I think this pretty much nails the wall street perspective. Interestingly enough I left the party because their attempts to monetize were really invasive; Emails, many notifications on my phone, etc... I think some subset of their users (to which I belonged) appreciated the simplicity of the product. Their attempts to increase engagement decreased it with what appears to be a significant portion of their user base.
I never quite got Twitter. It just seemed like a giant celebrity circle jerk. Especially for celebrity tech people. And I just don't give enough of a shit about famous or prominent people for it to matter much.
Honestly, I'm positively perplexed by this comment.
Twitter allows me to follow writers and influencers like Malcolm Gladwell, William Gibson, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, to niche industry influencers ranging from Rails engineers to industrial designers to photographers in a way that is digestable and at times personal. To me, it's been edifying to read thoughts from them, discover work they've created as it happens, or find out about a book they recommend.
Twitter is literally what you make of it. Follow interesting people, you get interesting content.
I know that the next day, or the day after that, worst case scenario, anything immediately relevant to me, or my community, will appear in my local newspaper, or RSS feed...
I live locally, in the short run, globally in the long run...
That's what devalues Twitter to investors...it's just "entertainment...it can easily be given up, without any real consequences...there are other more refined sources for what it offers...
Your comment is very reasonable but I've found that celebrity or wits or intelligence hardly correlates to interesting Twitter stream. Basically, most people who tweet are a waste of time to read. Even at 140 characters at a time.
It's surprisingly hard to find people who consistently say interesting things in such a restricted space.
Overall, I've decided it was so hard that it just wasn't worth my time, so I no longer read Twitter at all.
I too have felt the same way. I occasionally check John Carmack's twitter or some other developers, but that's it.
and when he was around I loved https://twitter.com/devops_borat
* Take the words of very popular accounts (even if they have no checkmark) with a grain of salt.
* Use your account to converse or pontificate, not to advertise your personal brand.
* Avoid jokey one-upmanship. It is tedious.
* Avoid detailed explanation until prompted. Brevity makes for misunderstandings.
* Follow people you do not know personally.
* Follow artists.
* Follow journalists.
* Follow minorities.
The reason to use Twitter is to get perspectives that have no other outlet - no advertising, no backing, no organization behind them. These are voices that are so faint that they could be tuned out any other way, and they don't get covered in the paper the next day, because they're going outside of the narrative lines. That is why you do better avoiding the blue checkmarks and people who would strive for them.
Last night I engaged an A16Z partner over net neutrality and Free Basics in India. Nothing circle jerk about it. No other platform offers this kind of engagement. I really wish Twitter wasn't public so all this money pressure wouldn't exist. It should be run like Wikipedia.
Me neither, and not for lack of trying either. I've posted thousands of tweets. It was most interesting during breaking news events. But it never seemed useful enough to justify my time expenditure in it, so I gave up.
Interesting. I receive no emails and rarely any push notifications from Twitter. I use it every day while riding the bus, although I'm mainly a consumer and hardly tweet anymore.
Did you and I fall into different categories or something and somehow that led to you receiving invasive marketing where as all I ever see are a few promoted tweets? Pretty curious about this because you mention that your experience is happening to a large portion of the user base.
I used to receive multiple push notifications a day at a minimum, which was irritating to me because prior to this a push notification meant that someone was interacting with me, and that didn't hold true anymore. Twitter had broken that implicit contract with me.
As for what I had said in the parent comment, what I was trying to imply was that something has happened recently that has disengaged a significant (different than large portion, specifically meaning not insignificant) portion of its user base as evidenced by the deceleration in user growth. Apologies for any confusion. :)
My mental model jumped from significant to large too easily, sorry about that.
What notifications were you seeing? I'm trying to think what I would receive that wasn't another user interacting with me and all I can recall is something along the lines of 'User1, User2, ..., all liked User3's Tweet' where User1 and User2 were people I followed. But it was very strange because every now and then I get those notifications for high profile accounts and other times it would be like two friends liked a third friends tweet. Those notifications were quite sporadic though and don't bother me in the least.
Their Android widget used to show the latest tweet of a person a follow. Recently (few months, maybe?) it was only the most recent ad. I'll be damned if I dedicate a chunk of my home screen to whatever crappy ad Twitter wants to fling at me.
Some products are chosen, by consumers, because of one thing...simplicity...an easily intuitive UI, use-ability..the product fills a need, just as it is, when introduced to the market...
Scaling up is difficult for such products...
It doesn't matter to consumers that a business needs to monetize...they don't care; they weren't even aware that it needed to...they are satisfied with the product they know, as is...
This is something we in the industry get wrong, so often...
Exactly. I'm used to unsubscribing from some random newsletter every company inevitably signs you up for but with Twitter it went from occasional emails to suddenly subscribed to 20 different notification-types (on all 3 of my Twitter accounts) delivering everything from daily "summaries" to every random follow I get.
