Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

annoying.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 215 posts

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#161

Post by smegsicle »

rado wrote: post #37
smegsicle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how would you expect it to go off?

There will be a huge scandal when somebody's personal info leak leads to irreparable damage: exposed political affiliation, health issues, sexual orientation etc.

i guess so, maybe a massive leak across several sensitive demographics? just seems like boiling the frog how things like doxing is now mostly ignorable outside whatever immediate drama-circle is involved- even hunter biden's laptop is just, "who doesn't smoke crack?" and "of course he's involved with shady deals, who isn't?"

ot: still haven't seen the eli5/timeline of the relationship between ukraine and the dem party, maybe i've only heard exaggerations..

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#162

Post by spullara »

notreallyserio wrote: post #154
spullara wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is almost never the case for me. The replies to this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1512109658432888... are way, way off screen (except for the self replies). And when you scroll down to them it's not clear if they're replies to the first tweet, the last, or the middle.

Every tweet under the tweet are a reply if they don't have a line connecting them to a previous tweet. The ones that have lines up are replies to the tweet the line connects to.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#164

Post by playpause »

mikestew wrote: post #33
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 it's a variation of Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I've used Twitter since early days, and the only reason I even keep an account is to keep the user name. But I quit regularly viewing Twitter going on probably close to ten years ago, and open it in some form maybe once a week to look at a specific post (not just browse). So, as one who doesn't use the interface very often: it's a fucking dumpster fire. If…

I used to think exactly this - whatever Twitter has that makes it so popular, it can’t be its dumpster fire UI. But in the last year I finally got into it and it became a go-to place for me at certain times of day to get a kind of social/conversational fix that is just not provided by any other social networks. At some point I realised I no longer find the UI baffling, I seem to sail around it intuitively and enjoy it. Now I think it might be a smart decision not to ‘fix’ it. Yes you are constantly hunting around for the context of things, but I wonder if that’s a big part of what makes it work, makes it more enjoyable for your social brain. It’s that sense of “what’s going on? What’s this thing about?” and then being rewarded, over and over. It’s the closest thing online to a bustling marketplace where you bump into people you see often and overhear interesting things that draw you in.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#165

Post by _moof »

svnpenn wrote: post #156
_moof wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People split long posts into dozens of tweets I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape about this. Ok, there's more than one tweet, but they're all on one page, in order, so you've got all the text right there. It's not like you have to do anything special to read it. You just read it and scroll, like you would any other medium. What's the problem?

People are deliberately misusing the site. The whole point of the character limit, is to force you to make a concise thought. Some people ignore that, and just ramble over a dozen tweets, like a monkey with a typewriter. The anarchist in me says fine, but objectively it's just a dumb way to use the site. Just make a blog post and link to it.

Twitter very intentionally added support for this use case. There's literally a button just for it. There's even a help page about how to do it: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/create-a-thread

So maybe this would've been a misuse in 2007, but nowadays it isn't. An objection based on rules just doesn't hold water.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#168

Post by Someone »

threeseed wrote: post #13
dmart wrote: post #5

The 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.

> 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.

I always use the (small) button in the top left of the screen that appears left of the clock, e.g. “◀ Twitter”.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#169

Post by goldtownjac »

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly.

Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service that is hostile to them_. Especially because you and I both know that these workarounds aren't going to work forever, and soon enough you'll be scrambling for another hole in the wall.

Cut the cord. You don't need twitter. You don't need reddit, which has been employing similar patterns recently. The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Take some time to reflect on your relationship to this technology and the people/ideas whose presence in your life/mind is dependent on it.

Post reply on HN