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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

The logged-out user experience (or even just the web/mobile experience) is really odd. Apart from a bar permanently blocking screen real estate telling you to signup/login, there are times where it simply doesn't work (not down, just not working), translations are mismatched/wrong, things like viewing an image.. simply don't work, and never have for me. It literally gives a black popup with nothing happening and this old iPhone 1.0 feel to it.

For a long time, they didn't even manage to provide an up to date version of someones tweets. Heres a realtime communication website, and yet when logged out, tweets would be at times delayed for hours and days.

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There's also no way to search from the main page. I find myself typing "twitter.com/search" into my URL bar a lot.

do you mean the logged out main page? If it is any consolation you can't search Facebook logged out either.

Yeah, but Facebook kind of has different use cases. Unless you're really trying to do some form of "stalking" (I don't mean this literally), there's not much use for a search feature while logged out.

Twitter on the other hand is very useful to use when you're logged out. Plus Twitter DOES let logged out users search, with the exact same search abilities as any logged in user, but they simply hide the functionality until yo're logged in.

The most common thing I struggle with as an accountless user is linking to tweets. It can take me a good while to find a link to a tweet I'm looking at.

The second most common problem I have is finding a user, even if I know their handle. It was hard to believe how difficult that was the first time I tried it (admittedly, vanity URLs have made this easier).

In the Twitter OSX app, if I want to find an account, my method is:

  Search icon
  Paste in handle, "@accountname"
  Receive list of people mentioning @accountname
  Click on one of them to view the account

Pretty insane that it wouldn't just give me that account name first followed by similar account names.

Another classic thing is the autocomplete on account names when writing a tweet. It will show me (and prioritise!) accounts I've never heard of and more often than not the account I'm actually wanting is last in the list.

Most Twitter apps (including the official one) support ⌘-U (command/apple-U), which is "Go to user..." - it autocompletes, though I imagine it's using the same suggestions that you mentioned. Definitely less steps, either way.

Oh boy, that's going to be helpful. Thanks!

As a user with an account, I also struggle with linking to tweets. The process right now is something like this:

1. See tweet in timeline, click the "expand" link in the lower left, or just some other blank spot in the tweet. 2. Hunt around until I see the non-obvious de-emphasized "details" link in light grey next to the date. 3. Click the "details" link and load the full page for the tweet. 4. Copy the link from the browser URL bar.

I don't know why they make it so hard and require me to load a whole other page and interrupt my timeline browsing flow. Annoyingly there's a "more" link on each tweet which I always end up checking anyway, and it doesn't have an option to copy a link to the tweet! You can "share via email" or "embed tweet" but neither of those gives you a useful URL you can just paste somewhere. The UI is a train wreck.

You can just click the date. Not obvious, I know.

you can also click or right click on the hour right next to the tweet which will give you a permalink to the tweet.

Obvious and discoverable. I never even realized the time was a link, and I use the twitter web UI every day.

really good point. There was a discussion on NPR the other day about how un-intuitive Twitter was and how most normal people just don't get even what a retweet is, what a hashtag is, or the whole reply system on Twitter.

For example the fact that if you start a tweet with @ it will not show up on your feed. Stuff like that.

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