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Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Reply threads are a pain. Tweetstorms get old. And all too often there is way too much spam. However, there are

Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Reply threads are a pain. Tweetstorms get old. And all too often there is way too much spam. However, there are amazing communities of people sharing interesting content and having great conversations. Twitter needs to realize that there value prop is the community using it and not the app itself. They need to make radical design and product changes to make for a better user experience if they want to grow. The vast majority of internet products evolve significantly as they grow, surfing the wave of changing user behavior and taste as they reach new markets.

visarga 9y ago
Scrolling is very inefficient on Twitter - to read the equivalent of a single screen on reddit or HN means to scroll 20x more on T. When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost. Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.
- icebraining 9y ago
  When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost. That's also my experience - I have to be very careful not to click on anything, lest I lose my position on the thread. I don't understand how the developers themselves don't get frustrated about this, frankly.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    You think the developers of Twitter use Twitter?
    - mrkrabo 9y ago
      That's actually one of my concerns. As a heavy Twitter user for like 8 years (I spend at least one hour a day in that app) it is obvious to me that those involved with Twitter do not use the product at all.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      Not heavily, no, and definitely not on Android (at least), where they have some algorithm to reflow the timeline both at random times, and after viewing a specific tweet. Click the back button to continue reading your timeline and they insert 5-20 tweets in between the one you just read and the one you were about to read, or they pop you up to the top of your timeline. It's truly a bizarre UX, and the only charitable way I can interpret it is that they're using Continuous Delivery, implementing features in a piecemeal fashion, using users as alpha testers, and basically moving slow and breaking things.
  - wott 9y ago
    I never know what is going to happen when I click somewhere. The only thing I know is that it is not going to be what I expect. So I dare not click anywhere...
- sp332 9y ago
  Is there a platform where you can filter political stuff? Anyway Twitter lets you hide tweets with certain keywords. You can cut down on noise dramatically that way.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Eridrus 9y ago
Does anyone know what the status of the Twitter API is? I remember there being a kerfuffle about Twitter placing limitations on it, but is it still possible to make a custom client that unifies, say, Twitter and Mastodon?
- TekMol 9y ago
  Haven't used it in a while, but: I think if you use it via user auth, it still works. So if a user of your app is approving your app to act on their behalf, you can do most things the user could do manually. I think the limits mainly regarded application auth. So if your application wants the last 10k tweets about "honey" it will not get them unless you pay. I could be wrong though. Would love to hear more from people in the know.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    You can't use DM image/video send from any API client, you can't send polls and I believe you can't display them too.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    The search API is limited to 7 days. You can get a 1% firehose feed, too, so you can tell the relatively frequency of hashtags and stuff. All this is free and you don't need user auth. User auth gives you extra rate limit increase (a separate bucket per user). https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limits https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limits The big number for app auth is you can do 450 searches/15 minutes, with up to 100 tweets each. So last 10k on "honey" is easily doable (it's only 100 searches) so long as those 10K are within the last week. For everything else they want you to buy their Gnip product.
    - tpaschalis 9y ago
      (Shameless self plug) You might be able to use http://tweetstream.space http://tweetstream.space I created this tool, that isn't limited to 1-week-old tweets, uses the public feed, and outputs it to an easily parsed format.
nothis 9y ago
>Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Amen to that. I still don't fully get the logic of what Twitter decides to display and what to hide when I click a multi-tweet reply or something. Connected tweets (which happen so often that I feel like the 140 char limit is more hindering than helpful) run bottom-up in the time line. You can't maximize embedded youtube videos. Why? When you click an image and then "back" in a long scroll, it sends you back to the start of the page. I also have to click an image like three times to get to the source. I don't get how those split-views of multiple images are supposed to work, they always open a random one. An annoying delay/stutter whenever you scroll down because of how goddamn infinite scroll loads images. No proper search, but I'm already getting used to that in modern websites. "Just google it", right? EDIT: I just checked and a few of these things have been changed. Am I nuts or did they have differently sized fonts for tweets at one point and reverted that by now?
QAPereo 9y ago
Every time I try to get into it, usually as the result of a particularly entertaining comedian or insightful scientist, I'm driven away by all of the things you're describing. I tolerate the bad parts of Reddit, I used to do the same for Usenet and Irc, but Twitter is too much. Facebook is similar, except without any of the temptation to actually join in the first place.
epoch1970 9y ago
When I last tried to sign up, they requested a phone number, I assume as some sort of an attempt to make it harder for spammers to sign up. I don't think they have any legitimate reason for that sort of information, so I didn't provide it. I don't remember the specifics, but either I couldn't finish creating the account, or it was created and then automatically locked/suspended a few minutes later. The end result was that I couldn't sign up and use the service in any meaningful way. I don't know if that's still the case or not. After that rather awful experience trying to sign up, I've lost all interest in trying again. I'm not surprised they're having trouble growing when they impede the ability of people to sign up! There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They do (and any service basically). You don't want to run a large-scale service without having some way for your users to self-reset their passwords. > They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me. That requirement is recent and I believe comes from law enforcement / politicians as they want to be able to track "hate speech" (that's the official speech, but rather I believe it's about dissidents, YPG supporters etc) to real persons. Many left-wing German accounts had them frozen until entering a phone number, for example. Facebook is easier because many people use their real name and photographs or other personal details from which law enforcement can identify them.
  - epoch1970 9y ago
    > They do (and any service basically). You don't want to run a large-scale service without having some way for your users to self-reset their passwords. I don't buy that. There are other similar services that allow an email address to optionally be provided later, for password-resetting purposes. I believe reddit is like that, as is this site. This site gives me a "Please put a valid address in the email field, or we won't be able to send you a new password if you forget yours." message when I view my preferences, for example. I don't buy your phone number claim, either. There are many other services out there, including ones that very likely have a presence in a country like Germany, that support user-posted content but that don't require a phone number to sign up.
Macsenour 9y ago
I'm sure we're not, but Twitter still feels like it's at the 1.0 version of the user experience.
bluthru 9y ago
>Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. I think so much of it comes down to trying to put too much content in a small space. Twitter was a lot less annoying when it was only 140 characters and no embedded media since the information density was appropriate for a phone screen. Now it's just absurd how much one needs to scroll just to use it. It's almost more of a scrolling app than an information app. One quick fix would be to have an option to show tweets one at a time with next and previous buttons at the bottom for rapid digestion of tweets.

visarga 9y ago

Scrolling is very inefficient on Twitter - to read the equivalent of a single screen on reddit or HN means to scroll 20x more on T. When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost. Another big one - you can't filter out the political crap from the domain specific stuff.

icebraining 9y ago
When reading comments I have to be very careful not to click outside the column because it gets closed and position lost. That's also my experience - I have to be very careful not to click on anything, lest I lose my position on the thread. I don't understand how the developers themselves don't get frustrated about this, frankly.
- freehunter 9y ago
  You think the developers of Twitter use Twitter?
  - mrkrabo 9y ago
    That's actually one of my concerns. As a heavy Twitter user for like 8 years (I spend at least one hour a day in that app) it is obvious to me that those involved with Twitter do not use the product at all.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Not heavily, no, and definitely not on Android (at least), where they have some algorithm to reflow the timeline both at random times, and after viewing a specific tweet. Click the back button to continue reading your timeline and they insert 5-20 tweets in between the one you just read and the one you were about to read, or they pop you up to the top of your timeline. It's truly a bizarre UX, and the only charitable way I can interpret it is that they're using Continuous Delivery, implementing features in a piecemeal fashion, using users as alpha testers, and basically moving slow and breaking things.
- wott 9y ago
  I never know what is going to happen when I click somewhere. The only thing I know is that it is not going to be what I expect. So I dare not click anywhere...
sp332 9y ago
Is there a platform where you can filter political stuff? Anyway Twitter lets you hide tweets with certain keywords. You can cut down on noise dramatically that way.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Eridrus 9y ago

Does anyone know what the status of the Twitter API is? I remember there being a kerfuffle about Twitter placing limitations on it, but is it still possible to make a custom client that unifies, say, Twitter and Mastodon?

TekMol 9y ago
Haven't used it in a while, but: I think if you use it via user auth, it still works. So if a user of your app is approving your app to act on their behalf, you can do most things the user could do manually. I think the limits mainly regarded application auth. So if your application wants the last 10k tweets about "honey" it will not get them unless you pay. I could be wrong though. Would love to hear more from people in the know.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  You can't use DM image/video send from any API client, you can't send polls and I believe you can't display them too.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  The search API is limited to 7 days. You can get a 1% firehose feed, too, so you can tell the relatively frequency of hashtags and stuff. All this is free and you don't need user auth. User auth gives you extra rate limit increase (a separate bucket per user). https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limits https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limits The big number for app auth is you can do 450 searches/15 minutes, with up to 100 tweets each. So last 10k on "honey" is easily doable (it's only 100 searches) so long as those 10K are within the last week. For everything else they want you to buy their Gnip product.
  - tpaschalis 9y ago
    (Shameless self plug) You might be able to use http://tweetstream.space http://tweetstream.space I created this tool, that isn't limited to 1-week-old tweets, uses the public feed, and outputs it to an easily parsed format.

nothis 9y ago

>Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. Amen to that. I still don't fully get the logic of what Twitter decides to display and what to hide when I click a multi-tweet reply or something. Connected tweets (which happen so often that I feel like the 140 char limit is more hindering than helpful) run bottom-up in the time line. You can't maximize embedded youtube videos. Why? When you click an image and then "back" in a long scroll, it sends you back to the start of the page. I also have to click an image like three times to get to the source. I don't get how those split-views of multiple images are supposed to work, they always open a random one. An annoying delay/stutter whenever you scroll down because of how goddamn infinite scroll loads images. No proper search, but I'm already getting used to that in modern websites. "Just google it", right? EDIT: I just checked and a few of these things have been changed. Am I nuts or did they have differently sized fonts for tweets at one point and reverted that by now?

QAPereo 9y ago

Every time I try to get into it, usually as the result of a particularly entertaining comedian or insightful scientist, I'm driven away by all of the things you're describing. I tolerate the bad parts of Reddit, I used to do the same for Usenet and Irc, but Twitter is too much. Facebook is similar, except without any of the temptation to actually join in the first place.

epoch1970 9y ago

When I last tried to sign up, they requested a phone number, I assume as some sort of an attempt to make it harder for spammers to sign up. I don't think they have any legitimate reason for that sort of information, so I didn't provide it. I don't remember the specifics, but either I couldn't finish creating the account, or it was created and then automatically locked/suspended a few minutes later. The end result was that I couldn't sign up and use the service in any meaningful way. I don't know if that's still the case or not. After that rather awful experience trying to sign up, I've lost all interest in trying again. I'm not surprised they're having trouble growing when they impede the ability of people to sign up! There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me.

mschuster91 9y ago
> There's no reason for their signup process to need anything more than a username and a password. They don't need my email address. They do (and any service basically). You don't want to run a large-scale service without having some way for your users to self-reset their passwords. > They surely don't need my phone number or any other information about me. That requirement is recent and I believe comes from law enforcement / politicians as they want to be able to track "hate speech" (that's the official speech, but rather I believe it's about dissidents, YPG supporters etc) to real persons. Many left-wing German accounts had them frozen until entering a phone number, for example. Facebook is easier because many people use their real name and photographs or other personal details from which law enforcement can identify them.
- epoch1970 9y ago
  > They do (and any service basically). You don't want to run a large-scale service without having some way for your users to self-reset their passwords. I don't buy that. There are other similar services that allow an email address to optionally be provided later, for password-resetting purposes. I believe reddit is like that, as is this site. This site gives me a "Please put a valid address in the email field, or we won't be able to send you a new password if you forget yours." message when I view my preferences, for example. I don't buy your phone number claim, either. There are many other services out there, including ones that very likely have a presence in a country like Germany, that support user-posted content but that don't require a phone number to sign up.

Macsenour 9y ago

I'm sure we're not, but Twitter still feels like it's at the 1.0 version of the user experience.

bluthru 9y ago

>Twitter is so disappointingly annoying to use. I think so much of it comes down to trying to put too much content in a small space. Twitter was a lot less annoying when it was only 140 characters and no embedded media since the information density was appropriate for a phone screen. Now it's just absurd how much one needs to scroll just to use it. It's almost more of a scrolling app than an information app. One quick fix would be to have an option to show tweets one at a time with next and previous buttons at the bottom for rapid digestion of tweets.