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 years save for the occasional feature here and there and some styling.
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.
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.
Related: Here's how to hide all the crap they've been adding to the timeline
One could argue they filled out their niche. Took the VC money, made the thing global, does what it says on the tin. The world now has a broadcast-short-messages service that can be used by people to reach their audience.
Unfortunately that's not enough, since these tech firms tend to be priced to eat the whole planet, thus requiring a lot more than going global with a little thing that works.
> world now has a broadcast-short-messages service
Twitter is a company that has a track record of both user and developer hostility. They shouldn't be this for the world, and they don't need to be either.
I like to say if you're skating where the puck is going to be, you should be skating towards running your own software that speaks ActivityPub.
By you, I don't mean you per se. I mean organizations with budgets who would typically be assigning email accounts and that keep an LDAP directory.
Twitter could even sell a white-labeled version of this and manage it on your behalf on their own servers.
Some of the target organizations may not want to be subject to rules applicable to American corporations. They're free to operate something like this outside those bounds and use an interoperable protocol.
I don't use TikTok, so I'm probably wrong here.. but isn't TikTok "algorithmically served user generated content" rather than "community" or "social media". As I understand it, it's like a TV station. If there's "dialog", it's in the form of answer-films, rather than actual discussion. If it does behave the way I think it does, then it backs up the idea that social media is on the wane.
TikTok can be considered at least 3rd generation, if FB and Twitter were second and first is MySpace. I am sure one could argue there are more generations. Twitter is not among the first social media god generation.
In my experience, first generation happened on BBSs (contemporaneous with usenet, which wasn't on my radar until it was nearly dead). Then came niche community discussion boards and AOL. Then, Geocities and webrings. Friendster came out a few months earlier than MySpace, but they were close enough to be the same generation. By my count, TikTok is sixth generation? I can't help but feel that I'm missing a few; not even considering my anglocentric experience.
They're not even remotely priced at the magnitude to eat the whole planet. And yet, their market IS eating the entire world (except China, due to insular political reasons). That points to me like they're significantly undervalued.
What is Twitter's market? They seem increasingly like just another online community. Most of my feed is the same few Twitter influencers with high follower counts. The drama, conventions, and memes all make it feel insular and hostile to outsiders. Feels more like Tumblr than some global, open, platform.
Twitter has all of the "smart people" and "money" on it, unlike Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Billionaires are tweeting each other in the open. Politicians. Reporters. CEOs, CFOs.
No other social network is like that. It's the only thing keeping Twitter relevant.
TikTok and Instagram have their celebrities and trend setters (which is where the ad dollars are), but you don't see anyone musing about "metaverse", "web3", and what their latest fund is going to pursue, geopolitics, OSINT, stocks, etc.
If I go onto "developer Twitter", there is a thriving ecosystem of thought leaders, developers attached to well-known project, etc. If I follow those people I feel like I am a part of a conversation between People Who Matter™.
But if I compare that to my own firsthand knowledge of those same projects and what's happening in the ecosystem, I realise that there is very little overlap between reality and Twitter's projection of reality.
I don't believe for a second that anything being tweeted by billionaires, C*Os, and politicians is not approved by some marketing and/or social media department. It's not like people are required to tweet, they choose to tweet.
In the end Twitter is just the illusion of people talking to each other. It's all just to further their brand or to push their goals, not insight they give up for free. Sometimes someone slips up but this just results in even more carefully crafted tweets.
In the US, Elon Musk, the 45th and AOC are known to tweet on their own. For the 45th, it was easily discoverable if he tweeted on his own or not by looking on the app ID.
In Germany, health minister Karl Lauterbach, foreign Minister Annalena Charlotte Alma Baerbock (yes, her parents really did name her 1312) as well as a boatload of MPs (most notably Katharina Schulze) also tweet on their own.
twitter won; no doubt - but there is no stick or way to money-tise that doesnt not turn into a facebook slow drain gurrgler on your userbase.
this is the conundreum of social enagement based apps. Your a fad, and your only another fad away from history!
GREAT long term investment? NAahhhhh. Traditional PUMP n DUMP stock. Billionaires get made, mom and pops get DESTROYED! Celebs will go wherever the endorsement money is. Life will continue. These apps wont.
Those topics are only important to you and your bubble though. Not to the vast majority of regular Joes like my mom, grandmothers, people in 3rd world countries, etc.
When you say they are you referring to Twitter specifically or social media/US tech companies in general?
If you mean Twitter specifically I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on the "bull case" for this takeover. I like Twitter and use it to shout into the void from time to time. I wonder if it's just like.. a company and not a growth company? Like what if we just had Twitter with some monetization and then it just paid out dividends to shareholders? Why is that such a bad thing?
I think the only thing that keeps them afloat is their importance to political figures who LOVE the short form sound bites. Of course that could just be the conspiracist in me :)
The average voter prefers to base his/her opinion on a soundbyte. And I don't blame them people have actual lives and loved ones nobody has time to waste on democracy.
just because you reach the whole world doesn't necessarily mean there's a good way to monetize it, at least without losing what makes the service attractive.
Sure they could start slapping ads on everything, even paywall the site but at the end of the day there'd be significant competition eroding profits.
Twitter almost makes more sense as an open protocol than a commercial service, which is basically what Mastodon is. It's even what Dorsey wanted to do at one point with Bluesky, not sure if that's still alive.
I'm amused at you questioning what they've been doing all this time, and then giving instructions to avoid seeing what they've been doing all this time.
I don't like those things in my timeline either, but that's your answer. Also those annoying voice chatrooms and their lame attempt at stories.
What killed me it was Twitter killing developers apis: no more interesting apps than theirs. It sucks big time. They're also screwing the chronology, sometimes you get the latest tweets (most interesting) and sometimes they switch you to Recommended, which, normally, it sucks. Let me browse chronologically as it was in the old days.
I recently wondered about this, from another angle. In a way it was "weird" that they had an API, given our times. I.e., it was different: imagine if FB/Instagram/WhatsApp had an API. (I think it would be awesome, but it puts into perspective that it was weird that they had one imo)
Back then, free APIs and mashups based on them were the hot thing. (Free geolocation resolvers, Google hat a free search API, Bing as well, FB had one, too, free weather forecasts APIs, etc., etc.) You couldn't be a trendy start-up without providing one. Things have changed a lot since.
PS: I keep a few selected apps from this era on my phone. Once a year I open them and admire them in their data-less beauty. (Favourite one: Partly Clouded) Let's call it software shinto.
Facebook actually had APIs which got closed down after a couple of data-mining scandals (first these "quiz" apps and games, then Cambridge Analytica as the final nail in the coffin), and their messenger used to support federation via XMPP. IIRC that got shut down because of spam and scams.
Now devs and social engineers are using FaceBook groups to covertly gather intel... I joined a local development (to my home) group and found out after answering development questions people posted that I was suddenly getting a lot of recruiter calls out of nowhere. Facebook apparently exposes contact info in the process, or perhaps the engineers cross-reference other sites as well. It makes the job easy for scammers too.
The convoluted ways in which people are gathering info on individuals is rampant in many Facebutt groups... There is way too much unsolicited spam and it grows every time I use an app or social site.
Facebook still has APIs, there's just a bunch of attestations and app reviews before you get access to them now. Some of them have been neutered, like friends' lists and whatnot, but there's a lot they still do.
Is it viable for advertising supported services to have a fully functional API? Some third-party developer will build an alternative client app with no ads and eliminate the revenue stream.
Chronological posts were the one thing making tools like twitter useful. The ideal that you could follow someone and see their minute-to-minute thoughts was refreshing.
In the age of bots and schedules posts, fake accounts and marginal content/reposts are rampant. Twitter to me now feels like a "dead body" repost zone where the only thing that grabs attention are snuff clips and pr0n.
Their overhead from all the volume is probably stratospheric, and they're scrambling to stop the hemorrhage of expenses over innovating now, so it's probably gonna take an entirely different platform to recapture the classic dynamic that Twitter once had.
Chronological is worse since you will see a bunch meaningless tweets from people. It's better if twitter can show me the important tweets that I've missed since I last used it.
Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity of user not quality of user. Because their product is the user: behavioral analytics & advertising.
If you're gonna use Twitter anyways, Twitter has zero incentive to make it a more productive tool for you (in fact they want to be slightly less productive so you spend more time on it). Due to network effects, they are not worried about competitors shipping a better product.
Their advertiser don't want to advertise to bots and the users who break the rules potentially cause a pile of bad publicity for them so they're happy to get rid of them.
They've actually screwed up the very basis that made it useful though, they reduced control over what users can elect to see, they've completely wrecked real time timelines, and they are covertly ratio-ing user accounts so that even their subscribers see posts later than they are completed or even in many cases not at all, and now they're marketing to users (main contributors to all the platform's content) to pay in order to boost their posts... The whole business model is like telling people they can ride electricity generating stationary bikes in order to charge up teslas for the wealthy.
I've never seen any other tool as productive as it boched terribly... Facebook was never really as useful for real time news and events in nature (mind you).
Based on the ads I see in my timeline, they didn't do a great job at that. I have used the service for many many years and I have literally never seen any ad that I wanted to click.
Maybe they do better for the US, but they seem to have done far worse than their competitors in ad space.
I've used Twitter for almost 13 years (!!) and its ads are barely relevant to me. An example of Twitter missing the mark: my Twitter mute list includes a bunch of cryptocurrency keywords and yet Twitter still shows me cryptocurrency ads that include those muted words. I've explicitly told Twitter that I'm not interested in cryptocurrency, but they show the ads anyway. Perhaps Twitter still considers me in the target audience because I've proven that I what cryptocurrency is by muting those keywords.
In contrast, I joined Instagram just last year and use it very little, but its ads are much more (sometimes almost scarily) relevant to me. My wife is a big Instagram user, so perhaps Instagram has a shadow profile for our home IP address and I'm seeing ads personalized based on her activity (and thus peripherally relevant to me).
The goto answer for this is that they have the number of employees they have because they deemed each new employee to provide more value than they cost to employee. That’s their goal. Their goal is not to have the minimal number of people required to run some very simplistic description of their company. They would employee a thousand milk delivery people if they thought each one would provide more value than their cost to employee.
Do they need to do anything? The product just works, pays their bills, why should everyone jump off pants trying to squeeze as much money from their product as possible?
For me (different language, if it makes a difference), the "Discover new Lists" was interesting but didn't work because just that one doesn't have an aria-label. Instead, it's just a series of divs placed consecutively in the Lists page, each containing a span inside, with the header and the suggested lists.
I found it a nice challenge to learn a bit about selectors and uBlock Origin filter rules, and got this working, for anyone who might care:
twitter.com##span:has-text(Discover new Lists):upward(6) > :nth-child(n+5):nth-child(-n+11)
PS. also a nice tip: you can use the uBlock's "element picker mode" and write your filter starting from the "##" (i.e. leave the ___domain name out), and that will provide immediate visual feedback of the affected area, without having to reload the page. Neat!
I honestly don't get it. My company gets a lot of traffic from Twitter apparently so I signed up to get some perspective. I mostly follow journalists and publications as well as some business and tech folks I like. I see so many context-free messages of people arguing about topics I'm out of the loop on or posting links to news I already saw in a better aggregator. Maybe once or twice a week do I see an interesting bit of insight but it's drowning in an ocean of gibberish. And as far as I can tell that's the entire premise of the platform.
They do. Twitter's randomized css means the filters need to be based on something else like aria tags rather than css. Going after these means twitter will have to decide between blocking adblock or... Screen readers.
It's unfortunate that these tags need to be leveraged outside of their intended purpose to make their product more usable, but here we are.
...and almost every time I end up on a mobile link to a tweet in a web browser I have to refresh the page to get anything but an error. Which has been going on for years, or at least seems like it.
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.
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.
Related: Here's how to hide all the crap they've been adding to the timeline
twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"]
twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]