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Comment by ericzawo | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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