Twitter design discussion - may 2016

"what is wrong with twitter?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736808

i do not post to twitter. i do not have any twitter apps installed on any devices. occasionally, i access an individual's or an organization's twitter feed directly through a web browser on phone and on desktop/laptop.

• http://twitter.com/ia
• https://twitter.com/hashtag/indieweb?src=hash

it's an understatement to say twitter's web UI/UX is frustrating to use. it's amazing that a company that employs thousands of people can create something so awkward and complex.

i have humorously assumed that twitter's irritating web experience was intentional to encourage more people to download a twitter app.

as of mid-day on Fri, May 2016, 57 comments exist in that HN thread. Here's content from the top comment:

The interface is bad and difficult to use. It is also incredibly bloated considering they only need to display 140 characters and some media.

Say, you see a chain of replies. You click Show More replies a few times, then you want to see replies to a particular reply. You click on it. Suddenly everything disappears except the original tweet and replies to this reply. There's no way to go back to the previous state. You click back and only see the top replies again. For example go to https://twitter.com/chromakode/status/731942777131425792 and try to follow all the replies. If you don't want to throw your PC out of the window after a dozen tweets, I admire your patience.

Also, say you're viewing an individual tweet (like the one I linked above). For some reason, search is unavailable from this view. Why? Also if you accidentally click anywhere outside of that tweet, the entire page reloads with the profile of the person who made that tweet. Happens to me all the time.

What if there's an image in this tweet? You click on it and get yet another modal window that shows this image slightly enlarged. We now have two levels of modal windows and yet we can't see the full image yet. You need to copy the image's url and add :large or :orig to the end of it to actually see the uncropped, full-size image.

I swear, a kindergartener could've come up with a better UI experience.

Another comment:

The main problem with Twitter is that it's no longer a chat system, it's a broadcasting system, where the broadcasting is done by media stars, sports people, journalists etc.

Unless you already have friends on Twitter, there's basically nobody to talk to.

That leaves more than 90% of users tweeting into a void, with no one listening. This is why most Twitter accounts are inactive.

If you're a normal person with friends and family on Facebook, you're better of "tweeting" there, because you are far more likely to get a response.

it also seems that every twitter poster tries to create a quote that outshines everyone else's effort. the memorable one-liner. everyone tries to be a comedian.

old-school message boards are better, in my opinion, especially if the board is narrowly-focused.

another HN comment:

I hanged out in IRC with a bunch of smart bloggers ten years ago. They wrote well-thought and interesting content that was easily aggregated through RSS.

Then there was a massive migration to Twitter where the style changed to (supossedly) witty, and a lot of new people wrote that couldn't have written two paragraphs that made any sense.

The interface is also terrible, very difficult to follow a conversation with, and the last straw was the trend to make it all with JavaScript in the client that made Twitter more of "an app" than "a web site".

HN comment:

I don't hate Twitter, however, when I follow someone for a specific purpose (programming for instance, or music) I don't want to hear him talking about his baby daughter, his new car or how "Trump is evil", no matter what political side I belong to. That's the biggest problem with Twitter. When you subscribe a RSS feed, most feeds have channels with separate topics, that's what Twitter need, follower tweets filtered by topics in which I'm interested in, I don't want to see the rest.

some bloggers write about a wide variety of subjects. i may be interested only in their tech-related posts. i ignore or scroll past all of their other posts.

some people maintain separate blogs for all of their interests.

HN comment:

Twitter lost a lot of relevance to me when they killed the RSS output. It used to be awesome to have a dozen feeds being filtered and presented to me each morning.

I do have a couple of pages bookmarked that I check on occasion, but generally I now find it preferable to wait until events / occurrences surface through other forms of aggregation. To the extent that I've not actually created a Twitter account.

Perhaps if they offered a paid-subscription offer with powerful filtering tools to shake-out the chaff. I don't want their opinion of relevance, I want mine.
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when i worked at the bsbo, i accessed the rss feed for the "biggest week in american birding" twitter account, and i displayed the info on web page on my own server. the screen display was used by the bsbo during the festival. we displayed it on large TV screens at the bsbo and at the maumee bay state park lodge. repackaging the tweets from an account that the bsbo owned was useful. then twitter eliminated the rss feed. my display setup used frames or iframes to display the tweets, weather radar, forecast, and something else. it was one screen of useful information.