
Twitter's missing manual - prawn
https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/20/twitters-missing-manual/
======
mbrock
Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it.

If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you
need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do
the trick.

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.

(And yes, it's pretty hard to figure out how to actually use Twitter
correctly.)

~~~
macrael
The point isn't to have an actual manual but to show how complex things have
grown.

~~~
recursive
I don't know. I'm getting a lot of value out of this as a manual. I've tried
to get into twitter a few times, but I had trouble figuring out how you do
anything. I was surprised to find (guess it's still the case) that most things
aren't documented anywhere.

I've bookmarked this, and will definitely refer to it next time I try to do
anything with twitter.

------
lingben
Too little, too late. Twitter has the most abysmal UI/UX I've ever seen,
especially when you consider its clout and popularity (although that is fast
waning).

Any meaningful change will be so jarring that the dyed in the wool users will
balk at it, kicking up a storm of protests and it will not serve to bring in
new users (they come in not for good UI but for the network effect - but they
don't use it and leave because of the UI).

I honestly can't believe how insanely horrible twitter UI is - and it seems to
be something that all twitter users have agreed to never mention. It just
leaves one breathless after it opens the FOURTH modal window on top of the
previous three that it had already opened.

On the bright side of things, for anyone teaching UI, twitter is a fantastic
example of what NOT to do.

~~~
ape4
Maybe Twitters "UI" is so messy is because its text. People can make up any
convent they want. Like signing posts with ^.

~~~
lingben
compare and contrast to reddit: text but extremely simple, intuitive, you can
follow conversations, know who is talking to whom, respond, link, etc.

~~~
morgante
I get what you're saying but I don't think we should hold up Reddit as a gold
standard of accessibility.

I'm fairly technically proficient and I have a hard time figuring out how to
"onboard" myself to Reddit and to understand the whole system. It's relatively
intimidating.

If we want to stick to text-only, I think HN is actually a better example. Of
course, Facebook is really the pinnacle of broad accessibility.

~~~
digi_owl
One thing i like about Reddit is that you can temporarily collapse a noisy
thread so you don't have to scroll past it.

~~~
ant6n
I was just thinking of commenting about the lack of collapsing threads on HN
as well. Nice to see I'm not the only one who's missing it here. (Especially
if the most upvoted comment is not interesting to me, but resulted in a lot of
conversation)

~~~
srathi
I use this [1], but if you click on a link and hit the back button, all the
threads will expand back.

[1] [https://github.com/andrewheins/HN-Comment-
Hider](https://github.com/andrewheins/HN-Comment-Hider)

~~~
ant6n
Oh neat. Thanks!

------
chillingeffect
I think this is a brilliant illustration of the "wear marks" around a basic
service. At its core, it's still 140 chars, but each of these subtle
deviations represents a bend in the direction of features valuable to users.

Developers and designers can benefit from this by not overspecifying how a
technology is to be used until loads of feedback has returned. Kind of like
the old story about the architect who didn't fill in the sidewalks until
students had worn paths into the campus lawn :)

~~~
steveklabnik
... I THINK I just upvoted you, which was my intention, but I'm on mobile and
am also not sure if I downvoted you. If so, my bad: this is a great comment.

~~~
geostyx
I don't think HN has downvotes...

~~~
TheDong
It does once you hit a certain karma threshold (maybe 500?).

Steve is definitely faaaar above that threshold.

------
aresant
Took me reading this 4800 words of instructions to get it: Twitter is the
Dwarf Fortress of social.

~~~
lingben
LoL that's the most hilarious and apt way of putting it :)

------
johansch
Wow. I didn't know it was this bad. They probably have too many developers and
"product manager of x" types, with no one person really in charge? So it ends
up being a race for lots of people to get their pet feature in... Repeat for a
decade.

Seriously, this looks like something out of a consumer/UI facing open source
project with 1000 contributors. (My favorite example: The glorious spectacle
that is the VLC settings dialog.)

~~~
chipsy
Most of these things really come down to implementation detail(e.g. formatting
rules), and they are mostly interesting for aesthetic purposes.

The important ones like conventions surrounding replies are weird artifacts
left over from the early days of the product. Twitter bottlenecks quickly in
lengthy conversations amongst multiple parties and you really have to
carefully respect the social dynamics it creates, or people will just block
your rude self. If there is one place where the product could use revision,
it's in improving average case conversation quality.

~~~
marshray
When you're limited to 140 characters, aesthetics become essential for
communication.

This is Twitter's blessing and its curse: It's a game we willingly play to
communicate within its limitations.

Even the greatest artists have to paint within the canvas. By making the
canvas ludicrously small, limitations become a democratizing force.

------
cornellwright
> On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only
> easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time.

I wonder how many people reading this just opened Notepad to try this.

~~~
mrestko
I believe adding ".LOG" to the beginning of file also automatically inserts
the date each time you open the file so you can use it as a journal. I don't
have access to Windows right now to test that though.

~~~
dsp1234
Indeed it does [0]

[0] - [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/kb/260563](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/260563)

------
mintplant
> the analytics tools (pretty but pointless)

Hah, yeah. I was curious about how these worked a while back and figured out
that a tweet's "Impressions" includes any time someone reloads a timeline that
includes your tweet somewhere within. This includes your own page loads, so if
you open Twitter a few times throughout the day you'll see your tweets
accumulate impressions by default. And if you're followed by a really active
Twitter user, those numbers will be inflated quite a bit.

I'm not sure whether this is shortsightedness on Twitter's part or
"convenient" padding of their numbers.

~~~
ktRolster
To be fair, that's more or less what an impression is.

If you want "unique visits," you can look for unique visitors or unique
impressions or just uniques, depending on what company you are working for.

(And if you are doing TV, you can get an estimate of how many people saw it on
DVR in the next three days)

~~~
mintplant
True, however Twitter doesn't expose uniques at all, only impressions and
"engagements", which _also_ include your own activity. Hence the analytics
tools they offer are "pretty but pointless".

------
bufordsharkley
These interactions may be convoluted, and at times surprising, but at least
they're deterministic.

This (the fact it's deterministic) is what makes Twitter so useful for me, and
what drove me away from Facebook (with its stochastic Timeline).

~~~
marshray
Don't worry, they're working hard to change that:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11048523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11048523)

~~~
lingben
They also constantly censor their own platform to fit the narrative of those
running it. They've kicked out and muted multiple users for being
conservative. They mute or remove 'problematic' hashtags like #JeSuiMilo

Just recently they've also censored the #whichhillary hashtag.

The fact that twitter execs fundraise for Hillary Clinton must have no bearing
on this, right?

~~~
marshray
Do you have a link with some evidence of this political manipulation?

~~~
lingben
please google it, there are tonnes of articles and blogs talking about it

[http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/20/did-twitters-orwellian-
tru...](http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/20/did-twitters-orwellian-trust-and-
safety)

[http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/26/1491618/-Twitter-
Exe...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/26/1491618/-Twitter-Exec-Censors-
WhichHillary-in-advance-of-Sunday-Fundraiser-Key-Primaries)

~~~
marshray
The first article is about Gamergate, the second is a Daily Kos article with a
title ending in a question mark.

------
cballard
> Tweets may contain newlines, and there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how
> many.

140

~~~
bpicolo
138 rather, because of stripped space.

Edit: Actually fewer because consecutive newlines are reduced to two. so
like...2/3 * 140 roughly

~~~
cballard
I wasn't sure if that was client-side or server-side, and, if client-side, if
the filtering is done at submit-time or display-time. I have seen someone
tweet something with many sequential newlines, so I figured that it was
probably client-dependent (I use Tweetbot).

~~~
bpicolo
Ah, not sure. You could certainly cheat in some ways with e.g. zero width
characters probably

------
henrik_w
Just the other day, a tweet of mine mentioned $PATH (as in where to find
executables in bash) with the unexpected result of linking to the Twitter
account of path. Live and learn.

~~~
cballard
This is similar to having a Github account that is an Objective-C keyword:

[https://github.com/protocol](https://github.com/protocol)
[https://github.com/dynamic](https://github.com/dynamic)

etc.

@IBOutlet and @IBAction appear to be available if you'd like some Swift issue
spam!

------
ebbv
This isn't a good manual for Twitter because it doesn't distinguish between
features, quirks, bugs and just "interesting tidbits". It just lumps things
together categorically. That means anyone who is new to Twitter is gonna get
halfway through the first section and be lost.

Twitter could use a good tutorial for new users, but it should be written as a
tutorial for new users. Not as a "Here's a bunch of categorized random
things."

~~~
exolymph
I think "Twitter's missing manual" was more of a tongue-in-cheek comment than
a descriptive headline. As someone said above, the point was to illustrate how
complex and weird Twitter has grown.

------
spectrum1234
Textbook example of poor top down management. Think of the case studies that
will result :)

(Jack hasn't been back long enough so not saying it's him.)

------
thewavelength
Way too complex stuff for a minimalistic service like Twitter.

------
geostyx
I found a lot of this out on my own. When people ask "how does twitter work"
I'm always at a loss for words.

------
multinglets
That person's blog is pretty fantastic.

~~~
tim333
Famous for "PHP: a fractal of bad design" which is well written even if you
disagree.

------
tacone
As somebody who played with the Twitter API, this post is so awesome. So much
knowledge packed in a single article.

------
erinjerri16
Can I downvote this post, it's like common sense for anyone who uses
Twitter...

