
Signing up for a new Twitter account shows why the company is struggling to grow - owenwil
http://owened.co.nz/i-signed-up-for-a-new-twitter-account-to-see-why-the-company-is-struggling
======
jobenjo
I wrote this flow about 3 years, ago, and my face is still the Twitter teacher
(see twitter.com/finkel). I haven't worked at Twitter for over a year.

A few things. At least when I wrote it, the very first step you'd see the
friends who tried to connect with you, if you have any. I doubt that's
changed, so this may be a special case.

After building this flow, I helped my team design multiple better/more modern
flows, but all performed worse than my original when we measured for retention
over time. It turns out it's much trickier than it looks to build a better
flow, and it also hard to prove that it's better due to bots/spammers.

Even though this flow is far from perfect, I still take pride that my face has
been shown to hundreds of millions of new users, and that it greatly
outperformed its predecessor. But I just want to remind users here that it's
easy to say: "This is crap, I could do better." When it fact, many other
"better" things have been tried, and it's surprisingly harder and more nuanced
than it looks.

With my knowledge now, I believe more of Twitter's energy should be spent
improving the product, because the new user flow is much less important than
the product people see when it's done.

~~~
owenwil
Wow! Nice to meet you, Twitter teacher! Crazy that it's still the same three
years on; I know what you mean that it's easier to talk about building a
better flow than actually doing it, but I do think that it's fundamentally
focusing on the wrong thing (from the outside in particular).

Perhaps this flow performs better than we think, but what I find most
interesting about it is that instead of focusing on what you're interested in
learning about/following, it instead just helps the bigger Tweeters get
bigger/more famous, which is kind of sad, especially with many numbers
suggesting that the average user has less than 100 followers.

I totally agree in terms of improving the product - it'll be interesting to
see what Twitter delivers over the next year. I do hope that the focus shifts
away from what it is now and more onto the intrinsic value of
conversation/engaging with new people that in my experience seems to keep
Twitter users active/proves the value to them.

~~~
jobenjo
Likewise. It amazes me how long it's lasted.

I agree with your sentiment about famous people. It feels really generic. I'm
sure there's something better. We tested lots of interest-based versions, but
they also underperformed.

Twitter is becoming more of a consuming platform for most users, so getting
followers for the average user is much less important than finding great
content.

~~~
joshelman
I think you have to think of the twitter experience as a progression where you
start with people that you know/have heard of/can relate to, and over time you
discover new interesting people in areas of your interest to connect with
directly. So I feel like it makes sense to first suggest following a list of
people you may recognize and want to hear more from, and from them get drawn
into using the service more deeply. This applies to recognizable celebs /
media / etc as well as friends. the company can do a lot of analysis to only
suggest celebs, etc that do a good job of hooking users over time.

That said, having worked on some even earlier versions of this process (and
with Ben too) it is a constant work in progress and set of changes needed as
more and more people join the network. Today's users are later to twitter and
probably don't want to just start and get drawn in following individuals but
probably want content quickly that is personalized to them and would be open
to learn twitter from there. But following accounts may itself be too much
work. Or the challenge is just that mobile Signup is so common now that no one
gets the experience and starting point from the web. In any case, the biggest
challenge and opportunity with onboarding is just to constantly be changing
learning and trying to improve it.

~~~
jobenjo
Well said, Josh. It's about constant iteration and improvement.

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rmason
Twitter actually makes it difficult to find value from it. You have to
actually work at it. What Silicon Valley startup doesn't pull in a list of
your friends that are already on its service?

Once you've followed your friends then how about your interests? If I'm
interested in Formula 1 its possible I might want to follow a driver or team
owner. Only if I'm interested in Hollywood or pop music would I be interested
in Kate Winslet or Lady Gaga.

Twitter assumes just the opposite, we all care about celebrity to the
exclusion of our friends and hobbies.

------
ASquare
As has been mentioned in the post about the onboarding process, it gives you
suggestions of who to follow when you sign up (first as a random list of
celebs, followed by another list of big names in broad categories likes
music/technology et) – but doesnt give you context for why.

To me twitter is an “interest” network, as in, I want to find out more about x
or keep up with the latest on y etc – and I think this is the biggest failure
of twitter ie not communication this aspect of its value proposition
effectively. Ironically, Twitter themselves have called themselves an
information network and not a social network.

So, if before making suggestions on people to follow if it were to a) position
itself (better than it currently has) as a way to get massive value from
keeping up on things of interest and b) ask users to type in, say, 5 things
there were interested in – and then serve up suggestions of who to follow… …
this would not only personalize the feed but be immediately relevant which
should raise engagement/retention etc. I think such an approach would get
users to their aha moment about twitter much quicker.

Add to this, the most powerful features of Twitter which most people still
don't use/know about is Lists. So once you were onboarded and had say 10+
people you were following, if you were prompted to segregate these people into
lists by topic, that would make consuming twitter 10x easier than it is.

It seems that at times twitter still behaves as if it was something only the
technorati (early adopters) use – who will figure things out. That is clearly
not the case anymore.

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joesmo
"What would a new user even do after signing up? Who should I search for?"

I agree that this is the problem with Twitter, but the signup process is
unlikely to be the cause. Some people are just not interested in the 140
character mental garbage that others are spewing. I understand the author
likes Twitter a lot and cannot fathom the idea that Twitter is just not useful
or interesting to vast numbers of people.

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JustARandomGuy
_This is disappointing, as most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following
celebrities. I suspect that many users sign up for the first time, follow
mostly celebrities and then give up, since they never get much interaction._

Agreed. What I'd like to see is for Twitter to do much more curation: select
top users in very focused categories (for instance, "Technology Journalists",
"Linux Experts", "Java Experts" and let users drill down through multiple
categories to select the people they want to follow. Twitter already has
something similar (it's step 2 in the sign up process) but the current
categories are too overbroad and unfocused.

~~~
forgottenpass
_the current categories are too overbroad and unfocused._

OK. Then how do they narrow it down? Remember that they're not targeting any
one narrow demographic, and don't necessarily have any demographic data on a
brand new user.

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diego
It looks even worse than three years ago when I wrote a similar post:

[http://diegobasch.com/why-twitters-growth-has-slowed-down-
an...](http://diegobasch.com/why-twitters-growth-has-slowed-down-and-what)

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far33d
No.

Signing up for a new twitter account shows why _you think_ the company is
struggling to grow.

Without any insight into their acquisition, retention, or other core data that
drove these decisions you have no idea what you are talking about.

Don't get me wrong - I think these are all good hypotheses. But without data
they are just hypotheses.

~~~
skizm
Every article and blog post comes with this caveat. Pointing it out adds
nothing of value to the discussion.

~~~
hayksaakian
That's an excuse for low standards.

~~~
brianmcc
Not entirely. It's necessary to encourage any reasonably open and informal
exchange of ideas. Upvotes should be enough to endorse and promote the
minimally good ideas, or at least the well articulated ones, for discussion.

------
gametheoretic
Owen,

I would submit to you that an analysis of Twitter's, for lack of a better
word, design decisions can't be made without putting more thought in re: who
they are as a company and what their tendencies are.

What sticks out about Twitter is how deliberate and disciplined their
decision-making tends to be. (To me, at least. FWIW, I've worked with a major
telecom on their buyflow in both a business and technical capacity. I'm proud
to say I'm the reason email/password is the fallback auth and address/pin-
number (half of which was already taken care of in the previous step:
determining service availability via address) is the default, rather than the
other way around as per the original design. Given that the app is in Best Buy
kiosks and whatnot, that was a pretty big one.) E.g., these guys track time-
to-first-tweet. They're not not looking at what you're looking at. Hell,
they're looking at it with a microscope. If they and I arrive at different
conclusions, I ask what I'm missing, not what they're missing -- and I don't
say that in a platitudinal sense; I'm an arrogant bastard who thinks everyone
is wrong about everything. In case you hadn't noticed.

But think about how long, how many years TC, et al. chirped chirped chirped
about Twitter's "inability" to monetize. Now those people-- if anyone would
bother to look-- look like idiots. Twitter silently told everyone to go fuck
themselves, we're going to spend like 4 years throwing away ideas, developing
a very strong opinion on this, because a wrong decision could kill our company
- not now, but 10 years from now. Compare and contrast: Fb ads, which have
been (thoughtfully! and with data!) likened to Ponzi schemes.

------
bcsmith
Twitter suggests celebrities because they are broadly known quantities. Plus,
Twitter knows absolutely nothing about you when you first sign up. While it
would be nice if they would suggest some smaller niche people to follow, you
may not recognize any of the people they suggest - and that would be even more
frustrating...

~~~
general_failure
If they don't know anything about me during sign up... maybe they can ask me?

~~~
gametheoretic
Groan.

------
computerjunkie
I too have a similar problem with twitter. Its not just the signing up
process, but also the signing in process, especially on the mobile
application. Every time I "sign in" the mobile applicatoon , I'm put through
the same annoying process of being shown suggestions of who to follow,
importing my contact list, tips I already knew when I signed up and some more
suggestions. Once signed in, random twitter notifications come in which make
no sense or which I have not signed up to (for example, x and x have favorited
x tweet who I am not following)

To further add to this without trailing off topic, twitter is incredibly
restrictive when it comes to sharing content through direct messages. As I
find useful resources which may benefit a friend I am advising on his startup,
twitter seems to think I am spamming him even if I send one link at the time.

All of this , including reasons others have mentioned in this thread
ultimately drives away users slowly. I feel like I'm fighting the platform
just to share content when Facebook, Google+ et al seem to let users easily
share content.

------
recursive
This exactly describes my experience with Twitter. I've had an account for
over five years and tried multiple times to find some value in it. For a time,
I was subscribed to a channel (is that what they're called?) that published
race results I cared about. Aside from that, I struggle to find anything
relevant to me. How do people normally get engaged in some community?

~~~
egypturnash
Do you have friends who use Twitter? Maybe you should follow them for
starters. Ask around on whatever social network you're on - "hey, I'm on
twitter as @egypturnash, who're you?"

What's your hobby? Maybe see if there's anyone you follow who's involved in it
on Twitter. I, for instance, am following a slowly growing number of comics
people, because that's a thing I do.

If someone you're following keeps retweeting interesting stuff from a person,
consider following that person.

I also found that Twitter didn't make a damn bit of sense until I had a
smartphone, flipping through it is great to kill time on the bus or whatever.

You can also use it as a public chat channel, where you control who's in it by
dint of who you follow.

~~~
eitland
Same experience as gp: Twitter for me today only has possible value as a news
source.

Please correct me if I got this wrong but:

Posting just about anything to twitter means spamming most people that follow
me with stuff they don't care about: programming? Everyone except the
programmers couldn't care less. Java programming? Now it is just noise to
about everyone. Etc.

Basically this means I should keep a few different twitter accounts, right?

I've tried using it as a news source as well. However I'm down to just hn + a
web edition of one of the bigger local newspapers. Less noise.

~~~
egypturnash
You are pretty much correct. But you're missing something important: Twitter
moves so fast that anyone following a decent number of reasonably active
people will just shrug and skip over the stuff you say that's not interesting.

So, for instance, if you're mutually following some of your friends, they may
not have a damn thing to say about your thoughts on Java programming, but if
you're both Apple users you may find yourself chatting with them during the
next keynote. If you live in the same city you may find yourself organizing
impromptu get-togethers over Twitter. Hell, a while back I was playing Dark
Souls on a 360 without a net connection and tweeting about places I got stuck,
and my followers offered me some pretty useful advice.

People who follow me are not interested in everything I have to say. They may
not even see everything I have to say. But they are interested in ENOUGH of
what I have to say that they're continuing to follow me.

Multiple accounts can help: I have a public one that I use a lot, my blog
auto-tweets new posts to that one. I also have a private one that is only
accessible to my friends (and to the private accounts of my friends); these
accounts see us griping about day job stuff we don't want public, talking
about our marijuana intake, our sex lives, all kinds of stuff we don't want to
share with the whole world. There's also an account for my comic, that emits a
tweet every time a new page or blog post goes up. I pretty much never tweet
manually as that one! A good twitter client can make it a lot easier to
maintain multiple accounts, but honestly? Just start with one, ask your
friends if they have a twitter account and follow them, say whatever you feel
an urge to dump into the void and see what happens. Here's a conversation I
had this morning:
[https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/480774881198358528](https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/480774881198358528)

I find the best way to use Twitter is to stop thinking of it as a place you
HAVE to be and turn it into a place you WANT to be. Twitter is where I chat
with my friends and drop random nuggets of thoughts; I'll photograph something
I think is interesting and make some comment about it that way, I'll mutter
about some weird little social interaction I just had with a stranger and my
friends will tell me that shit was fucked up or that it was perfectly normal
and what rock have I been living under, I'll make some dumb joke and my
friends will riff on it. Twitter is not where I Extend My Brand. Follow
people, not entities. Not all people you know - I follow a bunch of leaders in
my field (comics) - but if a bunch of them are your social circle, then
Twitter becomes a place you WANT to go because it's where you can casually say
hi to your friends and talk about what they're up to in an environment that
welcomes both rapid responses seconds after the original statement, and ones a
couple days later. (And I find that having it on my phone makes it much more
attractive than having it stuck in a desktop machine - it's like I've got a
bit of ALL MY FRIENDS present any time I want them around.)

Ultimately I kinda want to riff on Twitter's branding: Imagine a bunch of
birds, hanging out in earshot of each other, singing to each other and working
out just who's gonna mate with/intimidate/eat who. _Follow your friends_. They
call it _social_ media for a reason.

------
logn
I think this is very true. Creating a Twitter account is like being force-fed
the experience. They should move away from the step-by-step wizard idiom and
instead do a tutorial mode... after creating your account in one step, they
should just show little inline tips for getting started and then have a button
to permanently stop showing the tips.

~~~
joshelman
Having worked on various versions of this flow, I think this is backwards.
Taking the user step by step to follow their first people teaches them the
important of following and starts them on the path of that as a long term
habit. Simply dumping them into the product with a few pointers and tips is a
much worse experience. Most companies miss the power of onboarding as a
teaching experience by walking new users step by step through the actions that
will matter long term in using a product

~~~
otterley
> Taking the user step by step to follow their first people teaches them the
> important of following

This bugs me about post-2010 Twitter and Facebook. Why do they now bias
towards following instead of leadership?

~~~
joshelman
i don't understand this comment. I was referring to following others on
Twitter as a way to get information.

------
lrichardson
Interestingly enough, I had just about the opposite experience when I signed
up for twitter.

I created my account around 2 yrs ago I think... maybe a little longer.

When I signed up, I remember the onboarding process being a bit similar in
terms of requiring you to follow at least 5 people, except for me, the users
it listed out were _incredibly_ relevant.

It was to the point where I almost felt like my privacy had been breached. My
understanding was that basically twitter looks at the IP address (or maybe
it's with cookies?) of everyone viewing every page on the internet that has a
twitter "tweet" button on it.

Since I read lots of blogs, articles, etc. around the web... twitter then had
at the very least a starting point for the users that I would be interested in
(based on the tweet buttons they put on their page).

Perhaps the code was different back then, but I remember the initial follow
recommendations being really good.

------
austinhutch
I agree the on-boarding process when registering an account is painfully bad
on the desktop. I'm wondering what the breakdown is on desktop vs mobile
account creation.

~~~
owenwil
Added this to the post - it's actually even worse. Two steps, no on boarding
at all.

------
rrggrr
Twitter: the greatest one to many communications platform since radio and they
haven't spent a dime marketing their "channels". Onboarding isn't as big an
issue as ignorance of the product. Anyone still buying Star Magazine or Time
hasn't figured out how to leverage Twitter to get the same info but real time.
Twitter... If you are going to do a good job, take credit for it man!

------
Domenic_S
> _most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following celebrities_

Are you sure?

------
kirab
Would Twitter be allowed to import contacts from Facebook or Google+? AFAIK
they disallow the exporting of the social graph to other social networks to
lock users into their network.

~~~
gametheoretic
Yes, they keep asking me to import my Gmail contacts.

------
adventured
Twitter is struggling to grow because they failed at achieving the purpose
they were created for.

WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik, FB Messenger, et al. have accomplished what Twitter was
supposed to.

Now Twitter is just a mostly one-way broadcast for famous people. That's why
such a small percentage of their user base actually shares anything, much less
on a regular basis.

There is no reason for Twitter to exist. What they do is being better served
by other platforms. This will become very painfully obvious in the next few
years, their active user base will shrink.

~~~
voyou
Those are all messaging apps, for sending messages to an individual or to a
specified, small group. Twitter is a microblogging system, for sending
messages to an indefinite, large, group. They have very little in common.

------
fiatjaf
As a frustraded Twitter ex-user I'm interested in hearing your experience.

