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> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better und

by skymt 7y ago

> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design for conversation and had decided that the controversy boost to engagement numbers was worth creating a toxic environment. For real, consider these two basic elements of Twitter's design. First, any given post has a low maximum length, so any time you want to say more than a sentence or two it needs to be spread over multiple posts (a "tweetstorm"). Second, Twitter has two separate features that let anyone pull any part of a series of posts out of its original context: retweeting and quote-tweeting.

carriers 7y ago
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuff below it, some of which is definitely replies to the original post, and some of which appears to be part of a completely different conversation. Some threads of conversations get cut off for no apparent reason and you have to click something to see more of them. Nothing is indented, so it's really hard to tell who's replying to whom. I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter, so I've never signed up because who the hell wants to be part of that? I usually also don't go to Twitter to read stuff other people link to because I'm not going to be able to follow it. Forget boosting controversial stuff, I bet a lot of users post the way they do because they also don't understand what they're looking at.
- nineteen999 7y ago
  I'm a similar age as you. I did create a Twitter account once, but never used it more than once or twice. Unfortunately the Twitter username (handle?) I chose happened to be the same as the name of a somewhat well-known RnB/Hip Hop video producer (who I had no knowledge of before I created the account). I signed in a year or two later and found that I had a couple of hundred follow requests from various aspiring and up-and-coming rap artists. At that point I realised in all honesty that I probably had no real use for Twitter.
- monk_e_boy 7y ago
  I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Today I read Spacex and Musk talking about Starlink on twitter and I could not fathom who was talking to who, it seems like abunch of random statements with tons of animated gifs and stupid jokes. How does anyone navigate that mess? People say such stupid things. And spend so much time writing it out and finding a gif and ... for what? It's just noise. What motivates them? When do they find the time? What are they hoping to achieve? That Elon Musk replies with a lol. Couldn't Twitter just look at your last 40 posts and if no one has interacted with you then it just deletes your account. Sorry buddy, no one cares.
- DavidSJ 7y ago
  I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter I don’t think Twitter understands threads on Twitter, and they never have. They built something over a decade ago, it took off for reasons they never fully could fathom, and they’ve been afraid ever since to futz with what for them has been a good thing.
  - username223 7y ago
    Once upon a time, there was IRC for single-stream chats, and NNTP for threaded ones, and all was good. Twitter used to be one of the former, but then they noticed that users were using the "@name" convention to simulate replies, and started officially supporting it. Instead of a single conversation, or a tree of nested replies, they created some unholy thing partway between the two, that serves neither role well.
    - thwarted 7y ago
      Twitter threads are a tree, but the representation in Twitter's web interface and mobile apps is linear and it's not obvious which tweets are in response to which. There are hints in the interface if you're aware of them, but it's easy to get lost.
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        They ought to figure this out or let people build alternative clients...
        asdff 7y ago
        They used to let people build alternative clients, but those days of user customization are long gone.
- theoh 7y ago
  Some people used to feel this way about IRC. I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is. There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.
  - fjsolwmv 7y ago
    IRC is also terrible for conversations.
    - fivre 7y ago
      IRC is fine for conversations, though it's a different model of conversation than many mediums. All comments from different threads of conversation are intermixed, and you must separate them out mentally. This is very different from threaded models, but it's something that can be adapted to easily enough, same as how most people can talk within a group in a noisy bar, where there are multiple surrounding intelligible conversations. Like in a bar, it's easy to jump into another adjacent conversation spontaneously.
      - Twisell 7y ago
        More important IRC don’t enable to browse history as far as I known. Meanwhile tweet can persist enabling asynchronous conversation, so it’s more like a very lightweight forum than IRC. Edit: But the tree structure for reply is actually more similar to a HN thread with a less visible structure.
    - ramblerman 7y ago
      It isn't but solely because IRC channels are of a reasonable size, and have some form of moderation. If you wanted to chat in a channel with 1000s of people (like twitter), the IRC model would be untenable.
  - rjf72 7y ago
    I'd separate use cases. If you want to talk to/about yourself or if you just want to rant at somebody, post memes, etc then Twitter is easy and natural to use. If you want to have meaningful nuanced conversation, Twitter is useless. So you end up with a dichotomy where for some people Twitter is a fine fit and for others it's completely unusable. Both are correct.
- sexisfun 7y ago
  Twitter is the human condition. Most people are going to be giving you noise on any given topic. Weight loss? Noise. Stock market? More noise.
- lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  I'm young, used twitter for about a year, and I don't understand twitter replies either.
- michelb 7y ago
  This is why I use https://threadreaderapp.com https://threadreaderapp.com on tweetstorms. Kinda silly, but it's the only way to properly read threads, as even Twitter itself seems to mess up the ordering.
- jrootabega 7y ago
  Twitter, reddit, slack and others are meant for constant asynchronous engagement, mostly by schoolkids, and not random access or long-lived discussion. Coming from the message board world, the difference in the attention spans involved is pretty frustrating.
  - HNLurker2 7y ago
    And 9gag. Strong market for short attention spans.
- rusk 7y ago
  > I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. Chaos is a Ladder [0] [0] https://www.thenarcissisticpersonality.com/narcissistic-chaos/ https://www.thenarcissisticpersonality.com/narcissistic-chao...
- newen 7y ago
  I had the same problem with Twitter too. The posts and replies seemed random and without any structure and I didn't really get it. But after I spent a few weeks using it, it started making sense and I would browse posts and replies without too much effort. I think it just takes a while for new people to get Twitter. Probably most people don't even know why Twitter is confusing initially because they are so used to it.
- seapunk 7y ago
  > I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter I built a Twitter client just for that, because I find Twitter threads hard to read (https://threader.app https://threader.app). It turns threads into a single page so it’s easier to read, like an article. We are also working on a way to compile conversations with multiple users: https://threader.app/conversation/1123033196642201600/vpw88SgcOF https://threader.app/conversation/1123033196642201600/vpw88S...

by skymt 7y ago

carriers 7y ago

Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuff below it, some of which is definitely replies to the original post, and some of which appears to be part of a completely different conversation. Some threads of conversations get cut off for no apparent reason and you have to click something to see more of them. Nothing is indented, so it's really hard to tell who's replying to whom. I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter, so I've never signed up because who the hell wants to be part of that? I usually also don't go to Twitter to read stuff other people link to because I'm not going to be able to follow it. Forget boosting controversial stuff, I bet a lot of users post the way they do because they also don't understand what they're looking at.

nineteen999 7y ago
I'm a similar age as you. I did create a Twitter account once, but never used it more than once or twice. Unfortunately the Twitter username (handle?) I chose happened to be the same as the name of a somewhat well-known RnB/Hip Hop video producer (who I had no knowledge of before I created the account). I signed in a year or two later and found that I had a couple of hundred follow requests from various aspiring and up-and-coming rap artists. At that point I realised in all honesty that I probably had no real use for Twitter.
monk_e_boy 7y ago
I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Today I read Spacex and Musk talking about Starlink on twitter and I could not fathom who was talking to who, it seems like abunch of random statements with tons of animated gifs and stupid jokes. How does anyone navigate that mess? People say such stupid things. And spend so much time writing it out and finding a gif and ... for what? It's just noise. What motivates them? When do they find the time? What are they hoping to achieve? That Elon Musk replies with a lol. Couldn't Twitter just look at your last 40 posts and if no one has interacted with you then it just deletes your account. Sorry buddy, no one cares.
DavidSJ 7y ago
I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter I don’t think Twitter understands threads on Twitter, and they never have. They built something over a decade ago, it took off for reasons they never fully could fathom, and they’ve been afraid ever since to futz with what for them has been a good thing.
- username223 7y ago
  Once upon a time, there was IRC for single-stream chats, and NNTP for threaded ones, and all was good. Twitter used to be one of the former, but then they noticed that users were using the "@name" convention to simulate replies, and started officially supporting it. Instead of a single conversation, or a tree of nested replies, they created some unholy thing partway between the two, that serves neither role well.
  - thwarted 7y ago
    Twitter threads are a tree, but the representation in Twitter's web interface and mobile apps is linear and it's not obvious which tweets are in response to which. There are hints in the interface if you're aware of them, but it's easy to get lost.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      They ought to figure this out or let people build alternative clients...
      - asdff 7y ago
        They used to let people build alternative clients, but those days of user customization are long gone.
theoh 7y ago
Some people used to feel this way about IRC. I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is. There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.
- fjsolwmv 7y ago
  IRC is also terrible for conversations.
  - fivre 7y ago
    IRC is fine for conversations, though it's a different model of conversation than many mediums. All comments from different threads of conversation are intermixed, and you must separate them out mentally. This is very different from threaded models, but it's something that can be adapted to easily enough, same as how most people can talk within a group in a noisy bar, where there are multiple surrounding intelligible conversations. Like in a bar, it's easy to jump into another adjacent conversation spontaneously.
    - Twisell 7y ago
      More important IRC don’t enable to browse history as far as I known. Meanwhile tweet can persist enabling asynchronous conversation, so it’s more like a very lightweight forum than IRC. Edit: But the tree structure for reply is actually more similar to a HN thread with a less visible structure.
  - ramblerman 7y ago
    It isn't but solely because IRC channels are of a reasonable size, and have some form of moderation. If you wanted to chat in a channel with 1000s of people (like twitter), the IRC model would be untenable.
- rjf72 7y ago
  I'd separate use cases. If you want to talk to/about yourself or if you just want to rant at somebody, post memes, etc then Twitter is easy and natural to use. If you want to have meaningful nuanced conversation, Twitter is useless. So you end up with a dichotomy where for some people Twitter is a fine fit and for others it's completely unusable. Both are correct.
sexisfun 7y ago
Twitter is the human condition. Most people are going to be giving you noise on any given topic. Weight loss? Noise. Stock market? More noise.
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
I'm young, used twitter for about a year, and I don't understand twitter replies either.
michelb 7y ago
This is why I use https://threadreaderapp.com https://threadreaderapp.com on tweetstorms. Kinda silly, but it's the only way to properly read threads, as even Twitter itself seems to mess up the ordering.
jrootabega 7y ago
Twitter, reddit, slack and others are meant for constant asynchronous engagement, mostly by schoolkids, and not random access or long-lived discussion. Coming from the message board world, the difference in the attention spans involved is pretty frustrating.
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  And 9gag. Strong market for short attention spans.
rusk 7y ago
> I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. Chaos is a Ladder [0] [0] https://www.thenarcissisticpersonality.com/narcissistic-chaos/ https://www.thenarcissisticpersonality.com/narcissistic-chao...
newen 7y ago
I had the same problem with Twitter too. The posts and replies seemed random and without any structure and I didn't really get it. But after I spent a few weeks using it, it started making sense and I would browse posts and replies without too much effort. I think it just takes a while for new people to get Twitter. Probably most people don't even know why Twitter is confusing initially because they are so used to it.
seapunk 7y ago
> I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter I built a Twitter client just for that, because I find Twitter threads hard to read (https://threader.app https://threader.app). It turns threads into a single page so it’s easier to read, like an article. We are also working on a way to compile conversations with multiple users: https://threader.app/conversation/1123033196642201600/vpw88SgcOF https://threader.app/conversation/1123033196642201600/vpw88S...