10 ms·

Twitter Killing Its Mac App

131 points by ttepasse 9y ago

arnklint 9y ago
Finally, show the way Twitter! Open web for the win!
fishtoaster 9y ago
It seems like this has been a while coming. The Mac app still hadn't been updated to support 280 characters when I finally ditched it a couple weeks ago (in favor of Tweetbot). If they couldn't push out a change like that in 3 months, the app has probably not been maintained for quite a while.
- rkuykendall-com 9y ago
  I also ditched a few weeks ago for Tweetbot. The official Twitter app still uses square avatars and, the real killer bug, no longer supports pictures. pic.twitter.com links just send you to the tweet recursively.
draw_down 9y ago
I’ve always preferred the web app. Slack too.
hengheng 9y ago
What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent spot in the Dock?
- nawazdhandala 9y ago
  Chrome + (Windows / Mac / Ubuntu) should let users dock any "Web App". That would enable new possibilities. No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows.
  - nielsbot 9y ago
    Unfortunately. Personally I much prefer apps that provide a native experience.
    - zanny 9y ago
      The broader ecosystem doesn't seem to think so. All kinds of software like Atom, VSCode, the desktop Slack client, Discord, etc are all just Electron or React apps wrapped in native installers and launchers.
      - lokedhs 9y ago
        I think this is a case of everything looking like a nail if all you have is a hammer. A lot of programmers these days have been brought up on JS and web technologies so they literally do not see any other solutions, regardless of how much better they may be.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Native app launchers (which you can stick into the taskbar/dock/etc.) are built into Chrome. • Windows: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-shortcuts-for-web-pages-using-chrome https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-sho... • Mac: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe-HrVE https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe... What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group. This is really a failing of our desktop window managers, not of web browsers: we need to separate the semantic concepts of "process" and "application", such that one process can be responsible for driving several applications, and choosing to "quit" an application can just result in an IPC message being sent to the process telling it that the user wants that window-group-context gone, rather than telling the window manager to go terminate the entire process. (Such a feature would also greatly help with things like managing "non-rooted" Remote Desktop or X11 or virtual-machine windows. Right now, some of these use a workaround of generating a stub binary to register each foreign application for the local DWM's sake. But it's a leaky abstraction: Alt+Tab/Cmd+Tab to the proxy "application", and the RDP client/X server/VM "app" gets focus instead. If window-groups—with metadata for the name and icon of the "application" they represent—were something a process could publish to a DWM, rather than something the DWM tried to determine heuristically about an application process, all of these problems would go away. And, even without offering this up for webapps to use, browsers would benefit from this change: Chrome's "profiles" are exactly separate "application" window-groups in the same sense as apps under an X server or VM process.)
- jiqiren 9y ago
  no ads is one of the many good features. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- xenadu02 9y ago
  Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform conventions? I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?
  - derefr 9y ago
    > They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse I mean, webapps obviously have a positive value for you over the alternative of not using the service—otherwise you would be doing exactly that (and maybe using a competitor's service.) At least personally, I appreciate first-class web-app versions of apps (with or without wrappers), since I use a not-very-popular OS and web-apps are basically the only way any company is ever going to give me a version of their software I can use.
  - msvan 9y ago
    Wasn't the Twitter Mac app just an Electron app?
    - evan_ 9y ago
      no
    - djsumdog 9y ago
      I think it was a native app and predated electron by quite a bit.
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    The Twitter app in no way has lower memory usage than a browser. It leaks GPU buffers like crazy.
  - eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
    > They do not solve any problem I as a user have. That's a pretty broad statement. As a user, I hate installing apps. They take up disk space, and then I need to remember to remove them if I am not using it. Also as a user, I am not sure how much additional security holes are created by installing a third-party binary. With a webapp, there is only a single source of security issues (browser).
- reednj 9y ago
  Its much easier to manage multiple accounts. I think on the website you can only be logged in as one account at a time. The twitter app has a vertical 'tab' for each account.
- hoistbypetard 9y ago
  It used to be much nicer to use, back when Twitter acquired it. (It was called Tweetie then.) The notifications were better, the mechanics of doing things like following conversations or refreshing a conversation were simpler, filtering options were better, etc. And I don't think it had a prominent spot in the dock... IIRC its icon was mainly in the menu bar. It's been a while since I used tweetie or twitter, though, for very much at all. I'm really sorry to see it go away more because it used to be a nice UI playground for a talented developer than because of any recent experience with it.
- evan_ 9y ago
  For me at least the killer feature in the twitter app is the global hotkey I can press to hide/show it: when I have 5 seconds of downtime I can press the hotkey, read three tweets, and then send it away. Great for filling short pauses while other things load or I'm waiting for a response from someone. Fortunately Tweetbot has that same feature now, so I've switched to it.
- ttepasse 9y ago
  A better UI. As every native app does. Yes, in principle web apps can do more, from drag & drop to .. stuff. But in practice they never do, they never go the extra mile but instead just building for the lowest common denominator. Also the dock spot is important for my method of using windowing. The browser is for websites. I wouldn't want to mix it. I could banish twitter.com to a wrapper window with Fluid, but it's still just a crappy web app. I use Tweetbot instead. And before that Tweetie for Mac. Which was killed today. Fingers crossed that the API survives.
- stesch 9y ago
  You can block twitter in the browser so they can't track which sites you are visiting. Same goes for Facebook.
- rahoulb 9y ago
  One of the greatest things about the Twitter native apps were that the guy who originally wrote them (Loren Brichter, who Twitter acqui-hired) literally invented the Pull-to-refresh gesture that is used everywhere nowadays. Before Twitter killed native clients by restricting their acccess tokens, they were an amazing place for people to try out new UI ideas - a really simple concept (one text area and a scrolling list) but a huge explosion of ways of presenting and interacting with it. Then twitter bought Tweetie and Twetdeck and restricted what the 3rd party clients could do and it all just died.
thrillgore 9y ago
Where do I go to add my "this is a dumb decision, Twitter should fix its botting/fake account problem" take?
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Twitter.
5_minutes 9y ago
Also strange: on the iOS app, you can add multiple accounts. On the web version not. Tweetdeck doesnt feel snappy at all. Twitter is, very broken - for a very long time now.
- samstave 9y ago
  Nope. you're the broken. Not broken. Let me tell you, I have the best brokens and you dont compare. sad. best brokens! Believe me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- khc 9y ago
  I use Firefox container tabs to get around this
  - deecewan 9y ago
    It's this built in to Firefox? I use session box in Chrome for a similar effect.
    - smnrchrds 9y ago
      Container API is built into Firefox, but for now you need to install a Mozilla add-on to actually use the feature: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
    - andromedaworld 9y ago
      Bro, session box is such a handy recommendation. Didn't know of it till now. I typically have to use incognito and it's rather tedious.
- vwadhwani 9y ago
startupdiscuss 9y ago
This allows the following to happen: 1. If someone can make a better MacOS client, they should do so and charge for it! 2. Customers can probably pick up a free client from someone who wants to play around or pay a little more for a pro client
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  But, doesn't Twitter have sufficient restrictions on the use of their API as to make this not really worthwhile?
  - startupdiscuss 9y ago
    I see from all the other responses too that this is the case. I thought if it was available to their own web client, another local client could just effectively scrape that data.
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  "TweetBot" has been the canonical "good" Mac Twitter client for a while now. But there are strict limits on the number of clients Twitter allow for third party companies, which is why it's so expensive - so that they do not hit that limit. The whole situation is a mess.
  - startupdiscuss 9y ago
    I am not familiar with these limits. (I mean, I know they have some, but not how they work). Can't any client just read off the web version? Is there something preventing that?
    - sitharus 9y ago
      Technically yes, you can imitate the web Twitter client and scrape that. However it’s against their terms of service. Also technically it’s hard because it’s undocumented and they can change it at any time with no notice, which would cause your client to break.
jhack 9y ago
So, alternatives? I have Twitter on the side next to my browser. Using Twitter in a separate window doesn't work because Twitter for the web isn't mobile friendly and mobile.twitter.com doesn't refresh if the window isn't in focus.
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  TweetBot
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Tweeten (a Tweetdeck clone) is my preferred one, but other people like Tweetbot, and Twitteriffic just kickstarted a new Mac app that people seem to like too. (typing that sentence out made me realize just how ridiculous Twitter app names really are :-) )
- amedvednikov 9y ago
  I'm working on a desktop client for Twitter, FB, Slack etc. It's pretty snappy and weighs only 90 KB (!) https://eul.im https://eul.im Twitter support is coming later this month.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Still no source code up? Do you intend for this to be open source or are you trying to push this commercially?
    - amedvednikov 9y ago
      It will be open sourced eventually, it's not ready yet.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - pharrington 9y ago
        You can release source code without it being open sourced.
kmfrk 9y ago
As a latecomer to macOS, Tweetie feels like a bygone era back when the default didn't seem to be Electron and web views. I want to believe in online apps, but god, they all just suck so much, if not at launch, then a few years down the line.
- oldmancoyote 9y ago
  Given the sociopathic aspects of Twitter, maybe this is a good time to kiss it off. Maybe this is just the nudge we need.
  - Hydraulix989 9y ago
    Yes, Twitter as a campaign/marketing vehicle pretty much enabled the outcome of our last Presidential election.
tatersolid 9y ago
Will everyone on HN just stop complaining when a random free service doesn’t give you exactly what you want? You are not Twitter’s customer. You are Twitter’s product. If you don’t like that situation, tune out.
drvortex 9y ago
Because of జ్ఞా ?
- saagarjha 9y ago
  No.
itsdrewmiller 9y ago
The commentary on this is off base - maybe twitter is pulling people off this project to put them on fake accounts / nazis? Certainly maintaining a mac app doesn't help there.
- orionblastar 9y ago
  All the fake accounts, Nazis, racists, alright, tea party, and other right-wingers have boycotted Twitter mostly and went here http://gab.ai/ http://gab.ai/ instead. Those left on Twitter are either bots or puppet/troll accounts.
sleepybrett 9y ago
More moeny for tweetbot
sodosopa 9y ago
I wonder if the Russian money they sucked in during the 2016 elections wasn't enough to keep the app?
AHTERIX5000 9y ago
I've been using TweetDeck on Mac until it started crashing I guess after High Sierra update. Scrolling also works in somewhat weird way compared to other apps. The Twitter web app is a mess, it displays lots of tweets liked by others that usually is just clickbaity noise, not something I want to see in my feed even though cat pictures can be funny indeed. Also notifications used to show actually relevant notifications but nowadays it just displays retweets and tweets liked by others just like in my main feed and I haven't found a way to disable that.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  I thought they killed the TweetDeck app for all platforms. Mac must have survived the cut. You can still use it on the web, but I don't know how it compares to the apps.
rocky1138 9y ago
Can we channel all the anger and frustration this has caused into switching to Mastodon/GNU Social? Open standards, run your own if you want, nobody deprecating or discontinuing anything.
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  Personally if I have to jump from Twitter, I'm more likely to switch to Micro.blog [1]. Everything is posted to your own site as an RSS post, and it already has iPhone and Mac apps. And of course, it has an API for making your own apps. [1] https://micro.blog/about https://micro.blog/about
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    Does it support OStatus?
    - ttepasse 9y ago
      It seems that Microblog is a mixture of Feeds and the Indieweb, namely the Micropub API which originated there: http://help.micro.blog/2017/api-posting/ http://help.micro.blog/2017/api-posting/ Btw: Isn't ActivityPub the new OStatus?
      - SyneRyder 9y ago
        Might also be worth pointing out that Micropub is a W3C Recommendation [1], and I think MicroPub and ActivityPub are meant to work together [2]. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ [2] https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/5286 https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/5286
- lokedhs 9y ago
  I tried Twitter a long time ago, and never enjoyed it. I've been quite active on Mastodon (@loke@functional.cafe) for the last several months, and enjoying it a lot. It's not perfect, but it gives me more satisfaction than Twitter ever could. The biggest problem with Mastodon at the moment is discoverability. It takes some effort finding the right people to follow but I've found a reasonable group of people who are interested in things like Emacs, Lisp etc.
polutropos 9y ago
Twitterrific is on sale right now in the Mac App Store for eight bucks. Both it and Tweetbot are great native Mac Twitter apps and are so much better than the web interface.
radley 9y ago
Maybe this is a good thing. My current Mac app will remain a "pure" Twitter app and I won't have to worry about it updating to include promotions, suggested tweets, and needless features (unless "stop supporting" means they're shutting off the API).
- Kudos 9y ago
  That is surely what it will come to at some point.
artsnail 9y ago
I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the time/resources on maintaining this. I would guess that the kinds of people who 1. use Macs and 2. decide to download the app are probably among some of Twitter's more engaged and higher-income users.
- joejev 9y ago
  Why does it matter if the users are high income? Twitter can still serve ads to low income users.
  - rulum 9y ago
    Ads are there to convert (sell stuff). Low income users buy less stuff. Also less expensive stuff. Ads catering to high income users tend to budget more for ads because they can be more lax with cost per user acquisition - their product has the margin to support it. All this leads to more income for twitter.
nasredin 9y ago
Related question. Suggest a Twitter client that... is not Electron based shows tweets horizontally, maximizing number of tweets, minimizing scrolling hides crap like images and video shows replies as threads Windows Thanks

131 points by ttepasse 9y ago

Finally, show the way Twitter! Open web for the win!

It seems like this has been a while coming. The Mac app still hadn't been updated to support 280 characters when I finally ditched it a couple weeks ago (in favor of Tweetbot). If they couldn't push out a change like that in 3 months, the app has probably not been maintained for quite a while.

rkuykendall-com 9y ago
I also ditched a few weeks ago for Tweetbot. The official Twitter app still uses square avatars and, the real killer bug, no longer supports pictures. pic.twitter.com links just send you to the tweet recursively.

draw_down 9y ago

I’ve always preferred the web app. Slack too.

hengheng 9y ago

What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent spot in the Dock?

nawazdhandala 9y ago
Chrome + (Windows / Mac / Ubuntu) should let users dock any "Web App". That would enable new possibilities. No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows.
- nielsbot 9y ago
  Unfortunately. Personally I much prefer apps that provide a native experience.
  - zanny 9y ago
    The broader ecosystem doesn't seem to think so. All kinds of software like Atom, VSCode, the desktop Slack client, Discord, etc are all just Electron or React apps wrapped in native installers and launchers.
    - lokedhs 9y ago
      I think this is a case of everything looking like a nail if all you have is a hammer. A lot of programmers these days have been brought up on JS and web technologies so they literally do not see any other solutions, regardless of how much better they may be.
- derefr 9y ago
  Native app launchers (which you can stick into the taskbar/dock/etc.) are built into Chrome. • Windows: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-shortcuts-for-web-pages-using-chrome https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-sho... • Mac: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe-HrVE https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe... What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group. This is really a failing of our desktop window managers, not of web browsers: we need to separate the semantic concepts of "process" and "application", such that one process can be responsible for driving several applications, and choosing to "quit" an application can just result in an IPC message being sent to the process telling it that the user wants that window-group-context gone, rather than telling the window manager to go terminate the entire process. (Such a feature would also greatly help with things like managing "non-rooted" Remote Desktop or X11 or virtual-machine windows. Right now, some of these use a workaround of generating a stub binary to register each foreign application for the local DWM's sake. But it's a leaky abstraction: Alt+Tab/Cmd+Tab to the proxy "application", and the RDP client/X server/VM "app" gets focus instead. If window-groups—with metadata for the name and icon of the "application" they represent—were something a process could publish to a DWM, rather than something the DWM tried to determine heuristically about an application process, all of these problems would go away. And, even without offering this up for webapps to use, browsers would benefit from this change: Chrome's "profiles" are exactly separate "application" window-groups in the same sense as apps under an X server or VM process.)
jiqiren 9y ago
no ads is one of the many good features. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
xenadu02 9y ago
Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform conventions? I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?
- derefr 9y ago
  > They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse I mean, webapps obviously have a positive value for you over the alternative of not using the service—otherwise you would be doing exactly that (and maybe using a competitor's service.) At least personally, I appreciate first-class web-app versions of apps (with or without wrappers), since I use a not-very-popular OS and web-apps are basically the only way any company is ever going to give me a version of their software I can use.
- msvan 9y ago
  Wasn't the Twitter Mac app just an Electron app?
  - evan_ 9y ago
    no
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I think it was a native app and predated electron by quite a bit.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  The Twitter app in no way has lower memory usage than a browser. It leaks GPU buffers like crazy.
- eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
  > They do not solve any problem I as a user have. That's a pretty broad statement. As a user, I hate installing apps. They take up disk space, and then I need to remember to remove them if I am not using it. Also as a user, I am not sure how much additional security holes are created by installing a third-party binary. With a webapp, there is only a single source of security issues (browser).
reednj 9y ago
Its much easier to manage multiple accounts. I think on the website you can only be logged in as one account at a time. The twitter app has a vertical 'tab' for each account.
hoistbypetard 9y ago
It used to be much nicer to use, back when Twitter acquired it. (It was called Tweetie then.) The notifications were better, the mechanics of doing things like following conversations or refreshing a conversation were simpler, filtering options were better, etc. And I don't think it had a prominent spot in the dock... IIRC its icon was mainly in the menu bar. It's been a while since I used tweetie or twitter, though, for very much at all. I'm really sorry to see it go away more because it used to be a nice UI playground for a talented developer than because of any recent experience with it.
evan_ 9y ago
For me at least the killer feature in the twitter app is the global hotkey I can press to hide/show it: when I have 5 seconds of downtime I can press the hotkey, read three tweets, and then send it away. Great for filling short pauses while other things load or I'm waiting for a response from someone. Fortunately Tweetbot has that same feature now, so I've switched to it.
ttepasse 9y ago
A better UI. As every native app does. Yes, in principle web apps can do more, from drag & drop to .. stuff. But in practice they never do, they never go the extra mile but instead just building for the lowest common denominator. Also the dock spot is important for my method of using windowing. The browser is for websites. I wouldn't want to mix it. I could banish twitter.com to a wrapper window with Fluid, but it's still just a crappy web app. I use Tweetbot instead. And before that Tweetie for Mac. Which was killed today. Fingers crossed that the API survives.
stesch 9y ago
You can block twitter in the browser so they can't track which sites you are visiting. Same goes for Facebook.
rahoulb 9y ago
One of the greatest things about the Twitter native apps were that the guy who originally wrote them (Loren Brichter, who Twitter acqui-hired) literally invented the Pull-to-refresh gesture that is used everywhere nowadays. Before Twitter killed native clients by restricting their acccess tokens, they were an amazing place for people to try out new UI ideas - a really simple concept (one text area and a scrolling list) but a huge explosion of ways of presenting and interacting with it. Then twitter bought Tweetie and Twetdeck and restricted what the 3rd party clients could do and it all just died.

thrillgore 9y ago

Where do I go to add my "this is a dumb decision, Twitter should fix its botting/fake account problem" take?

egypturnash 9y ago
Twitter.

5_minutes 9y ago

Also strange: on the iOS app, you can add multiple accounts. On the web version not. Tweetdeck doesnt feel snappy at all. Twitter is, very broken - for a very long time now.

samstave 9y ago
Nope. you're the broken. Not broken. Let me tell you, I have the best brokens and you dont compare. sad. best brokens! Believe me.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
khc 9y ago
I use Firefox container tabs to get around this
- deecewan 9y ago
  It's this built in to Firefox? I use session box in Chrome for a similar effect.
  - smnrchrds 9y ago
    Container API is built into Firefox, but for now you need to install a Mozilla add-on to actually use the feature: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
  - andromedaworld 9y ago
    Bro, session box is such a handy recommendation. Didn't know of it till now. I typically have to use incognito and it's rather tedious.
vwadhwani 9y ago

startupdiscuss 9y ago

This allows the following to happen: 1. If someone can make a better MacOS client, they should do so and charge for it! 2. Customers can probably pick up a free client from someone who wants to play around or pay a little more for a pro client

s73v3r_ 9y ago
But, doesn't Twitter have sufficient restrictions on the use of their API as to make this not really worthwhile?
- startupdiscuss 9y ago
  I see from all the other responses too that this is the case. I thought if it was available to their own web client, another local client could just effectively scrape that data.
LeoPanthera 9y ago
"TweetBot" has been the canonical "good" Mac Twitter client for a while now. But there are strict limits on the number of clients Twitter allow for third party companies, which is why it's so expensive - so that they do not hit that limit. The whole situation is a mess.
- startupdiscuss 9y ago
  I am not familiar with these limits. (I mean, I know they have some, but not how they work). Can't any client just read off the web version? Is there something preventing that?
  - sitharus 9y ago
    Technically yes, you can imitate the web Twitter client and scrape that. However it’s against their terms of service. Also technically it’s hard because it’s undocumented and they can change it at any time with no notice, which would cause your client to break.

jhack 9y ago

So, alternatives? I have Twitter on the side next to my browser. Using Twitter in a separate window doesn't work because Twitter for the web isn't mobile friendly and mobile.twitter.com doesn't refresh if the window isn't in focus.

LeoPanthera 9y ago
TweetBot
Analemma_ 9y ago
Tweeten (a Tweetdeck clone) is my preferred one, but other people like Tweetbot, and Twitteriffic just kickstarted a new Mac app that people seem to like too. (typing that sentence out made me realize just how ridiculous Twitter app names really are :-) )
amedvednikov 9y ago
I'm working on a desktop client for Twitter, FB, Slack etc. It's pretty snappy and weighs only 90 KB (!) https://eul.im https://eul.im Twitter support is coming later this month.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Still no source code up? Do you intend for this to be open source or are you trying to push this commercially?
  - amedvednikov 9y ago
    It will be open sourced eventually, it's not ready yet.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - pharrington 9y ago
      You can release source code without it being open sourced.

kmfrk 9y ago

As a latecomer to macOS, Tweetie feels like a bygone era back when the default didn't seem to be Electron and web views. I want to believe in online apps, but god, they all just suck so much, if not at launch, then a few years down the line.

oldmancoyote 9y ago
Given the sociopathic aspects of Twitter, maybe this is a good time to kiss it off. Maybe this is just the nudge we need.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  Yes, Twitter as a campaign/marketing vehicle pretty much enabled the outcome of our last Presidential election.

tatersolid 9y ago

Will everyone on HN just stop complaining when a random free service doesn’t give you exactly what you want? You are not Twitter’s customer. You are Twitter’s product. If you don’t like that situation, tune out.

drvortex 9y ago

Because of జ్ఞా ?

saagarjha 9y ago
No.

itsdrewmiller 9y ago

The commentary on this is off base - maybe twitter is pulling people off this project to put them on fake accounts / nazis? Certainly maintaining a mac app doesn't help there.

orionblastar 9y ago
All the fake accounts, Nazis, racists, alright, tea party, and other right-wingers have boycotted Twitter mostly and went here http://gab.ai/ http://gab.ai/ instead. Those left on Twitter are either bots or puppet/troll accounts.

sleepybrett 9y ago

More moeny for tweetbot

sodosopa 9y ago

I wonder if the Russian money they sucked in during the 2016 elections wasn't enough to keep the app?

AHTERIX5000 9y ago

I've been using TweetDeck on Mac until it started crashing I guess after High Sierra update. Scrolling also works in somewhat weird way compared to other apps. The Twitter web app is a mess, it displays lots of tweets liked by others that usually is just clickbaity noise, not something I want to see in my feed even though cat pictures can be funny indeed. Also notifications used to show actually relevant notifications but nowadays it just displays retweets and tweets liked by others just like in my main feed and I haven't found a way to disable that.

rainbowmverse 9y ago
I thought they killed the TweetDeck app for all platforms. Mac must have survived the cut. You can still use it on the web, but I don't know how it compares to the apps.

rocky1138 9y ago

Can we channel all the anger and frustration this has caused into switching to Mastodon/GNU Social? Open standards, run your own if you want, nobody deprecating or discontinuing anything.

SyneRyder 9y ago
Personally if I have to jump from Twitter, I'm more likely to switch to Micro.blog [1]. Everything is posted to your own site as an RSS post, and it already has iPhone and Mac apps. And of course, it has an API for making your own apps. [1] https://micro.blog/about https://micro.blog/about
- rocky1138 9y ago
  Does it support OStatus?
  - ttepasse 9y ago
    It seems that Microblog is a mixture of Feeds and the Indieweb, namely the Micropub API which originated there: http://help.micro.blog/2017/api-posting/ http://help.micro.blog/2017/api-posting/ Btw: Isn't ActivityPub the new OStatus?
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
      Might also be worth pointing out that Micropub is a W3C Recommendation [1], and I think MicroPub and ActivityPub are meant to work together [2]. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ [2] https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/5286 https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/5286
lokedhs 9y ago
I tried Twitter a long time ago, and never enjoyed it. I've been quite active on Mastodon (@loke@functional.cafe) for the last several months, and enjoying it a lot. It's not perfect, but it gives me more satisfaction than Twitter ever could. The biggest problem with Mastodon at the moment is discoverability. It takes some effort finding the right people to follow but I've found a reasonable group of people who are interested in things like Emacs, Lisp etc.

polutropos 9y ago

Twitterrific is on sale right now in the Mac App Store for eight bucks. Both it and Tweetbot are great native Mac Twitter apps and are so much better than the web interface.

radley 9y ago

Maybe this is a good thing. My current Mac app will remain a "pure" Twitter app and I won't have to worry about it updating to include promotions, suggested tweets, and needless features (unless "stop supporting" means they're shutting off the API).

Kudos 9y ago
That is surely what it will come to at some point.

artsnail 9y ago

I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the time/resources on maintaining this. I would guess that the kinds of people who 1. use Macs and 2. decide to download the app are probably among some of Twitter's more engaged and higher-income users.

joejev 9y ago
Why does it matter if the users are high income? Twitter can still serve ads to low income users.
- rulum 9y ago
  Ads are there to convert (sell stuff). Low income users buy less stuff. Also less expensive stuff. Ads catering to high income users tend to budget more for ads because they can be more lax with cost per user acquisition - their product has the margin to support it. All this leads to more income for twitter.

nasredin 9y ago

Related question. Suggest a Twitter client that... is not Electron based shows tweets horizontally, maximizing number of tweets, minimizing scrolling hides crap like images and video shows replies as threads Windows Thanks