Fixing Twitter

&gt; Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses.<p>This seems like speculation. Empirically, do a search for &quot;@justinbieber&quot; (click on &quot;live&quot;) or look at any of his tweets, and you&#x27;ll see innumerable 16-year-old fangirls who have found some incentive to tweet at him. There&#x27;s also the subphenomenon of these 16-year-old fangirls getting incredibly excited when those tweets <i>do</i> get seen and interacted with, which indicates, one, that they don&#x27;t go into the ether, and two, people have a genuine hope of interaction.<p>I&#x27;ve seen this in practice, because I do actually follow certain parts of popular culture and music and trashy television (not Bieber, as it happens, but enough others) and occasionally look at what they&#x27;re up to on Twitter. It happens without fail for <i>every</i> celebrity.<p>So I wonder if the author is actually reporting on how actual people actually use Twitter, or extrapolating from the eyes of a non-16-year-old non-fangirl who cares about things like reply threading.

There might be no fixing Twitter. The reason Twitter grew imho is because of the rich ecosystem of developers they had. Those developers, time and time again, found new ways to use Twitter and did the development, marketing, and educating of the public. The result was rich engagement and growth.<p>Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go and tell the developer community to come back? How do you trust Twitter? The answer is you don&#x27;t.

&quot;Nothing great is Built On Twitter&quot;<p>That quote sums it all up.<p>Most of Dustin&#x27;s suggested extensions are things other people should have built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton&#x27;s App.Net plan where Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on ensuring the backbone stays in place.<p>Funny enough, that is how twitter originated. Others built their clients and they focused on the core. They lost that direction and wanted to &quot;own it all&quot; like Facebook. But they took that direction rather too early.<p>Take Tweetstorming as an example which is a niche need. My team built a tweetstorming app <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com</a>. It pulls and pushes all it&#x27;s content from and to Twitter. In an ideal case, Twitter should support it and similar ones rather than making Twitter.com more convoluted with the aim of doing everything themselves.<p>If Twitter had supported third patrty developers, someone&#x2F;people would have built a killer app for using twitter to follow and interact live events. That would have brought another set of people into the platform and that extends to other use cases too.<p>Hopefully, Twitter gets it right because I have come to really find Twitter useful.

&gt; Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it.<p>It has? I don&#x27;t follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than&#x27;s not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It&#x27;s like an IRC channel where <i>I</i> get to decide who&#x27;s there. And it works great for that.<p>&gt; Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.”<p>Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills. I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they&#x27;ve trusted me with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality from various art project bots I follow. I don&#x27;t need a &quot;huge fucking banner&quot; telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking about it.<p>When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their @name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will reply and help fix it.<p>Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn&#x27;t going to get a reply. Duh? Would they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own account? There&#x27;s a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by their social media specialists, and they&#x27;re boring as fuck because they&#x27;re not really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters.<p>Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he&#x27;s not using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.

My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I get more and more bot &#x27;followers&#x27; and more ads in my timeline. The signal &#x2F; noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.

I think it&#x27;s time to rethink the 140 charcter limit.<p>When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort.<p>Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it&#x27;s going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?

Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese &quot;copy&quot; of twitter (hint: it&#x27;s not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that&#x27;s ahead of twitter in many respects.<p>Just off the top of my head, weibo has:<p>- the &quot;event&quot; grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping system (&quot;micro topics&quot;)<p>- rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are very popular)<p>- payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw<p>- properly threaded conversations, easy to follow<p>- a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to connect companies to the system<p>I&#x27;m aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at what they&#x27;re doing seems like a pretty good starting point.

As I&#x27;ve written in past comments (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10094396" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10094396</a>), and as this post suggests, rebuilding developer relations and improving integrations would go a long way. There&#x27;s a lot of potential locked in the platform right now; they should work on letting developers get access to it more easily and strive to remove the cloud of uncertainty that has built up around it (i.e., will they shut me down if I do something too popular that colors outside the current lines?) It would benefit everyone, especially Twitter.

Twitter doesnt seem like it&#x27;s capitalized on what it&#x27;s good at, or anything really.<p>For personal: Facebook has network effect, complex relationships, share anything and everything, privacy, groups, etcs. Younger generations more focused on sharing are using Instagram, Snapchat, and all the messaging apps.<p>For work: LinkedIn gives value in seeing work histories, connections, companies, etc (although still a bad product but without competition)<p>For news: The mainstream just use news sites, search and Facebook or get alerts from all the other apps&#x2F;networks&#x2F;reddit and there&#x27;s RSS which is way nicer for following blogs and niche news.<p>What Twitter has been good at is allowing people to have a easy public voice (although nobody might see it but its there) without being tied to a personal identity and giving the chance to talk to people you might never be able to reach otherwise. You can tweet at politicians, celebrities, top executives, companies and can reasonably expect a reply or exposure. That&#x27;s really powerful and a great equalizer. It&#x27;s also good for real-time obviously, working like a constant stream of consciousness of the collective you follow.<p>However like the article says, thats it. There&#x27;s no movement on the product itself. Terrible UI with broken conversations, broken sharing, broken lists, no new features like deduping tweets, non-chronological ordering, better developer APIs, and the ads product isn&#x27;t great either.<p>It&#x27;s kind of sad that the network that originally began as messaging based around sms&#x2F;phones has been completely overtaken by all other messaging and sharing apps while still keeping completely unnecessary limitations like 140 chars. There&#x27;s just no focus here...

I think the disaster that is Twitter is a product of its culture. If you read the history of the business, it started with a group of people who really arrived in the business quite randomly. There wasn&#x27;t much thought given to building a balanced team or a strong culture. Effectively, twitter was an accident that came out of another business.<p>Most worryingly, the founders couldn&#x27;t agree on what the purpose of Twitter was, and illuminatingly people in this discussion <i>still</i> don&#x27;t have a clear idea of its purpose. Is it a news broadcast system, to follow current events? Or is it about sharing your personal life with your friends?<p>From a technical point of view, I find Twitter very confusing. I read that they were at over a million users before having any kind of backup strategy. They rewrote their systems from Java to Scala, but then seemed to regret that decision, their decisions on shutting down API access to third parties have been really nasty... this kinda thing makes me worry that they don&#x27;t have clear leadership.<p>And then there&#x27;s the politics of infighting, and some of their executives being &quot;overthrown&quot; over time... I can&#x27;t see how you can create a good culture when people at the top are behaving like that. It&#x27;s hardly rocket science - just focus on the product and your users.<p>I think creating a culture from the beginning is a lot easier than changing an engrained culture, so my view is that Twitter is screwed. Failing a Jobsian turnaround, the best they can do is sell and sell fast. I can seriously see Twitter losing out to a startup. Any thoughts on whether they will survive?

What amazes me is how slowly it seems to move on for users.<p>There&#x27;s a ton you could do to improve search, UIs on top of the feed, analytics, communities, twitter lists, conversations, media embedding and interactions.<p>On top of that social graph they had the potential to build a better, more real time, more community led Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube.<p>And yet it doesn&#x27;t seem to move forward as a product.

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

Great points all. Especially #5.<p>One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken. Sometimes when I&#x27;m trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on Twitter.<p>Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.

&gt; Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text.<p>That&#x27;s not unexpected given their signup flow, it&#x27;s pages and pages you have to click through where it automatically follows hundreds of celebrities unless you uncheck the boxes.

Well twitter has just recently restructured the product team so maybe big things are in-store: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;twitter-restructures-product-team-promotes-jeff-seibert&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;twitter-restructures-product-te...</a>

Parts of this are a little off, at least in how I use twitter.<p>&quot;There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses.&quot;<p>Maybe true for the 1mm+ follower people, but ironically, this is 90+% of how I actually use Twitter. I tweet at a mid-high volume (100k-&gt;500k) individual, and occasionally get a response, more often get a fave, and ever so often get a retweet.<p>For &lt; 50k follower people, I almost always get a response if what I sent was thoughtful.<p>Also, I love looking at the responses to tweets - and often respond to <i>those</i> responses, and get a thread going with the responder - often dropping out the original person who tweeted altogether.<p>I&#x27;m not saying all is well in twitter world - but I quite enjoy (perhaps too much) the back and forth&#x2F;threading&#x2F;responding that twitter offers. I really, really don&#x27;t need any more.

My main issue with Twitter now is the recent (undocumented) change to the mobile apps for &quot;suggested tweets.&quot; (example: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AfsmQgW.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AfsmQgW.png</a> )<p>As mentioned by the commentators, Twitter has a discovery issue. Twitter&#x27;s solution is to put &quot;suggested tweets&quot; below the normal replies, but without any clear discernible division. (just &quot;Suggested by Twitter&quot; in light gray color). Way too many times I accidentally read suggested tweets instead of normal replies while instinctively scrolling to the bottom and I get very confused.

I really, really want to like Twitter, but I just can&#x27;t. Most of the content in my stream is crap, as I (apparently) don&#x27;t know the &quot;correct&quot; people to follow. Finding the &quot;correct&quot; people to follow is difficult, and even then they sometimes spew multiple boatloads of crap. :&#x2F; I wish there was a way to filter some of it out and only keep the good stuff.<p>Conversations are almost impossible to follow. Once you locate a good tweet, its a confusing process to find all the related tweets. Sometimes, they are below the tweet (which is confusing as I don&#x27;t read from the bottom up most of the time) and sometimes they are buried inside the tweet. Grrrr!!!<p>Finally, putting non-text media in a tweet is turning out to be horrible. At least when tweets used to be ASCII, I could reasonably read through them. Now, I have pages and pages of little silent movies that start playing when they come into focus. How annoying is that!?<p>I really like the &quot;World News Headline&quot; feature that Dustin proposes and would probably use Twitter more if it has something like that. However, given that Twitter is transforming itself into a Vine&#x2F;Instagram clone I probably won&#x27;t be hitting the tweet box much in the future. :(

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

Very interesting point regarding the illusion of interaction that Instagram provides. I do find Twitter&#x27;s displaying of replies and retweets (to the first 100) questionable.<p>As for how Twitter can improve in that aspect, how about a horizontally-scrolling feed of users who retweet, and a less-annoying version of such for comments? They seem like relatively easy design choices.

Twitter need to focus more on developers. The underlying concept behind the site is really solid. Allowing people to build cool things which adds value and brings in new users is good for everyone. So make it easy for them! Their API is not great, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they don&#x27;t release official libraries for the major languages?

Twitter&#x27;s problem is simpler: it is great for power users, shite for everyone else.<p>Twitter needs to curate the content I see better - especially for newer users. Twitter is boring as sin until you follow a few interesting people, then it becomes overwhelming as it adds too many more.<p>Twitter needs to focus on the feed being more malleable, both with and without personal effort from me.

Not sure I agree about #1 and maybe my twitter experience is different from others. First, if I want to communicate with others I take it over FB&#x2F;Email&#x2F;Messenger of choice. Sure public conversation is nice, but its painful over Twitter and I&#x27;m not sure how it could be made better. Everyone talks about how a threaded view would be nice, but people fail to consider that Twitter conversations are never 1-to-1, its usually multiple people tweeting at one person. Having a conversation on something as open as Twitter is like trying to have a conversation with the President during his speech. Not everyone can talk at one, and no matter how you do it, the interface will drown some out. Combine that with the fact that you can tweet anything at anyone (unlike a Facebook&#x2F;HN thread which is usually around a specific topic), you get a very constrained opportunity to have actually conversations.<p>However, Twitter does a better job at problem #1 than instagram does. Beiber is not replying to fans over Instagram - and I doubt people are actually communicating to celebrities via Instagram comments, have you seen Beiber&#x27;s (or any music celeb&#x27;s) instagram? Its a wasteland of spam, self promotion, and emoji. I doubt Justin Bieber has a higher reply rate on Instagram than Twitter - it&#x27;s very easy to see that Justin Beiber engages fans on Twitter, not so much on Instagram.<p>That said, as someone who uses Twitter heavily, but never tweets - my most useful function for it is a realtime news feed (to not just news orgs, but people, parody accounts, comedians, tech nerds, sports news, ...). I place as much emphasis on the ability to &quot;respond and have conversations&quot; to the success of Twitter, as to the success of Buzzfeed and other news orgs (- I doubt you need an active comments section to have a good news site - most of it is garbage anyways).<p>The second and third points are apt though - Facebook&#x27;s &quot;trending&quot; seems a lot more useful the Twitter&#x27;s, however I&#x27;m not sure how useful either is without constant curation. Even if Twitter had a super sophisticated algorithm to automatically detect topics - without curation you end up with garbage. Facebook&#x27;s trending is just as useless once you have the reason why its trending.<p>Lastly, FTA &gt;<i>Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text.</i><p>I&#x27;m not sure how Twitter can fix this, but my response to this is if this is what Twitter has become, then its because you made it that way. Reddit now has a subreddit &#x2F;r&#x2F;BlackPeopleTwitter which would give you a very different idea on what Twitter is if your Twitter experience was like that.

Your word in Twitter&#x27;s ear!<p>I seem to recognise a pattern where Twitter &amp; Apple&#x27;s AppStore fail in the same way: Failing to give end losers (er, users) intelligent filters so they can decide what they want to see, and equally important, what they do not want to see. The conspicuous absence of those options speaks loud &amp; clear as to the platform owner&#x27;s intentions.

I very much like tweets be ethereal like SnapChat snaps. Many people don&#x27;t like to keep a history of stuff they said previously.

I encourage anyone who thinks that #2 is as easy as the OP to give it a shot. It&#x27;s actually quite a hard problem, especially when you have to deal with fake news tweets and want over 80% accuracy.<p>Disclaimer, I work for a startup doing exactly this, so if it&#x27;s something you actually want to do for a paycheck, shoot me an email.

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

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

&gt; The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team.<p>This is THE ONE THING they&#x27;ve done right. I&#x27;m come on Twitter to read what people wrote about stuff. Last thing we need is an emotionless machine generated feed.

If the MM+ tweeter is half way savvy they&#x27;d do what Zuck does and reply to some small % of his followers. I&#x27;m sure if they did that, a 13 year old follower would irrationally hope that their tweet was seriously read and would engage in the conversation.

Thats funny, if followed it seems these advices would transform twitter into facebook<p>So, yeah..

Disconnecting from twitter was one of the best moves I ever made. Being subjected to a high volume&#x2F;low quality stream of garbage is not good for the mind.

Dustin clearly doesn&#x27;t follow @cher if he thinks there&#x27;s no meaningful interaction with celebrities going on on Twitter

Yes, and for that last few months the &quot;Whats new&quot; message on Google Play has been: We made it easier to add you comments to others tweets - or something to that effect.<p>I have been saying their problem is they have been too busy painting themselves into a corner:<p><pre><code> [v] alienating 3rd part developers [v] public by default - no organization level settings [v] keep the cute 140 char limit that is now just an historic artifact </code></pre> I guess you can add more to that list.

Twitter like Trello is a tool, a mainstream tool got to be horizontal product [1].<p>There is no point discussing about it should be this or that. Feel free to use it the way you want it to be.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;items&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;06.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;items&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;06.html</a>

If Twitter didn&#x27;t exist, what would the world use instead?

twitter&#x27;s default landing page is more interesting than the default page that you see after login

I&#x27;m a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps until they fucked them all. I&#x27;m now forced to use their glittery official app full of ads and suggestions and things I don&#x27;t care about. I follow less than 50 people and use Twitter 24&#x2F;7 literally. I never miss a tweet.<p>&gt; First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction. Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses.<p>Let&#x27;s force Justin Bieber to sit down and read the thousands of replies he gets to each any of his tweets.<p>Let&#x27;s also make it so when I click on a Justin Bieber tweet, my browser downloads a webpage of 50MB with all the responses so I can read them all.<p>&gt; Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.”<p>No, please, please no, NOOO. Some of us are just simply not interested in real-time events and use Twitter to talk to our friends. If a bomb explodes in Bangkok, I simply don&#x27;t care. If I did, I&#x27;d use the search engine. And by knowing Twitter, they would probably make the banner mandatory, or would make you dismiss it each time (along with a nice &quot;Did you like this?&quot;).<p>&gt; Third, Twitter has fucked up multimedia integration. Why the hell does adding a photo or video use up some of the 140 characters I want to use for my description? Why does it crop my photo? Why does it not show full-width images in the feed?<p>Because Twitter is a text-only social network... Or at least that&#x27;s what it was.<p>&gt; Fourth, let’s talk about third party payloads&#x2F;integrations on Twitter. They have never felt native, and they are still–after three years–in a bizarrely dire state.<p>Same response as before: I think media integrations should not be encouraged.<p>&gt; And that leads to me to the final thing I want to talk about, which is also the most important: Twitter has fucked up its platform. Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it.<p>So don&#x27;t follow them. Follow only humans with real feelings that are not using Twitter to earn themselves money.<p>&gt; The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone.<p>So you want to read automated tweets all day? Don&#x27;t be silly, who wants to read &quot;Johnny has favourited this vid on youtube!!&quot; &quot;Mike has uploaded this pic to Instagram!!&quot; all day? You? No, nobody, that&#x27;s why these integrations with automatic tweets are RUDE. If I want to know what you uploaded to Instagram I&#x27;d follow you there, jackass!<p>There, I vented it.

I love that the author is criticizing Twitter&#x27;s UI, yet when I tried to find a date of the article, I had to mysteriously hover over the title of the post to see it magically appear before me.

Twitter&#x27;s real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO&#x27;s vision is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.

The primary problem for twitter is that they more than ever is a protocol for link-sharing.<p>If twitter wants to survive they need to get content onto their platform which means loose the 140 character.<p>In some ways and ironically, Medium could be a kind of replacement for twitter if they found a nicer balance between long and short posts.

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

Twitters problem, is that you had an idea, and it took 5243 characters to relate it. So, instead of using their platform you went elsewhere.<p>(139 characters, maybe I should use twitter...)

OK, I&#x27;ll admit, I haven&#x27;t been following what is going on with Twitter, but come on people, their product is limited to 140 characters. Surely they have something to fix.

I recently visited a Twitter page, to find that it downloaded 6.3 MB of data across 63 requests. Since it only displays around 10 140-character tweets on the first page, that&#x27;s a bloat factor of 4718x in my book. Twitter is done.