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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

Is Jack too woke for you or not woke enough? Hard to make sense of your criticisms...what do you envision twitter should be?

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That's not a dimension I care much about. As a product, it's stagnant. I think it could be a much better product. Better meaning serving a wider audience and serving different people in different ways.

build it then and become a billionaire. We'll be waiting.

As I said, it's a network effect business. There's no point to anybody without giant pockets trying to build a better Twitter or Facebook. People don't use those things because they are amazing products. They use them because that's where the other people are.

I don't think Jack is either woke or not woke enough. Twitter doesn't have a COO, but I do believe whomever is making day-to-day decisions at Twitter has a liberal bias. One need only look at the NY Post journalist that was recently suspended for tweeting a picture of the house Carlos Maza listed as an address while registering to vote, when nothing happened to Maza when he tweeted a picture of James Carville's home.

I not sure that is the only thing we need to do. For instance, Trump regularly threatens violence on twitter and doesn't get banned. So perhaps they have a conservative bias. Using your sort of puerile logic, anyway.

Do you mean President Trump has threatened a specific individual with violence? Can you give me an example? What part of my reply do you consider childish?

Here's a writeup of one notable incident where Trump's rhetoric collides with Twitter policy: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/477046-trump-tests-twi...

I appreciate you taking the time to research and share that link, but the third paragraph in that article states, "But Twitter says the president’s tweets do not violate any of its rules...". And once more in the 8th, "But in this instance, Twitter has opted to leave Trump’s tweets alone, finding that they are allowed under its rules." This does not seem to be an example of President Trump violating Twitter policy.

Twitter has a history of great flexibility for famous accounts. E.g., in 2017, Twitter introduced the "newsworthiness" exception for tweets pretty much guaranteeing that anything he says is allowed under the rules. Many people feel that Trump gets much greater latitude compared with what some 20-follower anime-avatar account would get.

I certainly believe that's the case. In some ways, Trump saved Twitter. Their numbers improved greatly when he came along. Even ignoring the fact that banning Trump could be incredibly bad for Twitter in PR and regulatory aspects, kicking him off would cause a significant hit to key metrics.

It's incredibly amazing people think Twitter's problem is dumb partisan bullshit related to the United States. Industrial-strength bikeshedding.

What would you say is a significant problem with Twitter? I'm interested in what you think would make Twitter a better service for its users.

I think one of Twitter's big mistakes is to go for a one-size-fits-all product. For example, in shifting away from a time-based timeline to the algorithmic timeline they've made it worse for advanced users in an effort to juice user activity metrics among less engaged users. That could be fine if they let other people build successful Twitter clients, but the put the kibosh on that long ago. This makes them more ad dollars, but at the cost of treating users like foie gras geese.

Another is the single model of discussion: tweets and replies in a single global space. There's no way for individuals or groups to create other contexts, so anybody attempting to have a sophisticated discussion needs to be prepared for 101-level people blundering in, reading a single tweet, and reacting ignorantly to it.

A third is its inability to handle longer blocks of text. The tweetstorm is as close as they come. It's a medium I enjoy, but it's not good for everything. In the same way one attaches images, one should be able to attach longer blocks of text, and perhaps richer things, like HTML. That would take it from being a micropublishing platform to an actual publishing platform.

They could also do massively better in terms of abuse prevention and conversation quality. I'd love to be able to pay for verification, so that they'd check my claimed identity and mark me as me. For anonymous accounts, I'd like ways for serious organizations to vouch for them. E.g., a human rights org should be able to say, "Yes, this is actually a person on the ground in Country X," so we can start telling real people from propaganda sock puppets.

For the longest time, a one-size-fits all product was Twitter's strongest value proposition. I disagree about the single model of discussion, and its inability to handle longer blocks of text. To me, these are some of the most significant ways for Twitter to distinguish itself as a social media platform. I don't think Twitter will ever be a place you go to for a quality conversation. It was never intended for that. Almost everything they did to enhance their platform made it worse.

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.

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