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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

Apart from various "trust and safety" censorship and moderation activities, what new features or updates has Twitter done in the past 3 years? I can't think of many changes they've made beyond those things, except for adverse ones (like breaking Firefox compatibility for months).

Is it a conscious choice for them to actively do nothing?

MySpace died because it didn't innovate and refused to invest in the core platform. While Facebook was spiking in popularity, MySpace was still a slow ad-plastered mess. Twitter seems to be that sleepy giant who has stopped all progress.

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I've actually seen quite a few updates from twitter the last couple of years, most of them quality of life related.

Not a lot of new features (although let's not forget they increased tweet size) but personally I don't mind that. It'd be like complaining HN is not getting enough new features.

They have given the option to disable the algorithmic timeline. This has been a game changer for me. I can use twitter without fear of being exposed to unction.

Really? That was the single most annoying thing they had done. I switched to using tweetdeck just to escape that change. Is it disabled permanently when you turn it off now? The "you can turn it off but we'll automatically turn it back on" bit was mind blowingly terrible.

Yes it was awful wasn't it. It pretty much turned me off twitter altogether. These days there is an icon on the top right of the app, or web page that looks like a constellation of stars. If you click that you get the option to go back to good twitter.

The stars option will switch back automatically though after some period of time, which is why I switched to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com for my interface.

If you switch back enough times it will stop trying. Same with other things like suggested tweets in your notifications or likes from others, if you see those just click on the top right arrow on the option that says I'm not interested and after a few days it will stop showing them.

> just click on the top right arrow on the option that says I'm not interested

Haha - I just use the block button like it’s going out of fashion. Cleans things up nicely.

Yeah that's too much effort to turn off a feature. I spent over a year trying to keep it off. To the point I actually scheduled a recurring event in my calendar to check and turn it off.

I'll stick with tweetdeck until they support a real offswitch.

Does tweetdeck handle threads properly? I tried a few different 3p clients but found them all lacking. Just gave up then and just used the web client every now and again.

It does as well as the twitter client does.

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