
Not Even Twitter Understands Twitter - huphtur
http://www.baekdal.com/opinion/not-even-twitter-understands-twitter/
======
rmason
Twitter's problem is that they don't even have the basic understanding of why
they're successful. In the past several years there hasn't been a single
change they've implemented that has improved things. The goal I guess has
always been to attract the non-user.

But when I really study things most of the stuff that people think as
fundamentally part of the service was instead added by the community and
initially rejected by those running Twitter like use of the pound sign.

In fact when you look at when Twitter really slowed its growth was when they
turned their back on that very community, especially developers. Anyone here
actually believe that their experience with Twitter wouldn't be far better if
there were still independent clients?

Twitter imho would be far better served to improve the service for those using
it than randomly try throwing stuff at the wall in an attempt to broaden its
appeal.

~~~
danielrakh
I think the real core value prop of Twitter is the niche communities people
can build around their interests. It's about the interest graph. I posted this
in another article on the front page today, but I'll do it here also. I think
they need to double down on growing communities within Twitter. It's just too
hard right now.

Here's my proposal:

Twitter Rooms: [https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-
rooms-e6f34e843e9a](https://medium.com/@danielrakh/twitter-rooms-e6f34e843e9a)

~~~
rmason
What Twitter is lacking more succinctly is a thought pg expressed when talking
about startups:

Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Twitter's strategy is to have lots of people to like it rather than to have a
smaller group love it.

------
deckard1
> Or what about hashtags. This is a brilliant concept invented by Chris
> Messina, which allowed people to group tweets from many different people
> into a single collection.

Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this
article.

Are bookmarks really not a thing anymore? Is such basic browser functionality,
such as back buttons and bookmarks passé today? I mean, I guess we all
collectively forgot IRC ever existed. Or Usenet. Or RSS. Why not forget
bookmarks exist as well. Oh right. None of that can be monetized.

The internet is fucking doomed. We've moved from the promise of open networks,
federated protocols, and decentralization to centralized services, advertising
everywhere, and tracking your every movement to sell to the highest bidder.
And people are _worried_ Twitter might die. Yeah, it's really so sad they
won't live another day to track you or sell you useless shit. Sob story of the
eyeball economy, right there folks.

~~~
tomjakubowski
> Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this
> article.

Huh? Hashtags are only superficially related to IRC channels. For one, you
don't need to be "joined" to a hashtag to see messages on it.

~~~
dingaling
Plus IRC channels existed in a bounded scope which kept them relevant to the
interests of their participants.

Twitter hashtags are global in scope which makes many of them useless due to
dilution.

I encountered a particular Twitter hashtag the other day: #fog

Imagine every global reference to fog being tagged thus. It's a mess.

------
sowbug

      When you favorite a tweet, you mostly do so for your
      own consumption. It is a way for you to tell yourself
      that this tweet is something you want to get back to,
      or remember for later use.
    

That sure ain't how I use it. Two reasons. (1) Favorites are public. (2) I
don't need to get back to a tweet or remember it for later use; they're short,
so I remember them in my brain.

I saw the article was much longer, but the author lost me at that point.

~~~
dsjoerg
Same here. Who is this Thomas Baekdal to tell me what I mean what I favorite a
tweet?! Maybe that's why he does it, but how does he know about me?

I favorite a tweet to tell the tweeter that I liked what they said. I know
they're gonna get an email saying I favorited their tweet.

I've totally forgotten that someone could use favoriting as a bookmarking
system; I'm too busy to go back and look at lists of bookmarked tweets.

~~~
to3m
This does seem to divide people. My own instant response to the favourite
system was that it was obviously a means of expressing approval, without
bombarding your followers' timelines with other people's stuff. "This tweet is
a favourite of mine" = "I like this tweet". Eventually somebody favourited one
of my tweets and I got an email telling me they'd done it, which just
reinforced this idea for me.

Then after about 4 years somebody pointed out that it actually stored your
favourites. And that meant you could use them as a kind of bookmark. Well!
Who'd have thought? (I don't use Internet Explorer, which is my excuse for not
spotting the favourite = bookmark connection.)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I disagree with the statement that people don't use it for chitchat. That is
_also_ something people use it for: I have a lot of friends on Twitter who
tweet whimsical things (and whom I tweet whimsical things to).

But this still makes Twitter very different from Facebook. On Twitter, I
follow people who tweet about interesting things or who share some common
interest with me. Facebook, on the other hand, is something I use to talk to
the people I met at high school and Uni. Thus Twitter is always a fun place to
go to, filled with content that will appeal to me. Facebook, on the other
hand, is mostly lowest-common-denominator plagiarised content and life updates
I probably don't care much about.

Facebook is a place that represents some of your existing relationships.
Twitter is a place where you make new ones.

------
utnick
Twitter moments could be so awesome, I have a feeling they will get it right,
but its not quite there yet.

Especially for sports, when I'm watching a game I usually have twitter open to
see people's jokes & analysis. Sometimes, I look at the moment the day after
just cause I'm curious, but the moment doesn't reflect my game experience at
all.

Here is the twitter moment for the 1st day of the NBA season.
[https://twitter.com/i/moments/659130295396896768](https://twitter.com/i/moments/659130295396896768)
\-- its mostly just pictures from official nba and team accounts. There are no
jokes, and there is very little analysis. It has some random highlights from
games. But the biggest highlight of the night ( game winning block on Lebron )
is missing for some reason.

Same with this moment on the most recent GOP debate:
[https://twitter.com/i/moments/659492422137827328?lang=en](https://twitter.com/i/moments/659492422137827328?lang=en)
There are no jokes at all. There had to have been at least 1 donald trump joke
out there that should have been included.

I think they are working on curation tools so anyone can curate moments, and I
think that will really help if enough interesting people take the time to do
it. But I really think it could be the newspaper or the 'reddit' of a lot of
topics.

------
abritishguy
They changed it because people were using them as likes rather than
favourites.

I originally used them as "favourites" (for links that I was interested in but
didn't have time to read now) but others didn't. Twitter catered for the
majority and made the list of your favourites harder to get at and started
putting things you favourite into other people's timelines.

Whilst I preferred how it was originally it is clear to me that this change
was motivated by how the community at large used the feature.

------
npizzolato
I should include a disclaimer to this comment that despite attempting to use
Twitter multiple times, I still cannot find a use for it, so I would not
consider myself a "Twitter user". That said, the criticism of the favorite ->
like change makes no sense to me.

> Favorite (old) = neutral statement related to the importance of the tweet
> for you. It's mostly a bookmark, not really an endorsement.

> Favoriting a tweet didn't mean it was her favorite (as Twitter apparently
> believes)

Oh yeah? If that's true, that's a _terrible_ UX. Any time you have to say "xxx
doesn't actually _mean_ xxx", you should stop and think extra hard about what
you're saying. "Favoriting" a tweet should mean exactly what it says it means.

And considering how favoriting a tweet notifies the recipient, and a person's
favorites are public, I don't buy that favoriting a tweet was a neutral
reaction to a tweet. If I got a notification that said Bob favorited tweet
yyy, I would take that to mean endorsement.

Just because some users are using it as a bookmarking service doesn't mean
that's what most people use it as or what Twitter intends it to be used as.

------
volaski
Ironically, Not even this guy understands how people (other than marketers
like himself) use Twitter. It's rare to see anyone favoriting a tweet to
"reference" it later. Most people use favorite as a token of acknowledgement
(I saw this and approve). Favorites are not endorsements either, since it
doesn't get broadcasted to my followers.

~~~
cableshaft
I do what he does. I see something interesting about design or development
posted by someone else, I'll favorite it so I can find it easier later, not to
endorse it (although usually I would endorse that it's worth checking out).

That being said, I've used 'like's' in that way too, so I don't particularly
care about this change.

------
hotgoldminer
Twitter succeeds because it takes a feature everyone already likes - chatroom
- and breaks down the walls. Hash tags serve to group users into "rooms",
following groups users, favorites (<3) invite users into your conversation.
The brilliance is in making it universal so everyone clicks Twitter's Ruby.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
A realisation I just had: Twitter and Tumblr are similar in many respects.
Both are microblogging (though the former more micro) services, both are
interest-based networks, both work fairly similarly (retweets/posts,
hashtags/tags, etc.). The demographics are different (Twitter's is broader
than Tumblr's, which is largely just young people), but they're not
fundamentally different services.

Yet their corporate masters differ. Tumblr, the company, totally _gets_
Tumblr, the community. They understand why the site is popular, what people
want. Twitter, though, believes it is Facebook.

------
nosuchthing
Twitter is only interesting because it happens to be the current iteration of
instant messenger / community chatroom. Kik, AOL IM, ICQ, IRC.. there's no
particular innovation from Twitter keeping users there. It just happened to be
in the right place at the right time, and right now it seems as though
anything with a half decent design UI and interesting set of features could
sprout up to draw migration from twitters core/casual userbase.

------
hk__2
Not having people use your product the way you expected it is not a problem.
_This_ is in fact the greatest lesson from Twitter history: you don’t make
your product; your users will.

The problem here is that Twitter is slow to respond to these usage patterns;
we don’t really know if they realize how people use their product and they
seem to try random things to satisfy investors and/or users.

------
4684499
Some people consider the fav button as a marker, the expression of feeling is
not necessarily what they want. I understand this UX change might bring more
users because it made others subconsciously feel being endorsed, but
personally I don't like it, it's like twitter claims that I have something
which I don't.

------
Karunamon
Are people still complaining about the icon change that has no functional
differences whatsoever? Star, heart, whatever, it saves the tweet in a list
for later access.

~~~
lotyrin
There is a pretty big semantic difference, that the OP explains very
thoroughly. Could you explain how you disagree?

~~~
Karunamon
I'm not clear on what the semantic difference is between favoriting and
liking. Publicly doing either carries a connotation of approval, and the
function is unchanged.

Is anyone _really, actually, demonstrably_ confused by this change?

~~~
Nadya
Facebook added options to their "Like" button because "Liking" a post about
your best friends' husband dying isn't something many people felt comfortable
with doing even with understanding what "liking" something does.

I've favorited nothing since the heart change. Because many of the things I
favorite are not things I "love" \- which is what the heart implies.

 _> Is anyone really, actually, demonstrably confused by this change?_

I'm confused why they felt the need to change it _at all_. So you can lump me
in with people being actually, demonstrably confused.

~~~
Karunamon
_I 've favorited nothing since the heart change._

Why? You know what the function does, and the way you worded your comment
implies that there are still things you want to like/favorite, so why not?

~~~
lukaslalinsky
Imagine the icon would change to a skull, or some kind of symbolic cross,
without changing the functionality at all. Do you think people would use it as
before? The heart icon implies a certain emotion, and many people feel that
emotion to be stronger than what they feel towards the tweet.

------
__jal
This just reinforces my belief (and I'm a broken record on this) that Twitter
would have been far better as a protocol than as a company.

------
spectrum1234
Best article I've read in awhile. How many points will there stock fall
Monday?

------
ikeboy
I'm confused. The article apparently thinks that it's fine to favorite
something you don't actually think is your favorite, contra twitter. But then
why not heart something you don't actually like? The logic doesn't seem to
work out.

~~~
untog
When you add your online banking site to your browser _favourites_ is it
really because it's your favorite site on the internet?

~~~
npizzolato
When I favorite my banking website, a notification isn't sent to the website
telling them I favorited them, nor are my browser favorites public for anyone
to see. The semantics, and thus the meaning, are totally different.

Chrome doesn't even use the term favorites. It uses the (more accurate, imo)
term bookmarks.

------
thedesihobbit
Can I heart this?

This post is spot on.

~~~
cryptoz
You can't 'heart' this but you can 'upvote' it. Which I think it quite an
interesting thing; we have 'likes', 'favourites', 'upvotes' and more, across
different sites and they serve different purposes. But often, users conflate
them and use them incorrectly. A good example of this would be the 'upvote'
and 'downvote' on reddit and HN. Many users will use these buttons to express
agreement or disagreement, even though that is explicitly wrong as defined by
the owners of the site.

It's a journey, I think, that developers and users are taking right now. We're
both searching for the right language to express ourselves, a language that we
can use to our advantage. Are we converging on a common language between
startup owners and users? No I don't think we are - but perhaps we should be.

~~~
npizzolato
> Many users will use these buttons to express agreement or disagreement, even
> though that is explicitly wrong as defined by the owners of the site.

Interestingly enough, downvoting to express disagreement is not against the
hacker news guidelines[1].

A few subreddits I visit pop up a message right next to the comment when you
downvote it, saying you should only do so when it does not contribute to the
discussion. I think that's a pretty good solution for educating users about
the intended purpose of downvoting. I also think HN's idea of only letting
older users downvote is a healthy idea.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
DHJSH
From the article:

"Last year it had a revenue of $1.4 billion, but it's [sic] operational costs
was [sic] $1.9 billion"

How on earth could it cost 1.9 Billion to run "Twitter"? 50 WhatsApp engineers
and 100 Elixer servers could handle everything. That's just insane. They need
to cut costs NOW.

