
One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end - robin_reala
https://medium.com/@monteiro/one-persons-history-of-twitter-from-beginning-to-end-5b41abed6c20
======
K0SM0S
As an outsider looking in, Twitter is a harsh place that feels unwelcoming to
say the least.

I've had an account for years, but every time I try to engage in something on
Twitter it just falls flat. The main criticism I have about the platform
itself are:

\- hashtags too limited to meaningfully reach people, thereby making the
platform all about knowing people _already_ and then staying in your own
circles. I'd appreciate ~5 tags to reference my posts independently of the 140
limit, and to better find others' posts.

\- too much spam, marketing BS and whatnot. I'm all for GaryVee's take on
marketing and media etc., I really am, but Twitter seems to me like an ill-
suited platform for that. When something's popular you don't interact, you
just add your 'voice' to a long list of spammy comments. The place is
impersonal and cold. Even Reddit is much better for 1 liners with its voting
system.

\- bad engineering. Seriously, so many flaws. The mobile app is a buggy mess
that crashes too often (on Android 8 it doesn't even work with 2FA, I had to
deactivate it to re-log in, and why doesn't it work with usual
authenticators?). Statistics pages are AWOL. I appreciate they made a night
mode, I really really do, but it works worse than browser add-ons. I don't
know how they manage to be both so popular and so bad.

Overall Twitter feels very lonely and kind of useless, at least for everything
that isn't already much better covered by Facebook (ie real contacts/circles).
And I don't like Facebook much, but they do a much better job at their
mission.

~~~
zimpenfish
> The mobile app is a buggy mess

I use Tweetbot. It's a long way from perfect but it's orders of magnitude less
shit than the Twitter app.

> and why doesn't it work with usual authenticators?

Don't know if this applies to every platform but last time I was angrily
waiting for a Twitter 2FA SMS to arrive, I decided to see if the number Authy
gave me worked instead and ... it did. Which was a bit of a shock since the
page didn't give _any_ indication that it would. But might be worth a try for
you...

(Obviously you need to have set up your other 2FA number generator first and
that's a faffy faff mcfaff o'faff.)

~~~
K0SM0S
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely check these out.

