So, as one who doesn't use the interface very often: it's a fucking dumpster fire. If one were one of today's 10K, seeing Twitter for the first time, imagine explaining how to read a thread (no, you are not allowed to direct the n00b to a 3rd-party tool such as Nitter). It would appear to me, a not-regular user, that Twitter tries to do threaded conversations and fails miserably. As with parent comment, finding the context quickly turns into actual work. Someone must get value out of Twitter if they put up with all this, but that someone is not me. At the end of the day, I find Twitter to just not be worth the trouble anymore.
Consider also their privacy model. Twitter is the only website I have ever been a user of that lets me see more information if I log out than I can see when I'm logged in (i.e. the tweets of anybody who has blocked me). Deep confusion is on display at every turn.
Maybe it's a generational thing.
Would you rather have them invade every bit of privacy you have to track you when you are signed out?
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
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.
I'm not sure that even works -- when I go to a tweet in a "thread" I see there are replies but I can't figure out how to view them. All I see are the rest of the tweets in the "thread".
I've completely given up on seeing replies to tweets mid-thread. I'm too dumb to grok Twitter's UI.
Second: I think they are leaning into the surprising and sometimes pleasing juxtaposition of conversations that can be happening "close" to each other. Like, I'll click into a tweet, and generally the first "thread" is the one where the OP replies to themselves - but that's not always the case! Sometimes another reply is more popular and they will swap it.
I think they are trying to give you a sense of how the conversation has gone - when they break the thread they are showing you that, based on activity, other people are ignoring the thread and paying attention to this other thread. It messes you up if all you want to do is see what the OP said, but if you are there to see "why people care about this tweet" (also common) it's important to understand where things fell apart.
Replace the word "drove" with the word "stoked" and you have the current world.
They do not flatten it to a linear timeline, they "optimize" it by mixing in the important sub-threads. Generally they show only the first level of replies. and then they optimize it by also showing some replies to those replies, which can go down pretty deep. So basically they give the thread, but selectively hide the unimportant parts. I understand the reasoning here, as there popular tweets can gain many replies of which most are just noise. But the actual result is a clusterfuck of experience which only makes it worse.
And lately they even made it worse, because now they also show irrelevant tweets under the normal tweet-view, and it's hard to see where the original tweet ended.
I have no clue who is responding to who or when or what the 'thread' is.
YouTube content is also very unstructured - in 2022 there will be a 5 part series and it's nary impossible to find the 'next part' it's utterly inane.
I don't know if this is 'just me' but it triggers something deep within, like an OCD, like something 'very out of place'.
Twitter and Youtube almost rely on you to just go from one random thought to the next with nary and consideration in between.
They offer obviously triggering content. TikTok I've noticed does not try to dose you up with political BS.
https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1512109658432888...
are way, way off screen (except for the self replies). And when you scroll down to them it's not clear if they're replies to the first tweet, the last, or the middle.
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.
Maybe it's on purpose?
In small discussions where most people are interested in every detail being followed up on, HN and Reddit's style is nicer. In popular discussions where every individual message has too many replies to care about and most people don't care to see every single subthread to completion, Twitter's style is much nicer because you can just scroll without repeatedly hitting buttons to avoid getting caught in way too deep subthreads every single message.
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1511425005443174402.svg
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1510898215448678400.svg
I find it invaluable, others find it unusable.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
That can be framed as a feature.
Replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.net", keeping the rest of the URL the same.
Overall, I'd like to see something other than pure convenience factor in. I think there's a moral (ethos) & logical (logos) cause here, working against the single garment of identity being turned into a corporate run straight-jacket of dominion, and accepting some responsibility, some charge for helping push us towards better, to positively affecting each other, is to me what life is about.
Personally, on extensions versus logins, this doesn't seem like a big ask. Getting a private, non-aggressive, non dark-pattern website is a huge upgrade, for very little cost. Having links I can share easily is a huge upgrade versus linking people to partial fragments & concealed login-walls.
The description for this extension says it only affects Twitter. This is fairly easy to validate in devtools, or if you trust it you can go read the open source, which also proves this claim to be true. This extension will not slow down any other site. This would be great information for the extension stores to make known! Oh, the Firefox site tells you this! Personally I hadn't heard the complaint about extensions slowing things down before. That's a shame. It'd be great for the browser to make more information visible to end-users about the performance impact of extensions. Anyhow, I was able to find this core evidence in less time than it takes a gmail tab to open: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect/blob/5b997ea...
Extension reviews are also great. Looking for some low reviews, & finding if anyone has anything particularly technical & noticeable is a great easy filter to put extensions through, to keep your experience quality high. Trying to socialize both the utility & hazards of extensions is a huge challenge for the web, and something I'd love to see us get better at, so we can more effectively be augmenting our user agency.
Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service that is hostile to them_. Especially because you and I both know that these workarounds aren't going to work forever, and soon enough you'll be scrambling for another hole in the wall.
Cut the cord. You don't need twitter. You don't need reddit, which has been employing similar patterns recently. The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Take some time to reflect on your relationship to this technology and the people/ideas whose presence in your life/mind is dependent on it.
Network effects are real.
I only use Twitter to read posts that someone linked to. I would prefer these posts to be hosted elsewhere, but I have no control over that, just like I cannot control the messenger apps that others are using. I currently have three options for communicating online:
1) use the platform/protocol that someone else picked, directly or through some other tool
2) convince them to use the platform/protocol that I prefer
3) stop sharing content with that person
I think the only way out of this is regulation that breaks up walled gardens. Companies have no incentive to open up their gardens to competitors, so we may have to apply some force.
> Cut the cord. You don't need twitter. You don't need reddit, which has been employing similar patterns recently. The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Take some time to reflect on your relationship to this technology and the people/ideas whose presence in your life/mind is dependent on it.
The cost for that for many people is losing connections to friends, family and other contacts, unless their peers migrate at the same time. That Signal moment was a bit like that when many people moved from Whatsapp to Signal. My wife was finally able to get rid of Whatsapp without losing contacts.
How many times does someone have to fall for the same scam before they deserve some of the blame?
Only support services that aren't blatantly trying to buy their way into becoming a monopoly and abusing their locked in customers.
There are no such services. Everything that gets popular goes for abuse and lock-in and often they only start with that after they already have become wildly popular. There is nothing you can do against it.
Gettr really drove this point home for me. Here’s a right wing Twitter alternative that’s actually not bad UX wise, it’s been recommended by big names including Joe rogan, yet what’s happened? Most conservative influencers have stayed on Twitter and complain on Twitter about Twitter censorship. They mirror their posts on gettr with some tool but that’s it, Twitter is still primary.
If you can’t even get these people to leave Twitter, that means something.
Based on their new API efforts it's going in the different direction of actually making more third party apps possible. They just added a bookmarks endpoint that only used to exist in the official apps and not in the API, now everyone can implement that.
Barely. The amount of content that is locked in Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Co. is enormous and I have never managed to find anything that can remotely compete with them. Worse yet, most alternatives are just clones of those services, they don't really change anything fundamentally. If they would ever get successful, they would go down the very same path. See imgur, which started as an image-sharing-but-good site and is now just another site trying to force you into their mobile app.
At this point I think the only way to solve this is legislation that forces those companies to open up the data and not wall it away. GDPR already did that for users personal data. The upcoming Digital Markets Act will force messaging services to interact with each other and maybe the walled gardens will be the next target.
The "regular" web and email get a lot of criticism for various things, but they can be thought of as federated platforms people adopted. They're the glue that makes these other things usable.
I'm not advocating for anything in particular, but if you could get enough people to start using a federated alternative, I think it would be enough.
For a very long time, if you went to mobile.twitter.com and set your User-Agent to that of some old browser, you'd get a sane plain-HTML version. Apparently you can still get plain HTML if you use Googlebot instead:
I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape about this. Ok, there's more than one tweet, but they're all on one page, in order, so you've got all the text right there. It's not like you have to do anything special to read it. You just read it and scroll, like you would any other medium. What's the problem?
Some people ignore that, and just ramble over a dozen tweets, like a monkey with a typewriter. The anarchist in me says fine, but objectively it's just a dumb way to use the site. Just make a blog post and link to it.
Notice how you don't see any discussions, or news stories related to 4chan unless it's bad? But there've been really wholesome things there, and really interesting benign things too.
But they treat twitter/fb/reddit, like pals, because they all stamp out wrongthink.
I'm at the point where I'd rather not have it, but it's effectively the LinkedIn of my professional sphere.
I don't think that holds up in general, and especially not in Twitter's case. Logged-out users can barely interact with the site -- all of the important interactions (and, in particular, all of the ones that would be concerning from a spam-prevention standpoint) require the user to be logged in.
I'm not sure it applies to YouTube either. The site has very few login requirements, other than for age-restricted videos.
You need a login in order to spam. What a stupid theory.
I wish people would give you the benefit of the doubt instead of finding a single wrong word and then attacking that point.
Sometimes I’ll click the wrong link and end up there. It’s uncomfortable.. lots of people screaming and spreading their excrement around.. I just avoid eye contact, keep quiet and close the tab as quickly as possible.
> 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 know enough to use old.reddit.com for everything. It's ugly, but it's not at all confusing. It's about as straightforward as it could be.
But yeah, I only go there when I get a link to something specific anyway.
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.
Impossible to get into until the algo kicks in for me.
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?
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.
- Switch to an alternate Twitter frontend like nitter.net. There are extensions that can redirect to this automatically as well.
- Block Twitter from setting any cookies. This will prevent loginwalls.
- Add this custom uBlock Origin filter:
twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
I've mostly been using the Fritter app for now for whenever I want to read some tweet. So far, I like it very much: Native performance with no nag screens and no engagement bullshit, just tweets and replies. The only problem is the often replies don't load. My suspicion is Twitter is doing some shady stuff with the API again.
Up until the Ukraine war started, this worked for a few days and then I’d get the login wall. Delete cookies again, buy a few more days. Since the war started though they seem to be acknowledging a lot of non-logged-in people need to see tweets and I haven’t seen the login wall since.
You would not believe the amount of disdain Twitter, Inc, has for its users.
What's cute is that Twitter has always been a walled-garden, since its founding. We have better alternatives now. Don't matter though, because there's a centralization/decentralization pendulum in big picture computing trends. If you skate to where the puck is going to be (not where it's been), we're in the middle of a swing to the decentralization side.
Look at W3C recommendation ActivityPub (a specification for the federated social web with a vibrant and fun ecosystem of communities). You may know of Mastodon, its biggest implementation.
Or, for the free speech* types out there, just host a WordPress site where you agree with the terms of the AUP.
My first thought was that the unrepentant bizarreness of Twitter's layout was going to be the "wall" in this case. But the idea that Reddit - a mild variation on the timeless forum format - is somehow more confusing than Twitter? No.
Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or something.
It's been bizarre watching the increasing prevalence of these types of behaviors the last few years. There was a period of time when I remember seeing a number of consumer tech youtubers discussing supply chain issues but having to avoid using the words "COVID" or "pandemic" for fear of demonetization or being buried by the algorithm. You see similar behaviors everywhere on TikTok, where a whole new vocabulary has sprung up to talk about taboo topics. "Unalive" instead of "kill", "seggs" instead of "sex", and so on. My understanding is that some of the TikTok vocabulary originated among kids communicating over school-monitored channels.
The most unsettling part is that it seems like in many of these cases nobody can point to concrete evidence that a word is actively being punished by the algorithm. The simple existence of these black-box moderation tools has a panopticon-esque effect where people will preemptively alter their behavior just in case.
Deadpool's circumlocution around killing and death is a parody of similar linguistic gymnastics from 1980s cartoons, which were considered "for children" and so addressing death directly was forbidden. And given that Deadpool's mental illness makes him genre-savvy, it was probably deliberate in-universe and out. The writers then paired that with Spidey using "kill" directly in an animated kids' block show, to show how ridiculous such censorship was.
The sheer irony is that we're now self-censoring to 1980s cartoon levels to avoid robotic censors we can't even argue with.
1. Promise everyone to decentralize itself, aka the "bluesky" project. Except it's been a thing for ~2 years and exactly zero meaningful progress has been made. Related: didn't Jack say they wanted to open up the API again?
2. Become ever more manipulative and get in my way more and more with its engagement growth bullshit.
How hard would it be to simply comment out all the checks in the code to give everyone the same access official apps have? Why is it taking them months? It's as if they don't actually want to open up their API.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine led me to seek alternatives, and I now use nitter for those few Twitter accounts that I care to follow. It's no panacea, but it's better than being punished by Twitter for not logging in.
But they just don't prioritise the interests of developers and technical people who are often the ones writing these blog posts.
It's an encrypted session, to identify your account to Twitter. It's encrypted to prevent an outside party from figuring out which user shared the link, but if you share multiple links from the same session and someone knows you were the source of one of them, they'd be able to link the other ones to you as well.
I get enough value out of Twitter as a social space that future me would recommend just sucking it up and getting an account. I like that I can still use a fairly low-engagement-driving chronological view (even if they keep trying to kill it, only to backpedal each time). I hate the embedded browser, but as the author notes this is more of a platform-wide problem.
But here’s the thing: I never would have listened to future me about any of this had Twitter not been freely browsable when I started to give it a try. I wasn’t opposed to a closed social network even then—I was fairly active on Facebook at the same time. But they’re used in vastly different ways. I never would have understood the appeal of Twitter at all if I needed to sign up just to see all the weird rando stuff I’ve since come to follow and appreciate.
twitter.com##div#layers div[data-testid="sheetDialog"]:upward(div[role="group"][tabindex="0"])
twitter.com##html:style(overflow: auto !important;)
If you can't take your entire profile and move it to a raspherry pi in your living room on a forked server via a forked client (possibly losing your handle) and continue communicating with your social network then this is inevitable.
To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I only logged in some of the time?") Terrible UX.
Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind that feature?
I mean, I can sort-of understand that individual apps want me to stay inside the app as long as possible. But why would the platform vendor actively support or even push that pattern?
Man I don't miss owning a smartphone, this stuff is really pants on head retarded.
And so they end up going Home, getting distracted by some other app and not going back to Twitter at all.
That's why in-browser UIs exist. Because it makes a big different to keeping users in the app.
I mean, maybe that could be an indication that cryptic and completely arbitrary swiping gestures without any sort of discoverability or visual feedback might not be the best interface for fundamental user actions like navigating the history.
I always use the (small) button in the top left of the screen that appears left of the clock, e.g. “◀ Twitter”.
(/s, since that’s not obvious on the internet anymore)
For anyone looking for alternatives, I've been building https://sqwok.im and welcome you to check it out. Sqwok is all about live discussion with fully public topical chatrooms, a simple interface, small community, and driven by desire for building a better place for conversation on the web.
Or even better, why can't we say goodbye to the 'mobile web' and have the option for mobile browsers to always load the real (desktop) site?
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.
quick disclaimer I am a mod of the /r/Mastodon subreddit so there may be a bit of a bias there (not really though, I just like the software).