Twitter has features to Share, Like, Subscribe, Explore via Hashtags. Twitter does not have a feature to "Edit". I'm unclear how we can look at these core strategic choices and decide it's designed not as a community, but as a blogging engine.
Maybe I'm being dumb here, but twitter doesn't look like a product from the outside that has many features. Are these focused on advertisers, analytics or what?
Perhaps, but you are talking about creating rather complex machinery in order to support a tiny feature. If the only argument in favor is engagement statistics (would those take edits into consideration as well?), I certainly see why Twitter doesn't care too much.
At least for me, I've spent the last ~3 years designing new feature ideas for twitter and twitter-like products as a hobby and been involved in various communities working on these issues. Ways to improve quality of comments, reduce conflict, improve context, build media literacy, etc. I need to get around to publishing these ideas but have definitely put real work in. This is the only one I've published in blog form [1], tho I've put bits of others out on twitter itself over the years. Fwiw I used to run product/design for a social media co and have on and off run communities all the way back to bbses.
As far as I'm concerned the innovation just isn't there in the core loops and UX of twitter-likes, it's all circa 2008 stuff.
I dunno, it's a tool, you can use it how you'd like to use it.
Twitter is kinda weird in that there are some blindly obvious UX improvements everyone is aware of that Twitter refrains from because the poor UX is subsidizing their business model.
Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok).
Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it.
My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it.
It also doesn't try to charge me for access to my own followers like Facebook does.
Twitter may have problems but I like the balance they've struck.
An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.
I think they can keep that value proposition for users who want it, while still serving other audiences. E.g., people already attach long blocks of text to tweets. They just publish it somewhere that has pages set up for Twitter Cards. Twitter could bring a lot of that in house without harming the core experience at all.
Twitter wasn't intended for anything. It was an experiment that caught on. Almost everything that distinguishes Twitter today (retweets, likes, replies, posting links, even the at symbol) were all things users invented. Twitter just observed what people were doing and added support. Most of what I'm talking about is in that exact same tradition.
Yet you'll notice that the only features they mention that people might build upon are all features based upon contributions to Twitter itself, in the form of either content (posting proxies) or analytic data ('like' buttons, embeds). Consumption is left entirely out of the mix.
I can think of lots of ways I would design a twitter that was a better user experience. I can't think of many ways that improve it while also being profitable. And that's the rub.
You could create something that looks like Twitter, but you couldn't create Twitter. Ignoring the network effects and scale that Twitter has is ignoring its primary value.
Without a comparison, then the only conclusion is that Twitter simply cannot be run "correctly" by anybody, given that everyone has a vision of how it should be.
I'm a huge fan of blogs, agree with the author in general, but think he's defining "something much better" in a way that doesn't make sense to the average person.
Twitter is at least easy enough for the average person or even dopey + clueless non-technical celebrity to add to their phone, search, and use normally.
Blogs give infinitely more customization options, and in theory are easy to setup, but in practice are still a lot more work and harder to setup. All of their advantages are for nothing when it takes a lot more work to setup compared to a Twitter account for the average person.
Regardless, Twitter is done for. They're trying in vain to achieve an impossible politically correct goal (all of their new safe spaces features to eliminate trolling and name calling) rather than actually innovating or coming up with a business model that can sustain them.
I'm surprised that no one mentions that the value in Twitter is not in the software and hardware but in the community around it. Yes, you can rewrite the software and duplicate every other aspect but getting a world wide community to use it is a multi-billion dollar project if it's even possible to replicate. Not to mention the years it will take to get people to use it.
If it was software and hardware only, it would have been done already since people are constantly calling for its replacement. There's only one twitter. Looks like it's here to stay until people get tired of it.
I am not arguing that Twitter is the perfect interface for its content, or even that its content is particularly good. I am just saying that it can have value regardless of its (many) faults.
I have to point out that this last point is totally ridiculous. Twitter is functionally just like like Xanga or Livejournal or any other dead blogging platform you care to name. Just because you have a community of dedicated users and a better UI doesn't mean the service is unique. It's as if you thought Evian(R) or Dasani(TM) are public utilities.
Frankly, I think we're going to see a backlash against information overload - social media has lost its novelty, and most consumers need far less of it than the producers want to provide.
I think it is more a case of being everything to everyone, and one size fits all just plain sux.
IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.
Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.
How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.
But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
I think one of the things that makes twitter successful is it's lack of features. I'm on friendfeed, I was on Pownce, neither of them stuck. Friendfeed comes across like a 64-track mixing console with a builtin patch bay; it's got features and it does stuff. It feels like Pro Gear, but it's mostly built for readers not senders.
Twitter is as close as my phone. It removes most of the barriers to publishing, and the limitations help to make it predictable.
Could twitter's functionality be replicated; yes. However none of the fast followers seem to be able to stick with the simple feature set.
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