Twitter requires an account to scroll through tweets, which is why I just close links to twitter on reflex now. There's no point, I won't be able to read anything.
The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
61–70 of 215 posts
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#62Twitter 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.
> I think login walls are to stop spam
You need a login in order to spam. What a stupid theory.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#63Twitter 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…
You go where the readers are, not where the best author UX is. The draw of Twitter is that your random thought can be forced upon millions of people ("the algorithm"), and you get feedback like "31,000 people gave you a <3". You aren't going to get that anywhere else.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I think login walls are to stop spam You need a login in order to spam. What a stupid theory.
While I agree with your first sentence, I don’t think your second sentence is constructive.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#65I 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 kno…
Same here.
I found old reddit really easy to understand and found twitter to be much harder.
I bounced off twitter a few times just because I didn’t understand the UI.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#66I 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 kno…
Are you serious? It's a very simple thread-based design. Threads are separated by approptiate dividers or whitespace or indentation. I don't get it.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#67If you want to read Twitter without a Twitter account, the search function lets you read more before the paywall stops you. Until they plug that hole.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#68I 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 kno…
Are you serious? It's a very simple thread-based design. Threads are separated by approptiate dividers or whitespace or indentation. I don't get it.
I also find Twitter nearly impossible to follow. The threaded model is difficult to build a mental model around, you must click/tap endlessly to read a whole thread, I see error messages daily that are incorrect ("this tweet has been deleted" when it has not, or "offline" notices when it is not, etc), significant confusion on tweet metrics (reply count is sometimes visible, sometimes not?), etc. I could go on forever about my issues with it.
Been on since 2009, follow/followed by a few hundred people, use reddit since 2006, blahblah. Reddit isn't great either but I find it a lot less confusing to read on a day-to-day basis. At least old reddit...new reddit is quite confusing IMO in many of the same ways twitter is.
If I had to guess I would vote with other commenters here who are saying that the UX is likely on purpose, and has been built with metrics in mind and not user comprehension.
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#69Best thing I ever did was install Nitter redirect. Even though Nitter breaks every once in a while, it makes Twitter usable (assuming you don't mind read-only interaction).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
#70I was excommunicated from Twitter on fairly laughable grounds (like all social networks these days, they elude exposure by being as oblique/obtuse in moderation as possible), and then allowed endless nonsense because it was 'engaging' which is basically why we have the goat rodeo of today.
I went to Mastodon a while ago, and while I miss some of the pocket communities of Twitter (mostly academic/political science and the arts type of stuff), the UX for Mastodon is far more sanity-friendly.