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> 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

> 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.

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.