Square's terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores - <AUTHOR> https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/pos <comment><USER2> This makes absolutely no sense. I'm almost certain that Square lawyers fucked up big time.

They looked at the AGPL and completely misunderstood the context. There is no way in hell anyone can interpret AGPL in a way that makes Square responsible for any license violations their customers make selling software.

<comment><USER3> And even if there were liability concerns due to copyleft or other clauses in AGPL, singling out AGPL makes no sense. If they want to avoid copyleft, it should be better phrased like so.

<comment><USER2> It's almost like they used some kind of AI software to scan legal documents, then it found sentence fragments like " .. opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network ..".

You need artificial stupidity to misunderstand the "Interacting with Program through a computer network" in the way Square seems to understand it. Distributing software via online store is not interacting with the program.

<comment><USER4> Some would maintain that being a legal analyst requires you to be artificially stupid because you are looking for loopholes and trying to avoid being trapped by ridiculous edge cases, whereas AI is trying to find a general solution that will work in 6-9s cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This concerns the Online Store, which is their Squarespace clone:

[https://squareup.com/us/en/online-store](https://squareup.com/us/en/online- store)

not Square Payments.

<comment><USER6> > _By using Square Point of Sale, Customer Engagement, Appointments or > Employee Management, Square Online Store, and any associated products and > services (the "Services")_

It looks like it's a lot broader than just the Online Store, although it doesn't mention Payments specifically.

Still, "any associated products and services" sure seems like it would cover Payments as well? What's the dividing line for a product that's associated with the Online Store?

 _EDIT: This specific clause is listed under section 3 "Online Store", so it does seem likely to me that it's not meant to apply across the entire TOS._

 _Still a weird restriction for the online store, but given that there 's also a non-disparagement clause right under it, it's certainly not the most egregious thing in this license._

<comment><USER7> FWIW they also clearly ban a lot of other things in that section that are obviously only targeting the hosted online store. For instance:

> engage in excessive advertising on your website, which includes adding more > than three ad units per page, or any advertising that greatly reduces the > usability of your website;

Still no idea why they single out AGPL the way they do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Relevant quoted text from the article:

> B. Content Restrictions. In addition to the restrictions set forth in these > Additional Product Terms, the General Terms and Payment Terms, you will not: > [...]

> 15\. use, under any circumstance, any open source software subject to the > GNU Affero General Public License v.3, or greater;

<comment><USER9> How's that even legal or verifiable?

<comment><USER10> Why would it not be legal? Verifiable does not play a role. You sign a contract that you won't do it.

<comment><USER11> Not all contracts are valid.

<comment><USER12> This is not an answer. Invalid contracts are usually invalid for a specific reason.

<comment><USER11> I really was only answering the bit stating;

> _" You sign a contract that you won't do it."_

As that is not the be all and end all of contracts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know if the response here is good, but [https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1078...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/107883/agpl- what-you-can-do-and-what-you-cant), gives a rationale for not including any AGPL "in" another work and might thus be the reason for the exclusion.

See also, [https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2630...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263063/how- viral-is-the-affero-gpl?noredirect=1&lq=1).

<comment><USER14> Yeah so if your service completely unrelated to the Stripe service uses AGPL you have to remove it?

Doesn't sound good at all

<comment><USER15> Yes. AGPL attempts to infect with copyleft all services it is integrated with, so contractually prohibiting AGPL integrations is the only defense against AGPL infections.

<comment><USER16> This is a common misunderstanding of the AGPL. It has the same combined work rules as the GPL. It just has the additional condition that a modified work offered as a network service must make the corresponding source available.

If the AGPL program is unmodified, you don't have to share its corresponding source no matter what it is integrated with.

If the AGPL program is modified, you only have to offer the corresponding source of that program, not all programs that connect to it over the network.

<comment><USER15> So, then, since Square's application is a work, if an AGPL service interacts with it to modify Square's work, your assertion is that this does _not_ count as a modification introducing AGPL responsibilities.

That's useful to consider, but it doesn't reassure me enough to remove the risk altogether. I would, if I were a coder in Square's position, acknowledge this explanation and then very likely still move to deny AGPL interactions as a whole rather than try to finesse the exact legality as described. I care a lot about licensing but I also want to get work done without fear of AGPL lawsuits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Square is taking a conservative approach on what a "modified version" as used in the AGPL is. It hasn't really been litigated so different lawyers have different opinions. Square's position appears to be combining Square's products with AGPL code creates a "modified version" of the AGPL code and would require providing the code for Square's products.

<comment><USER2> Conservative approach would be taking approach that is possible interpretation of the license. Their lawyers made just a mistake.

The restriction applies to software sold in their online store. It is not possible to interpret "Interacting with Program through a computer network" as distributing software via online store. The program must be running and executing it's code.

<comment><USER17> The restriction applies to anyone "using Square Point of Sale, Customer Engagement, Appointments or Employee Management, Square Online Store, and any associated products and services". I'm not sure why you think it only applies to people selling software. Nothing in the terms says that.

<comment><USER2> Because it's under

> Additional Point of Sale Terms of Service >3\. Online Store > I. Your > Content and Content Restrictions

<comment><USER15> To clarify the question without trying to answer it myself, restated in terms of Amazon rather than the less-understood Square Store, here are two similar questions that may have _different_ answers under the Square terms update:

Does the AGPL specify its terms of infection such that "a third-party seller listing a physical CD full of AGPL software sold on Amazon" would bind Amazon by the terms of AGPL source code release for Amazon.com?

Does the AGPL specify its terms of infection such that "a third-party seller publishing CD listings to Amazon using an AGPL script" would bind Amazon by the terms of AGPL source code release for Amazon.com?

And so in those terms, the core question of this thread is, "may I sell items and services on Square that are composed of AGPL code as long as I do not use AGPL-containing or AGPL-integrated code or content when interacting with or publishing listings on the Square Store or when interacting in any way with Square services or APIs?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> AGPL is really weird. There are widely differing opinions on what it means. There is this extreme where it is horrific, then you have this guy on stackoverflow who makes it shound like a kitten with claws removed [1] The ambiguity itself in interpretation (or at least how the "general public" interprets it) is a danger signal to avoid it.

[1][[https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4691/java- and...](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4691/java-and- agpl-3-how-far-does-license-extend-into-web-app)]

</comment><comment><USER19> From the comment thread, there seems to be a bit of confusion on what the AGPL actually can do, so people are just avoiding things under AGPL as an abundance of caution. It seems that the license has never been tested in legal challenges. Seems like this would be something right up the EFF's alley. Is it really in the open source community's advantage to have something this confusing lingering for so long, or would it be better to get this kind of confusion cleared up altogether?

<comment><USER20> I don't think it's just the wording of the license, though. It's really hard to envision every possibility and decide how the AGPL should handle it. E.g., are they really going to add something as specific as "If a cloud service provider hosts its own code along with user code that includes AGPL code, the cloud service provider is not bound by the AGPL and the user does not need to include the provider's bundled code when they release the source code in compliance with the AGPL."?

Plus, if you treat the cloud service provider's code separately from the user's code, there is a pretty strong danger of opening loopholes that defeat the entire purpose of the AGPL. It's not clear that people releasing code under the AGPL would even want the AGPL to be interpreted that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Scratching Square off my list of service providers. I bet half of their datacenter software is in some way or the other using AGPL-licensed stuff; hypocrisy is just insane.

<comment><USER22> It might be GPL but I would guess it's not AGPL. AGPL requires you to open source the code to run the service. They've not done that. Their legal people are likely on top of this. It's not hard to run a SaaS and avoid all AGPL

<comment><USER23> How does "linking" works in this regard? If I have an internal AGPL service do I have to open source that too?

I mean my end users never interact with that service. They interact with a - let's say - proprietary one. And that service is the client to the AGPL service.

Or anything AGPL touches turns into AGPL? What is considered touching? If I use an AGPL firewall do the packets turn into AGPL? If I use an AGPL log aggregator? Or an AGPL centralized identity management thing every other service that auths turns into AGPL?

<comment><USER24> This is half the reason why many large companies have prohibitions on using AGPL code - no one is quite sure exactly what counts as 'interacting remotely', and thus what would be in scope for the source release requirements. In the absence of any case law to clarify the situation, many orgs just prefer not to bring in that uncertainty in the first place.

<comment><USER25> This is the section about "interacting remotely":

> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the > Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting > with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such > interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your > version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network > server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of > facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include > the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU > General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following > paragraph.

So that's about who you have to give the source code to if you modify the program, right? But isn't the salient point there that it only matters if you make modifications? Why should anybody who is using the software unmodified care about that at all?

And all the stuff about "what is linking" would be the same as it is for the ordinary GPL, would it not? The "Source Code" section of both licenses are word for word identical, anyway.

It all seems like a lot of FUD from people who don't like the AGPL because it requires them to follow the spirit of the ordinary GPL when they actually do make modifications but then use them in a public-facing service instead of distributing them as a software product, i.e. when it does exactly what it's intended to do.

<comment><USER26> That's your interpretation and that's the problem because you might be wrong in some subtle way that a lawyer could exploit. Also, you are looking at a single paragraph, there's a lot more to this and it includes notions of linking, derivative works, distribution, etc. Lawyers really don't like having a lot of open questions around this stuff and some of the more extreme interpretations would be very disruptive for any business that wants to keep parts of their software proprietary.

The other point is that the intention of this license is explicitly to prevent people commercializing software licensed this way through proprietary extensions, additions, etc. The whole point of the license is to make that difficult/impossible. If you use AGPL software, you have to respect this intention.

Gplv3 is also not that popular with legal departments for the same reason. Even Gplv2 is generally frowned upon but better understood since there is a fair bit of case law around it and known ways of dealing with it when e.g. shipping binary kernel modules with an OS, which is one of those legally grey areas where you have to depend on legal interpretations of the license. Gplv3 was explicitly written to close some of those loopholes in Gplv2: they were unintentional.

So, this is not FUD but basically lawyers doing their jobs and they are fairly consistent in their reservations with respect to this license across the industry. You talk to lawyers in any fortune 500 company and they'll probably will be very reluctant to sign off on any AGPL dependencies.

<comment><USER25> You're arguing that companies should fear the license because there is uncertainty and you doubt that an unproblematic interpretation is accurate, but that that isn't FUD. It's fear, uncertainty and doubt.

> The other point is that the intention of this license is explicitly to > prevent people commercializing software licensed this way through > proprietary extensions, additions, etc. The whole point of the license is to > make that difficult/impossible. If you use AGPL software, you have to > respect this intention.

That may be true, but why should you care if you are not actually doing that and are only using the software without modification?

> Even Gplv2 is generally frowned upon but better understood since there is a > fair bit of case law around it

It is pretty uncommon for there to be existing caselaw interpreting a given software license. Proprietary software licenses are commonly unique to the software, sometimes even unique to the customer. If this is a concern then shouldn't a widely used form license like the AGPL be an advantage, because then it's more likely the first time a court has to interpret the text will be in somebody else's case and not yours?

> So, this is not FUD but basically lawyers doing their jobs and they are > fairly consistent in their reservations with respect to this license across > the industry. You talk to lawyers in any fortune 500 company and they'll > probably will be very reluctant to sign off on any AGPL dependencies.

Have you experienced asking lawyers for their opinions on contract text? You'll generally get back a document identifying various concerns with just about every provision in the text, because that's their job.

For example, here's a fun provision from the Windows 10 license:

> [you may not] use the software as server software, for commercial hosting, > make the software available for simultaneous use by multiple users over a > network, install the software on a server and allow users to access it > remotely, or install the software on a device for use only by remote users;

What does that mean? How will a court interpret it? Should corporations avoid Microsoft Windows as a result, because they might violate some interpretation of the license and then be liable for copyright infringement?

Lawyers having concerns about license terms is par for the course. What you haven't established is what makes the AGPL unusual in that regard, as compared with the above or a hundred other provisions in various other licenses.

<comment><USER26> It's reasonable fear, not unreasonable fear if countless lawyers in countless companies seem to be coming to the same conclusions and enforcing very strict policies regarding this (fact, not imaging this). When in doubt, listen to lawyers, not engineers.

FUD would be spreading unreasonable fear and uncertainty to create doubt.

The thing you don't seem to get about these licenses is the generally fuzzy language about derivative works, distribution, and modifications. The legal interpretations vs. the intent of the authors vs. the technical interpration of these licenses are three things. An engineer saying, "it's fine" means absolutely nothing. These licenses are versioned for a reason: the intent and legal reality apparently don't always line up and people try to fix these things.

The key point of the AGPL license is that it deliberately intends to prevent proprietary bundling/extensions of software licensed that way by demanding it is open sourced under a similar license (aka. the viral nature of the license). Gplv2 had similar intentions but contained enough ambiguity and weaker requirements that gave clever lawyers enough wiggle room to get away with e.g. creating things like Android which definitely has a lot of proprietary stuff covered in patents and other things. Hence, GPLv3 which aimed to rectify some of these ambiguities.

And yes, I have experience being lectured on this by actual lawyers (with a clue no less) in the context of Nokia's OSS efforts a few years back around their linux based mobile os. They had thousands of engineers collaborating with the OSS community on hundreds of projects with all sorts of licenses. Their job: protect Nokia's IP and prevent inadvertent legal fall out with patents, copyrights, etc. due to improperly licensed software. I learned a lot talking to and listening to these people.

In short their attitude was, MIT/Apache is generally fine. Gplv2, you need to know what you are doing but we know how to deal with this and mitigate potential risks. Gplv3: please avoid adding anything with this license to any Nokia product (patents were a big concern here). AGPL, no way in hell that we would approve this, ever; the risks are substantial and generally not worth it, even for server side only stuff.

Regarding the MS license; lets stay on topic and not digress about the legal saviness of their lawyers. Generally my advice would be to assume they can make life hard for you and thought long and hard about how they would do that. Any court case would likely set you back more than you or your company can afford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's not rare to see even very high profile legal firms totally mess up when it comes to software licensing in general and open source licensing in particular. Chalking this one up to incompetence rather than malice until there is proof it is the latter.

<comment><USER28> That's fine but there needs to be more demand to force competance.

We all grew lax with copyleft cause all this corporate pro open source stuff, and now there isn't a critical mass of AGPL projects compelling Square's lawyers to read harder. I have no idea how to build that critical mass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> II.B.15: use, under any circumstance, any open source software subject to the GNU Affero General Public License v.3, or greater;

That's spooky. Any idea why?

<comment><USER30> I don't fully understand the context, but I'm guessing that if you provide a service using software that's AGPL licensed and use Square to sell it, they have no way of complying to the AGPL terms of providing end users (your customers) with the source code and/or a link to it.

<comment><USER31> The service provider might be breaking the AGPL, but square isn't liable. It isn' using the AGPL it self and isn't a party to the copyright contract.

<comment><USER10> If they need to redistribute some AGPL content they are liable.

<comment><USER31> I don' see square having any service that offers fulfillment (for example where you can download your order).

Even if they do though it would be a stretch to hold them liable, it's like requiring github to be agpled if you upload your agpl code there.

<comment><USER10> This is for their store system: [https://squareup.com/us/en/online- store](https://squareup.com/us/en/online-store)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems either a prank or ideologically motivated. Beyond the fact that there is no legal reason to prevent your users from using copyrighted code since you are not breaking copyright if you are not a party to the contract, the wording is bad - there could be similar licenses that are problematic but aren't named AGPL v2 (or greater)

</comment><comment><USER32> Might Square be doing this just to prevent their customers from mistakingly including AGPL in their frontend?

"we know we're not liable, but the customer might get into trouble, let's make it easy to understand what can and can't be done and just forbid it"

</comment><comment><USER33> *AGPL ?

</comment><comment><USER34> > 15\. use, under any circumstance, any open source software subject to the > GNU Affero General Public License v.3, or greater;

Note to self: create a license whose concepts/terms are similar to the AGPL but don't call it that.

<comment><USER35> MongoGPL?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The same restriction is also in Weebly's (owned by Square) terms

[https://www.weebly.com/ca/terms-of-service](https://www.weebly.com/ca/terms- of-service)

</comment><comment><USER37> APGL as in the title or AGPL as in B.15?

</comment><comment><USER38> What's APGL? Anti Personnel Grenade Launchers?

<comment><USER39> Network GPL, like GPL but if any system in your network (think of a chain of micro services) uses an AGPL/AGPL-like dependency, then _all_ of your services have to be open sourced too.

<comment><USER40> He's mocking the fact that the title says APGL instead of AGPL

<comment><USER41> Some days I wonder if my brain is just wired significantly differently than most people. These single letter shift typos rarely even register in my mind. Hell, my mind registers words with 2-3 letters off perfectly fine. What usually gets me is when sentence structure is significantly off, not this kind of stuff.

<comment><USER42> Same

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I don't understand why are there so many proponents of the AGPL when it's one of the most restrictive and therefore against freedom licences there are.

<comment><USER43> It removes developer freedoms in order to ensure user freedoms; claiming it is "against freedoms" is like saying the Bill of Rights--which restricts the acts of government--is "against freedom".

<comment><USER40> It's the opposite thing because there usually are a thousand users for every developer, so you're restricting the freedoms of 1000 people to defend the freedom of 1 person. While there's 1 government official whose freedoms are restricted for every 1000 people (made up numbers but you get the point)

<comment><USER37> In this metaphor developer == government official and users == citizens, so you should agree with GP.

Again, AGPL restricts what developers can do with software to let users enjoy more freedom.

Actually I don't care much about that, I just don't want to see companies come and exploit developers work without having to give back anything. So I really favor GPL and AGPL. Then, if somebody prefers BSD and MIT, no hard feelings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If your operating system is AGPL3+, are you prohibited from using tools upon it to access any/all Square services for any reason? Are you in violation of every copyright agreement on your hard drive due to your failure to reconcile the AGPL3+ terms with the software licenses you are integrating with the operating system through installation and use?

I can see why they would want to explicitly decline to participate in AGPL infections.

<comment><USER44> Those questions can as easily be asked of proprietary software with EULAs.

And "infection" is a creepy way to write "compliance".

<comment><USER15> Most proprietary software with EULAs does not contain a copyleft provision that forces itself upon other software. I find copyleft creepy and power- hungry, so my choice of word reflects how I perceive it.

<comment> michael-ax an agpl lisc only requires that you provide the code you altered in order to integrate. prohibiting it from running on their servers simply closes the door on people coming to them for code they don't even own!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Time Flows Backwards - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/when-the-future-helps-determine-the-past

<comment><USER2> > And watching the experiment progress forward through time, it remains > impossible to say beyond 50/50 odds what the actual final state of the > particle will be in. But, if you follow the experiment backwards, following > the particle's timeline from its future to its past, Murch and co. found > that they could up their odds to 90 percent correctness. The implication is > that everything that happened to the particle/state after the strong > measurement, influences the strong measurement itself ... in the past.

I'm not a quantum physicist, but I don't get this. Maybe it's just explained in a silly way, but this seems to imply correlation, not "causation" (i.e. the future influencing the present). Correlation isn't that surprising, obviously - if I flip a coin, a friend looks at it, then I look at it, I can predict what my friend saw (in the past) with 100% accuracy.

Obviously I'm missing something.

<comment><USER3> It's explained in a silly way because explaining it in a non-silly way is not so easy. Here's my best shot:

Measurement in QM is not an all-or-nothing process (and hence there is no such thing as "wave function collapse"). You can measure "just a little bit" by carefully controlling the entanglements of the system you are "measuring". These are called "weak measurements". When you make weak measurements, the probabilities of various outcomes can be non-intuitive because of how the quantum math shakes out, similar to the Bell inequality, except that the entanglements in this case are across time instead of across space. It's cool experimental work, but there's nothing fundamentally new here. It was already well known that the quantum wave function is timeless. This experiment just confirms it.

<comment><USER4> It is worth emphasizing that weak measurements only (and can only) apply to ensemble averages. They work by making weak measurements on many copies of the same system (or equivalently, many identically-prepared systems) and then drawing inferences about "the system" from this. But it is not, in fact "the system" but the average over many copies of a system.

Bohr would likely have made a big deal over this, because there is no actual measurement on any single system that corresponds to the retrodicted inference, and that matters a great deal in Bohr's quantum ontology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Much better article (and from the source):

[http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/future-affects-past- quantum...](http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/future-affects-past-quantum- state.aspx)

<comment><USER3> And the actual paper:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0510](http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0510)

<comment><USER6> Future me probably understands this...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare to the classical electrodynamics interpretation of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorbe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorber_theory) ?

I mean, the former is not hard to believe for me, as a model for classical eletrodynamics (due to the sucessful consistency of the theory). Why should the quantum equivalent be hard to believe?

<comment><USER8> The interpretation this is based on is usually called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two- state_vector_formalism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two- state_vector_formalism).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The 90-10 odds of "retrodiction" as opposed to the 50-50 odds of prediction suggest it could in reality be 100-0 given better tools, and the initial 90-10 odds are the result of macroscopic "interference". Could this then mean quantum decoherence isn't so much the result of measurement as it is the result of time running backwards at the quantum scale? This would mean time runs forwards at the gravitational scale but backwards at the quantum, and the collapse of quantum states is where the two time directions smash into each other, so to speak.

Perhaps the existence of consciousness is also the result of time running backwards, somehow reaching up from the quantum to the macroscopic level. It would be just as good as the weak anthropic principle to explain why we humans seem to be the only intelligent life in the Universe. If the rise of consciousness was somehow planned and executed from the future, it would perhaps even _require_ only one instance of consciousness evolving somewhere given how difficult it might be for those in the future to execute it.

One hint this is actually what's happening is the fact the distribution of the planets in the solar system appear to be fine-tuned for inter-stellar space travel. There's only about 10 other solar objects with gravity comparable to Earth's and hence suitable for long-term civilization. The Moon has already been walked on, and humans will one day easily build large contained cities there using telepresent robots with a 1 second response time. Then they will be experienced enough to tackle Mars and Mercury with semi-intelligent robots to cater for the much longer response time. Mercury will be a good candidate to build a huge particle accelerator around its equator because its very slow rotation allows human workers aid in construction, and its highly elliptical orbit around the Sun would give many gravitational variances for experiments. Jupiter's 4 large moons would provide humankind with experience of much longer travel times, a single large moon of Saturn eliminates any initial choice of target, then the huge gap skipping Uranus's lack of sizable moons to Neptune's Tritan gives an even longer travel distance. Concurrent with all this, humans will spend probably thousands of years to terraform Venus, the ultimate in hostile environments. By then humankind will have trained up, apparently serendipitously, for inter-stellar travel using knowledge from terraforming Venus, travelling huge distances to Tritan, and whatever's learnt from the Mercury particle accelerator.

Perhaps humans will build a silicon-based consciousness in each star system they colonize. Each planet-based consciousness in the galaxy could then communicate with one another to build a one-off galactic consciousness by structuring the gravitons flowing between the star systems, though its speed of thought would be far slower than that of humans. Ditto for each galaxy humans eventually reach in the observable Universe, and then the whole Universe. This Universal Consciousness based on gravity then "begins" to reach back in time using quantum retrodiction to ensure fine-tunings so one planet in one galaxy 14 billion yrs after the Big Bang evolves monkeys then humans who then mutate as they colonize the galaxy and build silicon-based AI and eventually a single Universe-wide gravity-based consciousness. If the Universe continues expanding and never comes to an end, then such a Universal gravity- based consciousness need never finish being built, it only needs to be continually being built. If a graviton-based consciousness can indeed reach back in time through retrodiction, not only would the Universe increase in entropy over time, but also increase in intelligence. Perhaps there's a law of physics saying that as entropy increases, so does intelligence.

<comment><USER10> Think about it this way: Everything you're doing at this present moment has already happened. You've already reached your destination. All you're doing right now is letting yourself (go through the) experience (of that moment).

In the next 30 years, this will be much better understood, with our (scientific) tools and "consciousness" evolving to a point that we can measure, proof and present this as fact.

Go back to the middle ages and try not to fall for the common belief that the "The Black Death" is a punishment by God for your sins, simply because there were no tools to locate and fight "Yersinia pestis".

Go back to when it was a common belief that the earth was flat, until someone ventured out across the (then) vast oceans and prove otherwise.

And don't forget, it already happened. Your just in for the ride.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thiotimoline</comment>


Ask HN: Are any startups working on text-to-speech? - <AUTHOR> It seems like TTS technology hasn't evolved much over the years and I was wondering if any startups are working on making it sound more realistic? <comment><USER2> Have you tried the TTS in Mac OS X? You can run it on the command line using:

        say 'this is a test'

I for one think it's very good quality (at least for the Alex voice)

<comment><USER3> I have the crontab set up to `say 'ay ay. ay ay. smoke weed. every day.` every day at 4:20.

I'm not even a stoner and folks seem to get a kick out of it whenever they're pair programming with me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you see as the business use case for more realistic text-to-speech?

We use TTS extensively within the Pantelligent iOS and Android apps, and it's something our users requested and get a lot of value out of. It seems like the existing solutions are already good enough / dramatically above the threshold of usefulness for an interactive real-time-guidance application like ours, and just keep getting better from the OS side.

<comment><USER5> It seems that IVR phone systems could benefit. Maybe the state-of-the-art just hasn't had the chance to propagate, but it always strikes me as inelegant when I hear, "Your account has a balance of... ONE, HUN-DRED, DOLLARS... AND... NINETY, FIVE, CENTS. To pay this bill,"

<comment><USER6> I've just tried playing "Your account has a balance of 100 dollars and 95 cents" on [https://www.ivona.com/us/](https://www.ivona.com/us/) and it seems quite natural to me (but I'm not a native english speaker so I may not be sensitive).

<comment><USER7> Just spent more time than I would like to admit making those voices say all matter of inappropriate things and giggling to myself.

<comment><USER8> Did you try the chipmunk voice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > It seems like TTS technology hasn't evolved much over the years and I was > wondering if any startups are working on making it sound more realistic?

It's not true that TTS hasn't improved (see below). Many people are working on this, both in academia and in private enterprise. It's an obvious and potentially valuable part of the human-computer interface.

This is not to suggest that it's easy -- the mathematics and vocal tract modeling problems are formidable. The only reason there are reasonable TTS resources now is because of the rapid increase in computer power -- power that's needed to support this feature.

Here's a site chosen at random that offers a high-quality TTS example:

[https://www.ivona.com/](https://www.ivona.com/)

It's pretty good based on prevailing standards, and it's the outcome of a lot of work.

To find the companies working on this, just Google for "high-quality tts".

</comment><comment><USER10> I've thought about getting into this area myself, but I was too afraid there was not enough market for it. This was several years ago. As far as CPU power, today's average PC is easily 5x what's necessary for perfect speech. The real question is the algorithms being used. Perhaps the fear is that the algorithm would be pirated. I mean just look at the history of digital audio (or video) and encoding, with things like Xvid and Ogg. Basically every time a good algorithm even starts to gain traction, an open "alternative" is made available practically overnight. This is not to say I don't like open algorithms. In fact, I believe that any standard algorithm should be open. This fact, however, is enough to deter research in this field. Perhaps a Web service that converted text to speech would be one option, but it would have limited applicability.

Edit: Perhaps a Kickstarter or related would be a good idea since this type of feature would be useful by so many people. Nearly everyone has functioning ears. (no offence to those who don't)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ivona, acquired by Amazon, is a hugely notable example. They're great folks, and do great work. Alexa'a voice was done by them, but an early customer of theirs was the Polish public transit system.

A lot of really great work is happening in academia; I'm not going to name names because I'd forget someone deserving.

(Shameless plug: we [0] do speech and language consulting including custom TTS.)

[0] cobaltspeech.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Please name names in Academia I would really like to explore the research and advancements being made in TTS

<comment><USER8> aah. Okay. Disclaimer, [b] this isn't my area [/b] and I'm going to miss some folks. I apologize to all of the important and interesting work that I'm missing.

Also, I'm really linking to research groups, so take these names as starting points and look at their students and other professors working with them.

First off, the Blizzard challenge is a major hub of activity. [4] Festival is an important piece of software [5]. Interspeech is an important conference [6] (take a look at the speech synthesis track and the organizers for that).

Alan Black [0] @ CMU is kinda a giant.

Keiichi Tokuda [3] @ Nagoya also a giant.

Simon King [1] @ Edinburgh, just had a paper linked to on HN a few days ago and does important work.

Mark Gales [2] @ Cambridge does work here, too.

[0] [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/) [1] [http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/ssi/people/simonk.html](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/ssi/people/simonk.html) [2] [http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mjfg/](http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mjfg/) [3] [http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/](http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/) [4] [http://festvox.org/blizzard/](http://festvox.org/blizzard/) [5] [http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/) [6] [http://interspeech2015.org/wp- content/uploads/direct/INTERSP...](http://interspeech2015.org/wp- content/uploads/direct/INTERSPEECH_2015_AbstractBook.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A ML based app to read articles to me in the morning on my way to work may have some commercial success. The ones currently have a hard time reading through an entire article without sounding like an robot, or reading a headline as if it was part of the previous sentence.

</comment><comment><USER12> I made this app called Ultimate Alerts that allows for all email and text messages to be read over TTS when your car goes over 10mph for over 1 minute.

It switches back to normal settings when you go below 10mph for over 1 minute. Helpful with switching everything to TTS when you're driving automatically.

Lots of other functionality as well. Check it out: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono.emailnew&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10925826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10925826)

May be of interest to you.

</comment><comment><USER14> FWIW I think TTS is a bad interface. That said, IBM Watson is getting pretttty good. Check it out, they're willing to work with startups too.

<comment><USER15> Do you mean the current execution is bad or that it is just a bad concept? I can think of plenty of times where TTS is the perfect interface for the problem at hand. For example, a Sat Nav giving turn by turn directions.

<comment><USER14> That is true - all voice related interfaces are best exemplified with travel. STT for example is best when you're alone and can't use your hands aka driving. TTS is best for the same set of situations, so listening to articles on the train or getting directions read back.

In general, TTS is a better interface than STT, both are (in my very, very humble opinion) bad interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've also noticed this stagnation. The quality of the spoken voice TTS sound depends upon two things, I've heard -- processor speed and memory (RAM). Processor speed has increased dramatically in the past few years. I wish someone would design TTS that only works on the fastest processors. There seems to be too much lowest-common-denominator going on in this field.

<comment><USER17> I was under the impression the problem the field currently has is that improving the diction rapidly becomes AI-complete. Voice synthesis is either a solved problem, or one that could be solved with just a bit more effort, but the real problem is what do you _feed_ that perfect voice model?

Read your comment or my comment aloud to yourself. Now feed it to your choice of TTS engine. The problem isn't the words, the problem is the lack of comprehension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Have a look to Watson Text to Speech API: [http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/text- to-speech.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is not really a "text to speech" but an voice search engine. It is called Mobvoi and is invested by Google. [http://chumenwenwen.com/global.html](http://chumenwenwen.com/global.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I've messed around with Api.ai ([https://docs.api.ai/docs/tts](https://docs.api.ai/docs/tts)) and it is quite impressive. Full-featured, amazing pricing (free), and goes way beyond just TTS.

</comment><comment><USER21> OSX's "say" is amazing (judging from their english and german voices). Do you believe there's enough room for improvement to build a business case on it, even though some companies have worked on the problem for decades?

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know of a good one that will without an internet connection on ubuntu 14.04?

</comment><comment><USER23> Try Vocaloid.[1] It's overkill for plain text to speech, but quite good. Better for Japanese than for English.

[1] [http://www.vocaloid.com/en/](http://www.vocaloid.com/en/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm building a web-to-speech(-to-podcast) app that's gaining traction. Integrating new voices and integrations all the time. [https://narro.co](https://narro.co)

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://www.mivoq.it/en/](http://www.mivoq.it/en/) is trying to advance TTS technology

</comment><comment><USER26> I recently ran onto this for the browser: [http://responsivevoice.org/](http://responsivevoice.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Try Houndify from SoundHound! (www.houndify.com).

<comment><USER28> This website could use some more demos!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Apple bought Cambridge UK startup VocalIQ that does this (in part, they also did recognition work) a year or so ago.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here are three vendors that provide a good TTS apis. Have you evaluated the performance. What did you find lacking?

1\. Nuance

2\. AT&T

3\. IBM Watson

<comment><USER31> Basically there is Nuance, which is the leader. All others either use older open source projects underneath, legacy software or just license from Nuance. If you can name another one, please do.

<comment><USER32> Ivona, [https://www.ivona.com/](https://www.ivona.com/) the Amazon company responsible for Echo's Alexa voice also has an excellent TTS system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Shameless plug. Give www.voiceclonr.com a try (something I built a while back)

</comment><comment><USER34> TTS has definitely evolved over the years. If you compare Google Maps voice to Stephen Hawking, it's night and day.

However, I can definitely understand how TTS technology looks stagnant. Part of this is that going from nothing to something reasonable happened exceedingly quickly. Early TTS research was supported by the US government which saw that early systems were comprehensible (if not wonderful sounding) and declared victory. Funding went to other problems in computational linguistics (like speech recognition, information extraction, etc.) and so did a lot of the workforce.

Modern systems usually involve many hours of speech from a single person and use variable length units to form more natural speech. Many systems still sound pasted together because that's how enterprise technology goes. How many banks have online banking that seems like it's from the 90s? You can't compare what systems can do to what some call center has installed as its technology. Someone has linked to Inova. Google and Nuance have good systems as well, but there's a balance between resources and perfect speech.

In terms of some of the issues. . . When you're going through a finite amount of recorded speech, you have to choose something that fits. It isn't going to be perfect in many cases. You have to deal with things like F0 declination. You have to deal with how long phonemes are going to be. You have to deal with breaks in utterances.

And the fact is that we can understand Hawking's 1980s TTS.

If you want to start thinking about the problem more, try inputting these two statements into Inova "Do you really want to see all of it? Do you want to see all of it? I want to see all of it." Notice how it tries to rise around "really" in the first sentence. It's trying to match how we would speak - rising for "really" in the first sentence and rising for the question-ending in both questions. But it kinda misses in both cases. Still, in some ways it's amazing that it recognizes "really" as something that should go up. It recognizes that questions go up at the end. It recognizes how the non-question goes down as the sentence progresses. And it finds things within its data set to fit to how it thinks the sentence is going to go. But it doesn't have perfect language understanding so it doesn't know exactly how things would be said - a lot of sounding natural isn't making the phonemes more accurately, but the intonation and attitude of the speech. It also has to find something that fits. Lots of smart things are done, but it's pulling from a limited amount of recorded speech - speech that has been sliced in many useful ways, but still limited.

TTS has definitely evolved and I think that Google, Nuance, and others are definitely pushing it forward. You're going to interact with a lot of legacy systems that feel like they're still in the Hawking era. But most ATMs I use don't even have touch screens (opting for buttons on the side of the screen) and even fancy ATMs like Wells Fargo don't feel like an iPad. You don't want to compare to systems that are so far away from modern, commercially available systems.

There is definitely work being done on it and it's definitely become much better. But to an extent, it isn't something that a lot of companies are going to work on. How big is the market for TTS? Before you say, "it's useful in loads of things," think about the market for maps. A lot of it is Google or Apple Maps. Loads of apps integrate mapping, but don't want to map the world or run their own infrastructure for serving it. Some use OpenStreetMaps, but they're really just serving generated tiles rather than re-mapping the world. If you were to create a TTS startup, what would your business model be? Pay us money to TTS your text rather than getting it for free from Google's Android TTS? The issue is that TTS is more a feature than a product. Companies like Amazon might bring a company like Inova in-house. Nuance sells their stuff to companies like Apple. Google is large enough to build it. But you'd be pitching something that doesn't directly solve something for customers and trying to hire very smart (expensive) people who you hope will be able to come up with something new that isn't an obvious "with more resources, better" solution. Remember, TTS needs to be done in real-time, possibly on low-powered mobile devices (don't eat their battery or storage) or over the network (don't make our AWS spend go through the roof). If you're going to sell to an app maker as a no-network TTS, how much bloat are you adding to the app?

It's just a hard market to be in given that the 1980s solution works, even if it doesn't sound realistic and modern already-available systems are quite reasonable.

<comment><USER35> > If you compare Google Maps voice to Stephen Hawking,

Has anyone else wondered why Stephen hasn't upgraded his voice? Maybe it is his signature of sorts.

<comment><USER36> >Has anyone else wondered why Stephen hasn't upgraded his voice? Maybe it is his signature of sorts.

That's exactly what he's stated publicly - it's so widely recognised it's part of his identity.</comment></comment></comment>


Tactical Laser Defeats Ground Target - <AUTHOR> http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817

<comment><USER2> "will transform the battlespace and save lives by giving warfighters a speed- of-light, ultra-precision engagement capability that will dramatically reduce collateral damage"

It's language like that that I really can't stand. So, you're making a new high energy weapon and you claim that it will save lives ? That depends on the side of the weapon that you are on I guess.

Collateral damage as it is so nicely called is one of the weirdest terms.

Why are we so scared to name it with a more descriptive term, such as innocent civilians, or even better children, women and men that happened to be in the wrong place.

This weapon 'minimizes' such damage, or so they claim but all I see is another way of killing people. If the idea is that it minimizes them as compared to other weaponry then how about a suggestion to not use that stuff at all if it can be avoided, instead of funding ever more ways to murder people ?

The quality of a weapon is as good as the intelligence that guides it, not the precision of the weapon itself, that is only a very small factor.</comment>


How to Elect a Leader Faster Than a Tournament (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1001 <comment><USER2> Why do scientific "papers" insist of using PDF when HTML would be a much better choice as it supports linking to references, dynamic media (better graphs), meta keywords and search indexing!?

<comment><USER3> > Why do scientific "papers" insist of using PDF when HTML would be a much > better choice

Almost all journals do offer both HTML and PDF versions of their articles. The main advantage of PDF is that it appears exactly the same as the printed article in a journal, and is easy to print.

A PDF also combines the whole article into a single file that can be easily imported into reference management software.

> as it supports linking to references

So does PDF (easily generated in LaTeX using the hyperref package), though a given PDF file may or may not actually include links. For example, the ACS journals offer a 'PDF' and 'PDF w/ Links' download for every article.

> dynamic media (better graphs)

This is a fair point, but enhanced/interactive figures could be on a separate figures-only web page.

> meta keywords

PDF does support metadata, including Author, Title and Keywords. In LaTeX this can set using pdfinfo: [http://www.howtotex.com/tips-tricks/adding-pdf- metadata-in-l...](http://www.howtotex.com/tips-tricks/adding-pdf-metadata-in- latex/)

> search indexing

I'm not sure what you mean. The PDF of any paper will contain serchable text (except for old papers produced by scanning archived copies).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How can an algorithm which sends _O(n^2)_ messages between _n_ nodes have _O(log-star(n))_ time complexity? I'm reading the paper now to try and understand, but it doesn't seem possible to me. Doesn't _O(n^2)_ messages mean each node send on average _O(n)_ messages? Perhaps some subtlety of asymptotic notation escapes me here.

For those (like me) who didn't know, log-star is the iterated log function and grows _very_ slowly: IteratedLog[2^65536] == 5.

<comment><USER4> The answer, of course, is in the paper: "time complexity" here doesn't have its usual meaning, but is defined as "the number of times a processor relies on the adversary to schedule a computation step or to deliver messages". The paper implies that this is the usual definition used in distributed systems analysis.</comment></comment>


Cray CS-Storm Delivers High-Performance Computing In Million-Dollar Package - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/26/geek-dreams-cray-cs-storm-delivers-high-performance-computing-in-million-dollar-package/

<comment><USER2> The Cray brochure for this system has more information, including detailed specs: [http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/products/cs/CrayCS- Storm.pdf](http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/products/cs/CrayCS-Storm.pdf)

A few fun points from the brochure:

\- The internal network ("interconnect") is Infiniband in either a torus or fat tree topology

\- Up to 512 GB RAM per node

\- Power usage is up to 63 kW per rack

\- You have the option of including liquid-cooled rear door heat exchangers, if your datacenter air cooling isn't up to the task ;-)

\- Compute nodes can have disks installed, but the system supports diskless booting

\- Each compute node weighs 88 lbs

One thing to remember about these machines is that the internal high- bandwidth, low-latency network is a _big_ part of why they get such good performance. Most applications that run on these machines are long-running computations consisting of many processes spread across the entire machine, with lots of inter-process communication throughout the lifetime of the job. Think weather prediction, simulations of fluid dynamics, or complex mechanical systems.

(I work on similar systems to these every day. Huge amounts of fun, but quite different needs than your typical web service, or even most Hadoop-ish data analysis problems.)

</comment><comment><USER3> In what cases would this be better than AWS/other IaaS? Seems like a steep investment. Do labs use stuff like this?

<comment><USER4> Real scientific computing needs high-bandwidth low-latency networks.

<comment><USER5> Go on then, let me know what "real scientific computing" is.

I work with bioinformaticians, which is an area with lots of research going on. I don't see much that is complex there. Split up your jobs and send them to a cluster. I take it that's not "real scientific computing" though?

<comment><USER6> From the article: _planet-wide weather forecasting, seismic measuring for oil exploration, financial analysis or crash simulations._ You can't split up a physical simulation.

<comment><USER4> You actually can split up a physical simulation. Imagine you're trying to model heat diffusion through a piece of metal. You split the chunk of metal up into many small pieces and model temperature in each one. Each node in your cluster is simulating the behavior of some portion of the model; at each timestep, nodes simulating chunks that border each other must swap the state of their "edges", sharing the outer edges of their own state with their neighbors.

Edit: unless you meant that you can't split up a physical simulation on loosely-coupled nodes and still get good performance. Then, well, yeah.

<comment><USER6> Well I guess the simulation would have to be broken up to run on multiple GPUs at once anyway. But even if you had a good interconnect, the GPUs in this box (K40) have almost 2x as many processors and 3x as much RAM. (Edit: compared to AWS GPU instances.) If you're doing a 3D sim, each node needs to communicate with 26 others, so just having 1/3 as many nodes is going to help a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But does it come in a beautiful form factor with bench seats?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a bit confused, is the described 1PFlop system really only one million dollar, including cooling and power? That would be amazingly good value. The single digit PFlop systems I know of have cost two to four orders of magnitude more than this, even when powered by GPUs.

<comment><USER9> The computers cost 10 billion dollars? Who buys them? That would be above the noise floor of even the NSA's budget.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, I meant one to three orders of magnitude. The most expensive computer I know of is the Japanese K computer at ~ 1.25 billion and 10 something Petaflops. This was mostly politically motivated (Japanese chips) and too costly for what it does IMO. A typical new supercomputer in the Top 500 today is in the order of 100 million.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So going to get one as my new laptop. Might have to invest in a wheelbarrow though.</comment>


Meet the rightwing power players lurking beneath Silicon Valley's liberal facade - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/10/silicon-valley-right-wing-donald-trump-peter-thiel <comment><USER2> Lurking?

<comment><USER3> To Guardian and its readership: right-wing means evil.</comment></comment>


Create diagrams online  - <AUTHOR> http://www.processon.com/

<comment><USER2> There's _lots_ of online diagramming software out there, and there is nothing I can see that sets this apart other than the fact it seems to have a Facebook clone built in, which if I had to list all the features I want in an online diagramming tool, would only fail to be last on the list because it wouldn't be on the list at all.

If it has any advantages _as a diagramming tool_ , it isn't doing a good job of selling them.</comment>


A Floating Island Is Cleaning Up Brooklyn's Polluted Gowanus Canal - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/3051524/this-floating-island-is-cleaning-up-brooklyns-insanely-polluted-gowanus-canal <comment><USER2> I'm sure that people will learn a lot from doing this. But it's not going to make much difference in "cleaning up" the Canal.

The Gowanus Canal is on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List. The actual cleanup will cost $506 million and take until 2022. That's "the rest of the story". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gowanus_Canal#Cleanup_efforts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gowanus_Canal#Cleanup_efforts)

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's a depressing read.

> The building of new sewer connections only compounded the problem by > discharging raw sewage from neighborhoods even farther away into the Canal. > By the turn of the century, the combination of industrial pollutants and > runoff from storm water, fortified with the products of the new sewage > system, rendered the waterway a repository of rank odors, euphemistically > called by wise-cracking locals "Lavender Lake".

Such a shitty place, but so aptly named gowANUS cANAL.

[http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/13/these_photos_of_gow...](http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/13/these_photos_of_gowanus_canal_sludge_are_weirdly_beautiful.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand. The plants are fed by a solar still, so they are not in contact with the water. What are they supposed to do that is useful?

<comment><USER5> Their roots are in contact with the water, or at least with soacked soil.

Looks like an expensive and inefficient version of placing aquatic plants there. Maybe there's no good aquatic plant adapted to there.

<comment><USER6> Often plants will take up the toxin through their roots and sequester it in their aerial tissues. In this case the tissue could be harvested (and then perhaps incinerated) and the pollution will be removed from the canal. If aquatic plants were used and they didn't fully degrade the pollutants, then the waterway would be still contaminated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems very inefficient to me, or even if it is efficient somehow, at that scale it could not be making any real difference.

Must be better ways to spend $20,000

<comment><USER8> This was my immediate reaction. A few small plants aren't going to "clean up" a canal.</comment></comment>


Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/twitter-s-revenue-tops-estimates-monthly-user-growth-evaporates <comment><USER2> Anyone still _actually_ having a good time on this service?

Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers.

I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" checkbox in settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and politics from elsewhere.

Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly.

 __Edit __\- Mass replying to the careful follow question: I already choose who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it 's really tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're all people who actually do things outside of comment online.

To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst (Political hot takes).

<comment><USER3> I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it.

Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.

Selection criteria I use: \- don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day \- sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam \- select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")

Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):

[https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following](https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following)

<comment><USER4> Nice list! Thanks for the gift to the community, Max. I bet this took a lot of work to curate.

I'm following you. Better yet, I'm following who you follow.

<comment><USER5> Twitter should fix lists, and make them collaborative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Reply threads are a pain. Tweetstorms get old. And all too often there is way too much spam. However, there are amazing communities of people sharing interesting content and having great conversations.

Twitter needs to realize that there value prop is the community using it and not the app itself. They need to make radical design and product changes to make for a better user experience if they want to grow. The vast majority of internet products evolve significantly as they grow, surfing the wave of changing user behavior and taste as they reach new markets.

<comment><USER7> Scrolling is very inefficient on Twitter - to read the equivalent of a single screen on reddit or HN means to scroll 20x more on T. When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost.

Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.

<comment><USER8> _When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost._

That's also my experience - I have to be _very_ careful not to click on anything, lest I lose my position on the thread. I don't understand how the developers themselves don't get frustrated about this, frankly.

<comment><USER9> You think the developers of Twitter use Twitter?

<comment><USER10> Not heavily, no, and definitely not on Android (at least), where they have some algorithm to reflow the timeline both at random times, and after viewing a specific tweet. Click the back button to continue reading your timeline and they insert 5-20 tweets in between the one you just read and the one you were about to read, or they pop you up to the top of your timeline.

It's truly a bizarre UX, and the only charitable way I can interpret it is that they're using Continuous Delivery, implementing features in a piecemeal fashion, using users as alpha testers, and basically moving slow and breaking things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Twitter is such a fascinating platform. I use it on a professional basis and I really enjoy it. I get the opportunity to interact with the rock stars of my field. These are people whom I would probably never have the chance to ping otherwise. I consume more media on TWTR than FB at this point because I trust the people I follow to be great "taste makers".

Clearly the company has some value, but how they fix the business model is a big question mark. I wonder if the Microsoft-LinkedIn complex would be the most natural home for Twitter at this point.

<comment><USER12> I mean interact is a strong term here. You send 0-140 characters towards them and they get to send 0-140 back. Yes I'm sure sometimes meaningful conversations happen, but I doubt that is the norm.

I get to interact with a rock star if I hang out near the exit door after the concert. I can shout at them and (s)he might say something back. If I'm lucky and it's a cool musician we might be able to have a brief conversation...

As a professional, if I wanted to interact with a leader in my field on a meaningful level I would e-mail, write them, attend a speech by them, etc. etc.

<comment><USER13> I mean - this seems like you don't actually use the service. I do JS development, and I can pretty reliably get someone like Dan Abramov or other JS 'rockstars' to look at/comment on an issue if it's required. Additionally, I can see these people interact with their peers and discuss ideas. Fundamentally, twitter has become a platform for idea exchange and conversation that has professionals on it, discussing things professionally! It doesn't really get more meaningful than that.

<comment><USER12> So for your JS example, why would you attempt to reach them on Twitter when something like Github would be so much better? Create an issue on Github, point to the exact line of code that is a problem and wait for a response?

How do you ask a meaningful question about source code / software development in 140 characters? How do you get a meaningful response in 140 characters?

<comment><USER13> Because it's not just about issues - I don't exclusively want someone to interact with me in a setting that's centered around the content. I would preferably like the experience to be more free form and open to a wider audience. Incidentally, I don't think the 140 character limit has ever really bothered me. Most of the time I text shorter strings than that - if I want to have a longer conversation I'll either send multiple tweets, or move to DM/chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > A long-term turnaround depends on Twitter expanding its audience. That > number stands at 328 million monthly active users -- the same as in the > prior quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement Thursday. > Revenue fell 4.7 percent and the company's net loss also widened, affected > by a $55 million writedown of the value of its investment in SoundCloud, the > German music streaming service.

This is insanity. This is utter insanity. Twitter is at over 300 million monthly users. How have we created a system where that's not _enough_? Twitter is incredibly relevant. The president's Tweets are basically driving the news cycle now. And yet it needs to grow? Why? (Okay, okay, I understand why -- to feed all the VCs that invested in it. I just... ugh.)

<comment><USER15> Because at the end of the day companies are supposed to make a profit and Twitter isn't managing that. They also aren't managing growth, which people believe is a good reason to delay profitability in favor of a future larger amount of profit.

This is hardly ridiculous.

EDIT: and moreover this is a situation that has existed for multiple quarters now, adding to the reasonableness of the frustration and lack of trust in the future of Twitter.

<comment><USER14> Could Twitter be profitable if they weren't spending so much money on new customer acquisition?

<comment><USER15> I honestly don't know. I heard mutterings that they can become profitable if they become more lean (layoffs and less office extravagance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And here we all really thought their recent redesign to add border-radius: 50% to literally everything on the site (avatars, text boxes, buttons, etc) and to strip all contrast away from the icons by hollowing them all out would bring about massive growth of the platform!

How many more times do they have to listen to exactly what their users want and add things like more complicated reply-to functionality that most can't seem to figure out still, live auto-playing sports video on the frontpage regardless of your interests, temporary automatic bans for using adult language in replies to verified accounts when yours isn't, moments, reordering your timeline so that it's no longer chronological, hiding tweets behind "show more replies" (with no opt-out), hiding even _more_ tweets behind a second "show even more sensitive replies" (still with no opt-out), invading others' discretion and flooding your timeline with other peoples' likes, replacing the dreaded egg avatar with a person silhouette, etc before the platform starts to grow? /s

</comment><comment><USER17> Twitter needs to:

1\. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise to Twitter anyway.

2\. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with no links.

3\. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interact with other users. in other words, throttle those bots and broadcasters.

I believe the noise problem is a huge issue in twitter. it gradully causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads.

i would even go as far as banning apps like Buffer and social schedulers from Twitter. They are a net negative for users (note: I said users not marketers)

<comment><USER18> Businesses would have to get some kind of value-add (honey) otherwise literally everyone would tweet as "Owner at Business" and just happen to tweet about their business all the time. Regulating that would be a nightmare.

<comment><USER17> if you are not a business nor journalist/celeb you cant tweet more than x links a day.

<comment><USER19> That ruins it: the businesses and celebs are mostly posting pictures, or some businesses are using it for tech support, while some of the most interesting accounts are just streams of links from random people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Twitter began investing heavily in video, aiming to draw a more mainstream > set of users and premium advertising deals

What's with this whole "pivot to video" trend among websites?

Why is it preferred to text which is probably easier to write, needs less network and is more accessible than a large number of videos (which don't have captions)?

<comment><USER21> Video ads pay much more.

<comment><USER22> And autoplay video jukes the stats to make it look like the consumers are more engaged in video ads than they are in banners.

<comment><USER23> Autoplay ads/videos are the fraudulent lie that corporations are attempting to use to inflate their ad impressions. It will come back to bite them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The problem with Twitter is that it has an identity crisis. It wants to be as massive as Facebook but the way it works is only attractive to a minority.

For example the 140 characters limit which was a novelty at the launch is more of a nuisance than anything. It's very common that users are replying to themselves to be able to say more.

The other big problem is noise. For example I recently started following one of the NPM devs and my feed was flooded with LGBT content. This is not Twitter's fault, but the way its users are using Twitter has become part of the culture.

Twitter could probably solve those two problems, but at the same time it would destroy what Twitter is about for its current users.

The only solution for Twitter is to realise it can't really cater to a mainstream audience and to become profitable it needs to lower its costs.

</comment><comment><USER25> I use twitter's web app primarily with heavy editing with uBlock origin. I don't see trends, or suggestions or moments.

I block 99% of accounts that show up as 'promoted'.

I always click 'show less often' for 'In case you missed' and 'Who you should follow'.

With all that, I love it. It's indispensable for keeping up with machine learning news.

The core product is the best curated news feed around, but you have to do the curation. Almost all the content twitter itself pushes is noise.

To survive twitter needs to start serving ads that are extremely tailored to me and my feed. Just like with google, the quality of ad results needs to match or exceed the quality of organic results.

</comment><comment><USER26> Twitter is amazing, but it needs to ditch the 140 chars, improve discoverability, and get more modest in its expectations. Twitter is an interest network, where you follow interesting people and read what they write, re-tweet what they write and sometimes interact with them. Given that a lot of people don't have that much interest in things that can be expressed in Twitter form, Twitter has a low ceiling on how big it can get. Most sports fans would rather watch sports than following an athlete. I think Twitter should try being better at what their users use it as.

<comment><USER22> I think I'd probably stop using Twitter (the only social network I use) if they ditched the 140 character format. I don't want to see long form facebook style posts there, its literally their differentiation.

<comment><USER26> I would say that their differentiation of Twitter is that all posts are public and connections are uni-directional.

They could implement 140+ using the same kind of GUI that's already there for text-as-picture, which is already widely used.

<comment><USER22> Sorry let me rephrase. Its their differentiation to me. I don't _want_ to see 140+ character posts. I _like_ the terseness of the format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> keep up the failure twitter! i love it.

every time they make a serious mistake and alienate users, the federated timeline on my private mastodon server is flooded with new people. quite beautiful actually. fun to see how people show up ready to fight only to find that there are a lot more ways to interact with people, if you can believe it. fights break out. people show up to try to cool the situation down. some people decide to stick around. lovely.

[https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)

[https://cybre.space](https://cybre.space)

[https://ephemeral.glitch.social](https://ephemeral.glitch.social)

[https://sunshinegardens.org](https://sunshinegardens.org)

</comment><comment><USER28> My primary reason for not using twitter is the lack of a Windows client that I like. All I want is to see tweets from people I'm following in a compact, not screen-filling, undistracting way. Just something simple to keep up with the tweets of a handful of people.

All such clients I could find are discontinued and broken by now. The current clients are either are oriented at power-users (Tweetdeck & co) or turn what could be 8 lines of text into a screen-filling experience that you have to dedicate time to to follow (official Twitter windows client & co). I don't care enough to code something myself, so I just don't bother with Twitter.

<comment><USER29> just go to [https://mobile.twitter.com/home](https://mobile.twitter.com/home)

<comment><USER30> This is what I get[0] which is much worse.

[0][http://i.imgur.com/sJ6qAQE.png](http://i.imgur.com/sJ6qAQE.png)

<comment><USER29> much worse than what ?

Its simply the tweets of the people you follow - no fluff.

<comment><USER30> Much worse than the desktop version, I can only see two tweets the info density is terrible.

<comment><USER29> Its only two tweets if each tweet has a picture attached. And I can only read one thing at a time, I prefer scrolling than being bombard with ads and other shit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Their usability keeps going downhill. This showing me other people's favorites thing is one step too far. I know they must feel a bit putout that the community invented the retweet, but making favorites act like retweets is just dumb.

Also, the amount of data the service uses is obscene. The auto-play even if I have the preference not to is a cell plan killer.

</comment><comment><USER32> This comes up semi-regularly when Twitter is mentioned on HN, but I've moved all my Twitter attention over to Nuzzel and have enjoyed the change. Twitter started to feel like such a poor return on my time due to the format- having an aggregator makes a huge difference. It partially solves the clutter problem of having hundreds of Twitter followees, and partially solves the problem of not wanting to check Twitter perpetually.

What I don't understand is why Twitter hasn't implemented more direct methods to see the generally/statistically good content. Anyone remember 'Texts from last night' and 'Fuck my life' and the like? They had this _incredible_ feature that allowed you to sort by top posts of the week, or even, can you believe it- the month! Nuzzel provides this as well, but it doesn't have much effect unless you follow enough people to decimate your normal Twitter experience.

</comment><comment><USER33> 328 million monthly active users and still not happy.

</comment><comment><USER34> What I don't understand is how can they burn so much money to still not be profitable despite millions of users.

Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?

<comment><USER35> Twitter has something like 3000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of where they are. Before I heard this number, I would have guessed they had 300 employees (based on Instagram having 20 employees when Facebook bought them).

At some point, I think Twitter is going to accept that they are pretty much done growing. Shift some of their user acquisition budget to user retention. Make Twitter better for those of us that love it.

<comment><USER36> Based on their last 10-Q filing, I would estimate that

\- ~500 in operations (data centers, sysops, related managers)

\- ~1000 in R&D (developers, designers, researchers, and related managers)

\- ~1000 in Sales and Marketing

\- ~500 in general & administrative (finance, legal, H&R, IT support, management, misc)

If you compare to e.g. Google, this sounds pretty similar split.

<comment><USER35> Every one of those numbers sounds an order of magnitude too big to me. Is it wrong to compare Twitter at 3000 people with Instagram at 20?

<comment><USER36> Yes, I think it is wrong to compare them directly. I think Twitter has room to cut employee count, but not by order of magnitude.

Instagram had 20 at the time of acquisition, I bet it's much bigger now. They had a single product, no ad tech platforms, no working business model. Twitter has multiple products and several (acquired, partly failed) ad platforms. Also Instagram were able to build on top of modern cloud technologies and scalable infrastructure services like AWS. Twitter was launched same year that AWS, so I think Twitter has paid a price by building it's own infrastructure. Instagram likely used a lot of outsourced people too to run all non-core things. Both Instagram and Whatsapp were clearly amazing, well-functioning technology teams to be able to execute with such small teams, but they were still very early in developing their revenue engines.

I think employee count and costs are not Twitter's biggest problem per se. They still have quite good financial situation, $4B in cash and equivalents, IIRC. The problem is that they haven't found a working ad model. Performance marketing has made both Google and Facebook the revenue engines that business has never seen before. Twitter could still do something similar but on the smaller scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm wondering why they're getting more and more adamant that people register an account, even though a lot of people don't care about having an online persona outside of Facebook and wouldn't ever contribute anything to the platform.

I honestly believe that could do much better by providing a good experience to people that just want to stay up-to-date and follow a few people that they find interesting.

<comment><USER38> Gotta pump up those numbers. Can't show growth without people signing up for accounts.

<comment><USER37> I don't buy it.

At least two core products of the biggest advertisement company in the world have no problem providing you value and generating ad-revenue without you having to be logged in. Google and YouTube would be nowhere near the success they are if they'd force you to log in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I guess i'll be the only contrarian here and say that Twitter has become the preferred communication platform for some notable political figures (including the current Sitting US President). On that simple premise alone, I can't for good reason work up the nerve to use it anymore.

There was a time when I relied on Twitter to get details about life in a rather medium-sized city. We had tweetups and I even used it for business networking. As it grew bigger, I felt less interested as the value increased on other platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn. Even now, I still find dedicated Subreddits more valuable than Twitter.

To me, Twitter is now a space for low effort comments and input on media. I'm sure it works well for others, and good for you. But I have no time to cultivate relevant trends, and it seems philosophically wrong to suggest a platform should enable or mandate the culling of an audience. Especially since by design, Twitter is supposed to be the cross section of humanity (with its inherent downsides).

</comment><comment><USER40> But is it a safe space yet? :)

Autoblocking list bots going crazy can't hardly be a good thing for growth. Facebook with their groups concept feels like a better model than the free- for-all model Twitter uses.

And I've always felt that text-only and limiting to 140 chars is a great way to ensure there's misunderstanding between people.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have just deleted Twitter app from my mobile phone today. I am getting fed up with constant push notifications I don't care about.

It seems like push notifications from other social apps are more relevant, notifications from Twitter rarely are about something I care about.

</comment><comment><USER42> side point, but i really hope Twitter doesn't try to mimic FB type algorithms that serve content im likely to click vs content as is from people I follow. This includes withholding updates so that users keep pulling the lever to get a trickle of content.

I hate it so much when i F5 on a window in Facebook (or hit the back button) and completely different front page loads.

<comment><USER43> This is probably happening already. The feed itself is no longer sorted by date (you get some highlights that you can dismiss but hey, here they are again), and then even content _liked_ (not retweeted) by people you follow shows up. This makes absolutely no sense for the user, as it happens on Facebook. I assume it's a way to tackle the lack of original content generated from individual users / content consumers (e.g. friends you follow).

<comment><USER17> this is an elephant in the room. most people simply do not produce any useful content. they just auto tweet links or comment on something random and specific that is uninteresting.

<comment><USER44> But on twitter, it doesn't bother me if most people aren't interesting. I only follow the people I want to follow.

<comment><USER17> but there aren't that many interesting ppl with interesting stuff to say. So less of those ppl to follow.

<comment><USER42> i don't necessarily agree, but regardless if i did, i'd rather view the content i signed up for in a true chronological way

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> To me it seems that Twitter is less of a back-and-forth engagement platform like Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram, and more of a platform for anointed experts/celebrities to use as a megaphone to anyone who will listen.

Accepting that, I wonder why Twitter doesn't charge people to use the service to either have a verified account or beyond some # of followers after which it's capped? Celebs obviously get a great deal of value from the service and have the means to pay, so why not charge them? I refuse to believe that there would be a noticeable decline in accounts if you had to pay some fee per, say, 30k followers.

</comment><comment><USER46> Twitter has caused serious harm to myself and my family. I'm a big fan of the platform, but I've been "doxxed", harassed, and was even SWATed once by different people trying to get me to give them my username.

I'd release it, except that'd be almost as big of a pain. I'd have to release a new edition of my book, change all my websites. Ugh. People are dicks. I wish I'd picked a less desirable handle.

</comment><comment><USER47> _Twitter's business troubles contrast with its increased profile in the political world, as U.S. President Donald Trump frequently uses the platform to reach the public in an unfiltered manner. Despite his daily fusillade of tweets, Trump hasn't helped Twitter's growth in its home country._

<comment><USER48> Maybe he is one of the reasons 2mm users left the platform... Not the only one, but one factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Maybe it's naturally limited from it's format and doesn't need to grow more.

\- I like the website for quick feed and "real time" data \- I wished the logic was thinner, it's still a heavy site in a way \- maybe a 3 real columns UX would make the thing blossom

</comment><comment><USER50> I read somewhere that the issue with Twitter is that its platform doesn't have the level of mainstream appeal the likes of Facebook or Instagram have. It's good for journalists and influencers sure, but for the average Joe it's not as intuitive to use.

</comment><comment><USER51> Discovery for new content/people to follow on Twitter's iOS app (Explore tab) is appallingly bad. Its astonishing that they made so little improvement in this area after so many years. Its sad when you compare with what you get on Weibo, its China clone.

</comment><comment><USER52> Twitter's problem is that they let Ev Williams walk away from the company, and then he goes and creates Medium. Medium could have been a product of Twitter Inc., and then no one would be talking about their lack of growth.

<comment><USER53> Isn't Medium struggling in its own ways, cutting costs & laying people off? If it was a Twitter product, I imagine the stockholders would want it shut down, seeing it as a distraction to the main Twitter product.

<comment><USER50> Yeah, Medium's having trouble finding a good business model itself:

[https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums- focus-98f374a960be](https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums- focus-98f374a960be)

It's got the same general issues as Twitter has. No clear business model, a more limited audience than the creators of the service want it to have and a severe with too much noise and hostility (especially when you go away from recommended articles to random ones).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Every discussion on Twitter on HN talks about UX issues like the threaded comment layout, as though these are what's responsible for driving away Twitter's audience.

I think the simple answer is that you don't actually have to ever visit Twitter to know what Trump, Nicki Minaj, Drake etc. are saying.

Whatever is said on a tweet will be screen-capped and re-reported on your favourite gossip website, news site, Instagram page, reddit, etc. That's what you get with a 140-character limit. Whatever you said or pic you snapped can easily be reproduced on a different medium in its entirety.

<comment><USER55> That's a great point. Text and images are easy and damn near free to copy and distribute (unlike video). So it is very easy to copy content from Twitter and post it elsewhere (where those publishers can then monetize it themselves).

Compare that to say...video hosted on YT/FB where, when embedded, can still include ads that allows those platforms to monetize people sharing their content offsite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Twitter owns [https://www.mopub.com](https://www.mopub.com) an ad exchange too. I think its one of the bigger ones. Ad exchanges are the things that provide revenue to app devs. Basically, when you open a free(mium) app there is a market bidding for the right to show you an ads. There is all kinds of tech trying to characterize you based on your phone's id so you see relevant ads. Having an audience of 320+ million people and ad tech powering a significant portion of the app world seems like nice problems to have.

</comment><comment><USER57> Twitter is it's own enemy. There's no way to adjust video quality for a smoother streaming experience. Twitter Lite has a horrible user experience; you have to manually click on each image to load and the images seem to be full quality which defeats the purpose of data saving. Why can't they build an app like Facebook Lite? Facebook lite is small in size to download (less than 1.5MB) and has nicely compressed images and videos.

</comment><comment><USER58> Are there any desktop or self-hosted tools designed to archive my Twitter feed? Every time I remember seeing something useful it is nearly impossible to get back to.

</comment><comment><USER59> Twitter has been actively banning various accounts, usually alt-right but some even satirical in nature. They banned GodfreyElfwick for instance.

Each time that happens, Twitter loses some of its appeal.

They could very easily put more filtering power in the hands of their users, but don't (to give me more control over whose tweets show up as response to my tweets, which is the main complaint people have about accounts they vehemently disagree with).

</comment><comment><USER60> They brought on the global creative director from Beats by Dre. He had a hand in some interesting campaigns, but clearly it didn't do the trick.

Twitter is still insanely enmeshed in the American cultural fabric right now. Any newscast or radio show usually mentions it, businesses and publications fight for impressions, etc. There have Been multiple times I think Twitter is finally on it's way out, but it somehow remains relevant.

</comment><comment><USER61> Twitter should just focus 100% on real time news. That's the only time I've ever seen anything valuable come from it. If a major site is down, it's generally on there instantly. If some event just happened in the world, it's on there instantly.

All this other nonsense, interacting with celebrities, businesses, or coding "rockstars" is just noise.

Overhaul the horrendous UI, focus on world news ONLY.

</comment><comment><USER48> Q1 and Q2 MAU are the same: 328 million worldwide. Only in the US -2 million MAU less than in the first quarter. Not tragic, in my opinion.

<comment><USER28> And 328 million is 4.5% of all humans. That sounds like a pretty solid audience.

<comment><USER62> ... but how many of those 328 million are in fact bots?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I follow 44 accounts, a mixture of Eastern philosophy, interesting entrepreneurs/economists, Quanta/Nautilus, Patagonia, one design showcase, a few people in tech industry.

Twitter is mostly noise, little signal. Social media in general is to be honest. I get a little value from each of the major platforms. Reddit and Instagram are my two favorites.

</comment><comment><USER64> Is there any way to deduplicate tweets? Some accounts seem to have the same tweets scheduled over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER65> I got off twitter because it felt like they were constantly changing the app to make it worse / more covered in ads but mostly because I didn't like the way it was changing my thinking. It's the first app I've felt the pull to compulsively check and I really didn't like that.

</comment><comment><USER66> [opens Twitter]

EVERYONE: How dare you be a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white male?!?!??!?!

ME: …Ok then.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER67> You're not following the correct people. I agree it's sad that almost everybody involved with tech is a die-hard liberal :P I'd love to get my tech news from Twitter but I simply don't like to be told how to think regarding politics, which tech people do all day. So I just read Hacker News...

<comment><USER68> I don't mind die-hard liberals who are actually open-minded believers in individual rights and equality.

The whole white, het, cisgender stuff is coming from intersectional feminism, which is anything but a liberal philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Instead of focusing on growth they should focus on their business model. More users cause more noise first and foremost. How is noise going to help long term sustainability?

</comment><comment><USER70> What if a company like Amazon bought Twitter? They could also charge for accounts. Something like more than 100 followers you need to pay.

</comment><comment><USER71> Should not be a big surprise, Twitter has an absolutely questionable policy when it comes to content filtering.

</comment><comment><USER72> twitter's core interaction mechanism was always ripe for trolling, brigading and other abuse. the ui in general is pretty bad.

</comment><comment><USER73> Maybe the audience is already grown? I mean it's being used by presidents and heads of states and is a major communication tool for businesses and governments. Maybe it's just not hip anymore.

</comment><comment><USER13> Part of the problem is the sheer amount of racism and harassment. How many times do twitter eggs and other hate speech peddlers get reported without anything happening? Why does Twitter drag their feet over this? Nobody will miss the neo-nazis.</comment>