Just a spring cleaning that is about a decade late.
Twitter under-performs in every aspect imaginable: financially, product quality, product innovation. Nothing ever gets released and whilst this pace has improved in recent years, those "innovations" don't really deliver. They're barely used, copycats from other apps, and so on. Meanwhile, age-old problems are never addressed, like bots and the extremely hostile mob mentality on the platform.
They're ineffective and lack accountability. They need a reset and mentality change.
They shut down Vine. TikTok is now a billion dollar industry.
As far as I'm concerned, every product manager involved in that decision shouldn't be involved with Twitter anymore, because they display an astonishingly level of incompetence.
Vine was exploding when they shut it down, and some of the biggest influencers of today started on Vine. It's incomprehensible to me why anyone would shut down such an absolute jackpot, bizarre really!
Vine should have been what TikTok is today, it was so close to being a product that I wanted to see and use. TikTok without the close relationship with the People's Republic of China would be so much fun to use.
The fact that vine as a name and at least some vines are still at least somewhat prevalent online, makes me think that vine literally was "already" the next big thing and twitter just completely misread the room.
yeah, people are still reconnecting with vine creators, on TikTok. You can see in the comments, a video came up on the user's feed and they were compelled enough to be like "are you so and so from vine!?" Vine was killed half a decade ago.
And YouTube. Some of the biggest commentary channels used to be Viners.
The fact that it was shut down when it was is testament to how badly Twitter misplayed their hand with it. Every single creator flocked to whatever platform would take them at the time.
I think it's a lot more likely that there are/were a horde of PMs there who thought it was a very dumb and short-sighted decision to shut it down at the time. In my experience, it's usually some high-ranking exec who makes confounding decisions through authority in big tech. Not so much the average IC PM who has to spend time understanding their users for their job.
Wow, never heard of Vine (call me out of touch grumpy old man user persona!), but reading the wikipedia page, what is amazing it was aquired for less than one of today's early rounds - $30m. Maybe they were "too early"? Post pandemic things look a lot different.
Vine was at the peak of internet culture and mindshare when it was shut down. I have to believe there was some kind of personal vendetta or motivation behind the shut down. It makes absolutely no sense.
Vine was not too early by any means. It was exploding in popularity when they shut it down. It absolutely would have been as big as Tik Tok if they got the algorithm right.
Was it, though? My memory isn't perfect, but I seem to recall the days after Instagram copied the video feature, there were articles on tech blogs mocking Vine on how Facebook was going to eat their lunch. You could even refresh your browser on Vine's Twitter page and watch the count of its followers decreasing in realtime. Not pushing back, I just remember it kind of petering out in popularity (in the US, at least) and then quietly going away, and everyone sort of shrugged.
The 6 second limitation was holding them back and their competitors knew that longer formats would be more successful. The vine 6 second format was interesting and kind of "created" the format that turned into tik tok, but there is no doubt that vine would had to have pivoted sooner rather than later. Still, the decision to shut it down was shocking and short sighted.
Twitter is filled with extravagantly paid Product Managers with thoroughly mediocre (at best) results. Vine is a great example, but think about the complete lack of imagination when it comes to Musk's idea of charging users $3/month. I would absolutely pay that to be on a Twitter free of bots. And wow, how bad is the data science team at Twitter that they can't spot the OBVIOUS bots all over the site? When you see what they get paid, that's what makes it pathetic.
Periscope was a brilliant streaming app. And one of the first that you could write messages to people who were streaming.
It was an incredibly intimate experience to write something, and see people in the video you're watching, react to it live. Seems normal now, with so many streaming apps, but periscope was the first I saw on mobile do this well.
Eventually, the big apps implemented it too (Facebook, Snapchat... Instagram). Which killed Periscope...
I've learned that, when speaking with a certain half of society, any narrative other than Twitter's future being bleak, and it current state good, is not accepted.
Twitter has huge monetary potential, and adoption potential (beyond the niche audience it current has), but if the status quo is kept them that potential will likely never be realized.
Honestly I've not heard anyone say that Twitter's current state is good. Yo're literally taling about a company that has somehow managed to stay flat whlist all their competitors are up multiples. Sure, people think Musk won't make it better, but no one thinks twitter is doing well.
I would say twitter threads need robust support and the edit button is sorely missed.
But yes in a way the paralysis that Twitter is in is interesting in a world where everything is being changed always all the time in agile cycles. Twitter feels like it just exists and this is the way it works.
The edit button would only be available for say 5 minutes after posting. Would show that it was edited with a history available to see what was changed. And according to Musk, could reset the like / retweets on it.
What I want from an edit button is just a convenient UI for deleting and resubmitting a tweet with small changes. Right now the UX for that is really bad - if I want to fix a typo I have to copy my tweet text, then reopen the tweet / reply box, paste in the text, edit it, and then re-add any attachments I had included (together with any accessibility text). And doing all this is even more difficult on mobile than on desktop.
> * Bait and switch. Now replies to the original tweet will be out of context
I used to think this could be a problem too... but Reddit has had an edit button as long as I can remember, and bait and switch doesn't really seem to be much of a problem.
Perhaps it'd be more troublesome with the concept of retweets or quote tweets?
> I used to think this could be a problem too... but Reddit has had an edit button as long as I can remember, and bait and switch doesn't really seem to be much of a problem.
Anyone who does it enough to be irritating (instead of funny) will just find themselves banned by subreddit mods or otherwise they're doing it in a subreddit where it doesn't matter and no one will care.
The same community controls don't exist in twitter, so its plausible that it might be more damaging there. But so what? Many of the benefits are clear, the risks speculative. They could mitigate with a history button.
Wikipedia lets arbitrary users edit other users posts and gets by just fine-- not just the encyclopedia pages but the discussion pages too. Part of that is because it has a history so funny business is easily caught, but part of it is that if you give people more way to behaving unambiguously abusively if they intentionally chose to do so, some people will take you up on the offer and you can just remove them from the platform without regret. In that case everyone will be better off than if they didn't have the option to shoot themselves in the foot to begin with.
I see things differently. The number of customer-facing feature releases in recent years has been significant.
Yes, some are irritating (GIF integration). Others miss the mark (endless iterations of topics/explore/algo changes). Still others haven't been attempted but are sorely needed (editing tweets, clear verified account policies).
But a few innovations are trying to solve real problems identified by subsets of users (Twitter Professional, Twitter Blue) or help everyone a lot (photos, doubling tweet length, improvements to RT functionality, reporting tools).
Another thing to keep in mind: When discussion forums try to shoehorn too many things into the feature set, often to compete with other platforms, the results can alienate existing users. I see this with Instagram bolting on TikTok-like features, to the detriment of everyone who just likes to share photos.
(I am thankful most of HN's feature improvements have been restrained. Slashdot tried to do too much with new features, and it hurt rather than helped the community)
Those may help, but I'm not sure what they could do other than breaking the core conceit of their platform (short form, limited space) to really deal with it.
Limited space to express your intent, and the quick response cycle it engenders are not conducive to productive discussion. It's hot-takes and terse replies that people interpret as hostile even if they weren't meant as such all the way down. Take that out and what makes Twitter any different than every other platform? Though, maybe they're large enough and popular enough they could weather that change.
> (e) Make it possible to prevent retweets (including quote retweets) from certain accounts you follow from showing up on your timeline. There are certain people you might like who retweet effluent, and you don't want that effluent going straight into your eyeballs.
There's many good points here. This is the best. They need to assume the content kinda sucks and let people control as much as possible, instead of thinking that AI is doing a good enough job for them.
That's a decent plan. I like how you mention punishing false reports, I wish reputation had more value on social networks though they would have to protect against bots that boost it.
Couple of questions:
1.Normally when you report something as a violation of the rule and the moderators determine it is not a violation that might not be objective. "Hate Speech" for example is not objective even if you provide examples.
- How would you prevent people from being punished unfairly.
- Right now a false report has no consequences. Wouldn't reporting go down since people would want to avoid a punishment?
2. In detecting mob patterns how would you determine if it's not just everyone getting on to tweet about a current event and if you rate limit it doesn't that mean some people would be censored and others not simply based on time?
3. Related to the other limits you mentioned, such as number of retweets. What prevents people from opening multiple accounts or bots?
4. Assume the above three are solved wouldn't this put the business at a disadvantage due to both decreased ad revenue and competitors who don't have these rules?
And for whatever action you do, the majority will usually think you're wrong. But, on the plus side, you're also wrong when you are "providing a platform for it" (aka not doing anything).
I'm always surprised at how well dang manages this, although he definitely receives his share of critic from all sides, too.
Twitter under-performs in every aspect imaginable: financially, product quality, product innovation. Nothing ever gets released and whilst this pace has improved in recent years, those "innovations" don't really deliver. They're barely used, copycats from other apps, and so on. Meanwhile, age-old problems are never addressed, like bots and the extremely hostile mob mentality on the platform.
They're ineffective and lack accountability. They need a reset and mentality change.