Building the New Twitter.com | Hacker News Reader

Building the New Twitter.com

blog.twitter.com

207 pointsspzx216 comments

To the posted article, I think it's impressive they are shipping a single codebase for mobile and desktop. Modular features you can turn off for different views. It's smart and I'll be curious to see if other sites follow suit.

Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive feature from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive.

Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy? Anyway it makes it a lot harder to modify the desktop HTML presentation with an extension or set of ad blocker rules.

That's a feature, not a bug (the changing CSS)!

This anti-scraping tech is getting a little ridiculous, and will only end in accessibility issues (while still not actually preventing or even slowing down scraping).

But it is a feature, there's a few different (good) reasons to do that. Here its almost surely tied to CSS-in-JS/React.

HTML class names would not affect accessibility.

That's still not a feature, in that it's something that serves developers, not users. I'm fine with people making better CSS tools; they should feel free to add dynamically named classes. But when the remove the static ones, they break things for some users. That's definitely not a feature.

It's a feature for developers, because it's in the code, and it doesn't break their product. It won't affect anyone but users like you and I that are developers themselves, it might break their code, but that's not Twitter's responsibility.

Non-deterministic class names are quickly becoming the norm for a lot of good reasons.

Sorry, what are these good reasons that aren't in the realm of specifically impeding user's ability to use the site as they please? My understanding is that the sole reason for dynamic class names is to confuse user style sheets that may reformat the page (how dare they not use our beautiful UI!) or to combat tools trying to ad-block based on a CSS selector rule.

Is there some advantage other than removing these two features that dynamic CSS classes provide?

Since they are likely using CSS modules or some other type of scopped CSS, it means the classes they write are human readable, but not guaranteed to be globally unique. For example, you have FooComponent and BarComponent. Both may have a button, so as a developer, you decide to make a class called 'button' for both of those components. The tooling will then create a unique CSS class name in each of those cases and replace FooComponent.button and BarComponent.button with a hash of some sort.

The best they could do to make it less obfuscated is to include the name with the hash. So the class name may look like 'fkljdkldjf9303-button'. However, the hash may change if the component changes for example, so still not super reliable from your point of view. Also, most users won't care, so they'd just be including extra page bloat to add the human readable names along-side the hash in production builds.

I'd argue that CSS modules and similar reduce many many bugs I've seen people make over the years and that it's a huge win in terms of developer speed and reduction of bugs. I highly doubt anyone made the decision explicitly to obfuscate the CSS...

This is a terribly weak argument. Just use post or prefixes and at least you know which scope you’re working in, or combine classes.

There was a prior request to actually have a scoped CSS tag in the HTML+CSS standard[1], why aren't we seeing a stronger advocation for it if that's all people are looking for? I'm a small fish but I certainly would love to see this HTML spec be revived.

[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/552

Something done for the developers is not a feature. Features are things we build for our users.

It's not always wrong to do things that are self serving at the expense of our users. But we should never confuse ourselves into thinking of that as a feature. It's always important to keep in mind who we serve.

I wonder if using any kind of extension/devtools to make changes to twitter, even if it's only UI, is a break on their ToS

It's most likely not at all intended stop or affect scraping. Although I haven't looked at how obfuscated it is.

https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules or similar does this because the CSS global scope is more and more painful as applications get bigger.

Is it that impressive? The desktop experience looks like I'm being served the mobile site.

I've stopped using the timeline entirely: I follow nobody and create private lists of the people I'd like to keep up with. When you view a list the tweets show up in chronological order and as a bonus, you don't see promoted tweets.

List functionality operates annoyingly different from timeline functionality though. In the TL, if I click out, it remembers where I left off.

With lists, if I swipe out, it loses my place.

Small issue but it puts a hamper on me using lists.

In the TL, if I click out, it remembers where I left off

really? One of my major gripes with twitter is I'll be about 20 (ajax loaded) pages down the timeline, click on some retweet or name, and lose my place. At best it takes me to the bottom of the first page. What browser/os are you using?

Twitter App for iOS 12.3.1

Have you tried Tweetdeck? It has ads but it fixes the chronological timelines and helps keep up with multiple lists.

Sometimes it switched back to "Home" while you're using the app. I don't know why they're so against just letting me make the change constant. I really hate when companies think they know what I want more than I do.

ublock origin also seems to block the ads just fine at least.

> Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive feature from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive.

Sounds just like Facebook now.

Facebook doesn't switch me back. I've been in chronological mode for ~3 years now. I think it's per-device though so you do have to set it if you login somewhere new.

There may be A/B testing going on though.

I can say Facebook does switch this back every time I visit, and sometimes switching it to 'latest' literally causes the site to cease loading posts after one or two pages.

Same.

They might have changed it since I left Facebook but they absolutely did change that setting back frequently in the past. My frustration with that is one of the reasons I stopped using the site.

Does Twitter show the same posts multiple times right next to each other? Because I’m getting a lot of that on Facebook right now. Not that I actually like either platform [1], but they are the de facto way of keeping up with everyone.

[1] I’m kinda glad Twitter doesn’t force me to have an account, no account makes it so much easier to not get sucked into the reply-rants.

>Sounds just like Facebook now.

Bookmark this URL: https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Your newsfeed is now in "Most recent" mode.

Nothing showcases the failure of the Twitter algorithm to deliver relevant, timely information than seeing yesterday's tweets about impending bad weather.

> Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything

Non-deterministic class names have been popular for a while, especially in React; open up Chrome inspector on a Gmail tab. Sometimes they are used for minification. This might not be a (strictly) hostile change.

It annoys me too, I write custom CSS for any site I use a lot.

> Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy?

I would be a little surprised if this wasn't just caused by using a library like styled-components for managing CSS. I'm sure it could also be partly anti-adblock or anti-scraping, though.

> then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two

To my great rage, some Twitter design poobah was energetically explaining how they could "prove" that was better. Actual people saying no, it was actually worse for them were of course ignored.

As much as I love Twitter, the extent to which users are the product, not the customer is obvious. At best, you're a dairy cow, producing valuable content. Maybe you're a beef cow, carved up and sold to the real customers, the advertisers. And maybe you just end up eaten the rats that are always in the shadows and frequently come out in hungry swarms.

I’ve lost count of the number of designers who tell me that the way I use the product is wrong.

OK. Won’t use the product then.

As for obfuscated CSS classes, this is likely to use scoped CSS, which allows for components to share class names but not share class attributes.

That's kind of against the point of CSS, but it's also a useful dev tool to make your code more readable. I agree that it can be annoying on the user side, but it makes sense that they made this change.

Also, most likely, these change every deploy (when the depedency manager builds the app).

I think it's more likely that this is a user-hostile feature to prevent scraping or styling scripts that might mess with ad views.

I really, really doubt that. At worst, it's both. CSS scoping and obfuscated class names are really popular and part of any modern JS framework.

It's certainly not the primary driver. Twitter is built using React Native for Web, which uses a pattern called "Atomic CSS".[1] So it's just a result of the framework they're using.

[1] https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web/blob/master/docs...

I wrote an open source application that uses Webdriver to scrape tweets; it used to show how heavily Twitter censors all kinds of users. Twitter used to have a tweet's "quality" (per them) right in the HTML: "HighQuality", "LowQuality", and "AbusiveQuality". They put some tweets in the "tombstone" section. I now need to change the app to deal with them obfuscating the "quality" and all the rest.

I've run a Twitter ad for the app so at least someone there knows about it. I don't know if the app was a factor, but certainly hiding what they think of their users' output is in line with all the other sneaky things they do to their users.

It's definitely done to obfuscate as well - I took a look a while back and they were intentionally splitting up things like the "Sponsored" text into tons of tags and gunk to make it harder to find programmatically.

That was facebook

I'm sure it is possible they are doing it as well, but I was talking about what I saw on twitter's new design. I don't use Facebook, so it was definitely Twitter I saw. This was a while back, so potentially it isn't the case any more.

One of the main things that keeps me using a third-party client (for as long as I can continue using one) is the Home vs.Latest Tweets feature. I NEVER want to see the home timeline. I always want a reverse-chronological list of tweets. It is user-hostile to have to continuously select Latest Tweets. I'm sure they see more engagement with the Home timeline, but I just want to be able to flip a switch and never see it.

Search results in reverse chronological order is Twitter's killer feature but, bafflingly, it seems like they've been going out of thier way to prevent that for years now, especially on mobile. Why? Also, if there's any Android app which lets you do that without having a Twitter account, I'd love to know about it. I used to use a nice little app called SearchBird for this, but it's disappeared and I can't find a replacement.

Either hard to efficiently implement at scale, or they want users to forget about reverse chronological ordering in hopes of monetizing feed rank

I'm pretty sure it's easier to sort by -timestamp than to run a complex ranking model across all recent tweets (which would have to be windowed by timestamp anyway), and then sort by the output of that.

Seems to me like they are going out of their way to force their "top tweets" algorithm on users.

It's a global platform with billions of users, with many users follow hundreds of people, some users followed by millions, huge volumes of media tweets, broad distribution of posting frequency... even with those basic scaling concerns, I don't see how consistent reverse chronology could be implemented as naively as "yo just sort by -timestamp".

I would bet "top tweets" improves engagement with the passive consumption audience while saving money by abandoning consistency and improving caching.

> Search results in reverse chronological order is Twitter's killer feature but, bafflingly, it seems like they've been going out of thier way to prevent that for years now, especially on mobile. Why?

The engagement metrics have got to be better with Home. It makes sense, since the whole idea of an algorithmic timeline is to take the stuff the company knows is getting a reaction and feed it to more people.

Personally I think this is a great example of how engagement metrics mislead companies. The numbers go up, but it fundamentally changes the nature of the experience.

When you're on a reverse-chron timeline you have a sense of people's lives in real time and can have conversations. You only see people you have chosen to follow, so you recognize people and get a sense of their personality. A lot of the content is fairly banal, which gives an (accurate) sense that life for most people is kind of calm and mildly interesting.

When you're on an algorithmic timeline, you're seeing content that is really likely to get a reaction--that usually means it has a lot of emotion tied up in it: outrage, anger, sadness, humor, etc.

But it's also content that is old and choked with replies. So you can't have a normal conversation around it; there are too many people acting too emotionally. And you're seeing content from more people you don't follow--Twitter's Home timeline brings in a higher percentage of tweets that your follows have liked or replied to.

So if your timeline is filled with this kind of content, it creates the (inaccurate) impression that life is full of really extreme moments and amped-up strangers!

I can almost always tell when Twitter has switched me back to home. Suddenly I realize I'm feeling more angry, and the numbers on most of the tweets are bigger. I also see more tweets from people I don't recognize. It's like opening my kitchen door and suddenly finding a loud restaurant with spicy food in my house.

Twitter doesn't currently have the stack to scale realtime reverse chron search... there was a spec doc years ago where each timeline would just be a search query on a pool of tweets but that architecture never got built.

I'm sure if Twitter was a product which came out of Google's culture, it would've worked that way.

It has more engagement because people can't find what they are looking for.

They should have ignored the A/B test results, but investors give them money not to!

There's tweetdeck.twitter.com, which is in chronological order, and gives you separate Home (posts by people you follow) vs Activity (other things related to people you follow) columns, as well as other configurable columns for notifications, searches etc.

One thing I really hope they fix is the timeline is very jumpy when new tweets come in from the top.

The previous design was very good about keeping whatever tweet you were scrolled to in focus when new tweets come in.

I'm not sure how widespread this issue it, but I have seen other people in my personal feed express frustration with this issue.

Fortunately you can still go to realtwitter.com (which is just a redirect) and click latest. Two clicks, but it's easy to make it a habit.

"A bunch of your friends are hate-following this obnoxious prick, let's show you that guy's tweets to ramp up engagement!"

Yeah I'm not a fan of the "Home" view.

The Aria attributes can be used to block at least some of the junk, eg in ublock origin:

   twitter.com##div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
   twitter.com##aside[aria-label="Who to follow"]
   twitter.com##a[aria-label="Search and explore"]
   twitter.com##a[aria-label="Bookmarks"]

there's stuff that's no longer easy to block this way, like promoted crap in the replies to a tweet. But if that gets to be an issue, I'll just greasemonkey it. Even with obfuscated classes, the injected content is easy to identify, it's just that css doesn't let you style 'elements containing (some complicated several layers deep selector)'

can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive.

Never forget: you are the product. On whatever is the ad industry equivalent of HN, there is probably someone gloating about how much they love that it does that.

I wonder also if it’s cheaper. Computationally I mean. You don’t need to worry about consistency if you don’t care about ordering. You can also just show the same few popular tweets to everyone without needing to compute an individual timeline for each person.

More generally, always consider: what is the maker's motive?

Is it to make the best tool for conversation, or is it to make money? If it's both, how important is each?

Bad news: Twitter slammed me back into the "Home" view in less than 24 hours. Guess I'm now at war with their user interface.

One other thing I hate about the mobile app is that Lists are unordered (or ordered by creation date which isn't helpful). The website automatically alphabetizes lists, which is great, no idea why the mobile app can't too. For heavy Lists users it's physically painful hunting through the unordered list on the mobile app every time you want to add someone to a list.

I just get the impression the PM's at Twitter don't actually use it, and worse, engage with people who use it, enough. I follow a ton of CMOs, social media directors, agency heads, people who use Twitter to drive business and commentate regularly on their industry, and they have expressed disdain for product direction decisions for years around the "mobile-ification" of the desktop experience. Now it seems they're pushing total usability-hostile 'features' to their desktop webapp.

Really, who on earth over there made the call that two tweets visible if there's an embedded image, even on a large 27" 1080p monitor, was a good idea?

Twitter isn't going to make money with a bunch of power-user features for non-paying users. They're going to make onboarding painless and the overall experience as unintimidating as possible. That means minimizing features that don't keep people on the site and viewing ads.

Non-paying users? These are the people and the businesses creating the most interesting and valuable content on the Twitter platform. They directly make Twitter as a platform more valuable and enjoyable for end users.

I don’t think Twitter cares about “interesting” or “enjoyable”, only “attention grabbing” — and even the political troll bots can produce that by themselves.

All users are non-paying. And people who tweet are more valuable than those who don't, because there wouldn't be anything to follow without them.

Yeah, the feed is now just slightly awkward and oversized, for what I can't see as any good reason. Reducing the zoom to 90% makes it comfortable again to read a Tweet. I have trouble reading oversized text.

Eh to me part of the appeal of Twitter is It’s a very unopinionated social networking tool, which means there’s 1000 ways to use it.

Perhaps the only sentence in which 'Twitter' and 'unopinionated' make sense together.

https://twitter.com/mkruz/status/1151537752766238720

Genuinely hilarious thread from Twitter's design lead on information density claiming they are "careful" about it.

A Twitter profile page now presents literally zero tweets on screen (other than the pinned crap) now without scrolling on a Macbook.

The old design was also terrible, but this one is just a joke. Literally everything needs to be about twenty five percent of the size it is.

With 4k monitor at native resolution in a fullscreen window, I see about 5 tweets on that thread.

"CMOs, social media directors, agency heads, people who use Twitter to drive business"

... are merely one class of users and by no means authoritative on what makes sense for users or Twitter itself.

I find it all so bizarre. Everything from how big the font size is in the left nav, to the ordering of the nav items, to how the feed and right nav scroll together (can’t see the top of the right nav if you scroll down the main feed) to how huge tweets with images appear (can only see 2 tweets if they contain images on a massive desktop screen) to the fact that you cant resize the left or right nav on your own...

What's bizarre about it? It looks a lot like the reddit redesign to me, and seems to be focused on emphasizing sponsored content more, if I had to speculate.

Large-picture tweets taking up a lot of space means that large-picture interstitial ads and promoted tweets also take up lots of space. I would guess also that scrolling the right-hand column gives a lot more automatic eyeball space to trending stuff in sections below the fold, and is no longer constrained to just screen height for what everyone will usually see there. Who's going to willfully scroll down the trending column of promoted stuff separately from the main feed?

The left-nav stuff seems much more straightforward for new users, even if it's a useless change for long time users who already know how to operate the site.

The "display" setting is a good start. Give me options to hide the left-nav, the trend, and I'll be cool with it.

Why in the world would they give users the option to hide trending stuff?

Because, if, enough numbers of users want it, seriously. Also it's still an option, not a default.

because what's trending never interests me, and possibly, other users?

If I want my content based on others' opinion, I go to Reddit.

What's the point to follow accounts if you're not guaranteed to see their content, and not in the prefer they intended to?

And reduce the font size from a minimum of 14 down to a minimum of, say, 6.

And for it to also reduce the menus. And for the site to actually use horizontal space. And for the site not to insert different scrollbars over the menus if you're using it in a small window. And for to let us reduce the negative space padding by 99.99999%.

Gah. It's so, so fucking bad. Twitter have the worst design team, and literally everything they have done for a decade has been garbage.

> It looks a lot like the reddit redesign to me

Not at all. Reddit has one nav across the top and side and a large auto-expanding area for the main content. Twitter desktop now has navs on both sides which take about roughly the same amount of real estate as the main content area, which is not auto-expanding.

> It looks a lot like the reddit redesign to me

Which was also widely hated.

Totally. I also don't think the new Reddit looks "bizarre" though. Not much about it is strange or surprising.

But at least you can go to old.reddit.com for a sane view.

Agree - 99% of what I do is read tweets, but now they take up only ~33% of my screen's real estate, and are outweighed visually by large distracting content on either side.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs, "What's this supposed to do? Let me read tweets? So why doesn't it fucking do that???"

It's just another example of the latest trend in UI/UX "experts" trying to create an "experience" for users, instead of letting the user create their own experience through customization of the UI.

People generally don't know what they want. Expecting anything but a small percentage to customize their UI, let alone even know or care that feature exists, is optimistic at best. Think outside of the HN bubble, the other 99.999% of people that use these products.

It's not the HN bubble. There are very real users who want to do small customizations to the UI. Sometimes it's as simple as, in the case of GP, this sidebar is taking up too much space and I want to reduce it. Or it can be, let me choose how I want this list view to be sorted, and remember it. Or, this button on the toolbar is for a feature I never use, and let me hide it. All of this is incredibly common in well-designed Cocoa apps, but not at all in web apps or mobile apps (including iOS-builtin apps).

Sometimes ugly is functional. Sometimes worse is better. Sometimes designers don't know what they're doing as they chase after some idealistic goal that's detached from reality.

Functional design is sometimes not good design. It's pragmatic.

This redesign is hot garbage. Take it out back and shoot it.

Why on earth is the text of Home/Explore/Notifications etc on the left bold and twice as big as the content aka the tweets?

You see the navigation every day. You know where it is. Its not that you have to read through it. So if anything, shouldn't it be smaller?

I would also like to be able to see my username somewhere. Its confusing when managing multiple accounts

God, it's not only me then. I have to zoom in until the nav is in icon-link mode. But then the feed is too big. I don't want to bother styling extension (I don't love to have more).

I tried the new Twitter interface, it was so bad that if I hadn't been able to go back to the normal one, I would have stopped using twitter. It had successfully reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior.

So like new reddit? And digg before it

I went to take a look to a sub reddit this week, after a few months of not going there and their new design has gotten way worse. I mean only a comment depth of only ONE?

Edit: I retested it on Firefox and at least there I had a decent comment depth.

And if you click read more, it's only to read 1 more level. You have to keep clicking read more all the way down...

If/when old.reddit.com stops working, I will overcome my Reddit addiction once and for all.

The native mobile apps are good which is Reddit’s only saving grace.

It’s so easy to design something for designs sake while ignoring the fundamental reasons people use the site - first and foremost the content, not the site looking visually good or some clever card pattern or other UI concept.

The whole reason Digg got blasted was how it lost information density and jumped on the ‘web 2.0’ bandwagon without improving the user experience.

The new reddit is significantly worse but I think it got redesigned with ad revenue as top priority

As far as I can tell, subreddits custom sidebars are missing. That's insane they ignored that.

You realize the site redesign isn't why Digg failed, right? At least not the literal UI part, anyway.

They formalized power users by giving them outsized control of content, and that is what drove people off the platform, not because the site was less pretty...

I don't like it either. How do I use the older version?

There used to be an opt-out, but the endpoint has been removed. I'm not aware of a way to go back at this point.

I had the luck of nopping out of the new version pretty quickly.

I did too but they kept changing it back.

Set your user agent to `Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko`

My twitter followers have confirmed that this works!

For me, deleting all cookies and logging back in works.

Neither this nor resetting one of the cookies to "off" (another method) works at all times. These are client-side overrides.

However, the user-agent spoofing works because it fakes IE11 on Windows 7 and it triggers a server-side override.

Thank you for this! I wonder how long I'll be able to get away with this trick. The new twitter is terrible!

Download a User-Agent switcher extension and set it to IE11. Downsides: You can't paste anything or watch videos/gifs.

Or better yet just put Twitter into its own container and patch up the UA with a native config override - https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/ce1bea/reverting_b...

Setting the cookies

rweb_optin=off

dnt=1

and then navigating to https://twitter.com/i/directory then your user profile via the settings dropdown (next to [tweet]) seems to set you back to Legacy Twitter permanently without breaking your user agent.

>reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior.

For some reason i'm noticing this happen on a ton of different platforms and I seriously don't like it. I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space

> I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space

But devs have unilaterally decided that bigger screens and more powerful hardware is for them to hog and not for you to do efficient/more things in the same time.

I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options, and automated tools to remove whitespace padding.

I would honestly pay good money for a browser that removed 95% of whitespace on most sites.

>I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options

If you use Ctrl-+ to make the text larger, both FF and Chrome already remember how large you made it and use that size every time you visit that site from then on. What am I missing?

People keep telling me that more whitespace is better, and I keep no longer using websites that manage to eclipse some breaking point of too much whitespace. Clearly folks like you & myself are in the minority, but I don't get it.

You have different definition of "better" than does Twitter the business

What I mean is that I've been told by UI/UX experts that more whitespace is demonstrably better for users. I personally disagree for me, but I'll buy that I'm in the minority.

I don't mean to be pedantic here, but again, I think you have to further unpack how different parties interpret the word "better."

A UI/UX expert trying to drive new user engagement has a different definition of "better" than one trying to lengthen the average user-session length of "power users" above some usage threshold, for a random example. Or someone optimizing the new user sign-up flow.

If the goal is information density, then yes, whitespace can often be antithetical to that. If you are trying to make money with a website/app, increasing whitespace can be done for any of a myriad of reasons depending on business goals.

The idea of having one answer to "is whitespace better," and saying "experts say yes but I say no" is just such a myopic view of the world of interface design...

Information density has been cratering over the past decade. Every redesign adds centimeters of whitespace around every element. I guess maybe it's touchscreen-motivated, but it sure does get tiresome on desktops.

I'm not even sure it improves touchscreen UX. Most touchscreen devices also have small screens, and I really hate viewing a mobile site that's 50% whitespace. If my screen is only 2x5 inches, I don't want any of it wasted with useless whitespace forcing me to zoom in to see anything. At this point, I'm starting to suspect that most designers actually don't have any clue what they are doing and the entire discipline is 90% following the latest trends.

> At this point, I'm starting to suspect that most designers actually don't have any clue what they are doing and the entire discipline is 90% following the latest trends.

You could say the same thing about the software developers who work on these websites.

FWIW, you can still use TweetDeck[1] which has better density, customizable media size, and multi-column views. Previously I just used it for following live events but switched when the desktop site got mobile-ified. I also left feedback on the redesign.

I pray they keep around the alternatives like this for a dense display format on desktop.

[1] https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

Tweetdeck also has strictly chronological order, with the Home and Activity feeds kept separate.

Tweetdeck is lacking the built-in translation tool that's present on Twitter, though. (I just spotted that because there's a Tweet in Brazilian at the top of my timeline)

What? How can you switch back to the old style?

Uh, is that just a kneejerk feeling of "there is more wasted space" vs. the reality? Because I did get an initial kneejerk "shove this mobile the fuck out of my desktop" reaction when I tried the new design.

But I checked, and the tweet boxes themselves are a bit wider and a bit taller in the redesign. Even so, though, I can see just as many text-heavy tweets on screen with the new UI as with the old one because the UI itself wastes less screen real estate - and that's with the second-smallest, default font option. The same applies to tweets with heavy picture use: I can see a larger portion of a chopped-off tweet with the redesign than I can with the old desktop UI. With the smallest font size option, it's not even a contest and the redesign wins handily.

A high percentage of the time when I attempt to view a twitter page on mobile the spinner times out and just gives a "something went wrong" error. There is a Try Again button but clicking on it is futile, as it always goes back to "something went wrong" error after a second. The only thing that seems to work is to ask the browser to refresh the page, sometimes more than once.

Is this only happening to me? I always wondered what the hell is going on.

Often when it happens refresh isn't even enough, I have to do a duplicate tab operation. I had that issue on mobile for a long time, now I have it on desktop too. O boy.

This happens to me as well, but only on mobile. Maybe the result of some rate-limiting, combined with not being able to distinguish different mobile users on the same network? I also use ublock origin with Firefox mobile, fwiw.

Happens to me a lot on desktop, especially when following an external link to a tweet. Like you say, refreshing the page fixes it. Also seen it on mobile from time to time. Expected they’d fix this before a wider rollout, it’s pretty common for me!

Happens to me too all the time on mobile and boy is it infuriating. I either get the "something went wrong" or the "you're being rate-limited," neither of which make any sense for someone opening tweets every now and then inside other apps.

I assume it's because when you open tweets with in-app browsers etc. Twitter wants to make it a poor experience in order to get you to use their app instead. Same reason they have been gutting their API features and limiting API tokens for 3rd party apps for years now.

Happens to me every time. I think it is intentionally done if you are not logged in to discourage you from using Twitter.

It's also happening to me but usually works on second try when resubmitting the url omitting the "mobile." subdomain

Bring back full historical search back to the UI. Every search I do is limited to the past week. It used to be you could keep scrolling down and you'd keep seeing past tweets.

I don't care about this new UI thing. Don't care one bit.

I don't see such a limit. When I search, I still can scroll. Just tried and it worked all the way down to 2011.

Maybe you need to be logged in? Idk.

Hah, it seemed like they only restricted it for my IP address. When I use a proxy, it works.

Another prime example why UI redesigns are a waste of time - https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2019/03/ui-redesigns-ar...

But what if you have a total of 3000 engineers. What will all of them do? Perhaps a handful of them can investigate and try new things?

Or maybe you have them work on complementary products to your... oh wait Twitter leadership has no desire for a B2B presence, so it can't build B2B tools. Oops.

Every web app I've used extensively had bugs. A few of those 3000 devs could focus on improving the existing functionality, rather than changing the color and location of various bells and whistles.

I personally prefer the "slow walk" of UI improvements instead of a full-blown UI redesign. Examples are eBay, Paypal, and (in a way) Amazon. eBay and Paypal are both stuck in a half-design stage, where 50% of the pages are designed and 50% of the very functional pages have been redesigned but not rolled out... in perpetual beta, because the redesign cannot accompany all the features of the old. Amazon very slowly rolls out new button designs and side-menus, probably whenever Bezos is sleeping. But some of the buttons in the rarely-used sections of their site are still using the old familiar yellow JPGs.

eBay and PayPal are an inconsistent mess. The changes often make it hard to even Google to find what you are looking for. Some pages on PayPal as far as I can tell seem completely inaccessible from the UI and require you to know the endpoint.

Thanks, that was a rereshing read. So many companies do these, sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in tech who hates UI redesigns that don't add or fix any functionality. Moving around and changing the appearance of UI elements is worse than useless, it takes users longer to perform the actions that are the actual reason they use the site.

The article is based on the assumption that upper management is just trying to throw out new UI for no reason other than to say they did something new.

The reality is these companies change the UI because some metric told them that the new design will bring in the most ad revenue with the least risk. They know most people don't care, and those that do will become apathetic. They don't care about your taste or feelings, just about the percent likelyhood you will click on an ad.

I'm not saying this to be overtly adversarial to these companies, but it is a little naive to think they 1) are just arbitrarily changing things or 2) don't know that people will hate it, but it's a calculated risk.

Am I in the minority of folks that enjoy Twitter's algorithmic sorting?

In the classic timeline view, I always felt the urge to check my feed all the time, in case i missed part of the conversation or the like (a la "FOMO.")

On one of my accounts where I follow a lot of people, the algorithmic sorting works wonderfully. On my main where I only follow a few people, it is terrible. I pretty much only check Twitter in Tweetbot now, becasue if I had to use the algorithmic sorting only for my main, I'd probably stop using Twitter.

So it'd be really nice if we could choose which one we like, and most importantly, that the choice sticks.

That’s great, but GP was complaining that their preference is literally undone. There’s no consumer-friendly reason to change explicit preferences.

you're probably not alone but the issue here is forcing it on the user. that the option exists means they understand some people want a raw timeline which makes repeatedly changing the display that much worse

Wouldn't it be annoying then if Twitter kept switching you to chronological?

I think a lot of people like Twitter's algorithmic sorting. I've heard they have internal data supporting that it's better for most users. That's fine. FWIW I like Facebook's algorithmic sorting. But I use Twitter differently and time-sorted works better for me on Twitter. (As a secondary thing; time-sorted also avoids the injection of most of the tweets from people you don't follow.)

The offense is that they deliberately undo your expressed preference every week or two. I also hate the cutesy language of "you're back Home".

I think the better way to handle this would be a tab that includes all the stuff they think you'd like. Good things you missed, things your friends have liked, discussions they're in, people you should check out, tweets that are probably relevant to you based on your behavior.

I honestly wouldn't mind seeing that stuff if I have a, "Oh, what else on here is good" feeling. But it makes me crazy that they keep insisting that I really must want to see it right now, when I am very sure I don't.

That's how https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ works. You have a Home column, which is strictly things the people you follow have tweeted and retweeted, in chronological order; and you have a separate Activity column for those other things (and optionally more columns for searches, lists etc.)

I want to see all tweets of the people I follow. Precisely because I decided to follow them. It's the whole point of the site for me. Seeing all the updates from accounts I care about.

Wasn't it great when we all had API access and could choose between different clients that had different emphasis? I'd be happy to pay too.

This strong sign of the confidence Twitter has in React Native for Web[1]. In 2017, Nicolas Gallagher gave a talk[2] about why it was used for mobile.twitter.com.

[1]: https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFn39lLO-U

How do you know they use React Native for Web? The article says they unified their desktop and mobile architectures, but doesn't specify how.

Opening in React devtools shows a number of hints[1]. "React Native Style Editor" section. "View" components with numeric "style" props. And the classname prefixes "css-" and "r-" match the generated identifiers from react-native-web[2].

[1]: https://imgur.com/lFUvL7P

[2]: https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web/blob/45f94eb43da...

That's convincing :-) Thanks!

I have to use Tweetdeck, because not having a reverse-chronological timeline is such a dealbreaker. If they ever remove this ability from Tweetdeck, I will probably just leave.

I'm already on Mastodon and more active there anyway, it didn't turn into a ghost town like the last time I tried it.

I like it, but I have a weird bug.

It could have something to do with some of my extensions, but every time I open the new Twitter on Firefox, it has me logged out...but if I refresh the page, I'm back to being logged in and I can browse my feed.

I experience this as well, but in Chrome.

I've tried it several times over several weeks, always revert back to old design.

Engineering at Twitter must be a constant context switch. Every quarter there’s a new blog post about some new re-design they’re working on.

All that work, and still I had to use right-click "open image in new tab" to see the text of a meme?

Is anybody in there actually using that thing? (those in user-facing changes authority?)

Somebody worked very very hard on an algo that figures out which part of the image is important and they're not going to let some dumb users with silly opinions like "I want to see the whole thing" ruin it.

My biggest pain as far as missing features is new tweets. In the old interface if I had someone's timeline open, There'd be a number '(n)' in the tab that indicated there were new tweets. If I went to the tab I could click on a show new tweets button and see them. A nice side effect of this was that you could easily view deleted tweets as they were queued and shown normally.

The new interface has none of this.

Yes. Not the biggest, but a huge pain.

I know there are different opinions but I like it. I like the dark theme, the explore tab, the "data saver" option and also that the navigation experience got better (backward button points you back to the correct tweet). Well done!

I only hope they do not remove the "see latest tweets" in the home tab.

I am not sure they could have added more white space to the new Twitter if they tried. I would not kill them to adapt to the amount of screen real estate that I have.

The mobile-first page is a lot better than the old one. I've been using it for a while.

... When still using Twitter, that is. The platform decisions like showing me notifications of things I never subscribed to in any way ("look, some person you don't follow tweeted this") and can't unsubscribe from is 100% offensive to me and one of the major reasons I really don't like using the platform anymore (besides a crippled API and only now slowly improving mobile app).

That said: The website is amazing on mobile. It feels NOTHING like 99% of webapps out there. How are they doing it? Are they damn wizards?

Is the navigation on mobile for you on the left or on top? No matter how small I make the browser window on desktop it still shows the navigation on the left side as a vertical bar but on mobile it always shows as a top bar. It's a big difference in my opinion and I am curious which version you like.

I like the mobile version.

And shit, I thought they just made the old mobile.twitter.com the default. Instead they made a new site that also mobile.twitter.com points to, so you can't get the old style back.

Oh well, a lot of meaningful interaction for me already happens on the Fediverse and with Twitter's moves I don't think that will decrease.

Check out Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/) for a light weight client.

On my 13'' MBP there are many tweets I can't see completely unless I scroll down. This is wrong.

It's an odd choice to put the tweet button at the top of the dialog rather then the bottom where your eyes and mouse should be after finishing the tweet message.

They got 1 code base. I got a UI that I don't like.

1. There used to be a drop down for "copy link" to a tweet. So I could tweet then paste the URL across other platforms. Now I need to click the link, and copy the URL manually, and it's laggy.

2. The darker dark mode dims the text too. 3. The font size setting has no affect on making a new tweet...

As usual, company degrades experience for users on UI upgrade...

For 1, the link to the relative time the tweet was posted (1 minute ago, 15 seconds ago, etc) is a direct link to the tweet. Right click, copy link location (or your browser's equivalent). This has been the case as long as I can remember.

Nice to see they are still working with Progressive Web Apps.

I'm really interested in seeing if PWAs can reach first class citizen status everywhere. Still a bit skeptical as installation from web is still wonky in Chrome. Google was pushing PWAs pretty hard for a while on the developer side....browser felt like an afterthought... that worries me.

Never used twitter. Just made an account using work email to test twitter login. Didn't do a single thing yet. And my account gets blocked for 'suspicious activity' and they want my phone as well. What a shady company.

This happened to me as well when I recently tried to make an account with an email address and no phone number. It was frozen almost immediately after creation, and when I requested it be unfrozen, twitter sent a message to my main email (NOT the one I signed up with!!) and required me to respond and say I had access in order to get the account back up. Made me very uncomfortable and virtually destroyed any desire I had to use their service.

Twitter has changed the front end like five times in the past five years and improved exactly zero of those times. They need to lay off 80% of their front end devs to keep them from just pointlessly churning the website.

I quite like the redesign except the annoying sidebar on the right hand side, its way too big and pushes everything too far to the left for my liking

I wrote this Stylus rule to get ride of it and make the main box a bit wider. It's a blunt, brute force rule but it works for now...

  .r-1ye8kvj {
      max-width: 700px
  }

  .r-1ovo9ad {
    display:none;
  }

The downside is it gets rid of the search input.

Also I suspect those class names are auto generated by something so the above rules will probably break if they ever do a redeploy

As someone pointed out earlier, it seems they're changing CSS classes constantly to deter scraping, so this might not work for long.

After the reddit redesign and a twitter redesign I am starting to suspect that annual bonuses in those companies are tied in to the negative KPI.

With the new Twitter in Firefox it logs me out immediately after I close the window (no, I'm not incognito.) Also if I sign in using a different browser none of the options are saved. It's pretty annoying. It is a bit snappier, but it has a lot of annoyances. I can no longer go back to "old Twitter," either...so, it's a mess.

I wish they would fix the 'Report Tweet' bugs - I keep getting stuck in a seemingly endless rotation of pop up dialogs once I complete a report.

Or is this a deliberate dark pattern to curb people's enthusiasm for reporting bad content?

I dont have strong opinion for their new design but i find it a bit goofy with those very rounded corners. I don’t know if the single codebase is a good idea, time will tell if they will end up like Windows 8

Is there some kind of cookie hack I can run to get the new UI? Would be nice if engineering posts included a way to change your feature flag so I can experience what is being discussed.

One area I wish they would improve is the DMs. Being able to organise them into folders would be amazing, but just marking one unread again would be a huge improvement.

> So we enable these shortcuts whenever we detect a keyboard.

How exactly do they they do this? Is it just detect keypress so load the shortcut code, or more complicated?

Cool, now when is Twitter going to adopt ActivityPub?

Does anybody know what song is playing in the background? Or think it was custom recorded for this video.

Is this why they were down a few weeks ago? Dual testing / feeding the feed in a secondary system

Does anyone know what’s under the hood? React? Vue? Something I don’t even know enough to ask about?

It’s React (I think they mention this in the article) and I believe they are actually using React Native for Web, the engineer behind that works for twitter and the generated markup and classnames match how that works. Perhaps they are considering moving to React Native for their mobile apps in future... though there are other valid reasons to use React Native for Web

Is using react-native for Web better than having react & react-native for your UI and nicely separated business logic that is reusable for both? If you use react native for Web, does it mean your UI will look exactly the same whether it is on the web or mobile?

If they had just stopped developing Twitter years ago, it would be a better product today.

so the new version is the mobile site that's been active for awhile right? Someone tipped me off about using the mobile version on desktop a few months back and I never went back. Faster/more streamlined etc

I like it. Snappy & nice looking UI (with the bigger bolder fonts).

The new twitter.com which turns out to be the mobile version they released years ago and that has been working ever since, but with two sidebars.

There is no new twitter until the corruption involved in twitter is taken to a head. Any technology will never improve the lousy policy and posturing that they do as a company.

Oh weird, I thought the new Twitter was called "Mastodon"...

> The techniques and technologies we’ve used on the new Twitter.com mean you only download and run code when it’s needed. So a mobile user won’t download the sidebar you see on the home page, and may not download the settings pages until they go to update their display name. However, it also means that the full functionality of the site is still available to them should they want to access it.

Can someone explain to Twitter's web developers that there's nothing groundbreaking about this idea? Like... lmao. That's how web apps should work. That's how traditional django and rails apps already work. I like JavaScript and React as much as any web developer but if you're loading unnecessary code that's actually degrading the usability then that's a problem to be fixed asap. And it's definitely not something worth mentioning in this press release.

Oh wait, this was post written by "software engineers", not "web developers". They're probably too smart for these details.

Will there be an edit function? No? Still nothing like that in 2019? Well... twitter will go down. It's just a question of time at this point, imho.

What, because of no edit function?

Lack of innovation. I can edit my posts on all networks, except on twitter. One might consider this a unique feature, I think it's a unique mistake.

That seems like a stretch. You can delete erroneous posts, reply to your own erroneous posts with corrections, or retweet with corrections.

It's not like there's no way to correct yourself, you just need to be a bit more deliberate. It also arguably causes people to be a bit more conscious of what they're saying before they post too.

Immutability

Twitter has built its data model around the tenet that tweet text is immutable. Edit is not going to happen.

https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...

That's why people are attracted to Twitter: it's live. You get Twitter in real time, and you can't un-say what's been said. Even when people try, readers make screen caps. Typos and other mistakes just scroll past; readers have already moved on. They're still accessible, because the Internet never forgets, but it only retains focus when you've monumentally screwed up -- and even then only briefly.

It's that living-in-the-moment feeling that has kept Twitter alive to this point, and if anything takes it down, it'll be by something that manages to be even harder to edit. Perhaps a live feed directly from your keyboard, or your mouth, or your camera -- or brain.

If you don't want to participate in that, you stay off Twitter. I find it bizarre myself. I like to get my moment-to-moment experience from what's in front of my face. But that's very limiting, and a lot of people seem to prefer the stream of consciousness from the entire rest of the world.

I use Twitter differently. I don't comment, rarely retweet something, and mostly just follow about 100 selected accounts. I care to know what certain people are up to in my field.

What I hate about it is that you can't rest your mouse on anything. Everything is clickable, everything must be touched with care. I like 90% of the content to be plain text.

Lack of edits is an important anti-abuse feature. If you can edit a tweet, you can make a tweet saying one thing, and then edit it to say something entirely different after someone else retweets, links, or embeds it elsewhere..

(Though frankly, given how poorly they've handled other abuse-related issues, I doubt this is their reasoning)

So give people 1 minute or something and maybe don't show it until that time period is up.

That would break the spontaneous nature of "live-tweeting".

Should be feasible to show a list of edits and avoid that

That's a silly argument. Facebook and all other blogging platforms allow editing posts. It isn't a real problem.

I don't see why edit couldn't save the previous tweet and make it accessible from the edited one. That way you can link to the original if someone said something they're now trying to obscure. The replies could also be linked to the tweet they were replying to.

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