Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediately followed the 4 or 5 people. On the last one, my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number. What? I haven't even tweeted anything yet and only followed verified checkmarked users. And why do I have to supply a phone number to use a web site? So, I just left the account in limbo and went back to what I was doing before - just manually going to individuals walls to read because they're bookmarked.
So then a few months ago, Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue.
As of a few weeks ago, they got rid of the ability to dismiss the modal. The page just locks and you can't scroll unless you sign in.
And that was the last day I used or visited Twitter. I now see 0 ads, will never give up a phone number to join a website, and have nothing but disdain for that company.
I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. At least I was seeing your ads before.
I have repeatedly heard it said that Twitter does this for every single new account as a matter of course. Twitter wants your phone number, but don’t want you to bounce right at registration.
On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers
Instead, they end up filling their database with countless unused accounts created by those who gave up?
I had to make a new MS account to migrate a 2nd minecraft account. The account has only ever been used from the game launcher, and they have the analytics that the account was created for the migration. But apparently there was "suspicious activity" that violates TOS and they auto locked it, and rather than contact the gmail address I used for the account, they demand a phone number.
Tbf, I'm considering just raising this with the authorities, given a lot of relevant authorities, as not everyone migrating an account will be ab adult, and asking for kids phone numbers seems like a GDPR slamdunk.
I think Instagram and/or Pintrest often require you to log in before letting you see even the first picture you click on.
I did the exact same thing for Instagram. I never post or like anything.
Pinterest images in Google image search results would like to have a word with you.
Worst part is that when Pinterest launched I even used it for a short while, it was useful for some things (e.g. collecting examples of furniture I'd be eyeing, tattoo motifs inspiration) and over time it just became a huge cluttered unusable mess. And then the spam on image search came and I simply despise Pinterest, ranting about them convinced at least 2 close friends to abandon it as well.
Thus triggering the headline "missed user growth estimates".
This is abhorrent to me and led to me deleting my account after a dozen years of use and double digit thousands of followers.
If you won't let me read it, don't let it be posted.
I will no longer donate my writing and attention to censorship platforms.
Instagram pulled that same crap a couple of years back, and I haven't visited since.
you can no longer dismiss the modal, or in any other way bypass this as of a few days ago. (at least on mobile)
If anyone reading this works at Twitter: WHY are you guys making these changes? I'm far more likely to just never use the service again out of outrage then make an account.
(I've also never created an account there, and only ever used it in "read-only" mode.)
The latter give me longer annoyance displayed.
As of you account deactivation maybe twitter think you are a bot scanning an account.
And what did it get them? Billions USD from Microsoft.
So dark patterns work.
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 "]
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.
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.
Between this and Facebook's recent woes, I wish this was a sign of a global tiring of social media in general.
I'm frequently wrong about these things, but one can hope.
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.
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.
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-st...
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.
Then why do they ban low quality users such as bots or users who have broken their rules?
There was that one time in 2017 when they increased the character limit.
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).
They added NFT profile pics. What more do you want?
Maybe they do better for the US, but they seem to have done far worse than their competitors in ad space.
What I don't get about twitter as a company: Why do they have so many employees? If they scaled back they could have a nice business as it is.
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!
https://sergiotapia.com/how-to-use-custom-adblock-rules-in-b...
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.
Say what you will about Facebook and Instagram, their ads are better overall. There's been several times an Instagram ad showed up in my feed, and I said shut up and take my money.
Nothing like that has ever happened on Twitter for me.
Google Ads is an amazing piece of tech with usually great ROI but requires lots of setup. Facebook is easy to use, worse in terms of ROI but it has the amazing feature of optimizing for spending 100% of your budget all the time.
Twitter and LinkedIn don't do either.
- Is it because they are "not evil enough" compared to FB in tracking people?
- Is it because they can't track people in the same way (FB pixel is _everywhere_ on the net, Twitter's code is also widespread but probably less?)
- Is it because publisher tools are not as good as FB's? (in FB from what I know you can target various demographics really well with campaigns, based on criteria such as location, age, interests, approximated wealth etc)
Twitter does neither.
Which is great for the users, but probably horrible for the advertisers.
I never ever get an actually good ad on Twitter.
I believe their biggest bet on revenue has always been to grow their passive audiences (people who just use the feed and don't tweet) but their product lacks the immediate stickiness that other feed products have. It's almost impossible to get the value of Twitter out of the box if you don't have a clear idea of what topics matter to you and who are the central figures in those topics.
News outlets have a better funnel to distill and distribute information, so most people don't need to have Twitter to have a general idea of what was said on Twitter. A large amount of news nowadays is "X person tweeted Y".
I'm convinced Twitter will never be able to grow into a meaningful mainstream social media (+1B users) with their current model, but I do believe there's a lot of unlocked value in what they have created.
We seem to all browse it to find interesting news/articles and then share them on WhatsApp groups. Having said that we all follow politics pretty closely so maybe we are a bit niche?
I actually get a lot of value out of twitter. Way more than I used to do with Facebook, which is just total trash now and my habit of checking it all the time has actually stopped simply because the content was so poor I seem to have inadvertently trained my brain out of expecting a dopamine hit scrolling through it.
After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet, livejournal/myspace/facebook ...
I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text discussions looks like this !
What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think of this ?
It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.
I specifically agree with the part about barely-usable garbage. Whenever I'm linked to a Twitter thread it's a dumpster fire. Baffling.
If you find it boring you can bail at anytime and if you find it interesting you can bookmark tweets for later consumption. The trending feature allows for multi-community discussion, jokes, and memes.
Twitter encompasses engaging text-based human interaction perfectly.
It's not private if it's viewable by Snapchat. You can have personal on any platform. And Snapchat is one of the most advertisement-laden platforms ever.
Its algorithm seems to work really well for rapid consumption of buzz within a particular network that you can tap into by following people. It is one of the few cases where I like the fact that I occasionally get out-of-network Tweets in my timeline because it usually exposes me to something really interesting posted by someone outside of my direct field. I'd never want to use Twitter for comprehensive reviews of some topic, reliable back-and-forth discussion, etc. but it's just fantastic for gossip and trends.
The tables here are even starting to turn–so many people are on Science Twitter that it feels like I find as many new and relevant papers on Twitter as I do in my tailored email notifications and RSS feeds. Twitter is also always a day or two ahead, and the papers usually come with the backstory and context in plain English. I hate to say that the Twitter thread from the paper author is often more informative (at least, per unit of time that it takes to consume) than the content of the paper itself.
And even if I create lists for people I want to see posts from (suggestion from another post from earlier this week), I still can't make my likes not be 'advertised' to everyone that follows me. So basically sometimes I can't even give a like to a tweet if it's risqué for example, because some followers might not like seeing that and then unfollow me.
There is some truth to the classic HN post that "Twitter can be built in a weekend". A service / protocol that can distribute 280 character messages isn't really where the value is for a service like Twitter. It's 20% engineering, 80% recruiting the right users, retaining them, and getting them to engage on the platform.
Additionally, open protocols are way harder to evolve and are therefore less competitive with closed services. The only reason why email has stuck around as long as it has is because it locked everyone in with its network effect before commercial players figured out how to compete.
Additionally, email isn't really an open protocol in practice. Sure, it's spec'd, but in order to actually participate in the network you need to navigate a really complicated system of anti-spam reputation systems. This is why people just end up paying companies like Twilio to send email instead of running their own servers.
Overall, I don't think we should be looking to learn any lessons from email. It achieved market dominance in a time that doesn't look anything like the modern era, and is much more complex than most people realize.
This is straight up denialist and hyperbolic FUD. There's a healthy and vibrant ecosystem surrounding the federated social web, which has been a thing since 2008 or so.
Also, I would argue that email's staying power isn't quite backed by the answer you gave ("it locked everyone in with its network effect") but more along the lines that it survived the Lindy effect (the great thing about this is that it's not going to its grave as a technology anytime soon).
I read an interesting point somewhere: empirically, platforms can change an innovate far faster than protocols. The example given was encryption: email doesn't have it, even though people have been talking about it for literally decades, but WhatsApp added it in a relatively short time (a year? less?).
It makes sense. With a protocol, once it gets popular, change becomes really hard. It's like herding cats to get everyone to update, so things stagnate at the lowest common denominator for interoperability reasons. When all the software and installs are controlled by one entity, that entity can make a decision to change and just execute it, no herding needed.
This headline is at best misleading -- intended to give the impression that Twitter is performing worse than they are by ignoring the metrics in which they are excelling -- or potentially even just outright wrong.
If you're expecting much of what Wall Street (or journalists covering the markets) does to make sense, you're going to have a bad time.
The overall conclusion seems to be the same as with Meta last week: It's going well, but not as well as predicted. The slower than expected growth is only a problem, because the stock market likes predictability and will punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future.
If you're calculating the present value of future profits and the rate of increase in profits declines then the present value can swing wildly. That's not "punishment". It's the market self correcting.
https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-would-have-posted-1-8-b...
Among other things, we resell hardware and software. The basic idea is that customers can get a Dell, or Oracle server and a license for an Oracle database from us, when buying hosting. This saves them the trouble of dealing with multiple suppliers. The hardware and software business is just sort of a side thing, but we can generate crazy amounts of revenue by losing money on hardware. The idea is that we make the money back longterm on hosting. We never use revenue as a meaningful KPI, because we know that some years it will be inflated like crazy by hardware or software sales (which aren't profitable).
So I don't really see revenue as useful figure either, not without also knowing if you're profitable.
No single number tells any story on its own. You can have $1T revenue tomorrow. Just sell $10 bills for $1.
If you keep losing money, you eventually run out.
But if you look at a company that is always in the red with no plan to become profitable, the question becomes:
- how is this a business?
- where is money coming from?
- why is money still coming?
Twitter seems to be mostly profitable in the past few years.
I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
You're really better off with traditional thread-based forums to have conversation topics. Muting somebody's entire existence just because they occasionally dirty the general feed with 'offtopic' just doesn't seem like a sustainable way to use social media.
It’s nothing personal for me not to follow someone, so I don’t really see it as muting their whole existence.
All services would be better if they were more like Google+ (but didn't share name with a despised effort to crush pseudonyms and wasn't owned by a company that buried it as soon as they had been forced to iron out the wrinkles ;-)
Opt in would be nice, I am sure high follower people would rather go to the effort of categorising their tweets rather than losing followers when they decide to Tweet about their local sports.
You can argue that the payouts are a pittance for the large number of views those YouTubers get, but in comparison, the only thing Twitter has done to reward its users is provide a virtual tip jar.
Not only that, you can't pay to remove ads on Twitter.
I realize iOS users are not the majority, but it's likely that they are more valuable for advertisers and therefore could generate more revenue.
edit: as noted below, this was in the article — I had done a search for "FB" and didn't see there was another reference to Apple that was upstream from where I landed.
> The company said the impact from privacy changes by Apple Inc (AAPL.O) remained modest. Last year, Apple began requiring apps to receive permission from iOS users to track their activity on apps and websites owned by other companies.
> The Apple changes could impact Twitter in the future as it grows its performance advertising business, Segal said, referring to ads that seek to drive sales or other consumer actions. He said Twitter is working to mitigate future negative impacts from Apple's changes.
That being said, good recommendations are welcome!
NFT profile pictures? Who wants this?
Someone else mentioned Mastodon. If you don't want to run your own Mastodon server, but you have a WordPress site, use an ActivityPub plugin to connect with the wider network.
That doesn’t require ads, is optional, and works well in a social context.
I think Twitter has massive opportunity though with their power users. Many of them are definitely willing to spend $100+/mo just based on the value they get out of it alone if they can get access to power user analytics, insights, data, or better tools to engage with their audience.
Assuming 1% of their users are power users, that's around 3M users with a market opportunity exceeding $3B annually.
Seriously, that has been developed by game companies since a while now, people pay for showing to their friends their cool little golden label. Twitter has the advantage of not being a serious platform, people are there to shitpost, create and follow drama, or other type of crowd interactions. And users already show of their affiliation, how cool and trendy they are using their bio and username.
Imagine for example a 1-month “official Marvel fan” banner for $$ at the time of release of a big marvel movie, people would pay for this.
It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way that you gain new users and don't lose the current.
- A reply to someone else that I can't see, so I now have no context about what I'm looking at. It's like coming in in the middle of a conversation.
- A normal tweet followed by a set of replies that appear to be incomplete. There are a bunch of buttons to press to "see more". Often when you click on them there's only a single additional response, not a very long thread, so it's unclear why I had to click to "see more". Other times there are several back-and-forth replies in a row shown, most of them inconsequential. What decides whether I need to click to "see more"?
- Bots, crypto scams, misinformation, ads
- The entire interface appears to be an overlay over something else. Like it looks like you're reading a popup that you can dismiss to see the actual content. But when you do that, it shows you something unrelated.
- Sometimes, but not always, I see the tweet I was intended to see, but instead of seeing replies, there's a bunch of completely unrelated tweets below that where the replies normally are
I'm old, so it's probably me, but I just can't parse a Twitter page because it's so bizarrely laid out, and so much of the expected content either isn't shown, or is hidden by default, and so much unexpected content is shown. Call me crazy, but I don't have time to figure it out just to read someone's hot take on the latest trend.
Both are pretty useless statements without context.
In fact, what other tech stock valued at double digit billions has had such a flat valuation for its whole lifetime, yet still survived?
Yes, a range of ~14-77, but it's neither taken off nor crashed.
Look at any other survivor and they'll be shaped more like Oracle, Cisco, FB&NFLX (well, recent troubles aside)
Look at them all over the last 9 years. Twitter stands out to me.
I dunno, maybe there are many big tech companies following the same pattern. But none of them are this high profile, so Twitter is the odd one out.
The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays, the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics all related to that person.
And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account.
And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
I changed my trends location to Tokyo on someone's recommendation, and it's been a great workaround. I don't speak Japanese, so it's the same as 'hiding' the trends to my brain.
(I think the way to do this is 'Explore' -> gear icon, at least on desktop.)
But also, in terms of non-politics, I am so tired of seeing "JUST ANNOUNCED".
You have to aggresively curate your For You page constantly to stop TikTok from throwing a bombastic opinion piece at you
Some stories are completely missed, due to not being Twitter friendly (to many words, hard to boil down to a tweet). Other non-stories are blow out of proportions because it was big on Twitter, even if no one outside Twitter cares.
They are both bad, but in very different ways.
On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
I’m not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically dividing the culture.
I really don’t think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I may be wrong.
Trump was banned from Twitter first. Any one with mildly right wing opinion is insta-banned from twitter. Blue checkmarks are strongly tied to institutional approval and fringe institutional voices are given a megaphone.
Twitter perpetuates the current class system. So those in power have no qualms with it.
In the same period that Twitter is -10.4% from its IPO, the S&P500 is +150%. The NASDAQ composite is +260%.
And the destruction wraught by Twitter Inc goes beyond what can be measured in its shareholders' lost value. By purchasing short-form video leader Vine, privileging it just enough to undermine competitor Periscope, then fumbling Vine completely, they destroyed two promising US-based short-form video companies – allowing Chinese-owned TikTok to dominate.
Twitter-like companies overseas have pioneered new e-commerce & private-messaging features, while Twitter launches, then ignores, half-thought-out features like polls, bookmarks, or fleets.
Twitter Inc is a corporate malignancy suppressing innovation on an essential communications frontier.
Starting at the same time (Oct 3, 2013), S&P 500 is up 153.45% and the NASDAQ is up 260.30%
As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook.
As far as "is Twitter a good product" - apart from complaints that people talk about politics on the app, I don't see anything substantial in the complaints here.
Twitter looks under-priced if you count its recent acquisitions from Quill, Sphere, Revue and it's intention to focus on the so-called 'web3'. Lots of ways to grow in those areas if they are smart enough.
- Spaces have successfully siphoned users out of Clubhouse - Audio ads could be next - The crypto integration they've done is just the tip of the iceberg
What did they spend that money on? Did they invest it in some new stuff or spend it on marketing?
So much opposition with everything having to be bigger and bigger.
Once you've had your term of ruling the world, there are only so many directions you can go from there. And by definition, the majority are downwards.
Maybe they should try something more person like where people pay a certain amount of money to get exclusive content from the people they follow. Can't think of any other way I would pay for micro-blogging.
Over sharing, or the idea of broadcasting details about my life to strangers on the internet is also something I completely don't understand.
You can easily make a private account.
I'm actively looking to buy a house in Sydney for a million dollars, yet Twitter shows me general ads that have no interest to me - like investing in gold or installing a virtual chatbot app.
Twitter should be working with Domain.com.au to show targeted ads to Domain's active user base.
Anyway, someone described twitter as a "honeypot for assholes". If your platform is dominated by trolls or other malicious people, I can't see it having a good valuation no matter how many users you have.
Curious if anything has gotten better on that front.
That's what I decided to quit using Twitter.
So they're a growth stock, but really they're a dividend stock?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/shdmpq/mastodon_a...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/apple-unveils-contact...
While we're here, take another pro-tip: Set yourself up with an RSS/Atom reader and "Follow" accounts you are interested in through Nitter. No account, no random "We thought you might like", and no ads, just posts and retweets from the accounts you're interested in.
During a gold rush, sell shovels.
They are a “dividend” stock without proper dividends. Not everything needs to be a growth stock. Having said that 10% down in 10 years isn’t great, especially with where the rest of tech has gone in that time.
If they were able to show strong user growth, revenue would follow as would the stock price. There are folks who love twitter, and those who prefer images. The larger segment is those who prefer images.
Elon Musk can tweet something and a million people will reply. What percentage if those replies are bots, shills, or people trying to get money out of some offer of employment? Likely an absurdly high %.
Then there are the hacker groups and their influence campaigns... All over twitter.
I feel like twitter might be useful on a self hosted intranet with your close family and friends -- but as a global product it is grotesque.
Has anyone been on Twitter? Bots, spam, etc.
Remember that weird time in 2020 when they were slapping "offensive content" to all tweets from supporters of one specific party while still allowing porn clips without any filter. Yeah, I quit twitter around that time.
