3 ms·

Ask HN: How long have you been on Twitter? Does the recent rebrand bother you?

5 points by penaazv 3y ago

I've been a Twitter user for over 5 years, and an admirer for many more. The branding, the minimalism, high-quality content, and text-emphasis - all of it used to feel great! Things were actually good in the pre-Elon era. Or stable, to say the least. While the users are still there and will most likely continue to be, I miss Twitter as it was already.

rman666 3y ago
I've been on Twitter since 2007. Elon is clearly and purposefully destroying it. I'm not happy about the changes. I'll probably stop using it soon.
- penaazv 3y ago
  The never-ending changes feel devastating. Twitter was one platform that felt the least superficial, and having the most number of high agency people. The user experience continued to be good unlike the Facebook-Snapchat-Instagram-TikTok clones for the lack of a better word. It is tragic to see Twitter (literally) fall apart and how.
- jonahbenton 3y ago
  Curious whether it is utility or habit that keeps you from actively stopping. Personally I relied on it for reading, had thousands of interesting upstreams and was programmatically pulling content...but basically stopped cold turkey once Elon took over. Missed it for its utility but had decided to vote with my feet. And at this point about 3/4 of my upstreams have left.
cowsup 3y ago
Since I created my account in 2009, nothing really happened on Twitter week-to-week, month-to-month, even year-to-year. Fundamentally, the site was mostly the same, and most new updates were either logical or non-important. We went from using a third-party service to upload photos (TwitPic) to being able to upload directly to Twitter. And we'd go from having a certain shade of blue, to a different shade of blue; or the icons changed to be slightly thicker and redesigned, to contrast better. Nothing interesting. The only real "shocking" change came when tweets went from 140 characters to 280 a few years back, and then early last year Twitter announced that you'd be able to edit tweets. Those two things, in my view, were the biggest changes pre-Elon. Now Elon owns it, and a lot of things are changing, like paying for verification, prioritizing paid users in replies, disabling Direct Messaging from free accounts by default, and other changes that, in my view, are geared more towards short-term profits as opposed to long-term platform trust and survival. But overall, it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the service. I get the news on there faster than anywhere else. Twitter's got a great secret sauce in their algorithm that has yet to be destroyed. The moment I can't get immediate useful information from there, I'm not going to use it nearly as much. Until then, change the logo all you like...
- penaazv 3y ago
  I think the user base continues to make a difference in the app's likability and usage pattern. And yes, it may have been a bit too stagnant in the past, and some of the new changes are kinda good. But things have gone too far now. Changing the logo and name (with several other consequent changes) does seem to be a big deal to me. It's good to think bigger and try new things, but why at the cost of wiping off the very foundation of something awesome and legendary? I had a conversation with my elder brother who was telling me how Twitter was the origin of many of the mainstream things like followers, likes and whatnot. This seemingly overnight decision (from the track record) is upsetting at the very least.
night-rider 3y ago
I don't like the concept of an 'everything app'. It seems diluted and non-focused on what Twitter actually is/was: a microblogging platform. Now I see walls of text and diatribes completely lacking wit and brevity because we're now spoiled with more characters. The witty things you could inject into a 280 char tweet are now gone. Sometimes, constraints are good, and encourage creativity. Another pain point: we can't say 'she/he tweeted that', we have to say they x'd it which is awkward and annoying.
- penaazv 3y ago
  I SO agree with you. It basically destroys everything Twitter stood for. And yes, it doesn't have to be huge blocks of text for it to be meaningful. And while we were making do with the (relatively) smaller changes in hindsight, this everything app thing (with super long videos and whatnot) is outrageous. Also, constraints are actually good more often than not. Just because you can say (write) more doesn't mean you have to. Sigh.
eva_cananim 3y ago
As mentioned in other HN threads, recently twitter has changed everyone's message settings so you are much less likely to be able to send someone a private message and now requires people to log in to read it. That is is very inconvenient. The only aspect of the rebrand that I care about is that they are wasting a second of my time showing the new logo full-screen when a page loads.
Zigurd 3y ago
The nazis, racists, TERFs, rapist pimps, and misogynists bother me. Claiming U+1d54f is a logo when Twitter has globe-spanning brand recognition is just an epic fuckup, but it's not offensive.
retrocryptid 3y ago
I started as a beta tester in 2006, took a two year break and then used it extensively until 2011. By that time most of the people I liked had left, but I retained one of my alts until around 2019 when I finally closed the account. For reasons I don't quite understand, I can't close the @retrocryptid account. Which seems weird. I created it a while ago when I thought having the same name on numerous services was important, but it was never my primary account. I'm not sure what I did or didn't do to disallow me from deactivating the account. I couldn't care less about the rebrand.
rsynnott 3y ago
I was a Twitter user from 2007-2022; I bailed out around the time Saint Car started purging journalists, though briefly returned for a joke when mention of the dread term 'mastodon' was banned. While I was quite annoyed to lose Twitter, I think the ill-thought-out rebrand is _extremely_ funny, and look forward to his realising that he doesn't have anything sensible to call retweets. Or, er, Twitter video. We are seeing the _worst rebrand in all of history_ unfold in real time, before our eyes. There's something special in that.
- penaazv 3y ago
  It's been just half a year. Do you miss it by any chance? And yes, this is historic stuff happening right here. Can't deny that.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Mastodon is very much my Twitter methadone, in this case. I mean, I miss it to an extent, but it's been getting gently worse for a while anyway, and the management has been increasingly questionable (NFT avatars! That weird audio thing!), so a shift from "increasingly questionable" to "comically incompetent" just felt like accelerating the inevitable. I had planned to go down with the ship, so to speak, but the current management is just really off-putting, and he really has let some extraordinarily unpleasant people back on. Also, if nothing else had driven me away, the API thing certainly would have; I've been using third party Twitter clients since before Twitter even _had_ a first party client (they actually bought the client I used and ruined it, so I moved to another, back in the day).
    - penaazv 3y ago
      That seems quite reasonable. Mastodon for some reason doesn't seem very inviting or maybe it's not marketed well enough. But good to know it's working for you :)
libraryatnight 3y ago
On and off since around when Trent Reznor first joined- funny I only lasted a little longer than he did post Elon. I didn't think I cared but I kind of do. It is sad Elon is such a disappointment, but that's not new and I'd moved on. The rebrand is sad because it feels really dead, now. Twitter was fun once.