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I feel like I must be missing something, because I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it. How is it too hard to post? You type the words you want to say i

I feel like I must be missing something, because I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it. How is it too hard to post? You type the words you want to say into the box, and click the button. I saw the "missing manual" article that went around the other day, and I agree they have way too many bizarre and undocumented behaviors, but you can ignore that stuff 99% of the time and be fine. Edit: I should add, this is a genuine question. I really do want to understand what people find hard about posting on Twitter.

ryanbrunner 11y ago
Being a "read-only" Twitter user, I don't think it's about the technical difficulty of posting to Twitter (definitely if you're posting to Hacker News, you're not going to have problems knowing how to post to Twitter), but rather, the futility of it. Twitter, to me at least, seems like a platform for relatively influential people / people who have a pretty unique insight on something happening real-time to post. If I post on Twitter, I get maybe a few likes and retweets, and nothing else. On facebook, or reddit, or even here, I'm far more likely to feel like a part of a conversation rather than a lone voice yelling into a sea of a million people.
- zippergz 11y ago
  This definitely resonates with me. I've been a Twitter user since the very early days. Early on, I could tweet something (even something mundane) and get dozens of replies. More if it was something interesting. These days, no matter how interesting the Tweet, I'm lucky to get 2-3 responses (including likes). Clearly I'm not an unbiased judge of the quality of my Tweets, but by any measure I'm finding it MUCH harder to get responses these days.
- petra 11y ago
  One easy thing to do is to start a discussion with someone non-famous who responded to someone you read. Often you'll get a nice conversation out of it.
  - ryanbrunner 11y ago
    I'm sure there's strategies and whatnot that can help you grow your audience / influence. And if you're using Twitter for marketing purposes, then great. The point is that I, and I'm sure a lot of people, aren't interested in that. I want to have interesting conversations, and I'm going to gravitate to posting on platforms that allow those conversations to happen without having to do unnatural things to start them off.
DanBC 11y ago
[this is a tweet] [@zippergz this is a tweet] [this is a tweet for @zippergz] I have no idea if these are different. I know my followers get to see the first example. But do they get to see the others? I have no idea what happens if I post these as a reply to a tweet that you posted. Do I need to keep the @ handle in there? Or is it being a reply sufficient to trigger an alert on your end? I just now got followed by a porn account. So, I'm not interested in the porn they produce, and I'm never going to tweet to them. Either they're spammers who are just following everyone, or they've seen some sex industry relevant tweets I've retweeted (because another person I followed researches the sex industry) and thought I'm worth following. I have no way of knowing. So do I block them? Or just ignore them?
- lingben 11y ago
  a friend who recently took up twitter ran into this exact thing. here's what happened, they had figured out that you just write stuff in the text box and press enter. great. simple. done! here's what happened though, they started a tweet with @nameoffriend and noticed that unlike their previous tweets that were just words, this new tweet they wrote and sent didn't show up in their timeline like the others. so she wrote another, thinking that for some reason it hadn't been successful. nope. again, it didn't show up. so after the fourth duplicate message which started with @nameoffriend she gave up in exasperation and said, this is stupid! she was later informed that all her messages which started with @nameoffriend had in fact been sent but she wasn't seeing them until she clicked on the tab tweets and replies category it is this sort of thing that makes twitter's UX just atrocious for the average person of course, many people on HN will read the above and chuckle but you have to understand that the average person out there is not nearly as tech savvy or nearly as invested. they will not commit to dedicating 100's of hours to learn the intricacies of a specific UI. no way! if it is badly designed and made so that they can't use it in the first or second try, they get frustrated and just leave, and go where they can interact without the UI tripping them up, which is what you're seeing in twitter's stats
dang 11y ago
Oh yes, the typing something into the big box and publishing it part is obvious, but that's part of my problem. The interface seems Byzantine to me in general. As long as I'm just reading, I do the two or three things I know how to do and leave the rest of it be. When I think about actually posting something, though, the stakes are higher (since if I do something dumb it will now be public), and that pre-existing general discomfort causes me to back down. I'm sure I'd feel the same way about a power tool that had lots of complicated switches and might kill me.

ryanbrunner 11y ago

Being a "read-only" Twitter user, I don't think it's about the technical difficulty of posting to Twitter (definitely if you're posting to Hacker News, you're not going to have problems knowing how to post to Twitter), but rather, the futility of it. Twitter, to me at least, seems like a platform for relatively influential people / people who have a pretty unique insight on something happening real-time to post. If I post on Twitter, I get maybe a few likes and retweets, and nothing else. On facebook, or reddit, or even here, I'm far more likely to feel like a part of a conversation rather than a lone voice yelling into a sea of a million people.

zippergz 11y ago
This definitely resonates with me. I've been a Twitter user since the very early days. Early on, I could tweet something (even something mundane) and get dozens of replies. More if it was something interesting. These days, no matter how interesting the Tweet, I'm lucky to get 2-3 responses (including likes). Clearly I'm not an unbiased judge of the quality of my Tweets, but by any measure I'm finding it MUCH harder to get responses these days.
petra 11y ago
One easy thing to do is to start a discussion with someone non-famous who responded to someone you read. Often you'll get a nice conversation out of it.
- ryanbrunner 11y ago
  I'm sure there's strategies and whatnot that can help you grow your audience / influence. And if you're using Twitter for marketing purposes, then great. The point is that I, and I'm sure a lot of people, aren't interested in that. I want to have interesting conversations, and I'm going to gravitate to posting on platforms that allow those conversations to happen without having to do unnatural things to start them off.

DanBC 11y ago

[this is a tweet] [@zippergz this is a tweet] [this is a tweet for @zippergz] I have no idea if these are different. I know my followers get to see the first example. But do they get to see the others? I have no idea what happens if I post these as a reply to a tweet that you posted. Do I need to keep the @ handle in there? Or is it being a reply sufficient to trigger an alert on your end? I just now got followed by a porn account. So, I'm not interested in the porn they produce, and I'm never going to tweet to them. Either they're spammers who are just following everyone, or they've seen some sex industry relevant tweets I've retweeted (because another person I followed researches the sex industry) and thought I'm worth following. I have no way of knowing. So do I block them? Or just ignore them?

lingben 11y ago
a friend who recently took up twitter ran into this exact thing. here's what happened, they had figured out that you just write stuff in the text box and press enter. great. simple. done! here's what happened though, they started a tweet with @nameoffriend and noticed that unlike their previous tweets that were just words, this new tweet they wrote and sent didn't show up in their timeline like the others. so she wrote another, thinking that for some reason it hadn't been successful. nope. again, it didn't show up. so after the fourth duplicate message which started with @nameoffriend she gave up in exasperation and said, this is stupid! she was later informed that all her messages which started with @nameoffriend had in fact been sent but she wasn't seeing them until she clicked on the tab tweets and replies category it is this sort of thing that makes twitter's UX just atrocious for the average person of course, many people on HN will read the above and chuckle but you have to understand that the average person out there is not nearly as tech savvy or nearly as invested. they will not commit to dedicating 100's of hours to learn the intricacies of a specific UI. no way! if it is badly designed and made so that they can't use it in the first or second try, they get frustrated and just leave, and go where they can interact without the UI tripping them up, which is what you're seeing in twitter's stats

dang 11y ago

Oh yes, the typing something into the big box and publishing it part is obvious, but that's part of my problem. The interface seems Byzantine to me in general. As long as I'm just reading, I do the two or three things I know how to do and leave the rest of it be. When I think about actually posting something, though, the stakes are higher (since if I do something dumb it will now be public), and that pre-existing general discomfort causes me to back down. I'm sure I'd feel the same way about a power tool that had lots of complicated switches and might kill me.