Twitter begins testing Reddit-style nested conversations | Hacker News Reader

Twitter begins testing Reddit-style nested conversations

engadget.com

59 pointselorant52 comments

Twitter hasn’t reached its full potential. It’s just not intuitive enough to most people. When a new user signs up, they don’t know:

- Who/what to follow, except a handful of celebrities and sports teams

- When to compose tweets vs. passively consume them

- The esoteric grammar of the intimidating Twitterverse

It seems like one must be a celebrity, CEO, or super user to use Twitter at all. Clearly, that’s improving, albeit at a glacial pace. Worst of all was how long it took for Twitter to add Twitter Topics.

> Twitter hasn’t reached its full potential. It’s just not intuitive enough to most people. When a new user signs up, they don’t know:

What? Twitter's selling point was how simple and intuitive it was.

> It seems like one must be a celebrity, CEO, or super fan to use Twitter at all.

That's because Twitter changed from a "user" focused to a "celebrity/journalist/CEO/etc" focused platform.

If seems like you got introduced to twitter in the past 2 or 3 years. Twitter was nothing like it is now. You are describing what twitter was 5 or 10 years ago. I don't think twitter is going back towards a "user" oriented site. The same with youtube, instagram, etc.

For Average Joe or Median Marsha:

YouTube —> watch videos

Instagram —> see and share photos

Reddit —> discuss whatever you want

Facebook —> share thoughts and experiences with friends

Twitter —> ???

I know what Twitter can be, if you really optimize it, but it takes patience which a lot of people don’t have.

I think it is:

Reddit-> ????

Twitter: One Way Small Texts

Why don't you think the parent post is accurate? Reddit is terrible logged out, but that's because its use case is basically "follow subjects that interest you, discuss whatever you want".

I'm also not sure what you mean by "one way" texts. That seems to describe the format of Twitter, rather than its use case. Why would someone want to send a small text to no one in particular?

I mean & I interpreted that the common user/man thinks of what (is the purpose) after hearing these site names.

Not many people outside HN Crowd or tech knows about reddit; many of those regular fols use Facebook for reddit-related things like discussions, meme, groups, meetings etc. So, for a common user (not HN Crowd), Reddit is unknown -> ????.

Same with twitter, as one of the above post said User thinks Twitter is for Celebrities, so they follow, & think that Twitter is for one way communication from Celebrities from a higher stage, saying their opinions & User may reply to that Celeb, but it will be drowned in other 100s of replies, just like as if a Politician is talking from a stage higher up & any of the audience member's voice will not be that high/hearable & also that that Politician is not talking one-to-one with that particular user; albeit as one-to-many users as in collective audience.

Makes sense, I think I misunderstood what you were saying.

> I mean & I interpreted that the common user/man thinks of what (is the purpose) after hearing these site names.

I don't see any evidence that people in general assume the name of a site must literally describe its purpose, or that anyone is confused when it doesn't. Amazon.com seems to do fine, despite not being a site about the Amazon.

>Not many people outside HN Crowd or tech knows about reddit; many of those regular fols use Facebook for reddit-related things like discussions, meme, groups, meetings etc. So, for a common user (not HN Crowd), Reddit is unknown -> ????.

Reddit ranks as one of the top 10 most visited sites among American users, and is in the top 20 worldwide. You can find articles about it surpassing Facebook in popularity last year.

>> I mean & I interpreted that the common user/man thinks of what (is the purpose) after hearing these site names. >I don't see any evidence that people in general assume the name of a site must literally describe its purpose, or that anyone is confused when it doesn't. Amazon.com seems to do fine, despite not being a site about the Amazon.

Sorry if you misunderstood me, nowhere I meant to say that a site domain needs to be descriptive of its function. I meant that if you ask a common folk about facebook, they will respond with social media, instagram-> photos, youtube->videos. The domain could be anything, I was just stating that if common people could say what is that site about after listening the name.

>>Not many people outside HN Crowd or tech knows about reddit; many of those regular fols use Facebook for reddit-related things like discussions, meme, groups, meetings etc. So, for a common user (not HN Crowd), Reddit is unknown -> ????.

>Reddit ranks as one of the top 10 most visited sites among American users, and is in the top 20 worldwide. You can find articles about it surpassing Facebook in popularity last year.

Of course, the Reddit is Front Page of Internet, its the most visited site on all of my devices. When I have nothing to click, I always go to either reddit or /r/all.

My observation group in my above comments were people around me; my siblings, relatives, friends from India in India, Qatar, USA; by no means a representative sample but just people around me.

I have been lurking on Reddit for 5 years without an account. Decided to create an account last week. Deleted it within a day because I didn’t enjoy the new experience. I prefer reading what other people are writing and also prefer a mix of subreddits.

Can't you still enable the "old" reddit experience in settings? I would delete my account tomorrow if they got rid of the ability to do that. If so, old accounts must be grandfathered in. They've never forced me to use new reddit.

I can simply navigate to old.reddit.com if I really wanted old reddit. I am fine with new reddit.

Reddit has two use cases.

It has the "logged out" snapshot of what's going on in the world/internet use case, much like digg or slashdot or fark fulfilled in the past.

Then when you get tired or annoyed by that it has the "curate what you want to see" use case.

The one audience tends to transition to the other over time but there's a huge amount of people who visit reddit for the first and not the second.

I actually go the other way. One a typical day, I usually read all of the interesting stories on the front page of HN, then read all of the interesting content on my Reddit front page. On slow days where I have nothing better to do, if I manage to exhaust the first two I'll switch to r/popular to get a bit of a taste of what the internet at large is up to.

Twitter —> shouting into the void ?

I prefer to scream into the void. but your mileage may vary.

Also it's quite useful for shouting at some company's poor social media interns whom they use as a proxy or alternative for customer service.

If I use twitter again, I will use it as a news source. I will follow news outlets, IT personalities, sports personalities, sports clubs, and Presidents. I won’t even tweet. Tweeting when you aren’t a celebrity or public figure is a waste of time.

I’d say it’s worse than a waste of time. You might make a jocular comment or retweet something that, when taken out of context, can get you ostracized or fired.

More risk for zero gain.

I never understood the point of twitter until I started following journalists, professors, lawyers, etc. I still wish Twitter had Google+'s circles feature, so I could group those (along with engineers) and flip between them. I don't personally want to deal with multiple twitter accounts.

twitter private lists more or less allow this, for following at least

Twitter's list feature might help you a bit to get that, as might the tweetdeck client.

Twitter —> follow tech people —> ...but learn about CrossFit, Code of Conduct, Speaking / Leadership, LGBTQ+ things, being at airports, Trump things, pronouns, remote work or bust and male toxicity. Sometimes a bit of Kubernetes or React, but not too much.

> That's because Twitter changed from a "user" focused to a "celebrity/journalist/CEO/etc" focused platform.

That seems about accurate. Same with Instagram, in my experience, although if you know a bunch of other people on the platform I suppose you can all follow each other, and then the experience is different.

Actually, I personally follow less than 100 people on Twitter. None of them are celebrities, journalists, or CEOs. They're not people I know either. Twitter for me is basically RSS for posts by a handful of interesting people who don't have blogs. I force it to stay in "latest tweets" mode and hide the sidebar with the latest viral hashtags. I spend about 10-15 minutes a day on Twitter.

It's very telling that everything about Twitter seems to be actively trying to make it as difficult as possible to use it this way. The "ideal" Twitter user seems to be someone who follows a few thousand celebs and spends every spare moment working through the latest viral tweets and memes.

They are actively trying to make it difficult use Twitter like that. They measure that 15 mins of your in a day and every test they run shows by showing you meaningless latest dramas, making you angry and write sarcastic bits triples your engagement and time spent on the site. The value spent to you, the real value, doesn't mean anything, it works directly against their financial interest. Stay strong :)

"showing you meaningless latest dramas, making you angry and write sarcastic bits triples your engagement and time spent on the site."

I don't know if Twitter is following the media's lead or if the media is following Twitter's lead. Probably both. Paying attention to neither has been a positive in my life.

All of the main social media platforms at this point have exactly the same set of skewed incentives (i.e. attention maximizing instead of value generating). I sense some sort of massive opportunity around campaign the formula but not the exact way forward yet.

> They are actively trying to make it difficult use Twitter like that.

Not true. Twitter switched to a default "we'll sort tweets for you" a year or two back, with a switch box to temporarily change it back to chronological sorting (this is similar to the Facebook feed). After outcry, they changed it so that it sticks with whichever sorting method you choose.

> After outcry, they changed it so that it sticks with whichever sorting method you choose.

It doesn't do this for me. It automatically switches back to "top" mode if I haven't used it in several days, or seemingly whenever I'm logged out.

Edit: actually, it looks like you're wrong. Take a look at this screenshot I just took - the automatic switching back seems to be an intended feature: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmbeFHFSZW58kf8AocrZXkJRYw8...

Interesting. I guess it's been a while since I've not used it for >24 hours, as mine has not switched from chronological in months.

The post is about nested conversations, not Twitter generally. What do you think about nested conversations on Twitter?

keenmaster's post is about Twitter's potential for growth or success, and it frames calculations one might do for nested conversations.

What do you think about keenmaster's post? If you think there's a better framing, then by all means, lead the room.

>It seems like one must be a celebrity, CEO, or super user to use Twitter at all. Clearly, that’s improving, albeit at a glacial pace

I mean, most people who use Twitter are none of these things, and still seem to manage. Your comment seems to assume that someone who signs up to Twitter will never have even heard of it.

And... "esoteric grammar" of the "intimidating" Twitterverse? You do know the concept of hashtags alone have become so well-known that they're used in everyday English, right?

It goes beyond hashtags. I was speaking more to the structure of discourse. Even people who are used to speaking in public, on record, in front of cameras, frequently fail to engage with others properly on Twitter. That’s pretty intimidating to me. There just seems to be so much nervous energy on that platform. You could enjoy your day, write one tweet just to express your thoughts on something before going to sleep, then have people halfway across the world jump down your throat and wake up to a nasty surprise.

I would agree that Twitter's design has led to a lot of toxic discourse, but I would disagree that it's the result of people not knowing how to use the site "properly." Quite the opposite - that's what the intended usage of Twitter leads to.

This is funny to me because I remember being at Chirp, the first Twitter developer conference, 10 years ago. There was a bit of a chill in the air because they'd just announced their own mobile client, effectively competing with their own ecosystem. Part of their justification for doing this was that the onboarding process, as you describe - the user testing video they showed was pretty damning. Surprising to hear no progress has been made.

Oh...and privacy and data ownership as well. It's a shame how they haven't tried to monetizie by having premium accounts and merging twitter with periscope to compete with snapchat and friends.

It took me a good year of giving twitter a second chance for it to begin to be useful to me. I started by following all of my podcast and youtube follows.

Still, it's not my first or even third destination. But maybe if I'm in line at the grocery.

Nobody cares about anything I post. So why would I bother.

Reddit is being credited with usenet style nested threads?

the old is new again...

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."

Same thought I had when I read the title, forums have been using nested threads for the longest time.

i mean, hellooo, we are in a nested thread

_echoes_ N E S T E D _echoes_

Well, it's not surprising that Engadget would compare it to Reddit, one of the top 20 websites in the world that readers actually use in 2019, instead of a dead social platform that people don't use except maybe a handful of people still using it for piracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline

Even nested-view on forums like vBulletin and phpbb was more or less worthless for various reasons, like how the software defaulted to a single-level linear view and nobody bothered to explicitly reply to individual posts. Also, linear view let you respond to any number of posts at a time which was superior for longer form discussion among multiple people, something that HN/Reddit can't really do.

there is nothing new on the internet since a long time, it's old ideas scaled up.

nobody's claiming Reddit invented the concept, it's just more salient to the average reader. are you seriously saying, if you were an Engadget editor, you would have said "change it to Usenet"?

For those who can't wait, I wrote an open-source FireFox and Chrome plugin that gives a tree view of a conversation: https://treeverse.app

Anyone got a mirror of this article? I can't click this link without ublock complaining about being passed through advertising trackers

https://web.archive.org/web/20191130080133/https://www.engad...

I don't have this problem with uBlock (origin), for the record.

Me too, it tries to redirect me through "guce.advertising.com" because I have enabled the list "Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list".

You don't actually need to click, this is a preview:

https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1199446847560880128/pho...

Just click "Temporarily" or "Permanently" to bypass the block, if you don't mind the tracking.

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