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I started visiting twitter.com for the first time about 2 months ago, due to the presidential primaries. I do not have an account. Every time I visit the site,

I started visiting twitter.com for the first time about 2 months ago, due to the presidential primaries. I do not have an account. Every time I visit the site, I just want to search for interesting things people are saying about politics. I don't want to create an account. I don't want to visit some recomended profile which comments on some sports team in which I have no interest. But for some reason, there is no search box. So I always vist www.twitter.com/r and then there is a search box at the top of the page. Why are they so against new people poking around?

bobbytherobot 11y ago
Because some top brass has the number of sign-ups tied to their pay.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
danudey 11y ago
I created a second account last year, after having my primary account since 2007. The onboarding procedure, if you do end up creating an account, is absolutely horrible. You have to choose a username, a password, pick a photo maybe. They then walk you through half a dozen screens of 'follow one of these celebrity accounts', with the UI designed in such a way as to feel like you're supposed to choose one before you proceed to the next screen. Once you get through their awful onboarding, which in my case I did by skipping following anyone, the entire UI is geared towards pressuring you into following new people over and over, without any real idea of who you were, what you wanted out of Twitter, or what your account was for. There's always some new box taking up 30% of one of the columns telling you you should go follow a bunch of (initially) apparently random people. They've also added the new 'While you were away' feature, which consistently shows me tweets which I have already replied to via twitter clients. If I'm active on Twitter every day but I don't visit the website for two weeks, it'll show me two-week-old tweets (which, again, I've already replied to). Twitter has been so consistent in terms of adding new features that no one I know likes, and I've made dozens of sales of Tapbots' Tweetbot client solely based on telling people that all the annoying new features Twitter keeps adding are never in third-party clients, so they don't have to worry about (e.g.) DMs suddenly being relegated to three taps away from the main screen for a few months before being brought back. I get the strong impression that Twitter's management has a vision for how they get paid, and they're trying to shoehorn their user behavior into this vision rather than building something around how users actually use Twitter or what features would actually be useful to them.

bobbytherobot 11y ago

Because some top brass has the number of sign-ups tied to their pay.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

danudey 11y ago

I created a second account last year, after having my primary account since 2007. The onboarding procedure, if you do end up creating an account, is absolutely horrible. You have to choose a username, a password, pick a photo maybe. They then walk you through half a dozen screens of 'follow one of these celebrity accounts', with the UI designed in such a way as to feel like you're supposed to choose one before you proceed to the next screen. Once you get through their awful onboarding, which in my case I did by skipping following anyone, the entire UI is geared towards pressuring you into following new people over and over, without any real idea of who you were, what you wanted out of Twitter, or what your account was for. There's always some new box taking up 30% of one of the columns telling you you should go follow a bunch of (initially) apparently random people. They've also added the new 'While you were away' feature, which consistently shows me tweets which I have already replied to via twitter clients. If I'm active on Twitter every day but I don't visit the website for two weeks, it'll show me two-week-old tweets (which, again, I've already replied to). Twitter has been so consistent in terms of adding new features that no one I know likes, and I've made dozens of sales of Tapbots' Tweetbot client solely based on telling people that all the annoying new features Twitter keeps adding are never in third-party clients, so they don't have to worry about (e.g.) DMs suddenly being relegated to three taps away from the main screen for a few months before being brought back. I get the strong impression that Twitter's management has a vision for how they get paid, and they're trying to shoehorn their user behavior into this vision rather than building something around how users actually use Twitter or what features would actually be useful to them.