[ryanjshaw]

The article sums up my experience well. I've had a Twitter account for years. I never use it. I have no idea how to use it. If I'm really bored I might take a look at Facebook, but never Twitter. I don't 'get' Twitter, but I want to (because I see many people I respect who apparently 'get' it), I just don't know how to.

My first thought was how you measure "better". You say "all performed worse than my original when we measured for retention over time". And this is not surprising - I doubt one flow works for all people. Did you ever try multiple flows to rescue stranded users like myself?

For example, whatever stats Twitter has on me right now shows that my engagement is zero. Would Twitter have better luck getting me to actively use their service if they tried re-engage me? Or do they think I'm a bot at this point? :)

[probablyfiction]

I'm in the same boat. A lot of my friends love and use Twitter regularly, but I've never been able to get into it. I feel bad that I don't get it, because millions of people clearly find compelling use-cases for it, but my experience hasn't changed even after multiple attempts to figure out the missing piece.

[coldpie]

Speaking of use-cases, I found this part of the article interesting:

> This is disappointing, as most of Twitter’s value is not tied up in following celebrities. I suspect that many users sign up for the first time, follow mostly celebrities and then give up, since they never get much interaction.

It's funny because that's precisely how I use Twitter. I've been using it daily (hourly sometimes) for more than three years, and I have less than 150 tweets. But I follow a number of interesting people who post often, like webcomic artists I like, some indie game developers, some AAA game developers, some celebrities like deGrass Tyson and Alton Brown.

I follow a couple friends on there, but mostly I find them to be annoying noise. I don't really give a shit about baby photos or what beer you had at lunch today.

People really use Twitter to have conversations? That blows me away. I have trouble making two sentences fit into 140 characters, much less an entire conversation. What kind of conversation can you have in that space?

[solnyshok]

Seems that you use twitter as "rss with human faces attached"