Twitter will start serving you promoted tweets from accounts you don’t follow | Hacker News Reader

Twitter will start serving you promoted tweets from accounts you don’t follow

venturebeat.com

52 pointsBry78912363 comments

I hope that these promoted tweets don't cause background notifications on my phone. The second my phone vibrates to tell me that I just received an ad, is the second I stop using twitter.

Which is a shame as I really like twitter as a concept and, honestly, I think I would pay for not having to deal with this advertising crap. Careful selection of whom I follow really has made my twitter feed to be one of the few ad-free places on the web where 80% of the content is interesting to me.

This is the highest rate in years (in the beginning, Usenet was better, but that was more than a decade ago). Don't take this away from me.

You piqued my curiosity. Could you give an example of a Twitter message that you consider valuable enough that you'd actually want your phone to vibrate so you'd see it immediately?

I don't think I've ever seen a Twitter message that I considered worth the time spent in reading it, so it always surprises me to hear about people who find them useful.

Deleted comment

The minute you (as a twitter client developer) start doing that, Twitter will revoke your API access.

Start doing what? They've deleted it.

I didn't see the original comment, but I assume it was a suggestion to hide tweets in the stream that aren't from or retweeted by a user that you follow.

This is how Digg fell apart. I'm surprised they don't seem to be learning from others' mistakes. They must feel huge pressure to start pulling in profit, but this is not the way to do it. Surely they should be searching for a way to use their vast databases and trend knowledge to make money rather than just exploiting user's attention.

I don't recall people having a problem with Digg's in-stream advertising. It was much more well received than the giant background advertisements they had previously been going with. Digg's downfall had nothing to do with the way they monetized; their shtick simply became a feature of larger, more attractive products.

digg's ads only work if you enable javascript

Twitter only works if you enable JavaScript.

How so? Browsing twitter.com/username or twitter.com/username/status/tweetid works. Other than a bad habit of giving other people URLs with content in the fragment id which have to be repaired, they seem more competent than most web authors.

http://m.twitter.com

Sadly, m.twitter.com does some terrible things to the Android browser and gets it stuck in some sort of redirect loop.

Have you tried its CNAME[1] directly?

[1] http://mobile.twitter.com

Ads were definitely not what killed digg. The biggest upset in balance was the increasing appeal of Reddit, a bloated staff, and Digg 4.0's RSS importer for submissions, which effectively made users pointless (aside from voting). Digg probably was still going to die, but these things certainly sped it up.

No, it wasn't the ads. Digg aways had ads. The problem was that the community felt more and more pushed out the door. And it wasn't just thet there was an RSS importer, it was that digg was replaced a website built around a community with a website that was _nothing but_ an RSS reader. There was an understanding in the community that the new digg was going to be about allowing content creators to advertize, not the previous submission/voting system (which was already skewed to the userbase's tolerance limits).

In short it was not the advertising content alone, but that the advertising content replacing real content in a drive to monetize. That is exactly the kind of thing twitter is doing.

Here is an open letter from Ohanian to Rose where he blames the downfall of digg on the VC meddling. http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose

Ads inline with content was definitely a major factor. Just look at this screenshot: http://www.treehugger.com/digg-oil-spill-sponsored-bp-image....

Pretty terrible way to treat your users.

"we didn’t want to sacrifice user experience"

Bullshit. They are ads. At least be honest about it.

Past tense. They "didn't want to" but now they do because the magic business model fairy never arrived.

Tweets are already ads; it seems like they could just charge social media experts™ to send tweets rather than injecting stuff that people probably don't want.

Twitter is cable tv for me. I get some national news, a lot of stuff I don't like and a little that I do from about 100 sources. I don't think I'll mind ads.

I love twitter, but if that's all I was getting from it, I wouldn't use it if they paid me. Why do you bother following sources who show you a lot of stuff you don't like?

I don't know about the op, but I'm in a similar boat. Here's why I do it.

1) I don't know of any source that likes exactly the same things as I do. Think venn diagrams.

2) It's very easy to skim over the things that aren't interesting. I usually see tweets through flipboard and it's like a magazine. I scan for interesting things, and skip most of it.

This is the only way I know how to get the variety I want. I've thought about writing a statistical classifier to filter out a lot of it. I should get off my ass and do that.

I agree.

Because no one tweets pearls of wisdom all the time. Regardless of who you follow, most tweets are noise. That's what twitter means.

Break the ad chain, use https://identi.ca

Well, I don't want to be one of the "Oh god this ruins everything I've ever loved" people, aka the hyperbole crew, but ... seriously? I manicure my twitter stream pretty closely. If they're raising the signal:noise ratio, I hope they give me a way to ... I don't know, not see it somehow.

I'm surprised that they have never offered a paid, pro version of Twitter. Even features as simple as no-ads and access to their complete timeline history would be enough to entice some people.

They can't do that. Then you'd have revenue to base valuations on.

Revenue is a big no-no in silicon valley, it punctures the reality distortion bubble.

You bring up an excellent point about the difference between bootstrapping and being funded. When you are on your own, profits are good, period. But if you have to show people numbers, small numbers are bad and it might be more "strategic" of you to show them other numbers (like usercount) that are big instead.

The dual ad-based and paid ad-free model doesn't work. The existence of an ad-free version devalues the ad-based model. The most attractive customers will pay for the ad-free version so advertisers won't pay you as much. And you can't pay Twitter's bills on the 0.1% of users who'll pay $5 a month. Ad-based is the only viable solution. They'll lose a tiny minority of ad-hating zealots and profit meanwhile.

> And you can't pay Twitter's bills on the 0.1% of users who'll pay $5 a month.

I wonder do their bills exceed $5 million a month. (I know, you pulled numbers from nowhere. I'm only making the point that they have an absolutely enormous userbase[0].)

[0]http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/09/08/twitter-100m-users-...

$500k a month: 0.1% of 100 million is 100k, not 1 million.

Whoops. Sorry, I haven't slept in 34 hours.

Or just one that simply works.

Business idea for twitter: paid access to the old, non ajaxified interface.

So what stops me from writing a client that whitelists only the users I want to see? Unless Twitter completely changes their API, or camouflages ads as tweets from my follow list, how can they lock you into seeing ads?

Not giving you access to the APIs for a new, "misbehaving" client is one way.

Twitter is more than ripe for disruption. One of these days someone will pull a google on them. Between the super slow 'new and improved' interface to sending you spam (the whole point was that you only got the tweets from those you follow) and 'twitter is over capacity, please try again in a few moments' (which is a permanent fixture these days) I can't wait for the next iteration of this concept, as long as it is done by people that know how to really scale a backend.

Twitters downfall will come when people realize that the service their offering isn't exclusive. It can be easily duplicated and improved. It seems similar to SMS and e-mail. The concept is something that will last forever, but eventually, someone is going to create an open standard that allows for people to submit "tweets" (or whatever the equivalent will be) from anywhere to anyone on any platform. Imagine a podcast style system. Get live updates on any device, subscribe to users from iTunes/GMAIL/etc.

It'll happen, sooner or later. (Probably sooner now).

To explain my idea better, think of internet messaging systems. People use AIM, ICQ, Pidgin, etc. You can communicate with users on other platforms using different software. Right now twitter is both the back-end and the front-end. Eventually, it'll just be the front end like GTalk or Pidgin.

And yet of the non-techy people I know, they all either use Skype or MSN (or, game-playing friends, Steam Friends).

If people felt there was somewhere to go from Twitter, they many of their userbase segments would switch. The trick is building up a big enough userbase in a competing product.

For a little while now, I've been wondering why nobody has created email-like systems for social networks.

By email-like, I mean that it's decentralized... Everyone can run their own server. No 1 company has complete control over it. (Except possibly the root DNS servers.)

People can subscribe to content from others (like Twitter) and receive those updates automatically.

I'm thinking that when you subscribe to someone, their server is notified that you subscribed, and your server remembers it as well.

If the person unsubscribes, the other server is notified, etc etc.

When you post, your server tells every subscriber's server that you posted and gives them the message. If the person has unsubscribed, but there was no notification, an 'unsubscribe' response is returned, instead of accepting the message.

As far as I've thought it through, this means nobody can send you spam unless you are subscribed to them. No companies can monetize you, unless you use their server instead of running your own. With a set of standardized protocols, it should be possible to create twitter-like clients that hook to any server running this...

It doesn't have to be limited to 140 characters. It can have all kinds of extras, like media or hashtags built-in. Replies can be threaded, instead of hoping the other person knows why you are replying.

There's some other things to think about, such as what happens when a server is offline for a while. Does it poll everyone to try to catch up? Do servers send messages in batches back and forth, instead of dealing with things on a user-by-user basis? etc etc.

buddycloud does this.

Distributed, like email. Federated like email. Realtime. Your "home" server maintains an inbox of events since you were last connected.

And we are working to standardise the protocol (https://buddycloud.org/wiki/XMPP_XEP).

Yesterday we released the first working server that implemented the entire protocol: http://buddycloud.com/cms/node/247 and we are now working to finish the webclient which looks like: http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/buddycloud-screen-dump-par...

No 140char limit, no promoted tweets, no API agreement BS.

I'm glad to see this is being worked on. God-speed to you.

Twitter was my RSS for a very long time. If they start injecting ads as content now, i think I'll close my account since it is no longer serving it's purpose. A bit of a shame really, i liked my spam-free Twitter.

Its sad they have to do this to monetize. But they wanted to build a centralized platform, not a distributed service.

A single point of congestion on the Internet so that they could retain their control, and now they're paying for it. They could have just been a federation provider, and one of many equal-level service providers. It would have scaled much, much, much better while offloading costs onto others.

Oh well. Thats where we are on the Internet today. Its all about the control a signal, centralized, web-centric offering gives rather than the service it provides to the users.

Quite a slippery slope they've embarked on here. It'll be way too tempting to turn up the ad frequency now if the quarter's numbers don't look good. Not a good move.

So Google cuts them off and Twitter resorts to this? If Twitter is trying to keep people from flocking to Google+, this is not the way.

I thought Twitter cut Google off? Well, all the people with non-European names / pseudonyms will have to stay with Twitter.

I'd like to start a twitter client that "curates content" based on ML and NLP. "Curating of content" is on twitters "OK can do" list as far as I know. What do you guys think about that?

"curates content" = skip the noise, more bacon.

older thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971204

Before everyone starts hyperventilating, they aren't going to send you emails of promoted tweets from accounts you don't follow. This sounds like Reddit's promoted links -- hopefully, like Reddit, they'll open it up to more users and it won't be a repeat of what happened with Digg.

As long as the ads are formatted differently or labeled, I am fine with it. I am easily distracted. I don't spend too much time reading tweets and I wouldn't want a tweet suddenly making me think about context when I don't want it to.

I really don't like keeping up with Twitter "stream". Just today I was picturing how much better it would be for me to consume the information if the folks I follow just discussed on some Google Group.

How many people do you follow? I am pretty sure a Google Forum would not work for me...

256 now. I don't know how if that is a lot or a few.

But why wouldn't it work? Scanning your google groups topics shouldn't not take longer than scanning the list of tweets...

What stops third party apps from filtering these tweets?

I guess that hints at why they've gotten so much tighter on indie client developers.

Great move. It's time to grow up, ignore the people who complain (let them move on, they won't click on ads anyway), and make some profit.

Growing up == throwing your userbase in the shitter? In case you were in a coma a year ago: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

Shoving your monetization attempts in the user's face by interrupting the stream of information they expect from you is like shoving a dogshit-filled paper towel in someone's nose right before they take a bite of cake.

Twitter needs to make money or it will just go away.

How is showing sponsored tweets the same as "throwing your userbase in the shitter"? Your sense of entitlement is as disgusting as your scatological language.

Don't like it? vote with your feet.

I know what you mean by sense of entitlement, that sort of thing annoys me too. But in this case I don't think the person was displaying a sense of entitlement. Just opining that people will, in fact, vote with their feet, and that it's going to hurt Twitter a lot.

> Just opining that people will, in fact, vote with their feet, and that it's going to hurt Twitter a lot.

Well, if the people are going to do this when Twitter finally figures out a monetization strategy, then Twitter won't be in business for very long and people will be forced to find an alternative either way.

It's a bit silly to expect them to continue living off of hundreds of millions of VC money to preserve an ad-free user experience.

Don't pollute my datastream with unwanted content. Find another way to deliver the ads, even if it's alongside or above my normal stream. It's not a sense of entitlement, it's a sense that I don't want tweets from people/things/entities I don't give a damn about polluting my data stream.

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