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The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

annoying.technology

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Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#141

Post by jollybean »

eminence32 wrote: post #21

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?

Yes, this is the most absurd thing about Twitter and makes me wonder how it can exist.

I have no clue who is responding to who or when or what the 'thread' is.

YouTube content is also very unstructured - in 2022 there will be a 5 part series and it's nary impossible to find the 'next part' it's utterly inane.

I don't know if this is 'just me' but it triggers something deep within, like an OCD, like something 'very out of place'.

Twitter and Youtube almost rely on you to just go from one random thought to the next with nary and consideration in between.

They offer obviously triggering content. TikTok I've noticed does not try to dose you up with political BS.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#142

Post by kbelder »

hackernewds wrote: post #101
emerged wrote: post #51

Twitter is the homeless encampment of social networks. Sometimes I’ll click the wrong link and end up there. It’s uncomfortable.. lots of people screaming and spreading their excrement around.. I just avoid eye contact, keep quiet and close the tab as quickly as possible.

You seem to have a lot of biases about large swaths of people

Particularly excrement-spreaders and twitter posters. But I repeat myself.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#143

Post by spullara »

eminence32 wrote: post #21

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?

I think if you tried you could understand why it looks the way it does. There replies are rendered under what they are replying to. Do you have any example of what you think is being displayed incorrectly?

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#144

Post by redmen »

redmen wrote: post #24
woodruffw wrote: post #23

Twitter 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.

edit: to also stop spam.

I wish people would give you the benefit of the doubt instead of finding a single wrong word and then attacking that point.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#145

Post by Gollapalli »

jsemrau wrote: post #127
eminence32 wrote: post #21

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?

Twitter is terrible as a social platform. It's a great platform to get quick news about something. Obviously platforms like these thrive during eventful times. Just look at who is posting about the Ukraine/Russia war. But it's not about dialogue or threads. It's only consumption.

Imagine a world where social media companies drove controversial events just to drive engagement metrics.

Replace the word "drove" with the word "stoked" and you have the current world.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#146

Post by Gollapalli »

dionidium wrote: post #92
eminence32 wrote: post #21

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?

It is a plainly idiotic user interface and threading model and the fact that it's lasted so long looks to me like evidence of extreme dysfunction within the company. Consider also their privacy model. Twitter is the only website I have ever been a user of that lets me see more information if I log out than I can see when I'm logged in (i.e. the tweets of anybody who has blocked me). Deep confusion is on display at ev…

I only use it on mobile, but I kind of like it, tbh.

Maybe it's a generational thing.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#147

Post by MisterBastahrd »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #45

Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so they can increase the bloat to 10MB inste…

Many people are not using twitter directly. They're using hootsuite or one of the other marketing products that make twitter usable.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#148

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #45

Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so they can increase the bloat to 10MB inste…

It's a mouthpiece of the establishment. The ideologically agree, so they get space on legacy media, just like facebook.

Notice how you don't see any discussions, or news stories related to 4chan unless it's bad? But there've been really wholesome things there, and really interesting benign things too.

But they treat twitter/fb/reddit, like pals, because they all stamp out wrongthink.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#150

Post by wwweston »

twofornone wrote: post #55
pram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many things that make it an unpleasant ordeal. Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. Having to click on individual tweets to see their replies. Pressing back and having your window reset to the top of the replies page, and now you have to click 'see more replies' all over again. Having your history completely broken somehow so pressing back doesn't even take you to the right place. etc etc

>Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. I don't know if I'm just suffering from confirmation bias but it seems like this feature is used as a form of soft censorship, to discourage users from reading certain threads, as it appears to disproportionately pop up on "controversial" topics where right of center opinions are likely to be expressed.

> soft censorship

If it's soft, it's not censorship.

(On top of "if it's private, it's not censorship.")

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