Going back to the old (pre-X) Twitter iOS app
blog.gingerbeardman.com
blog.gingerbeardman.com
I have seen bad rebrands in my life: Far too fashionable. Totally unnecessary. Reactionary.
But I have never seen a company go from good branding like Twitter had (easy on the eyes) to something as ugly as X. I will never bad mouth the branding/advertising/PR guys again.
The logos and colours are hideous. The balance on the whole page is off.
Like there’s the verb he’s thrown away. There’s the awareness. The brand. The goodwill. The safety. But he’s traded it for the least aesthetic choice. It has recontextualised every other redesign I can remember disdaining in my life.
And even for a mature product it will probably cost quite a bit of money/users longterm
Sign up to X Premium to get access."
It looks and feels like a template where someone forgot to pass in the variables.
I’m sure they’ll get right on fixing that!
But does it go so far that it even excuses Papyrus? :P
Never mind that it already has a rather different meaning.
The change is done, they’re not going back, any “reversal” you may make is utterly temporary and depends on the lone soul who wrote it in an afternoon and forgot about it.
Anyone having lived online for 5 years knows this: there’s only going forward, Google Reader isn’t coming back.
When Pixel phones switched from navigation buttons to gestures I tried them and hated the experience and reverted. Eventually I got forced over to gestures and still hate them so delaying gave me a bit more bandwidth to allocate from stupid UI changes to things I actually care about.
For a network service, however, I think this is worse than doing nothing: continuing to use Twitter at this point is not neutral but actually supporting and rewarding Musk for every decision he’s made, and your use of a social network encourages people you know to stay there. That means that you’re not only not finding a long-term replacement, you’re making it harder for one to exist.
https://jbscript.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
You can also hide the idiots with the BlueLiteBlocker extension
https://github.com/BlueLiteBlocker/BlueLiteBlocker
Makes Twitter a bit more like it was before idiot in chief took over
And on mobile! (some assembly required)
Control Panel for Twitter also has an option to hide Blue replies in threads, but it's off by default as you can end up with hundreds of replies "visible" (as far as Twitter's windowing implementation is concerned) on the screen, which tanks performance.
Tweet threads seem to top out at just over 200 replies, so boosted replies make looking at most "popular" tweets pointless, like anything from ${siteOwner} with thousands of people trying to engagement farm for Blue Bucks in the replies. You're lucky if more than 5 non-Blue replies are left standing.
Or check trusted sites like apkmirror to see if they just have one.
https://rderik.com/blog/resigning-ios-apps-from-an-ipa-for-m...
An app that I use daily got aquihired and was removed from the store. The company who made the app warned us in advance they were shutting down, so many of us were able to make a backup.
The downsides are that you can only have 3 sideloaded apps at a time, and you have to reinstall them every 7 days.
https://sideloadly.io/ automates the process and can automatically reinstall them for you - I use it to keep the Pebble app installed and my watch synced.
When I did this in 2016 for eBay and Google Inbox I got a year out of each.
For this Twitter app, I'll enjoy it whilst it lasts. I'm a glass half full kind guy.
Twitter before Musk didn't routinely ban people for no actual rule breaking?
One could reasonably argue that in some cases they were stretching the meaning of a rule, but they didn’t just arbitrarily ban users.
Heck, if there was one thing the Twitter Files actually showed it was the massive amount of debate and discussion and fretting that the powers at Twitter spent over most of their decisions.
Modern Twitter doesn't seem to particularly care about this factor.
What changes more frequently: (a) APIs or (b) public web pages. How could we test the correctness of the answer.
(I know which answer I would choose, based on experience, but I'm curious what others think.)
On a tangent: Is there anything on betting markets on if "X" will ever change back to "Twitter"? I could see Musk getting bored or deciding to focus on his other companies, and after a re-sale, reverting to Twitter.
I'm sure you can now see the problem with your argument.
My issue was only with the app not the service. I'm using a version of the app from March 2021 (pre-Spaces, pre-takeover) and it's peak Twitter user experience IMHO. Stories of the API deprecation have been greatly exaggerated.
> I'm sure you can now see the problem with your argument.
If using Twitter is equivalent to living in your analogy, then I'll choose death, thanks.
I think a more apt analogy would be:
"Why bother maintaining a relationship with an abusive lover if they're just going to tire of you and drop you to the curb?"
I'm sure you can now see the problem with your argument.
Not everyone has £1000-£2000 lying around doing nothing. However, a lot of geeks have old PC hardware lying around doing nothing. One of the details I liked about The Big Bang Theory was the multiple half-cannibalised PC carcasses in the background of every shot.
A Mac Mini is hardly breaking the bank.
You can't really bypass them on web or in the new app. But Twitter has no choice but to support old iOS/Android apps, where, for whatever reason, auto update is not working, lest they lose thousands of users.
My mother broke auto update on her old Galaxy. I dont even know how she did it, as it should be working, but it is not, and she won't let anyone mess with it too much...
On Android, it's possible: you can install an old version and then turn off auto-updates at a per-app level.
And she likes it that way anyway, and she gets upset when UIs change and such.
I'm only talking about the app here, of course, though you seem to be conflating the app and the platform/service.
Personally, I don't see the types of problematic content that have apparently increased on the platform, never have. I just use it how I've always used it and I'm happy enough. YMMV
hmm, they have an odd way of saying that then.
The world changes, and we move on. I don’t always like it either but we have to deal.
But for me, I'm enjoying my communities as much as ever. Data point that my friends in Japan are oblivious to all the stuff people in the USA/Europe are getting worked up about. I don't really think about it, I just carry on using the service for my interests and needs.
Let's see if we can reign in your ignorance a bit. This man owns the service 100% and when you use it, you're putting money directly in his pocket (or helping to fill in the debt hole).
https://theconversation.com/antisemitism-on-twitter-has-more...
https://news.yahoo.com/gets-better-steps-back-twitter-222417...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/31/tech/twitter-lawsuit-hate-spe...
Are you really OK with this?
Ah yes, the token Nazi argument. Twitter is now the official Nazi hangout?
You're being manipulated. None of your sources provide any evidence of there being more "hate" speech on Twitter now than before. None of your sources provide any evidence there's more "hate" speech on Twitter than Facebook, Mastodon, Reddit, your favorite video game, etc. None of your sources even provide specific examples of what this "hate" speech actually was.
It's a big "trust us" thing. You're being manipulated.
I rather deal with moderation by myself by choosing who to follow, than rely on Twitter moderators and their moral compass to decide what's OK and what's not.
The fact that there is almost no point of contact for average Japanese person in life to anything not Japanese, still in this day and age, seems too often overlooked. Here, everything from baby formula to grad school textbooks on nuclear physics are available from local producers or at least in thoroughly rewritten versions. Average scores for TOEIC Reading/Listening test[1] for University students in English language major is ~600/990. 450/990 for CS students btw(!!) and both without doubt heavy uses of sophisticated test-taking techniques.
And it's the same even for Twitter: Everyone you follow speaks solely in your language, and has zero contacts with anyone who don't. Anyone who aren't speaking your language always seem total Martian and the languages don't even translate. Maybe you would come across couple quote-tweets per day from influencer types explaining peculiar foreign contents. You'd know that the domain name of the service is registered to an address in San Francisco, CA, USA, which is supposedly an area on a land, and that'll be the whole global experience you would passively receive on Twitter as a Japanese user.
1: which is apparently almost like a sanity check for a 5th grader, like the hardest challenge is finding the correct store hours on a flyer printed on the test book by multiple choices, literally, but the questions are also written in the same language as the flyer, so...