91–100 of 198 posts
Dorsey (from the article) : “I also don’t feel good about how Twitter tends to incentivize outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and fragmented conversation and consideration.” But what has he done to fix the problem, besides tiny UX tweaks that go nowhere, and the occasional ban of a highly visible jerk? Twitter is on fire, and he just plods along. Dorsey, in this article, is about as believable a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…
Some people used to feel this way about IRC. I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is. There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.
> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design fo…
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…
I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter I don’t think Twitter understands threads on Twitter, and they never have. They built something over a decade ago, it took off for reasons they never fully could fathom, and they’ve been afraid ever since to futz with what for them has been a good thing.
Simpler: stop showing tweets just because other people liked them. That's not a reshare, so it shouldn't be treated that way. More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.
[1] https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows -filter%3Areplies&src=typd
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> stop showing tweets just because other people liked them There's already a way to do this: use any third-party client. You even get the added bonus of a reverse-chronological timeline!
That works for individuals, but the social interactions won't change unless a lot of people do it.
Now everything is so serious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people used to feel this way about IRC. I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is. There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.
IRC is also terrible for conversations.
This is very different from threaded models, but it's something that can be adapted to easily enough, same as how most people can talk within a group in a noisy bar, where there are multiple surrounding intelligible conversations. Like in a bar, it's easy to jump into another adjacent conversation spontaneously.
From its tiny size limits to its byzantine threading and inability to follow all of one person without creating an account (which they often instantly ban, even if it does nothing but read)... Twitter is a communications medium constructed in a way that maximizes the ability ferment outrage and minimizes the ability to inform. Twitter is a platform for twits to be twits as an amusement to other twits.
Fortunately, you don't have to use it and a great majority of people largely don't. For some reason it gets fetishized by the media -- probably because twittishness is good for business -- and spun as if it were important.