> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.
What I really dislike is the spam in the notifications section. If someone likes my tweet, replies to it or retweets it, that's relevant. I don't however want to see a notification for something Tweeter deems interesting under other people you follow liked/retweed this as a notification.
+1000 This completely ruins using Twitter as an official support channel for a business. I want to be notified immediately whenever my company is mentioned, but enabling email/push notifications so that I'm aware of these asap also means constantly opening Twitter just to dismiss whatever unsolicited spam they're trying to put in front of me. It adds up to quite a lot of wasted time and is a downright obnoxious user experience--in the end I had to disable the notifications and our response times suffer for it. At this point I would definitely pay to have these irrelevant notifications removed.
This is an honest question - why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business? If I had a business, I would respond to Twitter support requests with “please see our support website for how to contact us” or “thanks, we are now contacting you.” I don’t know why Twitter users should get better support and it seems odd to me to rely on Twitter to provide or to ask for support.
This is flawed thinking. Surely you're not proposing to implement every support channel your users might want to use? People are generally happy to use designated channels, as long as it's discoverable, easy to use and effective.
People will call you out on Twitter. You likely have a brand account on Twitter already so you'll already get those mentions. Even if you don't have an account people will create a hashtag.
If you want to control your brand perception you don't want the first result when people look for your brand on Twitter to be people tweeting about how terrible you are.
The reasons to do support on Twitter have less to do with what's tech support needs and more with marketing and controlling your brand perception.
You do customer support via social media for the same reason you do PR and marketing on social media: because that’s where your customers are! People spend a lot of time on social media.
Go to your customers if you can. Don’t force them to come to you unless you have to.
I really hate when a company lists "Support Email" address and never replies to it. Dozens of companies did this to me (sent from my gmail). And yet in horrible and unusable twitter or slightly less horrible facebook they reply in hours, or even minutes.
Twitter has been the absolute best way for me to get actual support from Australia Post and Telstra*
Unfortunately, the Telstra CSAs on Twitter aren't actually allowed to do anything useful so they mostly direct me to other, more useless support channels.
Because it's cheaper than having an actual support hotline and easier to ignore than having email.
And in the US especially, companies hate having to support users, which is why they are also pushing for AI support instead of actually having a human there.
Think about it, when is the last time you had an issue with some Bay Area Saas company and could call them on the phone to get support, like you'd do with a bank?
To put it bluntly -- the prevailing mindset is that customer support is a cost-centre. It's hard to reliably measure customer satisfaction, so its value is misunderstood.
And if you're the only game in town with your own little walled garden, and everyone in your industry has entirely automated (read: low opex) support, where's the incentive to do better?
Which is partly because the business model is selling data to large companies and data brokers, not providing a service to the "customers" (users). And then you get places like Facebook that are themselves data brokers, and sell access to the data so they can claim they aren't Acxiom.
As a consumer, if a company with a Twitter presence responds that way I'll ignore them. Because 9 times out of 10 when I tweet at a brand it's either because I'm calling them out for actively harmful stuff (like using plaintext passwords) or prodding them about issues that likely affect more people than just me.
If I have a specific support request about my personal account, I'll go through the usual channels. But if it's on twitter, it's probably there because the extra visibility and public accountability is intentional.
That's a funny one. I worked at a place where the support team that worked for the social network accounts of the company had better tools and higher priority when doing their jobs than the phone/site support team, so effectively customers asking for support on Twitter or Facebook got better and faster support than customers asking for support on the phone or the site. I assume that's because companies are terrified of bad publicity on social networks.
Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.
why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business?
Note that the poster said "an official support channel" rather than "the official support channel". Adding more ways for customers to contact support is usually a good thing. There was no mention of taking away other channels that you might prefer.
Right--most of our support is done via email, but we also use Github issues, chat via our website, and Twitter. Which one gets used depends on the customer and what the issue is. I try to make sure that we respond as soon as possible regardless of the channel, but Twitter usually ends up being slower (unfortunately) because of the notification issues.
Might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually really like this feature. I'm usually not able to get to everything, so it's great to know when something important or interesting got tweeted and I know to check it out.
That notification was actually what slowly made me an active Twitter user, because they kept surfacing me interesting content and giving me a reason to come back and it became a gateway for me to discover other great content on Twitter
I don't use Twitter, except to look at tweets that people on HN or whatever link to. And the main reason that I don't is that the idea of "following" just doesn't work for me. I tried it. But even people who sometimes post stuff that interests me mostly post stuff that just gets in my way.
I like HN. But I never look at particular users' posts. I just look at the front page, or sometimes at the comments list, so see what people are talking about.
That's kind of the point though - I had no idea this feature existed until they started pushing it to me. I think it's too much to expect users to opt-in to things. How would I have known to opt-in to this? Yet I am now much happier because they improved the UX for me.
I think opt-out makes sense though, for users who don't a feature.
If you put it on a single, easily recognizable, easily accessible page (all new features, etc.), then many users will find it. You can even give a notification when a new feature is added (as long as kept to a reasonable amount).
Features that will go viral are worth adding for all, features that did not can be kept there.
You overestimate what people will understand from a technical description in a configuration option. Even if they were experimentally inclined, which most people are not, they probably wouldn't even notice the effect, particularly if not a new user. Twitter is a black box for most users.
Twitter very likely did market research on its effectiveness for the target market they were trying to please. Probably that's just not you.
But what if most people like it? I have to say I think it makes a lot of sense. If a high number of people I follow like something, you might want to show it to me too.
Agreed. I wish that they would just mix those into the primary feed. I keep using the "See less often" option, but the "Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your experience better." message that I get in response almost feels like a taunt at this point.
What really clogs up my notifications is when other people “like” a post I’m mentioned in. You get a few ‘runaway’ threads that pull on a few dozen people and every like becomes its own notification. A dozen people each liking a dozen tweets on the thread, the notification timeline becomes absolutely useless.
Let me mute all likes (potentially keeping likes only for my own tweets).
I'm always surprised by these threads expressing frustration at the timelines being re-arranged - then I remember I use a 3rd party client (Tweetbot) and that's why my timeline is not molested and spam-filled.
If they ever fully disable 3rd party clients that will be the day I cancel my account. I thought forced ads as you started a DVD were obnoxious...
They're certainly going that way. Group DMs don't work with the API (in that there's not even a "hey log onto the website your client doesn't support this" notification). A ton of features have been removed from or gimped in the API, to the point where many of the third-party devs have given up.
"Fully disable" - probably not. But they'll certainly make it nearly impossible to produce something "like the Twitter app but better".
Agreed. They have a useless option "see less of this", which has absolutely no effect.
My approach is now to unfollow any user when Twitter forces a notification from them. Maybe someone with some brains at Twitter will notice the clear pattern and fix their idiotic notifications.
I don't quite get why you can't disable these notifications at all. I really don't want to see the things I missed or it finds interesting. And they're purposefully pushing you to look at it to dismiss those notifications.
Algorithmic feeds are, in all cases, Satan's handiwork. What I want is to see posts from the individuals I have selected, interleaved in chronological order, with no tampering.
I follow a few hundred people with very varied interests, and I don't log in every few minutes. For non-addicted people, the algo is pretty nice. I want to see a sampling of interesting stuff I "missed" over the last day or two. If I want to go look at a particular person's chronological feed, I can do that.
You can change it if you don't like it, click the sparkle button to do so, but don't think nobody likes it.
Try doing that, and find out how many times Twitter helpfully resets you to go back 'home' - a home which they feel they own and control. I press that button about once a week to go back to a chronological feed.
I don't log in every few minutes - every few hours perhaps on a good day, but have no interest in an algorithmic feed - a scrolling chronological feed is just fine.
There are very good reasons they forced us all onto this algorithm, and they are not in your interest - it means they can insert content whenever they like, and make posters pay for it. You may be happy with it now, but I doubt you would be long term when it becomes pay to play.
Once a week? Lucky you, I have to set it to "Latest Tweets" almost every time I open the app. It even reminds me to set my "Content Preferences" every time I do it, just to ignore them over and over again. Helpful.
Have you ever tried Twitter lists? I find that having separate streams for "irl friends", "professional network", "people I might want to hire", etc. makes it easy to dip in, get a sense of what's up with that particular set of people/accounts, and then go about my day.
I agree. As soon as there is any tampering of what information is being displayed, users have a difficult time understanding why they are seeing it and ultimately find it less enjoyable to use.
Research keeps showing that for users to "trust" software then they need to have an understanding of why something is being presented to them. It is one of the biggest barriers with recommendation systems.
If that maximized user engagement, then that is the UI they would present. The fact that they don't do that should tell you that their tests have shown algorithmic feeds are more engaging for users.
"User engagement" is not a single, well-defined, easily measurable thing.
For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that.
But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".
I think something like this circular logic is actually useful, and in some sense true. It might better phrased as "companies which usually make bad financial decisions die, so the decisions of a company which hasn't died are probably financially beneficial." Further qualifiers could be added to account for longevity of a company (we might put more faith in a company which has spent longer not dying), earning reports, and the fact that a good decision isn't necessarily beneficial (just probabilistically so given available knowledge), but the basic reasoning seems valid.
You could apply this reasoning to literally anything, because every organisation / nation state / what have you has at some point and in some form considered the consequences of their actions. History shows that internal evaluation is an imperfect science. I suspect you know this and only reserve this extremely circular reasoning for cases which you already agree with. It would be easier to admit you've already formed an opinion and don't care to change it under any circumstance, rather than weakly appeal to Twitter's own authority to justify their actions.
It is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field. So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points, instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.
Wikipedia's costs are extremely small relative the service usage. They don't have a lot of active development (relatively), and they don't need a ton of expensive infrastructure (relatively). Twitter's annual operating costs are in the $2+ billions. Wikipedia's are in the ~$60 millions. Not to say a non-profit twitter couldn't exist - this just feels like an unfair comparison. Just because two services are popular tech services doesn't mean they are apples to apples to operate.
We have an example of a service similar to twitter that's effectively free to run due to it's distributed nature in Mastodon/ActivityPub. Being financially sustainable without having to resort to dark patterns could just be an engineering question.
Dorsey has done three recent podcasts (two on JRE, one on Tales From the Crypto) where he states that he thinks there will be a decentralised blockchain based Twitter competitor in the future. I've taken that as a given for years, but to hear the CEO spell it out in public is pretty crazy. He wasn't even cornered into it, but rather brought the topic up himself.
I read that as Dorsey pandering to the audience. There is no room for a blockchain-based twitter competitor, because there is no sensible application of blockchain to the domain.
In 2019 you're more or less correct, but only due to cost and time constraints. Short-form public messaging on the blockchain already exists[0], it's just prohibitively expensive and slow. Imagine a blockchain with cheap, fast transactions. This should be harder to censor than other distributed solutions like a federated network or a similar scheme hosted on IPFS since you're taking the whole chain with you in the event of censorship, whereas the other schemes allow just the hosts of particular data to be targeted. Even before the economics work for full-on blockchain twitter, we might see a cheaper blockchain/IPFS hybrid where at least some metadata is censorship resistant. Unless the government wins the war on information, I'm reasonably convinced that a better blockchain twitter is coming.
I'm sure a gigantic portion of Twitter's operating costs are the once necessary to monetize their users. I have a feeling the product that is for the users would be much closer to Wikipedia-level costs.
If the feed shows me a pseudo-random sample of recent tweets, and each time I refresh I get a slightly different view, of course I'm going to keep refreshing to see if there's anything new or anything that I haven't been shown yet. But most of the time, I just keep seeing the same thing over and over. Imagine if your email client did this.
It's frustrating that this is the general trend today. I was using the Reddit app the other day and pruning my list of subreddits to reduce distraction when I'm in the app. Of course the app will still insert suggested subreddits in my feed. And then there are the streaming services that recommend (and auto-play) shows and movies to you.
Usually I just want to just use a service to consume specific things and then move onto some other activity, but each one is aware of the attention economy and trying to keep me in for as long as possible.
And the option to choose the algorithmic filtering based on my needs, in the rare cases that the number of individuals or volume of their tweets may be too large to take in chronologically.
>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order.
What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
Sure, but that will no longer be twitter, it'll be a reddit competitor. He should then also state what will make it better than reddit, from what he's public ally saying so far it just sounds like he's never heard of reddit and is going to invent it.
It's already a reddit competitor to some extent. I agree that it will be more of a reddit competitor, but it's already on the continuum. These things are mushy.
I use twitter specifically because it's focused on people and not interests. I love learning more about the history of communist mapping because somebody who I followed after meeting them at a conference tweeted about it.
> I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
I've had this happen, typically with interjections of sport commentary, and I will immediately unfollow them. None of the unfollows has been a great loss. People who are truly insightful have enough self-awareness not to self-indulge like this.
Anyone who's in a position to use Tweetdeck instead of Twitter's web UI will find a free, Twitter-maintained, product with no annoying algorithms and no advertising.
It's the version of Twitter targeted at newsrooms, etc.
I assume a lot of people already know and have reasons why they don't... but likely not everyone here has tried it so it may be worth repeating.
I had heard of Tweetdeck, but I assumed that it was a third-party client which provided a better experience and was therefore at odds with Twitter's interests. You're telling me that, not only is Twitter okay with it, but that they built it?
I'm doubtful of whatever sort of nonsense philosophical rationalization Dorsey comes up regarding how he thinks users should use, and should want to use the service. It's likely this:
> And while Dorsey said he’s less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing “what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it,” Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it’s a public company, with a business model based on advertising.
I'm fairly certain that Anderson's expectation here is probably true, and that Dorsey is at best disconnected from the reality of how Twitter's business operates if he's not being outright disingenuous. The number of ads shown increases with the amount of time spent using the service, and assuming there is some business unit within Twitter tasked with increasing revenue, that business unit will likely attempt to increase time spent using the service. Inserting this extra garbage and preventing users from disabling it serves that purpose because it makes it more difficult to tell when you've reached posts you've already read and forces you to scroll longer to reach them.
I recently created a Twitter account, mostly as an experiment. I just followed some programmers, stuck to programming content. Immediately and every day after, I was constantly being displayed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, etc. Not a single politician or voice not on the left. Considering how powerful Twitter has become, this is troubling. I know this is just one anecdote, wondering what the rest of HN sees...
I used to be annoyed about how a lot of the programmers I followed on Twitter would tweet about politics and feminism.
Then I talked to some people who were on the receiving end of the kind of programmers that don't care about those things, groan when they hear words like "feminism", "intersectionality" or "diversity" and instead believe in "meritocracy" and "rationality".
Now I'm one of those programmers who tweet about politics and feminism.
Sometimes you need to be confronted with the pain you've been complicit to in order to figure out why the people around you all seem to disagree with you and make such a fuss about stuff you don't care about.
This is what you see even if you follow nothing or if you only follow stuff clearly associated with the right.
When you follow stuff associated with the right, it often gets unfollowed. This was very noticeable with the movie Unplanned. Basically you couldn't follow it.
If you start off a new account by following only politicians on the right, you are highly likely to get your account banned.
I think video game players are probably actually left-leaning on average. GamerGate seems to have created massive misunderstandings on all sides of the issues. (And no, I'm not defending it or denying things that occurred.)
Game players yes. Prominent gaming channels are a mixed bag though. "Bro culture" is very much a thing and casual homophobia and racism is still very widespread.
I'd say "liberal" is a more accurate descriptor than "left-leaning". I'd call PewDiePie liberal but not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination, for example.
Programmers are usually very vocal leftists. I've always assumed that those who don't speak openly about politics don't care or are right wingers, but who knows.
Right-wingers are plenty vocal. It's just that Twitter is not necessarily what they use to vocalize their views, for reasons that are probably obvious.
As far as I can tell the real motivation for so many feed based services doing this is just that if you stick enough irrelevant non ad shit in users feeds the ads will blend in better. None of these companies will ever publicly admit that that's the intention though.
This would suit me, actually. I use twitter almost exclusively to follow motor racing journalists. However, because of this, I have to dig through the same journalist's opinions on Brexit, FIFA, or Game of Thrones. It would suit me much better to be able to follow 'motorsport' as a topic instead of specific people.
I think it's impossible to re-think Twitter and satisfy everyone. I completely switched who I follow (using Lists) twice already based on my interest changes in technology. First Rails, then iOS, now "crypto". I was early enough in the first two communities to know who the movers and shakers were. However it took me a while to find who is worth following in "Crypto Twitter". So I personally welcome any attempts to show me relevant content from folks I don't follow yet in the field.
Even IF it was relevant sometimes/mosttimes/alltimes... Why would you ever allow someone else to choose what you see?
Do you not realize the massive avenue for abuse? How about come election time and the impossible scenario where your "curators" don't agree with your opinions?
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit are already creating/supporting bubbles. How would you know if you are in one?
Although I seem to be in the minority, yeah, I've been pretty happy with the recommendations they give me recently.
It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in.
For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
During the Joe Rogan podcast, he mentioned that what they are trying to attempt to give people the "other side" of the story rather than promoting creation of echo chambers.
I think Farage is a moron and I couldn't disagree with him more, but what a disappointingly closed-minded view you have. That view is one of the worst problems of Twitter, in my opinion.
I think Dorsey is trying to blow smoke up our ass on the other issues, because their core business is advertising no matter what he says, but I actually believe him on this and think it's one of the few really good things he's sincerely trying to do (though I doubt he'll succeed, unfortunately). Echo chambers are poison to good discourse, democracy, philosophy, humanism, and humanity in general. I strongly believe Brexit is monumentally and egregiously terrible, a result of some of our worst and most base instincts in many cases, but if you think Brexit backers don't deserve a fair seat at the discourse table, don't be surprised when that accomplishes the polar opposite of your desired goals.
Knowing what "Farage" is does not mean I wont debate properly with other political views.
Farage is not a moron he is dangerous nationalist stirring up violence for personal gain. Just as the "crank" end of the labour party has its own dangerous individuals.
"Here we have a climatologist, and for balance, someone who believes the Earth is a computer simulation, and another who is certain it's flat and was created by the Illuminati who are alien lizards."
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
Not to mention Jack/Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams has a company called Medium that literally does just that.
_Maybe_ if they removed all their weird gating and order logic and presented tweets as a list of time ordered events that match the hashtag you're searching for (including user sources) and have another tab for tweets people you're following have retweeted and for tweets in your subject that were popular then they'd fix it...
Basically if they actually let users see the data they are holding onto.
Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.