How To Fix Twitter

An anonymous reader writes: Dustin Curtis succinctly breaks down Twitter's biggest problems, and how they can be fixed. Some of the problems are technological — they way they've decided to handle multimedia objects is arbitrary and annoying, and their inclusion of third-party modules is inconsistent and behind the times. Other problems are more central to what Twitter is about: "[F]or normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. ... Twitter responses are difficult to read on the website–with that weird accordion expansion UI that only shows 5 responses and makes it impossible to follow a coherent conversation."

The biggest problem is in Twitter's utility for browsing real-time information, which should be its strength: "When I open Twitter during a major debate in the U.S., or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge f@$%&#g banner at the top that says 'follow this breaking event.' It shouldn't just search for a hashtag–it should use intelligent algorithms to show me all of the relevant content about that event.

Comments

Sigh...Twitter is about following celebrities

[Anonymous Coward]

"Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system"

Well duh, that's the point. Celebrities get to spew their thoughts out, and everyone lsitens, and they don't have to listen to responses unless they actively want to.

"'follow this breaking event"

On Twitter? So I can hear what Jow Blow and his friends have to say about something that doens't involve celebrities? "Nuke everyone", eh, Joe Blow? What wonderful insight!

Re:Sigh...Twitter is about following celebrities

[Andreas Mayer]

Works great for keeping up on news headlines as well. It's like a modernized RSS reader.

You can sort of use it like RSS.

What I don't understand is the 'modernized' bit ...

Re:Sigh...Twitter is about following celebrities

[Applehu Akbar]

If Twitter had an option to use current phone GPS location (which should be easy to enable and disable) making tweets, it could identify accounts which were known to be physically near a breaking story, and autogenerate a hashtag like #PhoenixStandoffWeAreThere, with tweets only from those accounts. This would make it the 'world police channel' we have all wanted.

fix it for who?

[tqft]

Make a twitter for newbies and a news feed if you want, I like my hand curated news sources as they are.

It isn't broken for me.

A bigger fix would be to make twitter a proper platform like it was, not a semi closed app

Re: fix it for who?

[pauljlucas]

An even better fix would be to decouple Twitter the protocol from Twitter the company. Just like nobody owns e-mail, nobody should own Twitter the protocol. (I realize that it's not in Twitter-the-company's interest to do this.)

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Twitter's biggest problem was vitriol.

CAPTCHA: alarmed

Sink it into the ground

[ickleberry]

It would be great to see it gone. Who knows, journalists might resort to doing actual investigation once again instead of simply regurgitating what shows up on their twitter machine

Re:Sink it into the ground

[Ol Olsoc]

It would be great to see it gone. Who knows, journalists might resort to doing actual investigation once again instead of simply regurgitating what shows up on their twitter machine

You have to admit, it's a very efficient way for people to ruin their lives.

Re:Sink it into the ground

[RogueyWon]

A couple of years ago, I was involved in the recruitment of somebody for a high-profile and politically sensitive job. Twitter was the number-one means by which candidates managed to exclude themselves. Bear in mind we're talking here about late-career professionals with, at the least, six-figure salaries, not about teenagers.

The nature of the job meant that anybody who had demonstrated poor judgement in public communications could be considered for it (the press would have torn them to shreds). Surprise, surprise, almost everybody who had used twitter had demonstrated (very) poor judgement at some point, usually on multiple occasions and sometimes over a span of several years.

The rapid-fire nature of twitter and the tight character limit encourage flamebait, knee-jerk responses and escalating incivility. It is the ultimate career-limitation tool and nobody who aspires to be regarded as "serious" should have a personal twitter account.

A friend's wife works as a recruitment consultant and tells similar stories; countless people whose angry twitter exchanges, viewable by the general public and posted with their real name, have created such an impression of poor judgement that employers don't want to touch them.

Re:Sink it into the ground

[Ol Olsoc]

A friend's wife works as a recruitment consultant and tells similar stories; countless people whose angry twitter exchanges, viewable by the general public and posted with their real name, have created such an impression of poor judgement that employers don't want to touch them.

And the very first poor judgement was getting a Twitter account in the first place. For all the reasons you noted.

This is really something that ends up killing a service. It's th tragedy of the commons.

An example was how usenet was destroyed. As a couple examples, A couple newsgroups I paid attention to were an antenna newsgroup, and an amateur radio policy group.

The antenna group at one time had a number of world class designers who were happy to share their knowledge with the rest of us. But the kooks moved in, people with miracle antenna and fringy physics, and ill manners to boot.

Well, on the internet, a world renowned expert is on equal footing with someone who designs dummy load antennas based on physics only a perpetual motion advocate could love, and doesn't hesitate to go nuts if challenged.

So the usefull people go away, and the crazy dude wins. for aweek or two.

The policy group was taken over by some kooks from West Virginia whith sever psycho sexual problems. Now no content, and since pissing off people who were there for a valid purpose was part of the fun, the kooks end up leaving.

Its just how those things evolve.

Fixing an internet firehose

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting meaningful signal from Twitter's noise is an effort in futility.

The bigger fix for twitter would be in the tos

[Anonymous Coward]

The more productive change to twitter would be to change their terms of service to allow free scraping of data without restriction or shaping, and to allow third party clients to present the data in any form they choose rather than a twitter-like experience as mandated by the terms of service.

Whiney whiney whine

[wonkey_monkey]

When I open Twitter during a major debate in the U.S., or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge f@$%&#g banner at the top that says 'follow this breaking event.'

Why should there be a banner? If you go to Twitter to get your breaking news, you're a maroon.

I thought one of the whole points of Twitter is that it's 99% driven by user content, not by the company deciding what to promote, and that seems to work just, umm... "fine." If you like that sort of thing.

The biggest problem is...

[AndyKron]

The biggest problem with Twitter is censorship.

Searching a specific TL / own tweets

[Jesrad]

This one's been frustrating me a lot: I apparently cannot search my own TL or my own tweets for that nugget of info / chart / URL that I need again.

how 'bout this?

[turkeydance]

https://twitter.com/breakingne...

Two problems

[jabberw0k]

1.Twitter is a walled garden, and not unlike Facebook or Instagram, don't expect them to yield control of the medium.

2. #@$@ can't this @#$#$# author @+#~~& speak @#$#@# two @#$@#$ sentences #@$#@ without @#$#$ using #@$@# profanity? Good grief. Spare us the sailor talk, or don't people know how to talk without swearing anymore?

Re:Two problems

[Ol Olsoc]

Good grief. Spare us the sailor talk, or don't people know how to talk without swearing anymore?

Fuck that shit!

Re:Two problems

[wonkey_monkey]

Smoke you, melon farmer!