One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline. I've always struggled to understand the full context of the tweet I'm reading (that is, where is this tweet in the full conversation?). Do others also struggle with this? Am I just Doing It Wrong?
The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
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Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#22The sub-rant about every app having its own browser really rang true for me. I never gave it much thought until now, but wow, what a horrible experience. Frequently I click a link to a private GitHub repo (404!) or a news article (paywall!) inside an app and then have to clunkily "Open in Safari" to actually apply my session cookie. To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I only logged in some of…
The confusing part for non-developers is how to get back from Safari to Twitter. Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures. And so they end up going Home, getting distracted by some other app and not going back to Twitter at all. That's why in-browser UIs exist. Because it makes a big different to keeping users in the app.
> Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.
I mean, maybe that could be an indication that cryptic and completely arbitrary swiping gestures without any sort of discoverability or visual feedback might not be the best interface for fundamental user actions like navigating the history.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#23Twitter seems to be slowly asphyxiating itself in a number of ways: login walls, artificially curated timelines, and turning a blind eye to spam (it seems to be okay as long as it's terrible autogenerated NFT "art"?) all make it a thoroughly unpleasant service to use.
I'm at the point where I'd rather not have it, but it's effectively the LinkedIn of my professional sphere.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#24Twitter seems to be slowly asphyxiating itself in a number of ways: login walls, artificially curated timelines, and turning a blind eye to spam (it seems to be okay as long as it's terrible autogenerated NFT "art"?) all make it a thoroughly unpleasant service to use. I'm at the point where I'd rather not have it, but it's effectively the LinkedIn of my professional sphere.
Interestingly, I think login walls are to stop spam. It interests me how many design decisions by youtube, for example, were to stop spam and getting rid of fake views and likes. Not directly for the user's experience.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#25The quality of the experience is also going down. My feed is rapidly approaching 50% ads by pixel count now.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#26Twitter seems to be slowly asphyxiating itself in a number of ways: login walls, artificially curated timelines, and turning a blind eye to spam (it seems to be okay as long as it's terrible autogenerated NFT "art"?) all make it a thoroughly unpleasant service to use. I'm at the point where I'd rather not have it, but it's effectively the LinkedIn of my professional sphere.
I feel the same way about LinkedIn ;)
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#27They don't want you to leave either of course. I'm an artist and there's a constant discussion with other artists over how to get people to ever see tweets where you mention things like "my Patreon" or "commissions" or other little things like this that involve going elsewhere or exchanging money, all that shit gets hidden by the algorithm. Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel li…
> Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or something.
It's been bizarre watching the increasing prevalence of these types of behaviors the last few years. There was a period of time when I remember seeing a number of consumer tech youtubers discussing supply chain issues but having to avoid using the words "COVID" or "pandemic" for fear of demonetization or being buried by the algorithm. You see similar behaviors everywhere on TikTok, where a whole new vocabulary has sprung up to talk about taboo topics. "Unalive" instead of "kill", "seggs" instead of "sex", and so on. My understanding is that some of the TikTok vocabulary originated among kids communicating over school-monitored channels.
The most unsettling part is that it seems like in many of these cases nobody can point to concrete evidence that a word is actively being punished by the algorithm. The simple existence of these black-box moderation tools has a panopticon-esque effect where people will preemptively alter their behavior just in case.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#28Twitter seems to be slowly asphyxiating itself in a number of ways: login walls, artificially curated timelines, and turning a blind eye to spam (it seems to be okay as long as it's terrible autogenerated NFT "art"?) all make it a thoroughly unpleasant service to use. I'm at the point where I'd rather not have it, but it's effectively the LinkedIn of my professional sphere.
I feel the same way about LinkedIn ;)
I was going to say this. I tried LinkedIn a few weeks as an intern ~10 years ago (oh man I feel old now) and was extremely underwhelmed.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#29I found this statement really bizarre:
> Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don’t use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design.
I've always found Twitter to be horribly confusing. It's mishmash of replies, re-tweets, and completely unrelated other tweets has been there for years and never made any sense to someone who doesn't have an account.
I don't have a Reddit account but know enough to use old.reddit.com for everything. It's ugly, but it's not at all confusing. It's about as straightforward as it could be.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#30The sub-rant about every app having its own browser really rang true for me. I never gave it much thought until now, but wow, what a horrible experience. Frequently I click a link to a private GitHub repo (404!) or a news article (paywall!) inside an app and then have to clunkily "Open in Safari" to actually apply my session cookie. To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I only logged in some of…
More frustrating still is often they remove the option to opt-out of their in-app browser so you have to do it on a link by link basis as you mentioned. Even more annoying on Android is it then breaks "smart" app links like opening Youtube for those links instead of the browser.