Twitter stops counting replies towards its 140 characters on web and mobile
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is spot on and buried further down the article. To me, the UX of this change just makes Twitter even more complicated now. Their UI/UX is getting so bogged down with rules that it's incredibly hard to explain Twitter to a new user. It's even confusing for a current active Twitter user to keep track of what's what.
I recently helped a friend get setup to use Twitter and until I had to explain it out loud for the first time to someone who didn't already use the service, I never realized how confusing all the rules are. They are not black and white like they used to be, and it's not easy to follow.
[link a] https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-hard-e9ff...
I really wish Twitter would work on better tools and policies to prevent stalking, harassing and toxic behaviour. I understand it's a hard problem (no, "just remove nazi, sexist and racist pigs!" does not cut it at all) but I'd like to see them try.
As far as I can tell, Twitter is a site with nondeterministic UX where the same folks who insist on civility on HN get to call other people monsters for their politics.
I sure don't get it.
It's really good to follow celebrities, experts or other personalities as a news digest though. And a good place to find a pulse on social topics. I killed my account I had for many years and just use it to search news and follow certain people or tech topics.
It's not worth the time investment for me to publish. It might be for those trying to build an audience to sell stuff to or get speaking engagements or prep their profile for optics to get a new job. But even then, most people would be better off focusing on building an email list instead of a follower list for those things.
This change evens the playing field for new users, allowing them to use the platform the same way og users like @alex and @ow do (having meaningful threads with 3+ people.)
1. They failed to provide a way to remove @s from thread replies. Edit: Whoops, there is a UI for this. Which jarringly takes you to a different dialog and back! So my new complaint is that they made it harder and weird. I stand by my opinion that they screwed this up.
2. They failed to provide a way to change the visibility, aka 'dot replies'
They fixed one thing, and broke two. Par for the course for Twitter UI designers. It has always baffled me how consistently bad every part of the Twitter UI is. Just try using lists sometime.
Dot replies haven't been necessary since Twitter added the ability to retweet yourself. You respond to someone as usual and then retweet it, so all of your follower's will see it, even if they aren't following the person you responded to.
It can definitely be a bit confusing for old users (and the UX for the first one isn't the greatest), but nothing's been removed, it's just been changed.
With regards to UX, it's debatably more or less confusing, but the functionality is still there.
Huge fan of this, being able to express more of what you want to respond about is great.
Summary: the probably did find problems like that, but long before this change when they encountered different languages and character sets.
I'm sure running into the int32 limit for object ids was more of a hassle.
Today though, I wouldn't expect it.
but I can't say the same with Twitter, if you see my twitter page, I use it only to tweet to nasty companies who keep pestering me with SPAM text messages despite my DO NOT DISTURB feature!
For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium, I really do not understand why they do not make this a feature. A friend had got a counterfeit phone from an Indian ecommerce site, he found out after a month, after calling the site, they said "sorry, 7 day return policy", I put that on twitter, one month later, he got his money back.
I gave up tweeting entirely. I have 6 followers and only 3 of them are people I know in real life, however none of them tweet. So twitter isn't a text messaging replacement for me.
I just accepted that Facebook is a much better place for me to put a thought and get feedback from people I know.
I follow ~150 people. The main blobs are pros in a video game I play seriously, and politics professionals, and science/tech professionals, and media outlets.
I don't follow any celebrities or people who I think are just brand pushers.
Now every time I go to twitter I know that I will have a new set of interesting content to pursue. New conversations about strategies or video archives from the game universe. Breaking news with commentary by politics minds I care about (no hacks or rank partisans). Interesting science and tech links from other like minded people who are keeping up.
The real problem with twitter is that it is completely nonobvious how I eventually came to like it. I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.
The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client:
Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them.
That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.
And that's fine. Is it OK for other people to get more out of it, though?
I feel maybe you haven't been lucky enough to find your content-suppliers.
There's some gold there in the nooks and crannies.
On the other hand, if you have some interests and you know some people who are active online about those issues, odds are extremely high that they're on Twitter. Follow them, then follow people they retweet, then follow people they retweet, and so on. Don't hesitate to unfollow people who are crapping up your feed with stuff you're not interested in.
Twitter is a beautiful web of connections, and you really only need a handful of starting points to build a feed tailored to your interests.
That being said, I wish they'd do more with the potential they have. For example, I have tried at various times to find out what's happening when I heard the distant noises of a large demonstration (I'm in Berlin, Germany and it's a weekly occurrence, at least in the summer). Not once did I succeed with twitter's search, not even in cases where I later found out that there were many tweets about the event.
Now they need to do the same with hashtags. Fitting what I want to say and including more than 1 hashtag (usually I just want 2, sometimes 3) is really difficult for me.
Actually I don't even think the hashtags need to be visible, necessarily (although some people start viral movements with them, like #blacklivesmatter, so I'm not sure). Like when I add "#boardgames #gamedev #magicaloctopus" or something like that, I really don't care that they're visible to people seeing my tweet in their feed, I just want my tweet to appear when people are looking for those topics.
Plus the most common tags are all over-saturated at this point, so including many of them reaches more bots than people.
Not seeing it on iOS.
Yikes.
so it's harder to remove people from a reply, and harder for others to remove you from threads you don't want to be a part of.
now each time you click the search icon on the left hand side, when you do a search in the pop up box, rather than inline the results in the pop-up search window (all still on the left hand side), it now automatically generates a new column. for each search. that appears to the right of the last column in tweetdeck.
as a ux decision this is awful. searches in tweetdeck were ephemeral. you search, 99% of the time you close your search once satisfied with the results, and that was it. the number of times you actually want to convert a search into a permanent column is very small.
as it is with the changes to search every single time you search now you instantly generate a new column. if you dont delete each search the columns just keep on building up and up. this is an awful and unrequested change to tweetdeck search, and there seems to be zero public facing community managers for tweetdeck who this can be raised with.
I think it's a bit awkward in the UX, but at least now you haven't wasted 110 characters on people's variably-lengthed names...