Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

It's an old and predictable rant, but for me Twitter is useless and unusable. 140 char limit is artificial and doesn't serve a point except to mimic sms, and interface is cluttered and horrible. Whenever I stumble across someones twitter is is completely unclear who writes messages and who responds to whom. All messages are littered with some visual garbage like tags that are for some reason inside of messages. It is just a UI mess.

View on HN

>140 char limit is artificial and doesn't serve a point except to mimic sms

...And to actively encourage witty, retweetable "hot takes" instead of in-depth discussions on issues. If someone espouses a "political opinion" in a 140-character tweet, whether or not said opinion actually stands up to scrutiny doesn't matter as long as it's emotionally resonant.

This is why Twitter has any value at all, to be honest. It's a highly efficient means of propagating memes (actual sense of the word) from famous people to non-famous people with short attention spans (nearly everyone). The non-famous-people then spread the brief, succinct memes to their non-famous friends, etc. etc.

> Is is completely unclear who writes messages and who responds to whom

Agreed. I always thought I was just dumb or something, since how could such a massive company with hundreds of millions of users have a completely nonsensical ui? It must be intentional on their part, but to me the user experience seems capricious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com