
Ask HN: What is wrong with Twitter? - karimdag
I&#x27;m seeing more and more people saying that they hate it[Twitter] and that if there was any better alternative they would us it. If you share the same opinion, why? what do you think is wrong with it?
======
Grue3
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](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.

~~~
blumentopf
[https://mobile.twitter.com/](https://mobile.twitter.com/) uses a much saner
and faster UI.

~~~
SyneRyder
I'd also recommend trying a third party client. I love Twitter but I _never_
use the official site or apps. I use Tweetbot on iOS and Mac (Osfoora is also
good on Mac), and Fenix on Android.

------
wslh
My thinking about them never changed:

1/ Their restrictive API and a commercial API that is expensive for small
companies.

2/ Poor business execution because they don't know how to offer services for
small companies and only know about wholeselling. This clashes with the
business fundamentals of Internet where individual users or small companies
can pay for services like AdWords, Slack, GitHub, etc.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227027)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11299941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11299941)

------
mikegerwitz
Others covered some other points, but one of my major motivators is the issue
of centralization: the world has come to depend on this single organization
(much like Facebook) that not only oversees all of this data, but can impose
whatever type of censorship or manipulation they want on users. Intentional or
not.

I use GNU Social[0], which is a federated service. I also host it myself, so
I'm in complete control of my data. Because it's federated, the instance of
anyone following me (or following others that repeat my messages) also have a
copy of my messages, and I others; this makes censorship effectively
impossible. In fact, it has some interesting side-effects: recently an
instance dedicated to hosting pornographic material was federated with popular
instances, which made many people uncomfortable; in that case, it's up to the
individual instance to decide what to do (e.g. block the posts in the global
feed).

I'm sure the recent controversy surrounding Moxie's opinions on federation
with Signal can help put this topic in perspective for many people.

[0]: [https://gnu.io/social/](https://gnu.io/social/)

~~~
wslh
You can't build a Twitter clone in a decentralized way and expect to have good
performance on the analytics side. This is a basic practical limitation.

The power of Twitter is having a single firehose where you can hook and
analyze ALL the tweets.

~~~
narrowrail
First, I don't understand why one couldn't federate their instance with every
other instance, essentially creating a firehose. It's not as if Twitter runs
on a single machine. Secondly, I do not think most _users_ care about
"performance on the analytics side" which seems more like a business need.

~~~
wslh
Sorry, I don't want to be pedantic but this is a constraint on distributed
systems. Like Google Search, Twitter doesn't run on a single machine but it is
a very cohesive and optimized system (e.g: high speed networks, storage and
performance).

~~~
sounds
And when a viable solution to the constraints imposed by CAP theorem arises? I
would think that will happen sooner rather than later.

------
rickhanlonii
IMO there's nothing wrong or broken with Twitter, we just have a culture of
criticism that exaggerates legitimate flaws and trends.

But I will say that bots are becoming pretty damaging to the community. Bots
that auto-favorite and auto-follow (only to undo those actions days later) in
order to gain followers--call it astro-engagement--has created a situation
where Twitter in some respect is a social network for bots.

------
dpcan
I think it's problem is that, as a user, I've pretty much ruined it for
myself.

I follow almost 1300 people. I don't even know how it got to that. Probably 2%
of those tweet regularly, about 0.1% tweet anything valuable or interesting.
It's just too large to go through and curate now.

I don't know who sees my tweets. There's no "viewed" count or "who viewed"
your tweet. I would think, if it flows past someone's eyes, it would be nice
to know that it did, and how many times.

Promoted tweets should have a bold background color. I never notice when one
is promoted other than it feels like it might be.

And something that really can't be fixed IMO is to have Twitter only show
things I will be interested in. I would like it to be able to read my mind. Is
that really too much to ask?

~~~
falcolas
> It's just too large to go through and curate now.

My advice? Declare bankruptcy. Unfollow everyone, and go back and start
building up a fresh list of follows that you're genuinely interested in.

~~~
zbuttram
Twitter's list creation feature seems to be underutilized by most people also.

Having lists of people I follow (or even some that I don't, but are still in
one of my lists) categorized by things like 'Tech News' and 'Video Games' and
keeping them relatively small and focused is exactly the way I prefer to use
Twitter, especially with clients that make viewing and editing lists easy like
TweetDeck and Tweetbot.

------
karmacondon
I think the biggest problem with twitter is that people follow too many other
people, and the feed becomes overwhelming. It's hard to increase the signal to
noise ratio because it's difficult to know in advance who will post
interesting things. The only thing I know for sure is that if I unfollow
someone, I will never see any of the good things they post in the future. I
feel like there should be a name for this, like "The Twitterer's Dilemma"

I don't think there's a technical solution. The more people use twitter, the
spammier and less interesting it will be. It's the same problem that every
online community faces. More traffic almost always leads to lower quality. On
the whole I think twitter serves its purpose well. Always room for new ideas
though.

~~~
FranOntanaya
Part of the solution could be to separate connecting from subscribing. People
feel they would lose some kind of social capital from unfollowing an existing
connection, but would rather not see most posts from that account.

I don't put much value on Twitter's social capital so I arbitrarily stick to
150 accounts. That seems to work for me.

~~~
SyneRyder
You can do that already, in a way. Twitter lists provide a way to 'subscribe'
to someone's tweets without actually following them and putting them in your
main feed / letting them DM you. I love @SwiftOnSecurity, but she tweets too
often for me to follow her, so I have her on a separate InfoSec list, together
with @TroyHunt and others.

If there's someone you feel socially obligated to follow but find annoying (or
they decide to go on a rant one day), you can Mute them and you'll still be
following them without seeing their Tweets.

I find Twitter only works if you can be ruthless in who you unfollow. As soon
as you worry that unfollowing someone will offend them, it starts to fall
apart.

------
pidg
I am using it less and less, not because of a particular technical fault, but
because of how it makes me think and act.

First off, instantly seeing see others' half-formed thoughts makes me strongly
want to find fault with their views, and the ability to instantly respond with
my own half-baked opinions compounds the problem.

Secondly, the character limit means that, when I do have a more considered
response to make, I can either:

\- split it up into many tweets (and risk the recipient not reading all the
parts, or simply risk annoying people)

\- spend time creating a blog post, which requires more thinking and a lot
more time writing, or

\- try in vain to fit it in 140 chars, give up, and keep my views to myself,
while stewing in my own annoyance.

To me, this is toxic. It makes me get worked-up over pointless things, wastes
time (mine and others'), and generally adds another stressor in my life that I
can do without.

It's a shame, as I've found Twitter to be great for actual 'social
networking', and made extremely valuable contacts through it.

------
scholia
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.

~~~
martinvol
I do not agree. Because I don't like my family commenting on my unpopular
opinions.

------
dingaling
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_.

------
narag
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".

------
exstudent2
When Twitter started banning and unverifying users based on political opinion,
they ceased to be a revolutionary platform (which is what made them
interesting imo).

[http://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-nero-
unveri...](http://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-nero-unverified-
by-twitter-2016-1?r=UK&IR=T)

------
billpg
"Oh you looked away for a minute or two, so I took you back to the top of the
page again. If you want to continue reading from where you left off I'm afraid
you'll have to keep scrolling and scrolling until you see something you don't
recognize."

------
DrNuke
I only follow 60+ influencers in my field and retweet their most important
news. That way, I have a narrative. Twitter is easily my most important social
network nowadays, also because LinkedIn morphed into a spam-trap and a click-
bait.

~~~
karimdag
Despite becoming what you say it became, it's still the best online résumé in
addition its strength is it's community. The reason why it is the best network
for pro is because most of the pros are there and not because it's the best.

------
spriggan3
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.

~~~
basch
twitter treats posts and comments all as first class citizens. no other place
i know weights an asinine comment or reply as equal to a share/post/publish.

i think it makes the product ridiculous to use to have combined the rss feed
with the metaconversation annotation layer, and not be able to turn one or the
other off.

------
saluki
I find it useful, great way to get news, keep up with interesting things from
a circle of people I follow.

The main problem is the ads/promoted tweets creeping in more and more.

I think the problem is now they are driven to maximize profits rather than
being a great service for users.

Probably should have stayed private so they could balance making some profit
with providing a great user experience.

~~~
karimdag
Well, I think that for a social network to be free, ads are the only/best/most
solid source of revenue.

~~~
kek918
What about; increasing the text limit by 30 extra characters for "Premium"
(paying) users? Idea of the century, you're welcome TwitterHQ :)

~~~
karimdag
Would you pay for that?

~~~
sreyaNotfilc
Someone would. I don't think that having that offer will set Twitter fans off
either.

$.10 for 30 more characters would be a huge benefit for Twitter.

------
Mz
I don't hate Twitter. I actually have gotten a lot out of it. But I struggle
to understand it and I think this is part of why there is friction. It if
fundamentally different from other social platforms that I have experience
with. And trying to figure out how to relate to it effectively has been work.

To me, a big piece of this has to do with social mental models and I think
Twitter would work better if someone were talking about how to relate to it
effectively. It doesn't work like you typical forum. Trying to relate to it
like other social media simply doesn't work.

I am still figuring out how to interact with it effectively, but it has been a
really positive experience for me. That doesn't mean it couldn't be improved
in some manner. But I see a large piece of this as people just not having the
right mental framework for interacting effectively with it.

------
MattyMc
"_____ (some person I have never heard, usually a marketer) is now following
you." Two days later, they're gone. This is a huge proportion of my push
alerts from Twitter. It's simple for me, far too much of the content has far
too little value.

------
hwhatwhatwhat
Never used it, don't really get why I'd want to. I don't see the benefit.

~~~
Tenhundfeld
The value of Twitter really depends on how you use it and whom you follow.

I get 3 main areas of benefit:

1) Exposure to new or alternative ideas: I follow a few people who post links
to articles I don't see elsewhere and discuss ideas that haven't (yet) reached
the mainstream. Of course, this could turn into an echo chamber if you follow
likeminded people, but for me, it's broadening.

2) Casual updates from IRL friends & niche celebrities: I follow mostly people
I actually know, and I enjoy seeing their random thoughts, links, pics,
whatevs. I also follow a few people like Kent Beck, whom I've met a few times
but don't really "know". In my slice of the tech world, he's a niche
celebrity, and I like seeing his half-formed thoughts and observations.

3) Breaking news & immediate reactions: News often breaks first on Twitter. If
something's happening, globally or locally, I usually check Twitter to see
what news links people are recommending to find out more. I also check Twitter
if I want to see how people in general are reacting. For example, I enjoyed
last Sunday's Game of Thrones episode, and afterwards, I searched
#GameOfThrones to see what others were saying, if they noticed the same things
I did, etc. It was fun.

#1 & #2 can and does happen through other forms, but I like how it happens on
Twitter. I think #3 is really where Twitter has a unique value and is exactly
what they're saying with the tagline: "See what’s happening right now."

But part of the reason it works for me is that I'm a ruthless unfollower (or
muter in Tweetbot). I'm very quick to unfollow/mute-forever if somebody just
posts too damn much – or temporarily mute if they're on some jag about stuff I
don't want to hear.

------
jdlyga
It's too cluttered. The official app feels like it has too many ads, and the
quality of the posts that I'm seeing is pretty poor. I like that they're
sorting the timeline better now with more relevant stuff first.

------
Keats
From a non-user point of view (well I check our company twitter once a day or
so):

\- no value: we follow ~40 accounts with the company account and the feed
never showed anything interesting so it seems you need to spend a lot of time
to get some value. At the same time, users following too many people complain
about it ruining their experience

\- unreadable: whenever I see someone posting a link to a twitter
"conversation", I don't other opening the link because it's a mess

Overall for me, it's still the same issue as I had when I first heard of it: I
still don't see the point.

------
martinvol
They notification system is broken on Android!

You receive a push notification -> You open it and see the content -> Go back
to the app's feed -> the app shows your notification as unread!

It happens every single time and I changed devices and it keeps happening, my
current phone is a Nexus 5X. I honestly can't believe such a well known app
has that kind of bug (You wont be able to convince me that that's not a bug
and it's the expected behavior).

~~~
karimdag
I have an iPhone 6S and the notifications only appear in the notifications
center or the lockscreen.

------
UniZero
A better alternative to Twitter should actually provide features other
websites don't.

Why should I go out of my way to use Twitter to do things I can already do on
Facebook?

Why would I want to share status updates with strangers vs. friends?

I understand what makes Twitter appealing in a marketing sense, but for me
personally, it's nothing more than a chore to deal with on top of everything
else.

------
Esau
I liked playing with Twitter in 2009 or 2010. It was almost completely text
based and it displayed timelines in a straight forward manner.

But then they started to mess with it: link shortners, inline multimedia, the
war on 3rd party Twitter clients, pinned tweets, and an annoying amount of
options.

I personally don't think Twitter can be saved, long term.

------
arisAlexis
Writedown.co is a stripped down to basics immutable Twitter but I don't see
people using it much. I built it on the basis of what you say but I think
people are way too much addicted to rihanna and they like to rant about the
service they love to hate.

------
sammyo
I had a single very useful use case. I needed to pick up someone when a famous
trial recessed, parking close was impossible, phones were not allowed for most
observers. Monitoring the twitter feed of a single journalist provided an
accurate low latency notice.

------
shanehoban
I have never had the desire to read my Twitter feed. That's a serious problem
for Twitter.

------
edoceo
The {searchTerms} bug

twitter.com would redirect to /q={searchTerms}

Bug was present for months. Folk started using #searchterms so their tweets
would have better visibility

Easy to fix usability bug that remains for a long time indicates to me a
general quality issue that is ripe inside

------
Torgo
Whoever is downvoting honest answers, stop it.

I stopped using Twitter because its design encourages people to be snarky and
mean and thoughtless, and over time this has been proven again and again.

~~~
Torgo
Keep it up.

Twitter sucks because it's filled with assholes and every single day it's
harder to deny the format encourages it.

~~~
J_Darnley
It is just twitter shills and fanboys downvoting everyone who badmouths it. It
is cancer and has always been cancer.

------
mathattack
1) Weak curation. The signal to noise ratio is very bad.

2) Too many clicks to get to lists, which would alleviate problem 1.

This worked ok in Social Media circa 2006. Not 2016.

------
throwaway1231k
Censorship

------
Polarity
It was a minimal, chronolical short message service. Great for sharing links
and compact news. Fast to read and to scan. Now, they want to turn it into a
social network. Longer Texts, more media, ads. That´s not what most people on
twitter want or signed up for.

------
zxcvcxz
Where do I even begin?

1\. I believe twitter (and others) is in cahoots with the NSA. I never had a
twitter, wasn't interested in twitter, but it seems like from the moment
twitter started it was being shoved down my throat by the media, who made it
seem like everyone was on it, yet no one I knew irl actually used twitter.
Everything they reported was about some post on twitter that some public
figure (or revolutionary) posted. Twitter was forced down peoples throats
during the Arab Spring too, and I think we all remember that it was being used
by protesters to organize events/etc.

Now why is half the Arab nation suddenly uploading their sensitive data to an
American based company? Do people really think the NSA isn't using twitter as
a data collection hub? Do people really believe the NSA (and other
organizations) had no hand in making twitter popular the world over? Well I
think that's a naive viewpoint.

2\. I recently realized twitter, reddit, facebook, even HN are filled with
people/bots/paid shills, that are just here to push some corporate agenda.
They realized we block most ads so they just invade our social media with ads
disguised as legitimate discussion. Twitter and reddit are the worst (although
I don't use facebook). Make a post about monsanto on reddit? It'll be filled
with "experts" who know monsanto has never broken the law. The monsanto
shilling is blatantly obvious on reddit. Then there are other posts from
people being paid by investors from Microsoft, Spotify, tons of film studios,
tons of game studios. Half of the posts on reddit feel like they're exposing
me to some product by some company. I just don't really go to twitter that
much but it's hard to deny the twitter admins/corporate don't give a fuck
about ads/bots/paid shills for the most part unless they're really abusive.
There is probably monetary incentive for companies to allow these forms of
advertisement and manipulation of political narrative.

Right now on the front page of HN 488m fake chinese social media posts a year,
yet some how people believe America is immune, or "a corpration would _never
ever ever_ do that!, sure a government would but a _business_ , you gotta be
outta your mind man!". Best case scenario you get called insane for believing
this and posting it on the internet.

It's naive to believe that there aren't people being paid to post on social
media (or even doing it for free). It's naive to believe that multiple
governments don't have organizations dedicated to spreading certain narratives
and propaganda online.

Operation Earnest Voice[0] is an astroturfing campaign by the US government.
The aim of the initiative is to use sockpuppets to spread pro-American
propaganda on social networking sites.

The US government signed a $2.8 million contract with the Ntrepid web-security
company to develop a specialized software, allowing agents of the government
to post propaganda on "foreign-language websites", but recently the law
preventing them from using this in America was repealed[1], allowing them to
spread pro-American propaganda even on American media.

Main characteristics of the software, as stated in the software development
request, are:

* 50 user "operator" licenses, 10 sockpuppets controllable by each user.

* Sockpuppets are to be "replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent". Sockpuppets are to "be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world."

* A special secure VPN, allowing sockpuppets to appear to be posting from "randomly selected IP addresses," in order to "hide the existence of the operation."

* 50 static IP addresses to enable government agencies to "manage their persistent online personas," with identities of government and enterprise organizations protected which will allow for different state agents to use the same sockpuppet, and easily switch between different sockpuppets to "look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization."

* 9 private servers, "based on the geographic area of operations the customer is operating within and which allow a customer's online persona(s) to appear to originate from." These servers should use commercial hosting centers around the world.

* Virtual machine environments, deleted after each session termination, to avoid interaction with "any virus, worm, or malicious software."

The US also operates in conjunction with the UK to collect and share
intelligence data[2], and the GCHQ has their own internet shilling program[3].

There is not enough evidence to say without a doubt that the US government
manipulates American social media, but we can say without a doubt that they do
have sophisticated software for the purpose of spreading propaganda, they do
manipulate social media, there are no longer propaganda laws preventing them
from doing so in America, and multiple world governments have these programs
in place (including but not limited to: [Russia, China, Israel, and the
UK.[4])

You can keep telling your self the US government would never manipulate social
media, or violate the 4th amendment, or collect data en masse, or you can wake
up and accept that this is the world we live in and ignoring it will never
solve the problem.

That is just the evidence of state-sponsored shilling. If the state is willing
to do it it's naive to believe large companies and their investors wouldn't do
it too.

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-
ope...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-
social-networks)

[1] [http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-
propaganda-b...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-
ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-
sponsored_Internet_sockp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-
sponsored_Internet_sockpuppetry)

~~~
banjobanana
About your point #2, I really have to tell you that Monsanto never broke the
law, Microsoft is an innovative company that never fired anyone, Twitter is a
wonderful social networks where every person with a soul has an account with
gazillions of active followers, and Marvel movies are the best movies ever
made in the complete history of the movies. You can trust me as I'm a
certified expert in these domains. By the way, did you check the latest
Pedigree dog food enriched with vitamins and the exclusive (and safe) extra-
fast poop dissolving enzyme(tm)? That's one of the 10 secrets the dog lovers
will never tell. :-p

~~~
pkd
Did you actually make a fake account just to try to validate your initial
arguments?

