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Twitter is rather easy for "normal people" to use, in theory. You follow the people you want to hear from. Its a collection of RSS feeds in small 144 characte

Twitter is rather easy for "normal people" to use, in theory. You follow the people you want to hear from. Its a collection of RSS feeds in small 144 character packets. Sometimes you needs some help and tweeting at a company seems to get a better response than sitting through a long phone call or navigating the crappy website. People know how to use it, Twitter itself keeps changing things to make it more difficult. The whole "out of order", moments, "what you missed", etc. make it harder to sit down and catch up. Show me where I left off last and let me scroll to now and I'll (and I expect a lot of "normal people" will be happy). Hell, their official client practically makes you read your timeline in reverse order after you hit "more tweets". I'll skip the whole shadow banning of people and hashtags since most won't notice. They killed client innovation because they wanted to control the experience. Sadly, they really needed to concentrate on getting paid. They've gone so far that "foreign" media (e.g. Instagram) cannot display inside the tweets in their client. Hashtags, retweets, etc. were not Twitter inventions. When they threw out the clients, that killed outside innovation.

desas 11y ago
Wasn't the instagram thing because instagram opted out of that, as they wanted to drive traffic to their own properties?
- protomyth 11y ago
  I thought it fit in with this answer and also not display stuff for other social networks: https://twittercommunity.com/t/displaying-tweets-amongst-other-content-in-a-crm-display-requirements-question/13748 https://twittercommunity.com/t/displaying-tweets-amongst-oth...
recursive 11y ago
I'm a normal person, and I can't figure it out. Every time I see a link to twitter, I can't tell who is responding to who. It looks like snippets of conversations, but I can rarely figure out the context. I don't think I'm looking at a timeline view, just a particular tweet.
- protomyth 11y ago
  That's basically the problem with twitter's web client and not a problem with you understanding of what Twitter is. You expected to click on the link and get a conversation which it is[1], its just displayed horribly. The problem isn't your understanding, its the UI. 1) Its amazing how many people can keep up with group SMS, but run into something very close to it on Twitter and hit a wall because of the crappy way Twitter zooms into a conversation. I got a couple of ideas for UI (one I actually prototyped for my own amusement), but there is no way I'd spend the time to make a working client. I'm pretty sure there are other people who probably have had the same thoughts and they are all shelved.
thex10 11y ago
This. PLENTY of normal people know how to use it. Many normal people can even use Twitter better than the engineers who work on it - "normal" people created some of Twitter's core features! [1] For me (a non-famous Twitter user with a moderate following), Twitter is the best place to find interesting conversation. It's probably just a matter of following the right people for me, and it took me several years to really curate my list. I'm sad that Twitter would rather muck things up for current users rather than make onboarding/discovery better. [1] http://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retweet-as-twitter-users-invented-them/ http://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retwee...

desas 11y ago

Wasn't the instagram thing because instagram opted out of that, as they wanted to drive traffic to their own properties?

protomyth 11y ago
I thought it fit in with this answer and also not display stuff for other social networks: https://twittercommunity.com/t/displaying-tweets-amongst-other-content-in-a-crm-display-requirements-question/13748 https://twittercommunity.com/t/displaying-tweets-amongst-oth...

recursive 11y ago

I'm a normal person, and I can't figure it out. Every time I see a link to twitter, I can't tell who is responding to who. It looks like snippets of conversations, but I can rarely figure out the context. I don't think I'm looking at a timeline view, just a particular tweet.

protomyth 11y ago
That's basically the problem with twitter's web client and not a problem with you understanding of what Twitter is. You expected to click on the link and get a conversation which it is[1], its just displayed horribly. The problem isn't your understanding, its the UI. 1) Its amazing how many people can keep up with group SMS, but run into something very close to it on Twitter and hit a wall because of the crappy way Twitter zooms into a conversation. I got a couple of ideas for UI (one I actually prototyped for my own amusement), but there is no way I'd spend the time to make a working client. I'm pretty sure there are other people who probably have had the same thoughts and they are all shelved.

thex10 11y ago

This. PLENTY of normal people know how to use it. Many normal people can even use Twitter better than the engineers who work on it - "normal" people created some of Twitter's core features! [1] For me (a non-famous Twitter user with a moderate following), Twitter is the best place to find interesting conversation. It's probably just a matter of following the right people for me, and it took me several years to really curate my list. I'm sad that Twitter would rather muck things up for current users rather than make onboarding/discovery better. [1] http://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retweet-as-twitter-users-invented-them/ http://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retwee...