Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

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[this is a tweet]

[@zippergz this is a tweet]

[this is a tweet for @zippergz]

I have no idea if these are different. I know my followers get to see the first example. But do they get to see the others?

I have no idea what happens if I post these as a reply to a tweet that you posted. Do I need to keep the @ handle in there? Or is it being a reply sufficient to trigger an alert on your end?

I just now got followed by a porn account. So, I'm not interested in the porn they produce, and I'm never going to tweet to them. Either they're spammers who are just following everyone, or they've seen some sex industry relevant tweets I've retweeted (because another person I followed researches the sex industry) and thought I'm worth following. I have no way of knowing. So do I block them? Or just ignore them?

a friend who recently took up twitter ran into this exact thing. here's what happened, they had figured out that you just write stuff in the text box and press enter. great. simple. done!

here's what happened though, they started a tweet with @nameoffriend and noticed that unlike their previous tweets that were just words, this new tweet they wrote and sent didn't show up in their timeline like the others.

so she wrote another, thinking that for some reason it hadn't been successful. nope. again, it didn't show up.

so after the fourth duplicate message which started with @nameoffriend she gave up in exasperation and said, this is stupid!

she was later informed that all her messages which started with @nameoffriend had in fact been sent but she wasn't seeing them until she clicked on the tab tweets and replies category

it is this sort of thing that makes twitter's UX just atrocious for the average person

of course, many people on HN will read the above and chuckle but you have to understand that the average person out there is not nearly as tech savvy or nearly as invested. they will not commit to dedicating 100's of hours to learn the intricacies of a specific UI. no way!

if it is badly designed and made so that they can't use it in the first or second try, they get frustrated and just leave, and go where they can interact without the UI tripping them up, which is what you're seeing in twitter's stats

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