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…
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.
Disagree with that assessment. The readers go where the good authors are as well - and so it is with Groupon, Doordash, Etsy, etc
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?
You'll see more ads and promoted content if you click through threads. Whenever you click a tweet to read through its threaded replies, sponsored content blocks refresh even if the page itself is an SPA that doesn't do a full browser refresh.
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.
That's exactly what I said LOL. What's the need for your anger?
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.
You've always had to login to post, so I don't see how twitters increasing push to force logins would impact a preexisting spam problem.
Meanwhile Twitter just straight-up put up a loginwall. Whenever I scroll down more than a few tweets, I get an undismissable popup prompting me to login.
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.
That's exactly the case, and its not at all limited to "right of center" positions. Accounts that are deemed undesirable by Twitter for whatever reason (usually involving posts that go counter to mainstream narratives) have all of their replies to every post listed after "see more replies" to reduce their visibility. And beneath "see more replies" you will often see another "show posts that may be offensive" that you have to click on to see even more replies from users Twitter finds less desirable still. Very frequently none of these posts will be offensive in any way. Those who have their posts under these extended tabs also don't give notifications to those they are replying to. It's censorship and information manipulation from top to bottom on Twitter.
Best 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...
I just do it manually: Replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.net", keeping the rest of the URL the same.
wow! that is nit!! but unfortunately doesnt render retweets
>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.
That's exactly the case, and its not at all limited to "right of center" positions. Accounts that are deemed undesirable by Twitter for whatever reason (usually involving posts that go counter to mainstream narratives) have all of their replies to every post listed after "see more replies" to reduce their visibility. And beneath "see more replies" you will often see another "show posts that may be offensive" that you…
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?
No, it's very confusing.
I also found Facebook too confusing to use back when I briefly tried it around 2009. A friend who'd been on it since it was still exclusive to some universities assured me it made a lot more sense a year or two before that, but by then, it was too confusing for me and I bounced off fast.
The Twitter UI is a mess. It’s infuriating me to even try to explain the problem to someone who doesn’t see it. For example, can you explain to me - without going to try it out first - where exactly to tap (on a phone) to view the comments on a picture post in your home feed?
Can’t you just tap the post (not the picture , but the post).
What do you mean by the “post”? The picture is the post..