For all the debate and consternation and concern around Elon Musk buying Twitter, there was a sizable group of power users, myself included, who were optimistic that Elon taking over would lead to a revitalization of the Twitter product. An injection of user aligned passion to fix all the little stuff that would improve the experience. So far we’ve gotten different colored verification badges and ads that are stuck to the top of our feeds.
But speaking as someone who’s seen it grow from the earliest days, who has spent untold hours on the site, for whom it’s been a lifeline during the pandemic and my own health issues, there’s really there’s only one thing that Twitter needs: make it a first class messaging application. Make DMs great again.
I love Twitter’s direct messaging feature. It is the glue that holds together my deal flow and my fundraising. It has all of the network of LinkedIn professionally, with none of its cringe. In fact, Twitter makes you look cooler. It’s the place where your achievements meet your personality. It actually is a holistic place to display yourself as a person. And shockingly we like to work with people that are authentic. Humans like empathy and vulnerability.
A Twitter DM comes with context. You know if you are mutuals. You can open it to people your followers follow. An excellent heuristic for deciding on how to direct your attention. You trust your network to make some decisions for you.
The ability to connect with people via DMs literally can’t be recreated elsewhere – there’s no trading contact info, confirming who you are on, – just see something interesting, click the person, send a message.
And because these messages are so powerful we desperately need improved features for communication on them. A few industry baseline improvements are all it would take to go from worst in class to baseline usability.
Threaded/Contextual Responses
A Twitter DM has no in-line individual message responses. This makes it hard to have a conversation that flows like it does in iMessage, Signal or WhatsApp. It makes it utterly chaos for Group DMs. Of which I’m in a number. I’ve used them to organize parties at crypto conferences and to guide the direction of a Doomer community. Imagine how crazy a chat with 20 people in it looks like without inline messaging. Absolutely nuts. But still easier than migrating to Discord.
Organization
While this isn’t technically a feature set for just DM, right now we can’t search our own followers or organize them with anything but the most manual full sight search. It would have been handy to see everyone who follows me in Austin Texas when I was there for the conference. I could have done a meet up much more easily. Or if founders could search by venture capital in profile bios and cross reference it with people their friends follow. Instant warm leads list.
We could build target lists based on who is most followed relevant to any of our passions or interests. Great Twitter users do this on intuition. That’s why Twitter is notorious for launching careers and fulfilling dreams. They had an entire advertising campaign based on it. #TwitterDoYourThing.
Search
DM search is completely unusable. I know multiple people who use texts.com literally JUST because it’s search of Twitter DMs work, unlike native search.
I’ve had some of the most valuable conversations of my life in DMs and yet its almost impossible to go back a few months later and find them.
Also while they’re at it, can they just fix Twitter search in general?
E2E Encryption
This one speaks for itself.
If Twitter could deliver on the promise of giving to its entire user base what it has given for its power users, their financial woes would surely improve. Plenty of proven ways to monetize people who you make money. But this all starts on the premise that we can message each other. We tweet into a wild stream and we get replies back. But what comes next is a better networked world. I’d be pissed if they took 10% but I would not scoff at 1%. If Elon wants to become WeChat he has to fix DMs first.