
Fixing Twitter - rkudeshi
http://dcurt.is/twitter
======
geofft
> Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the
> ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to
> interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses.

This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for "@justinbieber"
(click on "live") or look at any of his tweets, and you'll see innumerable
16-year-old fangirls who have found some incentive to tweet at him. There's
also the subphenomenon of these 16-year-old fangirls getting incredibly
excited when those tweets _do_ get seen and interacted with, which indicates,
one, that they don't go into the ether, and two, people have a genuine hope of
interaction.

I've seen this in practice, because I do actually follow certain parts of
popular culture and music and trashy television (not Bieber, as it happens,
but enough others) and occasionally look at what they're up to on Twitter. It
happens without fail for _every_ celebrity.

So I wonder if the author is actually reporting on how actual people actually
use Twitter, or extrapolating from the eyes of a non-16-year-old non-fangirl
who cares about things like reply threading.

~~~
ioddly
I've seen the same thing; it also seems like it's not so much an issue of the
platform as celebrities understandably don't have the time or inclination to
interact with strangers on a regular basis.

~~~
goldfeld
Just wait till Kanye West or Taylor Swift come out with a smart reply-bot
based on their online presence and it's gonna be all the rage.

~~~
patio11
The smarter play may be genuine Kanye doing 100 tweets at a time to 85 people
who are identified as Kanye's Most Lucrative Fans In The Town He Is Currently
In and 15 folks randomly selected (whose inclusion is for social purposes).

I'm peripherally aware of someone who is one or two orders of magnitude
smaller than Kayne presently doing this. I believe the vernacular is "killing
it."

(Think of the economics for a touring band which can sell out a 100 seat
theatre. The approximate lifestyle is "They plow 80% of their meagre revenues
into the costs of producing music, make McDonalds wages, and live in a van."
Now, give that band the ability to tweet for two hours, glad hand some fans,
and make $10k with no venue cut and no label cut. The specific example I heard
was "DM fan123: Hey Dave. Enjoyed seeing you at the last 5 concerts. Got a VIP
event coming up Thursday: 12 people, live in studio with us, light drinks to
follow. Thought you'd want to know. Tix & details: linkylink. Hope to see you
there.")

P.S. Before anyone on says "Wait, Patrick, the economics do not make 2 hours
of Kayne's time affordable on the budget of upper middle class Americans
unless he is sharded between so many people to not even have the pretense of
interacting with all of them" think less "movie tickets" as a comparable and
more "season tickets to an NFL team" or "a set of golf clubs" or "a cruise
around Europe" or any of the host of big-ticket items which upper middle class
Americans _actually do purchase frequently when given the chance_.

~~~
blazespin
Yes, I'm sure twitter could highlight the followers with the most followed and
then Kanye could reply to them. He could also get a highlight of those most
engaged in twitter (though they might not have a lot of followers) and tweet
to them as well.

And, while it's at it, twitter could provide some kind of AI analysis of his
followers to find the ones who are the most positive and have said the most
positive things about Kanye.

Hell, they could even advertise they're doing that. Imagine being a rabid fan
and learning that if you say lots of nice things about Kanye all over twitter
that it'll bring you to his attention and he'll start personally replying to
your tweets! Oh the algorithmic cult of personality...

~~~
dawson
We were verified on Twitter last week, and one of the useful additions is a
verified notifications tab, which similarly, allows us to quickly see
'important' accounts interacting with us amongst all the 'noise'.

------
electic
There might be no fixing Twitter. The reason Twitter grew imho is because of
the rich ecosystem of developers they had. Those developers, time and time
again, found new ways to use Twitter and did the development, marketing, and
educating of the public. The result was rich engagement and growth.

Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many
apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go and tell the developer community
to come back? How do you trust Twitter? The answer is you don't.

~~~
kzhahou
I can believe that the growth was significantly helped by third-party clients,
but I wouldn't believe that the more creative twitter integrations had a major
effect. That would be a dev/techy-centric view of the world, similar to those
that truly believe that the real-name policy was a mainstream issue that
killed G+.

~~~
insom
When I started on twitter, it had no hashtags, replies were public (because
they weren't initially part of the protocol), no t.co, no embedded photo
sharing, no geotagging. All of these features were added, and made popular, in
third party clients before being added to Twitter. It was like a giant lab
where the features could be tried by smaller groups who shared certain clients
or norms and the popular ones wrapped into the "official" API eventually.

------
OoTheNigerian
"Nothing great is Built On Twitter"

That quote sums it all up.

Most of Dustin's suggested extensions are things other people should have
built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton's App.Net plan where
Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless
applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on
ensuring the backbone stays in place.

Funny enough, that is how twitter originated. Others built their clients and
they focused on the core. They lost that direction and wanted to "own it all"
like Facebook. But they took that direction rather too early.

Take Tweetstorming as an example which is a niche need. My team built a
tweetstorming app [http://writerack.com](http://writerack.com). It pulls and
pushes all it's content from and to Twitter. In an ideal case, Twitter should
support it and similar ones rather than making Twitter.com more convoluted
with the aim of doing everything themselves.

If Twitter had supported third patrty developers, someone/people would have
built a killer app for using twitter to follow and interact live events. That
would have brought another set of people into the platform and that extends to
other use cases too.

Hopefully, Twitter gets it right because I have come to really find Twitter
useful.

~~~
wpietri
I think there are two pretty good reasons that Twitter moved away from being
an open platform, and they are: 1) ensuring a good user experience, and 2)
making money.

The tweetstorming thing, for example, conveniences particular writers at the
expense of all the other writers (and quite a number of readers). I hate it,
and will unfollow anybody who does it regularly. It's the tragedy of the
commons for an attention economy. Twitter's demand that people be concise is a
large part of its value to readers. The more they control the UI, the easier
it is to nudge people in particular directions that shape good user
experiences.

But that's a small thing next to making money. To experiment with various ad
products, they need extremely fine grained control of and reporting on user
experience, and they need to be able to rapidly change that as they come up
with new ideas. That's hard enough even when they control everything; getting
a zillion developers to do that is impossible.

Focusing on the core was great, but nobody was paying them for the core.
They're spending ~$1.5 billion/year. Anybody who says, "Twitter should do X"
without explaining how their plan will help pay the bills is not going to get
a lot of consideration at Twitter HQ.

~~~
OoTheNigerian
Re: I get where you are coming from. However, people use services differently.
Twitter has failed in determining how services should be used.

Re: Annoying Tweetstorming.

People should be able to mute content from certain apps. Just like you can
silence your Candy Crushers.

Re: Making Money.

On a sarcastic note, "I'll think of a way if I am paid 6 figures a year" :).
But seriously, we are making content more valuable by adding more people to
its service. Twitter can retain the rights to serve ads on those third party
services while sharing some of the ad revenue.

------
egypturnash
> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations
> broadcast text. That’s it.

It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple
of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is
a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC
channel where _I_ get to decide who's there. And it works great for that.

> Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on
> realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or
> when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner
> at the top that says “follow this breaking event.”

Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it.
Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they
saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions
going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame
speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to
preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing
about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills.
I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they've trusted me
with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked
selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality
from various art project bots I follow. I don't need a "huge fucking banner"
telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking
about it.

When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their
@name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will
reply and help fix it.

Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn't going to get a reply. Duh? Would
they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own
account? There's a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by
their social media specialists, and they're boring as fuck because they're not
really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media
Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters.

Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who
use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on
Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he's not
using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.

~~~
JasonSage
Thank you a bunch for saying this, I feel the same way. I cultivate a list of
accounts I follow strictly because their posts tend to be relevant or
interesting.

If you have a stream of garbage on Twitter, don't follow people who post
garbage.

I follow people primarily in tech and programming. Most of them use Twitter to
talk about things they work on, issues they have, things that are interesting.
Occasionally they share something funny, but I rarely see something
distasteful or annoying. Sometimes I follow somebody and after a few days I
feel like I'm not getting any benefit from what they are posting--it will be
annoying or I will realize that they are trying to reach an audience with a
different set of values--and I unfollow them. That's OK, they are not meeting
my expectations.

The argument for Twitter being broken because signal/noise ratio is like
saying email is broken because your inbox is full of newsletters for sites you
don't like. The problem isn't with email, it is with how you are using it.
Unsubscribe, clean it out, make a new address...

~~~
robk
But that's the exact problem for many average users. They were shunted into a
default track of follwing 10s of "garbage" posters. My mom's Gmail inbox is
exactly this problem - she has dozens of daily useless newsletters she was
default opted into and can't be bothered to unsubscribe (or doesn't find it
easy), so they just pile up and make email pretty useless. So yes, it's their
fault, but the product needs to correct for this behavior.

------
atmosx
My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I
get more and more bot 'followers' and more ads in my timeline. The signal /
noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.

~~~
aethos
Another thing on the "desert island" effect is that, from the perspective of a
artistist or creator, it seems oddly difficult to get discovered on Twitter.
Maybe it's something about the interface or recommendation system?

~~~
adnzzzzZ
Twitter itself does not encourage creators who want to share content that
much. I don't know if this is a problem with media integration (as mentioned
in the article) or with the types of people who use Twitter, but as a creator
of anything artistic it's not that nice of a platform. I've found tumblr to be
much better, both in terms of community (lots of artists, game developers,
musicians, etc hang out there) and in how the system itself works. People are
much more liberal with notes and reblogs, which means it's easier to gain a
following and it's also easier to get some data on how much something you
created resonates with people.

------
perlgeek
I think it's time to rethink the 140 charcter limit.

When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image
(so not searchable), which is considerably more effort.

Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default
(along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show
the rest on demand?

~~~
jerrac
It's impossible to have meaningful conversations with that kind of limit. You
end up having to use "1/N" over and over again. That limit has always left me
wondering how Twitter even got started...

~~~
logicallee
most incredible news you've had in your life can be shared in 140 characters.

most of the worst, most useless content you've ever written to anyone would be
several paragraphs.

that's why it worked.

~~~
scrollaway
What you're saying is inherently incorrect. "Usefulness" of content is always
going to be more limited by 140 characters than it would otherwise be.

It worked, not because people want to "share" less, but because they want to
_read_ less. Same reason a lot of people browsing Reddit for example only
browse it by glimpsing the headlines. The more news there is, the less people
are interested in the details of the news - they want to let their brains fill
in the details.

Say, for example (and please don't read too much into the example), you read
an article that says "Police shoots an innocent civilian". Then a few days
later, you read another article very similar to it. Then another. At some
point you stop reading the article and you just glimpse the headline - filling
in the details yourself, even if they are wrong. You do this for every article
you come across, and you enter a cycle where everything you read ends up
fitting your own learned narrative. Your brain autocompletes the content of
every article... and if there is no match, you can just ignore it.

This sort of behaviour is something you see a _lot_ of on Reddit. People are
attracted to short snippets of information they can autocomplete. Most don't
want to spend a lot of time on something they might be reading on the toilet,
or on the subway. It's the same reason mobile toilet games are racking in
millions, while the PC gaming market is taking a major hit.

------
josai
Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese "copy" of twitter
(hint: it's not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that's
ahead of twitter in many respects.

Just off the top of my head, weibo has:

\- the "event" grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping
system ("micro topics")

\- rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are
very popular)

\- payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This
is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to
make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw

\- properly threaded conversations, easy to follow

\- a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to
connect companies to the system

I'm aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at
what they're doing seems like a pretty good starting point.

------
digisth
As I've written in past comments
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396)),
and as this post suggests, rebuilding developer relations and improving
integrations would go a long way. There's a lot of potential locked in the
platform right now; they should work on letting developers get access to it
more easily and strive to remove the cloud of uncertainty that has built up
around it (i.e., will they shut me down if I do something too popular that
colors outside the current lines?) It would benefit everyone, especially
Twitter.

~~~
wpietri
Do you think that's even possible? They really burned a lot of bridges with
the way they treated developers in the past. Trying to build a business on top
of somebody else's social networking platform has been a spectacularly bad bet
the last 5 years or so. I sure wouldn't be first into that pool.

~~~
digisth
I hope it is. At the very least, they should be trying. It certainly won't be
an overnight process, but with time and enough developer-friendly decisions /
public guarantees, it could happen. They should start yesterday, though.

------
manigandham
Twitter doesnt seem like it's capitalized on what it's good at, or anything
really.

For personal: Facebook has network effect, complex relationships, share
anything and everything, privacy, groups, etcs. Younger generations more
focused on sharing are using Instagram, Snapchat, and all the messaging apps.

For work: LinkedIn gives value in seeing work histories, connections,
companies, etc (although still a bad product but without competition)

For news: The mainstream just use news sites, search and Facebook or get
alerts from all the other apps/networks/reddit and there's RSS which is way
nicer for following blogs and niche news.

What Twitter has been good at is allowing people to have a easy public voice
(although nobody might see it but its there) without being tied to a personal
identity and giving the chance to talk to people you might never be able to
reach otherwise. You can tweet at politicians, celebrities, top executives,
companies and can reasonably expect a reply or exposure. That's really
powerful and a great equalizer. It's also good for real-time obviously,
working like a constant stream of consciousness of the collective you follow.

However like the article says, thats it. There's no movement on the product
itself. Terrible UI with broken conversations, broken sharing, broken lists,
no new features like deduping tweets, non-chronological ordering, better
developer APIs, and the ads product isn't great either.

It's kind of sad that the network that originally began as messaging based
around sms/phones has been completely overtaken by all other messaging and
sharing apps while still keeping completely unnecessary limitations like 140
chars. There's just no focus here...

------
randomsearch
I think the disaster that is Twitter is a product of its culture. If you read
the history of the business, it started with a group of people who really
arrived in the business quite randomly. There wasn't much thought given to
building a balanced team or a strong culture. Effectively, twitter was an
accident that came out of another business.

Most worryingly, the founders couldn't agree on what the purpose of Twitter
was, and illuminatingly people in this discussion _still_ don't have a clear
idea of its purpose. Is it a news broadcast system, to follow current events?
Or is it about sharing your personal life with your friends?

From a technical point of view, I find Twitter very confusing. I read that
they were at over a million users before having any kind of backup strategy.
They rewrote their systems from Java to Scala, but then seemed to regret that
decision, their decisions on shutting down API access to third parties have
been really nasty... this kinda thing makes me worry that they don't have
clear leadership.

And then there's the politics of infighting, and some of their executives
being "overthrown" over time... I can't see how you can create a good culture
when people at the top are behaving like that. It's hardly rocket science -
just focus on the product and your users.

I think creating a culture from the beginning is a lot easier than changing an
engrained culture, so my view is that Twitter is screwed. Failing a Jobsian
turnaround, the best they can do is sell and sell fast. I can seriously see
Twitter losing out to a startup. Any thoughts on whether they will survive?

~~~
niccaluim
The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala, though far more importantly, it was a _re-
architecting_. And there are zero regrets. Without it, Twitter wouldn't exist
anymore.

~~~
randomsearch
>The rewrite was from Ruby to Scala

Sorry, you're exactly correct. It was Ruby -> Scala and Java.

To be precise, according to Tony Pritezis from Twitter, Scala is the main
language, Java is next, Ruby was still in use in 2014 but migrating away,
C/C++ and Python for some specific tasks. He did also talk about some of the
problems of using Scala, and I seem to recall someone saying that Scala may be
less favoured at Twitter in the future.

------
benjaminwootton
What amazes me is how slowly it seems to move on for users.

There's a ton you could do to improve search, UIs on top of the feed,
analytics, communities, twitter lists, conversations, media embedding and
interactions.

On top of that social graph they had the potential to build a better, more
real time, more community led Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube.

And yet it doesn't seem to move forward as a product.

------
slyall
The image cropping is something that annoys me. Someone will often post a
photo in the their timeline that is pointless when it is cropped. eg a Meme
with the captions missing.

------
hackaflocka
Great points all. Especially #5.

One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken.
Sometimes when I'm trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by
someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on
Twitter.

Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from
people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.

~~~
geofft
I suspect that the number of people who use Twitter search for that is
exceedingly low and non-monetizable compared to their target market.

Twitter has been working on excellent support (where "excellent" is defined as
"good for Twitter") for embedding tweets inside news articles and the like.
This means that if a celebrity (not a startup celebrity, a celebrity) tweets
something important, it'll get picked up by BuzzFeed or something, and then
you can use Google, the search engine people actually use, to find it. If it's
not important, it doesn't need to be found; that's not what the platform is
about.

~~~
hackaflocka
Topsy has a simple "from" flag to restrict search results to a certain user.
It only works sometimes when used directly in the Twitter search box.

------
steckerbrett
> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations
> broadcast text.

That's not unexpected given their signup flow, it's pages and pages you have
to click through where it automatically follows hundreds of celebrities unless
you uncheck the boxes.

------
probdist
Well twitter has just recently restructured the product team so maybe big
things are in-store: [http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-
product-te...](http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-team-
promotes-jeff-seibert/)

------
ghshephard
Parts of this are a little off, at least in how I use twitter.

"There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on
Twitter, because no one will see the responses."

Maybe true for the 1mm+ follower people, but ironically, this is 90+% of how I
actually use Twitter. I tweet at a mid-high volume (100k->500k) individual,
and occasionally get a response, more often get a fave, and ever so often get
a retweet.

For < 50k follower people, I almost always get a response if what I sent was
thoughtful.

Also, I love looking at the responses to tweets - and often respond to _those_
responses, and get a thread going with the responder - often dropping out the
original person who tweeted altogether.

I'm not saying all is well in twitter world - but I quite enjoy (perhaps too
much) the back and forth/threading/responding that twitter offers. I really,
really don't need any more.

------
minimaxir
My main issue with Twitter now is the recent (undocumented) change to the
mobile apps for "suggested tweets." (example:
[http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png](http://i.imgur.com/AfsmQgW.png) )

As mentioned by the commentators, Twitter has a discovery issue. Twitter's
solution is to put "suggested tweets" below the normal replies, but without
any clear discernible division. (just "Suggested by Twitter" in light gray
color). Way too many times I accidentally read suggested tweets instead of
normal replies while instinctively scrolling to the bottom and I get very
confused.

------
Corrado
I really, really want to like Twitter, but I just can't. Most of the content
in my stream is crap, as I (apparently) don't know the "correct" people to
follow. Finding the "correct" people to follow is difficult, and even then
they sometimes spew multiple boatloads of crap. :/ I wish there was a way to
filter some of it out and only keep the good stuff.

Conversations are almost impossible to follow. Once you locate a good tweet,
its a confusing process to find all the related tweets. Sometimes, they are
below the tweet (which is confusing as I don't read from the bottom up most of
the time) and sometimes they are buried inside the tweet. Grrrr!!!

Finally, putting non-text media in a tweet is turning out to be horrible. At
least when tweets used to be ASCII, I could reasonably read through them. Now,
I have pages and pages of little silent movies that start playing when they
come into focus. How annoying is that!?

I really like the "World News Headline" feature that Dustin proposes and would
probably use Twitter more if it has something like that. However, given that
Twitter is transforming itself into a Vine/Instagram clone I probably won't be
hitting the tweet box much in the future. :(

------
sushrutbidwai
Bigger issue is no developer trusts twitter any more. Just like LinkedIn.
twitter has been unkind to the developers which helped it make popular.
Remember things like lists, hashtags, media embed are all brought to twitter
before twitter did so itself. But developers of these innovations were treated
badly. And hence no developer wants to develop for twitter platform any more.

------
HappyTypist
Very interesting point regarding the illusion of interaction that Instagram
provides. I do find Twitter's displaying of replies and retweets (to the first
100) questionable.

As for how Twitter can improve in that aspect, how about a horizontally-
scrolling feed of users who retweet, and a less-annoying version of such for
comments? They seem like relatively easy design choices.

------
jeo1234
Twitter need to focus more on developers. The underlying concept behind the
site is really solid. Allowing people to build cool things which adds value
and brings in new users is good for everyone. So make it easy for them! Their
API is not great, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they don't
release official libraries for the major languages?

------
T2_t2
Twitter's problem is simpler: it is great for power users, shite for everyone
else.

Twitter needs to curate the content I see better - especially for newer users.
Twitter is boring as sin until you follow a few interesting people, then it
becomes overwhelming as it adds too many more.

Twitter needs to focus on the feed being more malleable, both with and without
personal effort from me.

~~~
wpietri
That may be trading one problem for another. The number one complaint I hear
about Facebook is how unpredictable the feed is. For power users, Twitter's
current approach to their feed is predictable and reliable: strict time order,
nothing missing from the people you want to hear from.

At the beginning of the year Twitter started testing out a "while you were
away" feature that curates, currently on mobile only:
[http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-
you-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/twitter-launches-while-you-were-
away/)

Personally, my initial reaction was instantly negative. I've now come to
grudgingly tolerate it; it's not very good, but it's limited to a small number
of tweets at a predictable place in my timeline, so I know it's not messing
with anything. I've never missed it when at a desktop, though.

~~~
scholia
I see "while you were away" on the browser/desktop version as well....

------
nemothekid
Not sure I agree about #1 and maybe my twitter experience is different from
others. First, if I want to communicate with others I take it over
FB/Email/Messenger of choice. Sure public conversation is nice, but its
painful over Twitter and I'm not sure how it could be made better. Everyone
talks about how a threaded view would be nice, but people fail to consider
that Twitter conversations are never 1-to-1, its usually multiple people
tweeting at one person. Having a conversation on something as open as Twitter
is like trying to have a conversation with the President during his speech.
Not everyone can talk at one, and no matter how you do it, the interface will
drown some out. Combine that with the fact that you can tweet anything at
anyone (unlike a Facebook/HN thread which is usually around a specific topic),
you get a very constrained opportunity to have actually conversations.

However, Twitter does a better job at problem #1 than instagram does. Beiber
is not replying to fans over Instagram - and I doubt people are actually
communicating to celebrities via Instagram comments, have you seen Beiber's
(or any music celeb's) instagram? Its a wasteland of spam, self promotion, and
emoji. I doubt Justin Bieber has a higher reply rate on Instagram than Twitter
- it's very easy to see that Justin Beiber engages fans on Twitter, not so
much on Instagram.

That said, as someone who uses Twitter heavily, but never tweets - my most
useful function for it is a realtime news feed (to not just news orgs, but
people, parody accounts, comedians, tech nerds, sports news, ...). I place as
much emphasis on the ability to "respond and have conversations" to the
success of Twitter, as to the success of Buzzfeed and other news orgs (- I
doubt you need an active comments section to have a good news site - most of
it is garbage anyways).

The second and third points are apt though - Facebook's "trending" seems a lot
more useful the Twitter's, however I'm not sure how useful either is without
constant curation. Even if Twitter had a super sophisticated algorithm to
automatically detect topics - without curation you end up with garbage.
Facebook's trending is just as useless once you have the reason why its
trending.

Lastly, FTA > _Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news
organizations broadcast text._

I'm not sure how Twitter can fix this, but my response to this is if this is
what Twitter has become, then its because you made it that way. Reddit now has
a subreddit /r/BlackPeopleTwitter which would give you a very different idea
on what Twitter is if your Twitter experience was like that.

------
tempodox
Your word in Twitter's ear!

I seem to recognise a pattern where Twitter & Apple's AppStore fail in the
same way: Failing to give end losers (er, users) intelligent filters so they
can decide what they want to see, and equally important, what they do not want
to see. The conspicuous absence of those options speaks loud & clear as to the
platform owner's intentions.

------
msoad
I very much like tweets be ethereal like SnapChat snaps. Many people don't
like to keep a history of stuff they said previously.

~~~
slyall
I know somebody who has a script setup to delete the majority of his tweets
(except for blog posts) after 24 hours.

[https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-
delete/](https://www.jethrocarr.com/2012/09/30/twitter-auto-delete/)

------
falcolas
I encourage anyone who thinks that #2 is as easy as the OP to give it a shot.
It's actually quite a hard problem, especially when you have to deal with fake
news tweets and want over 80% accuracy.

Disclaimer, I work for a startup doing exactly this, so if it's something you
actually want to do for a paycheck, shoot me an email.

------
vit05
Twitter is very confusing and useless to anyone who wants to use less than one
hour per day. So, if they focused on interactivity between anonimous,famous
and "live events", most people who do not want to live on Twitter, will have a
reason to open the app at least a few times a day.

------
olivermarks
Tech celebrities such as Guy Kawasaki have had teams of tweeters working for
them for years: it seems reasonable to assume large numbers of people are
employed to interact with show biz personality obsessives...just like all the
faked autographs the Monkees etc used to mail to their fans...

------
sreejithr
> The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the
> biggest failings of Twitter’s product team.

This is THE ONE THING they've done right. I'm come on Twitter to read what
people wrote about stuff. Last thing we need is an emotionless machine
generated feed.

------
blazespin
If the MM+ tweeter is half way savvy they'd do what Zuck does and reply to
some small % of his followers. I'm sure if they did that, a 13 year old
follower would irrationally hope that their tweet was seriously read and would
engage in the conversation.

------
zobzu
Thats funny, if followed it seems these advices would transform twitter into
facebook

So, yeah..

------
smegel
Disconnecting from twitter was one of the best moves I ever made. Being
subjected to a high volume/low quality stream of garbage is not good for the
mind.

~~~
panic
Why not just unfollow the accounts which are posting garbage?

------
joe5150
Dustin clearly doesn't follow @cher if he thinks there's no meaningful
interaction with celebrities going on on Twitter

------
reitanqild
Yes, and for that last few months the "Whats new" message on Google Play has
been: We made it easier to add you comments to others tweets - or something to
that effect.

I have been saying their problem is they have been too busy painting
themselves into a corner:

    
    
      [v] alienating 3rd part developers 
      [v] public by default - no organization level settings 
      [v] keep the cute 140 char limit that is now just an historic artifact
    

I guess you can add more to that list.

------
semicolondev
Twitter like Trello is a tool, a mainstream tool got to be horizontal product
[1].

There is no point discussing about it should be this or that. Feel free to use
it the way you want it to be.

[1]
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html)

~~~
minimaxir
Unlike Trello, Twitter is publicly-traded with mandated financial disclosures,
so discussion is fair.

~~~
semicolondev
But the post won't discuss about financials. It went on bashing twitter as if
it at its current state is pretty much screwed up which I disagree because I
am quite active on the platform and find it cool.

-> Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction.

I totally disagree. If you follow a avalanche of people and brands your
timeline gets useless within an hour. Twitter is place to build a community
that you want to be in and participate if you want to get max out of it. If
one expects it to be a community he/she shall participate. Why would I expect
Paul Graham to be replying me on Twitter for nothing (just because I follow
him and mentioned him some non of his business comment) ?

[Edit: added some reference from the post]

------
michaelborromeo
If Twitter didn't exist, what would the world use instead?

~~~
scholia
Facebook. That's really Twitter's major problem. Facebook used to be mostly
friends chatting to family and friends, but nowadays it's the single biggest
source of news links and the sort of viral spam that used to circulate on
Twitter.

Twitter is still a faster and more reliable source of breaking news, but not
that many people (apart from journalists) care about speed. And Facebook's
threaded chat provides a much better way to discuss stories than Twitter.

In sum, for most people, Facebook's news feed is probably now a better Twitter
than Twitter.

------
mandeepj
twitter's default landing page is more interesting than the default page that
you see after login

------
mahouse
I'm a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps
until they fucked them all. I'm now forced to use their glittery official app
full of ads and suggestions and things I don't care about. I follow less than
50 people and use Twitter 24/7 literally. I never miss a tweet.

> First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast
> system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way
> interaction. Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl
> goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the
> product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the
> responses.

Let's force Justin Bieber to sit down and read the thousands of replies he
gets to each any of his tweets.

Let's also make it so when I click on a Justin Bieber tweet, my browser
downloads a webpage of 50MB with all the responses so I can read them all.

> Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on
> realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or
> when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner
> at the top that says “follow this breaking event.”

No, please, please no, NOOO. Some of us are just simply not interested in
real-time events and use Twitter to talk to our friends. If a bomb explodes in
Bangkok, I simply don't care. If I did, I'd use the search engine. And by
knowing Twitter, they would probably make the banner mandatory, or would make
you dismiss it each time (along with a nice "Did you like this?").

> Third, Twitter has fucked up multimedia integration. Why the hell does
> adding a photo or video use up some of the 140 characters I want to use for
> my description? Why does it crop my photo? Why does it not show full-width
> images in the feed?

Because Twitter is a text-only social network... Or at least that's what it
was.

> Fourth, let’s talk about third party payloads/integrations on Twitter. They
> have never felt native, and they are still–after three years–in a bizarrely
> dire state.

Same response as before: I think media integrations should not be encouraged.

> And that leads to me to the final thing I want to talk about, which is also
> the most important: Twitter has fucked up its platform. Twitter has turned
> into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text.
> That’s it.

So don't follow them. Follow only humans with real feelings that are not using
Twitter to earn themselves money.

> The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the
> biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for
> apps to broadcast realtime information about someone.

So you want to read automated tweets all day? Don't be silly, who wants to
read "Johnny has favourited this vid on youtube!!" "Mike has uploaded this pic
to Instagram!!" all day? You? No, nobody, that's why these integrations with
automatic tweets are RUDE. If I want to know what you uploaded to Instagram
I'd follow you there, jackass!

There, I vented it.

~~~
alkonaut
When/how did Twitter mess up third party clients? I find the official
apps/page terrible (hard to follow conversations, embedded ads etc) and I'm
very happy with tweetbot as my client.

~~~
mahouse
They severely limited the amount of requests per minute (for example you can
only reload your timeline 15 times every 15 minutes). They have also refused
to open up the API endpoints that would allow those 3rd party apps to have a
functionality on par with the official clients. They also limited the number
of authenticated accounts under one app to 100,000, a limit which has been hit
by some clients already.

That said it must be understood that tweetbot is probably the only worthy 3rd
party client as of now. There are lots of Android clients but they are all of
a very low quality. Whether this is because of the lack of incentives to build
an app that uses an API that could close at any moment, or just reveals how
bad Android apps are overall, remains to be seen.

Four years ago or so I used twicca, which was pretty good at that moment, but
it hasn't been updated since then.

According to Ryan Sarver, former Twitter Platform Director:

"Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce
the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no." "We need
to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in
a consistent way."

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/twitter-development-
ta...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/twitter-development-
talk/yCzVnHqHIWo/sC34r_ZyMLYJ)

~~~
alkonaut
Ok thanks that explains a lot. It's true that tweetbot does seem to stand out,
I did try a few others and while they were a lot better than the official,
they were still flawed in one or many ways.

It struck me as odd to have a public API that serves the same content twitter
is serving themselves, while they actively lower the quality of their own
content by introducing ads! Maybe they have finally realized that, and will
just keep strangling the API until they own their own content once again.

You couldn't imagine youtube having a free API that served the same videos
without ads.

------
dennisnedry
I love that the author is criticizing Twitter's UI, yet when I tried to find a
date of the article, I had to mysteriously hover over the title of the post to
see it magically appear before me.

~~~
scandinavian
Ehh, it's right there at 0.05 opacity. It just gets opacity: 1 when hovering.
Try tuning your monitor, you should really be able to see that.

~~~
brongondwana
Nice if you have a big monitor in perfect lighting conditions and good eyes.
Grandparent's complaint is legit.

~~~
scandinavian
His complaint that a readability issue on a single string somehow makes the
author unsuited to comment on the clusterfuck that is twitters UI? I don't
agree.

------
onewaystreet
Twitter's real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO
with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO's vision
is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of
the major stakeholders.

~~~
minimaxir
> _a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the
> major stakeholders._

As Twitter is a _publicly-traded company_ , it would be impossible for that
person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.

~~~
onewaystreet
"Satisfy" was the wrong word but I couldn't think of the right one. What I'm
saying is that the CEO of Twitter will never have the same power as say Mark
Zuckerberg does.

~~~
MrJagil
How come?

------
ThomPete
The primary problem for twitter is that they more than ever is a protocol for
link-sharing.

If twitter wants to survive they need to get content onto their platform which
means loose the 140 character.

In some ways and ironically, Medium could be a kind of replacement for twitter
if they found a nicer balance between long and short posts.

~~~
nemothekid
What about Tumblr? Commonly when people ask to lose the 140-character limit I
try and understand what people are trying to accomplish and how that is any
different from what Tumblr has now.

After spending some time on tumblr, I've noticed the 140-character limit is
_great_ from a reader point of view. What it ensures (like you are alluding
to) is that one user doesn't dominate my feed/attention with one really long
post. I don't need curation on Twitter, because the time it takes to read 100
twitter posts is constant. It's harder to get trapped in an platform-imposed
filter bubble on Twitter this way too because there's less pressure on the
platform to algorithmically rearrange your newsfeed as well.

~~~
ThomPete
But Tumblr is Tumblr, they start from a different context.

------
lovamova
Who cares about Twitter? Sublevel is way better than that crappy thing.

------
StillBored
Twitters problem, is that you had an idea, and it took 5243 characters to
relate it. So, instead of using their platform you went elsewhere.

(139 characters, maybe I should use twitter...)

~~~
logicallee
and if you had written 5243 characters about what you just said (and you could
have), then I wouldn't have read a word.

~~~
logicallee
I'm being honest - you took a position and defended it, I read it, and moved
on. All in 139 characters.

I literally wouldn't have had time to read a wall of text (which is what 5,000
characters is, it's 850 words, i.e. a dense, full page and a half in a word
processor, if 11-point text.)

this is why twitter took off. it makes certain communication possible that
just wouldn't be! it lets a celebrity talk to people who wouldn't read even a
single page interview by them, for example. sorry if people don't get this.

------
meshko
OK, I'll admit, I haven't been following what is going on with Twitter, but
come on people, their product is limited to 140 characters. Surely they have
something to fix.

------
vortico
I recently visited a Twitter page, to find that it downloaded 6.3 MB of data
across 63 requests. Since it only displays around 10 140-character tweets on
the first page, that's a bloat factor of 4718x in my book. Twitter is done.

~~~
geofft
How is bloat related to their viability as a business / long-term
profitability? Does the extra bandwidth cost them a significant amount of
money? Does it negatively impact a significant number of users in their target
market, sufficiently so that they will stop using Twitter?

