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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

It's very painful to follow a conversation on Twitter. I'm not sure why they think the way they've done things makes sense.

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I think they A/B'd some UI and found that the confusing UI gets more clicks. Users are clicking around randomly trying to find context for the conversation, and that's "engagement".

I'm pretty sure the context isn't there in many cases, although I haven't figured out the rules exactly.

It was never supposed to support conversation in the first place.

People were supposed to shoot short, simple, single messages and other people maybe react to this with their own short, single messages.

You are describing a chat

We are way way past that point.

It’s time for Twitter to evolve in so many ways.

I think they can't as their system is built with many of these limitations and preconceptions and it's hard for it to evolve easily.

It may be difficult to evolve, but it should be possible.

If there's will, there's a way. Remember how long they've tried to convince themselves that 140 characters is more than enough. Nowadays, even phones display conversations better and combine or split text messages hiding the 160 characters limit from the end user and allow longer than 280 characters texts. Twitter has some nice ideas, but it's mostly a huge missed opportunity.

The character limit was central to making Twitter what it is. Without that limit you'd just have ended up with walls of text and nobody would have been interested. This is a great example of limitations forcing creativity.

The character limit is the defining feature of Twitter.

Maybe for you. I'm not saying having no limit, but a number of words limit is better than a number of characters. They started to revert their _defining feature_ but not counting characters in URLs, etc.

I cant even remember the last user feature changes Twitter has.

Proper support in the UI for RTs with comments.

But honestly I'd prefer if they spent some fucking time upstaffing their user service and abuse teams. And if they could finally ban Trump and his conspiracy nutcase followers/network.

If the very light gray color of your comment is any indication, folks here didn't like what you said.

I certainly don't think that HN should ban you because of it, though.

Fleets, I suppose?

Evolve or die. Twitter dies is a good option.

Yeah, I've never seen any value in Twitter. They should've called it "Public IM" or limited IIRC and make it function well like IM. Even the poor implementation of threads in Slack is way better than the perverted version of Twitter.

Apart from being stuck to a single level in depth (which IMHO kind of makes sense in the context of an IM platform), what's that bad about Slack's threads?

Well, literally, you need to move aside - they took the skeuomorphism of people getting aside to discuss a topic without bothering others too far.

Not sure what would you have preferred? I can only think of inline, but I'm not sure how well that would have worked in an IM application, where you'd typically expect things to be in chronological order. You basically described the point of having threads in the first place, and I also cannot think of many other existing implementations, so I'm curious.

> I've never seen any value in Twitter.

Except for the information that doesn't show up on other platforms, which is why it is a frequently linked site here?

An ever-increasing number of people uses https://threadreaderapp.com/ though.

I am not arguing that Twitter is the perfect interface for its content, or even that its content is particularly good. I am just saying that it can have value regardless of its (many) faults.

That value is in the content, not twitter itself

That sounds a lot like a conversation to me.

"You are using our product wrong" is never the hallmark of a successful product manager.

Even though I know I must be violating like half the conversational bylaws here on HN I gotta throw in...

"It's not a bug, it's a feature" I've heard since the late 80's and still works magic if you ask me.

I used to feel the same way until I decided to actually use my twitter account on a regular basis, which probably means it's on some level objectively terrible. But now I've learnt the logic of how to navigate twitter I find it very intuitive.

Twitter have tried to have their cake and eat it too by allowing a reddit or hn style tree (which is good for discussions) while having their ui present it as a linear feed (which is good for engagement). This has lead to their current solution where the branches are presented in a choose your own adventure way. Now because the linked tweet has three replies, it has to show all three of them and leave it to you to select which branch you want to go down by clicking on it or the show replies prompt (though it does give primacy to pixprin's replies to self).

As a reading medium seeing a bunch of tweets strung together is not fantastic as implemented today.

As an authoring medium though, the character constraints force you to write succinct points that keep the reader engaged. You can focus your writing just on one point at a time, committing to them when you tweet, and you can stop anytime. If you're struggling with writing longer form pieces a tweet thread is a great on-ramp to get the outline together, which you can later expand into a post.

As a conversation medium, it's also nice to be able to focus conversation specifically on a particular point, rather than get jumbled together with a bunch of unrelated comments in the comments section at the end of a post.

Really? I don't like that Twitter makes me to reword and abbreviate words, just because I'm 2 characters over! Any medium (pun intended) has the concept of paragraphs, but does not typically limit you how long the paragraph is. It could guide you not to go overboard, but to force you to a certain made-up character limit - it's not really acceptable in 2021.

You need to realize that the character limit was the defining feature of Twitter. There are many platforms where grumpy uncle could dump a wall of text with his views, but nobody was attracted to another one of those. In today's attention economy, limiting expressions of thought was exactly the right thing.

Maybe you do, but I never want to dump anything! I want to write a paragraph. I can't in many cases, and I need to break English or ruin the wording. So, it's okay for the texting culture, I guess, but not for people who care about what they say and how they say it. I know many people bombard you on IM or Slack with tens of messages instead of writing a single paragraph. You think that's okay? It's a pity if you think so! No wonder people today are suffering from all kinds of attention disorders!

It makes people misunderstand each other, which makes them angry, and increases engagement/replies.

Shouting works better than conversing to keep users "engaged" and target them with ads.

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