[wpietri]

What's your evidence that Twitter's market is significantly larger?

Non-tech people sometimes ask me whether they should get on Twitter. I ask them why they might want it, and very often my answer is, "No, don't worry about it." And that's coming from somebody who uses Twitter enough to have two separate accounts plus a Twitter bot (sfships).

Twitter, like HN, is a niche social network. [1] Twitter's niche is much larger, of course. But I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to FB, whose target market is "anybody with friends or relatives".

[1] Technically, I'd call it a multi-niche network, in that it gets the most publicly active segment of people in a whole bunch of social groups. For example, tech people is has are the sort most likely to write books and articles, speak at/go to conferences, etc. But if you're the sort of workaday programmer who punches a clock at a bank and pays no attention to the industry, Twitter doesn't do much for you.

[AbsoluteNonce8]

You’re slightly missing my point. I’m not claiming twitter’s niche is bigger. I’m saying for a social network to plateau at 300M users for 7-8 years that’s very embarrassing. Especially when the positioning was that “we’re a Facebook alternative.” For a social network to figure out tablestakes monetization 7-8 years post-ipo, that’s equally damning. The biggest offender is actually the glacial product development that Twitter has. Several Rudimentary features non-existent or canned because of analysis paralysis.

I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.

So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways

[wpietri]

I agree with you that Twitter's feature velocity has been terrible. Although in the last year or so they've definitely been trying more new things, so maybe they've finally fixed the internal barriers to that.

But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the masses" should be. The current value prop is something like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics". Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT. The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today, but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.

[AbsoluteNonce8]

Yep! I think they’ve slowly learned to ship over the last 1.5 years.

Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user. Similar to you, I don’t believe twitter’s addressable market is as big as Facebook’s. If Facebook’s TAM is N, twitter’s is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that they’re actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they have an opportunity to make the product more accessible but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as a big Twitter fan!

[aeternum]

Twitter is a great idea ruined by terrible UI. It's clear that people do want to listen to what famous people have to say, and they want to hear it directly from the person, not a PR team.

If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread, set up proper notifications, and made at least some attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.

[wpietri]

Those all strike me as very much advanced-user features, so as much as I'd enjoy using some of them, I doubt they'd make much difference to general-audience growth.

And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look at to see that stuff if it appears at all.