
Twitter is testing a new reply design - jaredtking
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/complaining-about-twitter-on-twitter/
======
grabcocque
One day entire books will be written about how Twitter, a company with lots of
time, money, millions of users and hundreds of the smartest people in tech
were somehow unable to get anything right, ever.

It's fascinating.

~~~
firasd
There seems to have been an inflection point in 2014 at which they stopped
shipping product updates.

~~~
mtgx
It kind of all went downhill since when Twitter essentially banned third-party
developers from the platform (or at least all Twitter client makers).

Third-party Twitter client-makers could've offered users an experience Twitter
itself seems unable to offer - such as much better anti-abuse systems, better
spam protection, better identification of bots, and so on.

But no, Twitter had to ban them so it can "control the experience" (as in
offer you whatever type of ads they wanted and not have to deal with client
makers when pushing them to users).

------
kawsper
Twitter is terrible, I was just victim of one new way of spamming.

Some beard company started liking a tweet of mine because it mentioned the
danish word for "beard", they then unlike it, and a day later they like it
again, so daily I get a new notification from them.

When people call them out on this behaviour, they just tell them to mute them:
[https://twitter.com/Golden_beards/status/793083513708961792](https://twitter.com/Golden_beards/status/793083513708961792)

They have so many engineers, but they can't or won't interfere with this.

I have never been so close to delete my profile than today.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Serious question: how would you expect Twitter to deal with this, at a
platform level? Put in a limit on how often the "like" toggle can be
triggered? Or how many times it may be triggered on and off?

~~~
baefage
I have worked programming Twitter spam bots, and depending on your behaviour
using the platform, it's like you build up a score, and when you reach a
certain threshold, you get banned.

Everything that triggers a notification increases your score, and certainly
favouriting tweets does so--but you have to be extra annoying for you to get
banned doing this.

You can also get shadowbanned, which means your interactions trigger no
notifications and your tweets simply disappear from everywhere. So if you're
spamming you probably want to check every once in a while if your account is
shadowbanned (by triggering a notification directed to a "control" account and
seeing if it goes through) but there's no way to remove a shadowban: not even
disabling/reenabling your account will remove it. It expires after a few days
though.

There are "hard" rate limits in place as well (amount of favs/minute), but
those can be avoided by using the API key of an official app. (Don't be
mistaken--you build up a "spam" score anyway.)

------
s3r3nity
I don't know why everyone is so negative on Twitter trying to experiment with
an improvement to an experience that most people tend to agree is a lousy one.
It's a "test," after all.

I agree that the new design they're testing isn't the best solution, and that
they could tweak it in a better direction -- but there are better avenues for
feedback that are more constructive to building a better Twitter UX.

~~~
nmeofthestate
I'm a huge Twitter fan, and not a Twitter conservative stick in the mud who
reflexively opposes all changes.

However, I think in this instance, users are baffled as to why Twitter would
even trial this functionality when it betrays a lack of understanding of what
is usable, and what is going to promote terrible user experiences. i.e. this
reply functionality would seem to exacerbate the problem of being stuck in
endless convos where other people leave your handle in long after you stopped
taking part. It's almost as if the devs don't use Twitter...

~~~
scrollaway
Devil's advocate: Maybe they're challenging their own assumptions about the
twitter experience?

This is something you often do in game design: Rather than say "pah, that'll
never work", you try it out and see what happens.

------
arkitaip
Frankly it's disturbing that a billion dollar company is having UI issues at
this level. Google, Microsoft, Apple and lots of other hi-tech companies have
the same problem and I don't understand why considering the brain power and
money they have.

~~~
moron4hire
Institutional inability to make decisions and stick to them. When you have
that many people in one place, it's just constant meetings. Smaller teams are
able to get proportionally a lot more done because they are not gridlocked.

------
ungzd
> and tapping on the ‘others’ link in a reply, revealing an additional pop up
> pane with the participants

They love popups enormously and made this antipattern popular over whole web.
First their Bootstrap which has popups became popular and then everyone
started to see popups as standard web feature. Now lots of websites have
complex UIs inside popups (usually with its own forward/back navigation) and
nested popups. Popups are used to "fix" scrolling amnesia — instead of
following link, content is opened in popup (infinite scroll is also highly
popularized by twitter).

~~~
firasd
Yeah I agree. I'm not against the idea of the user staying on the same page to
get more content, but for example when you click a tweet on the web to expand
it and see replies, I would have designed e.g. a pane that 'slides in' from
the right and can be closed by sliding out, rather than the frankly amateurish
overlay.

Also compare the way Facebook will let you 'expand in place' when you click
see more/show replies/etc. rather than overlay their feed with a popup.

------
nmeofthestate
On a related note, didn't Twitter recently say that they were excluding links
from the 140 char limit? I could have sworn they implemented that, but now I
see links taking up space again. What on earth are they up to over there...

~~~
at-fates-hands
They did but I've found its hit or miss sometimes. It's really weird, on my
account (been a user since 08') sometimes it doesn't count them and sometimes
it truncates longer links and takes the rest of the link and subtracts it from
the character count.

Here's the article about them not counting links in character count:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-16/twitter-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-16/twitter-
to-stop-counting-photos-and-links-in-140-character-limit)

------
ebbv
I've also been in the test for this new Reply since last week. It's got
advantages and disadvantages. All the @'s in messages can make them cluttered,
but the new way of tracking who's involved in the conversation results in "in
reply to Joe Schmoe and others", so I don't know who "others" are unless I dig
deeper. That's not great.

I think this feature could stand a bit more time in the oven before it is made
the default experience.

~~~
fideloper
Can you remove people from being replied to ? Didn't look like it.

Also seems to remove the ability to show everyone a reply via the ".@foo"
convention.

~~~
ebbv
I think you still can do that manually, but it is awkward. I think it's
clearly an attempt to make Twitter more welcoming to new folks.

------
woah
I haven't read the article yet, but one of Twitter's biggest problems is that
they listen to their whiny users too much. Facebook will roll out updates that
change large parts of the interface to great protest, and then see increased
engagement and growth because they are actually improvements. Twitter needs to
get past the musings of backseat designers in the media and their crankiest
users and start improving their product.

EDIT: Just read the article, and as I thought, it looks like a promising
experiment. They are removing direct user control over who will be notified by
replies in favor of handling it automatically. This also cleans up the
interface a bit by removing long chains of usernames from the front of every
reply. I can't say if it's ultimately going to stick, but it's a step in the
right direction.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Twitter don't listen to their users at all. Changes like this one wouldn't get
past their userbase because they make the experience worse.

------
baefage
I am hating this change a lot. I have been using the service for eight years
now and the fact that a tweet started with @whatever was the visual indication
that it was a reply. Now they have to ruin that too. I don't know, I sometimes
feel like they are trying to piss me off or something.

------
r721
I hate that it's impossible to see a full tree of replies to a certain tweet
in reddit(HN)-like form. Maybe there's an app for that?

------
return0
Google+ in 140 characters.

Hint the problem has been solved decades ago , called tree-like comments.

~~~
twoodfin
I don't think that works for an interface that has to live and die on a phone
screen.

~~~
wingerlang
I use a reddit app for X hours per day, works perfectly fine.

~~~
return0
Twitter is basically reddit without subreddits.

~~~
wingerlang
And (well defined starting points of) topics/threads.

I use reddit a lot, and I use twitter as little as possible because I hate the
experience of using it.

------
Tobold
Honestly, looking at the screenshots I don't even know what's going on.

