18 ms·

Building the New Twitter.com

207 points by spzx 7y ago

duxup 7y ago
Nice to see they are still working with Progressive Web Apps. I'm really interested in seeing if PWAs can reach first class citizen status everywhere. Still a bit skeptical as installation from web is still wonky in Chrome. Google was pushing PWAs pretty hard for a while on the developer side....browser felt like an afterthought... that worries me.
baud147258 7y ago
I tried the new Twitter interface, it was so bad that if I hadn't been able to go back to the normal one, I would have stopped using twitter. It had successfully reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior.
- rdtwo 7y ago
  So like new reddit? And digg before it
  - baud147258 7y ago
    I went to take a look to a sub reddit this week, after a few months of not going there and their new design has gotten way worse. I mean only a comment depth of only ONE? Edit: I retested it on Firefox and at least there I had a decent comment depth.
    - Already__Taken 7y ago
      And if you click read more, it's only to read 1 more level. You have to keep clicking read more all the way down...
    - pixelperfect 7y ago
      If/when old.reddit.com stops working, I will overcome my Reddit addiction once and for all.
      - dmix 7y ago
        The native mobile apps are good which is Reddit’s only saving grace. It’s so easy to design something for designs sake while ignoring the fundamental reasons people use the site - first and foremost the content, not the site looking visually good or some clever card pattern or other UI concept. The whole reason Digg got blasted was how it lost information density and jumped on the ‘web 2.0’ bandwagon without improving the user experience.
        rdtwo 7y ago
        The new reddit is significantly worse but I think it got redesigned with ad revenue as top priority
  - Already__Taken 7y ago
    As far as I can tell, subreddits custom sidebars are missing. That's insane they ignored that.
  - diminoten 7y ago
    You realize the site redesign isn't why Digg failed, right? At least not the literal UI part, anyway. They formalized power users by giving them outsized control of content, and that is what drove people off the platform, not because the site was less pretty...
- markdog12 7y ago
  I don't like it either. How do I use the older version?
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    There used to be an opt-out, but the endpoint has been removed. I'm not aware of a way to go back at this point.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      I had the luck of nopping out of the new version pretty quickly.
      - steveklabnik 7y ago
        I did too but they kept changing it back.
  - Avery3R 7y ago
    Set your user agent to `Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko`
    - steveklabnik 7y ago
      My twitter followers have confirmed that this works!
      - trazire 7y ago
        For me, deleting all cookies and logging back in works.
        eps 7y ago
        Neither this nor resetting one of the cookies to "off" (another method) works at all times. These are client-side overrides. However, the user-agent spoofing works because it fakes IE11 on Windows 7 and it triggers a server-side override.
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
  >reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior. For some reason i'm noticing this happen on a ton of different platforms and I seriously don't like it. I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space
  - geodel 7y ago
    > I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space But devs have unilaterally decided that bigger screens and more powerful hardware is for them to hog and not for you to do efficient/more things in the same time.
  - Mindwipe 7y ago
    I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options, and automated tools to remove whitespace padding. I would honestly pay good money for a browser that removed 95% of whitespace on most sites.
    - hollerith 7y ago
      >I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options If you use Ctrl-+ to make the text larger, both FF and Chrome already remember how large you made it and use that size every time you visit that site from then on. What am I missing?
- jghn 7y ago
  People keep telling me that more whitespace is better, and I keep no longer using websites that manage to eclipse some breaking point of too much whitespace. Clearly folks like you & myself are in the minority, but I don't get it.
  - Benjammer 7y ago
    You have different definition of "better" than does Twitter the business
    - jghn 7y ago
      What I mean is that I've been told by UI/UX experts that more whitespace is demonstrably better for users. I personally disagree for me, but I'll buy that I'm in the minority.
      - Benjammer 7y ago
        I don't mean to be pedantic here, but again, I think you have to further unpack how different parties interpret the word "better." A UI/UX expert trying to drive new user engagement has a different definition of "better" than one trying to lengthen the average user-session length of "power users" above some usage threshold, for a random example. Or someone optimizing the new user sign-up flow. If the goal is information density, then yes, whitespace can often be antithetical to that. If you are trying to make money with a website/app, increasing whitespace can be done for any of a myriad of reasons depending on business goals. The idea of having one answer to "is whitespace better," and saying "experts say yes but I say no" is just such a myopic view of the world of interface design...
  - coldpie 7y ago
    Information density has been cratering over the past decade. Every redesign adds centimeters of whitespace around every element. I guess maybe it's touchscreen-motivated, but it sure does get tiresome on desktops.
    - 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
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- fancyfish 7y ago
  FWIW, you can still use TweetDeck[1] which has better density, customizable media size, and multi-column views. Previously I just used it for following live events but switched when the desktop site got mobile-ified. I also left feedback on the redesign. I pray they keep around the alternatives like this for a dense display format on desktop. [1] https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
  - jpindar 7y ago
    Tweetdeck also has strictly chronological order, with the Home and Activity feeds kept separate.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Tweetdeck is lacking the built-in translation tool that's present on Twitter, though. (I just spotted that because there's a Tweet in Brazilian at the top of my timeline)
- dorfsmay 7y ago
  What? How can you switch back to the old style?
- coffeeling 7y ago
  Uh, is that just a kneejerk feeling of "there is more wasted space" vs. the reality? Because I did get an initial kneejerk "shove this mobile the fuck out of my desktop" reaction when I tried the new design. But I checked, and the tweet boxes themselves are a bit wider and a bit taller in the redesign. Even so, though, I can see just as many text-heavy tweets on screen with the new UI as with the old one because the UI itself wastes less screen real estate - and that's with the second-smallest, default font option. The same applies to tweets with heavy picture use: I can see a larger portion of a chopped-off tweet with the redesign than I can with the old desktop UI. With the smallest font size option, it's not even a contest and the redesign wins handily.
draw_down 7y ago
I’m not really looking forward to this launch. People are going to whine about it so much.
martin_a 7y ago
Will there be an edit function? No? Still nothing like that in 2019? Well... twitter will go down. It's just a question of time at this point, imho.
- fredsted 7y ago
  What, because of no edit function?
  - martin_a 7y ago
    Lack of innovation. I can edit my posts on all networks, except on twitter. One might consider this a unique feature, I think it's a unique mistake.
- civicsquid 7y ago
  That seems like a stretch. You can delete erroneous posts, reply to your own erroneous posts with corrections, or retweet with corrections. It's not like there's no way to correct yourself, you just need to be a bit more deliberate. It also arguably causes people to be a bit more conscious of what they're saying before they post too.
- ungzd 7y ago
  Immutability
  - riffic 7y ago
    Twitter has built its data model around the tenet that tweet text is immutable. Edit is not going to happen. https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-editing-a-tweet-after-being-posted-to-the-timeline/answer/Raffi-Krikorian?srid=uMEx https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jfengel 7y ago
  That's why people are attracted to Twitter: it's live. You get Twitter in real time, and you can't un-say what's been said. Even when people try, readers make screen caps. Typos and other mistakes just scroll past; readers have already moved on. They're still accessible, because the Internet never forgets, but it only retains focus when you've monumentally screwed up -- and even then only briefly. It's that living-in-the-moment feeling that has kept Twitter alive to this point, and if anything takes it down, it'll be by something that manages to be even harder to edit. Perhaps a live feed directly from your keyboard, or your mouth, or your camera -- or brain. If you don't want to participate in that, you stay off Twitter. I find it bizarre myself. I like to get my moment-to-moment experience from what's in front of my face. But that's very limiting, and a lot of people seem to prefer the stream of consciousness from the entire rest of the world.
AznHisoka 7y ago
Bring back full historical search back to the UI. Every search I do is limited to the past week. It used to be you could keep scrolling down and you'd keep seeing past tweets. I don't care about this new UI thing. Don't care one bit.
- HugThem 7y ago
  I don't see such a limit. When I search, I still can scroll. Just tried and it worked all the way down to 2011.
  - est31 7y ago
    Maybe you need to be logged in? Idk.
  - AznHisoka 7y ago
    Hah, it seemed like they only restricted it for my IP address. When I use a proxy, it works.
karussell 7y ago
I know there are different opinions but I like it. I like the dark theme, the explore tab, the "data saver" option and also that the navigation experience got better (backward button points you back to the correct tweet). Well done! I only hope they do not remove the "see latest tweets" in the home tab.
JaimeThompson 7y ago
I am not sure they could have added more white space to the new Twitter if they tried. I would not kill them to adapt to the amount of screen real estate that I have.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lanrh1836 7y ago
I find it all so bizarre. Everything from how big the font size is in the left nav, to the ordering of the nav items, to how the feed and right nav scroll together (can’t see the top of the right nav if you scroll down the main feed) to how huge tweets with images appear (can only see 2 tweets if they contain images on a massive desktop screen) to the fact that you cant resize the left or right nav on your own...
- Benjammer 7y ago
  What's bizarre about it? It looks a lot like the reddit redesign to me, and seems to be focused on emphasizing sponsored content more, if I had to speculate. Large-picture tweets taking up a lot of space means that large-picture interstitial ads and promoted tweets also take up lots of space. I would guess also that scrolling the right-hand column gives a lot more automatic eyeball space to trending stuff in sections below the fold, and is no longer constrained to just screen height for what everyone will usually see there. Who's going to willfully scroll down the trending column of promoted stuff separately from the main feed? The left-nav stuff seems much more straightforward for new users, even if it's a useless change for long time users who already know how to operate the site.
  - Existenceblinks 7y ago
    The "display" setting is a good start. Give me options to hide the left-nav, the trend, and I'll be cool with it.
    - Benjammer 7y ago
      Why in the world would they give users the option to hide trending stuff?
      - dorfsmay 7y ago
        If I want my content based on others' opinion, I go to Reddit. What's the point to follow accounts if you're not guaranteed to see their content, and not in the prefer they intended to?
martin-adams 7y ago
One area I wish they would improve is the DMs. Being able to organise them into folders would be amazing, but just marking one unread again would be a huge improvement.
_zachs 7y ago
Engineering at Twitter must be a constant context switch. Every quarter there’s a new blog post about some new re-design they’re working on.
beardedman 7y ago
I like it. Snappy & nice looking UI (with the bigger bolder fonts).
bijsv 7y ago
The new twitter.com which turns out to be the mobile version they released years ago and that has been working ever since, but with two sidebars.
jbverschoor 7y ago
Is this why they were down a few weeks ago? Dual testing / feeding the feed in a secondary system
kpwags 7y ago
I like it, but I have a weird bug. It could have something to do with some of my extensions, but every time I open the new Twitter on Firefox, it has me logged out...but if I refresh the page, I'm back to being logged in and I can browse my feed.
- jtreminio 7y ago
  I experience this as well, but in Chrome. I've tried it several times over several weeks, always revert back to old design.
HugThem 7y ago
Why on earth is the text of Home/Explore/Notifications etc on the left bold and twice as big as the content aka the tweets? You see the navigation every day. You know where it is. Its not that you have to read through it. So if anything, shouldn't it be smaller?
- buboard 7y ago
  I would also like to be able to see my username somewhere. Its confusing when managing multiple accounts
- Existenceblinks 7y ago
  God, it's not only me then. I have to zoom in until the nav is in icon-link mode. But then the feed is too big. I don't want to bother styling extension (I don't love to have more).
bobblywobbles 7y ago
Another prime example why UI redesigns are a waste of time - https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2019/03/ui-redesigns-are-mostly-waste-of-time.html https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2019/03/ui-redesigns-ar...
- throwaway66666 7y ago
  But what if you have a total of 3000 engineers. What will all of them do? Perhaps a handful of them can investigate and try new things?
  - btown 7y ago
    Or maybe you have them work on complementary products to your... oh wait Twitter leadership has no desire for a B2B presence, so it can't build B2B tools. Oops.
  - rurp 7y ago
    Every web app I've used extensively had bugs. A few of those 3000 devs could focus on improving the existing functionality, rather than changing the color and location of various bells and whistles.
- degenerate 7y ago
  I personally prefer the "slow walk" of UI improvements instead of a full-blown UI redesign. Examples are eBay, Paypal, and (in a way) Amazon. eBay and Paypal are both stuck in a half-design stage, where 50% of the pages are designed and 50% of the very functional pages have been redesigned but not rolled out... in perpetual beta, because the redesign cannot accompany all the features of the old. Amazon very slowly rolls out new button designs and side-menus, probably whenever Bezos is sleeping. But some of the buttons in the rarely-used sections of their site are still using the old familiar yellow JPGs.
  - robryan 7y ago
    eBay and PayPal are an inconsistent mess. The changes often make it hard to even Google to find what you are looking for. Some pages on PayPal as far as I can tell seem completely inaccessible from the UI and require you to know the endpoint.
PretzelFisch 7y ago
It's an odd choice to put the tweet button at the top of the dialog rather then the bottom where your eyes and mouse should be after finishing the tweet message.
NelsonMinar 7y ago
To the posted article, I think it's impressive they are shipping a single codebase for mobile and desktop. Modular features you can turn off for different views. It's smart and I'll be curious to see if other sites follow suit. Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive feature from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive. Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy? Anyway it makes it a lot harder to modify the desktop HTML presentation with an extension or set of ad blocker rules.
- lykr0n 7y ago
  That's a feature, not a bug (the changing CSS)!
  - spaceribs 7y ago
    This anti-scraping tech is getting a little ridiculous, and will only end in accessibility issues (while still not actually preventing or even slowing down scraping).
    - SippinLean 7y ago
      But it is a feature, there's a few different (good) reasons to do that. Here its almost surely tied to CSS-in-JS/React. HTML class names would not affect accessibility.
      - wpietri 7y ago
        That's still not a feature, in that it's something that serves developers, not users. I'm fine with people making better CSS tools; they should feel free to add dynamically named classes. But when the remove the static ones, they break things for some users. That's definitely not a feature.
buboard 7y ago
I dont have strong opinion for their new design but i find it a bit goofy with those very rounded corners. I don’t know if the single codebase is a good idea, time will tell if they will end up like Windows 8
ufo 7y ago
A high percentage of the time when I attempt to view a twitter page on mobile the spinner times out and just gives a "something went wrong" error. There is a Try Again button but clicking on it is futile, as it always goes back to "something went wrong" error after a second. The only thing that seems to work is to ask the browser to refresh the page, sometimes more than once. Is this only happening to me? I always wondered what the hell is going on.
- russdill 7y ago
  Often when it happens refresh isn't even enough, I have to do a duplicate tab operation. I had that issue on mobile for a long time, now I have it on desktop too. O boy.
- nosuchuser2 7y ago
  This happens to me as well, but only on mobile. Maybe the result of some rate-limiting, combined with not being able to distinguish different mobile users on the same network? I also use ublock origin with Firefox mobile, fwiw.
- tomduncalf 7y ago
  Happens to me a lot on desktop, especially when following an external link to a tweet. Like you say, refreshing the page fixes it. Also seen it on mobile from time to time. Expected they’d fix this before a wider rollout, it’s pretty common for me!
- jswny 7y ago
  Happens to me too all the time on mobile and boy is it infuriating. I either get the "something went wrong" or the "you're being rate-limited," neither of which make any sense for someone opening tweets every now and then inside other apps. I assume it's because when you open tweets with in-app browsers etc. Twitter wants to make it a poor experience in order to get you to use their app instead. Same reason they have been gutting their API features and limiting API tokens for 3rd party apps for years now.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  Happens to me every time. I think it is intentionally done if you are not logged in to discourage you from using Twitter.
throwanem 7y ago
Oh weird, I thought the new Twitter was called "Mastodon"...
s3r3nity 7y ago
Am I in the minority of folks that enjoy Twitter's algorithmic sorting? In the classic timeline view, I always felt the urge to check my feed all the time, in case i missed part of the conversation or the like (a la "FOMO.")
- servercobra 7y ago
  On one of my accounts where I follow a lot of people, the algorithmic sorting works wonderfully. On my main where I only follow a few people, it is terrible. I pretty much only check Twitter in Tweetbot now, becasue if I had to use the algorithmic sorting only for my main, I'd probably stop using Twitter. So it'd be really nice if we could choose which one we like, and most importantly, that the choice sticks.
- ProfessorLayton 7y ago
  That’s great, but GP was complaining that their preference is literally undone. There’s no consumer-friendly reason to change explicit preferences.
- alephr 7y ago
  you're probably not alone but the issue here is forcing it on the user. that the option exists means they understand some people want a raw timeline which makes repeatedly changing the display that much worse
- criddell 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be annoying then if Twitter kept switching you to chronological?
- NelsonMinar 7y ago
  I think a lot of people like Twitter's algorithmic sorting. I've heard they have internal data supporting that it's better for most users. That's fine. FWIW I like Facebook's algorithmic sorting. But I use Twitter differently and time-sorted works better for me on Twitter. (As a secondary thing; time-sorted also avoids the injection of most of the tweets from people you don't follow.) The offense is that they deliberately undo your expressed preference every week or two. I also hate the cutesy language of "you're back Home".
ChrisArchitect 7y ago
so the new version is the mobile site that's been active for awhile right? Someone tipped me off about using the mobile version on desktop a few months back and I never went back. Faster/more streamlined etc
riffic 7y ago
Cool, now when is Twitter going to adopt ActivityPub?
russdill 7y ago
My biggest pain as far as missing features is new tweets. In the old interface if I had someone's timeline open, There'd be a number '(n)' in the tab that indicated there were new tweets. If I went to the tab I could click on a show new tweets button and see them. A nice side effect of this was that you could easily view deleted tweets as they were queued and shown normally. The new interface has none of this.
- dorfsmay 7y ago
  Yes. Not the biggest, but a huge pain.
djhworld 7y ago
I quite like the redesign except the annoying sidebar on the right hand side, its way too big and pushes everything too far to the left for my liking I wrote this Stylus rule to get ride of it and make the main box a bit wider. It's a blunt, brute force rule but it works for now... .r-1ye8kvj { max-width: 700px } .r-1ovo9ad { display:none; } The downside is it gets rid of the search input. Also I suspect those class names are auto generated by something so the above rules will probably break if they ever do a redeploy
- LordAtlas 7y ago
  As someone pointed out earlier, it seems they're changing CSS classes constantly to deter scraping, so this might not work for long.
solarkraft 7y ago
The mobile-first page is a lot better than the old one. I've been using it for a while. ... When still using Twitter, that is. The platform decisions like showing me notifications of things I never subscribed to in any way ("look, some person you don't follow tweeted this") and can't unsubscribe from is 100% offensive to me and one of the major reasons I really don't like using the platform anymore (besides a crippled API and only now slowly improving mobile app). That said: The website is amazing on mobile. It feels NOTHING like 99% of webapps out there. How are they doing it? Are they damn wizards?
- Meai 7y ago
  Is the navigation on mobile for you on the left or on top? No matter how small I make the browser window on desktop it still shows the navigation on the left side as a vertical bar but on mobile it always shows as a top bar. It's a big difference in my opinion and I am curious which version you like.
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    I like the mobile version. And shit, I thought they just made the old mobile.twitter.com the default. Instead they made a new site that also mobile.twitter.com points to, so you can't get the old style back. Oh well, a lot of meaningful interaction for me already happens on the Fediverse and with Twitter's moves I don't think that will decrease. Check out Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/) for a light weight client.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ericzawo 7y ago
I just get the impression the PM's at Twitter don't actually use it, and worse, engage with people who use it, enough. I follow a ton of CMOs, social media directors, agency heads, people who use Twitter to drive business and commentate regularly on their industry, and they have expressed disdain for product direction decisions for years around the "mobile-ification" of the desktop experience. Now it seems they're pushing total usability-hostile 'features' to their desktop webapp. Really, who on earth over there made the call that two tweets visible if there's an embedded image, even on a large 27" 1080p monitor, was a good idea?
- sp332 7y ago
  Twitter isn't going to make money with a bunch of power-user features for non-paying users. They're going to make onboarding painless and the overall experience as unintimidating as possible. That means minimizing features that don't keep people on the site and viewing ads.
  - kccqzy 7y ago
    Non-paying users? These are the people and the businesses creating the most interesting and valuable content on the Twitter platform. They directly make Twitter as a platform more valuable and enjoyable for end users.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      I don’t think Twitter cares about “interesting” or “enjoyable”, only “attention grabbing” — and even the political troll bots can produce that by themselves.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    All users are non-paying. And people who tweet are more valuable than those who don't, because there wouldn't be anything to follow without them.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Yeah, the feed is now just slightly awkward and oversized, for what I can't see as any good reason. Reducing the zoom to 90% makes it comfortable again to read a Tweet. I have trouble reading oversized text.
ajmurmann 7y ago
Wasn't it great when we all had API access and could choose between different clients that had different emphasis? I'd be happy to pay too.
njn 7y ago
> The techniques and technologies we’ve used on the new Twitter.com mean you only download and run code when it’s needed. So a mobile user won’t download the sidebar you see on the home page, and may not download the settings pages until they go to update their display name. However, it also means that the full functionality of the site is still available to them should they want to access it. Can someone explain to Twitter's web developers that there's nothing groundbreaking about this idea? Like... lmao. That's how web apps should work. That's how traditional django and rails apps already work. I like JavaScript and React as much as any web developer but if you're loading unnecessary code that's actually degrading the usability then that's a problem to be fixed asap. And it's definitely not something worth mentioning in this press release. Oh wait, this was post written by "software engineers", not "web developers". They're probably too smart for these details.
cwyers 7y ago
Twitter has changed the front end like five times in the past five years and improved exactly zero of those times. They need to lay off 80% of their front end devs to keep them from just pointlessly churning the website.
statenjason 7y ago
This strong sign of the confidence Twitter has in React Native for Web[1]. In 2017, Nicolas Gallagher gave a talk[2] about why it was used for mobile.twitter.com. [1]: https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFn39lLO-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFn39lLO-U
- ngrilly 7y ago
  How do you know they use React Native for Web? The article says they unified their desktop and mobile architectures, but doesn't specify how.
  - statenjason 7y ago
    Opening in React devtools shows a number of hints[1]. "React Native Style Editor" section. "View" components with numeric "style" props. And the classname prefixes "css-" and "r-" match the generated identifiers from react-native-web[2]. [1]: https://imgur.com/lFUvL7P https://imgur.com/lFUvL7P [2]: https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web/blob/45f94eb43daa3cb3d7fae0295877345a176c04c4/packages/react-native-web/src/exports/StyleSheet/compile.js#L81 https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web/blob/45f94eb43da...
    - ngrilly 7y ago
      That's convincing :-) Thanks!
bkorte 7y ago
Is there some kind of cookie hack I can run to get the new UI? Would be nice if engineering posts included a way to change your feature flag so I can experience what is being discussed.
dstroot 7y ago
Does anyone know what’s under the hood? React? Vue? Something I don’t even know enough to ask about?
- tomduncalf 7y ago
  It’s React (I think they mention this in the article) and I believe they are actually using React Native for Web, the engineer behind that works for twitter and the generated markup and classnames match how that works. Perhaps they are considering moving to React Native for their mobile apps in future... though there are other valid reasons to use React Native for Web
  - jrm2k6 7y ago
    Is using react-native for Web better than having react & react-native for your UI and nicely separated business logic that is reusable for both? If you use react native for Web, does it mean your UI will look exactly the same whether it is on the web or mobile?
cracauer 7y ago
All that work, and still I had to use right-click "open image in new tab" to see the text of a meme? Is anybody in there actually using that thing? (those in user-facing changes authority?)
- Pxtl 7y ago
  Somebody worked very very hard on an algo that figures out which part of the image is important and they're not going to let some dumb users with silly opinions like "I want to see the whole thing" ruin it.
kup0 7y ago
I have to use Tweetdeck, because not having a reverse-chronological timeline is such a dealbreaker. If they ever remove this ability from Tweetdeck, I will probably just leave. I'm already on Mastodon and more active there anyway, it didn't turn into a ghost town like the last time I tried it.
robocat 7y ago
> So we enable these shortcuts whenever we detect a keyboard. How exactly do they they do this? Is it just detect keypress so load the shortcut code, or more complicated?
partiallypro 7y ago
With the new Twitter in Firefox it logs me out immediately after I close the window (no, I'm not incognito.) Also if I sign in using a different browser none of the options are saved. It's pretty annoying. It is a bit snappier, but it has a lot of annoyances. I can no longer go back to "old Twitter," either...so, it's a mess.
jacobdpeters 7y ago
Does anybody know what song is playing in the background? Or think it was custom recorded for this video.
RichardHeart 7y ago
They got 1 code base. I got a UI that I don't like. 1. There used to be a drop down for "copy link" to a tweet. So I could tweet then paste the URL across other platforms. Now I need to click the link, and copy the URL manually, and it's laggy. 2. The darker dark mode dims the text too. 3. The font size setting has no affect on making a new tweet... As usual, company degrades experience for users on UI upgrade...
- delecti 7y ago
  For 1, the link to the relative time the tweet was posted (1 minute ago, 15 seconds ago, etc) is a direct link to the tweet. Right click, copy link location (or your browser's equivalent). This has been the case as long as I can remember.
cyberferret 7y ago
I wish they would fix the 'Report Tweet' bugs - I keep getting stuck in a seemingly endless rotation of pop up dialogs once I complete a report. Or is this a deliberate dark pattern to curb people's enthusiasm for reporting bad content?
pier25 7y ago
On my 13'' MBP there are many tweets I can't see completely unless I scroll down. This is wrong.
not_a_cop75 7y ago
There is no new twitter until the corruption involved in twitter is taken to a head. Any technology will never improve the lousy policy and posturing that they do as a company.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wetpaws 7y ago
After the reddit redesign and a twitter redesign I am starting to suspect that annual bonuses in those companies are tied in to the negative KPI.
wanone 7y ago
Never used twitter. Just made an account using work email to test twitter login. Didn't do a single thing yet. And my account gets blocked for 'suspicious activity' and they want my phone as well. What a shady company.
- emikru 7y ago
  This happened to me as well when I recently tried to make an account with an email address and no phone number. It was frozen almost immediately after creation, and when I requested it be unfrozen, twitter sent a message to my main email (NOT the one I signed up with!!) and required me to respond and say I had access in order to get the account back up. Made me very uncomfortable and virtually destroyed any desire I had to use their service.
gridlockd 7y ago
If they had just stopped developing Twitter years ago, it would be a better product today.

207 points by spzx 7y ago

Nice to see they are still working with Progressive Web Apps. I'm really interested in seeing if PWAs can reach first class citizen status everywhere. Still a bit skeptical as installation from web is still wonky in Chrome. Google was pushing PWAs pretty hard for a while on the developer side....browser felt like an afterthought... that worries me.

baud147258 7y ago

I tried the new Twitter interface, it was so bad that if I hadn't been able to go back to the normal one, I would have stopped using twitter. It had successfully reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior.

rdtwo 7y ago
So like new reddit? And digg before it
- baud147258 7y ago
  I went to take a look to a sub reddit this week, after a few months of not going there and their new design has gotten way worse. I mean only a comment depth of only ONE? Edit: I retested it on Firefox and at least there I had a decent comment depth.
  - Already__Taken 7y ago
    And if you click read more, it's only to read 1 more level. You have to keep clicking read more all the way down...
  - pixelperfect 7y ago
    If/when old.reddit.com stops working, I will overcome my Reddit addiction once and for all.
    - dmix 7y ago
      The native mobile apps are good which is Reddit’s only saving grace. It’s so easy to design something for designs sake while ignoring the fundamental reasons people use the site - first and foremost the content, not the site looking visually good or some clever card pattern or other UI concept. The whole reason Digg got blasted was how it lost information density and jumped on the ‘web 2.0’ bandwagon without improving the user experience.
      - rdtwo 7y ago
        The new reddit is significantly worse but I think it got redesigned with ad revenue as top priority
- Already__Taken 7y ago
  As far as I can tell, subreddits custom sidebars are missing. That's insane they ignored that.
- diminoten 7y ago
  You realize the site redesign isn't why Digg failed, right? At least not the literal UI part, anyway. They formalized power users by giving them outsized control of content, and that is what drove people off the platform, not because the site was less pretty...
markdog12 7y ago
I don't like it either. How do I use the older version?
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  There used to be an opt-out, but the endpoint has been removed. I'm not aware of a way to go back at this point.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    I had the luck of nopping out of the new version pretty quickly.
    - steveklabnik 7y ago
      I did too but they kept changing it back.
- Avery3R 7y ago
  Set your user agent to `Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko`
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    My twitter followers have confirmed that this works!
    - trazire 7y ago
      For me, deleting all cookies and logging back in works.
      - eps 7y ago
        Neither this nor resetting one of the cookies to "off" (another method) works at all times. These are client-side overrides. However, the user-agent spoofing works because it fakes IE11 on Windows 7 and it triggers a server-side override.
TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
>reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior. For some reason i'm noticing this happen on a ton of different platforms and I seriously don't like it. I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space
- geodel 7y ago
  > I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space But devs have unilaterally decided that bigger screens and more powerful hardware is for them to hog and not for you to do efficient/more things in the same time.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options, and automated tools to remove whitespace padding. I would honestly pay good money for a browser that removed 95% of whitespace on most sites.
  - hollerith 7y ago
    >I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options If you use Ctrl-+ to make the text larger, both FF and Chrome already remember how large you made it and use that size every time you visit that site from then on. What am I missing?
jghn 7y ago
People keep telling me that more whitespace is better, and I keep no longer using websites that manage to eclipse some breaking point of too much whitespace. Clearly folks like you & myself are in the minority, but I don't get it.
- Benjammer 7y ago
  You have different definition of "better" than does Twitter the business
  - jghn 7y ago
    What I mean is that I've been told by UI/UX experts that more whitespace is demonstrably better for users. I personally disagree for me, but I'll buy that I'm in the minority.
    - Benjammer 7y ago
      I don't mean to be pedantic here, but again, I think you have to further unpack how different parties interpret the word "better." A UI/UX expert trying to drive new user engagement has a different definition of "better" than one trying to lengthen the average user-session length of "power users" above some usage threshold, for a random example. Or someone optimizing the new user sign-up flow. If the goal is information density, then yes, whitespace can often be antithetical to that. If you are trying to make money with a website/app, increasing whitespace can be done for any of a myriad of reasons depending on business goals. The idea of having one answer to "is whitespace better," and saying "experts say yes but I say no" is just such a myopic view of the world of interface design...
- coldpie 7y ago
  Information density has been cratering over the past decade. Every redesign adds centimeters of whitespace around every element. I guess maybe it's touchscreen-motivated, but it sure does get tiresome on desktops.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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fancyfish 7y ago
FWIW, you can still use TweetDeck[1] which has better density, customizable media size, and multi-column views. Previously I just used it for following live events but switched when the desktop site got mobile-ified. I also left feedback on the redesign. I pray they keep around the alternatives like this for a dense display format on desktop. [1] https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
- jpindar 7y ago
  Tweetdeck also has strictly chronological order, with the Home and Activity feeds kept separate.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Tweetdeck is lacking the built-in translation tool that's present on Twitter, though. (I just spotted that because there's a Tweet in Brazilian at the top of my timeline)
dorfsmay 7y ago
What? How can you switch back to the old style?
coffeeling 7y ago
Uh, is that just a kneejerk feeling of "there is more wasted space" vs. the reality? Because I did get an initial kneejerk "shove this mobile the fuck out of my desktop" reaction when I tried the new design. But I checked, and the tweet boxes themselves are a bit wider and a bit taller in the redesign. Even so, though, I can see just as many text-heavy tweets on screen with the new UI as with the old one because the UI itself wastes less screen real estate - and that's with the second-smallest, default font option. The same applies to tweets with heavy picture use: I can see a larger portion of a chopped-off tweet with the redesign than I can with the old desktop UI. With the smallest font size option, it's not even a contest and the redesign wins handily.

draw_down 7y ago

I’m not really looking forward to this launch. People are going to whine about it so much.

martin_a 7y ago

Will there be an edit function? No? Still nothing like that in 2019? Well... twitter will go down. It's just a question of time at this point, imho.

fredsted 7y ago
What, because of no edit function?
- martin_a 7y ago
  Lack of innovation. I can edit my posts on all networks, except on twitter. One might consider this a unique feature, I think it's a unique mistake.
civicsquid 7y ago
That seems like a stretch. You can delete erroneous posts, reply to your own erroneous posts with corrections, or retweet with corrections. It's not like there's no way to correct yourself, you just need to be a bit more deliberate. It also arguably causes people to be a bit more conscious of what they're saying before they post too.
ungzd 7y ago
Immutability
- riffic 7y ago
  Twitter has built its data model around the tenet that tweet text is immutable. Edit is not going to happen. https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-editing-a-tweet-after-being-posted-to-the-timeline/answer/Raffi-Krikorian?srid=uMEx https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...
deleted 7y ago
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jfengel 7y ago
That's why people are attracted to Twitter: it's live. You get Twitter in real time, and you can't un-say what's been said. Even when people try, readers make screen caps. Typos and other mistakes just scroll past; readers have already moved on. They're still accessible, because the Internet never forgets, but it only retains focus when you've monumentally screwed up -- and even then only briefly. It's that living-in-the-moment feeling that has kept Twitter alive to this point, and if anything takes it down, it'll be by something that manages to be even harder to edit. Perhaps a live feed directly from your keyboard, or your mouth, or your camera -- or brain. If you don't want to participate in that, you stay off Twitter. I find it bizarre myself. I like to get my moment-to-moment experience from what's in front of my face. But that's very limiting, and a lot of people seem to prefer the stream of consciousness from the entire rest of the world.

AznHisoka 7y ago

Bring back full historical search back to the UI. Every search I do is limited to the past week. It used to be you could keep scrolling down and you'd keep seeing past tweets. I don't care about this new UI thing. Don't care one bit.

HugThem 7y ago
I don't see such a limit. When I search, I still can scroll. Just tried and it worked all the way down to 2011.
- est31 7y ago
  Maybe you need to be logged in? Idk.
- AznHisoka 7y ago
  Hah, it seemed like they only restricted it for my IP address. When I use a proxy, it works.

karussell 7y ago

I know there are different opinions but I like it. I like the dark theme, the explore tab, the "data saver" option and also that the navigation experience got better (backward button points you back to the correct tweet). Well done! I only hope they do not remove the "see latest tweets" in the home tab.

JaimeThompson 7y ago

I am not sure they could have added more white space to the new Twitter if they tried. I would not kill them to adapt to the amount of screen real estate that I have.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lanrh1836 7y ago

I find it all so bizarre. Everything from how big the font size is in the left nav, to the ordering of the nav items, to how the feed and right nav scroll together (can’t see the top of the right nav if you scroll down the main feed) to how huge tweets with images appear (can only see 2 tweets if they contain images on a massive desktop screen) to the fact that you cant resize the left or right nav on your own...

Benjammer 7y ago
What's bizarre about it? It looks a lot like the reddit redesign to me, and seems to be focused on emphasizing sponsored content more, if I had to speculate. Large-picture tweets taking up a lot of space means that large-picture interstitial ads and promoted tweets also take up lots of space. I would guess also that scrolling the right-hand column gives a lot more automatic eyeball space to trending stuff in sections below the fold, and is no longer constrained to just screen height for what everyone will usually see there. Who's going to willfully scroll down the trending column of promoted stuff separately from the main feed? The left-nav stuff seems much more straightforward for new users, even if it's a useless change for long time users who already know how to operate the site.
- Existenceblinks 7y ago
  The "display" setting is a good start. Give me options to hide the left-nav, the trend, and I'll be cool with it.
  - Benjammer 7y ago
    Why in the world would they give users the option to hide trending stuff?
    - dorfsmay 7y ago
      If I want my content based on others' opinion, I go to Reddit. What's the point to follow accounts if you're not guaranteed to see their content, and not in the prefer they intended to?

martin-adams 7y ago

One area I wish they would improve is the DMs. Being able to organise them into folders would be amazing, but just marking one unread again would be a huge improvement.

_zachs 7y ago

Engineering at Twitter must be a constant context switch. Every quarter there’s a new blog post about some new re-design they’re working on.

beardedman 7y ago

I like it. Snappy & nice looking UI (with the bigger bolder fonts).

bijsv 7y ago

The new twitter.com which turns out to be the mobile version they released years ago and that has been working ever since, but with two sidebars.

jbverschoor 7y ago

Is this why they were down a few weeks ago? Dual testing / feeding the feed in a secondary system

kpwags 7y ago

I like it, but I have a weird bug. It could have something to do with some of my extensions, but every time I open the new Twitter on Firefox, it has me logged out...but if I refresh the page, I'm back to being logged in and I can browse my feed.

jtreminio 7y ago
I experience this as well, but in Chrome. I've tried it several times over several weeks, always revert back to old design.

HugThem 7y ago

Why on earth is the text of Home/Explore/Notifications etc on the left bold and twice as big as the content aka the tweets? You see the navigation every day. You know where it is. Its not that you have to read through it. So if anything, shouldn't it be smaller?

buboard 7y ago
I would also like to be able to see my username somewhere. Its confusing when managing multiple accounts
Existenceblinks 7y ago
God, it's not only me then. I have to zoom in until the nav is in icon-link mode. But then the feed is too big. I don't want to bother styling extension (I don't love to have more).

bobblywobbles 7y ago

Another prime example why UI redesigns are a waste of time - https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2019/03/ui-redesigns-are-mostly-waste-of-time.html https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2019/03/ui-redesigns-ar...

throwaway66666 7y ago
But what if you have a total of 3000 engineers. What will all of them do? Perhaps a handful of them can investigate and try new things?
- btown 7y ago
  Or maybe you have them work on complementary products to your... oh wait Twitter leadership has no desire for a B2B presence, so it can't build B2B tools. Oops.
- rurp 7y ago
  Every web app I've used extensively had bugs. A few of those 3000 devs could focus on improving the existing functionality, rather than changing the color and location of various bells and whistles.
degenerate 7y ago
I personally prefer the "slow walk" of UI improvements instead of a full-blown UI redesign. Examples are eBay, Paypal, and (in a way) Amazon. eBay and Paypal are both stuck in a half-design stage, where 50% of the pages are designed and 50% of the very functional pages have been redesigned but not rolled out... in perpetual beta, because the redesign cannot accompany all the features of the old. Amazon very slowly rolls out new button designs and side-menus, probably whenever Bezos is sleeping. But some of the buttons in the rarely-used sections of their site are still using the old familiar yellow JPGs.
- robryan 7y ago
  eBay and PayPal are an inconsistent mess. The changes often make it hard to even Google to find what you are looking for. Some pages on PayPal as far as I can tell seem completely inaccessible from the UI and require you to know the endpoint.

PretzelFisch 7y ago

It's an odd choice to put the tweet button at the top of the dialog rather then the bottom where your eyes and mouse should be after finishing the tweet message.

NelsonMinar 7y ago

To the posted article, I think it's impressive they are shipping a single codebase for mobile and desktop. Modular features you can turn off for different views. It's smart and I'll be curious to see if other sites follow suit. Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive feature from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive. Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy? Anyway it makes it a lot harder to modify the desktop HTML presentation with an extension or set of ad blocker rules.

lykr0n 7y ago
That's a feature, not a bug (the changing CSS)!
- spaceribs 7y ago
  This anti-scraping tech is getting a little ridiculous, and will only end in accessibility issues (while still not actually preventing or even slowing down scraping).
  - SippinLean 7y ago
    But it is a feature, there's a few different (good) reasons to do that. Here its almost surely tied to CSS-in-JS/React. HTML class names would not affect accessibility.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      That's still not a feature, in that it's something that serves developers, not users. I'm fine with people making better CSS tools; they should feel free to add dynamically named classes. But when the remove the static ones, they break things for some users. That's definitely not a feature.

buboard 7y ago

I dont have strong opinion for their new design but i find it a bit goofy with those very rounded corners. I don’t know if the single codebase is a good idea, time will tell if they will end up like Windows 8

ufo 7y ago

A high percentage of the time when I attempt to view a twitter page on mobile the spinner times out and just gives a "something went wrong" error. There is a Try Again button but clicking on it is futile, as it always goes back to "something went wrong" error after a second. The only thing that seems to work is to ask the browser to refresh the page, sometimes more than once. Is this only happening to me? I always wondered what the hell is going on.

russdill 7y ago
Often when it happens refresh isn't even enough, I have to do a duplicate tab operation. I had that issue on mobile for a long time, now I have it on desktop too. O boy.
nosuchuser2 7y ago
This happens to me as well, but only on mobile. Maybe the result of some rate-limiting, combined with not being able to distinguish different mobile users on the same network? I also use ublock origin with Firefox mobile, fwiw.
tomduncalf 7y ago
Happens to me a lot on desktop, especially when following an external link to a tweet. Like you say, refreshing the page fixes it. Also seen it on mobile from time to time. Expected they’d fix this before a wider rollout, it’s pretty common for me!
jswny 7y ago
Happens to me too all the time on mobile and boy is it infuriating. I either get the "something went wrong" or the "you're being rate-limited," neither of which make any sense for someone opening tweets every now and then inside other apps. I assume it's because when you open tweets with in-app browsers etc. Twitter wants to make it a poor experience in order to get you to use their app instead. Same reason they have been gutting their API features and limiting API tokens for 3rd party apps for years now.
stefan_ 7y ago
Happens to me every time. I think it is intentionally done if you are not logged in to discourage you from using Twitter.

throwanem 7y ago

Oh weird, I thought the new Twitter was called "Mastodon"...

s3r3nity 7y ago

Am I in the minority of folks that enjoy Twitter's algorithmic sorting? In the classic timeline view, I always felt the urge to check my feed all the time, in case i missed part of the conversation or the like (a la "FOMO.")

servercobra 7y ago
On one of my accounts where I follow a lot of people, the algorithmic sorting works wonderfully. On my main where I only follow a few people, it is terrible. I pretty much only check Twitter in Tweetbot now, becasue if I had to use the algorithmic sorting only for my main, I'd probably stop using Twitter. So it'd be really nice if we could choose which one we like, and most importantly, that the choice sticks.
ProfessorLayton 7y ago
That’s great, but GP was complaining that their preference is literally undone. There’s no consumer-friendly reason to change explicit preferences.
alephr 7y ago
you're probably not alone but the issue here is forcing it on the user. that the option exists means they understand some people want a raw timeline which makes repeatedly changing the display that much worse
criddell 7y ago
Wouldn't it be annoying then if Twitter kept switching you to chronological?
NelsonMinar 7y ago
I think a lot of people like Twitter's algorithmic sorting. I've heard they have internal data supporting that it's better for most users. That's fine. FWIW I like Facebook's algorithmic sorting. But I use Twitter differently and time-sorted works better for me on Twitter. (As a secondary thing; time-sorted also avoids the injection of most of the tweets from people you don't follow.) The offense is that they deliberately undo your expressed preference every week or two. I also hate the cutesy language of "you're back Home".

ChrisArchitect 7y ago

so the new version is the mobile site that's been active for awhile right? Someone tipped me off about using the mobile version on desktop a few months back and I never went back. Faster/more streamlined etc

riffic 7y ago

Cool, now when is Twitter going to adopt ActivityPub?

russdill 7y ago

My biggest pain as far as missing features is new tweets. In the old interface if I had someone's timeline open, There'd be a number '(n)' in the tab that indicated there were new tweets. If I went to the tab I could click on a show new tweets button and see them. A nice side effect of this was that you could easily view deleted tweets as they were queued and shown normally. The new interface has none of this.

dorfsmay 7y ago
Yes. Not the biggest, but a huge pain.

djhworld 7y ago

I quite like the redesign except the annoying sidebar on the right hand side, its way too big and pushes everything too far to the left for my liking I wrote this Stylus rule to get ride of it and make the main box a bit wider. It's a blunt, brute force rule but it works for now... .r-1ye8kvj { max-width: 700px } .r-1ovo9ad { display:none; } The downside is it gets rid of the search input. Also I suspect those class names are auto generated by something so the above rules will probably break if they ever do a redeploy

LordAtlas 7y ago
As someone pointed out earlier, it seems they're changing CSS classes constantly to deter scraping, so this might not work for long.

solarkraft 7y ago

The mobile-first page is a lot better than the old one. I've been using it for a while. ... When still using Twitter, that is. The platform decisions like showing me notifications of things I never subscribed to in any way ("look, some person you don't follow tweeted this") and can't unsubscribe from is 100% offensive to me and one of the major reasons I really don't like using the platform anymore (besides a crippled API and only now slowly improving mobile app). That said: The website is amazing on mobile. It feels NOTHING like 99% of webapps out there. How are they doing it? Are they damn wizards?

Meai 7y ago
Is the navigation on mobile for you on the left or on top? No matter how small I make the browser window on desktop it still shows the navigation on the left side as a vertical bar but on mobile it always shows as a top bar. It's a big difference in my opinion and I am curious which version you like.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  I like the mobile version. And shit, I thought they just made the old mobile.twitter.com the default. Instead they made a new site that also mobile.twitter.com points to, so you can't get the old style back. Oh well, a lot of meaningful interaction for me already happens on the Fediverse and with Twitter's moves I don't think that will decrease. Check out Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/) for a light weight client.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ericzawo 7y ago

I just get the impression the PM's at Twitter don't actually use it, and worse, engage with people who use it, enough. I follow a ton of CMOs, social media directors, agency heads, people who use Twitter to drive business and commentate regularly on their industry, and they have expressed disdain for product direction decisions for years around the "mobile-ification" of the desktop experience. Now it seems they're pushing total usability-hostile 'features' to their desktop webapp. Really, who on earth over there made the call that two tweets visible if there's an embedded image, even on a large 27" 1080p monitor, was a good idea?

sp332 7y ago
Twitter isn't going to make money with a bunch of power-user features for non-paying users. They're going to make onboarding painless and the overall experience as unintimidating as possible. That means minimizing features that don't keep people on the site and viewing ads.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  Non-paying users? These are the people and the businesses creating the most interesting and valuable content on the Twitter platform. They directly make Twitter as a platform more valuable and enjoyable for end users.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    I don’t think Twitter cares about “interesting” or “enjoyable”, only “attention grabbing” — and even the political troll bots can produce that by themselves.
- manigandham 7y ago
  All users are non-paying. And people who tweet are more valuable than those who don't, because there wouldn't be anything to follow without them.
microcolonel 7y ago
Yeah, the feed is now just slightly awkward and oversized, for what I can't see as any good reason. Reducing the zoom to 90% makes it comfortable again to read a Tweet. I have trouble reading oversized text.

ajmurmann 7y ago

Wasn't it great when we all had API access and could choose between different clients that had different emphasis? I'd be happy to pay too.

njn 7y ago

> The techniques and technologies we’ve used on the new Twitter.com mean you only download and run code when it’s needed. So a mobile user won’t download the sidebar you see on the home page, and may not download the settings pages until they go to update their display name. However, it also means that the full functionality of the site is still available to them should they want to access it. Can someone explain to Twitter's web developers that there's nothing groundbreaking about this idea? Like... lmao. That's how web apps should work. That's how traditional django and rails apps already work. I like JavaScript and React as much as any web developer but if you're loading unnecessary code that's actually degrading the usability then that's a problem to be fixed asap. And it's definitely not something worth mentioning in this press release. Oh wait, this was post written by "software engineers", not "web developers". They're probably too smart for these details.

cwyers 7y ago

Twitter has changed the front end like five times in the past five years and improved exactly zero of those times. They need to lay off 80% of their front end devs to keep them from just pointlessly churning the website.

statenjason 7y ago

This strong sign of the confidence Twitter has in React Native for Web[1]. In 2017, Nicolas Gallagher gave a talk[2] about why it was used for mobile.twitter.com. [1]: https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFn39lLO-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFn39lLO-U

ngrilly 7y ago
How do you know they use React Native for Web? The article says they unified their desktop and mobile architectures, but doesn't specify how.
- statenjason 7y ago
  Opening in React devtools shows a number of hints[1]. "React Native Style Editor" section. "View" components with numeric "style" props. And the classname prefixes "css-" and "r-" match the generated identifiers from react-native-web[2]. [1]: https://imgur.com/lFUvL7P https://imgur.com/lFUvL7P [2]: https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web/blob/45f94eb43daa3cb3d7fae0295877345a176c04c4/packages/react-native-web/src/exports/StyleSheet/compile.js#L81 https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web/blob/45f94eb43da...
  - ngrilly 7y ago
    That's convincing :-) Thanks!

bkorte 7y ago

Is there some kind of cookie hack I can run to get the new UI? Would be nice if engineering posts included a way to change your feature flag so I can experience what is being discussed.

dstroot 7y ago

Does anyone know what’s under the hood? React? Vue? Something I don’t even know enough to ask about?

tomduncalf 7y ago
It’s React (I think they mention this in the article) and I believe they are actually using React Native for Web, the engineer behind that works for twitter and the generated markup and classnames match how that works. Perhaps they are considering moving to React Native for their mobile apps in future... though there are other valid reasons to use React Native for Web
- jrm2k6 7y ago
  Is using react-native for Web better than having react & react-native for your UI and nicely separated business logic that is reusable for both? If you use react native for Web, does it mean your UI will look exactly the same whether it is on the web or mobile?

cracauer 7y ago

All that work, and still I had to use right-click "open image in new tab" to see the text of a meme? Is anybody in there actually using that thing? (those in user-facing changes authority?)

Pxtl 7y ago
Somebody worked very very hard on an algo that figures out which part of the image is important and they're not going to let some dumb users with silly opinions like "I want to see the whole thing" ruin it.

kup0 7y ago

I have to use Tweetdeck, because not having a reverse-chronological timeline is such a dealbreaker. If they ever remove this ability from Tweetdeck, I will probably just leave. I'm already on Mastodon and more active there anyway, it didn't turn into a ghost town like the last time I tried it.

robocat 7y ago

> So we enable these shortcuts whenever we detect a keyboard. How exactly do they they do this? Is it just detect keypress so load the shortcut code, or more complicated?

partiallypro 7y ago

With the new Twitter in Firefox it logs me out immediately after I close the window (no, I'm not incognito.) Also if I sign in using a different browser none of the options are saved. It's pretty annoying. It is a bit snappier, but it has a lot of annoyances. I can no longer go back to "old Twitter," either...so, it's a mess.

jacobdpeters 7y ago

Does anybody know what song is playing in the background? Or think it was custom recorded for this video.

RichardHeart 7y ago

They got 1 code base. I got a UI that I don't like. 1. There used to be a drop down for "copy link" to a tweet. So I could tweet then paste the URL across other platforms. Now I need to click the link, and copy the URL manually, and it's laggy. 2. The darker dark mode dims the text too. 3. The font size setting has no affect on making a new tweet... As usual, company degrades experience for users on UI upgrade...

delecti 7y ago
For 1, the link to the relative time the tweet was posted (1 minute ago, 15 seconds ago, etc) is a direct link to the tweet. Right click, copy link location (or your browser's equivalent). This has been the case as long as I can remember.

cyberferret 7y ago

I wish they would fix the 'Report Tweet' bugs - I keep getting stuck in a seemingly endless rotation of pop up dialogs once I complete a report. Or is this a deliberate dark pattern to curb people's enthusiasm for reporting bad content?

pier25 7y ago

On my 13'' MBP there are many tweets I can't see completely unless I scroll down. This is wrong.

not_a_cop75 7y ago

There is no new twitter until the corruption involved in twitter is taken to a head. Any technology will never improve the lousy policy and posturing that they do as a company.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

wetpaws 7y ago

After the reddit redesign and a twitter redesign I am starting to suspect that annual bonuses in those companies are tied in to the negative KPI.

wanone 7y ago

Never used twitter. Just made an account using work email to test twitter login. Didn't do a single thing yet. And my account gets blocked for 'suspicious activity' and they want my phone as well. What a shady company.

emikru 7y ago
This happened to me as well when I recently tried to make an account with an email address and no phone number. It was frozen almost immediately after creation, and when I requested it be unfrozen, twitter sent a message to my main email (NOT the one I signed up with!!) and required me to respond and say I had access in order to get the account back up. Made me very uncomfortable and virtually destroyed any desire I had to use their service.

gridlockd 7y ago

If they had just stopped developing Twitter years ago, it would be a better product today.