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Twitter's missing manual

eev.ee

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Re: Twitter's missing manual

#41

Post by steveklabnik »

chillingeffect wrote: post #28

I think this is a brilliant illustration of the "wear marks" around a basic service. At its core, it's still 140 chars, but each of these subtle deviations represents a bend in the direction of features valuable to users. Developers and designers can benefit from this by not overspecifying how a technology is to be used until loads of feedback has returned. Kind of like the old story about the architect who didn't fi…

... I THINK I just upvoted you, which was my intention, but I'm on mobile and am also not sure if I downvoted you. If so, my bad: this is a great comment.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#42

Post by comex »

mbrock wrote: post #4

Nobody 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…

I don't think most people 'need' to read this - it consists of a few important points which can generally be found elsewhere, plus a ton of esoterica that rarely matters. But as someone who spends a good amount of time on Twitter, I found it interesting, and wouldn't appreciate if the amount of content were reduced for accessibility's sake.

One exception: I don't think the self-reply trick is well known, but it's useful in the very common case of splitting a message across multiple tweets. I suppose 10K extended messages will obviate it, if they ever actually show up...

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#44

Post by bufordsharkley »

These interactions may be convoluted, and at times surprising, but at least they're deterministic.

This (the fact it's deterministic) is what makes Twitter so useful for me, and what drove me away from Facebook (with its stochastic Timeline).

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#45

Post by [deleted] »

ilek wrote: post #36
lingben wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#46

Post by digi_owl »

lingben wrote: post #24

Too 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…

If you look closer at the most prolific users they are not accessing it via the site, but via either the official app or a third party app/service (i think Hootsuite is popular with heavy users, as it allows them to track and post on a number of "social media" services).

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#47

Post by marshray »

bufordsharkley wrote: post #44

These interactions may be convoluted, and at times surprising, but at least they're deterministic. This (the fact it's deterministic) is what makes Twitter so useful for me, and what drove me away from Facebook (with its stochastic Timeline).

Don't worry, they're working hard to change that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11048523

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#48

Post by marshray »

chipsy wrote: post #5
johansch wrote: post #3

Wow. 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…

When you're limited to 140 characters, aesthetics become essential for communication.

This is Twitter's blessing and its curse: It's a game we willingly play to communicate within its limitations.

Even the greatest artists have to paint within the canvas. By making the canvas ludicrously small, limitations become a democratizing force.

Re: Twitter's missing manual

#50

Post by exolymph »

ebbv wrote: post #23

This isn't a good manual for Twitter because it doesn't distinguish between features, quirks, bugs and just "interesting tidbits". It just lumps things together categorically. That means anyone who is new to Twitter is gonna get halfway through the first section and be lost. Twitter could use a good tutorial for new users, but it should be written as a tutorial for new users. Not as a "Here's a bunch of categorized r…

I think "Twitter's missing manual" was more of a tongue-in-cheek comment than a descriptive headline. As someone said above, the point was to illustrate how complex and weird Twitter has grown.
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