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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that.

Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable.

But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It's unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable, or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original scope.

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Consider that two major newsworthy events in the US in the past week (Philando Castillo killing and Dallas attack) were live-streamed on Facebook rather than Periscope.

Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't.

"App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies.

> AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't.

> "App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies.

I agree. Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then? They should re-integrate it into the main app for all the reasons you wrote.

I imagine it's because Facebook has a huge amount of existing penetration and active usage with Facebook Messenger which allows them to have a separate app. They already have the stickiness with the platform.

I imagine, once live streaming gets a sufficient enough user base, it'll have its own application experience.

Messenger is the new Facebook – there won't be a re-integration, it will more and more replace today's Facebook as we know it.

I don't understand the reasoning behind your conjecture but I don't see that happening because of the different modes of interaction. Messenger is more of a 1-1 channel that focuses on the immediate. Facebook is more of a broadcast channel focusing on passive, asynchronous, entertaining items.

WeChat has been successful with the model that you talk though .... Never say never ...

I don't see where Messenger could replace the Facebook native app at all...Messenger is growing every day and with bot support and SMS handling it's also becoming way more useful but from there to "Replacement of Facebook" there's quite the jump...

Most people use Facebook to communicate with their friends and family. With the regular Facebook platform everyone can see everything and your comment on a friends obnoxious photo might be posted on your moms news feed. Not so with Messenger. It's easy to have groups for friends, groups for family, groups for your Sunday football group etc. I bet most young people already are using Messenger a lot more than regular Facebook already.

Facebook is the last thing young people use.

According to something I read, young people (<22yo) use twitter & snapchat for on-going daily updates and reserve facebook for bigger events like a family get-together.

I am not a young person but I am a graduate student with a lot of young friends. At my university, Facebook is primarily used as a carefully curated photo album and an event planner. The genuine social interactions on Facebook have moved into Messenger. Photos and videos that are not profession/parent friendly are only shared in group chats. Most people are in 3 to 10 active group chats.

A few years ago Facebook Groups were popular at my school but now only a few of the largest ones are active. When I transferred in to finish my undergrad, the groups were essential to meeting people. Now I think it would be much harder to meet like-minded students online because all of the genuine conversation is in semi-private group chats.

One argument I've heard that makes sense, specifically about uber eats, if the new app is a shit experience and gets one star reviews, it doesn't affect the primary product

That might be valid for most apps or services, but I don't think Facebook needs to worry about their app rating too much. It's almost a required app for most people. Not to mention the rating on the main app took a pretty heavy dive when they separated Messenger out anyway.

One reason, I imagine, Facebook made this choice as a company is to increase the amount of real estate their apps have on the app store and 'top 10 most popular apps' lists, similar to how companies strive for top listings and more real estate on search engine results pages.

Between Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook's apps occupy 30% of most top-10 lists.

Live video in Facebook isn't separate: it is a different form of news item that is integrated into everything else. Messages is totally unrelated to everything else... it was a tab at the bottom that had no integration into the rest of the app, but because of that left limited ways to expand the experience of messaging itself (as the tab bar was already being used). It made absolutely no sense to have those things be crammed into the same UI.

> Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then?

Well for one, you can use it now without having a Facebook account at all, and it can also be used as your SMS app (at least the latest version on Android).

One reason they did it was to make Facebook messages feel more important. Before Facebook messages were like eMail, you felt like you could reply whenever at a later time. Now you feel like you have to respond immediately, like SMS.

I am often in and out of the messenger app without being interrupted by the clutter of FB itself. I look at FB when I have some time (maybe waiting in line or whatever) while I actually use messenger for, you know, messaging. The app has its own message count badge, for instance, while FB's badge includes both contact requests and updates.

It's a case where disaggregation helps the user experience.

Size. The FB app is at the very limit of the iOS app size.

Deray's arrest was livestreamed on Periscope. I think you might be cherrypicking, but even if I'm wrong, it's not quite that clear-cut.

Perhaps DeRay feels a bit of brand loyalty to the Jack Dorset empire.

Constellations of separate apps are better for users who only want certain parts without ceding unnecessary permissions and space.

EDIT: 'is' to 'are'

"But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging."

right, they only added photos, video, FB style profile pages, link shortening, location metadata, algorithmic timeline, moments, messaging, and extensively developed mobile apps but otherwise yes exactly the same as when they were an 140 char SMS broadcast service.

I knew this was going to be challenged, and you're not wrong. But Twitter still feels closest to the original incarnation of 'here be a (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'. They had the timeline, the "friend feed" first, and most enhancements affected only the payload of their messages. Moments was a big innovation, and it's presented as a separate offering on their website.

Whereas Facebook's primary function went from a carefully-curated yearbook-style personal and interest page to an... algorithmic timeline of friend's status updates and tumble-blog reposts.

Snapchat went from an app that sends disappearing photos to a general-purpose multimedia messaging app that happens to still put a timer on photos.

Instagram went from a photo and selfie-sharing app to a general-purpose social network with an algorithmic timeline, sponsored posts, and private messaging.

Why are we putting a premium on 'retaining it's original features' ?

This looks like a logical fallacy.

Because a lot of radical changeovers in other services are not user needs driven and look more like bait and switch.

> (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'.

Twitter went algorithmic timeline not too long ago, sadly.

Fortunately, it can still be turned off - but is on by default.

You can turn it off??? This is the best news I've heard in ages.

FWIW, as far as I know it hasn't infected 3rd party clients, or at least Tweetbot is still unaffected.

Of course, you can.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083#settings

> it can still be turned off

Where? I unchecked every setting that I found, but I still get that "While you were away" and "#something is currently trending" bullshit.

Here is how you do it.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083#settings

You can't get rid of the dumb "while you were away" thing, but you can block it. With ublock origin, add this to your "My Filters" settings:

  twitter.com##has-recap

Twitter switching away from a chronological see-everything timeline was a massive departure from its original idea, on the same scale as many of your other examples. To me that was a core feature and not having it just makes Twitter much less interesting to open.

A lot of that is different from the original, but IMHO not against the "concept of microblogging".

   > It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so
   > than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the
   > original form of their product as they can. I admire that.

Except for that time they blocked third party access to their API. That was kinda big. [0]. I guess you could also say that this move supports your point of view, but those third parties were partly responsible for the popularity of the platform.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/twitte...

Agreed, blocking API access was an overconfident move on their part, likely in the anticipation of display ads, and they never recovered.

Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve. They've tried small changes, and nothing helped their bottom line. Rumors are that part of the reason is that they are not sure what their "secret sauce" is, so they are reluctant to change anything in fear of harming it.

Also, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but they have so far given no indication they can survive independently. And they have had a few billion dollars in funding and ten years to give that indication.

> Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users

Those companies already have those same users.

Maybe Rupert Murdoch is feeling adventurous again. I mean he did buy MySpace once.

Facebook had essentially all of WhatsApp's users, and they still paid $20B for it. I should have said "users and the time the spend on it".

On Device Research said the overlap was only 24% in the USA. 45% only used Facebook and 31% only used WhatsApp.

Also, WhatsApp was strong in some parts of the globe where Facebook was weaker. In particular, WhatsApp was used in mainland China where Facebook was banned.

>> It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can.

> Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve.

My feeling is the secret sauce was "being cool and disruptive". /s

To secure that position they have, IMO, spent the last few years painting themselves into a corner.

Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is:

You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.

Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.

But if you see Twitter as a social network, you're subject to a different set of pressures than a blogging platform.

Also, Twitter holds no value to FB, Google, MS, or Yahoo. They all have subsumed parts of its core functionality into their offerings. If they ever get acquired, it's by some 'outsider' that wants to enter this space, like Verizon or Yandex.

They have value to anyone who has an interest in selling interest / location / cross-device based advertising, so that's exactly Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Yahoo would buy it for exactly the same reason they bought Tumblr - trying to stumble on a new business model via acquisition.

>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.

A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago)

ex. “The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers.”

It is from a few years ago, maybe things have changed but if that's the experience of the average person why invest time in it?

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your...

Because most people's tweets are read by their friends/relatives/social circle.

Half of Facebook's users have fewer than 200 friends on it.

This is such an important point, lost in the punditry.

Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that Twitter works for them.

If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls writing mean (and often abusive) tweets about them.

Most twitterers would be lucky to be threatened with the rape and murder of their families, frankly.

Which is why Twitter is dying-- there are so, so, so many news curation and aggregation sources. Twitter isn't even all that good, frankly. Reddit does the job way better. (Still a lot of folks that want to fuck my mom though.)

As a social network, it's crap, has been crap and likely will remain crap. The time-based feed tends towards livelock from professional content producers. Their curation mostly suggests people I can follow who would generally prefer I do not engage with them beyond promotion of their brands and gentle applause.

Reddit only appeals to a specific demographic though. Twitter seems to have broader appeal somehow. I think because Twitter conversation is less controlled by a majority.

Would love to see stats on how often average reddit account owners comment and contribute vs average Twitter users.

I think warcher has a very good point about vocal people from other platforms (e.g journalists) giving a massive misconception over Twitters actual appeal and reach.

There is a huge difference between a platform where you shout in to the void and people have to choose to listen and a platform where you shout into the void and people can overhear you. One of those systems favours the popular, the other favours the average person.

Twitter is better than Reddit because it is decentralizes the information from single, topic-related feeds people can post to, to one feed per person that you can subscribe to. This makes it much faster and more convenient than Reddit for getting status posts on things you like, i.e. an independent game developer's latest WIP.

Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say, facebok.

The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for you.

I suppose all I can say to that is, I do not believe this level of gamesmanship to extract Twitter's value proposition is going to work out. I think they're asking too much of their users, and if they can't figure it out, they're gonna fail.

Carefully note he's talking about accounts, and accounts are probably over 90% bots for "pay $50 for 10000 followers" marketing scams. In comparison you're talking about "average person"

If most accounts aren't people, then what most people do on the service is likely to have nothing in common with what most accounts do on the service.

There is also the orphan account situation. My twitter and facebook and linkedin accounts are unused but not deleted. I would theorize that's yet another problem, once you cross off the list of bots, if the majority of remaining accounts are unused, that means what the majority of accounts do has little to no relationship to what actual active users do. For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.

There is an even deeper reason the analysis is wrong. Inspired by writing this post I logged into facebook for the first time in months. My kids stopped using it years ago and now posting is very power law distribution where virtually all my timeline posts are now from exactly two people who post or repost something roughly every waking hour and nobody else can keep up with their meme-stream which floods everything else out. When a sample is power law skewed like facebook, words like average and median are irrelevant and meaningless. Power law distributions have other ways to analyze them like half life / doubling intervals and talking about the actual exponent of the distribution and stuff like that. The average post "on facebook" comes from precisely two meme-crazy shitposters I feel familial / workplace obligation or peer pressure to friend, but the average user's post is an entirely different phenomena and is a perhaps annual event at most. Oh look its been a year since my last summer vacation, here's my annual summer vacation post.

There is a similar problem with email, yes 99.9% of email sent is spam no one reads. No that does not mean no one uses email or there are no important emails.

> For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.

They usually apply basic criteria such as monthly active users (MAUs) here when promoting such stats. Your account likely wouldn't meet the criteria. In the case of bots, being "active" can be programmatically achieved, however.

> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space

So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees?

Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.

> What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day?

Not the Mac app that's for sure.

Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples:

[1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html

[2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron

[3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/

[4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb

[5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb

[6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven

[7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard

[8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache

[9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy

[10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago

[11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet

I think Fabric does "help" their revenue ID'ing all those phones where Fabric-enabled apps are installed.

Great list! At some point, I think this would have included Bootstrap as well?

Thanks, I wasn't familiar with many of these projects. I'm still not sure whether all this output justifies the staff, or whether they're over-engineering the hell out of a microblogging service.

>Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.

Parent means their secret, money-making sauce. Not just what makes it appealing to some people.

>Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space

And 90% of them are almost dead.

The big problem was that they're profitable at the hundreds-of-millions-per-quarter level but have been trying to spend into the billion+ range.

They uses to have tons of ideas and innovation until they locked the API in preparation for the IPO, but the ways they expected that to generate revenue obviously haven't happened at the scale they hoped for.

Their quarterly reports consistently show that the losses are caused by stock-based compensation and simply having staffed for a much larger business.

What I think is interesting is their direction towards streaming. For instance, they struck a deal to stream NFL games and they will being streaming the RNC and DNC conventions.

That may be a good direction for them to pair with their platform.

I don't think that's true. Twitter has stuck to the original 140 character format...true. Honestly I think they should stick to that. The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish. Look at TweetDeck, it hasn't improved in years, and you could argue it has gotten much worse. They dropped the Windows client support for one.

Their services didn't change much, but their philosophy changed drastically.

Then you have them temp banning people for political speech (and I'm not talking about harassment here, which is different.)

As for Vine, that is one that they should have evolved. Vine could have easily been more like SnapChat is now, but instead Jack and company sat on their thumbs.

Twitter is a remarkable case of mismanagement. I think in about 5 years hopefully someone write a book about how Twitter has constantly shot itself in the foot.

> The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish.

Oh how I wish this was true but sadly this is usually never the case. If it was Facebook would be long dead by now.

Shouldn't this data be a validation of Facebook's/Instagram's/Snapchat's growth model?

Maybe you _need_ to iterate and change up the game a bit if you're to continue growing, expanding into new markets, etc. ("There are no sacred cows.")

Oh absolutely it validates their business model (or so it seems), but I can't help but feel that value is paradoxically lost (for the user) once everyone iterates themselves into equivalence. Network effect advantages become almost irrelevant when everyone maintains an equally split presence. And if value is lost for the user, their platform loyalty will plummet.

Facebook and Snapchat will begin to be perceived as a 'utility' (something that has already happened to Twitter), meaning, we as a society all expect these functions of social networking and messaging to be fulfilled by a provider, but the exact provider is no longer relevant. Pressures to maintain a positive balance sheet will lead to a proliferation of ads.

This will leave room for new upstarts to target a niche they can serve better than the incumbents, and lure engagement away. They will use VC money to fund their effort and offer ad-free, carefully-focused refuges away from the big networks. But the incumbents have so much money, they will all get bought out in the end. (Snapchat refused to be bought out by Facebook for $3,000,000,000, at a time when it was still known as a sexting app)

I see analogues to the churn of free image hosts -- new one starts up because all the old ones are full of ads; introduces ads a few years later because they can't pay the bills. The cycle continues.

I remember way back when a lot of stuff was forums.

I think the communities are the most important part of these networks, and even if they all have feature parity, it's 100% fine for them to still exist independently.

I think Facebook and LinkedIn are a good example. You could basically do everything you do on LinkedIn on FB, but the communities are different so they stay different. Of course, LinkedIn accentuates different features, but both are mainly "Walls" with some messaging features and community building.

Though, I think you're very right in that Twitter is its own beast. Namely for the semi-public nature of it all.

I think this is a fundamental truth that is rarely acknowledged by the creators of "free" services. Delivering value to your users and increasing profit for the company are almost always in direct conflict. Large groups of users are drawn in by a free product which will ultimately be unsustainable. The companies which succeed after this initial period are the ones who are willing to degrade their original product, and manage to do so gradually enough that it doesn't draw too much backlash from their existing users.

One major social network that rarely gets mentioned is NextDoor. Unfortunately, they've just begun doing ads, too, and I already hate it.

It's disappointing because they have such a natural starting base for generating revenue: collecting neighborhood dues. It provides a useful service, would likely increase dues participation, fits within the value-proposition of the product. Lots of opportunities for premium features paid for by neighborhood associations, too.

That's why it's sad to see NextDoor chasing the same ad revenue of every other social network.

> Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product

And I hope they stay that way. Despite reports on twitter's dropping valuation, I find it as an immensely valuable tool for staying up to date. I'd pay to use twitter.

Twitter isn't a product. It's, at best, a product-construction command line; every product they've had (photo-sharing before murderized by Instagram, for instance) has been accidental.

How not to product manage 101.

You state that these social networks haven't improved experience for user. But user count has steadily gone up and so has engagement. I'm sure the evolution is also inline with their internal metrics. Why is not evolving based on data a good thing?

As a casual observer and non-user I'm actually quite happy to see them all reach feature parity. I'm hopeful that layman users will start to rue having the community so fragmented and we may start seeing faster progress towards common protocols and interoperability.

Part of me is seeing shades of the browser wars in these social network wars, and even though there were years of pain in the middle, we're all better off nowadays.

> arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can.

I thought the original point of Twitter – it's entire raison d'être – was that you could broadcast messages via SMS.

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