2016 has not been Twitter’s year. Jack Dorsey has been dealing with a lot of complaints, and viable ones at that. So the company’s CEO tried out an interesting experiment 2 days ago, where he called upon all 4 million followers of his to pitch in suggestions for the upcoming year 2017, on how Twitter can be improved.
Interestingly enough, pretty much every user responded to his tweet and the suggestions seem to be to the brim. Jack Dorsey has tried his best to skim through each and every one of suggestions and was able to narrow it down to 4 main recurring themes: Abuse, Edit, Topics and Interests, and Conversations.
Thanks for all the feedback yesterday! 4 clear themes you want us to work on: abuse, edit, topics & interests, and conversations. https://t.co/hMJMZ3P0Rz
— jack (@jack) December 30, 2016
Abuse: obviously a ton of work ahead but biggest ask was for greater transparency around our actions (or inaction) and faster shipping
— jack (@jack) December 30, 2016
Edit: clearest ask was to provide a quick way to fix errors. Anything beyond requires showing edit history given tweets are public record
— jack (@jack) December 30, 2016
Topics: lots here but simply being able to follow topics was strongest request. Being more topic/interest-focused (v account) opens up a lot
— jack (@jack) December 30, 2016
We'll consider everything we heard from you. Not going to ship all of it, but will be more transparent about why and what we learned
— jack (@jack) December 30, 2016
The response for abuse was manifold since Twitter has been facing a lot of abuse related issues. People have called for a thorough screening and transparency process. Although, it can be agreed upon that the issue of abuse is not technically the lack of transparency, but the lack of new tools and policies. However, creating new policies and implementing them with new tools are extremely time consuming and costly.
Coming to the Edit request, it is in high demand from the Twitter public to be able to correct/edit tweets. But for that too, Jack Dorsey was able to propose a weakest solution which was to have quick fixes to the tweets but not allowing for tweet history to be shown since that would lead to security issues and abuse.
Regarding Topics and Interests, the problem people have is that they are unable to follow so many accounts all at once. Perhaps if it was easier to follow topics and interest, it could work in favor of Twitter. Conversations is also one of the major parts of Twitter. In combination with Topics and Interests, they are also harder to follow.
This is a really well thought out list for Twitter to be improving on but seeing the company’s progress in 2016, one can’t help but be a little cynical as to whether Twitter will achieve at least half of this in 2017. It may be difficult but definitely not impossible for the company to take a turn for the better. Good luck Twitter!
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