So I never created a Twitter account. Over the years, there are a few people that I liked to read their thoughts on Twitter, so I'd manually go to their wall and read occasionally. They're all verified.<p>Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediately followed the 4 or 5 people. On the last one, my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number. What? I haven't even tweeted anything yet and only followed verified checkmarked users. And why do I have to supply a phone number to use a web site? So, I just left the account in limbo and went back to what I was doing before - just manually going to individuals walls to read because they're bookmarked.<p>So then a few months ago, Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue.<p>As of a few weeks ago, they got rid of the ability to dismiss the modal. The page just locks and you can't scroll unless you sign in.<p>And that was the last day I used or visited Twitter. I now see 0 ads, will never give up a phone number to join a website, and have nothing but disdain for that company.<p>I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. At least I was seeing your ads before.
As a heavy twitter user who mostly enjoys it (I'm very particular of who I follow), I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. Their product has been incredibly stagnant for <i>years</i> save for the occasional feature here and there and some styling.<p>They've screwed over devs trying to build on their APIs and eroded all trust along the way. New features have been rolled out haphazardly, and they totally botched Vine and let TikTok takeover.<p>Despite all these issues, I like it, but it's increasingly frustrating to use, and can't help but question what's going on inside the company.<p>Related: Here's how to hide all the crap they've been adding to the timeline<p>twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]<p>twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]<p>twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]<p>twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]<p>twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]<p>twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"]<p>twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]
Honestly? It's because their ads are trash. I know lots of marketing people and they all stay away from using them.<p>Say what you will about Facebook and Instagram, their ads are better overall. There's been several times an Instagram ad showed up in my feed, and I said shut up and take my money.<p>Nothing like that has ever happened on Twitter for me.
Honestly, Twitter is just a weird product. On the authoring side, it has a tremendous product-market fit with particular outspoken groups (investors, founders, politicians, journalists, activists, etc) and a terrible product-market fit with everyone else.<p>I believe their biggest bet on revenue has always been to grow their passive audiences (people who just use the feed and don't tweet) but their product lacks the immediate stickiness that other feed products have. It's almost impossible to get the value of Twitter out of the box if you don't have a clear idea of what topics matter to you and who are the central figures in those topics.<p>News outlets have a better funnel to distill and distribute information, so most people don't need to have Twitter to have a general idea of what was said on Twitter. A large amount of news nowadays is "X person tweeted Y".<p>I'm convinced Twitter will never be able to grow into a meaningful mainstream social media (+1B users) with their current model, but I do believe there's a lot of unlocked value in what they have created.
After all of these decades ...<p>After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet, livejournal/myspace/facebook ...<p>I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text discussions <i>looks like this</i> !<p>What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think of this ?<p>It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.
I use Twitter occasionally -- but the real shift in the past year is that all of my family (4 siblings, parents, in-laws, etc) have switched to using Signal. A group Signal chat is a wonderful social media platform, without any advertisements, algorithms, or similar nonsense. Just updates and thoughts from people I care about. It gives me hope that the destructive social media platforms like Twitter and FB will eventually be small compared to actually private communication channels like Signal.
I never understood Twitter until I started using it professionally, if you could call it that, as an academic. "Science Twitter" complements traditional academic publishing models really well. When I want updates about science, I read papers that I find from searching, RSS updates, or citations. When I want updates about _how science is done_, I turn to Twitter, where many of my scientific role models are active and almost all of the interesting stuff tends to bubble to the top.<p>Its algorithm seems to work really well for rapid consumption of buzz within a particular network that you can tap into by following people. It is one of the few cases where I like the fact that I occasionally get out-of-network Tweets in my timeline because it usually exposes me to something really interesting posted by someone outside of my direct field. I'd never want to use Twitter for comprehensive reviews of some topic, reliable back-and-forth discussion, etc. but it's just fantastic for gossip and trends.<p>The tables here are even starting to turn–so many people are on Science Twitter that it feels like I find as many new and relevant papers on Twitter as I do in my tailored email notifications and RSS feeds. Twitter is also always a day or two ahead, and the papers usually come with the backstory and context in plain English. I hate to say that the Twitter thread from the paper author is often more informative (at least, per unit of time that it takes to consume) than the content of the paper itself.
They failed to get revenue from ads, just started a paid version that doesn't offer anything attractive for most people (I would be willing to pay a bit for a good experience), and by focusing SO MUCH on engagement without a way to opt-out, they make people hate the tool and their timelines.
Tik Tok at least has two tabs: Following and For You. On following I only see content from users I follow. But Twitter refuses to let this happen, and clutter my timeline with things I don't wanna see.<p>And even if I create lists for people I want to see posts from (suggestion from another post from earlier this week), I still can't make my likes not be 'advertised' to everyone that follows me. So basically sometimes I can't even give a like to a tweet if it's risqué for example, because some followers might not like seeing that and then unfollow me.
I feel so naive / out-of-touch when Twitter comes up. How is it we don't have a simple micro-blogging protocol. Like we do for email. Twitter didn't invent it, neither did Unix for that matter. Twtxt and others are doing some great things, but why don't we move from innovation to standardized protocols to enhance the user experience of the internet. Is it just great marketing driven by profits. As I said, I'm probably just naive, but it sure seems like a trivial protocol to write and then we can all jump on the task of building clients.
Are you sure about that Reuters? Twitter's stock is up 5% over the last five days. It seems to me that they met the market's expectation for growth. Not many people buy more of a stock after it underperforms their expectations.<p>This headline is at best misleading -- intended to give the impression that Twitter is performing worse than they are by ignoring the metrics in which they are excelling -- or potentially even just outright wrong.
Is there some reason articles like this doesn't include profits? Revenue is specified along with a number of other key metrics, but not profit.<p>The overall conclusion seems to be the same as with Meta last week: It's going well, but not as well as predicted. The slower than expected growth is only a problem, because the stock market likes predictability and will punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future.
I actually still get a pretty decent experience out of Twitter. The only topic I really engage with is remote work.. I don’t follow very many people (only humans who post real content) and unfollow anyone who goes “off topic”. Which is too bad, but it keeps my feed simple and sane.<p>I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
YouTube and TikTok pay people who have popular videos, which gives "creators" an incentive to put a lot of work into what they do.<p>You can argue that the payouts are a pittance for the large number of views those YouTubers get, but in comparison, the only thing Twitter has done to reward its users is provide a virtual tip jar.<p>Not only that, you can't pay to remove ads on Twitter.
Is this at all related to Apple's privacy change? The article mentions FB's recent miss, which was attributed to this issue, but doesn't say whether it was at play here as well.<p>I realize iOS users are not the majority, but it's likely that they are more valuable for advertisers and therefore could generate more revenue.<p>edit: as noted below, this was in the article — I had done a search for "FB" and didn't see there was another reference to Apple that was upstream from where I landed.
It's the only social I use really but I've been looking into alternatives. Ever since Twitter decided to open up a crypto/web3 team and introduced NFT profile pics I'm out and won't support it... but as the only social I have to keep in touch with other open source contributors and projects I work on/follow it's going to take some time before I totally close my account.<p>That being said, good recommendations are welcome!
I don’t understand why platforms like Twitter don’t make money the easy way: let people pay for visual customizations, like a different profile shape (octogonal instead of a circle), or a special banner or label, or any other cosmetics. That has been very successful for multiplayer games since more than a decade, people love to pay to show their cool new cosmetic. Let people pay for cool set of emotes. Or different colors, etc.<p>That doesn’t require ads, is optional, and works well in a social context.
I think Twitter is a victim of it's niche.<p>It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way that you gain new users and don't lose the current.
Twitter has been an absolute mess over the last few years. Through the explore tab, they aggressively promote topics that I have no interest in: k-pop, fashion, reality TV, telenovelas and birthdays. And there's no way to tell them that I don't really care about those topics, you can't even hide them.<p>The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays, the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics all related to that person.<p>And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account.<p>And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
FB deservedly gets a lot of criticism. I personally feel Twitter doesn't get its fair share of blame. IME Twitter is the most toxic social media platform out there. Twitter deserves a fair share of blame for the divisive political culture we live in right now. I hope these companies go bankrupt and it'd be nothing but a blessing for humanity.
The Hacker News zeitgeist appears to be strongly anti-Twitter. I'm not entirely sure why.<p>As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook.<p>As far as "is Twitter a good product" - apart from complaints that people talk about politics on the app, I don't see anything substantial in the complaints here.
I don't understand why anyone would read Twitter regularly. The short limit in messages makes any intelligent discussion difficult, so nearly all tweets are either links elsewhere or nonsense. Either way, Twitter is by far the easiest of all social media giants to avoid.
Twitter it's actually on a better path for generating revenue nowadays:<p>- Spaces have successfully siphoned users out of Clubhouse
- Audio ads could be next
- The crypto integration they've done is just the tip of the iceberg
I see they a huge loss of more than 500 million dollars on a healthy 1.2 billion dollars (which is up 37% from last quarter).<p>What did they spend that money on? Did they invest it in some new stuff or spend it on marketing?
User growth? Why does it need user growth? It’s twitter, it’s been around a long time, everyone that wants to use a service like that knows what it is.<p>So much opposition with everything having to be bigger and bigger.
It's a version of the same problem that Facebook has.<p>Once you've had your term of ruling the world, there are only so many directions you can go from there. And by definition, the majority are downwards.
I am willing to pay for no noise -- straight dope twitter just like I do for YouTube premium. But, Twitter has to remind of some fucking celebrity, some fucking political meltdown, so cultural gossip bullshit and days outrage. There is no way, I could turn this off this. Along with this, the garbage mumbling of the tweets of people I follow based on popularity (as twitter claims) instead of chronological or some other custom organization, I feel works for me.
I think there used to be an adage that if you can get enough members, you can monetize it. Twitter haven't exactly made no money but I can't imagine that there is any real trick here other than adverts - the same as most other "free" services.<p>Maybe they should try something more person like where people pay a certain amount of money to get exclusive content from the people they follow. Can't think of any other way I would pay for micro-blogging.
So, I guess it turns out that buying user engagement isn't really worthwhile if you have no monetization strategy (that doesn't make all those users angry)?
I have never understood Twitter as a product. The idea of <i>following</i> people seems bizarre to me. If I wanted to follow some product or organization I would subscribe to an email, mailer, RSS, or something of the sort specific to the thing I wish to stay informed about.<p>Over sharing, or the idea of broadcasting details about my life to strangers on the internet is also something I completely don't understand.
Maybe there just aren't enough people in the world that want to be a part of something like Twitter. It's an aggressively public platform, which many people understandably don't want. one in twenty people in the world using your platform aught be enough for anybody, but the whole financial system we've set up around these companies is insane.
There aren’t enough ex-USA Ad Dollars. Its a modern version of the town crier there isn’t much room to grow in terms of features. So they are trying with ‘clubhouse’ aka Spaces which has been a flop and other superficial UX gimmicks.
I think it hit its apex and something or someone will disrupt it so the cycle of businesses continue.
Twitter is terrible at targeted advertising.<p>I'm actively looking to buy a house in Sydney for a million dollars, yet Twitter shows me general ads that have no interest to me - like investing in gold or installing a virtual chatbot app.<p>Twitter should be working with Domain.com.au to show targeted ads to Domain's active user base.
I'm one of the suckers buying Twitter stock. My theory is that they're the last untapped value in social networking. In order to tap that value, they need to get someone that can run a business in the top spot. Time will tell if they ever find them.
I use Twitter regularly, but I do not have an account. I just bookmarked maybe a dozen of my favorite journalists/public figures, and go through their timelines daily. I do not feel the need to participate in the flamewars that arise under their tweets.
This chart doesn't take into account inflation.<p>Anyway, someone described twitter as a "honeypot for assholes". If your platform is dominated by trolls or other malicious people, I can't see it having a good valuation no matter how many users you have.
Every 5th tweet on my timeline is a sponsored one! I never seen twitter this aggressive. I was surprised how my brain has on auto-pilot for sometime that it refuses to acknowledge the ads even.
I got a new political debate with three other people on Twitter and at some point they revealed to me that all three of them were the same person.<p>That's what I decided to quit using Twitter.
Should HN have ads and become a revenue generating part of Y Combinator? Twitter and Reddit fall in a similar camp. Should they take the ad tech approach to sustain themselves?
> Twitter also announced a new $4 billion share repurchase program, which replaces a $2 billion program from 2020.<p>So they're a growth stock, but really they're a dividend stock?
I wonder if they count crypto scammers as real users. Hell , i can't even tweet at Amazon support without multiple automated scambots messaging me.
Like Instagram and others they have gotten quite hostile to visitors without an account. I guess tracking and monetizing your users earns a lot more than displaying ads for everyone.
Twitters design makes it kind of a weird one way communication tool.<p>Elon Musk can tweet something and a million people will reply. What percentage if those replies are bots, shills, or people trying to get money out of some offer of employment? Likely an absurdly high %.<p>Then there are the hacker groups and their influence campaigns... All over twitter.<p>I feel like twitter might be useful on a self hosted intranet with your close family and friends -- but as a global product it is grotesque.
It beggars belief that people don't think the numbers from any of these companies are completely fraudulent.<p>Has anyone <i>been</i> on Twitter? Bots, spam, etc.
The funny thing about all these articles about missed growth is that all the mission statements are just arbitrary numbers. Spotify, Twitter, Facebook none of them said anything about building something new or trying to be the best at something, nope. "Our Mission is XXX with YYY growth trajectory."
Live by the wokism, die by the wokism.<p>Remember that weird time in 2020 when they were slapping "offensive content" to all tweets from supporters of one specific party while still allowing porn clips without any filter. Yeah, I quit twitter around that time.
I think social media for political shit posting will be the first to splinter. In other words, Twitter will split into multiple smaller Twitters each targeting a specific political group.
It seems that every popular Social Media platform became an extension of the liberal governments. I trust a proper sentiment analysis would reveal this.