TL;DR:
- Restrict Post API to enterprise level users
- Purge duplicate/Spam accounts
- Make View counts the important tweet metric (not likes/Retweets)
- Merge ❤️ and Retweet into the same functionality
- Obscure follower counts
Twitter was, at one time, my favorite social media platform.
It made it easy to converse with people around the world, find out about events as they were happening, without any barrier to entry.
This brought on some amazing conversations, showed you who was truly witty and (and who simply couldn’t spell properly), and also brought out the good and bad in humanity. For every flame-war,[1] there is a group of people ready to debate the other side. Some of the attacks were unforgiving, but justifiably so (Really, Chrysler, what did you think would happen when you posted this?)
And then came the bots. They were innocuous at first, randomly offering discounts to websites, or trials to software, and then they started to branch out into anything and everything a person could want.
They soon mutated beyond obvious advertisements, and a new wave of interactive bots were born. This crowd was different – they are interactive, and mimic the existing users. These were bots specifically created to clone the accounts of users merely to “beat” bot detection algorithms so that follower counts, favorites and likes could swell.
The final result of this is that the actual, real user base of Twitter, realizing how easy it was to “script” aspects of their accounts, simply gave up and did so, turning their own formerly live accounts into, for the most part, bots.
Speaking as a user of many social networks, I can tell you that I rarely, if ever, click “Like”, “Favorite”, “Upvote”, etc unless someone specifically asks me to for some reason (or, my specially scripted Twitter bot does it for me.) It takes a lot to move that needle. The same goes for sharing. And clicking. Has to really be something special for me to click.
I do read stuff though. Those impressions mean I read it. You got my attention – it’s in my head and I’m thinking about it.
I highly suspect that I’m not the only one out of 7 Billion people like that.
My suggestion to Twitter to fix this requires some drastic changes. They’ll first need to accept a potentially significant reduction in their overall user count in order to gain an overall significantly higher utilization percentage.
Then, they will need to shut off the “post to account” ability in their API for non-enterprise users, as LinkedIn did last year.
This will have an immediate and stark reduction in the amount of noise posted to the social network (and I suspect that it won’t quite be the dead silence doomsayers predict.)
Next, they will need to do an account purge of all suspected duplicate/spam accounts a la Instagram (their BotDetect program is not good enough.) There are ways to detect these accounts that they are not currently utilizing, so they simply need to go all in.
And lastly, I would move impressions front and center (“how many actual people saw what I said”) and merge Retweet/Like into one thing. If you like something someone said, then you want to share it with the people you know.
And, purely as a radical suggestion – follower counts could be hidden. The bot craze exists because of inflated follower counts.
Case in point: I have 60k+ followers on Twitter (which I suspect are 75% bot) and 400 followers here. Which ones do you think I care about more?
Footnotes
[1] Top 10 Internet Flame Wars – Toptenz.net
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Twitter-need-to-do-to-restart-growth-and-reactivate-its-massive-dormant-user-base
Originally Posted On: 2016-01-30