1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year
2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused.
3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams
4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view
5. drop the video passion-project nonsense. you don't need to own content to use twitter alongside it. strike deals with the content providers instead where tweets are shown alongside (this is already being done) and become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor
6. improve the core product for users. group messaging, longer tweets, only show replies from people who are authenticated or two degrees away from you by default, etc. etc. (and pro accounts, if you wish)
7. let people pay to get a checkmark, and then let users pay to flair tweets they like
8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter. let them pay to use it as a platform and properly authenticate their customers on twitter
> 1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year
Really, is Twitter doing poorly? $2.52 billion in 2016 is more than enough revenue, I'd wager, to maintain a solid company. Twitter seem to me to have an explosive-growth mentality - spend like crazy and grow our way to success - in a post-explosive-growth reality.
Fix the cost structures, and make ~$1 billion in profit, and you have a solid company. With continued YoY growth of say 5%, and a valuation of $20 billion in the near future, about double their current $11.33B, is not out of the realm of possibility. Sure, it isn't Google or FaceBook sized, but is a $20B company in anyway failing?
Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly?
Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.
So many prole would want to finish a sentence for a few cents that would hesitate for $1/mth. Then have a $3 (or something smaller) minimum so people instantly have credit for future use to train behavior for some time. This would also give credit cards for future organisation and easy purchases. For power users 100 character a month would be nothing so it would up earnings there.
Then initially launch with a 'charity' test month. This helps get people using and people accepting longer tweets with good will. Doing a charity month will help reduce the invariable haters of anything new, and offset bad-will if trial goes down like a lead balloon. And then monitise assuming trial goes well
People already hack around this by posting images of text, or using several tweets (usually annotated with "1/" "2/" etc, or merely by replying to their own tweets).
The images hurt accessibility, and the streams make it harder to share the discussion (which is partly the purpose of being a social app to begin with).
This feels like maybe a [citation required] thing. Facebook doesn't have any particular length limit on posts, and anecdotally vast screeds are quite rare on my feed, and most posts are pretty terse regardless.
Is there data to suggest that people will just rant all the time if they're permitted to?
[edit] Anecdotally, my current top 20 posts in my FB feed: 17 under 140 chars, 3 greater than 140 chars.
Not sure why you've been down-voted. Twitter is so different from Facebook in terms of what it's primary use is, that it doesn't make sense to compare them, and while I wouldn't quite word my response this way, I agree with the sentiment that Facebook usage data doesn't tell us enough to predict Twitter usage under higher character limits.
Yeah, plus what happens now is you get these almost garbled, code-like sentences with emojis, inB4 type abbreviations, truncated URLS, hashtags, @ references and its unreadable/unscannable. I would totally prefer a 140 character block where the hashtags, @references and links fell outside and I coukd parse the tweet more naturally.
Yet, the people who like it, like it, and changing it would mostly make them leave, and the people who don't like it already left for something else and aren't coming back.
Its like daydreaming if the next version of Microsoft Word were reskinned EMACS with a new splash screen. Superficially that sounds pretty cool. But six months later everyone who wanted EMACS continued to use real EMACS and everyone who didn't want EMACS switched away from the MS Word clone of EMACS, leaving MS Word with zero users.
That's twitter's problem, the people who are really into "twitter 2016" are just going to leave if things are changed, yet the number of people into "twitter 2016" is seen as too small.
Perhaps their best bet is to abandon acting like a startup. Absolutely no one wants my local electric company to pivot into water and sewer services or open an office on Mars. There's nothing immoral or lower class about operating a respected public utility.
What twitter should be terrified about isn't finding the next billion users, but avoiding the 1970s CB Radio bust or the decline of BBSes in the 90s. The odds are much higher that twitter is going to be out of business and forgotten in 20 years than they're going to be ten times bigger in size/revenue/profit. Essentially twitter is a fad or a utility or in between and has to be monetized as a fad or a utility.
Maybe holding this arbitrary line in the sand as if it were a commandment is why Twitter apparently needs to be "turned around". 280 characters isn't now extensive prose - it isn't fundamentally changing anything. It has been 10+ years and they are still losing a tremendous amount of money, I think it is time to lose the idealism if there is a win-win for users and revenue.
At some point "condensed" thought just means reduced quality of communication. If some users want to say more, let them pay a dollar. I doubt users would be rattled to their core because some people can put two tweets in one.
Bottom line, users don't care about what Twitter's agenda is regarding character limit. Nobody decided to use Twitter because they were excited about a 140 character limit, they use it in spite of the limit. Twitter should be focusing on what the "in spite of" reasons are, because those are the reasons that define the intrinsic value of their service, not the character limit.
I believe most people use Twitter because it gives them the attention of an audience. If you can acquire the same size (or redundant, since most are on multiple platforms) audience elsewhere, then what reason is left for a user to tolerate any annoyance or quirk of the service?
Twitter is also a public discussion platform. It's a cog for democracy.
But after the 140 limit, Twitter's other annoyance is how public your comments are. You can't remove them and you're extremely liable for them. Making them private (actually, that option exists) would make it look like Facebook, so it isn't the solution, and making them anonymous won't solve trolls.
Liability on twitter currently doesn't prevent stupid people from harassing others, while a lot of clever people avoid using it because they understand the consequences of a mistake. That's pretty much the opposite of what we want. Twitter should think about reducing liability while moderating trolls better. A bit like on HN, where we have much less liability, but many more CEOs.
you very much CAN remove them. Tweets are deletable. You're no more or less liable for them than anything else you say in any other public environment. We have no less liability for our public statements here on HN. They're just harder to spread to the masses.
The very first Twitter clone I remember came up with the killer feature - infinitely long Tweets. How many times did I hear this dumb idea? It is not a sandwich, longer does not mean better! The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.
There is no technical reason. The reasons are all non-technical and irrational. Starting with the word-imagery: Have you ever heard a songbird go "tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet?" No, it ceases to be a tweet at that point. It's a squawk or scream or warble or something else. And probably it's annoying AF too. You probably think that's unimportant or has nothing to do with it.
Twitter is about the tweet. It's how they got big in the first place. It's the word they added to the dictionary. If you're thinking of pivoting away from what you are, you'd better consider it carefully and be sure it's not the main irreplaceable source of your claim to fame.
PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.
The core problem is that the length of a tweet should be "one concisely-stated thought", but that's hard to write into an API's documentation :)
> PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.
Not in the real world no, although people are nostalgic for the pre-crash US, but on the Internet I think it definitely is. Put another way, if you changed Twitter into Medium people would be talking about "the old Twitter" with nostalgia.
You think you're arguing the value of constraints, but you're actually arguing that different media formats have different points of cultural optimization.
If that's true, then is there any need to enforce an artificial length limit on tweets? If shorter, pithier tweets are better, then most tweets will be short and pithy--naturally.
Maybe the code base contains a bunch of edge cases where they assume 140 and trying to do anything else causes crashes or other poorly defined misbehavior. (Not what you were talking about but also a legitimate but unfortunate answer)
That's common knowledge. They were asking, why is it STILL the right length?
If Twitter want to encourage short form content, there are other ways to do it. Either hide 141 onwards behind a [+more] link or style the long ones differently so they have less impact.
Better yet, create multi-panel tweets so content is still presented bite-sized, but in a way that people can delve as deeply as they like.
I could see a version of Twitter that is similar in a way to the latest Instagram release (allowing for up to 10 images per post). So on Twitter you could have up to 10 tweets in a single post. Each still 140 char. Only the first one shows up in everyone's feed (just like it does today) and you swipe/scroll/page to the side to see additional pages. If the first 140 is intriguing enough people will scroll sideways to read more.
I've posted about that concept before. I think it's a no-brainer and it baffles me that they're yet to do it, and that it took Instagram so long to have their equivalent.
Tweet storms are only getting more common in my experience. Further, entire newspaper articles could be presented as a series of bite-sized pieces. Just limit the first one to 140 IMO.
It's also common knowledge that arbitrarily changing a standard costs money. They have to educate hundreds of millions of users, re-jigger their databases and services, and forego a well known trademark feature of their product. Why bother? Everyone's memorized that it's 140 characters, and people have adapted pretty well to 140-character microblogging. Would 1,000 have been better? Possibly, possibly not. I think Twitter's fundamental problems run deeper than the SMS limitation; apart from some celebrity accounts with tens of millions of followers such as @RealDonaldTrump etc., they are starting to lose relevance compared to Facebook and other, more dynamic services.
> The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.
Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc).
I think it requires more attention to decode the messages of people trying to work around the character limits (with bad spelling and dropped punctuation, etc).
yes, speakers of agglutinating languages would be able to shove in a few more words, but a) they'd be looked at strangely by their compatriots for using some strange new combo word and no-one wants to have to decipher megawords like that b) (this should be obvious) switching to a different language means that the people who follow you can't read anything you say. So no, people will not switch to German, or any other agglutinating language to beat a word limit.
You already have something similar with the current system. Languages like Chinese have more semantic load per character, so I'd imagine Chinese tweeters can tweet more complete thoughts.
A better (but more opaque) system might try to estimate the "quantity" of semantic content in a language-specific way.
This makes sense, although I would keep it simple and just offer for example normal and extended messages (max 280 char) with extended costing for example $0.10-$0.50/each.
Condensing your thoughts to 140 characters takes effort. This would allow trading the effort to money. The per message fee would limit the usage of this feature, encouraging people to still keep things short and only use the extended feature when they really need it.
The size of SMS messages is still fixed at 160 characters, but now they can be transparently chained to send longer texts. This is quite unlike IP protocols which have much larger maximum packet sizes.
Whether Twitter should ever have taken a cue from SMS is moot: apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice.
140 bytes to be more precise. An SMS client will cycle through 7-bit, 8-bit and UCS-2 encodings depending on the content, limiting the number of actual characters depending on the language.
The last time I tested it aaages ago, Twitter didn't enforce the encoding-based limitations, and if you sent a 140 character tweet full of unicode, it would actually send you several concatenated SMS.
> apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice.
It'd be interesting to see a Twitter clone where people could only communicate in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code (i.e. a code + its predefined strongly-typed parameters.)
The stratechery folks have said something akin to that Twitter is unsalvageable that this point from a growth perspective because they've already lost most of their potential customers. People who tried their product and walked away.
If these were fresh potential customers it would be one thing, but convincing someone to come back who already tried your product is much harder
In what ways do people see twitter as a cesspool? Im just genuinely curious because I get a lot of value out of twitter. It's a great way for me to be exposed to new work from artists, finding circles of people with overlapping niche interests, reading political dialogue and analysis, funny stuff...etc
Some people find harassment in the form of deeply personal insults, doxxing, and death threats to be unpleasant enough that it's just not worth spending any time on Twitter.
This article is from August, but nothing has especially changed since then.
To be fair, people using twitter don't generally call it a cesspool, and reading between the lines you know they must get value out of it if they continue to use it, but there's the constant "you have to have thick skin" statements from people about how it can occasionally be toxic.
As someone not in the social network, what it looks like is that there may be some value to me if I get involved, but I'll likely have to deal with bullshit to do so, and the perception is that the bullshit is much more assured than the value. Whether this is valid, or more specifically whether the relative assessments of each feature are accurate, is unknown, but that's how it feels.
Twitter, as Linkedin, suffers from a poor content to marketing ratio.
I do use it to follow some devs, but every time I step out the established circle into an hashtag or suggestion is nothing but marketing bots oneupping each other.
On the other social is easier to have real social interaction, while talking on twitter is more like people screaming in a crowd plus there are these big tv set all over the place loudness to the max splourting ads.
It was a nice way to grow an asymmetric network built on shared interest as opposed to shared connections when there where genuine people on it but I hardly even login anymore.
The idea is interesting, but you a forgetting something. In cases of extremely low cost (like $1), sometimes the payment process itself is seen as more costly than the payment itself. In other words, people may be willing to spend $1 for an additional sentence, but would they be willing to get their wallet, pull out the card, type in the number, name, billing address and security code? I bet not.
Beyond that, using a card would force users to attach a real identity to their account, even if it's not public. A lot of people wouldn't like the idea of that.
> Beyond that, using a card would force users to attach a real identity to their account, even if it's not public. A lot of people wouldn't like the idea of that.
I think the majority of consumers have zero issues with it. And the people who do and ALSO care about identity/anonymity definitely could just get some pre-paid card.
I'd say 10,000 from businesses in the USA alone. A lot of companies use twitter as their makeshift tech support and public image. $1/month for a company is completely irrelevant to their spending.
On iOS it takes a single TouchID auth and a few message prompts to sign up for a recurring subscription - you won't ever be asked for payment again. I'm certain Android is similarly streamlined.
> Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.
I do, yet I still think this should be experimented with. If an account I follow tends to post longer messages, I can deal with seeing only the first line of them.
I suspect the intersection of a) people who care about Twitter, b) who use twitter via sms, c) people who do not have phones that hide/abstract away multipart sms so they've got 300+ character messaging - is so small it'd be less expensive for Twitter to buy all three of them a new iPhone every 2 years instead of hold one meeting trying to solve the problem ;-)
(Note: I'm not convinced long-tweets are "the killer idea" others seem to think - like someone else put it, the reader's attention is the limited resource, not the service's ability to publish characters. I don't scroll thru Wordpress/LiveJournal/LongReads on the train or while waiting for coffee...
Isn't (or maybe "wasn't") the intention of the check mark to differentiate legitimate public figures from those who would attempt to create fake profiles and impersonate them? Lately it seems like anyone who has had any sort of notoriety has been getting one, but if you could just pay for it instead that would completely defeat the purpose.
I think both. Don't take away the need to be a public figure and to verify your identity. Just make them pay in addition to these things.
If you're a big enough public figure to want/need the blue tick, you're arguably making commercial use of twitter already, so you probably have a marketing budget that can sink a thousand bucks a year into maintaining your verified status with Twitter (in addition to proving your identity in usual ways).
If some famous person doesn't want to pay, that's fine: either quit using twitter's platform to market yourself, or continue but live without the tick.
I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the type of people verified on twitter. I mainly use twitter to follow comedians, and most of them don't make a ton of money (surely not enough to afford "a thousand bucks a year" -- one of my favorite comedians working today has said publicly that he made all of $16k in 2015).
And a few have become the victims of imposters who attempt to disrupt their careers by taking on their identity and messaging comedy clubs or TV networks or whatever. I don't think they are an untapped revenue stream.
"The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.
We approve account types maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas. If you believe your account is of public interest and should be verified, this article outlines information about submitting a request."
> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused.
I never understood why their home page is so basic. Is it just to reduce load on their servers from lurkers?
A guess: to push people to register. For several reasons: (1) they are judged on that every quarter; (2) a hypothesis that this makes the experience better for users, and hence more likely to contribute to MAUs; (3) a hypothesis this improves ad targeting.
Which is an admission of weakness in the first place. If the product is good enough, they wouldn't need to resort to anything special to enroll users beyond a sign up button up top.
I love #7. A lot of people would pay a monthly fee to maintain a checkmark on their profile as a part of a "Twitter Pro" account. That fee could cover the manual verification of the user via scanned photo-ID and become a profit center for the company. Think of it like Twitter's version of an EV SSL cert.
Yes, but you basically have to pass a notability test to get it (https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631). hellcow and nikcub are suggesting to just open it up to anyone who is willing to pay for it.
I don't know if it's still like this, but when I last tried to create a Twitter account it required a phone number and some kind of verification by phone. That's something I refuse to do.
I can sort of understand requiring that to try to combat the creation of spam accounts, for instance. But it made the service pretty much unusable for me.
Unless it's as easy to create an account there as it is to create one here or at reddit, I'll never bother with Twitter.
Yup I made an account several years ago to tweet to a support staff because I couldn't login. The next day my account was "suspended" or banned for something like "being a bot." Never looked back.
That feels like a vestige of Twitter's origins as a heavily SMS focused service. Even if that is true, though, odd to have such a high friction element to the registration flow for what is now a niche use case.
>8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter
That's a great one. The current process is very clunky from the user end. I can't imagine how clunky it is from the business side. Probably like a ticket system with no priorities, dates, state [open/closed/etc].
I think a lot of companies use software that wraps twitter. My company makes contact center software, and "twitter" is just another media type like calls or email.
> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'
Twitter generally needs to get a lot better at predicting what you'll be interested in (think Pandora.) Just based on the IP they should be able to tell a lot. Tweets that have been recently favorited, retweeted etc. in just your area would make a very decent default view (band coming to town! metro closure! the mayor is a jerk! etc.). Once you create an account they should also be able to predict a lot based on your activity. Oh, and please give us a Hide Tweet button. There are talkative people I'd still like to follow - but maybe a little less.
>5. [...] become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor
On a related note, we built a bot that recommends an event based on your tweet+profile. The amount of times we got banned what could be a useful service is off the charts. Twitter needs to engage more with devs rather than block them whenever they can.
The 140 character limit is what Twitter is most known for, and sets it apart from a typical social network.
It's something like a body-mark of Twitter.
It should stay.
Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time.
It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online distribution. Trump's tweets, the presidential debates broadcast on Twitter and the fact people turn to Twitter during breaking news make it a logical extension to move into news and possibly finance too.
Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics and the average joe has moved their engagement to more visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat where it is much easier to create and consume more personal content and updates.
Twitter would also be able to focus their monetization and advertising efforts around a much tighter content and audience niche. Plus consumers are used to paying for some of this premium content, making monetization of a freemium model even easier.
"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics"
Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of course). They also post opinions on the latest research publications. Twitter has become my best way to stay current in medicine.
Other apps targeted for doctors have attempted this. Doximity and Figure1 are examples. But twitter has done the best job.
That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.
As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers.
I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at super-serving your community. Is Twitter's ephemeral nature, mixed in with non-medical updates, really the best way for you to spot trends and identify useful links? If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?
> That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.
Although it's niche, you could substitute almost anything else for 'medical' and have it work. There's an equally good and thriving literary Twitter, arts Twitter, gay Twitter, black Twitter, politics Twitter, dev Twitter.
Turns out that people like their news and sports mixed in with other ephemera anyway - it's a secret that TV networks have known for decades with late night TV and 'and finally' segments on network news.
For me the point where Twitter really lost its way is when it decided to focus on being a 'media company' and drawing attention to tweets from 'public figuresrather than finding better ways to enable people to tap into and contribute to communities that matter to them.
The monetization Twitter has been able to achieve from this niche content hasn't met expectations and that niche content has also seen stalled growth.
Ephemera is what makes a sport/news/politics-aligned Twitter a much more interest proposition that routes around the negatives of the product and the value proposition on that front.
> If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?
One thing that's always bugged me about twitter - its so transient. when you log on you only get a snapshot of what's happening at that moment - scrolling back through the days or weeks traffic is next to impossible because of the sheer volume of content.
But in this way, the OP of this thread is correct - Live is most definitely where twitter is king.
That's called the "Long Tail"... individual users/customers have a niche interest, but together they form a center of gravity approximately as large as the largest use cases.
You have to think a little differently to design for the long tail. You can't just design one consistent experience, you have to design tools that can be used in many scenarios.
Yes, I'm familiar with the long tail ;) The problem is that Twitter has proven that it's incredibly hard to monetize this kind of content at a level that the public markets demand.
The reality is Twitter has failed as a business more than anything and this is about repositioning Twitter as a business that can be monetized.
It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money, or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.
If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.
Yes, it's a niche but how many niches in a similar vein exist on Twitter?
What I heard davycro describe above sounds a lot like the K-12 mathematics community on Twitter dubbed the MathTwitterBlogosphere #MTBoS. It connects everyone from kindergarten teachers in France to university professors and has been a source of tremendous professional development for me over the past four years.
Are there enough other communities like us out there to be material to Twitter's business? I don't know, but the #MTBoS derives great value from having Twitter as a gathering place.
Twitter also has incredible utility in terms of the InfoSec and Quant communities. All the latest papers and exploits are posted regularly, something that exists nowhere else. It also extends across borders, I follow numerous Chinese, Italian, and Middle Eastern hackers who post code and associating write-ups regularly.
The same goes for stock traders, the network offers incredible insights.
Definitely agree with this. Figure1 is great for focused learning, but Twitter has allowed me to hear about random clinical pearls, interesting cases, the latest research, and the ensuing discussions between active clinicians.
That's one of the reasons I built GroupTweet. To facilitate private group communication on Twitter with any number of participants that can persist through permanent Twitter accounts (instead of temporary Group DMs that are limited to 20 people).
Would love any feedback or suggestions on how it could be improved.
Happy to offer free use to anyone on this thread looking to test out the service.
You might want to check out Figure1 which is a social network for medical professionals and very twitter like but has a user base that's full of very people.
That was the original use case: "micro blogging". There is a case to be made for improving that interface and expanding the way people interact with Twitter for that. Curated follower lists for example.
Could you recommend 5-10 leaders in emergency medicine to follow? (I'm trying to build up a good follow list outside of my usual domains, and I find recommendation graphs to be really useful)
Depends on what content you're looking for, but off the top of my head, here's a variety of type of EM-related people/accounts. The first two are teaching resources. The rest are active (both clinically and on Twitter) clinicians or EM-focused students.
@emcrit
@epmonthly
@MDaware
@precordialthump
@seth_kelly
@mcsassymd
anything tagged #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education – often has an EM focus)
My undergrad degree's in biomedical engineering, and I've been a self-taught coder since middle school. I'm currently pursing my PhD in engineering in addition to my medical degree, and working on using computational simulations and analytics to improve our understanding of how electrical abnormalities occur in the heart. I've always been interested in startups but haven't actively been involved in one. My goal is to work in a academic setting where I do both clinical medicine and research, and hopefully help translate research work to the clinic by working with startups that are my or other people's research findings.
Not intrusive, thank you for the question. I'm a self-taught hacker/coder. Before medical school I made a Facebook application, when those were a thing, called Quiz Monster, which had about 3 million DAU for a few years. Thankfully earned enough through ad revenue to pay for my medical education. I see myself as a clinician first, but will always be a hacker and plan to return to software after residency.
I imagine one day I open Twitter to read my friends tweets and get greeted with message:
"Hello! Today, to make world more disrupted with innovation, we pivoted Twitter to become a sports TV channel! All your tweets are gone, instead open a bottle of beer and watch this great game! 20 well-fit males kick the leather sphere! Isn't it impressive?"
That will be day when I throw out my router to the window, flush smartphone into toilet, install MS-DOS and Fidonet software.
Foursquare managed to do this by migrating the original functionality to Swarm and pivoting the flagship product to something more monetizable.
Arguably it saved the company from going under while still enabling the original functionality for those who wanted to use it.
FWIW I'm not a sportsball fan either, but you can't argue that those of us with MS-DOS and Fidonet are in the minority. Sport is a super-majority content area that is very brand and advertiser friendly.
Did they actually manage that transition, though? I haven't heard anyone talk about Foursquare in years. My entire social circle effectively ran itself via Dodgeball when that was active; many of us remembered it fondly enough to give Foursquare a try, after Dodgeball's founders came back out of Google purgatory. It quickly became obvious that they really just wanted to become a cheap Yelp knockoff, though, and we all left. I don't remember hearing anyone propose a group migration to Swarm at the time, and I certainly haven't heard anyone talk about it since.
Checkin-based spontaneous social organization just... doesn't happen anymore, so far as I can see. Shame, because I really enjoyed it. If a new service came along which looked like it wasn't going to be evil, I might sign up and try to get my friends on board - but I wouldn't trust the foursquare people at this point.
I just looked at my cell phone and there's a notification of 9 friends checking in on Swarm - most of them early fellow-dodgeball users.
YMMV but most of my friends who were hardcore users switched over to Swarm upon the pivot. The migration was automatic btw - Foursquare told you in the app that checkins were no longer supported and offered easy install of Swarm with the same login credentials.
I think Ben Thompson's take on live-TV-on-Twitter is spot on:
"Twitter is still selling the exact same value the service offered back in 2006 — 'live commentary, live connections, live conversations' — and the only product ideas are to do what old media like television does, but worse: becoming the first screen for what is happening now means a screen that is smaller, more laggy, and, critically, in the way of seeing the actual tweets one might care about. It’s also an example of the worst sort of product thinking: simply doing what was done before, but digitally." [1]
Trying to replicate live TV - a market whose margins are currently contracting - is likely to mean preparing for a bloodbath.
I've seen other posts mentioning timeline changes, protocol changes, and opening up the API ecosystem, but I don't see any of these changes actually affecting Twitters bottom line.
Twitter is a great place to discuss what's going on right now. Whether it be sports, a natural disaster, political debate, news, etc. Twitter needs to be the place to go when you want social commentary / news on what's happening RIGHT NOW.
Twitter is very useful for professional announcements in a very informal setting. I use Twitter to follow colleagues and artists, not friends nor celebrities.
I think there's something TV-ish that's possible, but Netflix level? That seems difficult both in licensing and execution. However, I will agree what you propose now appears to be their end game. #hattip
They already have licensing deals with NFL and MLB, and built out the streaming infrastructure. I'd argue the licensing and execution is already proved out - it's time to focus on those, cut out the fat and double down on what's working.
You're so right. Twitter is all about NOW, about Live events, about the moment. Another way to exploit this would be to create a "news" space, a collection of journalist and press accounts which could be harnessed to provide live news feeds on trending stories. Maybe they do this already, but if not, they should
This is literally the only time I ever use twitter: to see, in real time, what people are saying about a certain event. (The Oscars, Presidential Debates, the Superbowl, the début of Stranger Things, etc).
But the app brings in so much clutter, and the interface is poor for quickly incoming tweets...
> Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics
What's the evidence for this claim? In academia, Twitter is super important, much more than Facebook or any other social platform. Academics are addicted to Twitter and I think you could charge them, e.g., for tweets longer than 140 characters.
Well, you should consider the possibility that you and your coworkers are not representative of academics more generally. In my research field Twitter is quite matter of factly really big. Also note that this was just an example showing that there are more areas where Twitter is doing really well than those that OP listed.
I'm talking about tens of thousands of people not individual cases. Pretty much every university, non-university research institution, and funding agency have active Twitter accounts. In my experience, most departments, and labs also have twitter accounts, not to speak of individual researchers. Jobs are found on Twitter, careers are made, new collaborations start there. I'm talking about tens of thousands of people who are highly active on a daily basis, whereas /u/kleiba was referring to himself and some unspecified coworkers which I interpret to be his lab mates.
"Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time." I didn't feel like their experiments in live broadcasting NFL games drew a large audience last year. I think twitter offers sports fans a solid mobile experience(checking real-time reactions from other athletes and sports fans) while watching the game on a big screen HDTV. The biggest sports and political events are also social in nature, most of the time you're watching in a group of people. How do you get a group of people to watch a sports/political event on twitter and discuss in real-time? I agree that Twitter's modern day utility lies here but the switching costs for the user have to be reduced.
"How do you get a group of people to watch a sports/political event on twitter and discuss in real-time?" Via friend lists. If all your friends are watching the game and tweeting at the same time then you are discussing the game with them
"the switching costs for the user have to be reduced" The rise of smart TVs with apps will lead to ever easier delivery of streamed programming to traditional mediums such as TV, while also opening new viewing experiences on mobile, tablet and computer.
Live sports rights are expensive. ESPN has been feeling the pain of having to pay the high prices while losing subscribers. Twitter wouldn't do any better with their ad-based monetization.
Could be an interesting case. reddit is already doing this for 'real time' conversations (via F5 refresh) in respective subreddits during games, speeches, conferences, etc.
Third Party Live TV content is significantly more expensive, competitive & complicated than the third party content Netflix pays for. To say it is a "greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet" is really naive, try to do little research on the market, live content is fragmented for a reason. Therefore we will need billions in cash to create a Netflix of Live TV, there are only a handful of companies(Apple, Microsoft) that can actually outbid the current players. Moreover the winning bidder is likely overpaying for the content making it less likely to see a direct financial return. To make it work it will require near perfect execution and cash Twitter does not have.
They've managed to already for it for NFL and MLB rights, and there's plenty of cheaper rights out there and up for grabs. Netflix didn't start producing original content to begin with, but Twitter could ramp their way up to obtaining a lot of the crown jewels of sport.
Their live streaming was all about content negotiation and marketing which I think they did a poor job of. The actual streaming was handled by MLB Advanced Media which is far and away the leader in this space. Twitter should just acquire them if they want to get into this space.
I would create a system where subscription to News on Twitter helps to automate payment for individual articles.
1. The lede or quote gets pulled into the tweet.
2. http://t.co becomes a payment-debiting gateway (402 Payment Required).
Basically, you would monetise the audience on behalf of the publishers who would be able to make their paywalls more porous.
Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement:
- Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions.
- Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share.
- Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to
coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops.
Edit: If anyone in Twitter wants to do this, please hire me - I'd be super interested to work on it. Wouldn't even need to be the CEO. ;)
You wouldn't own or display their content, nor would you set their prices (you merely give them the option to collect micropayments from a central wallet). Also, all social media companies already have data on their audience - that's just the way things are.
All publishers with paywalls have massive bounce-rates due to people not wanting to subscribe. This would help them make more money.
Micropayments on that level are a race to the bottom. Why read The Times content when you can be presented with a similar article written by some blogger. And why would media companies give Twitter any percentage of the cut? Twitter already supplies them with free traffic, it's in their mutual interest.
Facebook tried a similar approach with Instant Articles and the only publications that have jumped on it are the ones that are desperate for revenues. Big media companies are playing the long game. Content is king.
> Micropayments on that level are a race to the bottom.
> Why read The Times content when you can be presented
> with a similar article written by some blogger.
Because "Content is king" [0].
I'm not talking about the big companies that publish clickbait and make money through advertising at scale. I'm talking about smaller, niche, high-quality magazines and newspapers that need to show people that they're worth subscribing to. And that would like a more granular version of a subscription that allows more people to read them (instead of having to make their content freenium or free).
[0] You cannot talk about fungibility of publishers in one paragraph and then turn back on that to say 'content is king' in the next: you either believe one or the other.
Fair point, but I think my meaning did not come across correct.
Most articles today can be substituted with lower-cost versions of the same articles (news/reviews are good examples of this). There's your fungibility. Regardless though, publishers still hold onto their content, because it's one thing that Twitter/Facebook is lacking.
Is there much evidence to suggest that people are willing to pay for individual articles, though? Blendle has been around for a while and hasn't set the world alight. There are plenty of free news sources to compete with.
Probably not, but I think there could be a "twitter wallet" that the user pays into. Let's say I add $5 a month to this wallet and twitter pays it's content partners based on the percentage of click through received by me. It would work like Brave browser's wallet.
The problem with this though is it would probably encourage more junk content and instead of annoying ads we'll get more clickbait.
I like this idea. If I could subscribe through Twitter for the magazines/papers I'm reading I'd be much more likely to take on multiple subscriptions or try new sources out than I am now.
Basically turn it into an online Newspaper stand where I can read gated content without having to give out my personal info. or remember a username/password (to anything but Twitter.)
Yes - an adjacent thought, too: niche publications that are unable to make significant advertising money through sheer scale [0] would benefit from being able to attract users who just want to test the quality of their content before purchasing a full subscription -- or that wish to pay but only periodically for a smaller dose of content.
This might cause some niche, non-clickbaity magazines that do not have good web presences to become more interested in publishing content online.
Let the payment gateway link to whatever payment method(s) you already have, set a limit for automatic payment per day, and make it one-click ("Buy this article"), or even optionally zero-click below a trivial threshold (e.g. 10¢).
If you hit the daily limit, ask for confirmations, passwords, etc.
I love this. Publications could choose whether to be pay-per-view ($0.10/article) or included in some base-level subscription with profits shared based on how many clicks you get.
- Get rid of modals for everything. Especially: when clicking on a tweet to view replies, open a new page with better threading of replies, pagination, and no reordering (or optional "quality" reordering). Twitter is a forum on speed; take some good ideas from forums. Right now it's a forum on speed and acid.
- Have more options for blocking, including "block this person and everyone who follows them or followed them within last N days"
- Fix trending topic spam. Seriously, how is this so bad? Free advice: for every trending topic a tweet mentions over 1 in a single tweet, the probability that it's spam asymptotically approaches 1.
- Allow an unambiguous, never "played with", chronological timeline. Have a separate view that's your ML playground. The "In case you missed it" and "tweets you might like" features are good but I don't want them randomly appearing in my timeline.
- Allow alternate clients, even if you have to charge a fee.
- Similarly, create a separate free developer-focused API but clearly identify all tweets posted via that as "bot" and allow people to never see tweets posted by a bot, or tweets posted by a bot @ them. Tweets posted from the "alternative client" paid API would not be subject to this marking.
- Identify "sleeper cell" bots -- accounts inactive for a long time that suddenly become active, usually around a single topic, concurrent with many similar bots, and aggressively ban them.
- Do more and better things with Lists. Don't just show me 3 people to follow (usually clearly just based on the last person I looked at). Show me algorithmically curated suggested lists, popular lists, allow me to sort those by # of members, easily find lists that user X belongs to, etc., mark lists as low quality/harassment vehicles. Surface good content shared by my interest lists somewhere other than the timeline.
- My personal #1: give me the likestream of the people I follow. This is easily more interesting than their actual tweets, at least to me. Something like a quarter of my usage these days is visiting individual accounts "Likes" pages. At least use this data in the aforementioned algorithmic curation of Lists/suggested follows.
I think my list does address #3, at least somewhat. I don't have answers for #1 and #2, except hoping that if #3 is addressed people will give it another try.
- Allow companies to purchase moderation rights to a hashtag for a limited time. This might actually make advertisement campaigns asking people to share using a hashtag a viable thing.
I'm not an avid Twitter user and I don't think any of these would turn me into one. Maybe the issue is there isn't enough for me to do there...just saying.
> Get rid of modals for everything. Especially: when clicking on a tweet to view replies, open a new page with better threading of replies, pagination, and no reordering (or optional "quality" reordering).
A lot of users are not comfortable with browsing using many tabs. I've seen it myself a lot of times, and I suspect it's the main reason FB and Twitter started using modals in the same window lately.
I loathe the non-chronological timeline. I abandoned the official Twitter app for Twidere, which lacks many features - such as being able to display full threads most of the time - but preserves my timeline in chronological order.
But you're totally right. For me, the "you might like X" or "here's what you missed" is garbage someone is flinging in my lap. But for other people, whose feed may be too chaotic or moving too fast, it's probably the perfect way to consume twitter.
> - Fix trending topic spam. Seriously, how is this so bad? Free advice: for every trending topic a tweet mentions over 1 in a single tweet, the probability that it's spam asymptotically approaches 1.
At the very least, the topic attribution should be divided into separate buckets, the way search engines tried(do?) with meta-tags.
>Identify "sleeper cell" bots -- accounts inactive for a long time that suddenly become active, usually around a single topic, concurrent with many similar bots, and aggressively ban them.
Why? I use twitter maybe once in a few months, why should I get banned for that?
this is a pretty robust list with some good recommendations- but do you really think iterating on the existing feature set is sufficient? isn't that the focus that got them into this situation?
like, if they implemented every single one of your suggestions -- you think that would "turn Twitter around"? i'm not sure i believe it.
A fair point, and you might be right. But I'm an engineer & product person, so the more CEO-type change of vision moves are harder for me to evaluate.
What I really want is a global, public messaging protocol with Twitter-like pub-sub and integration points for secure third party apps including rich-media support and federated/individual controls for trust. And a flying pony.
I'd tear it apart until all that's left is a profitable, maintainable core. Like Craigslist.
Twitter's payroll (to say nothing of its stock-based compensation expense) is bloated. Slashing staff isn't a popular play. This is a textbook private equity deal.
Twitter's habit of ringing in the year with $500MM losses could be single-handedly cut with a 2/3rd staffing reduction (which costs lots in payroll and $800MM in stock-based compensation expense). How much of Twitter's $2bn in revenue would evaporate post-cuts. Over half? Still leaves $750MM of pre-tax income before R&D ($800MM in the FYE 2015). Cut that R&D budget in half, say you lose a further 25% of revenues, and you still have $160MM before taxes yielding $100MM of net income. That's worth $1bn to $2.5bn.
If you can grow that to $500MM over 4 or 5 years, you could sell it for ~20x. Discount back at 10% or 20% and you have an optimistic valuation of $4 to $7bn.
Twitter's trading at just under $12bn. I suppose I'd bid $3.50 per share and be willing to entertain someone talking just under $10 a share.
> It would be better to try to find a buyer at the current price
It would be even better to find a buyer at ten times the current price! Unfortunately, reality isn't so pliant.
Twitter had, as of the end of 2016, $3.8bn of cash and short-term investments on their balance sheet [1]. They also have $500MM of current liabilities and $1.6bn of long-term debt. This leaves $1.7bn of "free" cash.
Excluding financing activities, Twitter's operations and investments have lost about $450MM a year for the past three years ($1.0bn in 2014, $520MM in 2015 and a net gain of $165MM in 2016). So we're talking a few years until Twitter's face meets dirt.
It's a better bet to wait than lock yourself into an unsustainable valuation.
My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say.
I want twitter to be a feed of thoughts an opinions from people I respect, or important updates from companies I'm interested in.
I see a secondary value from twitter by people contributing to a conversation around an event, be that a sports game, a site outage, a traffic jam or an unfolding natural disaster.
Filtering out / systemically discouragingly a lot of the countless low-value/self promotional posts alongside a better hashtag (channel) view would be a great start.
So much this. I manage (using Echofon) by muting large numbers of people and casting them into 'talkative' and 'very-talkative' lists, which I glance at occasionally. The less frenetic tweeters then make up my main always-on feed. But it's a horrible hack for something that is so fundamental to the user experience.
Twitter could be so much better by fixing a few low-hanging UX fruit like this. Three others:
* let me zoom in on a picture without having to right-click and "Open image in new tab". I can't believe I actually have to point this out.
* text docs as attachments (like pics/videos). A stream of tweets from the same author, replying to each other is kinda cute once, not so much the next n000 times.
* it would be nice if any videos actually played in my incredibly weird rare browser (some thing called Chromium)
Yeah. By becoming a big company, Twitter missed her calling as a profitable, sustainable, 5-person operation a la Craigslist. Celebrities and others trying to make a career on the platform ruined it as a small interest-group informal discussion side channel.
I used to work for a (terrific!) company that uses all kinds of natural language processing tools on Twitter data: http://crimsonhexagon.com/
Without getting into specifics, I was constantly blown away by the trends we were able to discover just with simple techniques.
Twitter sells its data, so it really only pencils out for analytics companies like Crimson Hexagon to be B2B. If I were Twitter, I might recognize this as an opportunity to build good in-house filtering tools that are available to their users.
I think that Twitter and Facebook have similar problems - the choices that users make tend to ruin the experience for those users. People choose to follow (and continue following) folks who clutter up the feed.
>> those whose who have something worth saying tend to
...write books. It was never so easy buying books like today, so I don't get why I should waste my time reading #random #unimportant #stuff written by some social media managing intern from Bangalore.
No but seriously... so much this. Pardon my casualness.
Whenever we strive for both 'quality' (of information, talk/debate, etc.) and 'brevity', we end up with the exact opposite of books: traits d'esprit as they say in french, #randomWordPlays of the empty kind that made Levi Strauss hypothesize that humans didn't really form sentences but rather patched together chunks of expressions they had memorized (he was proven wrong by linguistics later on, but damn was his assumption so impeccably fitting much of the anthropological data). See any bland instance of "cheesy jpeg + logically flawed pensum" boasting thousands of likes/reshares circa 2017 to prove this point.
It's nothing new either, for as long as documented human societies existed, mind-numbing memes apparently were part of the landscape. For about as long, some (always much fewer) people prefered reading books. Or even writing them.
I don't think Twitter can ever be anywhere but at the far opposite side of books and quality discourse. Or it would become something else. Twitter is meant for remarks, quick-shot killer moves, and plugs. It's basically an ad board for opinion, and you've made a sale when someone likes/shares your tweet. Some people might defigure the sacred columns with a Shakespeare quote here and there, but vandalizing its culture is the only way to make a smart tweet.
I think it's OK that Twitter is 'dumb', as in non-filtering. Neutral towards speech, unpurposed. We need that too, just like we need curated libraries. It's fine that people have a place to vent and unwind. So long as they don't mistake that for an actual forum of opinion, let alone representative of anything but the few 'influencers' and their circles.
> My greatest problem with twitter is that those whose who have something worth saying tend to talk an awful lot less than those with nothing to say.
"He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know."
I originally thought this was an Israeli saying, because that's the only people I've heard quote it (usually journalists, referring to bloviating politicians). Turns it it's originally Laozi.
Twitter is really an unpleasant site to use for following discussions of any sort. When I click a thread-view for a post, I want to see a clear tree-view of all of the posts and replies like any other sane website, not the current flat-layout bullshit wherein you have no clue what the chronology of anything is, or who is responding to what.
There are a lot of good ideas in this thread for how twitter can refocus and monetize itself, but I think before all that you need to make it a site that more people enjoy using beyond its original use case of "waiting at the airport -- hmu".
I've never been a twitter user myself, but every now and then I end up following a link to a Twitter discussion, only to bounce right off again because I can't figure out what's supposed to be happening. Who is saying what to whom, in what order, in response to what? I can't tell. I imagine that there must be some context-literacy I don't have, which regular Twitter users somehow pick up on; or, possibly, Twitter only makes sense if you're following the stream of posts in real time.
Exactly the same for me. Every time I wanted to use Twitter I ended up confused by all that mess and closed it. Is it so hard to add tools (filters, permissions etc.) for more advanced users to create the experience they want? Twitter makes a wonderful media to follow interesting persons and getting breaking news, but probably 99.9% of its content for me is spam or uninteresting, annoying mess that I have no convenient way to avoid.
This analysis from Ben Thompson (Stratechery[1]) just yesterday would be a great place to start:
"Imagine a Twitter app that, instead of a generic Moment that is little more than Twitter’s version of a thousand re-blogs, let you replay your Twitter stream from any particular moment in time. Miss the Oscars gaffe? Not only can you watch the video, you can read the reactions as they happen, from the people you actually care enough to follow. Or maybe see the reactions through someone else’s eyes: choose any other user on Twitter, and see what they saw as the gaffe happened.
What is so powerful about this seemingly simple feature is that it would commoditize “live” in a way that is only possibly digitally, and that would uniquely benefit the company: now the experience of “live” (except for the shock value) would be available at any time, from any perspective, and only on Twitter. That such a feature does not exist — indeed, that the company’s stated goal is to become more like old media, instead of uniquely leveraging digital — is as good an explanation for why the company has foundered as any."
It may sound egotistic, but it's also a solid way to build something akin to a 'book' albeit in a discrete blogged form: you tend to quote yourself not to make the same point over and over again in so many different phrasings. It makes the arguments consistent, and rewards thoroughness, paying attention to each post (coherency, wording, etc.) Eventually it builds up a coherent, cohesive corpus of ideas that hopefully, should the theme be well-defined, is a book.
Usually when going for publication, you'd replace these quotes with references to previous chapters, typically in footnotes.
1. Remove senior management. They do not know what they're doing.
2. Experiment and find the right point between monetizing users and those that get the most value out of Twitter. Right now users' eyeballs are being bled dry, and getting their experience ruined with tons of ads, and timeline shuffling. It feels like those with tons of followers are getting a free ride at the expense of everyone else.
3. Introduce meaningful timeline features such as:
3a. Ability to follow #hashtags/topics instead of just people and companies. Curated "Moments" are a weak substitute.
3b. Follow geographical areas of interest (e.g. Top Tweets in Oakland, SOMA etc.)
3c. Ability to explore Twitter geographically. Again, I feel this is a huge and untapped. Heard something crazy happen over your neighborhood? Pull up an map and explore what people are saying around there.
4. Actually do something about trolls (Perhaps a reputation system?)
5. Clamp down on bots. Why is it even possible to follow 300k or a few million people?
6. Slim down the workforce, by a lot, unfortunately. I don't think a sustainable Twitter can ever be a large as it is today.
7. Bigger focus on live TV + discussion
8. Fix search: Its awful and nearly useless unless you put in a ton of effort in "advanced search". Top results are often times just the same retweets and news articles over and over again.
Offering the ability to follow hashtags in their current form would simply lead to more hashtag spam.
However I agree with your basic premise that following topics and geographical Tweets would be very useful. One of the main reasons I built GroupTweet. Allow people to form and manage "group" topical or location based accounts with any number of contributors while giving some admin controls like limiting approval to all or only select participants, moderation, etc.
Would love any feedback and suggestions on how we could improve to make your suggestions more of a reality.
There are a few camps of people using twitter, which want different things and are mostly being badly served.
1) Trolls love twitter. The legion of racist eggs sowing destruction for no other reason than their own nihilistic enjoyment is an existential threat to the business and must be culled. The company and the trolls cannot live together in peace. One or the other will die. It feels like twitter hasn't figured out it's them or you. There can be no 1st amendment compromise here. These guys are ruining you for fun. They gotta go.
2) Public figures. It's a good platform for them. Cull the trolls and they'll stay, bringing an audience of
3) Regular people, who need a nice feedback loop of people interacting with their tiny little voices. Twitter is pretty shitty at this right now-- if you don't have an audience, you're shouting into the void and are eventually going to figure out you're wasting your time and quit. This is shitty for engagement and it's sinking twitter. Facebook figured this out already. Just copy them.
4) The last group is "brands" and for-profit companies who are your actual customers, but who would like to free ride on the platform, soaking up the attention of the regular people for free. If they want access, they gotta pay. No free riding for non-people. Facebook also figured this one out. If you're not a human, and not a public figure, and you want the attention of humans, pay up. Twitter is also slowly figuring this out.
There's a virtuous cycle of engagement here, and Twitter is slowly getting it straight, but they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and that's going to hurt their monthly usage numbers. The management of that haircut is probably over my pay grade, but it seems like they're slowly getting it together with the algorithmic timeline. Had to be done. Livelock is a real thing for people who don't tweet professionally.
I've been hearing this since trolling was invented on Usenet. No one is going to rid the Internet of trolls unless all of the big players enforce RealName™ and we all know how well that ended. "Culling the trolls" means different things to different people, and probably almost every one of us has at some time in our internet lives posted something that another group would consider trolling.
> they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and that's going to hurt their monthly usage numbers.
From the handful of times I've clicked on a link to a tweet and then wandered around, I would bet that the trolls, spammers, and free riders make up something like 98% of their users, so I'm not sure this would really solve anything, since presumably their gross revenue is driven by the numbers of users.
You'll never get all of them, it's true. It's a never ending war.
And you're right-- there's a haircut that's got to happen at twitter. I don't know whether they'll survive it, but it's going to happen either way.
Revenue is driven by usage. Actual usage. They sell eyeballs. They can defraud their customers (the purchasers of said eyeballs), but only for a time. I think, as an article of faith admittedly, that you're better off being straight about it, but I've never piloted a ship that big, so what do I know?
This never has any numbers to support it, which is unfortunate.
Also, in a world of bubbles, how is a less free an open Twitter better? Is a Twitter with no controversy, with no argy bargy, really worth visiting?
I think Twitter's problem with trolls is minuscule compared to the problem of making it more entertaining, and easier to switch in and out of thoughts. If I like the NBA, cricket and South African politics, how do I switch between those three interests when, say, there is an NBA finals and a local election on? That is a problem much more so than trolls.
I think the trolls attack the public figures, which make the public figures less likely to attract the little fish, and the little fish are your audience, who need to be both entertained and interacted with, lest they decamp for a more robust social network like reddit or facebook. Both of which are far, far harder on trolls, bots, and spammers than twitter, not coincidentally. They recognize the fight to the death they're in, and are by and large winning.
Twitter was fine and good and groundbreaking at one point, but the naive implementation of a social network they cling to as a moral stand is obsolete for a billion dollar company. One who is more than large enough to game for profit or lulz.
They're going to adapt or they're going to die. Possibly both.
1. Remove post length limit.
2. Limit the number of tweets per day instead.
3. You can pay to remove the above limit.
This solves the problem of timeline being unreadable once you subscribe to enough people. Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap. Once everyone is rate-limited, everyone can easily digest their timeline. Without length limit, tweets become more thoughtful.
4. Fix the UI. Make it easy to view replies. Make it easy to view embedded images. Make it lean and fast. That would give Twitter advantage over similarly bloated services.
5. Anti-trolling measures. This one is really obvious! There should be no indication that you're blocked by another person, they just don't see you anymore. If the blocked person doesn't know they're blocked, they don't get the satisfaction of being blocked, and they don't know when they need to create another account to annoy you. This should be the basic rule when you implement a blocking feature.
+10 to this. The signal to noise on Twitter is terrible.
Pretty sure I'm using it "wrong", but my likelihood of following someone on Twitter is generally inversely proportional to their number of tweets per day.
In the set of people I follow, the popularity of Twitter accounts is directly proportional to the total number of tweets they have, which is a sample of almost 400 people. I did an analysis a while back.
Of course, there are always counter examples, famous people that don't tweet at all, or people posting dumb shit and not getting followers. That tweet to follower ratio has some variation. Quality matters too and it helps if people have a following outside of Twitter.
But still, I'd say that your likelihood of following someone is not representative of other Twitter users.
That post length limit is what made Twitter interesting for me. This is being identified as a problem, however there's always Facebook and Google+ that don't have a limit. Twitter will not succeed by copying competitors.
> 2. Limit the number of tweets per day instead. 3. You can pay to remove the above limit.
People will never pay for removing such limits. They'll simply switch service once it gets annoying enough. This is the flaw in the logic of people that are anti ads as a business model. Basically people will not pay up unless there's scarcity and artificial scarcity doesn't really work.
Such a strategy would also be really unwise, because from my own observations, a majority of Twitter users are fairly silent, being content consumers rather than producers. So alienating those users that produce content for you is not the best strategy.
Agreed that the post length limit shouldn't be removed. However, I am fine with a limited number of tweets instead. Perhaps not by day, since some days there are so many newsworthy events that there might be a lot of possible quality tweets. Maybe a weekly limit? Just something to discourage someone from spamming.
So what happens if instead of having 1,000 x 140 char tweets cluttering your timeline, you instead wind up with 100 x 1400 char tweets? Do you have time to read all that?
You can see if something is worth reading within the first 100 characters. Twitter character limit doesn't work because people are posting images of text, or do "tweetstorms". If the limit made sense, the users wouldn't be doing this.
Or rather what they think is causing Twitter to lose users/engagement. Those things directly affect whether Twitter will sink or swim within the next year or so which I think are critical.
People will stop switching to gab.ai? Twitter actually thrives on conflict - stop trying to turn it into a safe space for the easily offended! Or at least don't force it to be a neutered safe space for everyone - leave it up to the users to turn it into that for themselves, not for everyone else.
If the question "How would you turn Twitter around?" is being asked in public with tons of people giving great answers, I'm sorry but you have a major leadership problem.
Saudi investment money means none of that is ever ever going to happen. Twitter ain't ever going back from regressive left ideologies. If anything they're going to double-down.
The fact that Feminist Frequency is on the "safety council" should tell you enough about it and how useless it is.
This is rock-solid analysis, but I still have a couple questions. First, Saudi Arabians have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Twitter. Is this really the best strategy for weakening it? Or are you saying they're using Twitter as a weapon to poison America with the evils of feminism, or something?
Second, on a practical level, how did this happen? Someone from Saudi Arabia called up a Twitter executive and said "hey we think your platform could use more feminist perspectives" and they were like "oh yes, this makes perfect sense coming from you, and as you own 5% of our company we take your word as gospel"?
And obviously, what does Marxism have to do with feminism?
Sorry if you were joking, sometimes it's very hard to tell.
Well, "regressive left" is pretty vague and can mean pretty much whatever you want, but the connection between Saudi Arabia and Feminist Frequency is very specific and should be easily explainable.
I consider myself pretty tech oriented but I've never understood twitter, this is probably just my own stupidity but I've tried several times and it never makes sense.
I mostly just see replies to other conversations and I don't understand the context. Scrolling through the timeline I can't parse structure, it just seems chaotic.
Barely anyone I know uses twitter. It just seems to be a way to follow celebrities and politicians, I don't really care what they have to say.
Its the best source for breaking news. If something is going on I can search a twitter hashtag and parse out the good stuff for myself. Scroll through quickly and find people on the spot who may be periscoping etc.
Also because of the twitter culture/brevity In my personal experience people are more apt to reply. I have hired and been hired etc just through tweeting. I think there is a sort of casual atmosphere that can be used to get people to respond who otherwise never would.
Definitely. I had the same opinion, couldn't really figure out why it had any value. At some point I created a politically-oriented (anonymous) profile to interact before one of our local elections. I followed enough of the people who used it well (media, some politicians, various individuals) to pick up the value in it.
Killed that profile, created my own, still enjoy it. I don't follow too many people, I prune noise by either unfollowing or muting. I still don't care to be one of the chatteratii but it's great.
Some journalists (usually serious ones), some startuppy people, some friends, some investors. I often read stuff long before it hits the news, I see what journalists say on a less-scripted platform. Find opinions you value, follow them. Use e.g. Tweetbot.
That is true, the timeline is fragments of multiple conversations or popular statements. You are right that it is difficult to parse the feed, because your brain has to context switch between all the conversations. Whereas for instance a hacker news feed gives you exclusively top level headlines with a place to go for discussion.
Like a giant flock of birds all chirping to their immediate neighbor with slight variations on the same theme? Like a massive digital game of chinese whispers.
I'm sticking to the tree branched nature of reddit/HN. The flock can go flap their wings all they want.
Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with?
Right now you can turn on notifications for a user's tweets, but that gives you push notifications for all of their tweets which is super annoying. Also, 99% of users don't know that exists.
Their recent move to make trending topics and search more visible in the iPhone app is a step in the right direction but they're a long ways off.
FOMO and live is how they're different from Facebook. I can always go back to Facebook at any time and they'll show me what I missed and I can still engage with it. With Twitter, the discussion has come and gone and I'm left out if I don't know it's happening.
> Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with?
100% agree. Twitter needs to be in the game of maximizing signal-to-noise for their users. In my experience, there's just /way/ too much noise when you're trying to follow along with a live event. I almost never want to see content from a random account with 10 followers. Nor do I want to see a d-list celebrity hocking skin care products. What I really care about is how the conversation is shaping itself over time.
There are many ways of fixing this that don't spoil Twitter's free-speech mission. Personally, I think the answer is in clustering tweets based on topic and sentiment, then presenting a really intuitive filtering UI. You could expose options that would help you understand the broader conversation, but also dive into it at a super granular level.
Getting this right would be in the hard-but-possible realm. Given how many engineers Twitter has stockpiled, I think it's worth trying. Solving the noise problem would necessarily cut down on abuse, too.
I want to watch the superbowl from twitter: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/technology/with-nfl-deal-...
I have no idea how to watch the superbowl and I tried several apps. I had cable tv for like 1 year of highschool, and haven't felt any reason to purchase for myself since, but some things, like the superbowl / Olympics / World Cup etc. would be really great to be able to watch - no I'm not going to deal with cable / buying a TV just for 1-3 events yearly.
Interesting idea. It's been said that lack of alternatives to viewing sporting events is the biggest reason the remaining cable subscriber base hasn't cut the cord yet. Definitely an area sorely in need of disruption.
but you'll probably need a better directional antenna to have good reception (depends on the specific part of the world for how strong the signal is).
Once you're used to fast internet you won't want any of that though. Streaming HDTV on a 50Mbps+ internet connection ends up being a better experience since you don't have to go through all the setup hassle to make this work equivalently (installing the antenna, connecting it to a dongle on your own server, installing some kind of head end software, streaming from that server over your own network). I've done both and the antenna setup is now fully deprecated.
I think Twitter is already pretty great. My suggestions are below:
- Twitter is a platform, open it up to allow any clients first class access.
- Stop political censorship immediately. It's fine to prevent scams and bot-nets, but do not stifle political speech.
- Lower burn rate. Cancel all of the product-oriented projects that are expensive, simply focus on building the infrastructure to make Twitter's platform as inexpensive as possible to maintain. I'd estimate 10% of Twitter's employees are actually needed.
- Be very cautious about ads. Do not compare yourself to Facebook for ad revenue generation. This is a long-term decision that will require adequate funding to undertake.
And when that political speech threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or people? 'Cause I'm not saying you're conflating the two, but a whole lot of people for whom this is an axe they grind really kind of constantly do.
Removing all the anti-hillary trending or pro-bernie hashtags really pissed me off during the election. Google does similar things with auto-complete.
Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them? You can threaten people over anything, why conflate threats with political speech? There is real censorship on twitter over political ideas, and threats don't even enter into it.
> Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them?
Because it's not. The actions of actively authoritarian/alt-right political actors on Twitter are inextricably tied to the movement itself. Milo Yiannopoulos was not banned for the content of what he said. He was banned for saying things he knew would rile up his base of threatening, assaultive troglodytes into attacking someone based on their political priors. Coca-Cola is not going to pay Twitter if Twitter is a cesspool of people whose idea of political speech is threats. And, right now, a very large portion of it is. And given that free speech has the implication of free association, it's very fortunate that those poor benighted alt-righters who are so very censored have their own places to talk where nobody will get in their way--
--but, of course, it's not about talking about their political ideas at all. It's about forcing others to listen to them.
Twitter need not be an accessory to that. There is no great loss, either moral or financial, to the slow leakage of anime avatars and Twitter eggs.
> Twitter need not be an accessory to that. There is no great loss, either moral or financial, to the slow leakage of anime avatars and Twitter eggs.
Many people would say that exact thing if Twitter decided to censor content that was about gay marriage, etc. You are giving Twitter an easy out. Just censor everything that doesn't go over well in the suburban zipcode that best mirrors the target audience of Coca Cola.
If that would make them more money, I expect they would do that. It's obvious from even a cursory look at Twitter's demographics that it wouldn't make them more money and would make them look bad and hurt their bottom line. Much like the alt-right racist contingent makes them look bad and hurts their bottom line.
That would be why I am making a clear distinction between "moral" and "financial". The alt-right is immoral and financially negative. The people you so concernedly cite are neither.
Nnnnnno, it's not "just words". It's threatening to kill and rape people, directly attacking their safety and their right to a peaceable life. It's giving a platform to people who are putting the idea in others' heads that they should hurt and kill people. I don't have to follow the "race realist" assholes among us to have the fact that they are given a platform by a company under no obligation to do so--and that they use that platform to gather followers under the direct purpose of separating the white race from the blacks or the Jews or whoever the hate-object-of-the-week is. Their followers do. They are strengthened by being given their platform with which to attract more soft-headed followers. Words have consequences that cannot be waved away so cavalierly. Those consequences may not impact you, but they impact a whole lot of people and they can't be dismissed.
The government should, for reasons that make a lot of sense, be reticent (but not wholly unwilling, because the real world doesn't work in absolutes) to intercede here, because freedom of speech with regard to the state is a different thing from respecting and accepting speech by society--but Twitter isn't the government.
> they use that platform to gather followers under the direct purpose of separating the white race from the blacks or the Jews or whoever the hate-object-of-the-week is
I find the sort of speech you describe highly unsavory, but I also disapprove of many other messages. Many people would advise Twitter to suppress the speech of gay people or immigrants, all the groups they hate.
The point of speech being speech is that it doesn't harm anyone. If some unsavory group manages to get 5K followers then I'd like to be aware of it and see what they are talking about.
Also, for the purpose of law enforcement, public Twitter activity could constitute signals intelligence to help stop crimes.
The idea that words have consequences (as you describe) is one of the most anti-liberty ideas in our modern culture right now. It's behind everything from unconstitutional "material support of terrorism" charges based on speech, to prosecuting journalists who report on classified information under the espionage act, to trigger warnings on works of classic literature, etc.
By censoring politically charged accounts Twitter likely benefits those groups by allowing them to skate by with coded speech in public but then keep their private rallying cries away from public scrutiny.
Keep in mind also that as a company, Twitter will be under pressure from interest groups and governments worldwide to suppress speech. Should we be allowed to criticize China on Twitter? Well, not if the China market becomes important enough to Twitter's revenue.
By failing to adopt a firm stance against censorship, Twitter has greatly damaged its credibility as a platform and opened the door to all sorts of censorship requests.
There are enough moralistic gatekeepers in the world, why should Twitter be another?
I'm not sure why Tweets and free speech are so closely intertwined in this sort of discussion. Twitter is a for-profit business that isn't profitable. The OP asks what would you do to turn it around (which I'm taking as "make it profitable"). Some suggest better prevention of perceived harassment. My Uber driver has the free speech right to tell me 'my father smells of elderberries,' but if they do it's reasonable to assume I will no longer be riding in Ubers. Consequently, Uber sees it in their interest to try to prevent this sort of occurrence. Nobody tells me 'my father smells of elderberries' on Twitter, but if they did on more than a one-off basis I could see myself no longer enjoying the product, and consequently no longer using it, engaging with it, or promoting it. Twitter would be acting rationally to try to prevent this. So really the question becomes, is the damage to their brand and their user base from perceived harassment greater than the damage to their brand and their user base that would be induced by blocking this perceived harassment. Since one harasser can harass many users I suspect that the benefits would weigh in favor of protecting users from perceived harassment. I use "perceived" repeatedly here because I don't think it matters to the business of Twitter whether it's real or over-sensitivity, the customer is always right.
Broadly censoring accounts based on a subset of the content those accounts have posted is like Uber deciding not to do pickups / dropoffs near mosques.
Twitter has a profit incentive not just to censor content, but to make as much of the content as possible paid ads.
My suggestion to Twitter was to focus on what I think is the core value prop of twitter -- its infrastructure as a broadcast platform.
I realize many people prefer the approach Facebook takes where everyone is required to enter their real name and accounts are linked to credit scores and social security numbers, and login is required to view the content so that an ad can be served.
But I think the most promising social media infrastructure is something more like an unfettered Twitter. Simply a medium for exchanging ideas and broadcasting to the world without big media budgets or high production costs.
Yes, this gives some prejudiced jackass (or presidential candidate or ISIS) the same facility as highly credible organizations, but I think it's for the best.
Twitter's strength is an addressing scheme and non-reciprocal follow graph which allows a lot of expression to happen that would not likely occur otherwise.
The challenge for Twitter is to think of itself as an infrastructure company but not think of its product as ads.
Wait wait wait, a mosque isn't an individual. What people want Twitter to do is prevent certain individual users from pointing objectionable content at other users; based on those certain users patterns of behavior. So, Uber not picking up a certain cleric because they're known to bite their thumbs at drivers. Maybe a better analogy is a restaurant patron sitting in their own both, but yelling across the room at other patrons. If you own the restaurant, you'd consider silencing them or booting them so they wouldn't detract from the other customer's experiences. (Or maybe I just like analogies.) The complaint I hear from Twitter users isn't that people are broadcasting things they disagree with, it's that Twitter makes it to easy for people to broadcast directly at a specific person. Bearing in mind that anyone has the opportunity to leave the platform if they don't enjoy it. When I was in college I wouldn't have tried to prevent my institution from letting (for example) Milo, speak, I just wouldn't have gone to see him. But if my university let him show up in my dorm room, or gave him my cell phone number, or required me to attend his talk - I'd have had an issue. To be clear, the idea of Twitter being an entirely open broadcast platform has merit, and maybe it would be a better strategy (I assume that's sort of what Gab is trying to be?), but I think the people who say Twitter would be more successful if it pushed back harder on patterns of perceived harassment have a valid point too. I suspect any platform that opens the door too wide to one user bothering another is going to suffer in acquisition, retention, and referral - not a great start to any path to revenue.
> Twitter has a profit incentive not just to censor content, but to make as much of the content as possible paid ads.
The latter implies the former. I promise, Coca-Cola is never going to advertise on Gab. You're never going to see a paid spot for Budweiser on an 8chan board. There is simply no demand from marketers for prime placement alongside death and rape threats, photos of people outside their homes with crosshairs overlaid, etc.
> focus on what I think is the core value prop of twitter -- its infrastructure as a broadcast platform.
Yes, but every successful broadcast platform I'm aware of imposes some standards on the content they carry. I'm not sure why you think Twitter needs to break from that model.
It's not coming from the people that users follow, it's coming from strangers who either @ them directly (e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/lily-allen-stillbir... ), or use twitter to forment violence against persons or people who aren't even on twitter.
Milo was banned not because of anything he said directly against Leslie Jones, but because he drove a hate mob against her. Twitter really needs to give people the anti-abuse tools they demand.
What would those tools look like exactly? If you tell your 50,000 followers where I live and that what I really need is a bullet in the head, what does the tool do? Hide it from my feed? Super. When the armed militia appears on my lawn, at least I will have been spared the stress of reading about it first, I guess.
That's a serious question. What anti-abuse tools do you think they should deploy that don't actually prevent people from posting or seeing the abuse?
The people who actually harass (and are the ones who primarily bleat about "censorship" on private services) have been bleating about tools like BlockTogether and similar being "censorship"--how are "better anti-abuse tools" out of Twitter themselves any different? When--not if--these tools auto-block poisonous harassing protofascists from the default because they are poisonous harassing protofascists, how is that any different?
It's different because then users who don't like content to be censored can turn it off. I turn off Google Safesearch and have not regretted it in the least.
No, it's not a position only sustainable from privilege. I'm fairly privileged - white, male, upper middle class, good job, good neighborhood. If someone threatened to kill me, that's just words - it's not the same as them showing up at my door with a gun in their hand. But I'd still have to think seriously about whether they were going to show up at my door, and what to do about it. It's just words, and also it's not. My "privilege" doesn't insulate me from the "and also it's not" part.
Very true. My comment was not meant to suggest that I think Twitter should promote already illegal forms of speech like threats, etc.
To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society.
A non-privileged person is free to draw a cartoon of Trump that looks like Muhammed. In a totalitarian society nobody is free to draw cartoons of certain subjects.
To assume that a person of lower social status is more likely to be emotionally wounded from words is akin to claiming him/her to be less rational (and thus less human) than others.
Speech is dangerous because it can incite passionate behavior while also being nonviolent. That is why we must preserve our right to this freedom. It is far better than the many coercive alternatives.
Information is powerful, and it can empower and inspire people to act. But the idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed reminds me of the embarrassing attempts during the 1980s by social conservatives to cast heavy metal lyrics as satanic and deserving of censorship.
> To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society.
No, we're not. As a straight white guy, I can say "video games suck because X, Y, and Z" and people might call it stupid or call me a "cuck", but that's about it. A woman who say "video games are generally cool but have some problematic tendencies like X, Y, and Z" gets death and rape threats and have people post her personal information online. I know this happens because a friend did this, had it happen, and ended up crashing on my couch for a few days while she found a new apartment and moved because she feared for her safety, something which literally-literally does not happen to straight white men (though does happen, in varying but generally lesser quantities, to queer and minority men, and happens a lot more to trans people in general) who express similar opinions in that space.
Almost as if the numbers I drew in the genetic lottery has led to the privileged position of being able to speak in ways that others cannot without being literally endangered. How very strange.
There are many aspects of how society treats men and women differently that are abhorrent to me. One of the most abhorrent is how a girl who struggles in math is more likely to be encouraged to focus on other subjects, while a boy in the same situation is more likely to be encouraged to achieve mastery.
We (as a society) can do so much better... but censoring ideas is not he solution.
Refusing to associate with people is not "censorship" of ideas or anything else. Damaging, abusive people can be kicked out of one's place of business and it ain't a problem.
I will not cede the ground of basic language to protofascists and you shouldn't either.
So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood your last paragraph). grandalf sees blocking that speech as protofascism (more or less - he doesn't use that word).
I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech as if it were violence - no matter how threatening the content of the speech - opens another door to the fascists. You want it as a weapon to use against vile speech. But the problem is, that weapon will be turned against your speech soon enough. Your speech will be classified as "vile", "hateful", "violent", and banned. Rationally, based on content? No, but as a means of control by whoever's in power at the time.
Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech? I'm saying that private organizations should choose not to be associated with white supremacists and their ilk. Twitter's not the government. The protofascists and their broheims can go hang out on Gab dot AI for all I care. But they don't want that, because that means there aren't any targets for them to assault. Which they do, en masse, as part of a planned and intentional strategy to silence and shut up women and minorities across a wide range of topics.
Twitter does not need them. Twitter does not benefit from them. Twitter will actively lose users by pursuing these jackals as customers. And so Twitter should show them the door. But I certainly haven't said a word about the government prohibiting speech.
(I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.)
Um, you just said something about prohibiting speech. I agree, Twitter's not the government, so it's not a First Amendment issue for Twitter to do this. Nevertheless, you are calling for Twitter to block speech.
> I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.
I will not engage with you with regards to "threats are violence", because you're trying to change the definition of words, and then say that those who disagree are silly. You should be better than that, or at least better than your "argument" in the last paragraph.
The self-described white supremacists (since you don't like "protofascist") who plague the mentions of women who dare to comment on politics or make video games are not deprived of liberty because Twitter decides to show them the door. They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves.
Put those goalposts down. You're going to pull something.
> They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves
We can all imagine what Twitter would be like if created by a church group. Certain, virtuous tweets would be promoted, and tweets containing sinful thoughts would be banned.
This system would be fine, but not really any better (or different) than a phpbb system maintained by that same group. It would be a walled garden with very clear limits to the kind of speech and expression it wished to foster.
Twitter can be this too, but by doing so it lowers itself to the status of simply a large phpbb board with a righteous troupe of moderators keeping order.
Some people (such as yourself) seem to prefer this, and seem not to tolerate certain kinds of views being expressed, even when users are not forced to consume those views.
The drive to create a heavily censored/curated environment is exactly the opposite of the drive to create a platform.
Viewed as a worldwide platform, Twitter would have to maintain a ridiculous ratio of censors to users in order to provide adequate levels of totalitarian censorship of unapproved ideas.
If Twitter's massive censorship bureaucracy is causing it to flounder and face a loss of credibility with investors, it ought to correct for this rapidly by adopting a firm no-censorship stance.
Coca-Cola could easily ask to advertise only to people who have not viewed (for whatever reason) a white-supremacist tweet in the last 30 days.
i would love to see twitter-as-a-protocol but it's not going to be the current twitter. people forget that instagram bootstrapped itself off twitter's social graph and then bailed when they reached critical mass
I think this is what we all want, but I'm skeptical developers will return when it's implemented. Maybe if they focused on young devs? Give them an alternative to Snapchat?
that's interesting thought. i wouldn't be surprised if (big if) twitter opens up again and young developers embrace it for the first time (and old devs come back).
Layoff everyone except for the bare minimum to keep the company operational (~100-200 people), take it private and print money for 10 years then let it naturally sunset itself.
Came here to say cost-cutting. I'm not sure that Twitter will sunset itself.
Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen. Twitter is a protocol, and an excellent one. If it continues to serve as a backbone of public-domain discourse, it can remain relevant for the foreseeable future.
WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition, with 0.5B monthly users. Twitter currently has 0.3B monthly users and 3860 employees.
I keep considering TWTR, even had a limit order open for a while, but keep walking away.
> Craigslist remains an institution, even if its impact is beginning to lessen.
Is it? It's a private company and so is not subject to the same disclosure rules as a public company, so no one outside the company can actually say how they're actually doing.
Meanwhile, as a publicly traded company, TWTR is required to publish all sorts of information about the site's popularity, for critics to play armchair CEO with.
Not really, if you layoff everyone you'd save so much in liabilities you'd have a buyer for it almost immediately. Twitter isn't worth much now, but if you cut the fat it's actually a profitable company.
I worked for a major gaming company for almost a decade and based on that, I think it should be paid for by its corporate users.
Not from the angle of paying to use the service to tweet, but paying for access to tweetdeck. I know there are some fees associated with that, but from my understanding most of those revolve around "customization" and "reports". I think it should straight up be "if you want to see your mentions, you pay".
We dedicated multiple units of headcount in multiple departments. One department was treating it straight up as an additional contact channel and scheduled almost 24 hour coverage on it. One department devoted a whole TV to tweet deck to watch the various mentions. There were multiple instances where customer services issues were caught and handled before they blew up because we saw them emerge on twitter before we saw it on any of our internal tools.
This was especially true for regional/smaller issues. I was in the department with the TV for tweetdeck, and a phenomenal value came from being able to see the "burst flow" as an issue emerged. Each individual tweet wasn't really important, but flurries = issues that need to be addressed, and specific tweets can be dug into for specifics if needed.
I imagine this would be valuable to almost any "always on" type corporation, and there should be enough of them, doing well enough, that they could foot the bill.
Imposing a modest signal cost should improve the signal - to - noise ratio substantially.
Charge for reach. Ask accounts with more than 50K followers to either pay for all followers to receive tweets, or limit distribution to 50K followers, randomly chosen.
It's the accounts with many followers that get the most benefit from the platform.
And, a twitter crack could, in present circumstances, cause global political instability. The accounts with > 50K followers, if compromised, are the accounts that could cause this sort of problem. Why shouldn't the users of those accounts shoulder at least some of the cost of securing the service and making it fast?
Another possibiity: the Bloomberg Terminal biz model. Charge consumers of twitter for timeliness, and delay messages to unpaid consumers and general feeds. Allow originators of messages to purchase timeliness for their own messages, even to unpaid consumers.
I've been saying this for years, and I mean since 2007 or 2008, though I had figured just price levels. If you have 100K followers, that's probably worth some money to you. If you have 1M followers, that's worth even more. I was saying in the 2008 elections that CNN should have an entire rack in the data center sponsored by them, they were pushing their Twitter handles so hard.
One thing would be the fake followers, where you could DOS someone by creating bot accounts to follow people and use up their slots. I like the idea of randomly chosen followers, that's a twist I didn't think of; it also mitigates the issue of the fake followers. You could also do the opposite, charge to follow more than some number of accounts.
That's what Facebook is doing. Lowering organic reach. It pisses tons of people off. Basically you hand crafted this audience under the guise that they're yours forever. You took time to post interesting content, you engaged with your audience. You basically made the platform valuable in the first place by creating value.
One of these comments would have been ok, especially if you added relevant substantive information. But at this point you're spamming the thread, so please stop.
Focus on the core business and aggressively eliminate any and all costs not directly associated with it. It's ridiculous that they're one of the most popular websites on Earth that makes ~$2bn/year, yet they manage to piss it all away on things that don't noticably improve their service.
What Twitter really needs is to be bought up by some Wall Street type who can look at their books and do just that, and not much more.
Turn the entire business model 180 degrees. This might be very radical, but hear me out.
1) Creating a twitter profile (with tweeting privileges) costs $5. Profiles without tweeting privileges are free.
2) Once you have 10000 followers, you need to pay additional $$ per year. This fees increases exponentially as you gain more followers. Eg. Famous people pay a lot. Unless this $ is paid, the follower count caps up and the follow button disappears from the profile.
3) Stop considering no of active user profiles as a metric entirely.
4) Regular non-famous people can create profiles (that do not have option for others to follow), but can follow famous paying users for free.
5) If a normal non-famous person wants to chime into the conversation, they pay a one-time fee of $5 to become a paid user. Now they can tweet and have followers. If they ever get too famous, they might have to pay again to unlock ability to have 10000+ followers.
This way you try to charge the users who actually have the money to spend. Let's admit, people with high follower counts like politicians do gain a lot from twitter, and would probably pay for un-mediated access to the population.
This also fixes the problem of junk / troll accounts.
Edited. I meant creating profiles with tweeting privileges will cost money.
I think sometimes we need to rethink what growth and engagement means. In my model, Twitter does not rely on advertising.
Famous people might still be interested, because you allow them un-fettered access to disperse their message directly to the population without any filters and trolls bothering them.
1. Move the office to a city other than San Francisco where the costs of living aren't exorbitantly high. Plenty of other cities that have lower costs of living and would offer tax breaks for a company like Twitter. Allow employees to remotely work if they want.
2. Reduce salaries and lay some people off. Having seen how many people work for Twitter and how big their office is on Market street, some people need to go. Realise this wouldn't be popular, but Twitter is spending way too much cash.
3. Reduce the size of the ridiculous buffet they have for lunches, make it a fixed menu with 3 or 4 meals to prevent food waste. Get rid of the free alcohol and soft drink they seem to offer.
4. Actually, embrace developers, make the API limits more generous and allow developers to build cool things like the early days of Twitter.
5. Raise the character limit (even make this a premium feature, double it to 280 characters).
6. Get rid of Jack as CEO, it's not working. Twitter is losing money, they're not innovating and they keep focusing on things like video which most don't care for.
7. Focus on the core product and get rid of the Google-like dream products.
The way I see it, Twitter isn't a complicated idea. It's somewhat predictable size text strings being shown in a feed. Twitter is the kind of app you clone when you're learning a framework like Ruby on Rails, it's not a complicated idea from a technical standpoint. There is no reason to be spending two-billion per year.
- Focus and elevate video content. Entire TV episodes are sometimes made public on Twitter - there's no way to surface this. When The Expanse has a new episode, it should go into a tab that's YouTube on Twitter.
- Pay video creators out the ass to get them to dual-publish from YouTube, and create auto-sync features that let them publish in both locations. Build in live-streaming functionality to compete with Twitch.
- "Async realtime". When watching a show, make it possible to replay Homeland tweets from the time you start. If you watch an Apple Keynote later, make the realtime tweets replay, and make it possible to add your own.
- Allow different engagement models. If someone has a whiff of abuse in their feed, make it trivial for them to see only verified + low risk users. The moment someone sends an @message to someone they've never conversed with with a single abusive word, crank the risk on them. If someone wants to engage with the firehose, make that the default.
- Make it easy to "import" feeds. I've had at least 3 friends ask me who to follow, and then we spend 15 minutes scrolling through my follow list, they manually look them up. When a new user registers on Twitter, I should be able to pick 3 people I'm most interested in following, and it should then recommend the people they like the most.
- It should be one-click to "super follow" someone, and get all their follows into my feed. Make it trivial to get an awesome, active feed. And trivial to reduce noise when I'm not interested in something.
One thing for sure, I would remove posting privileges from the API.
Yes it is a bold move. It has a great platform ecosystem but the amount of automation you can do is what removes the value from the platform. For example, followers mean nothing anymore and auto-DMs from people I recently followed is an Ah-NO moment.
Instagram and LinkedIn have kept POSTing out of their API for the most part. One reason (of the many) they are thriving is because people know it's all handmade engagement.
I'm guessing Twitter has about as many users as it can ever hope to have, which means it's no longer about growth, it's about profits. That means it's time to cut costs, largely in engineering. You need a far smaller team to run a service and make incremental improvements than you need to grow a service aggressively.
Fire almost everyone. Cease innovation and roll several things back. Open the API up more. Limit spending to what you can afford and coast forever. Growth is overrated.
1) remove the 140 character limit. It was not a problem when you wrote it, and it definitely was not a problem today.
2) two factor phone verification should be removed. It makes people want to leave. Allow it to be turned on as an option, but don't force it in your users.
3) allow users to user your service without having an account.
4) increase the number of data analytic tools available for public use, tools that can explore relationships between social networks and postings
5) remove the whole ghost-tweet feature. No one hates it more when a site says Yes this message was posted, and then you look back and it really wasnt. It frustrates users, it also will make them leave, by the millions.
6) stop censoring speech and removing accounts for trivial behavior through speech. If anything replace it with a user voting feature so that posts can be flagged for different types of bad content and reported. The whole censoring option needs to be toned down about 1000%. No one will use your service if you keep doing this. Why should they? If you don't allow them to publish, one of the other 50 twitter clones will.
Food for thought: press enter twice after each bullet/number point which acts like starting a new paragraph (i don't know why they made that the format) but it makes it easier to read.
1) Add golden heart
2) Sell golden hearts to users.
3) Reward some golden hearts daily to users, perhaps based on tiered ranking.
4) Allow advertisers to gift golden hearts to users.
5) 'Promote' tweets with golden hearts and display them in Moments.
In short, allow peer promotion. Red hearts are currently being wasted as weak social signals and nods. This change blurs the line between ads and peer-promotion.
That's not the worst idea on here. I have no idea how much Patreon and various crowdfunding sites take in, but scale those up to Twitter's audience (which has some meaningful overlap with those likely to use or benefit from those services) and they get the foundation for a payment/micropayment type model. Twitter tried doing this with some sort of direct commerce experiment, but "give $5 to a cause/artist/politician" tends to be a more social activity than going right after retail, or hoping to crack the micropayments for content nut.
Aggressively use twitter to eat Yahoo Finance. There is a type of consumer that cares about twitter only in context to market/happenings and they have one of the best feeds for it. I don't want it to look like twitter, it should just be a totally separate product that takes advantage of being a primary user of twitter's data without being external. Make it a freemium service where the premium is looking at data more than a week old for $/year.
You have it in your power to truly differentiate your platform and make the world a better place by implementing controversial topic and filter bubble detection (per the paper we looked at yesterday), together with letting users see their polarity score (per today’s paper) and making controversy reducing / filter-busting follower recommendations (also per today’s paper). This would be something new and unique in the world of mass media consumption, and could help to make Twitter great again.
Lot of great ideas. The problem I see is execution (I'm an ex-employee). Primitive versions of most of the ideas suggested in these comments are tried and given up because they didnt really show huge difference in growth or other engagement numbers - This is partly because one of the below:
1) primitive implementation/design is very bad compared to the original idea.
2) There is huge reward in Twitter for starting new projects. But no one follows through to make sure project is well maintained/supported.
3) Cross team coordination is not good
Your comment leads to what may be the core advice I have: get better metrics.
Twitter has always suffered from being in the wake of metrics that their competitors excel at. That's led to an inability to manage investor expectations and focus on features and project prioritization that doesn't create long-term value.
1. Allow limited following of accounts. Right now, when you follow someone, it's either all (default) or nothing (if you mute/unfollow). But in many cases, I'm only interested in a subset of someone's tweets, on certain topics. For example, I'd follow many more scientists if I could just see their tweets on science, but not see their political or personal or sports-related tweets, which add too much noise to my feed. This would also be good for tweeters, as they could freely tweet about anything they like without risk of alienating followers.
Maybe Twitter could use the hashtag system to accomplish this?
2. Make replies work better. Relax the character limit for replies to several hundred characters, make replies threaded, make low-quality replies go away, and high-quality replies float to the top (just like HN). Remove the line noise by having @ and # symbols not show up in the feed. Hashtags and mentions also shouldn't use up any characters. If all this happens, it will become reasonable to have actual conversations on Twitter.
3. Stop showing me duplicate tweets. Once I've seen a tweet, I shouldn't see it again if it's reposted (something many media outlets tend to do frequently).
Actions like this will make Twitter a better experience for regular users, and should help to kickstart growth.
4. Charge whales (those with the most followers, who disproportionately benefit from using Twitter) actual monthly fees.
I feel there are majorly 3 issues which Twitter can address right away and increase their Revenue and user base. I am really pissed off that they are not doing this and sitting on this since so long:
1. Focus on getting more users onboard. Apart from Japan, where twitter has lot of users, there are very few users in Asia & Africa. The Twitter sales team in these regions are not working hard enough. They are focussing only on business side of things. They should focus on getting more users use twitter. Find innovative ways to draw more users onboard.
It's a simple math, the more users you have using the platform the more money you can make. I can't believe no one at Twitter is thinking about this. They have been mostly US centric.
2. Ask your sales team to form partnership with other sporting events. They are only focusing on livestreaming NBA. I would love to have live streaming of football(Euro cup, English Premier League etc.) & Cricket(whole of India will be using Twitter once you start live streaming cricket matches). This will increase user engagement. Outside US no one follows NBA!!!
This again shows they are not thinking beyond US.
3. Find other means of generating revenue, the advertising on twitter feed is one way. Since twitter doesn't have lof of user data these ads are abrupt and not highly personalized. Instead of advertising in feeds, monetize business accounts and provide them premium features.
I think Twitter could beat Reddit as the front page of the internet. They could easily expand their trending information and turn it into automated events and stories. It looks like they do this a little bit. But if they did it a lot more it would suddenly become way more interesting. Group it by hashtags or categories and you can suddenly see stories that really interest you.
That's the draw of Reddit (and even Hacker News). You immediately see what's really popular on the internet right now.
Pivot to a NSFW platform. It already is but most people don't know that side of it. I'm pretty sure porn is the only reason tumblr's still breathing so it might work.
There are two sides to this: usability and revenue.
On the usability side, there's lots of room for improvement in terms of fostering meaningful discussion, which in turn would lead to stronger social ties between users. Addressing that issue would probably have to start with an effort to improve discoverability of accounts that engage thoughtfully with other users. So people who reply to tweets that earn hearts might show up in suggestions more often, etc.
I'd also work to discourage endless ICYMI repostings of big multimedia tweets and go back to a chronological timeline. If there's too much noise in a chronological timeline, that means too much clickbait/link spam is being posted, and that's the real issue.
From a revenue perspective, there are a bunch of options worth looking at: a Patreon model to encourage people with great insight to tweet more; more accessible paid analytics, baked right into the app that could help non-business users improve the quality of what they send out; an in-app store for subscribing to third-party add-ons.
Basically, at some point it's worth realizing that plenty of mobile users will spend some money for an improved experience. The constant focus on ad-based revenue makes money, but ultimately incentivizes the company to do things that make the overall product experience worse.
Turn back the clock to when Twitter was mostly a protocol and less of a web application. Re-enable the API's that have been disabled, open up easier access to the firehose.
Essentially making Twitter 'too big to fail'.
Tell shareholders that they're in for the long haul and that they can write off any chances for quick bucks.
Most probably - unfortunately - cut deeply into the employee base because there is no way Twitter could sustain the company size they are at today based on the product that they have.
1. Focus on making the company profitable by cutting down on staff and resources. Seriously, Twitter doesn't need thousands of employees, a large HQ and all that other fancy stuff. I think a team of about 30 people could probably run it fine.
2. Get developers on board again. Open up API access, stop shutting down/blocking projects, etc. Make people feel like they could start a business on Twitter's platform, without the rug being pulled out down the line.
3. Get rid of the Trust and Safety Council. It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech, which groups like the ACLU suspiciously absent.
4. Improve moderation. Kick out terrorists and nutcases on the 'left', stop looking for every excuse to ban right wing users and generally treat everyone with respect all around.
5. Try and make the Android app more usable. Because at the moment, it's really awkward to use and gets rather slow at times.
6. Stop using verification and unverification as a punishment. Really, it's like Twitter is being as confusing as possible here.
7. Have the timeline set to how it used to be. Remove the 'show best tweets first' crap from any accounts unfortunate enough to still have it enabled.
8. Make things like URLs not count towards the character limit. I think Gab already does this, and it's very useful.
> It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech...
There's this idea that I hear mostly from the "right" that "freedom of speech" means "let people be assholes to one another with impunity."
We need to fight back when the government attempts to abridge free speech. That's what the ACLU is good at. But Twitter is a community -- a community under no legal obligation to include toxic users.
"Freedom of speech" gives people who don't fit in at Twitter the right to go build their own community that's as toxic as they want amongst themselves.
As a Twitter user, I don't want to have to worry about being attacked or experiencing floods of toxic responses to something I might say. Thankfully I don't. But I do see toxic content directed at people fairly regularly. Toxic content meaning: Stuff that attempts to make no point, just attempts to spread hate or fear.
Sure I guess they were small but their problem space seems to be similar to a more standard CRUD. I could be wrong but the one to many and many to one relations within Twitter seem much harder (at least from my perspective).
Set a goal of $1 billion yearly profit by 2020. That places the value at PE of 20 PE (2/3rds of Alphabets 29.9) at ~$20 billion, which is ~2 times their current valuation.
Assuming 5% YoY growth in revenue, which is about 2% growth in users combined with a 2% better yield, both of which are imminently doable, the current $2.5B revenue grows to about $3B.
Twitter spent $800 million on each of their three big areas, which they list as "Cost of revenue", "Research and development" and "Sales and marketing". If you can shave off 40% from each of "Research and development" and "Sales and marketing", costs hit $2Billion give or take, and goal achieved.
None of that is silicon valley swing for the moon sexy, and it seems pretty unremarkable in a world of hype and excess. But $3B in revenue and $2bn in costs seems achievable by 2020.
I agree they need to go back to the chronological ordering of tweets. It would also be nice to have a couple levels of tweeting, like "conversational message" versus "I really mean it this time", so followers could filter by importance. I've unfollowed several great people because they just kept tweeting nonsense comments throughout the day in between a couple of really interesting posts.
I would have a product recommendation. Twitter missed the change to be a player in the chat space, but it could still offer a chat experience that other services can't.
Imagine Twitter would start offering users the possibility to create group chats where only the invited users can write in but that others could follow in real time.
So lets say there is an Apple keynote and @BenedictEvans, @asymco and @gruber start a group chat where they comment the event. I get a notification that this group chat started and I can go and follow it (the same way I could follow a live video). I can't comment myself, but I can follow their conversation (and maybe hit the like button from time to time). Because it's a chat, the participants will write much more than they would if they would be only limited to tweeting.
It's crazy that in 2017 we can see celebrities interacting with each other via video, tweets,snaps, Facebook comments and so on, but there is no option to follow a real time chat between them.
Is Twitter involved at all in the annotation web standard [1]? There was a post and some discussion on HN a few days ago about it [2]. Seems like Twitter would be a natural fit to become a major player or popularizer of annotations and annotation infrastructure. Notwithstanding the decentralized nature of the standard, it would probably evolve to have a few major structural providers. If it takes off, one could imagine a future with billions of tweets and tweet threads anchored to source material of every kind -- adding optional value to the material, and driving traffic and value to and through Twitter.
There are several options. I guess Twitter could go with one or all of them.
As a backend service it would be nice if they focused on making your Twitter account into a sort of “internet driver’s license” to identify you anywhere and everywhere online through a sort of trust chain. I never want to have to sign up for an account again unless it pertains to my finances. I so desperately wish I could manage all my various subscriptions and accounts for random services from a central place that is highly secure and easy to access. I should be able to sign-on seamlessly, unsubscribe effortlessly, and never have to remember a username or password. This would also allow a central place for me to set privacy preferences so we can dictate exactly what the downstream services should and shouldn’t be able to see.
If Twitter can just let me two-factor authorize with a token+pin and have this let me into just about any account online (aside from maybe my main email and financial accounts in the interests of not having all the eggs in one basket) that’s a service people would indispensible. (So much so that maybe ICANN should just work on something like it as a public utility?)
On the more user-facing end, Twitter’s niche has always been people who are keen on promoting themselves and making announcements (new paper published, new product announced, press releases, etc.), so maybe they should just fill into what Facebook was before it became a NewsFeed. They could give you an About Me page and a status-bar. This basically is what Twitter is now, but they lack the focus to design it around that stuff as a central purpose for the service. They focus more on the “Status Bar” than the “About Me,” this would really just a difference in design language and emphasis. Make it into an RSS feed for people.
Or, as a third option. . . they could just make Twitter into an RSS reader. Maybe even add Wordpress/Medium style pages for long-form writing and feed that all through the same “feed” paradigm.
Offer Twitter Gold: A gilded account can post tweets that are 288 (144*2) characters long. Add other nice, but slightly costly features as they make sense.
Occasionally do "announce" tweets that explain "well-known" twitter features to help people be able to set it up better. Twitter could learn from Slack or Discord in this regard.
Others have suggested cleaning up the engineering org, that seems like a good organizational idea, but is going to be tricky to pull off.
Implement a feature or set of features to discourage bandwagon-hating. Twitter has been instrumental in destroying a non-trivial amount of careers, sometimes over things that were mere bad taste. Perhaps a limit on the number of responses a tweet can have, or rate limiting on how fast a negative tweet loads, or something. I'm not sure, but having them put some serious UX research into this problem would be a great reputation boost, if we know they are doing it.
Twitter is a dumb pipe for notifications. It's slightly more than the content equivalent of a bell going off when something interesting happens. Non-conversation twitter posts are mostly references to somewhere else with a longer form, and the conversation tweets are hard to follow.
If these things were decoupled, and a non-human readable version was introduced, Twitter could become a defacto real-ish-time pub-sub, message bus for web applications tied to users (instead of ips). I could sit at any machine, anywhere, and my notification widget would get notifications for all sorts of events. Or it could power internet game matchmaking, or I could subscribe to reminders and have them scheduled and sent out to me wherever I am rather than having to tie those things to my device or my calendaring app or whatever. e.g. I could ask the local bbq competition to tweet-notify me when the next competition is coming up and I'd just get pinged when it happened instead of getting blasted by spam and or having to remember to put it into my calendar and/or having to remember to read my twitter feed and happen to catch the notice.
How about sub with parameters, only send me a deal making coupon notice if it's for these restaurants and under $50? Okay, I bought some, now I'm unsubscribing for now.
Let me write some tools on my own to tap the notification feeds and build some home-spun IFTTT stuff. Like maybe I sub to a local meetup group, tell everybody I'm putting a hike together but won't go unless I get 5 other people to go, and then I don't get notified until I get a quorum. If I don't by a certain date auto-send out a cancel-the-hike notice.
Conversations should be decoupled and turned into a web-based IM (same character limits) but with easy references to human readable notifications and machine-readable notifications.
Charge $10/year and guarantee a spam-free communication and notification service for you and all your devices.
Charge Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, and anyone else who has 1MM+ followers. Charge them per tweet. They are the true economic beneficiaries of Twitter.
(Like any software company, offer lower pricing to charities.)
Use that cash to get rid of ads (they are not working) and invest in more tools for publishers (who are now paying).
So charge the people who are responsible for twitter's relevancy? Other companies would pay top dollar for that kind of viral marketing, and you suggest charging them for it?
Thats like Nike charging Lebron James per point he scores if he wants to wear their shoes. You have it backwards.
1. Remove all bullshit features: "While you were away", Cards, Ordering.
2. Stop messing with the chronological order of the timeline.
3. Do not monetize it with in-timeline-ads, many people block all accounts serving ads.
4. Remove API limitations for 3rd party developers/apps.
1) Focus on capturing value from "Twitter as realtime newsfeed" -- creating products for non-Twitter-posting-users to see what's going on at a longer timescale. This could be first party, or through partnerships with publishers.
2) All those Twitter developer/publisher services which Twitter recently sold were IMO the real value at Twitter, Inc. Unfortunately, Twitter has burned developers too many times to be trusted. I would have made them independent rather than selling, though.
3) Rather than randomly banning users, focus on better filtering tools, and tools to coalesce spam/multiple replies/etc. If you make a popular tweet, or are the target of an attack, there should be a single "click more" link, rather than hundreds of separate notifications.
Other than some small optimizations (When I reply to my own tweets, it should be visible without a page refresh), I would change nothing.
Granted, I am answering a different question: from the CEOs perspective, they _need_ to do something because they aren't growing fast enough.
But as a user, Twitter is more enjoyable when it's niche. I have a circle of developers that share their projects and thoughts on software dev, and it's delightful.
Someone else said that it's a great resource for the medical community, I know that the hiphop scene is big on twitter, there's whatever the hell Weird Twitter is...
Twitter makes more sense as a series of specialized clusters based around specific communities, not as a Facebook where it's everything for everyone.
There are lots of ideas in this thread that are worth trying out. However, despite being an early adopter, I have not once re-tried twitter after my first attempt as there have never been any compelling reasons to. Everyone hates on Google for shutting down failed products, but it is way better to try and fail than sit on the product you have.
I'll quote Walter Isaacson's book on what Steve Jobs said: One of Jobs's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize the sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize the sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.
In short - highlight what Twitter is really good at, which is delivering bits of fleeting information and working in commerce.
The long version - ads are great, but they cause a misalignment between the service users are happy with and the services necessary to monetize. In addition (not instead), id bring payments into the platform so goods can be discovered and purchased directly through the feed without the user having to leave the platform.
This would require quite a few changes throughout, but when they all come together I believe it'll bring the platform much closer to a Facebook-like status, where users spend more time on the platform as opposed to it being a "starting point" to finding interesting links.
I love Twitter, but it becomes less of a platform for personal expression and more of a machine operated tool for propagandists and spam garbage when you just widely allow botnets. For instance, do a little digging into some of the accts that constantly retweet Trump (Dems are no better). Maybe they tie back to alt-right blog-nets - not humans - which also managed to hijack the search engines to some extent. That ain't personal expression.
If they can't generate some new excitement, the BUMMER is, messaging is the future. I'll argue FB and everyone else will be known as messaging platforms - not a face book or social news feed.
I have no clue why they stopped developing it any further, in old days you would eagerly wait for a new feature, every couple of month. That's also true back then it didn't even have image upload.
I'd expect it be something between Facebook and twitter itself. Nope never google+.
It needs a fresh look hmm! By fresh I meant the design as the aesthetics of web Facebook messenger a modern, miminial, fresh look. That Facebook lacks.
I'd want to it be bit less minimal but not as much bloated as Facebook hence I suggestrd earlier something between the Facebook and twitter itself.
It's stalled and boring, and at this point it looks like a driveless train that could hit the dead end pretty soon.
1. Rebuild Twitter as an open, federated, decentralize service.
2. Write RFCs.
3. Shut down the massively dysfunctional company that should have been a protocol from the beginning so everyone involved can go get jobs doing something useful.
Twitter at the very least should adopt a standard and work with standardization bodies to improve the ability to federate and "self-host" your own Twitter on your own infrastructure.
Twitter has been chasing the explosive growth dream for years. It's not going to happen for them.
If I were in charge, my number one goal would be to change expectations for shareholders and investors.
Twitter has had all the rapid expansion it is going to have. From here on out, it needs to focus on retaining users and slow, steady growth.
It needs to rebuild bridges with developers and become the platform it used to be.
It needs to stop pretending that it can be a multi-billion user network and focus on serving the several hundred millions of people who care about it.
I think a big part of the management thinking problem at twitter comes from the fact that they suffered repeated outages early on. They invested a lot in terms of people and infrastructure to make sure they they don't go down anymore. And it worked. We almost never see the fail whale anymore.
I suspect that a lot of people inside twitter are sitting around in meetings saying, "Look, we're ready for 3 billion users. We built it for that. Where are the users?"
And perhaps some other people are saying, "Look, if we carry this monetization scheme to 3 billion users, we would make x money. We have the infrastructure for it. Let's bring the people and make the money."
The problem is that twitter's product just isn't that appealing to very many more people than they already have active.
They hit the max of their growth potential very early in their time. Now it's time to serve the users they have the best they can.
Twitter's number one problem is that they don't understand their market: it's not now and not ever going to explode to the level of facebook use.
Fix #1: explain that clearly to all investors, stakeholders, employees.
Fix #2: cut costs. There's no way it should cost as much as it does to run twitter.
Fix #3: stop trying to be Facebook lite.
Fix #4: repair your platform and relationships with developers. Developers will drive traffic to you and help you generate ad dollars.
Are corporate accounts free or do they cost? I've always thought that they should charge every big corp that is using their platform as a marketing / customer service tool.
Does CNN pay Twitter every time they read someone's tweet on the air? I'm not talking about a "newsworthy" tweet (for example one from a politician's account), but CNN occasionally says, "Let's see what a random person on the internet thinks about this development." Then they prominently focus on a couple tweets. I think CNN (or who ever) should pay for that content.
Don't know if it's even possible, but I'd start by having a good hard look at the engagement stats. Twitter runs on those stats same way the police departments in The Wire do. And, as a consequence, they've been loath to do anything that dips those stats.
Trolls, harassers and other bad actors all show up as _positives_ in Twitter's stats. Most of the UI features you hate probably cause upticks as well.
In practice, making a better Twitter might be a worse business plan than continuing to flame out, so this is unlikely to happen.
1) Offer a premium Ad Free model
2) Create a Reddit Gold type of economy to open up "premium features" ... e.g. Unfollow Tools and/or deeper analytics - this would tie into the Ad Free model
3) Allow for the creation of Groups.
4) Make Video more of a top-tier content experience, not some side-bar hand-wavy experiment (at the same level as Moments). The next Twitch could be Twitter-based. The community is already there. (note: expensive, but potentially very lucrative CPMs)
Pseudo-federate it into separate sites with differing levels of moderation: minors, special snowflakes, normal people, and anything-goes free speech fans.
In reality closing-down their API, hindered a lot of innovation that could happen, they missed a lot of devs working for free to create a product on top of the raw data that twitter is in a sense. (which they could easily acquire)
Imo you should keep the core stable until you construct an alternate route, so any new direction should be an extension and not replacement until established (see: not making a Digg v4 etc.).
So I'm of the opinion that at the current product monetization is at the edge of starting to damage the product, ad aggression from users will become an issue if they start to hunt for profits that way.
There needs to be monetization through another product. When talking about tweets and especially on a scrolling list of tweets that is quite minimal it's tricky. You have to expand it on another product-version.
Personally I would attack the inefficiency and problem of scaling (following a lot of users fails exponentially), with some tools that will drive up the quality of experience and increase user activity.
Secondly, I would try to embed a patron-like feature in a big way and take a cut from the earnings.
As a dev, having a big product idea for twitter's case, their past and current behavior of hindering its API use through walls and dealbreaking rate-limits, will make it really hard to give it a try again.
Twitter is the web interface for mobile messaging. The network effects have carried it so far. "Turning around" is going to mean saying no to all of the shiny new things both on mobile and on the web that have little to do with its core value. That means no live video, no original content, nothing but messaging on the web. Focus, focus, focus.
With that focus, I believe Twitter can return to growth in its user base. There is more that could be done to make the experience more engaging, for example, without interfering with the core experience. By mixing some suggested tweets into my feed using machine learning, Twitter could increase engagement. The new user experience would flow better with good use of machine learning.
In terms of monetization, it's about the data. Twitter APIs should be recognized as best-in-class, and access should be sold on a subscription basis on a graduated scale based on frequency of access.
There is a natural scale to core Twitter, and it might not be much bigger than it is right now. Sometimes we have to be content with what we've got -- which in Twitter's case is nothing to sneeze at. They shouldn't be going all "New Coke" getting into video and media in my opinion.
Twitter in it's current form mainly appeals to power users. For every day users it's simply too much work to get value from Twitter. To fix that they will have to make some choices that will upset existing users though:
1. Move the chronological feed to the background, the feed should be sorted by relevancy not time. (If you're a power user you can click to the raw chronological feed.)
2. Right now you can only follow users and not interests. This makes it extremely hard for new users to get a sensible feed of content. If a mainstream user signs up for Twitter they are only going to spend a minute or so to set things up. Twitter needs to immediately add value for those users.
3. Use a machine learning approach to learn what a user is interested in based on email clicks. (Quora does a great job at that.)
4. Redesign all apps and simply. A good example is their settings screen. Another is the crazy behaviour that you have to put a . in front of your tweet. Get rid of all those power user features and settings and simplify.
5. Remove abusive bots and clearly mark bots as bots. Twitter is spending millions to facilitate people engaging in follow spam and other forms of spam.
6. Build up a dedicated team to make sure Twitter works for high profile users. (IE, do notifications and messages work if i have >10m followers). They need a team on top of that to keep those users happy.
Add a down vote button so people can down vote the trolls. You'd see an enormous uptake in regular people using the service if every reply wasn't some random insult with a picture attachment of something disgusting.
Twitter is easily the most negative place on the internet, and that's including madness like the Something Awful forums or 4chan. A downvote option would hopefully push the constant arguments out of sight too.
> You can't fight negativity with negativity. Let the good and positive boil to the top.
How does that work? Someone organizes a hate mob and you're getting tons of horrible messages. How do you “let the good and positive boil to the top”?
That's a huge problem for Twitter because every time someone, usually a woman, is harassed off of the service, other people notice and adjust their actions accordingly whether that is switching to a system, reducing what they post, making their account private, etc. — all of which cuts into the engagement they need to keep the service growing.
2. Focus app and website around two concepts: 'Now' and 'Here' -- temporally local, and spatially local.
'Now' would surface what's happening in the world now: major entertainment events, major political events, intermingling global, culturally-similar, and local. Show a stylized zoomable map to show what's happening around the world, so one can narrow or widen the locality of the world's pulse.
'Here' would invert this, showing everything that happened hyperlocal, surfacing recent popular and random tweets from where you are now.
Bonus for some visual eye candy that shows, perhaps as a Venn diagram, when 'Here' and 'Now' get closer and closer together to where if you're at a sports event, they're one and the same.
3. Keep everything chronological. For a network like this, 'Fear of Missing Out' is a feature, not a bug -- the anxiety should be palpable. For 'Now', sell ad slots for exact rotating times, like TV. This will drive demand for high-quality, high-cost brand advertising, instead of low-value mundane stuff. For 'Here', sell the ad slot to local businesses.
4. Open the API but charge a fee for access.
5. Use ML, identity, hashtags, and context to classify tweets into a limited number of categories/tags: breaking news, humor, insight, commentary, chatter, feedback. Expose these as a user-controllable filter on top of any existing view.
6. Disable most notifications. Make users want to return to the app without being nagged.
7. Only allow replies and DMs from people you follow and verified accounts.
I believe Twitter's key problem is that they do not take enough product, monetization, and growth risks, either because they are too afraid to, or their org can't execute quickly enough.
1. Pay as much cash as you need to (even if it means laying off a few people) and hire one or two of FB's monetization and growth leaders, preferably away from a team like Instagram. Give them the freedom and resources to grow the team they want.
2. Based on what Twitter has done with the product over the past few years (i.e. not a lot), the product management team is too risk-averse. I would fire them and acquire a few startups to build a more aggressive PM team that knows when to listen to users/metrics and when to ignore them.
3. Partnerships team seems to be great. I would incentivize them to stay.
4. Twitter should invest in experienced engineering management to refocus the team. They have open-sourced four (four!) separate message brokers, and I heard that they had five internally recommended JS frameworks at one point. They should standardize on one boring stack for all new development and move all new development to the cloud.
1. Looking at their financials, they could become profitable by just removing half of their staff. I would start there before anything else.
2. Fix the mess of UI. I still don't understand how to engage in conversations to this day. Convoluted modal boxes, overlaying other screens, that then expand out to more replies, and so on and so forth. It's WAY too confusing.
Current advertising model of Twitter is not suited for the product. They tried to emulate google and facebook model of ad revenue by programmatically showing the user what might be useful to them and it did not work so well. People developed blind spots for such content. Twitter should really look into micro payments to reward users who increase engagement.
Some of our friends are good at recommending a movie or a restaurant and their opinions matter at a micro level similar to celebrity endorsements matter at a macro level. They would do more of it if they get paid like celebrities do but at a proportional rate. Take the burden out of complicated algorithms to match ad content to users and instead let users do it in between their conversations and pay for the content of their tweets. Make the normal user to be their spokesperson for the product/idea. Twitter is a very good medium for this.
This is native advertising at a whole new level. Financially rewarding users who are influential in their small circle might be difficult to implement. Take the ad money from businesses, local and global and share it with users who say nice and constructive things about their campaign to their followers. It could be as simple as rewarding a user for retweeting a well designed ad. Many users will get creative and make endorsements from their daily lives if it meant their followers liking it. Its like design crowd mixed with advertising. Brands would pay for this model because its driven by results.
Understanding user tweets and matching them to a business campaign and fairly allocating the reward to top/all contributors might be a much harder computer science problem but I think this model of advertising has a potential to work well for twitter. There is so much for user to tweet about. Local restaurants, to movies to their brand loyal purchases etc in exchange their tweets get financial reward based on how many people read them and engage with them.
1) Go private. Twitter is a simple product that will be increasingly difficult to monetize to appease the stockholders. Being public will either mutate it into a video-ad nightmare or end up being shut down or sold.
2) Keep the timeline simple.
3) Better custom timelines, searches, and notifications.
4) Stop trying to copy Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc. and just be the best Twitter possible.
I mentioned this in another thread recently: let users have about 10K followers for free, and then charge them for followers after that. A lot of celebrities straight up profit from sending out a tweet endorsing a brand. Twitter should get a cut of that and I think this would be a fair and easy way to do so. People pay for their influence.
Only show me content that's been re-tweeted more than X times, where X is something that I can set.
I don't want to read about what somebody had for lunch and I wouldn't expect it to be re-tweeted. But something thoughtful or interesting or funny would be.
Yes, there would be problems with fake accounts re-tweeting but that should be solvable.
I wrote a chrome extension to solve something similar i.e. filter out by keywords and then sort my timeline to see popular tweets that I shouldn't miss.
While I get the 140char limit, and they should stick with that, having something like a 10k limit that was only shown when the tweet is expanded, is, in my perspective, essential [for someone that comes from FB the 140 char limit is ludicrous bad UX]. I get that longer formats should go on something like medium, but asking people to change websites to do that is ludicrous. It's putting the barrier too high for the input of content.
I know that the shareholders of Twitter that also are medium's wouldn't be happy with the lifting of that limit, yet, for those read on:
Regardless of feasibility (as they are two distinct companies) more than 140characters would transform itself on a medium post and commentaries and highlights could become tweets.
That's one of the two suggestions that I think would help twitter improve a lot. Enough of texts as image and other crappy UX
As a user I struggle to stay engaged with twitter - the moment I try to read, I am flooded with irrelevant content, yet the platform is the best place for niche interest information and fast niche information. The Signal-to-Noise ratio is too low. Here is how I would fix engagement and revenue:
1. Consider twitter a user's portfolio of interest channels and let us tab between our chosen channels immediately (multi-select box at the top where I can pick VCs, medicine, Design, Oscars, whatever - and it blends my feed for me)
2. Encourage floods of content and monetise curators filtering for quality - I can pay for subscription a feed of world news from WSJ, NYT, and other paid sources, and my subscription fee is distributed to them based on consumption. The best content wins and the quality editorials get rewarded for earning loyalty, not writing clickbait.
3. Enable paid advertising-free feeds.
4. Enable premium, niche feed advertising that is hyper relevant (If I have a spine medicine feed, an ad from Stryder would be very appropriate, but one from herbal remedies providers would be irrelevant). Building the curation mechanisms would draw top engineering talent in machine learning too.
5. Allow co-watching experiences during media events.
6. Allow me to filter out topics I want to avoid (and by doing that, you get more engagement and better ad targeting capabilities)
7. Open your developer ecosystem again and this time pay attention to what works and provide guarantees that you won't kill developer efforts. Those developers build bots for Facebook now and help their user engagement instead of yours.
The gist of it is: make your revenue model reward and improve quality. The moment you let advertisers lead you by the nose and dictate for obstructive anti-user product decisions, you will permanently lose your market to Facebook and others. I lead a hyper-niche collaboration network so happy to do a longer brainstorming session with Twitter people.
Allow me to publicly follow someone while privately ignoring them.
Allow me to easily and permanently get rid of "In case you missed it" thing and read my feed on a strictly timeline basis.
I get a lot of junk in my feed that I don't want to see, and thus I don't go to it much.
Facebook is not as bad, but they've gotten worse. Two of my friends "like" some newspaper and then I start seeing the latest stories from that newspaper in my feed all the time.
I want to go to these feeds once a day and read what those who publish once a day or less who are my friends (Facebook) or friends/colleagues (Twitter) say, in timeline order. Any deviation from that lessens my desire to read it. Some of my friends publish to Facebook several times a day and I usually don't even want to read that, never mind the other junk that both put in my feed.
Make people pay to tweet. something like the cost of a text message. That will cut the garbage down a lot. It will reduce the costs by easing the infrastructure. Increase quality of information by reducing the number of bots/trolls/twitstorms and so on. Plus it will bring in some money in.
Embrace the use of lists and its workflow (think tweetdeck). Side by side lists. I insist on side by side because you don't want one particular list stopping content from other lists to catch your eye.
Implement smart/personalized lists by interest and suggest them to users, suggest new people to add to existing lists and/or tweets that may be relevant to that list. A bit like spotify playlists and smart radios, but oriented to tweets.
Basically, make it easier for people to find tweets and users they want to follow, segmented by interest.
Display relevant non-intrusive ads based on the interests on that list. They should take the hint from reddit regarding what "non-intrusive" means. Adding something like Reddit Gold wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Apart from that, a nice interface to follow live events and their tweets would be awesome.
I'm not sure anyone outside of twitter has enough information to really answer this. After all, they DO have revenue. So without knowing the intricate details of their expenses, it is difficult to know whether the problem lies in business strategy or just financial operations. Because the first step would be to be sure they really are running their operations in a financially effective manner. It is possible that a re-tooling of their internal operations would result in profitability.
If that turns out to not be the case, then the strategy would depend on how far from profitability they are -- are we talking about minor tweaks to the business model? Or a major overhaul of entire company?
In short, how would I turn it around? I'd step in and do a large analytic effort on the status quo, and then react to the result.
Facebook isn't great because of how it looks, but because they have React, hiphop (or what's the name now), things like that; and that allows them to scale and build and iterate more quickly.
Twitter had Bootstrap and that was great investment IMO... now the Bootstrap guys all left. Why?
Twitter's built Aurora, large parts of Mesos, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, Scalding, Finagle, and Finatra. A lot of these exist so they can build things quicker.
1. Make a bigger deal of lists. Add the lists tab to the top of the page, show the list of lists a person is in next to their name.
For new users its a great way to find people with similar interests. For existing users they let you unfollow people but still check in on them every now and then so your timeline isn't so insane.
2. Add the option of removing inline images/quoted tweets from the timeline it looks ugly
3. redesign, I find twitter so difficult to read its so cluttered.
4. when I say I dont want to see the 'while you were away feature' I do not want to see the 'while you were away feature'
5. Allow me to write private notes about a user or look up all our previous interactions on one page.
6. Allow me to star users - these users tweets are highlighted in some way on my time line
7. when I clikc the tweet permalink why is it a popup then when I go directly to a page its not styled like a popup - this is confusing to some users who think they've loaded a seperate tweet
8. I'd like a daily email of a select group/list/my timeline if < 50 followed emailed to me daily/weekly Some of us dont have time to scroll through twitter
9. Bookmark where I was last. I dont like to miss any tweets.
10. allow me to send group DM's
11. dissappearing tweets. I know this is cipying snapchat/instagramstories/whatsapp but tweeting a phtoo/text which dissappears after a custom amount of time (1 month/year/day/hour/minute) would be brilliant.
12. bring back the third party apps. they made twitter.
13. make trending hashtags easier to see/browse. News articles are always saying x is trending but I never see this.
14. allow me to search tweets nearby. Useful for conferences.
15. Dont include URLS in character count, I think this was supposed to have been added but I've not noticed it working.
Admit that it's a (better) chatroom and tailor it to that use case. It's not a new thing. Go super-aggressively after abuse, bots, etc. even if it hurts your bottom line short term, it will help it long term. Don't make statements about addressing abuse, just do it. It will be noticed. Stop focusing on growth, focus on quality of users. Make a tier of "verified" accounts that anyone can get -- subscription is fine. They verify their real contact info with you, they get a verified badge. Make eggs not able to dm or mention for two weeks. Let me right-click to save animated gifs. Allow "extended" tweets that start with 140 characters but you can click through to more, for when it's time for some game theory. Shadowban the potus.
relaunch it. have a countdown to the end of Twitter 2007-2017 and let everyone know it's starting all over again. Rush to get your username. The new twitter will be just like it was in 2008 but stable and working but get back to what made it great in the first place.
The main thing I love about twitter is the 140 character limit. It's an elevator pitch. Many times, when I am trying to communicate an idea, I put them in 140 character chucks to better refine the idea. Especially in this Trump era where people are confused by throwing too many words that do not many any sense. Concise - that is the need and twitter is concise.
Twitter should stop comparing itself to facebook and compare more to wikipedia. Twitter is an idea sharing platform. Journalist can use it to get their articles to more audience where the gist of what the article is about is given.
Let's not forget the role twitter played in Arab Spring.
140char should be ONLY for text. Links & embedded media should be excluded from that limit.
I'm amazed they arent more profitable, given that Twitter has become Ground Zero for the daily (hourly? minutely?) news cycle.
Are stock exchanges highly profitable? Twitter has become the global exchange for real-time information. I suppose Twitter cant really charge a 'brokerage' fee for tweeting. That is not in their interest.
Please excuse my ignorance of Twitter's commercial offerings, but is access to the Firehose expensive? Or real-time summary of Firehose statistics relevant to your keywords? That just seems so valuable and such a singular offering....its not like there is a competing service.
I know I've misued the word minutely. But there needs to be a better word for 'minute-by-minute'.
1) Integrate payments and one-click purchasing, take a cut.
2) Host specific pages for live-stream events (not within tweets) like sports games. Target the remaining pieces of cable TV: Live sports, ESPN, Awards Shows, Olympics, Talk shows (e.g. Daily show, Colbert Report, etc.)
# Large Account Monetization
1) Charge for additional features, e.g. private/protected accounts, verification, having more than XXX followers.
2) Build tools specifically for managing a) large accounts and b) brands/customer service. Charge them for it!
# Data Monetization
1) Build API access for alternative clients that is free for a certain number of users (~10k) then charges on a per-install basis.
2) Partner with marketing platforms (e.g. Salesforce) to build marketing funnels from Twitter into CRM or marketing platform.
Make advertising more accessible/cheaper. I have a Facebook page where I can spend ZAR210 a day and get value. Twitter costs way more for less perceived value. Opening up advertising to more small projects like ours brings in more revenue I think.
This. I have to hire another company, in order to monetize twitter, because twitter doesn't give me the tools itself. The other companies do a good job.
1. Give people control over things that matter to them, whether it be length of tweets, ability to enable/disable certain features, or see Twitter in preferred modes (pure reverse chron, ad-free, image-free, no politics, only sports, etc.).
2. Charge fees for this stuff
3. Make it easy to buy anything via Twitter
4. Get rid of the bots and AI-obvious trolling/threats/TOS violations. I find it astounding that despite years of promises to do something the situation seems to be getting worse.
5. Get a new fully-focused leader who can execute on these and other issues without distraction of a second company, and can also bring down headcount. This probably requires a reorg and a new board.
2. Per-thread privacy and write control. When you post a new OP (non-reply) tweet, you get to choose who gets to see it, and post replies to it.
These options make sense to me: just you, your followees, mutually following accounts ('friends'), friends and friends of friends, or members of given lists, or anyone unblocked.
But I think they won't go that way because they want to be One Big Community. My proposal would lead to balkanisation.
1. Customer Service - Provide enterprise solutions for customer service and charge $$$ per transaction. The live nature of this would prove a lot of value for feedback mechanisms for enterprise when they go through their change management.
2. Live Interaction with Events, Games, Television, Radio etc. e.g. Polls, QnA, Sentiment etc.
3. Open Access to Developers to build Apps on real-time content.
4. Enable fact-check score methodologies on every tweets. Don't completely wipe out the trolls. As weird as it may sound - trolls make twitter interesting.
5. The Ultimate messaging platform that replaces SMS/Texts with an identity that is not numbers.
Twitter does need to continue engineering. It needs to do exactly one thing: re-order the timeline so that coming to Twitter becomes fun and engaging again. Right now, when I open Twitter ( mobile or desktop ), I have a huge flurry of random things I don't really want to read, or don't want to read now.
Re-ordering the timeline promises the solution - but it doesn't work yet.
I would think you need "auto-group", which FB, Google, and others have tried and failed at.
But in any case - twitter is the place I feel like I have to go, but don't want to go, and I think I'm not the only one.
As ceo of Faveeo a startup active in this space since 2012, I've ben thinking a lot about these issues; and the main problems of twitter are also what motivated me to launch several products since the inception of our own company.
I'll try to post my 2c here :
1) I think there is a paradox on twitter, which is that the more you follow people (the more you use and invest yourself in the tool; the harder it gets to use and to extract value from.
The thing is; for more people it's already hard enough to actually take the time to find the right people to follow (and to actually find them, curate your followings, etc) butthe end result if often times am overload of information which begs the question : how can a app that rewards engagement with negative outcomes can succeed in the long run?
The concept of twitter is just awesome and they invented a whole new medium; but I'm quetionning the concept of following people one by one.
One thing we built at Faveeo is called Horizons, and it enables to show the system some examples of people you like and trust; and our tool will automatically uncover and follow the best links posted and shared by those users.
We call it uncovering and following a trusted network at scale and we're having quite a success with it especially with people who want to tap into twitter without spending their life managing their twitter experience.
Twitter is absolutely full of great content, it's too hard to find.
Twitter could do a massive consumer facing app enabling people to follow topics and trusted bundles of it's own users AND surfacing their best links and content and I'm quite sure it would reach up to a billion users as more and more people are looking for content outside of their own bubble...
Also, twitter should care much more about the content of the links people share; then ONLY caring about the tweets themselves, which to be fair they do with media inserts now.
Happy to discuss this and have a look at http://horizons.social to try our twitter network discovery approach. (self promotion but for once there is a topic I'm actually an expert on :))
2. Unemploy 90% of staff from all departments to stop bleeding money
3. Remove all feed filtering and return to a purely chronological timeline; highlights can hide somewhere else.
4. Increase character count to 200, don't count mentions against the limit, and reduce prominence of image posts so they don't overwhelm text-only posts.
5. Throw away all KPIs and remove all features done to service KPIs
6. Organize a small product team dedicated to making the API open and good again
7. Organize a larger product team that works on issues around custom mention/interaction filtering
8. Sell API access for business volume and use cases
- for the longest time I've wished to tweet to a subpart of my followers; Then only way to have that is multiple account right now. Let me follow "person X + #hashtag".
- support multiple accounts on the website
- Twitter ads do not seem as valuable as other ad services, there is not enough reason to buy them.
- remove the bots
- Twitter need a way to lessen noise from talkative people. Something between muting and following. See point 1.
- order the tweets by most recent, like it was previously. Ordering by popularity ensures your tweets are dwarfed by the popular GIF of the day.
Stop rewarding the most hyperbolic, sensational content by propagating it the furthest, fastest. Turn tweets into "ice-berg tips"; user taps on tweet to see more, nuanced info.
1. Lay off most of the workforce. There is absolutely no justification for them to have as many employees as they do.
2. Start charging people based on how many followers they have. Twitter isn't worth much for the average consumer, but it's hugely valuable for people with massive reach. Charge them for it.
People are giving lots of product suggestions, but the product itself isn't the biggest issue. Twitter spends too much and makes too little. Patch the holes in the boat before you try to row faster.
Have two accounts for regular(free) users and enterprise(paid) users:
1. Free/Regular user - Restricted to 'x' tweets a day, 'y' tweets a month or ad served etc. Not applicable for enterprises, marketing firms etc.
2. Paid/Enterprise user - No restrictions on tweets per day. Enterprises need to pay 'z' amount on a monthly/yearly basis. No ads are served to the account holder. More privacy, backup options. Tweets are promoted based on keywords etc.
Twitter should own the utility of being a messaging forum for the public. This means a communication layer that can be easily used by many different services for different purposes. From there on, it should open up this message level integration as easily embrddable feature for websites and to app developers. Monetization potential will increase with engagement and engagement to a forum using twitter should be made as easy as text messages.
Take a page from mobile gaming and let people buy extra characters.
The act of whittling down a tweet to fit inside the (increasingly ridiculous) 140-character limit is the exact kind of tedious, repetitive thing a game designer would instantly recognize as a "grind":
And free-to-play mobile games have demonstrated that lots of people, when presented with a grind, are very willing to pay real money to skip past it. So: give Twitter users the option to buy extra characters, usable whenever they're needed, at some price point low enough to be attractive as an impulse buy. A penny per character, say, or 40 characters for a quarter, or 120 for 99 cents. The marginal cost to Twitter of shipping 141 characters over the wire instead of 140 is essentially nothing, so whatever you charge would be almost 100% pure profit.
A user with a bag of such extra characters in hand would now have the ability, if they wanted to, to skip editing down every tweet and just post on the fly. Which could be a real time-saver, if you're one of the media-type power users who spend all day on Twitter! And how much it costs you depends entirely on how often you want the luxury of not having to edit yourself. If you only need it occasionally, it's cheap; if you're compulsively logorrheic, well... consider it a tax on the burden you're placing on your followers' attention.
But wouldn't it ruin Twitter, you ask, if people weren't forced to be terse? I don't see how. When people use the extra space wisely, it makes their life easier, costs you nothing and generates revenue that can subsidize freeloaders like you. When people abuse the extra space, you can always unfollow them -- and when the abusers notice their follower counts crashing, they'll be encouraged to rein themselves in. Nobody logs on to Twitter in the morning with the objective of losing followers. The system would correct itself.
So: Twitter makes money, power users enjoy using it more, regular users get their freight paid for by the whales, everyone has access to longer-form expression with a mechanism already in place to still encourage brevity. It's a win all around.
Btw I made an app[0] last year as my first iOS app which centers conversations around Live events using hashtags.
Based on comments on this thread, with some UX improvements the app could meet a lot your requirements. Will gladly accept feedback, and willing to iterate.
just a senior CS Student, though not a valid excuse the first attempt is not something I'm proud of....but yeah I will work on the UX and give it an update
I would work with the US post office, and any other countries postal service to turn the service into a public utility run by the people for the people under the same idea that the post office delivered physical messages, it would be in the public interest to deliver electronic messages as well. Stop trying to be profitable, not all useful things need to make money. Some things are worth funding because they are of public benefit.
I would pay serious money to use their historical data. It's a goldmine for machine learning research, finance, market research, news, politics, etc. I'm sure anybody could find a legitimate use for that much data from a social network.
Instead, I have to hack together a way to constantly collect tweets from within the past 2 weeks or use 3rd parties to access their data in any sane way.
Twitter as a company needs to think about how to be profitable. Twitter as a way for people to talk to each other and broadcast important events needs to be neither commercial nor centralized [1]
- Go private. Twitter is a simple product and will be increasingly difficult to monetize enough to satisfy shareholders' desire for ever-increasing profits.
- Keep it simple. Stop trying to be Facebook and Snapchat and Youtube all at once.
- Better AI / search to enable/improve things like custom timelines and notifications.
- Optional paid accounts with appropriate benefits. Keep the cost low and don't penalize unpaid accounts.
Allow users to pay to "boost" tweets and expand their exposure. I.e. you can pay $5 in boost credits to increase the reach of the tweet promoting your website or whatever. (Or maybe much more if you are a corporate account- not sure how the pricing model should work). The boosts should be invisible to other users.
Basically, monetize the one thing that every wants to do on twitter, which is go viral.
Take Twitter and add a sprinkle of Groupon. Let brands sell direct via a Tweet. I click buy, boom I paid for it. For what exactly? Anything you can buy on Amazon, discount movie tickets, buy one get one free burger at mcdonalds, pre-order video games, etc. SELL STUFF. Add limits, like only 500 of x, or tweet will self destruct in x seconds. Imagine Black Friday/Cyber Monday on Twitter...
Bring back the app ecosystem and this time make a blood oath to protect the apps instead of destroying them all. If apps want to monetize they need to use Twitter's methods of monetization and share the data they generate back to Twitter. Make the rules mutually beneficial, sign that blood oath (an actual public, binding contract), and people will come back and build cool things again.
Make profiles more robust. Features could include:
• Event creation
• A forum/group tab so followers of a specific account could more easily communicate with each other
• Expanded "About" section
• Custom calls-to-action (i.e. "Sign Up," "Message," "Shop," etc.)
Allow people to publish more content natively. Such as:
• Long-form writing
• Long-form video
Public figures post on Twitter first. As a result, it's where news breaks. However, due to the constraints Twitter has placed on how people are able to represent themselves (i.e. limited profiles) and communicate with their audiences (i.e. inability to publish long-form written content natively), these people are driven to other platforms (i.e. Facebook) to do things they might've otherwise done on Twitter.
Instead of trying to compete as social utility in the way that Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have positioned themselves, why not cater explicitly to the newsmakers who are already defaulting to their platform, giving them fewer reasons to go elsewhere and attracting non-Twitter users in the process?
I think Twitter could only be improved by removing all the garbage they've added since it's inception. It was perfect on day 1 except for scaling issues. If they didn't get greedy and just took the money for access to the real-time stream of data and maybe some advanced analytics, a few people could be making a ton of money instead of a ton of people making no money.
new economic model: users pay on the basis of how many followers they have. the first 1000 followers are free. pricing begins for accounts with over 1000 followers. the more followers you have the more you pay.
this places the payment model in alignment with who the actual beneficiaries of twitter are. it's a mass broadcast advertising/propaganda platform. let the propagandists pay for it.
That's massively open for abuse: Find someone you don't like or want to harass and get lots of people to hate follow them. Costs them money or forces them to use some Twitter moderation tool to cull followers.
Second thought with any social media feature should be how can an asshole use this to be an asshole easier.
I don't understand your criticism. How do you propose a bad-actor could control such a large number of accounts? even supposing this malicious figure had that much influence, the problem is just one of how Twitter bills its users. It is the platform's responsibility to determine how it bills and whether or not it is billing fairly. this is a technical implementation detail of the platform, which is beyond the scope of this discussion.
finally, suppose those are "malicious followers". who cares? you pay for reach. if all those supposedly malicious followers stay as your followers they're still seeing your tweets. isn't that the point? I don't see how this is an abuse of the system. A view is a view. Are we suppose to now distinguish between friendly vs. hostile views? This is getting ridiculous.
A couple different ways but bots or just a large group of people getting angry at someone are the simplest, the second is already pretty common and a problem with Twitter as it stands. Next the billing is an integral part of the discussion. If it's impossible to accurately bill something it's a terrible feature. Finally there are massive number of people who use twitter completely noncommercially but might wind up with this problem. Charging anyone who isn't trying to sell something for reach is a pretty much guaranteed way to shed tons of users.
1. Charge a subscription fee one rate for consumers and a higher rate for businesses
2. Get rid of all inactive accounts
3. Charge a fee for tweetstreams
4. Fix the rate limit of APIs and create tools for developers
5. Add a features for event tweets/group accounts
6. Talk to developers, add features for Twitter app development
7. Fix the 140 character limitation
I would cut Selling/General/Admin expenses. It's costing them $1.2 billion per year which is about half of their total revenue and this cost has kept growing over the years.
I would cut back on research (or at least bring it in-house) - $713 million is too much. If they paid each of their researchers 200K per year, they could hire 3500 of them which is insane.
If you could somehow filter out the most important parts, pack them into a digest and send them to me once a day, I'd invest 20 minutes into reading through the information just to keep up-to-date. This sounds curiously like the newspaper we used to have delivered to our door.
Open up the API again and let third parties integrate live-streaming features. If you have thousands of people already watching and livetweeting a new Netflix release, facilitate that and make it easier. Imagine if everyone could watch the Superbowl while live-tweeting it in the same interface... you'd likely broaden user adoption
Open up a cloud services arm that uses the Twitter infrastructure to host long-running business processes with broadcast-ability. Offer twitter feed integrations, human workflow steps, workbaskets/inboxes, and external partner API calls.
Low latency seems to be Twitter's thing, cash in on that and make some speedy low latency workflow thing.
1. Let users charge for more rapid access to tweets and share revenue (eg. instant tweet access versus delayed access).
2. Let users pay to DM certain accounts.
3. Mesh-networked solution.
4. Launch 'labs' version as sandbox for developers and users to experiment with (eg. encrypted tweeting, blockchain embedded messaging, proxied messages, etc.)
I'd definitely try to follow in the footsteps of many of our great 'turnaround' CEOs: 1) Insist on a 'golden parachute' clause in my contract that gives me a big payout on exit, 2) run the company into the ground, 3) jump ship before the explosion.
And I could do it for less than, say, Bob Nardelli or Carly Fiorina.
If I had the nuclear option I'd create a new account type, Twitter Business. Twitter Business has special features directly linked with their advertising core. A twitter Business handle costs $9.99 a month and includes "premium" business features such as engagement analytics, brand tracking, etc.
Happy to not be their CEO in 2017. That said, here are my thoughts:
Either:
Slowly turn it into Google+, only with users and API. (Including pseudonyms, groups and circles)
Or:
Make it a communication tool instead of a spam distribution machine sometimes used to communicate. Charge for API access above personal usage quotas (i.e. news organisations , company accounts etc).
Charge to hyperlink a URL. Maybe it costs $100 per year to have hyperlinks in your tweets. There are tons of businesses that rely on Twitter for distribution and twitter makes nothing off those businesses. You could still post a URL to a tweet for free, but hyperlinks cost some nominal amount.
Change the culture in-house. I've only known a couple people who've worked at Twitter, but both hated it and said they felt constant pressure to participate in extracurricular activities like after hours movies and games.
You're never going to be innovative if your employees dread coming to work.
Cut back all monetization projects that don't produce a ROI already, hire out the technical talent as a consultancy specializing on Twitter-scale scalability problems and keep the pipes running as the mother of all reference projects. It would be like hiring Noah to design your yacht.
Maybe too late for these specific examples, but figure out how to use their existing tech to take over new markets as they pop up. They currently have all their eggs in one, low margin product.
They should have been able to release, for example, competitive offerings against Disqus, Signal, and Slack.
I would sell hats for the user avatar. It worked in TF2 and it also works in CSGO, Pokemon and LOL. The typical Twitter and Instagram user is so full of vanity that tons of people would invest tons of money into getting that one very rare hat on their profile pic.
I don't think it can be turned around in the sense that it can be made into a profitable business.
I think of Twitter the same way I think of highways. It fulfills a huge market demand that the market isn't willing to pay for itself, so has to be subsidized in other ways.
1. Trim the fat. Reduce the number of employees dramatically. Obviously not a graceful change but I feel there should not be that as many people working there as there are now.
2. Focus on engagement, not growth. Twitter may not be growing in the way that the market wants, but the users that it does have are incredibly devoted to the platform. If I were to leave Twitter there's nowhere else I could go. If I leave Tinder or Snapchat there are many other platforms that can fill almost the same niche. Twitter needs to capitalize on that.
3. Make brands pay to have a page. In other words, if you're not an individual, you must pay to create an account. Savvy companies have realized that being on Twitter is a key part of a solid social media campaign. To not be on Twitter is to miss out on a huge opportunity to reach a very devoted audience, and you can't reach that audience anywhere else (#2). Some brands are already doing this well (e.g. Wendy's.) If the choice comes to paying for the opportunity to market on Twitter, and not market at all, companies will gladly pay. On the plus side, this could let Twitter reduce the interstitial ads on the timeline.
Everyone hates ads, but the way that brands have engaged with individuals on Twitter really humanizes them and makes people form more real relationships with them. It also forces brands to be more accountable and aware.
4. Bring back Vine. A huge part of Twitter's staying power is the unique culture it has created (#2). Staying power is what gives Twitter its greatest value to advertisers (#3).
5. Ramp up engagement on Periscope. Periscope being a part of Twitter makes a lot of sense because Twitter is all about stuff happening live. It's a great platform but I think it also needs a desktop client (with OBS support, the way Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content creation to go up.
6. Re-open APIs. Twitter has sown a bad seed with the dev community by making its API very restricted. Tweets make up a very interesting dataset on which other people could build very unique things on top of. Twitter should encourage this, not stifle it. "Look what cool things we can do with Twitter" will only serve to strengthen the image of Twitter as a unique, irreplaceable platform.
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These are the main issues I see as an everyday user of Twitter. Things like live sports/TV are good ways to grow but these are all secondary to Twitter strengthening its core platform for longevity and meaningful sustainability.
> [Periscope is] a great platform but I think it also needs a desktop client (with OBS support, the way Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content creation to go up.
I would gladly play to remove sponsored tweets and just display all tweets from the people I follow, in chronological order (because even with the preference turned off, I still see tweets being moved around in the timeline x.x)
Ability to limit distribution. I'm dropping use of Twitter because I don't want crossover between compartments in life; political rants shouldn't go to business contacts, dark humor shouldn't go to religious contacts, etc.
Developers, developers, developers. I would open up the apps store and the API -- embrace developers once again. The media companies trajectory that they're currently on seems like that which Yahoo was on, and it did help Yahoo much.
You can't just turn a business around from your core competency, which in the case of Twitter is short bursts of emotions. You can't turn it into a Medium or Facebook, you'll fail miserably.
Release a new text-based product that sits in the area between Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Shift focus away from likes and followers and towards the content. Make a bold announcement about how it will combat fake news.
Allow private tweet capabilities and charge for it. This is really all you can do. Twitter is largely a broadcast system and echo chamber, which perfectly explains the type of people who gravitate to it most directly.
Get rid of Quote Tweet. Its primary current use case is to facilitate pointless "gotcha" games. I'd say it contributes more to the current poisonous atmosphere more than any other feature.
I would add a feature that is similar to goole+ circles: allow the user to view the tweets of a subset of sources. I think it makes sense for twitter: one circle for each interest/ point of view.
Twitter sort of has this functionality via lists. During football season I only look at my 'NFL List' which is comprised of football analysts, beat writers, other media folk and 'regular' but smart football fans.
Circles sort of make sense from a design point of view, but suck from a UX point of view. They are too time-consuming to maintain for a user. I think adding some sort of tagging system could be a better system, so I could use tags to say "this tweet is 'tech' related" or "'sports' related" and then followers could decide if they only want to follow a subset of my tweets by tag. Would make search/discovery easier too.
Paid API Access. Provide a way for businesses to build tools on top of Twitter, while also removing the fears that Twitter will kill your business if they decide to build a competing feature.
1. design the service around topic lists, make it easy for users to create lists of accounts and filter twitter's view by list. make curated lists sharable and easily discoverable.
Duplicate facebook (private feeds) and sell adds like facebook. Facebook is just going to keep growing their pages and take over twitter anyways, so they don't have a choice.
Cut costs and lose the millions of bots! It's disheartening to be followed and messaged by bots all the time. You feel like you're in a echo chamber for crazy people.
For new users have them auto follow tweets nearby. This will be familiar to them and from there they can learn to follow and unfollow. Make following a lot more accessible.
Hashtags are basically adhoc rooms to begin with. They kind of suffer from the same discoverability problems that an IRC room like system does too, sorting through the chaff to find and interesting tag/room requires largely knowing what you're looking for when you start.
I don't think Twitter is doing "that" badly. It's a popular social network that loads of people rely on daily, and they are making some money, at least.
Either way, I'd make the following changes:
1. Open up the ecosystem again, and take advantage of the recent trend towards data science. Twitter have acquired a lot of startups relating to Twitter analytics, and to be honest I'd push to keep them separate, but a part of the company as a whole. Allow end-users to work with TV analytics, set up news aggregators powered by Twitter analytics, and push them as separate products on their platform. Twitter can separate themselves from the pack by being the ecosystem of choice for developers, and while it won't necessarily mean more money, it creates real value for their platform.
2. Add a cost to verified profiles. Nowadays, even people that work for magazines get a verified profile, because it's been pushed for by their sales department that deal with these people, and it provides otherwise ordinary people premium features. I'd create an "approved profile" flag to allow those that simply want to prove that they are who they are (i.e. press people, and moderately known people that may want to speak to everyone) and make verified profiles a paid-for feature for celebrities that want to ensure that the general population cannot contact them. Set this as a rolling cost per-month, and I think Twitter would make a fair bit of money from those that want to use its platform for commercial gain.
3. Drastically cut their costs by cutting sales/marketing. These departments are huge, and I think Twitter grew them out with the idea that they were going to become a media company themselves. Rather than make redundancies, I'd offer an opportunity for departments to separate from the main company and link up with outside investment, with the promise of access to the parts of the ecosystem they require.
4. Make a bigger deal of live events (i.e. sport, live shows, etc), but do it in a way that keeps them separate from the main product. This links to #3 in that a sales department that purely handles sport contracts could spin off into a separate service that utilises Twitter purely for sports events. Let people extend their Twitter profile on a separate site to indicate their sporting preferences, and allow Twitter to cater the experience for them. For example, I'm a Bristol City fan, so I could sign up to Twitter Sports as a Bristol City fan, and see highlights from the main Bristol City account, the trending hashtags around Bristol City, watch live games, and see what other Championship teams are up to. Essentially, it's making a more localised platform around sports.
Charge users a cent per tweet or some other amount.
I hate doing this but maybe they need to consider a "freemium" model where you get basic tweets at a certain rate limit for free but to do things like post long videos or images directly in the tweet you can pay to do that.
Consider charging for different types of searches a user can do.
Offer researchers and people using Tweets as a dataset for sentiment or other analysis a fee for real-time and direct access to data.
Seriously, Twitter can't be saved. They fucked up when they alienated every developer out there by making their API too damn strict. There's no way back from this.
Well, for one I would stop banning and restricting people for expressing their opinions. Your phone company wouldn't disconnect your service for leaving nasty messages on someone's mailbox, so Twitter shouldn't ban people for writing nasty messages to people. It's not their responsibility and I think society suffers from their judgement of what is allowed and what isn't - how can you promote understanding and bring people closer together when one side of the argument is being silenced and marginalized? People who break laws should be dealt with by the legal system. People that do not shouldn't have to worry about their ability to communicate with people being curtailed.
Get rid of censorship. They had a good idea with live streaming video and whatnot, but they're beat to everything by Instagram and Snapchat.
As it stands now, I deleted Twitter simply because it's nothing but corporate accounts, overly aggressive SJWs posturing over every damn thing, and the only content I actually cared about was reposted from Instagram (apart from a few people I know who live streamed, but have since switched platforms). So now I only use Instagram.
I'm not exactly sure what people mean when they reference "aggressive SJWs" but many would prefer stricter moderation on Twitter. Racists and targeted harassment is a big problem. I doubt that there is a pattern of "social justice warriors" who are seeking out and harassing those with mildly opposing viewpoints.
Yeah, most of the "freedom of speech" / "get rid of censorship" stuff I see seems to be code for "let people be assholes." Which, okay. But there's a line where you're just being too toxic for the community and need to be shown the door.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and it's destructive of what it is for.
If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise to use the site as intended, i.e. for thoughtful conversation on stories that gratify intellectual curiosity.
Twitter should never have succeed, it is a solution for a problem that never existed. It used funding money to artificially manufacture the need for it, to a point that news station started using it as a news source, which is IMO ridiculous.
I think it should just die. I never had a Twitter account and never thought that I'm missing something.
The only utility that twitter was providing was already solved by RSS feeds.
I wouldn't become the CEO of Twitter. If I were, I would resign. I think the business model of these "free services but you pay with your data and advertisements" is despicable. I would much rather spend my time creating and popularizing FOSS protocols for communication if I am to work in this area.
I think Twitter has always been a completely ridiculous service and it's a poster child for this misguided iteration of Internet companies. If we just get enough users, we HAVE to make a profit! Turns out that isn't the case. The only thing I've seen Twitter accomplish is poisoning our collective consciousness with false information and a bad model of reality provided by an unsustainable system.
2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused.
3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams
4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view
5. drop the video passion-project nonsense. you don't need to own content to use twitter alongside it. strike deals with the content providers instead where tweets are shown alongside (this is already being done) and become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor
6. improve the core product for users. group messaging, longer tweets, only show replies from people who are authenticated or two degrees away from you by default, etc. etc. (and pro accounts, if you wish)
7. let people pay to get a checkmark, and then let users pay to flair tweets they like
8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter. let them pay to use it as a platform and properly authenticate their customers on twitter
9. ditto above but for marketing