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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's UI is really bad too. If someone links to an image it loads the page with the image, then a second or so later loads the same image in a modal. And if you try to click the image make it bigger it might just close the modal (that's not yet loaded) and take you to the person's timeline.

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Also you can't navigate huge comment streams in Facebook. I always see some viral image with "xyz friend commented on this", click it and you just see the latest comments in the last 2 seconds.

this seems to only work well through the (iphone) app. accessing the website through chrome (or similar) shows the behavior you mentioned.

Certainly, Facebook has UI problems but I think there's more going on here.

The thing about the Twitter UI isn't just that it's awkward or ugly but that it makes the platform itself itself bad - bad as in making-the-world-a-worse-place bad.

When people can't ignore references to themselves, when they can only reply with short retorts, it turns Twitter into the shallow, ugly, uncivil platform that it currently is.

Or you just make a funny joke and get bored of getting 'lol,' reply notifications you reconsider making such awesome content

> bad as in making-the-world-a-worse-place bad

I think you could say that about twitter itself, not just the UI.

Yes. But this is only cosmetic. My biggest problem is that when scrolling a timeline, clicking on something, then clicking back, does not take me to the same position in the timeline.

Wikipedia currently has a similarly annoying UX. If you click on an image, then copy/paste the link to someone else to open, it first loads the article you clicked on the image from, then a modal of the image.

Oh yeah that's annoying. And when you close it they push a new history state so if you hit back the modal opens again. Personally I think modals shouldn't be a URL. If you want it to be a permalink then make it a standalone page.

IMHO, it should pushState a proper URL to the image, then history.back() to close it.

The image modal can be disabled by the settings on the right of the modal.

IMO, both Facebook and Twitter are just victims of the trend of using the web browser as a full-blown application platform.

Not only that, in my workflow I keep FB in the first Safari tab and open every story in other tabs, only to find out closing FB ruins every open outside link!

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