Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

"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.

You are describing a chat

That sounds a lot like a conversation to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com