&gt; it&#x27;s because you&#x27;re not their target<p>Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would think but obviously we&#x27;re an edge case.<p>&gt; Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn&#x27;t have otherwise used Twitter.<p>Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things you care about but this I&#x27;m not sure how it&#x27;s really sold to perspective users. Since it&#x27;s a social network I&#x27;m guessing much will be word of mouth but that requires support from existing users.<p>I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better, maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I wonder if they&#x27;ve done any A&#x2F;B testing where certain areas got different features like more character counts and how it turned out.