4 ms·

What's wrong with screenshots of text? They're easily readable. The white background makes things stand out more than just posting text on stock Twitter. It's o

What's wrong with screenshots of text? They're easily readable. The white background makes things stand out more than just posting text on stock Twitter. It's one reason Insta story posts and even slides have text. Technological progress doesn't mean making user-hostile design. If users like a format or medium, you can offer it to them even if your platform is capable of greater things.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Mostly the fact that they completely ignore accessibility. In fact, if Twitter did want to improve the user experience, automatic OCR of such text and generation of the corresponding alt tag would be a practical improvement. In fact, general recognition of the content of an image and auto generation of an ALT tag would be a significant improvement. ... But that require them to do actual machine learning as opposed to being the internet's bathroom stall wall.
- xbfjvusb6 4y ago
  OCR is a solved problem. It's like one call to tesseract and you're done. The fact they haven't done this just shows how inept their employees are.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    Tesseract has a horrific API and decades of technical debt. Add to this, it's also very sensitive to fonts. So... yeah, OCR is 'solved', but that doesn't mean it's easy.
    - xbfjvusb6 4y ago
      Solved for most the image text I see on social.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Twitter does a lot of actual machine learning, but mostly to improve ad clickability.
ilyt 4y ago
> What's wrong with screenshots of text? They're easily readable. The white background makes things stand out more than just posting text on stock Twitter. It's one reason Insta story posts and even slides have text. The fact you defend it as more readable than actual twitter design says a lot
matheusmoreira 4y ago
What's wrong? Everything. Screenshots of text are popular because people don't seem to be able to copy and save data anymore. Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore. I can only share intra-platform links to content. The Instagram app won't even let me select text. People get around this insanity by screenshotting the whole screen and saving a poor quality version of the data in image form. This is actually a lossy format conversion and will happen multiple times as people encounter resistance when they try to copy, save and share. It's not just images of text, it's screenshots of screenshots of of screenshots of text. This is what computing has degenerated to. People can't do basic actions like copying and downloading anymore so they just use screen shots and screen recorders to get around software limitations. I've seen so many videos that end with the user manipulating the interface to stop the recorder. And then there's the people reduced to taking pictures of another screen with their phone cameras.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore. These aren't problems with screenshots of text (although others have done a pretty good job in listing those) or even problems with computing. These are problems with shitty social media platforms that want to take control from their users, and with the users who accept those kinds of limitations. Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives. There's no point in migrating to some perfect encrypted federated free software platform and being alone because everyone I know is still using Instagram.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      Maybe just stop using social media. If you're interesting your friends will contact you still. If you're not interesting, go get a hobby and become interesting.
fivre 4y ago
screenshots of text on twitter exist primarily because people still want to post long segments of text on a platform that explicitly disallows it. screenshots of text are worse than actual text in every way i can think of. they do not: - allow clicking hyperlinks - allow copying content to paste elsewhere - adhere to device display preferences. you wanted dark mode? fuck you, my screenshot's black on white, dwi - support screen readers. i loled hardcore at the other post suggesting twitter OCR them--i mean sure, as a practical matter, they should given the status quo, but YOU COULD HAVE JUST USED TEXT TO BEGIN WITH - scale properly when zoomed in or out - display all the text up front. virtually all of these require you click through each image because the thumbnail is cropped (if not too small to read anyway) idk what reason you'd ever actually want to use them unless you desperately needed to show off the cool font you used. saying they're easily readable is like saying the abhorrent mandatory training videos featuring some extremely bored person reading a script over a static background for 30 minutes, with no option to speed up playback or fast-forward, are perfectly understandable. like, yeah, sure, they _are_, but also you could have provided a set of text bullet points about how not to violate USFCPA that any literate person could read in about 2 minutes and we'd all learn the same damn thing
sam0x17 4y ago
> Technological progress doesn't mean making user-hostile design Ok I want to copy paste one of the sentences he said to send to my friend but not the whole message. Oh wait
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
winternett 4y ago
A lot of accounts on Twitter screenshot text in order to circumvent notifications to the accounts they cite... This allows people to hijack content, and to arrange brigades without having a clear path back to the source of where they started. One of the most important things for Elon to understand is that no matter how many programmatical measures are put into place to prevent abuse, there will always eventually be a workaround for people on a very public and open site. Protecting users and their content rights should be a goal of the platform as well, too many of these social sites see copycat behavior as fair game, and they reward people who steal and hijack content, that needs to be discouraged among several other bad social media behaviors.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Mostly the fact that they completely ignore accessibility. In fact, if Twitter did want to improve the user experience, automatic OCR of such text and generation of the corresponding alt tag would be a practical improvement. In fact, general recognition of the content of an image and auto generation of an ALT tag would be a significant improvement. ... But that require them to do actual machine learning as opposed to being the internet's bathroom stall wall.

xbfjvusb6 4y ago
OCR is a solved problem. It's like one call to tesseract and you're done. The fact they haven't done this just shows how inept their employees are.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  Tesseract has a horrific API and decades of technical debt. Add to this, it's also very sensitive to fonts. So... yeah, OCR is 'solved', but that doesn't mean it's easy.
  - xbfjvusb6 4y ago
    Solved for most the image text I see on social.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Twitter does a lot of actual machine learning, but mostly to improve ad clickability.

ilyt 4y ago

> What's wrong with screenshots of text? They're easily readable. The white background makes things stand out more than just posting text on stock Twitter. It's one reason Insta story posts and even slides have text. The fact you defend it as more readable than actual twitter design says a lot

matheusmoreira 4y ago

What's wrong? Everything. Screenshots of text are popular because people don't seem to be able to copy and save data anymore. Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore. I can only share intra-platform links to content. The Instagram app won't even let me select text. People get around this insanity by screenshotting the whole screen and saving a poor quality version of the data in image form. This is actually a lossy format conversion and will happen multiple times as people encounter resistance when they try to copy, save and share. It's not just images of text, it's screenshots of screenshots of of screenshots of text. This is what computing has degenerated to. People can't do basic actions like copying and downloading anymore so they just use screen shots and screen recorders to get around software limitations. I've seen so many videos that end with the user manipulating the interface to stop the recorder. And then there's the people reduced to taking pictures of another screen with their phone cameras.

autoexec 4y ago
> Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore. These aren't problems with screenshots of text (although others have done a pretty good job in listing those) or even problems with computing. These are problems with shitty social media platforms that want to take control from their users, and with the users who accept those kinds of limitations. Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives. There's no point in migrating to some perfect encrypted federated free software platform and being alone because everyone I know is still using Instagram.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    Maybe just stop using social media. If you're interesting your friends will contact you still. If you're not interesting, go get a hobby and become interesting.

fivre 4y ago

screenshots of text on twitter exist primarily because people still want to post long segments of text on a platform that explicitly disallows it. screenshots of text are worse than actual text in every way i can think of. they do not: - allow clicking hyperlinks - allow copying content to paste elsewhere - adhere to device display preferences. you wanted dark mode? fuck you, my screenshot's black on white, dwi - support screen readers. i loled hardcore at the other post suggesting twitter OCR them--i mean sure, as a practical matter, they should given the status quo, but YOU COULD HAVE JUST USED TEXT TO BEGIN WITH - scale properly when zoomed in or out - display all the text up front. virtually all of these require you click through each image because the thumbnail is cropped (if not too small to read anyway) idk what reason you'd ever actually want to use them unless you desperately needed to show off the cool font you used. saying they're easily readable is like saying the abhorrent mandatory training videos featuring some extremely bored person reading a script over a static background for 30 minutes, with no option to speed up playback or fast-forward, are perfectly understandable. like, yeah, sure, they _are_, but also you could have provided a set of text bullet points about how not to violate USFCPA that any literate person could read in about 2 minutes and we'd all learn the same damn thing

sam0x17 4y ago

> Technological progress doesn't mean making user-hostile design Ok I want to copy paste one of the sentences he said to send to my friend but not the whole message. Oh wait

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

winternett 4y ago

A lot of accounts on Twitter screenshot text in order to circumvent notifications to the accounts they cite... This allows people to hijack content, and to arrange brigades without having a clear path back to the source of where they started. One of the most important things for Elon to understand is that no matter how many programmatical measures are put into place to prevent abuse, there will always eventually be a workaround for people on a very public and open site. Protecting users and their content rights should be a goal of the platform as well, too many of these social sites see copycat behavior as fair game, and they reward people who steal and hijack content, that needs to be discouraged among several other bad social media behaviors.