
Twitter is going to have a hard time fixing its ad problem - davidbarker
http://recode.net/2016/04/27/twitter-is-going-to-have-a-hard-time-fixing-its-ad-problem/
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timthelion
I started visiting twitter.com for the first time about 2 months ago, due to
the presidential primaries. I do not have an account. Every time I visit the
site, I just want to search for interesting things people are saying about
politics. I don't want to create an account. I don't want to visit some
recomended profile which comments on some sports team in which I have no
interest. But for some reason, there is no search box. So I always vist
www.twitter.com/r and then there is a search box at the top of the page.

Why are they so against new people poking around?

~~~
danudey
I created a second account last year, after having my primary account since
2007. The onboarding procedure, if you _do_ end up creating an account, is
absolutely horrible.

You have to choose a username, a password, pick a photo maybe. They then walk
you through half a dozen screens of 'follow one of these celebrity accounts',
with the UI designed in such a way as to feel like you're supposed to choose
one before you proceed to the next screen.

Once you get through their awful onboarding, which in my case I did by
skipping following anyone, the entire UI is geared towards pressuring you into
following new people over and over, without any real idea of who you were,
what you wanted out of Twitter, or what your account was for. There's always
some new box taking up 30% of one of the columns telling you you should go
follow a bunch of (initially) apparently random people.

They've also added the new 'While you were away' feature, which consistently
shows me tweets _which I have already replied to via twitter clients_. If I'm
active on Twitter every day but I don't visit the website for two weeks, it'll
show me two-week-old tweets (which, again, I've already replied to).

Twitter has been so consistent in terms of adding new features that no one I
know likes, and I've made dozens of sales of Tapbots' Tweetbot client solely
based on telling people that all the annoying new features Twitter keeps
adding are never in third-party clients, so they don't have to worry about
(e.g.) DMs suddenly being relegated to three taps away from the main screen
for a few months before being brought back.

I get the _strong_ impression that Twitter's management has a vision for how
they get paid, and they're trying to shoehorn their user behavior into this
vision rather than building something around how users actually use Twitter or
what features would actually be useful to them.

------
pamelabuck
It has an even bigger problem in that even remotely mediocre employees are
leaving. No one is sticking around. Morale is low.

~~~
danudey
Is this because they're all being forced to work on features which (at least
among tech and non-tech friends of mine) not only no one wants, but everyone
wishes would go away?

It must be hugely demoralizing to spend months working on a new feature and
then release it and have tons of people say 'why was this ever added? who is
this for? why would people want this and how can I get rid of it?', yet every
time they add new functionality this is what I hear from everyone I know, to
the point where _not_ supporting Twitter's latest features has become the
selling point I use for third-party Twitter clients.

Personally, I can't think of a feature since Lists that I actually use. I
would say 'posting videos in a tweet' but you seem to have to convert them to
a gif and then upload it and let them convert it back to a video so...

------
kelukelugames
My twitter stock is something like -60%. I'm not happy.

~~~
antisthenes
You should have a moment of silence for that money, since it's now gone
forever.

You bought stocks of a company that has never been profitable and whose stock
has plummeted in a bullish market. Even a layman will probably tell you to cut
your losses and invest into something else.

Or maybe keep hoping they'll get acquired by another company really soon,
which should prop the stock price up and hopefully mitigate most of your
losses.

------
eps
Twitter needs to allow advertising to your _existing following_.

There's lots and lots of Twitter users who follow hundreds of accounts and an
option to stand out in their aggregated feed would totally be worth $. But
what's extra cool about this is that users will also end up seeing tweets that
they actually want to see (or they would've not been following you in the
first place)!

------
visarga
Browsing on Twitter feels like browsing on the "new" section of YC. Lots of
unfiltered stuff. It would be great to select only for non-cheap (articles
containing more than 300 words) content that exactly falls on my interests (at
least use a naive bayes classifier or something to cut out the cat posts from
the serious posts).

