
My $4.5B Gift to Twitter - danso
https://medium.com/@darrenrovell/my-3-5-billion-gift-to-twitter-f6982b735fe6
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partycoder
clickbait.

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swang
Darren Rovell can't shill for brands if twitter doesn't exist!

Rather than retweet people, he does a lot of "steal pic, 'credit via /cc'"
essentially stealing a ton of exposure for other smaller twitter users. How
many people click on an @ to see who recorded a video clip rather than just
click the RT button.

Says there can't be racism in sponsorships (in reference to Serena Williams
not getting sponsorship) because there are black athletes that get big $
deals, therefore no racism can exist!

Says college players don't deserve to get paid, no one even knows who they
are! (Except you know people from that school, rival, and obviously excluding
the superstar college players who are probably losing the most)

Tweets constantly about the food he eats at sports events which would be fine
if he hadn't written some stupid article 5 years ago chiding "foodies that
tweet 10 sports tweets"

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galistoca
Just to let you know, there are some people who actually _hate_ retweets. I
would prefer that someone I follow would tweet only in their own voice even if
they're resharing what someone else shared. As you said, he signs his retweets
with "credit via". I mean what more do you want him to do? In my experience
the most annoying thing on Twitter is just because I'm following Marc
Andreesen I have to consume all the random tweets he retweets from his
friends/colleagues/interns/acquaintances/some random guy he met online.

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swang
uhm, you can retweet someone while also writing your own comment thus giving
your own take and giving people their credit's due!

literally that is what i want him to do. that is what "more" he can do.
literally give people credit for what they tweet about.

also you are probably the only person who "hates" retweets. i don't even get
what that means.

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galistoca
You're taking this tweeting thing too seriously. It's not like someone wrote a
nobel prize winning discovery on Twitter and someone else stole it to publish
on Nature and took the credit. That aside, based on all the downvotes I
received I guess I'll get downvoted again for this but just gotta say this. I
didn't say you were wrong. I said there are other people who feel this way and
was just sharing another point of view. And you are the one who's refusing to
accept there can be other perspectives.

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argonaut
I'll just save you the trouble of reading this:

The author ran a Twitter poll asking people how much they would pay for
Twitter. 64% said "nothing." The author believes people have a tendency to
vote "more negatively" to make a statement, and a lot more people would
actually pay than are represented in the poll. Laughable.

If anything, people _love_ to say they're willing to pay (it's just a click).
But when the time comes to _actually_ pay money... they're nowhere to be
found.

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cyphar
Ignoring the fact that he's choosing to fund a proprietary platform, he should
make it clear that all his poll showed was that "36 percent of people [who
follow him and responded to his poll]" are happy to pay.

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danso
> _For $1 a month & $12 a year, you get to prioritize your Twitter feed. You
> can have one timeline in chronological order and another one in order of
> your priorities, by topic and by follow. You also get a mobile version of
> Tweetdeck, which doesn’t currently exist, but is an essential for a power
> user._

So...I might have missed it, but has there ever been a good explanation for
why Twitter has so bewilderingly neglected Lists? I recently saw on Facebook a
little balloon pop up to tell me that if I wanted to, I could make friends
lists, and here was the menu to go to do so... _Facebook_ , a site that has
pretty much mastered the ability to prioritize your friends (not just Close
Friends, but favorite friends in a given locale), still thinks users might
like curating their own lists.

But Twitter...The only way I see to even _accessing_ my lists is to go to my
profile, where there are 4 buttons at the top: the settings-gears, a button
that takes me to Twitter Ads, another button that let's me switch accounts as
if more than one person were using my iPhone, and then "Edit Profile". The
lists are currently buried in the Settings button, and even then I have to
stumble around to find the lists that I've carefully curated.

The biggest complaint I hear from new users is that it's hard to cut through
all the noise. So they limit who they follow...because in every other social
network, there's a distinct FOMO when your newsfeed is being crowded out.
Being able to easily generate lists and switch between them would've
encouraged them to follow more people and thus broaden the network. The most
common advice given among journalists about Twitter is to join Tweetdeck,
because of how powerfully it lets you monitor a variety of subjects.

Making lists usable -- and hell, sharable, like Spotify has made playlists --
is not a technical or a product challenge in the way that Moments or an
algorithmic timeline is. I'm not saying it's trivial to fit List-
making/following functionality into the interface but it doesn't even seem
like Twitter gave a shit.

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argonaut
I don't have any inside data, but I'm suspect Facebook's usage numbers for
lists are quite low. Anecdotally, I'm the only person out of all my friends
that uses friend lists for anything (mostly to tailor privacy settings). Most
people are unaware they exist.

Secondly, Facebook auto-populates lists based on clusters of friends (e.g. a
bunch of friends are in your current city, so Facebook might create an
automatic list for that). Twitter can't do this bootstrapping, for obvious
reasons (and if they tried I wouldn't be surprised if the clustering was poor
quality).

Also, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how many ways to slice and dice
your friends there are. Nothing will change the fact that Twitter is crap if
1) nobody knows who you are (you're just tweeting to an empty room), and 2)
you haven't spent the time to follow the right people.

One will note that Facebook puts everything into one algorithmic news feed.

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brian-armstrong
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4395665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4395665)

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xiaoma
I think the poster underestimates the costs involved in creating some of those
product features, but it's not a bad idea and it's kind of shocking Twitter
hasn't released a pro version over the years.

It's a shame top management spent so much energy fighting each other instead.

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riffic
Donate your money to the Gnu Social project instead.

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jkot
celebrities already pay for twitter

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jen729w
Ben Thompson to the white courtesy phone. Ben Thompson.

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bringatzaboy
$3.5

