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.
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 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.
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.
Which was also widely hated.
Functional design is sometimes not good design. It's pragmatic.
This redesign is hot garbage. Take it out back and shoot it.