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Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made. Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the prom

Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made. Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value. Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information. If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.

eggie 11y ago
I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.
- simonswords82 11y ago
  Totally. People keep talking about removing the 140 character limit. That's just one of the many UX problems they need to address.
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  You're right and by extension you have to put together a search in order to see exactly what someone has tweeted to someone else, by which I mean you have to pro-actively search in order to truly follow someone. For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username. Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them. This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see. They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.
rconti 11y ago
I keep trying to use it, and I simply can't. I use Facebook all the time and have since 2005. The twitter feed reminds me of when GMail did away with colors and made it hard to tell at a glance when one message ended and a new one began. It's difficult to parse tweets vs retweets vs replies at a glance. The UI is somehow both cluttered and a huge waste of space, at the same time. My feed was boring, so I added people I wanted to follow; race drivers and commentators, tech commentators, etc. Now it's just a firehose of junk. Yes, if I tried harder, I could make it work. But that's not my problem -- I don't make money from my Twitter use. That's Twitter's problem to solve if it wants to attract more growth.

eggie 11y ago

I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.

simonswords82 11y ago
Totally. People keep talking about removing the 140 character limit. That's just one of the many UX problems they need to address.
PuffinBlue 11y ago
You're right and by extension you have to put together a search in order to see exactly what someone has tweeted to someone else, by which I mean you have to pro-actively search in order to truly follow someone. For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username. Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them. This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see. They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.

rconti 11y ago

I keep trying to use it, and I simply can't. I use Facebook all the time and have since 2005. The twitter feed reminds me of when GMail did away with colors and made it hard to tell at a glance when one message ended and a new one began. It's difficult to parse tweets vs retweets vs replies at a glance. The UI is somehow both cluttered and a huge waste of space, at the same time. My feed was boring, so I added people I wanted to follow; race drivers and commentators, tech commentators, etc. Now it's just a firehose of junk. Yes, if I tried harder, I could make it work. But that's not my problem -- I don't make money from my Twitter use. That's Twitter's problem to solve if it wants to attract more growth.