I am very bullish on Twitter’s future-I can’t imagine life without it
June 3, 2015 8:04 PM   Subscribe

What Twitter Can Be.
I believe in Twitter. The company itself is improving, not worsening. The stock market doesn’t get that because Twitter has failed to tell its own story to investors and users. Here is how I think that story could unfold:
posted by andoatnp (43 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
The cynic in me says pump and dump, the realist in me thinks tl;dr.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 8:19 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]




I read all the way to his first actual suggestion, Live, and ... well it seems to miss the point of Twitter. He wants some kind of channel for events that you don't even have to log in for, so basically he wants centralized reporting and aggregation where everyone in the world gets the same perspective. Plus, he wants this for events like any protest anywhere, and TV shows. Plus he wants "an editor or two" to keep an eye on each of those thousands of events' streams in real-time.

So... he wants Twitter to stop being so Twitter and start being more TV?
posted by aubilenon at 8:54 PM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


Anyway, I stopped reading after that. If his other ideas are less dumb, somebody say something, ok?
posted by aubilenon at 8:55 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm one of the users that tried out twitter very early in the piece, and then left, so my thoughts might not be very insightful.

One thing I didn't see him really touch on is the aspect of social network fatigue, and other users as a draw (the social part of the social media). I am a heavy facebook user, and despite the fact I HATE shit like constantly autodefaulting to top stories (something, he is, in essence proposing in this article), and the fact I found google plus a much better user experience, I stick with it.

Why? 1. Because the people I want to stay in touch are there, and show no signs of moving, and 2. Cause I just don't have the energy to pick up another social media platform. I am a prisoner to my laziness.

I think Twitter is great for what it is, but I also think its appeal is somewhat limited for what is is, too. And when one looks at the history of social internet platforms, it is littered with also-rans from MySpace, to Friendster, to Orkut etc etc. Investing in a social media platform to me seems like a very high risk investment, especially when the platform really has only one offering and is not part of an "empire" like google etc.
posted by smoke at 9:05 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


To refine my final para a little more: 140 character snacks are not for everyone, and I'm not sure you can make them appeal to everyone, either.
posted by smoke at 9:06 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


First: could the beginning of this article be more breathless? "Sorry this isn't a clickbait teardown piece, because I looooooooooooove Twitter!" is not a convincing way to make me believe your article about how Twitter is so awesome.

Second: Ctrl+F "harassment" : no results. Ctrl+F "threat": no results. Are you fucking kidding me? How does any article about Twitter's future, especially one that talks about how scary it is for new users to participate, manage to completely avoid the problem of harassment?
posted by chrominance at 9:07 PM on June 3, 2015 [14 favorites]


He does say twitter is scary-so lets lower the bar for entry! Let's auto ask everyone what they think about every newspaper article! Wheeeee!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:09 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


There are some good ideas in there. Some even that would make the product more fun for current users. But fundamentally I wish Twitter would just say, RE user growth "Nah, fuck it. We're not for the whole world. We're just for the tiny niche
of 100million users we have now. We'll keep making them happy for the next 20 years rather than try and make a billion users happy for 2 before we burn out.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:12 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


"
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:12 PM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


aubilenon: "If his other ideas are less dumb, somebody say something, ok?"

His next idea is "Channels" which I don't think is very dumb -- although this is coming from someone who doesn't really use Twitter but does use Instagram. If there was an effective way to organize my Instagram into, say, "kitties and puppies", "cars", "nature stuff", "celebrities", etc... and be able to switch my timeline between these channels, I'd be super stoked. I suspect someone following a lot of people on Twitter might also appreciate this kind of organization (e.g.: "people I know in real life", "comedians", "current news alerts", etc...).

... Although, on closer inspection, I think he's proposing that these channels would be defined by Twitter. Pretty much like TV channels. So, yeah, maybe not so great?
posted by mhum at 9:13 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I am a proud Twitter shareholder and Twitter user. I want this company to succeed. I want the people who work at Twitter to win. I want this stock to be worth more. I own more of it than virtually anyone working at the company.

lol
posted by junco at 9:14 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I am a proud Twitter shareholder and Twitter user. I want this company to succeed. I want the people who work at Twitter to win. I want this stock to be worth more. I own more of it than virtually anyone working at the company.

There is no fucking drummer better than Neal Peart.
posted by evil otto at 9:20 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


If there was an effective way to organize my Instagram into, say, "kitties and puppies", "cars", "nature stuff", "celebrities", etc... and be able to switch my timeline between these channels, I'd be super stoked. I suspect someone following a lot of people on Twitter might also appreciate this kind of organization (e.g.: "people I know in real life", "comedians", "current news alerts", etc...).

Twitter already has Lists, which lets you do just that. I think they're not that widely used; one in 8 people following my main account have it on a list, and only one in 50 people following my joke account have it in a list.
posted by aubilenon at 9:23 PM on June 3, 2015


If there was an effective way to organize my Instagram into, say, "kitties and puppies", "cars", "nature stuff", "celebrities", etc... and be able to switch my timeline between these channels, I'd be super stoked.

Yeah, that's something I really like about Google Plus; the circles made it very easy to self-curate (and self-censor) your content. I find/found it very empowering as a user and the antithesis of Facebook in many ways. I mean, technically you can do that stuff with facebook, but they make it as clunky and unintuitive as piss.
posted by smoke at 9:31 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


aubilenon: "Twitter already has Lists, which lets you do just that."

Oh, cool. I'm actually a bit tempted to explore Twitter a little more, knowing that I'd have at least some way to organize my timeline if I went on a follow spree.
posted by mhum at 9:35 PM on June 3, 2015


Things I definitely don't want from twitter and that will definitely hurt twitter: big emphasis on live event curation; human editors/curators doing, well, anything (moderation of harrassment is necessary, but he doesn't mention this); emphasis on popularity and interaction with content; question prompts for hollow engagement; fucking surveys; channels; suggested topics; or really anything suggested by this guy, at all.

Twitter's biggest strength is its hands off approach to the content, the users, and just about everything. It's the major blessing of the entire network. Screw with that, and I guarantee you the majority of current users will run screaming.
posted by naju at 9:41 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Wow, his whole argument is stupid. Just follow better people! Bam, you have your human curated stream. Great tweets aren't being lost, many of the people I follow go digging for old, great tweets and retweet them. In fact I've seen some of the truly awesome ones be retweeted on different occasions from different people. This guy owns so much twitter stock but apparently doesn't use it.
posted by Joe Chip at 9:42 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


for all his stock, this dude does not get that twitter isn't about letting you know what's going on in the world. it's about building a whole new world centered around you.
posted by smasuch at 9:46 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I suppose if I ever want to get massively harassed or threatened or spammed, I can start using Twitter.

Myself, I like using a social network where I can define exactly who sees my posts, and where I can define exactly who I read.
posted by happyroach at 10:01 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


this dude does not get that twitter isn't about letting you know what's going on in the world. it's about building a whole new world centered around you.

Wow what a dream.
posted by alex_skazat at 10:11 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


For years, whenever I've read long angsty things about Twitter, I just swap "Twitter" for "IRC" in my mind. Makes everything easier.
posted by meehawl at 10:16 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm tired of hearing how awesome Twitter is. Yeah, sounds great that I can't write more than one sentence and as a woman I become horrible trollbait. Sign me up, I can't wait to join for that! It sucks for writing (seriously, if you have a lot to say, WRITE IT ALL TOGETHER SOMEWHERE ELSE AND FUCKING JUST POST A LINK TO TWITTER) and rocks for ease of harassment. Sure, it'd be good for reading quick news stories, but that's about it. I do not get why it's so fucking awesome no matter how many articles I read about awesome Twitter discussion.

I can certainly imagine a world without Twitter, and it was glorious. Spare me another "celebrity quit Twitter!" and "the Twittersphere exploded" and "here's what everyone on Twitter said about this celebrity death" article, please.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:00 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


For years, whenever I've read long angsty things about Twitter, I just swap "Twitter" for "IRC" in my mind. Makes everything easier.

This article is certainly long, but it's not angsty. I'm not sure this article would make sense about IRC but it doesn't really make a lot of sense about Twitter either so maybe that doesn't really count against your system.
posted by aubilenon at 11:20 PM on June 3, 2015


Twitter needs to take online harassment and hate speech seriously, as opposed to saying it takes it seriously, or it faces slow decline.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 11:30 PM on June 3, 2015


retweet: The cynic in me says pump and dump, the realist in me thinks tl;dr.
posted by chavenet at 1:29 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


What Twitter really needs to figure out is how to not lose half of a billion dollars each year.
posted by octothorpe at 3:24 AM on June 4, 2015


Done right, countless users new and old will find Twitter indispensable, use Twitter more, see great ads, buy lots of stuff, and make the company much more money along the way.

I dream of the day when I can finally "see great ads" and "buy lots of stuff". It's what I always wanted from the Internet.

Seriously, I can easily imagine life without Twitter, and I don't even have a very good imagination.
posted by mmoncur at 3:44 AM on June 4, 2015


I like Twitter, I use it a lot I think it's great. It lets you do dumb stuff like play DnD as a doomed Goblin . But it doesn't need to be the next facebook or whatever.

I think something good would be lost inthe attempt to make more and more money and grow more and more. It needs to exist as a steady state utility type service. That's not particularly sexy or exciting, but that's where the tech world needs to go if it's going to grow up.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:23 AM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


My only interactions with Twitter are when tweets are quoted in an article or linked in an FPP here. I have yet to see a single thing there that is even a tiny bit compelling -- it is a format with no appeal to me, but more importantly that format seems to lead to content that I'm not interested in. I'm glad it works for a hundred million people, but it's hard to imagine any innovation on their part that would include me in that number.

And the harassment thing -- they need to figure out how to take that seriously, starting now.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:51 AM on June 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


Wall Street’s confidence in the management team has diminished.

You can't pretend to be doing serious analysis of something and include crap like this.

Twitter is fantastic and in many ways a preview of what all communication will be like in the future. The way ideas and jokes and campaigns spread, the way it is endlessly divisible by time and location, the speed at which it churns, the way it can rebalance the difference in volume between rich and poor voices...
posted by colie at 5:17 AM on June 4, 2015


Management people don't get Twitter. Hell, even Twitter's own management people don't get Twitter.

Just think of these poor shmoes, up in their offices. Ten or twenty years ago they would have been running something like a mid-size shoe company, or maybe selling staples on a business-to-business stationary contract. They're usually barely aware of how internet things work, and yet have to go into business meetings to discuss these things over and over again, whilst acutely conscious that everything they do is to a background of losing enormous amounts of money.
posted by The River Ivel at 6:28 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


this dude does not get that twitter isn't about letting you know what's going on in the world. it's about building a whole new world centered around you.

This may be the most perfect description of Twitter ever written because everybody will agree with it.

Those like myself who find Twitter to be an online cancer that amplifies and concentrates all the worst aspects of not only online behavior, but human nature in general, will nod and say yes, Twitter is narcissism incarnate.

Those who inexplicably enjoy Twitter will nod and say yes, it lets you express yourself and experience the world as you want it.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:53 AM on June 4, 2015


Twitter is narcissism incarnate

Nah, a lot of forms of narcissism are better served by Facebook — Twitter is specifically for narcissistic resentment.
posted by RogerB at 9:38 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Also, this deserves to be highlighted as (I hope) the first time a stupid MetaTalk argument has occurred in an activist shareholder's manifesto:
Favorite Is Too Strong A Word – A very high bar is set by using the word “Favorite” on Twitter. Favorite is a superlative. It implies a ranking. In the early days of Twitter many of us interpreted the word literally and only keep a few Tweets in our favorites that were truly, well, our favorites. Today, many of my friends and I use the star as a “Like” button equivalent or even a simple acknowledgement that we saw a Tweet. Whereas other people use favorites as bookmarks. However, the majority of users are baffled by favorites and they don’t end up using the star much, if at all.
posted by RogerB at 9:43 AM on June 4, 2015


I love Twitter; it's such an effective honeypot for mainstream news, celebrity gossip, and hyperventilating drama shitstorms that I can easily filter most of that stuff out of my Internet experience by simply never paying any attention to Twitter.
posted by Mars Saxman at 10:07 AM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


I hate Twitter for contributing to the decline of RSS.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 10:16 AM on June 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


I use Twitter a fair bit, but I don't tweet much (23 tweets in 5+? years).

I hate some of his suggestions: Snap polls? Prompts like "What do you think of that?" to encourage even more banal tweets?? "Thank You bombs" for celebrities???

I like some of them: a separate Twitter News app, which curates the day's news based on your follows, or shows you its own best-of list if you aren't logged in. Archived Periscopes, maybe even with Vine-style ads in front of them to make them some money.

The rest are resoundingly Meh. Hearts? And the failure to even mention harassment campaigns - heh, that's a bit unintentionally revealing, isn't it?

But here's the thing: Twitter is influential, and influential out of all proportion to its size - think of all the TV ads with mandatory hashtags now. It's a vehicle for taste makers (yeah I just threw up in my mouth a little) and it faces the Google Reader problem of hard-to-harvest value. Something must be done... and hey, this is something, right?
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:48 AM on June 4, 2015


I once heard twitter described as "Social media for brands and people who think they are brands."
posted by kaibutsu at 11:10 AM on June 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Maybe in the future it will be a network of sentient brands.
posted by Sangermaine at 11:15 AM on June 4, 2015


I love that 1/10 tweets in my stream seem to be sponsored pro-fracking messages paid for by the gas industry.
posted by octothorpe at 11:52 AM on June 4, 2015


I hate Twitter for contributing to the decline of RSS.

That ship sank when google stopped supporting it, the bastids.

I suppose if I ever want to get massively harassed or threatened or spammed, I can start using Twitter.

I have never had that happen. Not that it doesn't happen I know it's brutal to some prominent users. I could be wrong but I don't think average users run into much scary drama. Definitely something Twitter needs to do something about, I am just saying you can engage without that happening.

I love Twitter so I hope it somehow survives the unfortunate relationship with Wall St. I avoided it for years and just did not get it. But now it's one of my daily go-to sites on the web. I don't particularly want channels, I like a giant eclectic fire-hose of stuff I mightn't have found myself. The key to enjoyment is partly in who you follow and using lists. I follow a lot of great mefites and some fascinating people around the world. I'm not a huge chatterer but it is fun to put my "a cat can look at a king" two cents in to a celebrity now and then, and I get an occasional kick out of eavesdropping on a conversation. For me tho, I have it shaped to be a giant news-and-interesting-things feed and a place to store and share some of my good finds. I love following breaking events and that is very useful to my work, too. Plus, many really nice mefites, that's a plus.
posted by madamjujujive at 3:43 PM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


After years of being very much of the opinion that Twitter has done far more damage than good, I made a concerted effort last year to engage with it, try and figure it out, make it a part of my online life, dig up some feeling that mirrored the great utility and entertainment value so many people seem to find in it.

I failed. It's just not for me, I guess. It could be my intrinsic low-intensity drive for social engagement, or my love for lengthy disquisition over pithy bon mots (at least in text), or my lack of patience for mentally collating unintegrated snippets of information, or not being all that interested in the random thoughts and minor events that people experience in their daily lives, or a kind of snide and admittedly unlikable disdain for deliberate look-at-me-ism and celebrity worship, or my nearly-obsessive valuing of my time, or just an outgrowth of my weird discomfort with realtime text chat (like IRC and stuff).

I dunno. I see that there have been some (arguably) good things that have emerged from it along with all the bad, and if it makes someone's life better to use it, well, more power to 'em. As with Facebook and all the rest of the socials, for me at least, I feel like my life is better without it. Here and MFC and a few other places online where the population is smallish and known to me and the feeling is more village than megalopolis, that's about as much social as I can handle.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:28 PM on June 4, 2015


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