Signing up for a new Twitter account shows why the company is struggling to grow

I wrote this flow about 3 years, ago, and my face is still the Twitter teacher (see twitter.com&#x2F;finkel). I haven&#x27;t worked at Twitter for over a year.<p>A few things. At least when I wrote it, the very first step you&#x27;d see the friends who tried to connect with you, if you have any. I doubt that&#x27;s changed, so this may be a special case.<p>After building this flow, I helped my team design multiple better&#x2F;more modern flows, but all performed worse than my original when we measured for retention over time. It turns out it&#x27;s much trickier than it looks to build a better flow, and it also hard to prove that it&#x27;s better due to bots&#x2F;spammers.<p>Even though this flow is far from perfect, I still take pride that my face has been shown to hundreds of millions of new users, and that it greatly outperformed its predecessor. But I just want to remind users here that it&#x27;s easy to say: &quot;This is crap, I could do better.&quot; When it fact, many other &quot;better&quot; things have been tried, and it&#x27;s surprisingly harder and more nuanced than it looks.<p>With my knowledge now, I believe more of Twitter&#x27;s energy should be spent improving the product, because the new user flow is much less important than the product people see when it&#x27;s done.

Twitter actually makes it difficult to find value from it. You have to actually work at it. What Silicon Valley startup doesn&#x27;t pull in a list of your friends that are already on its service?<p>Once you&#x27;ve followed your friends then how about your interests? If I&#x27;m interested in Formula 1 its possible I might want to follow a driver or team owner. Only if I&#x27;m interested in Hollywood or pop music would I be interested in Kate Winslet or Lady Gaga.<p>Twitter assumes just the opposite, we all care about celebrity to the exclusion of our friends and hobbies.

As has been mentioned in the post about the onboarding process, it gives you suggestions of who to follow when you sign up (first as a random list of celebs, followed by another list of big names in broad categories likes music&#x2F;technology et) – but doesnt give you context for why.<p>To me twitter is an “interest” network, as in, I want to find out more about x or keep up with the latest on y etc – and I think this is the biggest failure of twitter ie not communication this aspect of its value proposition effectively. Ironically, Twitter themselves have called themselves an information network and not a social network.<p>So, if before making suggestions on people to follow if it were to a) position itself (better than it currently has) as a way to get massive value from keeping up on things of interest and b) ask users to type in, say, 5 things there were interested in – and then serve up suggestions of who to follow… … this would not only personalize the feed but be immediately relevant which should raise engagement&#x2F;retention etc. I think such an approach would get users to their aha moment about twitter much quicker.<p>Add to this, the most powerful features of Twitter which most people still don&#x27;t use&#x2F;know about is Lists. So once you were onboarded and had say 10+ people you were following, if you were prompted to segregate these people into lists by topic, that would make consuming twitter 10x easier than it is.<p>It seems that at times twitter still behaves as if it was something only the technorati (early adopters) use – who will figure things out. That is clearly not the case anymore.

&quot;What would a new user even do after signing up? Who should I search for?&quot;<p>I agree that this is the problem with Twitter, but the signup process is unlikely to be the cause. Some people are just not interested in the 140 character mental garbage that others are spewing. I understand the author likes Twitter a lot and cannot fathom the idea that Twitter is just not useful or interesting to vast numbers of people.

<i>This is disappointing, as most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following celebrities. I suspect that many users sign up for the first time, follow mostly celebrities and then give up, since they never get much interaction.</i><p>Agreed. What I&#x27;d like to see is for Twitter to do much more curation: select top users in very focused categories (for instance, &quot;Technology Journalists&quot;, &quot;Linux Experts&quot;, &quot;Java Experts&quot; and let users drill down through multiple categories to select the people they want to follow. Twitter already has something similar (it&#x27;s step 2 in the sign up process) but the current categories are too overbroad and unfocused.

It looks even worse than three years ago when I wrote a similar post:<p><a href="http://diegobasch.com/why-twitters-growth-has-slowed-down-and-what" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;diegobasch.com&#x2F;why-twitters-growth-has-slowed-down-an...</a>

No.<p>Signing up for a new twitter account shows why _you think_ the company is struggling to grow.<p>Without any insight into their acquisition, retention, or other core data that drove these decisions you have no idea what you are talking about.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong - I think these are all good hypotheses. But without data they are just hypotheses.

Owen,<p>I would submit to you that an analysis of Twitter&#x27;s, for lack of a better word, design decisions can&#x27;t be made without putting more thought in re: who they are as a company and what their tendencies are.<p>What sticks out about Twitter is how deliberate and disciplined their decision-making tends to be. (To me, at least. FWIW, I&#x27;ve worked with a major telecom on their buyflow in both a business and technical capacity. I&#x27;m proud to say I&#x27;m the reason email&#x2F;password is the fallback auth and address&#x2F;pin-number (half of which was already taken care of in the previous step: determining service availability via address) is the default, rather than the other way around as per the original design. Given that the app is in Best Buy kiosks and whatnot, that was a pretty big one.) E.g., these guys track time-to-first-tweet. They&#x27;re not not looking at what you&#x27;re looking at. Hell, they&#x27;re looking at it with a microscope. If they and I arrive at different conclusions, I ask what I&#x27;m missing, not what they&#x27;re missing -- and I don&#x27;t say that in a platitudinal sense; I&#x27;m an arrogant bastard who thinks everyone is wrong about everything. In case you hadn&#x27;t noticed.<p>But think about how long, how many years TC, et al. chirped chirped chirped about Twitter&#x27;s &quot;inability&quot; to monetize. Now those people-- if anyone would bother to look-- look like idiots. Twitter silently told everyone to go fuck themselves, we&#x27;re going to spend like 4 years throwing away ideas, developing a very strong opinion on this, because a wrong decision could kill our company - not now, but 10 years from now. Compare and contrast: Fb ads, which have been (thoughtfully! and with data!) likened to Ponzi schemes.

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

I too have a similar problem with twitter. Its not just the signing up process, but also the signing in process, especially on the mobile application. Every time I &quot;sign in&quot; the mobile applicatoon , I&#x27;m put through the same annoying process of being shown suggestions of who to follow, importing my contact list, tips I already knew when I signed up and some more suggestions. Once signed in, random twitter notifications come in which make no sense or which I have not signed up to (for example, x and x have favorited x tweet who I am not following)<p>To further add to this without trailing off topic, twitter is incredibly restrictive when it comes to sharing content through direct messages. As I find useful resources which may benefit a friend I am advising on his startup, twitter seems to think I am spamming him even if I send one link at the time.<p>All of this , including reasons others have mentioned in this thread ultimately drives away users slowly. I feel like I&#x27;m fighting the platform just to share content when Facebook, Google+ et al seem to let users easily share content.

This exactly describes my experience with Twitter. I&#x27;ve had an account for over five years and tried multiple times to find some value in it. For a time, I was subscribed to a channel (is that what they&#x27;re called?) that published race results I cared about. Aside from that, I struggle to find anything relevant to me. How do people normally get engaged in some community?

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

Interestingly enough, I had just about the opposite experience when I signed up for twitter.<p>I created my account around 2 yrs ago I think... maybe a little longer.<p>When I signed up, I remember the onboarding process being a bit similar in terms of requiring you to follow at least 5 people, except for me, the users it listed out were <i>incredibly</i> relevant.<p>It was to the point where I almost felt like my privacy had been breached. My understanding was that basically twitter looks at the IP address (or maybe it&#x27;s with cookies?) of everyone viewing every page on the internet that has a twitter &quot;tweet&quot; button on it.<p>Since I read lots of blogs, articles, etc. around the web... twitter then had at the very least a starting point for the users that I would be interested in (based on the tweet buttons they put on their page).<p>Perhaps the code was different back then, but I remember the initial follow recommendations being really good.

I agree the on-boarding process when registering an account is painfully bad on the desktop. I&#x27;m wondering what the breakdown is on desktop vs mobile account creation.

Twitter: the greatest one to many communications platform since radio and they haven&#x27;t spent a dime marketing their &quot;channels&quot;. Onboarding isn&#x27;t as big an issue as ignorance of the product. Anyone still buying Star Magazine or Time hasn&#x27;t figured out how to leverage Twitter to get the same info but real time. Twitter... If you are going to do a good job, take credit for it man!

&gt; <i>most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following celebrities</i><p>Are you sure?

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

Twitter is struggling to grow because they failed at achieving the purpose they were created for.<p>WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik, FB Messenger, et al. have accomplished what Twitter was supposed to.<p>Now Twitter is just a mostly one-way broadcast for famous people. That&#x27;s why such a small percentage of their user base actually shares anything, much less on a regular basis.<p>There is no reason for Twitter to exist. What they do is being better served by other platforms. This will become very painfully obvious in the next few years, their active user base will shrink.

As a frustraded Twitter ex-user I&#x27;m interested in hearing your experience.