6 ms·

It's very painful to follow a conversation on Twitter. I'm not sure why they think the way they've done things makes sense.

lmilcin 6y ago
It was never supposed to support conversation in the first place. People were supposed to shoot short, simple, single messages and other people maybe react to this with their own short, single messages.
- fluffy87 6y ago
  You are describing a chat
- iambateman 6y ago
  We are way way past that point. It’s time for Twitter to evolve in so many ways.
  - nikolay 6y ago
    I think they can't as their system is built with many of these limitations and preconceptions and it's hard for it to evolve easily.
    - yiyus 6y ago
      It may be difficult to evolve, but it should be possible.
      - nikolay 6y ago
        If there's will, there's a way. Remember how long they've tried to convince themselves that 140 characters is more than enough. Nowadays, even phones display conversations better and combine or split text messages hiding the 160 characters limit from the end user and allow longer than 280 characters texts. Twitter has some nice ideas, but it's mostly a huge missed opportunity.
        ganafagol 6y ago
        The character limit was central to making Twitter what it is. Without that limit you'd just have ended up with walls of text and nobody would have been interested. This is a great example of limitations forcing creativity. The character limit is the defining feature of Twitter.
        nikolay 6y ago
        Maybe for you. I'm not saying having no limit, but a number of words limit is better than a number of characters. They started to revert their _defining feature_ but not counting characters in URLs, etc.
  - ksec 6y ago
    I cant even remember the last user feature changes Twitter has.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      Proper support in the UI for RTs with comments. But honestly I'd prefer if they spent some fucking time upstaffing their user service and abuse teams. And if they could finally ban Trump and his conspiracy nutcase followers/network.
      - jlgaddis 6y ago
        If the very light gray color of your comment is any indication, folks here didn't like what you said. I certainly don't think that HN should ban you because of it, though.
        CamJN 6y ago
        The difference of course being that trump was actively trying to fuck over millions and this user was just pointing it out. God right wing people are pathetic.
        jlgaddis 6y ago
        You shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions! To be clear, I'm about as far from "right wing" as one can get. I wasn't aware that standing up for the First Amendment rights of others was a partisan issue, though. Now, I realize that -- in today's divided society -- I'm supposed to be completely on board with silencing those who hold different opinions or disagree with "our" beliefs ("canceling", I think it's called?) but, well, it just don't work like that. See, I'm from the rural midwest (a self-proclaimed "country boy"), I drive a big 4WD truck, I ride a loud ass Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and there's three or four times as many guns in this house are there are people. My hometown, my family, my friends, and my acquaintances are all overwhelmingly Republicans -- including some of the people that I love and care for the most in this world -- yet, somehow, I've been a Democrat for my entire adult life. Contrary to what some folks in "my" party seem to think, however, EVERYONE (still) has the right to their own beliefs and opinions -- and to express them -- no matter how ignorant, ill-informed, asinine, outright stupid, or batshit crazy they may be! We have a saying around here in "my neck of the woods": I may not agree with what you say but I will fight for and defend to my death your absolute right to say it. For the record, the only time I've even come close to attempting to "silence" someone or prevent them from exercising their rights has been at funerals -- as a (proud) member of the Patriot Guard Riders.
  - Finnucane 6y ago
    Evolve or die. Twitter dies is a good option.
- nikolay 6y ago
  Yeah, I've never seen any value in Twitter. They should've called it "Public IM" or limited IIRC and make it function well like IM. Even the poor implementation of threads in Slack is way better than the perverted version of Twitter.
  - folkrav 6y ago
    Apart from being stuck to a single level in depth (which IMHO kind of makes sense in the context of an IM platform), what's that bad about Slack's threads?
    - nikolay 6y ago
      Well, literally, you need to move aside - they took the skeuomorphism of people getting aside to discuss a topic without bothering others too far.
      - folkrav 6y ago
        Not sure what would you have preferred? I can only think of inline, but I'm not sure how well that would have worked in an IM application, where you'd typically expect things to be in chronological order. You basically described the point of having threads in the first place, and I also cannot think of many other existing implementations, so I'm curious.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    > I've never seen any value in Twitter. Except for the information that doesn't show up on other platforms, which is why it is a frequently linked site here?
    - nikolay 6y ago
      An ever-increasing number of people uses https://threadreaderapp.com/ https://threadreaderapp.com/ though.
      - 6y ago
- mac01021 6y ago
  That sounds a lot like a conversation to me.
- lsb 6y ago
  "You are using our product wrong" is never the hallmark of a successful product manager.
  - cubano 6y ago
    Even though I know I must be violating like half the conversational bylaws here on HN I gotta throw in... "It's not a bug, it's a feature" I've heard since the late 80's and still works magic if you ask me.
3gg 6y ago
Shouting works better than conversing to keep users "engaged" and target them with ads.
npunt 6y ago
As a reading medium seeing a bunch of tweets strung together is not fantastic as implemented today. As an authoring medium though, the character constraints force you to write succinct points that keep the reader engaged. You can focus your writing just on one point at a time, committing to them when you tweet, and you can stop anytime. If you're struggling with writing longer form pieces a tweet thread is a great on-ramp to get the outline together, which you can later expand into a post. As a conversation medium, it's also nice to be able to focus conversation specifically on a particular point, rather than get jumbled together with a bunch of unrelated comments in the comments section at the end of a post.
- nikolay 6y ago
  Really? I don't like that Twitter makes me to reword and abbreviate words, just because I'm 2 characters over! Any medium (pun intended) has the concept of paragraphs, but does not typically limit you how long the paragraph is. It could guide you not to go overboard, but to force you to a certain made-up character limit - it's not really acceptable in 2021.
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    You need to realize that the character limit was the defining feature of Twitter. There are many platforms where grumpy uncle could dump a wall of text with his views, but nobody was attracted to another one of those. In today's attention economy, limiting expressions of thought was exactly the right thing.
    - nikolay 6y ago
      Maybe you do, but I never want to dump anything! I want to write a paragraph. I can't in many cases, and I need to break English or ruin the wording. So, it's okay for the texting culture, I guess, but not for people who care about what they say and how they say it. I know many people bombard you on IM or Slack with tens of messages instead of writing a single paragraph. You think that's okay? It's a pity if you think so! No wonder people today are suffering from all kinds of attention disorders!
chubot 6y ago
I think they A/B'd some UI and found that the confusing UI gets more clicks. Users are clicking around randomly trying to find context for the conversation, and that's "engagement". I'm pretty sure the context isn't there in many cases, although I haven't figured out the rules exactly.
blhack 6y ago
It makes people misunderstand each other, which makes them angry, and increases engagement/replies.
adamjb 6y ago
I used to feel the same way until I decided to actually use my twitter account on a regular basis, which probably means it's on some level objectively terrible. But now I've learnt the logic of how to navigate twitter I find it very intuitive. Twitter have tried to have their cake and eat it too by allowing a reddit or hn style tree (which is good for discussions) while having their ui present it as a linear feed (which is good for engagement). This has lead to their current solution where the branches are presented in a choose your own adventure way. Now because the linked tweet has three replies, it has to show all three of them and leave it to you to select which branch you want to go down by clicking on it or the show replies prompt (though it does give primacy to pixprin's replies to self).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

lmilcin 6y ago

It was never supposed to support conversation in the first place. People were supposed to shoot short, simple, single messages and other people maybe react to this with their own short, single messages.

fluffy87 6y ago
You are describing a chat
iambateman 6y ago
We are way way past that point. It’s time for Twitter to evolve in so many ways.
- nikolay 6y ago
  I think they can't as their system is built with many of these limitations and preconceptions and it's hard for it to evolve easily.
  - yiyus 6y ago
    It may be difficult to evolve, but it should be possible.
    - nikolay 6y ago
      If there's will, there's a way. Remember how long they've tried to convince themselves that 140 characters is more than enough. Nowadays, even phones display conversations better and combine or split text messages hiding the 160 characters limit from the end user and allow longer than 280 characters texts. Twitter has some nice ideas, but it's mostly a huge missed opportunity.
      - ganafagol 6y ago
        The character limit was central to making Twitter what it is. Without that limit you'd just have ended up with walls of text and nobody would have been interested. This is a great example of limitations forcing creativity. The character limit is the defining feature of Twitter.
        nikolay 6y ago
        Maybe for you. I'm not saying having no limit, but a number of words limit is better than a number of characters. They started to revert their _defining feature_ but not counting characters in URLs, etc.
- ksec 6y ago
  I cant even remember the last user feature changes Twitter has.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Proper support in the UI for RTs with comments. But honestly I'd prefer if they spent some fucking time upstaffing their user service and abuse teams. And if they could finally ban Trump and his conspiracy nutcase followers/network.
    - jlgaddis 6y ago
      If the very light gray color of your comment is any indication, folks here didn't like what you said. I certainly don't think that HN should ban you because of it, though.
      - CamJN 6y ago
        The difference of course being that trump was actively trying to fuck over millions and this user was just pointing it out. God right wing people are pathetic.
        jlgaddis 6y ago
        You shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions! To be clear, I'm about as far from "right wing" as one can get. I wasn't aware that standing up for the First Amendment rights of others was a partisan issue, though. Now, I realize that -- in today's divided society -- I'm supposed to be completely on board with silencing those who hold different opinions or disagree with "our" beliefs ("canceling", I think it's called?) but, well, it just don't work like that. See, I'm from the rural midwest (a self-proclaimed "country boy"), I drive a big 4WD truck, I ride a loud ass Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and there's three or four times as many guns in this house are there are people. My hometown, my family, my friends, and my acquaintances are all overwhelmingly Republicans -- including some of the people that I love and care for the most in this world -- yet, somehow, I've been a Democrat for my entire adult life. Contrary to what some folks in "my" party seem to think, however, EVERYONE (still) has the right to their own beliefs and opinions -- and to express them -- no matter how ignorant, ill-informed, asinine, outright stupid, or batshit crazy they may be! We have a saying around here in "my neck of the woods": I may not agree with what you say but I will fight for and defend to my death your absolute right to say it. For the record, the only time I've even come close to attempting to "silence" someone or prevent them from exercising their rights has been at funerals -- as a (proud) member of the Patriot Guard Riders.
- Finnucane 6y ago
  Evolve or die. Twitter dies is a good option.
nikolay 6y ago
Yeah, I've never seen any value in Twitter. They should've called it "Public IM" or limited IIRC and make it function well like IM. Even the poor implementation of threads in Slack is way better than the perverted version of Twitter.
- folkrav 6y ago
  Apart from being stuck to a single level in depth (which IMHO kind of makes sense in the context of an IM platform), what's that bad about Slack's threads?
  - nikolay 6y ago
    Well, literally, you need to move aside - they took the skeuomorphism of people getting aside to discuss a topic without bothering others too far.
    - folkrav 6y ago
      Not sure what would you have preferred? I can only think of inline, but I'm not sure how well that would have worked in an IM application, where you'd typically expect things to be in chronological order. You basically described the point of having threads in the first place, and I also cannot think of many other existing implementations, so I'm curious.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > I've never seen any value in Twitter. Except for the information that doesn't show up on other platforms, which is why it is a frequently linked site here?
  - nikolay 6y ago
    An ever-increasing number of people uses https://threadreaderapp.com/ https://threadreaderapp.com/ though.
    - 6y ago
mac01021 6y ago
That sounds a lot like a conversation to me.
lsb 6y ago
"You are using our product wrong" is never the hallmark of a successful product manager.
- cubano 6y ago
  Even though I know I must be violating like half the conversational bylaws here on HN I gotta throw in... "It's not a bug, it's a feature" I've heard since the late 80's and still works magic if you ask me.

3gg 6y ago

Shouting works better than conversing to keep users "engaged" and target them with ads.

npunt 6y ago

As a reading medium seeing a bunch of tweets strung together is not fantastic as implemented today. As an authoring medium though, the character constraints force you to write succinct points that keep the reader engaged. You can focus your writing just on one point at a time, committing to them when you tweet, and you can stop anytime. If you're struggling with writing longer form pieces a tweet thread is a great on-ramp to get the outline together, which you can later expand into a post. As a conversation medium, it's also nice to be able to focus conversation specifically on a particular point, rather than get jumbled together with a bunch of unrelated comments in the comments section at the end of a post.

nikolay 6y ago
Really? I don't like that Twitter makes me to reword and abbreviate words, just because I'm 2 characters over! Any medium (pun intended) has the concept of paragraphs, but does not typically limit you how long the paragraph is. It could guide you not to go overboard, but to force you to a certain made-up character limit - it's not really acceptable in 2021.
- ganafagol 6y ago
  You need to realize that the character limit was the defining feature of Twitter. There are many platforms where grumpy uncle could dump a wall of text with his views, but nobody was attracted to another one of those. In today's attention economy, limiting expressions of thought was exactly the right thing.
  - nikolay 6y ago
    Maybe you do, but I never want to dump anything! I want to write a paragraph. I can't in many cases, and I need to break English or ruin the wording. So, it's okay for the texting culture, I guess, but not for people who care about what they say and how they say it. I know many people bombard you on IM or Slack with tens of messages instead of writing a single paragraph. You think that's okay? It's a pity if you think so! No wonder people today are suffering from all kinds of attention disorders!

chubot 6y ago

I think they A/B'd some UI and found that the confusing UI gets more clicks. Users are clicking around randomly trying to find context for the conversation, and that's "engagement". I'm pretty sure the context isn't there in many cases, although I haven't figured out the rules exactly.

blhack 6y ago

It makes people misunderstand each other, which makes them angry, and increases engagement/replies.

adamjb 6y ago

I used to feel the same way until I decided to actually use my twitter account on a regular basis, which probably means it's on some level objectively terrible. But now I've learnt the logic of how to navigate twitter I find it very intuitive. Twitter have tried to have their cake and eat it too by allowing a reddit or hn style tree (which is good for discussions) while having their ui present it as a linear feed (which is good for engagement). This has lead to their current solution where the branches are presented in a choose your own adventure way. Now because the linked tweet has three replies, it has to show all three of them and leave it to you to select which branch you want to go down by clicking on it or the show replies prompt (though it does give primacy to pixprin's replies to self).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]