Twitter's Complexity

created on Sat, Feb 27, 2016

https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/20/twitters-missing-manual/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11171643

It takes thousands of words to explain how to use a service that permits only 140 characters.

This is a space that is ripe for disruption. Someone or something could create a much simpler "discussion" engine that would probably gain significant traction.

The hard core Twitter users, such as media people, would not leave Twitter for a new service.

But some Twitter users might migrate, and the new simpler discussion service may attract people who never used Twitter, or who only dabbled with Twitter.

It was good to see that a couple people in the related Hacker News thread mentioned Twitter's horrible web UI/UX.

In the past, I have jokingly assumed that Twitter intentionally made its web experience frustrating in order to encourage users to install a native app.

Twitter's mobile and desktop/laptop web experiences break multiple, long-standing, and basic web principles.

I don't use any Twitter native apps. I don't log into Twitter. But occasionally, I like to access the Twitter feeds of users or see search results for a topic. And I'm always impressed by Twitter's bad web experience. It must make sense for hard core users. But the bad UI/UX may prevent me from accessing Twitter more often.

Excerpts from the HN thread about the so-called manual and Twitter's web design:

"Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it. People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they're doing."

"I don't think the self-reply trick is well known, but it's useful in the very common case of splitting a message across multiple tweets."

Hah! Self-reply. I've been doing that for about the past three years that my Junco code has existed, powering JotHut. My use of self-reply was an unexpected usage pattern. Junco/JotHut was intended to be a community site. The reply feature was for others. But when I switched JotHut to single-user mode, I wound up using the self-reply to organize notes or thoughts in one thread. I have revisited old