Took me reading this 4800 words of instructions to get it: Twitter is the Dwarf Fortress of social.
Twitter's missing manual
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#32Too little, too late. Twitter has the most abysmal UI/UX I've ever seen, especially when you consider its clout and popularity (although that is fast waning). Any meaningful change will be so jarring that the dyed in the wool users will balk at it, kicking up a storm of protests and it will not serve to bring in new users (they come in not for good UI but for the network effect - but they don't use it and leave becau…
Maybe Twitters "UI" is so messy is because its text. People can make up any convent they want. Like signing posts with ^.
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#33Wow. I didn't know it was this bad. They probably have too many developers and "product manager of x" types, with no one person really in charge? So it ends up being a race for lots of people to get their pet feature in... Repeat for a decade. Seriously, this looks like something out of a consumer/UI facing open source project with 1000 contributors. (My favorite example: The glorious spectacle that is the VLC settin…
Most of these things really come down to implementation detail(e.g. formatting rules), and they are mostly interesting for aesthetic purposes. The important ones like conventions surrounding replies are weird artifacts left over from the early days of the product. Twitter bottlenecks quickly in lengthy conversations amongst multiple parties and you really have to carefully respect the social dynamics it creates, or p…
I disagree. The business logic (at least the reported effects of the business logic) for blocking and muting seem rather arcane.
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#34Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it. If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do the trick. People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they…
The point isn't to have an actual manual but to show how complex things have grown.
I don't know. I'm getting a lot of value out of this as a manual. I've tried to get into twitter a few times, but I had trouble figuring out how you do anything. I was surprised to find (guess it's still the case) that most things aren't documented anywhere.
I've bookmarked this, and will definitely refer to it next time I try to do anything with twitter.
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#35Too little, too late. Twitter has the most abysmal UI/UX I've ever seen, especially when you consider its clout and popularity (although that is fast waning). Any meaningful change will be so jarring that the dyed in the wool users will balk at it, kicking up a storm of protests and it will not serve to bring in new users (they come in not for good UI but for the network effect - but they don't use it and leave becau…
Maybe Twitters "UI" is so messy is because its text. People can make up any convent they want. Like signing posts with ^.
compare and contrast to reddit: text but extremely simple, intuitive, you can follow conversations, know who is talking to whom, respond, link, etc.
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe Twitters "UI" is so messy is because its text. People can make up any convent they want. Like signing posts with ^.
compare and contrast to reddit: text but extremely simple, intuitive, you can follow conversations, know who is talking to whom, respond, link, etc.
I think reddit gets kind ofh ard to follow for conversations. It's really good for content aggregation, but I much prefer 4chan (and any other chan etc) for conversations. Though I think in the end thats more to do with the functionality than the UI. You definitely need an extension to use 4chan seriously but the same can be said for reddit.
I've said all this but either is INIFNITELY better than twitter, especially twitter's standard web client. TweetDeck makes the thing barely useable.
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#37As somebody who played with the Twitter API, this post is so awesome. So much knowledge packed in a single article.
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#38Textbook example of poor top down management. Think of the case studies that will result :)
(Jack hasn't been back long enough so not saying it's him.)
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#39I found a lot of this out on my own.
When people ask "how does twitter work" I'm always at a loss for words.
Re: Twitter's missing manual
#40Nice to know you're spending your time away from Yelp on the important stuff