Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.
Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!
Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would think but obviously we're an edge case.
> Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.
Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things you care about but this I'm not sure how it's really sold to perspective users. Since it's a social network I'm guessing much will be word of mouth but that requires support from existing users.
I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better, maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I wonder if they've done any A/B testing where certain areas got different features like more character counts and how it turned out.
This is such a crazy innovation to the structure of chat programs, that it blows my mind other real time communication platforms haven't incorporated it. Even Facebook Messenger and GChat feel inadequate now that I'm consciously aware that they don't let me edit my chat messages after sending them. It's such a no brainer innovation that nobody has ever done, likely because when you're building a chat program the idea of letting people edit chats after they send them makes the brain of any engineer hurt -- but there's an untapped value to allowing it that many products haven't realized yet.
Additionally it brought up nonsense click bait.
It looked like they just fed in the front page of yahoo.