8 ms·

Twitter stops counting replies towards its 140 characters on web and mobile

118 points by bpierre 10y ago

jackschultz 10y ago
Funny, I literally just noticed this 3 minutes ago. Was replying to a tweet with two people on the reply but couldn't figure out how to get what I was trying to say under the limit so I clicked out of reply. Then I decided to try again and was confused at why the auto reply names that are usually there were gone. Huge fan of this, being able to express more of what you want to respond about is great.
bluetidepro 10y ago
> While Twitter is making these changes as a means of trying to simplify its service for users, it’s really just swapping out one set of rules for another. And that can be super confusing [link a]. This is spot on and buried further down the article. To me, the UX of this change just makes Twitter even more complicated now. Their UI/UX is getting so bogged down with rules that it's incredibly hard to explain Twitter to a new user. It's even confusing for a current active Twitter user to keep track of what's what. I recently helped a friend get setup to use Twitter and until I had to explain it out loud for the first time to someone who didn't already use the service, I never realized how confusing all the rules are. They are not black and white like they used to be, and it's not easy to follow. [link a] https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-hard-e9ffc03e8bbb https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-hard-e9ff...
- smacktoward 10y ago
  The worst part is that they make big splashy announcements about these changes, but then don't actually roll the changes out until much later. Not counting @-replies was announced nearly a year ago (see https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-from-140-characters-ditches-confusing-and-restrictive-rules/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-from-14...), for instance, but it's only taking effect now. The long delay is guaranteed to confuse people, lots of whom will have (understandably) assumed that Twitter stopped counting @-replies when they saw a headline in the news reading "BREAKING: Twitter stops counting @-replies."
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    Yep, count me in that crowd.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    If i remember correctly they ACTUALLY enacted that a long while ago. Just ... you could only access it via the mobile twitter clients. What changed today is that they updated the website itself to act like that.
- dionidium 10y ago
  I've only recently started casually using Twitter. I have no idea how anything works. Threads make no sense to me. Am I supposed to respond to myself? How do @-mentions work? There seem to be a few different rules, but I have no idea what they are or when they apply. What counts against the character limit? It seems like links don't, but I'm not sure exactly how that works, either. As far as I can tell, Twitter is a site with nondeterministic UX where the same folks who insist on civility on HN get to call other people monsters for their politics. I sure don't get it.
  - visarga 10y ago
    I, too, started using Twitter semi-seriously as of late. I'd like to see Twitter conversations in a tree interface, like Hacker News and reddit. It's too much scrolling around to see such small nuggets of text.
  - exclusiv 10y ago
    It's a terrible service for almost every user who thinks their microblog messages are even being seen and the UI is cluttered with noise. The design of the platform itself prevents any sort of meaningful conversation; so it's not good for that. It's really good to follow celebrities, experts or other personalities as a news digest though. And a good place to find a pulse on social topics. I killed my account I had for many years and just use it to search news and follow certain people or tech topics. It's not worth the time investment for me to publish. It might be for those trying to build an audience to sell stuff to or get speaking engagements or prep their profile for optics to get a new job. But even then, most people would be better off focusing on building an email list instead of a follower list for those things.
    - vt240 10y ago
      I agree. I just recently signed up for the very first time, simply because news stories seem to break on twitter first. I can't see why I would bother with personal followers. Seems to work great, like you said, as a central place to receive updates for You Tube channels, journalists and industry experts.
- gdulli 10y ago
  When Twitter was simpler without all these new "features" the community did a significantly better job finding its own practices for using it effectively than Twitter has ever done since it started trying to undo all of that.
  - oliyoung 10y ago
    Damn straight, Twitter's most iconic affordances @ and # were community driven (i mean, they're old IRC syntax but still we never did get '/slap' )
- Jare 10y ago
  When I originally tried Twitter ~6 years ago, I found reading these soups of compressed writing, forced bad grammar, tags and @'s so weird, cryptic and confusing that I gave up immediately. It took me a while to rejoin and slowly get to 'get' it. I don't really imagine any of these new rules will be any more confusing to new users than the wild west of Twitter behaviours that was and still will be the norm. I really wish Twitter would work on better tools and policies to prevent stalking, harassing and toxic behaviour. I understand it's a hard problem (no, "just remove nazi, sexist and racist pigs!" does not cut it at all) but I'd like to see them try.
  - returnbuyer 10y ago
    I'd like to see you grow some skin.
    - dang 10y ago
      We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
  - kharndt 10y ago
    I had the exact same experience. Could NOT for the life of me figure it out for the reasons you cite. Came back after the election, mostly because I kept seeing it as the single source of breaking news (NOT Facebook, my traditional social media platform). And I can confidently say I had it figured out! Until now.
treve 10y ago
This happened weeks ago for me. Late news?
- throwanem 10y ago
  A/B testing.
cableshaft 10y ago
I can't believe how long it took for them to actually implement this. This was a braindead obvious change to make ever since it was clear no one cared about sending tweets by SMS anymore. Now they need to do the same with hashtags. Fitting what I want to say and including more than 1 hashtag (usually I just want 2, sometimes 3) is really difficult for me.
- DanBC 10y ago
  #that's #going #to #make #some #longer #messages #really #fucking #annoying #to #read #because #people #are #arseholes #and #this #is #why #we #can't #have #nice #things.
  - komali2 10y ago
    #instagram
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      The Instagram 30-tag limit seems to work well in practice. Plus the most common tags are all over-saturated at this point, so including many of them reaches more bots than people.
  - theseatoms 10y ago
    Then count all hashtags but the first.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      Well, but GP wanted like 3.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    They can already do what you're suggesting. I actually include the hashtag mid-message sometimes for that reason. You're right, though, and I don't know how to fix it. I see lots of hashtags on Instagram posts and it's not amazing but whatever. Actually I don't even think the hashtags need to be visible, necessarily (although some people start viral movements with them, like #blacklivesmatter, so I'm not sure). Like when I add "#boardgames #gamedev #magicaloctopus" or something like that, I really don't care that they're visible to people seeing my tweet in their feed, I just want my tweet to appear when people are looking for those topics.
eugenekolo2 10y ago
World breaking news.
swalsh 10y ago
I wonder if as they started to make this change they started finding numerous areas of the code where devs went "eh, it'll never be more than 140 chars... that's our thing".
- apetresc 10y ago
  I don't think this change invalidates it. What they're basically doing is moving the list of reply-to's out of the body of the text into another field, which is being shown differently in the UI. What remains in the text field is still <=140 characters.
- matt4077 10y ago
  This reminded me of the surprisingly interesting chapter on character counting in their docs: https://dev.twitter.com/basics/counting-characters https://dev.twitter.com/basics/counting-characters Summary: the probably did find problems like that, but long before this change when they encountered different languages and character sets. I'm sure running into the int32 limit for object ids was more of a hassle.
  - danso 10y ago
    Speaking of interesting writeups, their writeup on Snowflake, the system they use to generate unique 64-bit integers for tweets is itself a great read: https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake
- fizx 10y ago
  There was some stuff in search at one point that stored the length of a tweet in a byte. Making DMs longer was a database limitation at one point. Today though, I wouldn't expect it.
csswizardry 10y ago
This literally just turned on for me seconds ago. I noticed it because nearly all of my Notifications timeline now lacks clear context.
minimaxir 10y ago
How do you .@ reply with the new UI? (i.e so that the reply appears as a normal tweet to all your followers) Not seeing it on iOS.
- enzanki_ars 10y ago
  I think the "Quote Tweet" option is supposed to replace this.
  - psyc 10y ago
    Quote tweet is a retweet with added text. It's not a thread reply. As far as I can tell they just broke dot-reply and remove-recipient.
- shadowfacts 10y ago
  You reply as normal and then retweet your own reply. All of your follower's will be able to see the tweet regardless of if they're following whoever you responded to.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    This is apparently the official solution. Yikes.
swang 10y ago
i just tried this out on the web. if you reply to a tweet, and that tweet mentions someone else's name, your tweet will have both their names included just like before (except their names are now in a link above the textbox). however if you want to remove their names, you have to click on the link, click on their checkbox to deselect them. so it's harder to remove people from a reply, and harder for others to remove you from threads you don't want to be a part of.
thewhitetulip 10y ago
The problem of Twitter is that many people (including me) have tried to use the platform n number of times, but either it is too cryptic or too useless for us in day to day life. I don't use Facebook much, I do use HN/Reddit/Quora and sometimes stackoverflow. I use the platforms which teach me something, reddit taught me a lot of things across all domains, HN teaches me new things everyday (it is also my news source), Quora and Stackoverflow are also nice, they give me some advantage. but I can't say the same with Twitter, if you see my twitter page, I use it only to tweet to nasty companies who keep pestering me with SPAM text messages despite my DO NOT DISTURB feature! For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium, I really do not understand why they do not make this a feature. A friend had got a counterfeit phone from an Indian ecommerce site, he found out after a month, after calling the site, they said "sorry, 7 day return policy", I put that on twitter, one month later, he got his money back.
- XJOKOLAT 10y ago
  It's not the platform, it's the content. I feel maybe you haven't been lucky enough to find your content-suppliers. There's some gold there in the nooks and crannies.
  - nkrisc 10y ago
    You hinted at the problem: it's nearly impossible to find on your own.
    - TillE 10y ago
      I think this is making the same mistake that you see from a lot of new programmers asking "what should I write?" Unless there's a specific group you want to follow, maybe Twitter isn't for you. On the other hand, if you have some interests and you know some people who are active online about those issues, odds are extremely high that they're on Twitter. Follow them, then follow people they retweet, then follow people they retweet, and so on. Don't hesitate to unfollow people who are crapping up your feed with stuff you're not interested in. Twitter is a beautiful web of connections, and you really only need a handful of starting points to build a feed tailored to your interests.
matt4077 10y ago
I've actually grown a bit fond of twitter over the last months. For some communities, it's very much the place where the news happens, and you can watch it unfold life. That being said, I wish they'd do more with the potential they have. For example, I have tried at various times to find out what's happening when I heard the distant noises of a large demonstration (I'm in Berlin, Germany and it's a weekly occurrence, at least in the summer). Not once did I succeed with twitter's search, not even in cases where I later found out that there were many tweets about the event.
bengotow 10y ago
There's a lot of hate circulating around my Twitter feed this morning because of this, but I think it makes perfect sense. New users signing up for Twitter have to get longer usernames - everything else is taken. Then, when they try to reply to a couple of their friends, they only have like 50 characters to type a message. It's a non-starter. 140 characters enforces concise thoughts but somewhere around 90 characters you basically can't express yourself anymore. This change evens the playing field for new users, allowing them to use the platform the same way og users like @alex and @ow do (having meaningful threads with 3+ people.)
- psyc 10y ago
  The hate is not about the char count. It's about: 1. They failed to provide a way to remove @s from thread replies. Edit: Whoops, there is a UI for this. Which jarringly takes you to a different dialog and back! So my new complaint is that they made it harder and weird. I stand by my opinion that they screwed this up. 2. They failed to provide a way to change the visibility, aka 'dot replies' They fixed one thing, and broke two. Par for the course for Twitter UI designers. It has always baffled me how consistently bad every part of the Twitter UI is. Just try using lists sometime.
  - bengotow 10y ago
    Ahh wow thanks for the info - I didn't think about the dot replies. That's actually a real bummer...
  - shadowfacts 10y ago
    You can remove people from replies. Click on the usernames in the 'Replying to @personA and @personB' and it'll open a list of people you're replying to, each with a checkbox that can be used to remove them. Dot replies haven't been necessary since Twitter added the ability to retweet yourself. You respond to someone as usual and then retweet it, so all of your follower's will see it, even if they aren't following the person you responded to. It can definitely be a bit confusing for old users (and the UX for the first one isn't the greatest), but nothing's been removed, it's just been changed.
anigbrowl 10y ago
I'd be thrilled about this if they hadn't locked me out of my account and ignored my support requests :-/
meehow 10y ago
That's real innovation and deserves an article. Oh, wait...
27182818284 10y ago
I'm bummed out this was a focus as the user-feedback thread had a lot of other more useful features that I feel were mentioned more https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480 https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480
- r3bl 10y ago
  Ironically, for the first time in 5-7 years of me using Twitter, the replies didn't load until I refreshed the page.
infogulch 10y ago
Does this mean you can now reply to an unbounded number of people? i.e. one enormous reply chain where new people hit reply on the latest reply to add their own handle to the list. Possible?
hellofunk 10y ago
Twitter is gradually moving to final policies that will actually get me tweeting regularly. When I'm able to publish my memoir -- which incidentally, is coming along very nicely -- as a single tweet, I will know that I, and Twitter, have finally arrived. God speed the memoir tweets!
najati83 10y ago
I'm not the kind of person who hates changes, but everything that Twitter does certainly irritates me. I liked the service ten years ago when it was IRC-like. This is just one step towards their target of making it annoyingly complicated for power users. I've had this for weeks on Android (A/B testing?) and I was kind of hoping they'd drop it... nope.
laacz 10y ago
The problem is unwanted notifications of conversations (easy way to target you with spam, for example) you don't want to participate in. And there is no easy way to opt out.
nemof 10y ago
i'm still super pissed at the changes they made to search in tweetdeck recently. ( see announcement here https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/842044139587928064 https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/842044139587928064 ). now each time you click the search icon on the left hand side, when you do a search in the pop up box, rather than inline the results in the pop-up search window (all still on the left hand side), it now automatically generates a new column. for each search. that appears to the right of the last column in tweetdeck. as a ux decision this is awful. searches in tweetdeck were ephemeral. you search, 99% of the time you close your search once satisfied with the results, and that was it. the number of times you actually want to convert a search into a permanent column is very small. as it is with the changes to search every single time you search now you instantly generate a new column. if you dont delete each search the columns just keep on building up and up. this is an awful and unrequested change to tweetdeck search, and there seems to be zero public facing community managers for tweetdeck who this can be raised with.
awalton 10y ago
I am actually a fan of this change, simply because the enclaves on Twitter have expanded pretty significantly, and communicating with the whole group is pretty hard in a single conversation tree... I think it's a bit awkward in the UX, but at least now you haven't wasted 110 characters on people's variably-lengthed names...
skdotdan 10y ago
Every single feature Twitter introduces actually make it worse.
feborges 10y ago
It is worth mentioning the huge spam potential that ~unlimited~ @mentions can have: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8Nvg4EUwAE3Kzx.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8Nvg4EUwAE3Kzx.jpg (screenshot)

118 points by bpierre 10y ago

Funny, I literally just noticed this 3 minutes ago. Was replying to a tweet with two people on the reply but couldn't figure out how to get what I was trying to say under the limit so I clicked out of reply. Then I decided to try again and was confused at why the auto reply names that are usually there were gone. Huge fan of this, being able to express more of what you want to respond about is great.

bluetidepro 10y ago

> While Twitter is making these changes as a means of trying to simplify its service for users, it’s really just swapping out one set of rules for another. And that can be super confusing [link a]. This is spot on and buried further down the article. To me, the UX of this change just makes Twitter even more complicated now. Their UI/UX is getting so bogged down with rules that it's incredibly hard to explain Twitter to a new user. It's even confusing for a current active Twitter user to keep track of what's what. I recently helped a friend get setup to use Twitter and until I had to explain it out loud for the first time to someone who didn't already use the service, I never realized how confusing all the rules are. They are not black and white like they used to be, and it's not easy to follow. [link a] https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-hard-e9ffc03e8bbb https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-hard-e9ff...

smacktoward 10y ago
The worst part is that they make big splashy announcements about these changes, but then don't actually roll the changes out until much later. Not counting @-replies was announced nearly a year ago (see https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-from-140-characters-ditches-confusing-and-restrictive-rules/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-from-14...), for instance, but it's only taking effect now. The long delay is guaranteed to confuse people, lots of whom will have (understandably) assumed that Twitter stopped counting @-replies when they saw a headline in the news reading "BREAKING: Twitter stops counting @-replies."
- mi100hael 10y ago
  Yep, count me in that crowd.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  If i remember correctly they ACTUALLY enacted that a long while ago. Just ... you could only access it via the mobile twitter clients. What changed today is that they updated the website itself to act like that.
dionidium 10y ago
I've only recently started casually using Twitter. I have no idea how anything works. Threads make no sense to me. Am I supposed to respond to myself? How do @-mentions work? There seem to be a few different rules, but I have no idea what they are or when they apply. What counts against the character limit? It seems like links don't, but I'm not sure exactly how that works, either. As far as I can tell, Twitter is a site with nondeterministic UX where the same folks who insist on civility on HN get to call other people monsters for their politics. I sure don't get it.
- visarga 10y ago
  I, too, started using Twitter semi-seriously as of late. I'd like to see Twitter conversations in a tree interface, like Hacker News and reddit. It's too much scrolling around to see such small nuggets of text.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  It's a terrible service for almost every user who thinks their microblog messages are even being seen and the UI is cluttered with noise. The design of the platform itself prevents any sort of meaningful conversation; so it's not good for that. It's really good to follow celebrities, experts or other personalities as a news digest though. And a good place to find a pulse on social topics. I killed my account I had for many years and just use it to search news and follow certain people or tech topics. It's not worth the time investment for me to publish. It might be for those trying to build an audience to sell stuff to or get speaking engagements or prep their profile for optics to get a new job. But even then, most people would be better off focusing on building an email list instead of a follower list for those things.
  - vt240 10y ago
    I agree. I just recently signed up for the very first time, simply because news stories seem to break on twitter first. I can't see why I would bother with personal followers. Seems to work great, like you said, as a central place to receive updates for You Tube channels, journalists and industry experts.
gdulli 10y ago
When Twitter was simpler without all these new "features" the community did a significantly better job finding its own practices for using it effectively than Twitter has ever done since it started trying to undo all of that.
- oliyoung 10y ago
  Damn straight, Twitter's most iconic affordances @ and # were community driven (i mean, they're old IRC syntax but still we never did get '/slap' )
Jare 10y ago
When I originally tried Twitter ~6 years ago, I found reading these soups of compressed writing, forced bad grammar, tags and @'s so weird, cryptic and confusing that I gave up immediately. It took me a while to rejoin and slowly get to 'get' it. I don't really imagine any of these new rules will be any more confusing to new users than the wild west of Twitter behaviours that was and still will be the norm. I really wish Twitter would work on better tools and policies to prevent stalking, harassing and toxic behaviour. I understand it's a hard problem (no, "just remove nazi, sexist and racist pigs!" does not cut it at all) but I'd like to see them try.
- returnbuyer 10y ago
  I'd like to see you grow some skin.
  - dang 10y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
- kharndt 10y ago
  I had the exact same experience. Could NOT for the life of me figure it out for the reasons you cite. Came back after the election, mostly because I kept seeing it as the single source of breaking news (NOT Facebook, my traditional social media platform). And I can confidently say I had it figured out! Until now.

treve 10y ago

This happened weeks ago for me. Late news?

throwanem 10y ago
A/B testing.

cableshaft 10y ago

I can't believe how long it took for them to actually implement this. This was a braindead obvious change to make ever since it was clear no one cared about sending tweets by SMS anymore. Now they need to do the same with hashtags. Fitting what I want to say and including more than 1 hashtag (usually I just want 2, sometimes 3) is really difficult for me.

DanBC 10y ago
#that's #going #to #make #some #longer #messages #really #fucking #annoying #to #read #because #people #are #arseholes #and #this #is #why #we #can't #have #nice #things.
- komali2 10y ago
  #instagram
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    The Instagram 30-tag limit seems to work well in practice. Plus the most common tags are all over-saturated at this point, so including many of them reaches more bots than people.
- theseatoms 10y ago
  Then count all hashtags but the first.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Well, but GP wanted like 3.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  They can already do what you're suggesting. I actually include the hashtag mid-message sometimes for that reason. You're right, though, and I don't know how to fix it. I see lots of hashtags on Instagram posts and it's not amazing but whatever. Actually I don't even think the hashtags need to be visible, necessarily (although some people start viral movements with them, like #blacklivesmatter, so I'm not sure). Like when I add "#boardgames #gamedev #magicaloctopus" or something like that, I really don't care that they're visible to people seeing my tweet in their feed, I just want my tweet to appear when people are looking for those topics.

eugenekolo2 10y ago

World breaking news.

swalsh 10y ago

I wonder if as they started to make this change they started finding numerous areas of the code where devs went "eh, it'll never be more than 140 chars... that's our thing".

apetresc 10y ago
I don't think this change invalidates it. What they're basically doing is moving the list of reply-to's out of the body of the text into another field, which is being shown differently in the UI. What remains in the text field is still <=140 characters.
matt4077 10y ago
This reminded me of the surprisingly interesting chapter on character counting in their docs: https://dev.twitter.com/basics/counting-characters https://dev.twitter.com/basics/counting-characters Summary: the probably did find problems like that, but long before this change when they encountered different languages and character sets. I'm sure running into the int32 limit for object ids was more of a hassle.
- danso 10y ago
  Speaking of interesting writeups, their writeup on Snowflake, the system they use to generate unique 64-bit integers for tweets is itself a great read: https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake
fizx 10y ago
There was some stuff in search at one point that stored the length of a tweet in a byte. Making DMs longer was a database limitation at one point. Today though, I wouldn't expect it.

csswizardry 10y ago

This literally just turned on for me seconds ago. I noticed it because nearly all of my Notifications timeline now lacks clear context.

minimaxir 10y ago

How do you .@ reply with the new UI? (i.e so that the reply appears as a normal tweet to all your followers) Not seeing it on iOS.

enzanki_ars 10y ago
I think the "Quote Tweet" option is supposed to replace this.
- psyc 10y ago
  Quote tweet is a retweet with added text. It's not a thread reply. As far as I can tell they just broke dot-reply and remove-recipient.
shadowfacts 10y ago
You reply as normal and then retweet your own reply. All of your follower's will be able to see the tweet regardless of if they're following whoever you responded to.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  This is apparently the official solution. Yikes.

swang 10y ago

i just tried this out on the web. if you reply to a tweet, and that tweet mentions someone else's name, your tweet will have both their names included just like before (except their names are now in a link above the textbox). however if you want to remove their names, you have to click on the link, click on their checkbox to deselect them. so it's harder to remove people from a reply, and harder for others to remove you from threads you don't want to be a part of.

thewhitetulip 10y ago

The problem of Twitter is that many people (including me) have tried to use the platform n number of times, but either it is too cryptic or too useless for us in day to day life. I don't use Facebook much, I do use HN/Reddit/Quora and sometimes stackoverflow. I use the platforms which teach me something, reddit taught me a lot of things across all domains, HN teaches me new things everyday (it is also my news source), Quora and Stackoverflow are also nice, they give me some advantage. but I can't say the same with Twitter, if you see my twitter page, I use it only to tweet to nasty companies who keep pestering me with SPAM text messages despite my DO NOT DISTURB feature! For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium, I really do not understand why they do not make this a feature. A friend had got a counterfeit phone from an Indian ecommerce site, he found out after a month, after calling the site, they said "sorry, 7 day return policy", I put that on twitter, one month later, he got his money back.

XJOKOLAT 10y ago
It's not the platform, it's the content. I feel maybe you haven't been lucky enough to find your content-suppliers. There's some gold there in the nooks and crannies.
- nkrisc 10y ago
  You hinted at the problem: it's nearly impossible to find on your own.
  - TillE 10y ago
    I think this is making the same mistake that you see from a lot of new programmers asking "what should I write?" Unless there's a specific group you want to follow, maybe Twitter isn't for you. On the other hand, if you have some interests and you know some people who are active online about those issues, odds are extremely high that they're on Twitter. Follow them, then follow people they retweet, then follow people they retweet, and so on. Don't hesitate to unfollow people who are crapping up your feed with stuff you're not interested in. Twitter is a beautiful web of connections, and you really only need a handful of starting points to build a feed tailored to your interests.

matt4077 10y ago

I've actually grown a bit fond of twitter over the last months. For some communities, it's very much the place where the news happens, and you can watch it unfold life. That being said, I wish they'd do more with the potential they have. For example, I have tried at various times to find out what's happening when I heard the distant noises of a large demonstration (I'm in Berlin, Germany and it's a weekly occurrence, at least in the summer). Not once did I succeed with twitter's search, not even in cases where I later found out that there were many tweets about the event.

bengotow 10y ago

There's a lot of hate circulating around my Twitter feed this morning because of this, but I think it makes perfect sense. New users signing up for Twitter have to get longer usernames - everything else is taken. Then, when they try to reply to a couple of their friends, they only have like 50 characters to type a message. It's a non-starter. 140 characters enforces concise thoughts but somewhere around 90 characters you basically can't express yourself anymore. This change evens the playing field for new users, allowing them to use the platform the same way og users like @alex and @ow do (having meaningful threads with 3+ people.)

psyc 10y ago
The hate is not about the char count. It's about: 1. They failed to provide a way to remove @s from thread replies. Edit: Whoops, there is a UI for this. Which jarringly takes you to a different dialog and back! So my new complaint is that they made it harder and weird. I stand by my opinion that they screwed this up. 2. They failed to provide a way to change the visibility, aka 'dot replies' They fixed one thing, and broke two. Par for the course for Twitter UI designers. It has always baffled me how consistently bad every part of the Twitter UI is. Just try using lists sometime.
- bengotow 10y ago
  Ahh wow thanks for the info - I didn't think about the dot replies. That's actually a real bummer...
- shadowfacts 10y ago
  You can remove people from replies. Click on the usernames in the 'Replying to @personA and @personB' and it'll open a list of people you're replying to, each with a checkbox that can be used to remove them. Dot replies haven't been necessary since Twitter added the ability to retweet yourself. You respond to someone as usual and then retweet it, so all of your follower's will see it, even if they aren't following the person you responded to. It can definitely be a bit confusing for old users (and the UX for the first one isn't the greatest), but nothing's been removed, it's just been changed.

anigbrowl 10y ago

I'd be thrilled about this if they hadn't locked me out of my account and ignored my support requests :-/

meehow 10y ago

That's real innovation and deserves an article. Oh, wait...

27182818284 10y ago

I'm bummed out this was a focus as the user-feedback thread had a lot of other more useful features that I feel were mentioned more https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480 https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480

r3bl 10y ago
Ironically, for the first time in 5-7 years of me using Twitter, the replies didn't load until I refreshed the page.

infogulch 10y ago

Does this mean you can now reply to an unbounded number of people? i.e. one enormous reply chain where new people hit reply on the latest reply to add their own handle to the list. Possible?

hellofunk 10y ago

Twitter is gradually moving to final policies that will actually get me tweeting regularly. When I'm able to publish my memoir -- which incidentally, is coming along very nicely -- as a single tweet, I will know that I, and Twitter, have finally arrived. God speed the memoir tweets!

najati83 10y ago

I'm not the kind of person who hates changes, but everything that Twitter does certainly irritates me. I liked the service ten years ago when it was IRC-like. This is just one step towards their target of making it annoyingly complicated for power users. I've had this for weeks on Android (A/B testing?) and I was kind of hoping they'd drop it... nope.

laacz 10y ago

The problem is unwanted notifications of conversations (easy way to target you with spam, for example) you don't want to participate in. And there is no easy way to opt out.

nemof 10y ago

i'm still super pissed at the changes they made to search in tweetdeck recently. ( see announcement here https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/842044139587928064 https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/842044139587928064 ). now each time you click the search icon on the left hand side, when you do a search in the pop up box, rather than inline the results in the pop-up search window (all still on the left hand side), it now automatically generates a new column. for each search. that appears to the right of the last column in tweetdeck. as a ux decision this is awful. searches in tweetdeck were ephemeral. you search, 99% of the time you close your search once satisfied with the results, and that was it. the number of times you actually want to convert a search into a permanent column is very small. as it is with the changes to search every single time you search now you instantly generate a new column. if you dont delete each search the columns just keep on building up and up. this is an awful and unrequested change to tweetdeck search, and there seems to be zero public facing community managers for tweetdeck who this can be raised with.

awalton 10y ago

I am actually a fan of this change, simply because the enclaves on Twitter have expanded pretty significantly, and communicating with the whole group is pretty hard in a single conversation tree... I think it's a bit awkward in the UX, but at least now you haven't wasted 110 characters on people's variably-lengthed names...

skdotdan 10y ago

Every single feature Twitter introduces actually make it worse.

feborges 10y ago

It is worth mentioning the huge spam potential that ~unlimited~ @mentions can have: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8Nvg4EUwAE3Kzx.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8Nvg4EUwAE3Kzx.jpg (screenshot)