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Comment by lingben | Hacker News Reader

Too little, too late. Twitter has the most abysmal UI/UX I've ever seen, especially when you consider its clout and popularity (although that is fast waning).

Any meaningful change will be so jarring that the dyed in the wool users will balk at it, kicking up a storm of protests and it will not serve to bring in new users (they come in not for good UI but for the network effect - but they don't use it and leave because of the UI).

I honestly can't believe how insanely horrible twitter UI is - and it seems to be something that all twitter users have agreed to never mention. It just leaves one breathless after it opens the FOURTH modal window on top of the previous three that it had already opened.

On the bright side of things, for anyone teaching UI, twitter is a fantastic example of what NOT to do.

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If you look closer at the most prolific users they are not accessing it via the site, but via either the official app or a third party app/service (i think Hootsuite is popular with heavy users, as it allows them to track and post on a number of "social media" services).

Yep, and Twitter refuses to give API access to their newer features like polls, information shown in the connect tab, group DMs, etc.

So they're pushing new features that heavy users will never see, because 3rd party clients are vastly superior.

It's a marvel their product managers and executives can get out of bed unassisted in the morning.

Well some third party client can, by pretending to be the official client. This by allowing you to insert the ID strings of said client yourself.

Maybe Twitters "UI" is so messy is because its text. People can make up any convent they want. Like signing posts with ^.

compare and contrast to reddit: text but extremely simple, intuitive, you can follow conversations, know who is talking to whom, respond, link, etc.

I think reddit gets kind ofh ard to follow for conversations. It's really good for content aggregation, but I much prefer 4chan (and any other chan etc) for conversations. Though I think in the end thats more to do with the functionality than the UI. You definitely need an extension to use 4chan seriously but the same can be said for reddit.

I've said all this but either is INIFNITELY better than twitter, especially twitter's standard web client. TweetDeck makes the thing barely useable.

I get what you're saying but I don't think we should hold up Reddit as a gold standard of accessibility.

I'm fairly technically proficient and I have a hard time figuring out how to "onboard" myself to Reddit and to understand the whole system. It's relatively intimidating.

If we want to stick to text-only, I think HN is actually a better example. Of course, Facebook is really the pinnacle of broad accessibility.

One thing i like about Reddit is that you can temporarily collapse a noisy thread so you don't have to scroll past it.

I was just thinking of commenting about the lack of collapsing threads on HN as well. Nice to see I'm not the only one who's missing it here. (Especially if the most upvoted comment is not interesting to me, but resulted in a lot of conversation)

I use this [1], but if you click on a link and hit the back button, all the threads will expand back.

[1] https://github.com/andrewheins/HN-Comment-Hider

Oh neat. Thanks!

Nah, its messy because cloudcookoolander ui designers.

Notice how if you click a tweet in the timeline, you do not get a overlay to show the conversation. Nope, it push away the tweets below to make room. Then when you click anywhere else on the site the conversation collapse back, shifting the position of surrounding tweets once more.

Similarly, the only way to see a image full size is to basically drag and drop it into a new tab. If you click it you just get a floating view that barely make use of 75% of the screen, with a copy of the related tweet below it.

To make use of the twitter site i find myself liberally middle and ctrl clicking timestamps and similar to throw tweets into new tabs.

And their latest "innovation", embedded tweets, basically wrecks their own conversation view. Now you can't click a tweet and see the reverse timeline. Nope, you have to click each of them in turn to dig into the dialog.

When was the last time you used Twitter? The first concern you mentioned is something they fixed a few weeks back. I'm still trying to understand the rest.

Could have sworn it still behaved that way just the other day, but now it seems to use a overlay. Weird.

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