
Twitter is struggling, probably because normal people don't know how to use it - prostoalex
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/18/twitter-problems-jack-dorsey-silicon-valley-technology
======
protomyth
Twitter is rather easy for "normal people" to use, in theory. You follow the
people you want to hear from. Its a collection of RSS feeds in small 144
character packets. Sometimes you needs some help and tweeting at a company
seems to get a better response than sitting through a long phone call or
navigating the crappy website.

People know how to use it, Twitter itself keeps changing things to make it
more difficult. The whole "out of order", moments, "what you missed", etc.
make it harder to sit down and catch up. Show me where I left off last and let
me scroll to now and I'll (and I expect a lot of "normal people" will be
happy). Hell, their official client practically makes you read your timeline
in reverse order after you hit "more tweets". I'll skip the whole shadow
banning of people and hashtags since most won't notice.

They killed client innovation because they wanted to control the experience.
Sadly, they really needed to concentrate on getting paid. They've gone so far
that "foreign" media (e.g. Instagram) cannot display inside the tweets in
their client.

Hashtags, retweets, etc. were not Twitter inventions. When they threw out the
clients, that killed outside innovation.

~~~
recursive
I'm a normal person, and I can't figure it out. Every time I see a link to
twitter, I can't tell who is responding to who. It looks like snippets of
conversations, but I can rarely figure out the context. I don't think I'm
looking at a timeline view, just a particular tweet.

~~~
protomyth
That's basically the problem with twitter's web client and not a problem with
you understanding of what Twitter is. You expected to click on the link and
get a conversation which it is[1], its just displayed horribly. The problem
isn't your understanding, its the UI.

1) Its amazing how many people can keep up with group SMS, but run into
something very close to it on Twitter and hit a wall because of the crappy way
Twitter zooms into a conversation. I got a couple of ideas for UI (one I
actually prototyped for my own amusement), but there is no way I'd spend the
time to make a working client. I'm pretty sure there are other people who
probably have had the same thoughts and they are all shelved.

------
sakopov
I think the problem with Twitter is that normal people don't need it. I don't
have a single friend on Twitter and maybe one co-worker who tweets once in a
blue moon. These are normal folks who do normal things and have no interest
sharing them with strangers.

~~~
billmalarky
Twitter is mainly for consumption, not creation, for the average joe. This is
one of the many reasons Twitter should not be compared to Facebook whatsoever.

~~~
wodenokoto
Today it might be best for consumption. But when it started and had it's
character limited by the size of an SMS, it was very much meant (and used!)
for creation and communication.

~~~
gaius
Twitter's market or demographic is recreational lynch mobs. It amplifies
people's worst natures. The sooner it implodes the better the world will be.

~~~
digi_owl
Thats basically social media in general, nothing unique to twitter.

Even Google may be culpable, seen as they sort search results based on your
"profile".

------
speeder
Honestly, twitter to me feels... pointless.

There was a time, when people kept nagging me to enter the social world to
pump my startup and whatnot, and I even learned how to install several
software to help me manage it (including some that Twitter bought and killed,
something I consider a serious mistake of theirs).

I twitted prolifically, got several followers, managed to sometimes interact
with famous people, then after all the difficulties in using their service
after they killed the clients they bought, I started to forget more and more,
until I wans't using it anymore.

Then now years later, I noticed... it made no difference, the only different
between using twitter, and not using twitter, is that by not using twitter I
save time to do other more useful things, and also more entertaining things,
twitter is not good to get useful information, not good to entertain, and not
a IM, in fact I have no idea what twitter is for.

So to me, twitter is pointless... Also extremely hard to use (ie: some people
obviously saw some effect from twitter, but... HOW? I even used some tracking
apps to help, like Klout and whatnot... I scored my "brownie points" a bit,
but I always felt lost, what I should write, and why? And to who?

If I as user, don't figure why I am reader other people stuff, how as content
producer I figure what I am writing, and to who?)

~~~
partisan
My only interaction with twitter is through the weekly "Popular in your
network" emails I get every few days. I actually do find them useful; I don't
follow anyone extraneous and so the items are almost always directly related
to content I am interested in.

I am not a producer of content, so for me, Twitter will always be a one-way
street. What that means is that it competes with any other news/content source
such as Google News, HN, Reddit, etc. If it weren't for those periodic,
curated, but extremely relevant emails, twitter wouldn't be on my list of news
sources. I imagine they will start injecting sponsored messages on those
emails and then I might have to reconsider.

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im_down_w_otp
Only my "nerd" friends are even remotely active on Twitter, and even then
roughly 50% of my "nerd" friends don't even have a Twitter account, and zero
of my friends who are outside tech ever use it at all.

To me Twitter has always felt like primarily an echo chamber for Silicon
Valley hipsterdom, which eventually added-on a sub-culture of celebrity
narcissism.

~~~
collyw
The media love it for the lazy journalism it allows them to produce based on
twitter storms or whatever is trending.

------
SmallBets
Twitter struggles because of the sharp divide in its 2 types of users: those
with high ratio of people following them vs. those they follow (read
influencers/celebs), and everyone else.

For the first group, the creation function is phenomenal, interactive/engaging
and not suffering the signal to noise problem.

For everyone else, they struggle with a)consumption only (that's me), b) bad
signal to noise rate (follow too many), or low engagement/interactivity (not
enough follow them).

So to truly make the platform work for you, it is a longer cultivation to
become somewhat of an influencer. By definition this cannot be a mass market
appeal in terms of all users fully realizing the platform's potential.

Instagram has a similar structure but has overcome these problems with
simplifying the media/content type into pictures and limiting links. This
makes the signal to noise ratio better, and allows for the creation function
of non-influencers to go farther.

This is why I agree Twitter should embrace being smaller, and focus its
efforts into helping the 2 user types in parallel, and also help users cross
from being consumers to influencers more. They can take cues from YouTube in
all of their creator programs and rev sharing to work on that part of it.

------
abcampbell
Am not an expert, but think Twitter is struggling because the signal to noise
ratio has deteriorated significantly.

Solving this isn't just a matter of some UX tweaks, it literally speaks to the
heart of a very hard problem...how to you structure relatively unstructured
information in a way that enables machines to help humans navigate it

~~~
mitchty
Exactly. I got on twitter to follow certain people. Most of the time its great
but honestly what sucks is there is so much noise I just ignore everything.

And I'm a technical person willing to put up with a lot of BS. But I can't be
arsed to prune my list because while say someone I follow posts GREAT things
relating to libc internals, they also post things that are very much not what
I care about.

I can't tell twitter to: don't show me stuff like this from this person, or
better say show me more of stuff like this, hide the rest unless i ask to see
it from this user.

That is a hard problem to solve. I don't envy twitter but honestly their
"platform" hasn't moved for years. This whole mess is entirely of their own
lack of doing.

~~~
aikah
THIS, the most important thing for me.

If I follow a guy who tweets about Databases, I don't need to know or read his
thoughts about politics, his new born daughter, his outrage about X or Y or
all that bullshit. I want to hear only about Databases, DB management and not
the rest. I need to be able to follow @userX with #topicY exclusively.

~~~
digi_owl
You get that problem no matter what mode you follow them, unless its by way of
paid for articles in the trade press. Be it blogs, Tiwtter, or some other
unedited outlet, you are going to get that person raw and unfiltered.

~~~
saurik
With a blog, one would normally follow the RSS feed of a specific tag, not the
entire blog.

~~~
digi_owl
That depends on how well tagged things are.

------
anexprogrammer
I think most can use it fine, but don't see the point. For the whole ten years
or however long it's existed, they don't see the point. With one exception -
it's useful for yelling at large companies who are failing at customer support
or warranty etc.

It has a horrible signal to noise ratio, and always has. So unless you're
willing to spend a ludicrous amount of time searching and curating a feed to
weed out the marketers yelling louder than each other, the SEO types etc
you're left with a few celebs and personalities to follow. It really isn't
worth the effort. As everyone is reduced to 140 chars searching gives little
to no idea of how meaningful their output is, so go read back everyone's page.

Or add five celebs, and some personalities and stop using it after a week or
two. Log in every year or so to see why Tesco messed your order up.

For meaningless banter I'll do that in the coffee shop, or direct via SMS or
message app.

------
danols
Twitter is a Swiss army knife for both consumption and communication. People
that think it useless because you cant explain it in 5 words are missing the
point of Twitter. It is what you make out of it and it can be a lot of
different things for different people depending on your needs. This means that
not everyone needs it or are willing to learn to use it. If they try and dumb
it down and please as broad group as possible to attract the masses it will
eventually be useless to everyone and die a slow death. It is not for everyone
and it will never compete with Facebook. I wish they would accept that. Not
very likely though.

------
barney54
This quote from the article is spot on, "It’s just an enormous time-suck for
the amount of information you get from it.”

I like and use Twitter, but I don't see the value for most people. While I
like it, it don't suggest others use it.

------
caseysoftware
Does anyone else feel like this is trying to soften the ground to demand the
algorithmic feed?

Quotes like this make me believe that is the goal:

> It’s just an enormous time-suck for the amount of information you get from
> it.

------
downtide
There is a little mention about it being hard to consume one's feed. And that
you have to do a lot of work for little information.

I remember a few years back, there was talk that web tools that employed good
filtering would be the next big thing.

I only use the default web twitter client, which does make it very difficult
to consume the data. I page down on my feed a couple of times and that's about
it.

How do other clients let you interact with your feed?

Even flashcards of tweets that I've missed wouldn't be that bad.

~~~
evan_
The client I use, Tweetbot, starts me where I left off reading, and gives me a
number of intuitive ways to either skip ahead to "now" or read everything I
have missed.

------
danols
For me Twitter is 100% consumption. It is a way to discover new articles &
views from the 400 people or so that I follow. It could be Bill Gates latest
views. Maybe a couple of comedians. A couple of athletes. Probably a bunch of
Entrepreneurs. It is just another stream that I check out for 10-15 minutes a
day to discover new interesting stuff in niches that I am interested in. This
use case is never mentioned. Are there so few people using Twitter like this?

~~~
colmvp
Same.

Most of my friends don't regularly use Twitter.

But I don't care. Writers ranging from William Gibson to influencers like
Edward Snowden to editors like Nate Silver to basketball reporters like Zach
Lowe populate my feed. What's not to like? I get way more value from Twitter
than Facebook or Reddit.

------
gotofritz
I think Twitter is great, but I don't know how they can monetise it. Also it's
for the digital literate.

My older, barely literate relatives taught themselves how to use Facebook no
problem, but can't get their head around Twitter. When they start it looks
empty because they don't know whom to follow, then when someone adds some
followers for them it looks like a wall of noise because all the people they
are following are constantly talking.

------
samuli
(or have no need for it)

~~~
matt_wulfeck
(Or have no desire to)

------
dj_doh
I wish I could post the tweet where I said something like, "the beginning to
the end of the twitter." That was right after their anti-developer community
$hit. That's what happens when your in-house product team is insecure about
the brilliance of the community.

Ok probably little harsh there. But I used to love this service and its
potential. Now it's meh.

~~~
dk8996
I agree. They should of let the community flourish and strategically
partner/buy what the community produced.

------
majewsky
The whole comments thread here sums it up perfectly. You have a bunch of
people praising Twitter for its utility to discover interesting content (which
includes me), and a bunch of people condemning it for bad signal-to-noise
ratio and abusive subcommunities.

And frankly, if I had control over Twitter, I'd just be okay with that. The
only change I'd make is identify more clearly which usecases create actual
value for users, and advertise these more clearly. The biggest problem I'm
reading from the article is that people misunderstand what Twitter is good
for.

Case in point: "How do I get followers?" Uhm, how about posting interesting
things? This is not Facebook. People don't follow you just because you're a
distant relative or happened to go to the same school once. People follow you
because they find your tweets funny, insightful, or in another way a valuable
target of their attention.

------
digi_owl
Its funny to consider how much Twitter has morphed.

It started out as a SMS "broadcaster" with a web accessible log.

Now the SMS part, that got the whole thing started and set the 140 character
size limit, is largely useless. Most tweets are full of hashtags and urls that
only make sense on custom clients or on the web site.

~~~
justincormack
well, and no one uses sms any more

------
jorgecurio
I'd have to say the same for Facebook. More and more people are leaving
Facebook. About 50% of people that had facebook 4 years ago no longer have it.

I'm 100% certain Twitter will not be around in 4 years. 95% certain Facebook
will not be around in 10 years.

The reason is that these companies have created insane valuations that they
can't justify during tough economic times. The userbase are hostile to any
attempts at targeted advertising and it's something these large companies rely
on for revenue.

I predict a decentralized, free, twitter and facebook alternatives that more
or less mimic the UI except it's not managed centrally by a corporation. The
application runs on multiple computers. A committee of volunteers influence
it's future development and they are paid in some sort of cryptocurrency and
people are paid for helping host this giant distributed app in cryptocurrency.
People using the free application engage in market based economies in which
the platform gets a small commission just enough to sustain the development
and maintenance of the project.

It is at this point we will have enough wifi enabled devices to form effective
peer to peer mesh network that doesn't require any ISP. You will still need to
physically travel of a disconnected mesh network and authenticated by a
concensus of existing incumbents in this independent mesh network in remote
places separated by large geographical barriers and these networks will likely
depend on ISP. However, this disconnected networks create effective means for
them to thrive. You are limited by geography but not by the hazardous nature
of human trust in a profit-incentive scheme.

The closest thing is Ethereum but I don't think it will be The One. there will
be multiple 'Ethereum' attempts before a truly standalone, distributed, peer
to peer applications takes shape and becomes deeply embedded in our social
structure and bring about income and social equality.

This is sort of the future I have in mind, post-SV, China in permanent
economic stagnation, and rise of cryptoanarchy all within the next 40 years.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _I predict a decentralized, free, twitter and facebook alternatives that
> more or less mimic the UI except it 's not managed centrally by a
> corporation. The application runs on multiple computers. A committee of
> volunteers influence it's future development and they are paid in some sort
> of cryptocurrency and people are paid for helping host this giant
> distributed app in cryptocurrency._

I predict that wishful thinking won't come to pass, because wishful thinking
about utopias has basically never come to pass.

Happy to make payment in galactic credits if I'm wrong.

------
dk8996
One things about Twitter is that it gets way less post engagement than
Facebook or Instagram. Its a big firehose, if you tweet, and don't get
anything back -- you wounder if its worth it.

~~~
ffumarola
100% agreed. And this goes back to the argument between an algorithmic feed
and a simple time based feed.

I tweet some things that get 0 engagement, but maybe if they were shown to my
close friends when they checked Twitter 5 hours later they would get
engagement, but alas I am reminded that content creation is futile unless I am
a Twitter celebrity.

------
bliti
Maybe it's just past due? Communities die over time. Twitter was innovative
back when the options were limited. Now days I get a better experience from
other options like the rooms in Whatsapp. The only thing they seem to have
going is the amount of "celebrities" that maintain an account. Though I dont
know how sustainable that is over time.

------
brewdad
Seeing as I and most of my friends have families, it's rare that we can all
get together to watch our favorite sporting events. I use Twitter as sort of
my "can you believe that call?" way of chatting with others during a game. For
the most part, it's noise or mindless distraction.

------
akeck
I used to use Twitter. I stopped, because it didn't fit in my life anymore. I
have a fixed amount of attention every day, and more critical things use
almost all of it. None of my friends use Twitter anymore, and news aggregators
bring me up-to-date in much less time than my tweet feed.

------
alexashka
There's no problem with twitter - there's a problem for twitter's investors
and people who want to make money from Twitter. They can go solve their rich
people problems all day :)

As a user, I've always liked it - it's nice and simple.

------
mrfusion
I miss the RSS feeds. It feels like the only way to know what people are
saying is to log into Twitter everyday. It feels tedious like a chore just to
get information that should be in my rss reader.

------
collyw
I find Twitter fairly pointless, as I am sure many do. I am sure the fact it
is easy to data mine trends is the only reason it does get so much media
attention.

------
tonyferguson742
Couldn't agree more .. i've been on Twitter for over a year now and i still
have difficulties tracking a conversation between two people.

------
chris_wot
I'm into tech. I don't use or consume Twitter. May it ever be that way.

------
mrcactu5
it blows my mind there are people who don't know how to use twitter... they
living under a rock?

~~~
J_Darnley
No. We just don't care for such a crap platform.

------
kelukelugames
One of my co workers goes on the same rant anytime someone says the word
Twitter. He's only a few years older than me but sounds very "get off my
lawn!"

