Whenever I see comments like these, my immediate thought is "How interested are you, if you had to put a dollar figure on it?"
Also, you are missing alternative (e): availability bias. Maybe you haven't seen a lot of innovation around UX not because people are not trying, but because those who tried to experiment with different UX were aiming at such a niche that completely failed as social network?
As far as I'm concerned the innovation just isn't there in the core loops and UX of twitter-likes, it's all circa 2008 stuff.
Which is not the same as "innovating with UX" in any way that is incompatible with the status quo.
Going by your blog post, do you agree that it is not something that (by itself) a feature so innovative that would make people drop twitter to favor a new social network that implemented it?
My perspective on the problem is that the way twitter's medium is designed doesn't produce a wonderful signal:noise ratio. Some people might revel in the noise, and some amount of noise certainly generates MAUs and ad dollars, but ultimately it's not living up to its potential as a medium and social network. 'A clown car that fell into a gold mine' still applies.
My theory of change is that in general, features that improve SNR are going to provide a sustaining MAU advantage to products that implement them, because the vast majority of users want better SNR. They want quality discourse, funny memes, kind interactions, etc. Drama and conflict also produce MAUs, but ultimately they're net negative because of the people they scare off.
If you accept that premise, then the question is more when than if features focused on improving the SNR of interactions should be built. Do they meaningfully differentiate and help with the cold start problem? Or are they to be built after some amount of audience has arrived?
From what I've seen on the clones, as they grow they're all running into the same SNR ceiling. I think that ceiling is preventing them from being breakout successes, because whatever differentiator they started with (decentralized, free speech, etc) will fade in relevance as they get bigger and their core experience reverts to the mean. They're just twitter, but smaller.
Would a product that focused more on improving SNR be able to breakout? I don't know, I'm just disappointed nobody seems to have tried very hard.
Is that the case? Serious question, I'm curious about any social networks that have tried some new UX? The twitter clones seem to play things very close to twitter's style. At least it looks that way to me as someone who isn't a heavy twitter user.
Also what is "failed as a social network" when Twitter, one of the biggest bleeds money as it is?
Is the market just messed up?
Or maybe UX where I actually feel like I can find or interact with things I want just doesn't work for profitability (Facebook doesn't show me what I want)?
A lot of this is they're trying to capture the user base of an incumbent and users like familiarity.
> Also what is "failed as a social network" when Twitter, one of the biggest bleeds money as it is?
Twitter has millions of users and it doesn't cost a lot in infrastructure to host tweets. Twitter bleeds money because the company has been mismanaged (going back long before its current ownership), not because putting ads on a social network with that number of users couldn't turn a profit.
A "failed social network" is one that nobody uses.
> Or maybe UX where I actually feel like I can find or interact with things I want just doesn't work for profitability (Facebook doesn't show me what I want)?
There's probably a short-term/long-term thing here. Big companies run on metrics, so they make a change and the number goes up so they keep the change. But the way the change works is by frustrating people into spending more time on the site, which short-term increases the metrics and long-term makes people hate you and be eager to switch away at the first opportunity.
What you probably want here is a service with a single owner who actually uses it and cares about making the service good (and, most importantly, is competent), but what usually happens instead is it becomes a publicly traded company controlled by shareholders who institute the aforementioned metrics-based bureaucracy.
The key is somehow getting the one with benevolent leadership and the one with millions of users to be the same one.
And I'm curious about flipping this question: can you think of any UX that would be interested for you in a social network?
Still hanging around
