Also something I haven't seen discussed much re: twitter is the fact that one *actual* problem the platform has is new user onboarding. Like, for the vast majority of monetizable users, twitter is going to be a passive experience... but in order for that experience to be enjoyable, you have to curate a good feed, which is neither obvious or particularly easy for new users?
For the average person, you join Twitter and... do what, exactly? Probably no one you know is on there, maybe you'll try doing some tweets for a bit to zero engagement. You'll probably try following some actually famous people, who are all awful posters. If you stick with it, eventually you figure out what you actually need to be doing is following a pretty random assortment of media types, people who are funny but not comedians because most famous comedians are terrible posters, some pro athletes but almost certainly not the ones you think, etc.
I feel like most people who would potentially be MAUs bounce off the service long before they ever get close to creating a feed they would actually enjoy, and it doesn't feel like Twitter has any strategy for solving this...
Yeah, but I also think there's a kind of tension here, insofar as part of what makes Twitter a creative/productive place is that it manages to maintain a somewhat cohesive internal culture with its own set of social practices thanks (I think) to the relative difficulty it takes to join! I mean, maybe adding a cost of entry will create the necessary friction to ensure that only people who "get it" will join and stick around (this was always the theory for Something Awful), but it's genuinely a difficult tension to navigate and almost no one has been able to strike the balance well past a certain scale.
Totally... I think it's really telling that Elon has pushed for non users going to twitter dot com to see the trending topics page--which as a feature has been absolutely broken for a while, and is usually a bunch of incomprehensible shit like "JUST ANNOUNCED (800k tweets)" and "Memphis" (2178 tweets, none of which seem to have anything to do with each other) but even when it's working as intended maybe lets you know that, sure, people are posting about the NBA Finals... but it very rarely points you to the "main character of twitter" kind of conversations that make using Twitter fun (as a lurker, which is the user base Elon actually needs to grow to increase ad revenues).
Also something I haven't seen discussed much re: twitter is the fact that one *actual* problem the platform has is new user onboarding. Like, for the vast majority of monetizable users, twitter is going to be a passive experience... but in order for that experience to be enjoyable, you have to curate a good feed, which is neither obvious or particularly easy for new users?
For the average person, you join Twitter and... do what, exactly? Probably no one you know is on there, maybe you'll try doing some tweets for a bit to zero engagement. You'll probably try following some actually famous people, who are all awful posters. If you stick with it, eventually you figure out what you actually need to be doing is following a pretty random assortment of media types, people who are funny but not comedians because most famous comedians are terrible posters, some pro athletes but almost certainly not the ones you think, etc.
I feel like most people who would potentially be MAUs bounce off the service long before they ever get close to creating a feed they would actually enjoy, and it doesn't feel like Twitter has any strategy for solving this...
Yeah, but I also think there's a kind of tension here, insofar as part of what makes Twitter a creative/productive place is that it manages to maintain a somewhat cohesive internal culture with its own set of social practices thanks (I think) to the relative difficulty it takes to join! I mean, maybe adding a cost of entry will create the necessary friction to ensure that only people who "get it" will join and stick around (this was always the theory for Something Awful), but it's genuinely a difficult tension to navigate and almost no one has been able to strike the balance well past a certain scale.
Totally... I think it's really telling that Elon has pushed for non users going to twitter dot com to see the trending topics page--which as a feature has been absolutely broken for a while, and is usually a bunch of incomprehensible shit like "JUST ANNOUNCED (800k tweets)" and "Memphis" (2178 tweets, none of which seem to have anything to do with each other) but even when it's working as intended maybe lets you know that, sure, people are posting about the NBA Finals... but it very rarely points you to the "main character of twitter" kind of conversations that make using Twitter fun (as a lurker, which is the user base Elon actually needs to grow to increase ad revenues).