31–40 of 158 posts
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On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to what it was a decade ago. It’s materially the same, which is rare for unicorns of this time.
Materially in 2010 twitter was not the bullhorn of a political dictator.
There's some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140 character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled nicely with mobile/cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone era).
On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to what it was a decade ago. It’s materially the same, which is rare for unicorns of this time.
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Disagree. Before you could follow people. Now you have an algorithm of forced political tweets.
You can follow people. But if the people you follow "like" a political post, then you might see that. You can also tell Twitter to "Show you less" of any kind of post.
This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…
Hah! I did something quite similar back in the day for text message notifications of server downtime. The problem was that sometimes Twitter's messages were delayed by hours...
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On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to what it was a decade ago. It’s materially the same, which is rare for unicorns of this time.
For me, an occasional reader without a Twitter account, the experience became much worse in the past decade. That's because Twitter switched of RSS feeds and when opening links to individual tweets nowadays there is this ubiquitous "Something Went Wrong, Try Again" on first page load.
There's some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140 character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled nicely with mobile/cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone era).
On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to what it was a decade ago. It’s materially the same, which is rare for unicorns of this time.
There's some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140 character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled nicely with mobile/cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone era).
Similarly ironic: that Twitter essentially now requires a phone number for continued use of their service – by freezing all new users' accounts, soon after minor activity, until a phone number is provided. But, they won't let you use that phone endpoint for reading/posting.
During registration I was given a choice between providing an email address or a phone number. I provided an email address, only to immediately have my account locked until I provided a phone number. Well, I wouldn't have given my email address if I knew a phone number was required anyway! It wouldn't even let me visit my account settings to delete my account, and I never got a reply when I emailed Twitter support.
> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.
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I don't think there are any countries with government controlled internet that don't also have government controlled mobile networks, and SMS is sent in the clear?
They'd have to remember to shut down the SMS network.
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IMO the reasoning is more likely "you have to use our official app" rather than "text messages are expensive to send so let's discontinue"
But you don't. The mobile website works. Worse of the worse cases use Dabr.
My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my own browser. (edit: and note this is while using FB in my mobile browser. Think about how much more complicated a FB page should be than a single tweet, and it's still 100x faster to load.)
I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional because they'd really like me to install the app and therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard eventually reverses.