4 ms·

For all the talk of Snapchat being confusing, I think that Twitter is more confusing and hostile to new users than is Snapchat. And I'm also in my 30s. I've h

For all the talk of Snapchat being confusing, I think that Twitter is more confusing and hostile to new users than is Snapchat. And I'm also in my 30s. I've had a Twitter account for like eight years now and I'm still not sure how to have a conversation with someone. And trying to read a conversation with many replies confounds me every time.

Pxtl 10y ago
I agree the threading in Twitter is a train wreck. I like Twitter because it's great for super-local things, but it definitely fails at conversations even beyond the length limit.
ryandrake 10y ago
I still don't understand the draw of either of them, but obviously they're wildly popular for some reason, so bully for them. If I want to start a conversation with someone I call them up or E-mail them. I don't need to download some mobile app or to log in to some 3rd party service to do either of these. You can even send pictures through E-mail and delete them in 24 hours if you want. How in the world did humanity keep in touch with their family before Snapchat?
- lizardking 10y ago
  Yes but the receiver of your email doesn't necessarily have to delete your email, which is the key distinction of what makes the service useful.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    That's another thing I don't understand--how is "automatically deleting" a feature? Why would I care if the recipient eventually deletes something I send them? I've literally never given any thought to what people do with E-mails I sent them, since it doesn't affect me at all. They can print it and hang it on their wall or take a screenshot of it and use it as their desktop background for all I care.
    - rescripting 10y ago
      Flip it and look at it from the other side. Your inbox filling up with emails and attachments creates cognitive load; you have to decide what to do with all of them eventually. When you're consuming stories/snaps you see it, and it's gone. No overhead.
      - gremy0 10y ago
        Additionally, if you needed something that did need persisted you would hopefully have the wit to send it on another service (e.g. email) so automatic filtering for all recipients.
    - tdkl 10y ago
      It also makes you check Snapchat more because you know that the stuff will be deleted - which results in using it more often and being addicted to it. Social media novelty machine 2.0.
  - haimez 10y ago
    I have to disagree. What makes Snapchat popular is their use of pictures. Turning the thesis of your point into a totally public, 160 character or less, textual format is effort. A lot of effort. Pictures are what they are. They're also extremely difficult to parse (no practical reason to retain your message, deletion is a cost effective decision), and they're the easiest thing in the world to make. Who wants to carefully word your tweets when your camera will do?
    - majewsky 10y ago
      Because the camera limits you to visual content. You cannot do https://twitter.com/MicroSFF https://twitter.com/MicroSFF or https://twitter.com/sadserver https://twitter.com/sadserver with images.
- detaro 10y ago
  At least the e-mail software I know has very different UX: * it is terrible with comfortably looking at a stream of images, * for one-to-many you have to keep mailing lists around, * filtering such streams out (to separate notifications) needs to be set up, * ... You could do all that with e-mail, and some people probably are more comfortable with using e-mail for such purposes, but you don't get the same streamlined UX with e-mail. Somebody could write an app that offered most of it, but sadly nobody has as far as I know.
- andyjdavis 10y ago
  >but obviously they're wildly popular for some reason I am not actually sure that is actually true. My wife and I run a moderately successful travel blog and know quite a number of other travel bloggers, some of whom do it for a living. They are all technically on Twitter for example however the overwhelming majority have hooked up a service that automatically logs in as them then publishes tweets on their behalf freeing them up to never ever actually log in themselves. If you look at active user numbers, tweets published etc it presumably all looks great but how many real actual humans are there? I suspect the answer is not nearly as many humans as Twitter would like to publicly admin as so many have been replaced by bots. It feels like they could radically improve the experience by locking out the bots but doing that would make it obvious how few actual humans are present.
  - Teeboo 10y ago
    Insightful observation. The quality of the network is eroded by non-human automation.
maruhan2 10y ago
Both are crap. For one, neither has a UI instruction area. I get that you want to create a UI that doesn't require instructions, but why does that prevent you from making an instruction regardless?
batiudrami 10y ago
It doesn't help that Twitter is unbelievably slow, and loaded with on-demand loading and other nonsense that would be much faster (and possibly lighter) if they just loaded replies with expandos. And then I'm following a conversation in a shitty popup above my feed, click "view more replies" and suddenly I'm on someone else's twitter profile and not my news feed? And I press "back" and I have to scroll back to where I was in my feed? Twitter's UX is horrendous.
- sorenjan 10y ago
  I don't understand why these giant social media behemoths are so bad at web design which should be one of their core competences. Another example is Instagram hijacking middle click, so I can't open images in new tabs.
kerbs 10y ago
They are different kinds of confusing. Twitter is fundamentally confusing (for all the reasons mentioned - @'s, reply, RT, etc..) Snapshot's confusing part is only in the strange UI decisions of the app itself. Those I feel they could easily remedy.
- ryanSrich 10y ago
  This exactly. While I think Twitter could improve their UI by leaps and bounds, Snapchat's UI is just incomprehensible. However I'm a strong believer in it being 100% intentional at this point.
  - ohstopitu 10y ago
    Just out or curiosity, what part of snapchat's UI did you find confusing?
    - kerbs 10y ago
      Mostly the navigational system is a mess - and feels of duct taped features without ever a desire to go in and clean it up. Some points from just using it now: - The strange lower left/lower right hamburger slide out menu things with odd icons. Right one leads to news, left one leads to snaps. - When you go to the lower, right hamburger thingy - to go "back" there is a camera (not a back chevron/arrow) at the top left. Go experience it - it is weird. - You can swipe down from the main camera view to get your profile. Took my 31 year old ass a year to discover that. - The view snap vs. message view is just... no. I know what it does and I still input wrong.
  - stubish 10y ago
    Twitters UI developed around how people used Twitter. hashtags, RT, @mention all evolved from the massive userbase. Twitter is a platypus.
  - kobayashi 10y ago
    I don't find it to be incomprehensible. I think it makes sense once you get using it, but it's definitely a non-native feel on any OS. I, too, absolutely agree that it's intentional. Keeps the grandmas from using it and once people figure it out there's a great connection to the app - people have invested in it and felt the reward of understanding its intricacies.
goostavos 10y ago
Glad it's not just me. Approaching 30, I've been using twitter for 2-3 years, yet I still have no idea how to view the tweets that are relevant to me, or why, suddenly, twitter insists on pushing updates to my phone when people who _aren't_ relevant to me 'like' something. I know there are 'lists' on twitter. I tried adding my friends to a 'friend' list so that I could actually see their tweets amongst the sea of noise. However, that seemed to accomplish absolutely nothing. The only time I see tweets relevant to me are when I happen to already be looking at twitter when they pop up. And since I only look at twitter when queueing in a line, I almost never see the things that would make twitter useful for me. But hey, PracticalDeveloper retweeted _something_ today, Twitter told me that. So... there ya go.

Pxtl 10y ago

I agree the threading in Twitter is a train wreck. I like Twitter because it's great for super-local things, but it definitely fails at conversations even beyond the length limit.

ryandrake 10y ago

I still don't understand the draw of either of them, but obviously they're wildly popular for some reason, so bully for them. If I want to start a conversation with someone I call them up or E-mail them. I don't need to download some mobile app or to log in to some 3rd party service to do either of these. You can even send pictures through E-mail and delete them in 24 hours if you want. How in the world did humanity keep in touch with their family before Snapchat?

lizardking 10y ago
Yes but the receiver of your email doesn't necessarily have to delete your email, which is the key distinction of what makes the service useful.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  That's another thing I don't understand--how is "automatically deleting" a feature? Why would I care if the recipient eventually deletes something I send them? I've literally never given any thought to what people do with E-mails I sent them, since it doesn't affect me at all. They can print it and hang it on their wall or take a screenshot of it and use it as their desktop background for all I care.
  - rescripting 10y ago
    Flip it and look at it from the other side. Your inbox filling up with emails and attachments creates cognitive load; you have to decide what to do with all of them eventually. When you're consuming stories/snaps you see it, and it's gone. No overhead.
    - gremy0 10y ago
      Additionally, if you needed something that did need persisted you would hopefully have the wit to send it on another service (e.g. email) so automatic filtering for all recipients.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    It also makes you check Snapchat more because you know that the stuff will be deleted - which results in using it more often and being addicted to it. Social media novelty machine 2.0.
- haimez 10y ago
  I have to disagree. What makes Snapchat popular is their use of pictures. Turning the thesis of your point into a totally public, 160 character or less, textual format is effort. A lot of effort. Pictures are what they are. They're also extremely difficult to parse (no practical reason to retain your message, deletion is a cost effective decision), and they're the easiest thing in the world to make. Who wants to carefully word your tweets when your camera will do?
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Because the camera limits you to visual content. You cannot do https://twitter.com/MicroSFF https://twitter.com/MicroSFF or https://twitter.com/sadserver https://twitter.com/sadserver with images.
detaro 10y ago
At least the e-mail software I know has very different UX: * it is terrible with comfortably looking at a stream of images, * for one-to-many you have to keep mailing lists around, * filtering such streams out (to separate notifications) needs to be set up, * ... You could do all that with e-mail, and some people probably are more comfortable with using e-mail for such purposes, but you don't get the same streamlined UX with e-mail. Somebody could write an app that offered most of it, but sadly nobody has as far as I know.
andyjdavis 10y ago
>but obviously they're wildly popular for some reason I am not actually sure that is actually true. My wife and I run a moderately successful travel blog and know quite a number of other travel bloggers, some of whom do it for a living. They are all technically on Twitter for example however the overwhelming majority have hooked up a service that automatically logs in as them then publishes tweets on their behalf freeing them up to never ever actually log in themselves. If you look at active user numbers, tweets published etc it presumably all looks great but how many real actual humans are there? I suspect the answer is not nearly as many humans as Twitter would like to publicly admin as so many have been replaced by bots. It feels like they could radically improve the experience by locking out the bots but doing that would make it obvious how few actual humans are present.
- Teeboo 10y ago
  Insightful observation. The quality of the network is eroded by non-human automation.

maruhan2 10y ago

Both are crap. For one, neither has a UI instruction area. I get that you want to create a UI that doesn't require instructions, but why does that prevent you from making an instruction regardless?

batiudrami 10y ago

It doesn't help that Twitter is unbelievably slow, and loaded with on-demand loading and other nonsense that would be much faster (and possibly lighter) if they just loaded replies with expandos. And then I'm following a conversation in a shitty popup above my feed, click "view more replies" and suddenly I'm on someone else's twitter profile and not my news feed? And I press "back" and I have to scroll back to where I was in my feed? Twitter's UX is horrendous.

sorenjan 10y ago
I don't understand why these giant social media behemoths are so bad at web design which should be one of their core competences. Another example is Instagram hijacking middle click, so I can't open images in new tabs.

kerbs 10y ago

They are different kinds of confusing. Twitter is fundamentally confusing (for all the reasons mentioned - @'s, reply, RT, etc..) Snapshot's confusing part is only in the strange UI decisions of the app itself. Those I feel they could easily remedy.

ryanSrich 10y ago
This exactly. While I think Twitter could improve their UI by leaps and bounds, Snapchat's UI is just incomprehensible. However I'm a strong believer in it being 100% intentional at this point.
- ohstopitu 10y ago
  Just out or curiosity, what part of snapchat's UI did you find confusing?
  - kerbs 10y ago
    Mostly the navigational system is a mess - and feels of duct taped features without ever a desire to go in and clean it up. Some points from just using it now: - The strange lower left/lower right hamburger slide out menu things with odd icons. Right one leads to news, left one leads to snaps. - When you go to the lower, right hamburger thingy - to go "back" there is a camera (not a back chevron/arrow) at the top left. Go experience it - it is weird. - You can swipe down from the main camera view to get your profile. Took my 31 year old ass a year to discover that. - The view snap vs. message view is just... no. I know what it does and I still input wrong.
- stubish 10y ago
  Twitters UI developed around how people used Twitter. hashtags, RT, @mention all evolved from the massive userbase. Twitter is a platypus.
- kobayashi 10y ago
  I don't find it to be incomprehensible. I think it makes sense once you get using it, but it's definitely a non-native feel on any OS. I, too, absolutely agree that it's intentional. Keeps the grandmas from using it and once people figure it out there's a great connection to the app - people have invested in it and felt the reward of understanding its intricacies.

goostavos 10y ago

Glad it's not just me. Approaching 30, I've been using twitter for 2-3 years, yet I still have no idea how to view the tweets that are relevant to me, or why, suddenly, twitter insists on pushing updates to my phone when people who _aren't_ relevant to me 'like' something. I know there are 'lists' on twitter. I tried adding my friends to a 'friend' list so that I could actually see their tweets amongst the sea of noise. However, that seemed to accomplish absolutely nothing. The only time I see tweets relevant to me are when I happen to already be looking at twitter when they pop up. And since I only look at twitter when queueing in a line, I almost never see the things that would make twitter useful for me. But hey, PracticalDeveloper retweeted _something_ today, Twitter told me that. So... there ya go.