic
I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

------
MrQuincle
Timing.

Get the info you want from the sources you like at the moment you desire.

------
gdulli
Get rid of the algorithmic timeline, while-you-were-away, etc.

------
Mendenhall
Be politically neutral.

------
petegrif
Introduce channels to reduce noise and focus content.

------
elorant
Commit seppuku.

Seriously, Twitter can't be saved. They fucked up when they alienated every
developer out there by making their API too damn strict. There's no way back
from this.

------
cja
Charge for large numbers of followers.

------
crispytx
I would like... try and turn a profit.

------
anizan
Remove duplicate tweets from search.

------
z3t4
they have the chicken. just lay some eggs. i would probably make a micro
payment system.

------
danm07
Get rid of all the fake users.

------
xxdesmus
I would add an edit button.

------
flewthecoop47
Quit.

------
perseusprime11
Sell Twitter to Microsoft

------
arnonejoe
free for consumer accounts. paid model for business accounts.

------
ChrisPodlaski
create a calendar app with native video... you're welcome

------
ZeroCool2u
Nice try Twitter execs.

------
sova
Content aggregation.

------
pklausler
"again?"

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killersmalls
Nice try, Twitter

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charlesbarbier
Go upper market.

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thadjo
acquire nuzzel

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anotheryou
go away from the chronological view

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rootedbox
asking for a friend

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Oxitendwe
Well, for one I would stop banning and restricting people for expressing their
opinions. Your phone company wouldn't disconnect your service for leaving
nasty messages on someone's mailbox, so Twitter shouldn't ban people for
writing nasty messages to people. It's not their responsibility and I think
society suffers from their judgement of what is allowed and what isn't - how
can you promote understanding and bring people closer together when one side
of the argument is being silenced and marginalized? People who break laws
should be dealt with by the legal system. People that do not shouldn't have to
worry about their ability to communicate with people being curtailed.

If you think this sort of thing doesn't happen, read this:
[http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-
her...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-here-folks) ,
or [http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157201503761/freedom-of-
speech-...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157201503761/freedom-of-speech-is-
now-largely-an-illusion) . He's had problems with this for months, because of
his political blogging, and this is just one example. If it can happen to the
guy who made Dilbert, it can happen to anyone.

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RodericDay
Twitter should offer a secure chat channel like Signal, and the ability to
publish some of the best phrases that come up as Tweets.

Too often I have to take screenshots of a Signal convo, format it for Twitter,
etc.

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jecjec
stop banning the best accounts.

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monochromatic
I'd stop using it to suppress political speech that I disagree with.

[http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-
her...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157826468646/nothing-to-see-here-folks)

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jackmott
ban nazis.

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branchless
I'd change the way we issue money. I'd issue it without interest allowing
companies to be free from the tiresome burden of continuous growth.

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thr0waway1239
Automatically modify Donald Trump's tweets to say nasty things about Facebook
and other social networks on a regular basis.

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daliwali
They can continue doing what they're doing already:

\- Suspending accounts for no reason at all.

\- Shadow banning users by hiding their replies (they refer to certain users
as "low quality").

\- Aggressive censorship of alternative opinions.

~~~
accountface
> Aggressive censorship of alternative opinions.

I feel like you're probably including instances of harassment here, which is
generally unfair.

~~~
daliwali
Nope, just petty politics.

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takeda
Twitter should never have succeed, it is a solution for a problem that never
existed. It used funding money to artificially manufacture the need for it, to
a point that news station started using it as a news source, which is IMO
ridiculous.

I think it should just die. I never had a Twitter account and never thought
that I'm missing something.

The only utility that twitter was providing was already solved by RSS feeds.

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xatan_dank
I wouldn't become the CEO of Twitter. If I were, I would resign. I think the
business model of these "free services but you pay with your data and
advertisements" is despicable. I would much rather spend my time creating and
popularizing FOSS protocols for communication if I am to work in this area.

I think Twitter has always been a completely ridiculous service and it's a
poster child for this misguided iteration of Internet companies. If we just
get enough users, we HAVE to make a profit! Turns out that isn't the case. The
only thing I've seen Twitter accomplish is poisoning our collective
consciousness with false information and a bad model of reality provided by an
unsustainable system.

