Twitter will start serving you promoted tweets from accounts you don’t follow

I hope that these promoted tweets don't cause background notifications on my phone. The second my phone vibrates to tell me that I just received an ad, is the second I stop using twitter.<p>Which is a shame as I really like twitter as a concept and, honestly, I think I would pay for not having to deal with this advertising crap. Careful selection of whom I follow really has made my twitter feed to be one of the few ad-free places on the web where 80% of the content is interesting to me.<p>This is the highest rate in years (in the beginning, Usenet was better, but that was more than a decade ago). Don't take this away from me.

This is how Digg fell apart. I'm surprised they don't seem to be learning from others' mistakes. They must feel huge pressure to start pulling in profit, but this is not the way to do it. Surely they should be searching for a way to use their vast databases and trend knowledge to make money rather than just exploiting user's attention.

"we didn’t want to sacrifice user experience"<p>Bullshit. They are ads. At least be honest about it.

Tweets are already ads; it seems like they could just charge social media experts™ to send tweets rather than injecting stuff that people probably don't want.

Twitter is cable tv for me. I get some national news, a lot of stuff I don't like and a little that I do from about 100 sources. I don't think I'll mind ads.

Break the ad chain, use <a href="https://identi.ca" rel="nofollow">https://identi.ca</a>

Well, I don't want to be one of the "Oh god this ruins everything I've ever loved" people, aka the hyperbole crew, but ... seriously? I manicure my twitter stream pretty closely. If they're raising the signal:noise ratio, I hope they give me a way to ... I don't know, not see it somehow.

Twitter is more than ripe for disruption. One of these days someone will pull a google on them. Between the super slow 'new and improved' interface to sending you spam (the whole point was that you only got the tweets from those you follow) and 'twitter is over capacity, please try again in a few moments' (which is a permanent fixture these days) I can't wait for the next iteration of this concept, as long as it is done by people that know how to really scale a backend.

For a little while now, I've been wondering why nobody has created email-like systems for social networks.<p>By email-like, I mean that it's decentralized... Everyone can run their own server. No 1 company has complete control over it. (Except possibly the root DNS servers.)<p>People can subscribe to content from others (like Twitter) and receive those updates automatically.<p>I'm thinking that when you subscribe to someone, their server is notified that you subscribed, and your server remembers it as well.<p>If the person unsubscribes, the other server is notified, etc etc.<p>When you post, your server tells every subscriber's server that you posted and gives them the message. If the person has unsubscribed, but there was no notification, an 'unsubscribe' response is returned, instead of accepting the message.<p>As far as I've thought it through, this means nobody can send you spam unless you are subscribed to them. No companies can monetize you, unless you use their server instead of running your own. With a set of standardized protocols, it should be possible to create twitter-like clients that hook to any server running this...<p>It doesn't have to be limited to 140 characters. It can have all kinds of extras, like media or hashtags built-in. Replies can be threaded, instead of hoping the other person knows why you are replying.<p>There's some other things to think about, such as what happens when a server is offline for a while. Does it poll everyone to try to catch up? Do servers send messages in batches back and forth, instead of dealing with things on a user-by-user basis? etc etc.

Twitter was my RSS for a very long time. If they start injecting ads as content now, i think I'll close my account since it is no longer serving it's purpose. A bit of a shame really, i liked my spam-free Twitter.

Its sad they have to do this to monetize. But they wanted to build a centralized platform, not a distributed service.<p>A single point of congestion on the Internet so that they could retain their control, and now they're paying for it. They could have just been a federation provider, and one of many equal-level service providers. It would have scaled much, much, much better while offloading costs onto others.<p>Oh well. Thats where we are on the Internet today. Its all about the control a signal, centralized, web-centric offering gives rather than the service it provides to the users.

Quite a slippery slope they've embarked on here. It'll be way too tempting to turn up the ad frequency now if the quarter's numbers don't look good. Not a good move.

So Google cuts them off and Twitter resorts to this? If Twitter is trying to keep people from flocking to Google+, this is not the way.

I'd like to start a twitter client that "curates content" based on ML and NLP. "Curating of content" is on twitters "OK can do" list as far as I know. What do you guys think about that?<p>"curates content" = skip the noise, more bacon.<p>older thread here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971204" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971204</a>

Before everyone starts hyperventilating, they aren't going to send you emails of promoted tweets from accounts you don't follow. This sounds like Reddit's promoted links -- hopefully, like Reddit, they'll open it up to more users and it won't be a repeat of what happened with Digg.

As long as the ads are formatted differently or labeled, I am fine with it. I am easily distracted. I don't spend too much time reading tweets and I wouldn't want a tweet suddenly making me think about context when I don't want it to.

I really don't like keeping up with Twitter "stream". Just today I was picturing how much better it would be for me to consume the information if the folks I follow just discussed on some Google Group.

What stops third party apps from filtering these tweets?

Great move. It's time to grow up, ignore the people who complain (let them move on, they won't click on ads anyway), and make some profit.