5 ms·

I don't understand how other people can tolerate using Twitter. I just want to view people's comments in a compact form - one line per tweet, even if RSS or eq

I don't understand how other people can tolerate using Twitter. I just want to view people's comments in a compact form - one line per tweet, even if RSS or equivalent is not supported. How do people have time in their day to scroll down the page to see all the tweets (&ads) on their timeline when they're following hundreds/thousands of people? If I can't integrate it into my RSS reader realistically I have <15 minutes per day to spend on such a platform.

paulgb 3y ago
Fun fact, early in Twitter's life, RSS was supported. There was even a brief period where it supported XMPP! I remember following along with 2008 election tweets in Pidgin.
- belter 3y ago
  Fun fact, many years ago, Google had a SOAP interface. But it got removed as machines are not interested in Internet Ads. :-) How time flies... Edit: http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soap-s.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soa...
  - paulgb 3y ago
    I remember building an early "infinite scroll" search interface with it!
adamiscool8 3y ago
Tweets are often rich media and aren't designed to be one line, but Twitter has a Lists function that does basically this if you're willing to make manual groupings of users by topic.
Palomides 3y ago
there are two ways to use twitter: curate a small number of follows you read most tweets from, or follow many and treat twitter more like an endless river to sample from
- majikaja 3y ago
  Yeah I figure that's how people use it - for entertainment or sampling user sentiment. It's not even good at the latter because the act of following often is in essence cherry picking and the sample size from scrolling is so low. Something so cripplingly limited shouldn't have a near-monopoly...
the-printer 3y ago
My assumption is that we shouldn’t underestimate the volume of nonsense that a person can tolerate when their attention span has been reduced to banana skin fiber over the course of their lifetime. Combine that with the addictive qualities of the platforms and a desire to harvest maximum stimulation with minimal effort. Recently I noticed how overwhelming some posts on HN can appear. 400-500 comments, the top rated comment alone splinters into 78 sub-narratives and criticisms. Contrarily I feel like parsing this takes a lot more effort than Twitter. People put a lot more effort in their HN comments compared to a Tweet, and we are held to a different standard here in terms as what we say and how we say it. Also consider the fact that Twitter offers a variety of content while HN offers one primary form (text; I’m purposely excluding what links that are shared offer and am discussing primarily the core of the HN experience which is the conversation on the actual site). I say all of this to say, how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here? When you follow nobody (unless you subscribe to some users comments with an RSS reader, an option I’m becoming more fond of) and you actually have to do a lot of reading and thinking as compared to a deluge of Tweets that can be grasped in a matter of seconds. On one hand, this is what makes HN an exceptional website in a way. On the other hand, what makes Twitter appealing to others is what makes it exceptional compared to other websites and why it’s doubtful that the majority of its user base will leave, unless the layout changes. Overall, I think topics like literacy, intellectual curiosity, taste…and a lack thereof, contribute to why Twitter is either appealing and unappealing (I don’t tweet).
- majikaja 3y ago
  >how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here? Yeah this site can be a massive time-waste. I try to only scroll through a thread if it's of significant interest to me or I'm on the train or something. Some days that effort fails and I spend too much time passively consuming trivia from here when I should be working. When it comes to non-tech topics I don't think the level of discussion on this site is particularly high but the quality of prose may give the wrong impression on first glance. I get several thousand items in my RSS reader inbox each day (including HN headlines) - no way can I read a significant portion of that. Thankfully most news articles have limited new information beyond the title.
ecliptik 3y ago
The Twitter frontend Nitter [1] has RSS built in for posts. I don't think it can do full threads, but it's a compact read-only design is much easier to read than proper Twitter. Unfortunately the public instances can get overloaded and really slow. To get a more real-time like experience it's better to stand up your own instance and put it behind something like Tailscale so only you are using it. 1. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
afavour 3y ago
Twitter's answer to this is to use an algorithm to prioritize the content the user is mostly likely to want to see. Certainly, I never read every unread tweet in my feed. Ironically that same algorithmic approach has been subject to complaint from all sides, with "shadow ban" accusations thrown around, including by Musk himself. So it's now less effective than it used to be, in the name of "equality".
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Effective twitter usage is about maximizing the signal to noise ratio. Aggressively unfollow accounts that have low SNR. A few hundred accounts will give you enough high quality tweets for <15 min a day.
tgv 3y ago
The appeal of twitter is the fame. They may look down upon traditional media, but it's those that give twitter users their megaphone. If you've got 1000 followers that may or may not glance upon your tweets, that nice. But to see your opinion broadcasted as the voice of the people, that's attractive.

paulgb 3y ago

Fun fact, early in Twitter's life, RSS was supported. There was even a brief period where it supported XMPP! I remember following along with 2008 election tweets in Pidgin.

belter 3y ago
Fun fact, many years ago, Google had a SOAP interface. But it got removed as machines are not interested in Internet Ads. :-) How time flies... Edit: http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soap-s.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soa...
- paulgb 3y ago
  I remember building an early "infinite scroll" search interface with it!

adamiscool8 3y ago

Tweets are often rich media and aren't designed to be one line, but Twitter has a Lists function that does basically this if you're willing to make manual groupings of users by topic.

Palomides 3y ago

there are two ways to use twitter: curate a small number of follows you read most tweets from, or follow many and treat twitter more like an endless river to sample from

majikaja 3y ago
Yeah I figure that's how people use it - for entertainment or sampling user sentiment. It's not even good at the latter because the act of following often is in essence cherry picking and the sample size from scrolling is so low. Something so cripplingly limited shouldn't have a near-monopoly...

the-printer 3y ago

My assumption is that we shouldn’t underestimate the volume of nonsense that a person can tolerate when their attention span has been reduced to banana skin fiber over the course of their lifetime. Combine that with the addictive qualities of the platforms and a desire to harvest maximum stimulation with minimal effort. Recently I noticed how overwhelming some posts on HN can appear. 400-500 comments, the top rated comment alone splinters into 78 sub-narratives and criticisms. Contrarily I feel like parsing this takes a lot more effort than Twitter. People put a lot more effort in their HN comments compared to a Tweet, and we are held to a different standard here in terms as what we say and how we say it. Also consider the fact that Twitter offers a variety of content while HN offers one primary form (text; I’m purposely excluding what links that are shared offer and am discussing primarily the core of the HN experience which is the conversation on the actual site). I say all of this to say, how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here? When you follow nobody (unless you subscribe to some users comments with an RSS reader, an option I’m becoming more fond of) and you actually have to do a lot of reading and thinking as compared to a deluge of Tweets that can be grasped in a matter of seconds. On one hand, this is what makes HN an exceptional website in a way. On the other hand, what makes Twitter appealing to others is what makes it exceptional compared to other websites and why it’s doubtful that the majority of its user base will leave, unless the layout changes. Overall, I think topics like literacy, intellectual curiosity, taste…and a lack thereof, contribute to why Twitter is either appealing and unappealing (I don’t tweet).

majikaja 3y ago
>how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here? Yeah this site can be a massive time-waste. I try to only scroll through a thread if it's of significant interest to me or I'm on the train or something. Some days that effort fails and I spend too much time passively consuming trivia from here when I should be working. When it comes to non-tech topics I don't think the level of discussion on this site is particularly high but the quality of prose may give the wrong impression on first glance. I get several thousand items in my RSS reader inbox each day (including HN headlines) - no way can I read a significant portion of that. Thankfully most news articles have limited new information beyond the title.

ecliptik 3y ago

The Twitter frontend Nitter [1] has RSS built in for posts. I don't think it can do full threads, but it's a compact read-only design is much easier to read than proper Twitter. Unfortunately the public instances can get overloaded and really slow. To get a more real-time like experience it's better to stand up your own instance and put it behind something like Tailscale so only you are using it. 1. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

afavour 3y ago

Twitter's answer to this is to use an algorithm to prioritize the content the user is mostly likely to want to see. Certainly, I never read every unread tweet in my feed. Ironically that same algorithmic approach has been subject to complaint from all sides, with "shadow ban" accusations thrown around, including by Musk himself. So it's now less effective than it used to be, in the name of "equality".

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

Effective twitter usage is about maximizing the signal to noise ratio. Aggressively unfollow accounts that have low SNR. A few hundred accounts will give you enough high quality tweets for <15 min a day.

tgv 3y ago

The appeal of twitter is the fame. They may look down upon traditional media, but it's those that give twitter users their megaphone. If you've got 1000 followers that may or may not glance upon your tweets, that nice. But to see your opinion broadcasted as the voice of the people, that's attractive.