One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline. I've always struggled to understand the full context of the tweet I'm reading (that is, where is this tweet in the full conversation?). Do others also struggle with this? Am I just Doing It Wrong?
I think it's a variation of Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I've used Twitter since early days, and the only reason I even keep an account is to keep the user name. But I quit regularly viewing Twitter going on probably close to ten years ago, and open it in some form maybe once a week to look at a specific post (not just browse).
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.
I used to think exactly this - whatever Twitter has that makes it so popular, it can’t be its dumpster fire UI. But in the last year I finally got into it and it became a go-to place for me at certain times of day to get a kind of social/conversational fix that is just not provided by any other social networks. At some point I realised I no longer find the UI baffling, I seem to sail around it intuitively and enjoy it. Now I think it might be a smart decision not to ‘fix’ it. Yes you are constantly hunting around for the context of things, but I wonder if that’s a big part of what makes it work, makes it more enjoyable for your social brain. It’s that sense of “what’s going on? What’s this thing about?” and then being rewarded, over and over. It’s the closest thing online to a bustling marketplace where you bump into people you see often and overhear interesting things that draw you in.
OMG, Yes! I can't understand anything about it's interface. Sometimes there's a moderately straightforward discussion, other times, random, completely unrelated things show up looking like replies, but obviously aren't. Still other times the thing being linked to is a reply to something I can't see. It makes zero sense and I avoid going to Twitter if at all possible.
It is a plainly idiotic user interface and threading model and the fact that it's lasted so long looks to me like evidence of extreme dysfunction within the company.
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.
The fact that it's lasted this long is evidence that it doesn't matter enough to the end user to be worth changing. If it were Hacker News people would be saying "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." And people using Twitter despite its user interface - even putting in the effort to work around it, implies that it isn't really broken.
People also just suffer silently. Buggy, confusing, incorrect, whatever it may be, in my experience a lot of people just put up with all of it and never think to complain or look for alternatives. I find this especially true of less technical people who often think bugs are due to something they did wrong.
I think people have been trained to feel helpless about what companies do to them, especially when it comes to tech companies. It's very much not just a problem with tech, but tech gives companies new and easy ways to force things on their users long after the sale is completed. Everyone's been conditioned to accept things like sudden and unexpected changes. The websites they visit do it, so does the software on their computers, their consoles, and their cell phones.
There was some grumbling from uppity Windows users when forced updates/upgrades and reboots were pushed onto them, and I thought things might start to change but those things are still around (although the reboot thing was walked back a little) and now people are slowly being made to get used to hosting all their data on 3rd party servers and never being sure if/when it will be suddenly and unexpectedly be removed and inaccessible. Today there are stories of people who had their YT video or their repository removed, or lost access to books/music/games/movies they paid to be able to download/stream/play etc. Car companies are now disabling or pay-walling off features people already had when they purchased the vehicle.
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.
That's exactly the case, and its not at all limited to "right of center" positions. Accounts that are deemed undesirable by Twitter for whatever reason (usually involving posts that go counter to mainstream narratives) have all of their replies to every post listed after "see more replies" to reduce their visibility. And beneath "see more replies" you will often see another "show posts that may be offensive" that you have to click on to see even more replies from users Twitter finds less desirable still. Very frequently none of these posts will be offensive in any way. Those who have their posts under these extended tabs also don't give notifications to those they are replying to. It's censorship and information manipulation from top to bottom on Twitter.
> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies.
LOL there's a fun one. What's next, writing a new arbitrary definition so that pinching people for not wearing green on St Patricks day is also censorship?
There are reasons the formal definition of censorship focuses on the actions of the state. One of them is that decisions about which speech to carry or amplify (and which to not) in the context of private means are themselves rights of speech.
If you disagree, I look forward to you sending me your address and letting me put signs of my choice up on your lawn. After all as a principled defender of speech, you wouldn't want to "suppress" what I have to say by not giving me the privilege of putting whatever words I choose there.
The funny thing, though, is that even by your altered definition, what the ancestor comments are talking about here still isn't censorship -- even assuming that there's some basis on which to assume systematic click-to-read-more-ificitaion of "right of center" ideas other than "some dude on the internet feels like it might be true", it's not even that Twitter is taking the words down and making the ideas unavailable, it's that they're somewhat less convenient to actually read and you have to put extra clicks in. This has all the "suppression" of a downvote, a mechanism I'd wager you've recently used.
But hey. If you value discourse so little as to equate both "have to make extra clicks to read someone's hot take on some sites/apps (freedom to choose other sites/apps still quite intact)" and "face imprisonment for expression of certain ideas" under the umbrella of censorship, the good news is that free speech rights let you do that.
What are you on about? Certain ideas are made more difficult to express by a defacto authority (twitter). That's censorship, by definition.
>If you value discourse so little as to equate both
Censorship is a spectrum. Hence my original choice of the word "soft". Honestly it sounds like you're upset that someone noticed the suppression of right leaning opinions and are effectively deflecting by pretending that this isn't censorship, rather than acknowledging that it's happening. I don't think you even realize how disingenuous you're being if that's the case.
> Certain ideas are made more difficult to express
Which ones? Describe a few. Try not to embarrass yourself by either picking something for which someone could actually find a tweet embodying the idea, or by demonstrating that what you're talking about is actually not, in fact, so much an idea.
> by a defacto authority
Twitter is not an authority. It's one of many fora.
> That's censorship, by definition.
Nope. By definition, censorship describes activity by the state. You might productively stretch the definition to any other entity that can use physical force in the same manor a censorous state does to selectively deprive people of liberty or health on the basis of speech opposed by said entity, but that's it.
> Hence my original choice of the word "soft".
ie, indicating that in actual fact, no speech has actually been suppressed at all.
> Honestly it sounds like you're upset that someone noticed the suppression of right leaning opinions
"Noticed," heh. Like, with some kind of evidence? Not anecdotal, analytical? Systemic suppression of right wing opinions?
Can you describe which right wing opinions are being suppressed -- apparently to the point where I haven't even heard these opinions?
> I don't think you even realize how disingenuous you're being if that's the case.
Speaking of disingenuous, like I said above, please send me your address. Or tell me why I shouldn't be able to compel you to carry posters/signs I'd like to see displayed on your property.
Are you also one of those people who pretend that twitter, facebook, and google don't lean left in their moderation?
>Can you describe which right wing opinions are being suppressed -- apparently to the point where I haven't even heard these opinions?
Another in a series of strawmen. Again, I called it soft censorship. The fact that these opinions exist on these platforms does not imply that they are not made more difficult to communicate. But it sure does make it easy for people to weasily claim that no suppression is occurring.
This "show more replies" trick typically loads 3 comments at a time with a half second delay. Compare that to scrolling through hundreds of posts in an uncensored thread. Far fewer people are going to see those tweets. It's an obvious form of information manipulation - why else would it be done?
>Or tell me why I shouldn't be able to compel you to carry posters/signs I'd like to see displayed on your property.
My property is not a public square frequented by millions of people, including world leaders like Trump, whom I'll remind you was banned from twitter. I don't care about your weak rationalization for the ban, the point is that twitter does not need to be a nation state satisfy the definition of a censor. And if millions fewer eyes are landing on certain topics because of what is effectively a dark pattern, that's suppression, that's censorship, at the very least in spirit because certain information is being made more difficult to communicate. It's dishonest to pretend it isn't happening just because you agree with it, but I guess it helps with your cognitive dissonance over authoritarianism?
> Are you also one of those people who pretend that twitter, facebook, and google don't lean left in their moderation?
I'm one of those people who requires evidence for the assertion that there's some systemic left lean on any of those platforms.
I'm also able to observe plenty of speech by people who identify themselves as right-wing/conservative being propagated via Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
I'm also aware that some people like to make charges of oppression so they can "work the refs" in order to gain privileges.
> Another in a series of strawmen.
Strawman has a definition too. Just because there's something you don't like about it doesn't make it a strawman.
Censorship requires an idea actually being suppressed (and by the state). If that hasn't happened, what is happening is not censorship.
> Again, I called it soft censorship.
And again, I pointed out that this is a contradiction in terms -- the very phrasing admits that what is happening is not censorship, however much you'd like it conceptually associated without meeting the definition.
> The fact that these opinions exist on these platforms does not imply that they are not made more difficult to communicate.
Even if you're backing away from the idea that there are some viewpoints that are censored outright, the same question applies: do you have any evidence that "show more replies" systemically applies to any particular political pole? Because I can guarantee you I see "show more replies" across a wide range of topics, many of which are more or less apolitical (hey, here's one I just saw this happening, a thread about someone's divorce: https://twitter.com/moonbm_dmr/status/1512515632864145431 , oh hey, here's another one, gender reveal party: https://twitter.com/AriWRees/status/1512581194491183104 ), some of which are progressive as hell (here's one basically affirming a progressive vision of Christianity https://twitter.com/Brcremer/status/1512775185572671492 but it's cut short by "show more replies" insert is-this-censorship-butterfly-jpeg here).
But even if it were, the hypothetical you're talking about is no longer about censorship, but what is privileged. And Twitter's own free speech rights actually protect their decisions about what is privileged, actually let them choosing the structure of what they amplify and what they do not. They have the same rights that a political party or Fox News or any other private organization (explicitly partisan or not) have to determine how speech unfolds within their bounds.
That even extends to what they decide not to carry at all.
The authoritarians are those who suggest that a privately created and sustained platform be compelled to carry arbitrary speech. Compelled not to exercise their own preferences and opinions in moderating.
Compelled speech is not free speech. And compelled speech is therefore not anti-censorship.
> why else would it be done?
Off the top of my head because they think it helps engagement metrics with the platform as a whole, likely under some model with a law of diminishing returns for any given thread. Seems pretty obvious to me. But maybe that's only the kind of actual underlying technical dynamic that people who are thinking beyond partisanship and in principled analytical terms about this topic can see.
> my property is not a public square frequented by millions of people
Disneyland is frequented by millions too. It remains private.
Twitter is a forum, but it is not public. Those who run it can choose to run it in accordance with their own principles, within the bounds of law. Their property is as private as Disneyland's -- or as yours, choices about the scale of visitors they invite notwithstanding. They have as much right to set the terms within their places as you do with yours.
> world leaders like Trump, whom I'll remind you was banned from twitter.
Twitter has no general legal obligation to carry any individual's speech, so they could do this for any reason or no reason. As it happens, they chose to do it for specific reasons which were violations of their clearly articulate terms, and this after years of indulgence toward Trump crossing the line repeatedly.
> I don't care about your weak rationalization
Calling a rationale weak doesn't make it so. In fact, choosing to narrate your way to affirmation of your position is often a sign that you don't think you have a better tack.
> it's dishonest to pretend it isn't happening just because you agree with it,
I don't think it's happening because I haven't seen anyone present evidence that supports this position and because it is quite clear that conservative ideas are loudly and commonly represented. As for who's "pretending", observant readers will note that you keep avoiding/ignoring this point.
Some observant readers might even assume that the reason you imagine others are taking a position on twitter's policies "just because you agree with it" is because that's how the human being you know best from the inside out works, but that would surely be speculation.
> I guess it helps with your cognitive dissonance over authoritarianism?
As loose with the definition of authoritarianism as you've been with the definition of censorship, are you?
I believe that every person or institution has the legal and moral right to make decisions about which speech is valuable -- that this is itself a free speech right. I may be obligated to let others use their means to make speech, but I am in no way obligated to carry anyone's speech that I disagree with, and I am in no way forbidden from assigning different value to different speech when it comes to how I administer my means.
You appear to believe that under some circumstances, some private parties (conservatives?) should be able to forbid other private parties (Twitter?) from making systemic or individual judgments about how they carry, value, or present speech in fora that belongs to them. That sure seems more authoritarian to me.
>I'm also able to observe plenty of speech by people who identify themselves as right-wing/conservative being propagated via Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
As I've repeatedly pointed out, that these opinions still exist on the platform does not imply that they are not being suppressed. Yes, this is a strawman, because I'm not arguing that they are completely banned, as you're implying.
>I believe that every person or institution has the legal and moral right to make decisions about which speech is valuable
It's really odd how you devote about half of your ramblings to claiming that censorship/suppression are not occurring on twitter, and the other half defending their freedom to do so (which I'm not even arguing against, I just think it's slimy and potentially dangerous to society). While also disingeniously rationalizing the behavior by insisting that it isn't censorship if twitter is not a state.
Oh, anyone who's followed our exchange can tell you're into repetition. Almost like a religious mantra.
And while there's a lot I could also repeat here, the following is the only novel ground we haven't covered yet and it's ... interesting:
> It's really odd how you devote about half of your ramblings to claiming that censorship/suppression are not occurring on twitter, and the other half defending their freedom to do so
You really think that's odd? I mean, that's not just "LOL", that's "chef's kiss LOL."
In either exploration or argument, it's entirely standard to both refute an assertion, and then for thoroughness sake to also look down the road and say "let's say we accept your assertion, here's why it doesn't mean what you think it means."
This is not only honest, it's thorough. And if you think it's strange, then it sure seems like you're... pretty new to exploratory or argumentative discussion.
That wasn't an arbitrary definition invented by GP to make a point. It was copied from Wikipedia.
Major dictionaries agree that censorship is not limited to government censorship. For example Webster defines “to censor” as “to examine in order to suppress (see SUPPRESS sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable”
> Having to click on individual tweets to see their replies
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.
Clicking the text of the specific tweet in the thread should show the replies. I always click the little speech bubble in the bottom-left, which is the icon to show replies in all other interfaces, but that just pops up the Reply feature and I get aggravated every time.
Does that work? On the occasions when I read a post on Twitter (by following a link, since I don't use it) and I press "see replies" I always get to see the same replies again.
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.
I think it’s intentional on Twitter’s part. It’s FOMO: you see a hot take out of context and now your brain ~~wants~~ needs to know what the hell is going on, so you reward Twitter’s algorithm with lots of tasty engagement in your effort to figure out who pissed everyone off.
Yeah, this seems to be the endgame of the whole engagement maximizer craze: If struggling with an app because you can't find the function you're looking for counts as "engagement", then the obvious strategy is to make apps as hard to use as possible.
Twitter is terrible as a social platform. It's a great platform to get quick news about something. Obviously platforms like these thrive during eventful times. Just look at who is posting about the Ukraine/Russia war. But it's not about dialogue or threads. It's only consumption.
Wow, I thought it was just me. I've tried to "get into" twitter for the past decade, but I could never figure out how to read threads. I just gave up after a while because I was too proud to hunt for an explainer article somewhere. And I have too much noise in my life anyway...
> One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline.
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 think if you tried you could understand why it looks the way it does. There replies are rendered under what they are replying to. Do you have any example of what you think is being displayed incorrectly?
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.
Every tweet under the tweet are a reply if they don't have a line connecting them to a previous tweet. The ones that have lines up are replies to the tweet the line connects to.
Thanks, looks like you're right. That's some counterintuitive UX right there, requiring the user to scroll several pages just to see a mid-thread comment. Wonder why they don't just put the replies immediately below the tweet they're replying to.
What you are seeing in that thread is the OP replying to themselves to create a thread of related tweets. They believe that seeing the whole thread of the OP is more important than what could be 1000s of replies to the original tweet.
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.
I spend a lot of time hiding whole comment subtrees when browsing Reddit threads, especially on mobile. I'd do that on HN too except HN's UI is completely mobile-hostile with how tiny its buttons are. I don't fault Twitter for picking the opposite default.
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.
You'll see more ads and promoted content if you click through threads. Whenever you click a tweet to read through its threaded replies, sponsored content blocks refresh even if the page itself is an SPA that doesn't do a full browser refresh.
Best thing I ever did was install Nitter redirect. Even though Nitter breaks every once in a while, it makes Twitter usable (assuming you don't mind read-only interaction).
I was doing it manually too for a while, until I made a bookmarklet, but eventually I got tired of doing that as well. The redirect browser addons also intercept the request before it ever hits Twitter directly.
For what is worth, I'd much rather just create an account than install an extension (especially since sometimes one of my many extensions ends up slowing the whole browser and I have to hunt which one is it). It's not like I don't have thousands of accounts to random sites anyway and it typically takes less time than confirming if an extension is good.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -MLK
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.
Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly.
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.
> 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.
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.
There's a lot of content that only exists in these walled gardens. It's easy to say "don't watch that movie if you don't like it" but Twitter has a lot of information that you can't find anywhere else. Just like YouTube which can be a bad place but still has a lot of documentaries and valuable content that's only there and makes it worth jumping through hoops for.
> 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.
The problem with Federation is that it can be switched off at any time. If you are on a federated server you are just as depend on them as you are on Facebook. It doesn't fundamentally solve the problem, at best it just delays it a little bit.
I don’t think this is understanding the strength of network effects. For people who are actually using Twitter for communication, networking, or being an influencer they can’t leave.
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.
Twitter has barely changed for me the last 10 years. I only access Twitter from Tweetbot on my phone. Should Twitter decide to deny Tweetbot API access I’m pretty sure I’ll quit Twitter all together. Cause I don’t understand the web version or the native app.
> Should Twitter decide to deny Tweetbot API access I’m pretty sure I’ll quit Twitter all together.
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.
I use it because that's where everyone went after the Tumblr exodus. Many of them will post to other places as well, but Twitter is the only place where I can follow all of them without jumping between sites.
> The internet exists beyond these walled gardens.
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.
I agree with you about content but maybe disagree about the cure. Legislation might not hurt, but if an alternative became popular that was more or less a clone, except it was federated or decentralized, it would also be enough.
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.
Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so they can increase the bloat to 10MB instead of 1MB to read a tweet. Finally, it is stupendously influential in the real world, yet Musk was able to buy 10% of it for around $3B, so it has a fraction of a percent of Facebook's market cap. I don't know anyone who uses Facebook any more or cares what happens on it, but Twitter steers everything. It's weird.
You go where the readers are, not where the best author UX is. The draw of Twitter is that your random thought can be forced upon millions of people ("the algorithm"), and you get feedback like "31,000 people gave you a <3". You aren't going to get that anywhere else.
You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet.
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?
People are deliberately misusing the site. The whole point of the character limit, is to force you to make a concise thought.
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.
Even if CEO says, "yes do this", it's still an idiotic way to use the site. If you trying to kill a bear, you don't shoot it 18 times with a BB gun. You shoot it once with a shotgun.
It's a mouthpiece of the establishment. The ideologically agree, so they get space on legacy media, just like facebook.
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.
Twitter seems to be slowly asphyxiating itself in a number of ways: login walls, artificially curated timelines, and turning a blind eye to spam (it seems to be okay as long as it's terrible autogenerated NFT "art"?) all make it a thoroughly unpleasant service to use.
I'm at the point where I'd rather not have it, but it's effectively the LinkedIn of my professional sphere.
Interestingly, I think login walls are to stop spam. It interests me how many design decisions by youtube, for example, were to stop spam and getting rid of fake views and likes. Not directly for the user's experience.
> Interestingly, I think login walls are to stop spam.
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 don’t push feature like that for tens of millions to prevent some scrapers who bypass it in few minutes by creating account which is not providing anything to Twitter.
They account requirement is simple there for more efficient data collection.
I'd believe that! It's entirely possible and even likely that they're well intentioned. But they just don't work, because the spam is coming from inside the house.
Well, no, it's exactly the opposite of what you said. It's kind of concerning that you can't tell the difference.
A login requirement can't have any effect on spammers, because -- in order to be spammers -- they must already have satisfied that requirement. The only people a login requirement can exclude are, by definition, not spammers.
Ummmm a spammer is a person who must create many accounts to game the system. If there was no login requirement they could spam in other ways, for example voting, on YouTube: views. Scraping is a huge part of spamming. First you need to identify what you are going to do, which audience you are going to go after.
I'm not sure if you are trolling or just being overly pedantic to argue for the sake of arguing or what but it's tiring.
Spammers scrape data and sell it to other spammers who do other actions.
When you come in with an intent to disprove you're going to be looking for holes in what someone says rather than focusing on the value. That's one of the main problems with the web and the world these days.
Lol you really don't know much about this topic. Sorry if I am sounding rude but you just revealed that with yet another response looking simply to be right and prove me wrong without any actual thought.
In the context in which we are talking, yes indeed a spammer needs to create accounts to dm people, upvote, retweet,.etc etc etc.
You might be thinking of email or something, which is a different type of spam in a different context.
Again, please try to stay positive and look for value rather than just simply trying to win.
A Twitter spammer creates many accounts, scrapes to identify an audience, follows and unfollows to build their audience, DMs, tweets, etc for the purpose of making money.
There, are there any more blanks that you want me to fill? Or can I go back to living in peace and speaking with people who aren't trying to poke holes in everything.
P.S. sorry to anyone having to read this drivel. But I feel the need to defend when people come in here with an intent to argue for the sake of arguing and showing zero intent to listen or understand.
Totally agree. I have to use it for my sphere of work (financial services) and the first thing I’m going to do when I retire is delete my account there.
Twitter is the homeless encampment of social networks.
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.
It's funny because I don't even see "Related Tweets" anymore. It's just "More Tweets" immediately underneath a tweet and its threads. They're not even bothering to find tweets that related to what you're reading. They've gone to the Buzzfeed or Daily Mail strategy of finding the most engaging things and putting them in your periphery to ensure you stay on the site.
> 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.
Likewise! Every time I accidentally follow a twitter.com link, I find myself lost in an incoherent crazyland of intense emotions. Threadreader is OK, but I prefer to interact with Twitter in the same way that I used to enjoy Eve Online: wait for someone involved to write up a summary of whatever it was that just happened, then read it at a distance from all the shouting.
Glad it's not just me. It's especially infuriating when clicking a specifc tweet to see replies, scrolling down, then seeing god knows what random mess. Oops, you had to click the tiny 'see more replies' text to see more relevant replies, we're just showing you random unrelated tweets. Who designs such a mess and why...
Reddit doesn't make it very obvious that there are subreddits on the site or how to find and navigate them. The front page is just memes, which makes the site not look all that useful. A normal web forum or Usenet in contrast has the hierarchy of groups/forums always directly visible. Even 4chan has a big box with all the boards on their first page.
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?
It's messy but as a whole it's not that complicated because the basic model is simple. There's one thing - tweets - and various ways they are listed or threaded.
The post is a rectangle that spans the width of the column, which contains the picture, and any text commenting on the picture, and the author's name/avatar, etc. It's got a divider above and below to indicate the boundary, and it (at least used to) lights up when you hover the cursor over it.
This is only in some specific case too - now that I look again, it's simply tapping the post in most all cases. The annoyance I remembered was that tapping the comments icon with the number by it just opens a view to add a comment, not see them.
I also find Twitter nearly impossible to follow. The threaded model is difficult to build a mental model around, you must click/tap endlessly to read a whole thread, I see error messages daily that are incorrect ("this tweet has been deleted" when it has not, or "offline" notices when it is not, etc), significant confusion on tweet metrics (reply count is sometimes visible, sometimes not?), etc. I could go on forever about my issues with it.
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.
Meanwhile Twitter just straight-up put up a loginwall. Whenever I scroll down more than a few tweets, I get an undismissable popup prompting me to login.
Thanks for the filter! I've been kind of looking for one and had already assumed Twitter would randomise the IDs and page layout so that setting up a static filter would be impossible. But apparently it's not!
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.
Amusingly opening a private window avoids that. I speculate they left that loophole so that people who get into slapfights and block each other can still view each others' tweets.
Delete all Twitter cookies. If you’re not logged in you don’t need them. The wall disappears for awhile.
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.
I also see this loginwall sometimes when trying to click through to related images or tweets. The workaround I've found is to open the click in a new tab. It seems if there is no browser history, twitter is less aggressive about throwing up the login wall
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.
"Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don’t use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design."
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.
They don't want you to leave either of course. I'm an artist and there's a constant discussion with other artists over how to get people to ever see tweets where you mention things like "my Patreon" or "commissions" or other little things like this that involve going elsewhere or exchanging money, all that shit gets hidden by the algorithm.
Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or something.
> 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.
"Un-alive" comes from a Marvel animated cartoon series called Ultimate Spider-Man, in which Spider-Man teams up with Deadpool, who expresses his intent to "un-alive" a certain villain. To which Spidey replies, shocked, "You mean KILL him?!"
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.
It's really funny how Twitter manages to somehow do both these things at the same time:
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.
The did open up the API again, or rather are in the process of doing so. Look at the new essential access tier and v2 endpoints. Its early but they are launching more and more.
Okay so there still are nonsensical per-app limits, and they still act as if building a third-party client is not a use case that exists. Yeah, right, because of course people primarily use APIs of social media services for research and business.
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.
I think there is a balance here. Open the API and make shareholders happy. If they cannibalize their own traffic they violate fiduciary duty and get sued into the ground. Otherwise they inject ads into the API endpoints themselves and make it part of TOS to not strip them out. You can pay for higher and higher access levels but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. They have spent and spend millions and millions building that physical infrastructure.
Ah yes, the one reason why everything eventually turns to shit unless it's a nonprofit.
> but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”.
But they are contemplating doing exactly that with the Bluesky project. Not just that, but federation, as in, you'd be able to interact with tweets without a Twitter account, but from an account you host on your own infrastructure.
This is why I'm asking the question in my original comment. These two efforts feel so misaligned to me. If you're going to federate, you could as well provide completely unauthenticated API to access public content — you'll have to anyway.
Non-profits are typically just a mechanism for turning wealth into status. Mostly useless for all other concerns.
You would need to self host on Bluesky. Also it is just an open social standard that Twitter would be part of it. It would not be Twitter giving up control of Twitter data. They would never provide "completely unauthenticated API to access public content". The abuse vectors alone would destroy the network.
This is developed for humans. Certain humans want you to submit to their 'engagement' regime, and these humans have tailored their platform to pressure you accordingly.
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.
Twitter has reached that "party's over" phase. Till now it's been focused on growth, but... "At the end of the day, we must moooooooonetize our assets..."
Twitter requires an account to scroll through tweets, which is why I just close links to twitter on reflex now. There's no point, I won't be able to read anything.
> My other accounts don't have it yet, so I wasn't able to confirm if it identifies the account.
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.
On the one hand, I’m invested enough in Twitter now that I don’t think any of these things would bother me with the benefit of hindsight.
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.
It's more of a cure of symptoms rather than a cause, but these uBlock Origin filters work for me. They hide the signup popup. There is also a filer list called EasyList Cookie[0], which hides the cookies popup.
twitter.com##div#layers div[data-testid="sheetDialog"]:upward(div[role="group"][tabindex="0"])
twitter.com##html:style(overflow: auto !important;)
Sometimes a project does not need innovation, and pushes to monetize only breaks what people liked. If it is even mildly profitable, better in my mind to not shoot yourself in the foot by changing what people like.
Maybe it's a band-aid over a chainsaw wound, but the add-on "Tweak New Twitter" turns twitter into precisely what I expected Twitter to be. I see only actual tweets from people I follow (not uncommented retweets). No trending anything. No popups/popovers from twitter itself. It's a little quiet compared to life without it, but that's not such a bad thing.
Walled gardens have proven over and over again that the only model capable of respecting users is communication via an open protocol.
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.
Leaving the philosophical issues out for a moment, this is a problem for me even as someone who had a Twitter account and wants to be signed in. Every time I click on a link to Twitter in the Reddit app on iOS it opens in the embedded browser where I'm not logged in and don't know how to open it in the Twitter app instead. It's a pain!
The sub-rant about every app having its own browser really rang true for me. I never gave it much thought until now, but wow, what a horrible experience. Frequently I click a link to a private GitHub repo (404!) or a news article (paywall!) inside an app and then have to clunkily "Open in Safari" to actually apply my session cookie.
To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I only logged in some of the time?") Terrible UX.
I agree so much! I was puzzled when Google introduced that feature to android and even advised it as the recommended way for apps to open links.
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?
I imagine it was that apps were doing it anyway, and it was better to use the system browser that might actually be up to date security wise than have the apps bundle their own which was was based on nine month old code and horribly insecure more often than not.
It probably has to do with the (lack of) window management on mobile platforms and the coupling of which window is foreground to the (often also lack of) behavior of the application.
Man I don't miss owning a smartphone, this stuff is really pants on head retarded.
The confusing part for non-developers is how to get back from Safari to Twitter. Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.
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.
> Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.
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.
> The confusing part for non-developers is how to get back from Safari to Twitter. Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.
I always use the (small) button in the top left of the screen that appears left of the clock, e.g. “◀ Twitter”.
More frustrating still is often they remove the option to opt-out of their in-app browser so you have to do it on a link by link basis as you mentioned. Even more annoying on Android is it then breaks "smart" app links like opening Youtube for those links instead of the browser.
Agree with the core points, and it's not just Twitter these days. Perhaps some of it is in the name of spam prevention? But it's hard not to be turned off when every social site's mobile web url tries to get me to install an app or flat out says "not available on mobile web".
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.
I don't click on twitter links anymore, when I start scrolling some black screen covers my entire screen and you can't scroll back! I mean, we moan when some site breaks our back button here, twitter breaks back scrolling! People invariably suggest to replace the twitter part of the url with nitter, I'm not doing that every time, so maybe HN could do it by default? F twitter man, it's worse than that mess reddit (when not logged in, using the website, as I do).
I was excommunicated from Twitter on fairly laughable grounds (like all social networks these days, they elude exposure by being as oblique/obtuse in moderation as possible), and then allowed endless nonsense because it was 'engaging' which is basically why we have the goat rodeo of today.
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.
[Tweaks for Twitter](https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/) fixes this issue. It’s great when small indie developers can improve the web for all of us and this is a great example.
It's really not hard to just..... not use twitter. I've had an account since nearly ten years ago and maybe logged in or posted 5 or 6 tweets, nearly a decade ago, then just stopped using it completely. Now, on rare occasions, I open a twitter thread, read some particularly relevant content (to me), click any links available and bug right out again until months later. Or I used to until they did one more shitty little thing in terms of making logins even to scroll a few moments obligatory. So, nitter then, if the original Twaddler link is something I absolutely think is worth checking out for a few moments. As for actually participating in that toxic, naval gazing shit show of hostile tribalism, insipid 140 character nonsense and random incoherent snark, no thanks. I can't even fathom why so many people give a damn at all.
I feel like Tweetdeck fixes 99% of the UI problems with Twitter, even in a mobile browser. UI clean of suggested tweet garbage, pure chronological feed, just a more compact view, the list goes on and on.
The problem is even when you sign up, they restrict your account for commenting or liking something!! Now they want your phone number!!! Fuck you Agorwawol!! I hope this musk do something about it, although I doubt it!! They are all scumbags!!
There will be a huge scandal when somebody's personal info leak leads to irreparable damage: exposed political affiliation, health issues, sexual orientation etc.
i guess so, maybe a massive leak across several sensitive demographics? just seems like boiling the frog how things like doxing is now mostly ignorable outside whatever immediate drama-circle is involved- even hunter biden's laptop is just, "who doesn't smoke crack?" and "of course he's involved with shady deals, who isn't?"
ot: still haven't seen the eli5/timeline of the relationship between ukraine and the dem party, maybe i've only heard exaggerations..
