[HN Gopher] The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
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The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
Author : matrixagent
Score : 117 points
Date : 2022-04-07 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annoying.technology)
(TXT) w3m dump (annoying.technology)
| Havoc wrote:
| The quality of the experience is also going down. My feed is
| rapidly approaching 50% ads by pixel count now.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Twitter requires an account to scroll through tweets, which is
| why I just close links to twitter on reflex now. There's no
| point, I won't be able to read anything.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I found this statement really bizarre:
|
| > Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don't
| use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design.
|
| I've _always_ found Twitter to be horribly confusing. It 's
| mishmash of replies, re-tweets, and completely unrelated other
| tweets has been there for years and never made any sense to
| someone who doesn't have an account.
|
| I don't have a Reddit account but know enough to use
| old.reddit.com for everything. It's ugly, but it's not at all
| confusing. It's about as straightforward as it could be.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| Same here.
|
| I found old reddit really easy to understand and found twitter
| to be much harder.
|
| I bounced off twitter a few times just because I didn't
| understand the UI.
| silisili wrote:
| Glad it's not just me. It's especially infuriating when
| clicking a specifc tweet to see replies, scrolling down, then
| seeing god knows what random mess. Oops, you had to click the
| tiny 'see more replies' text to see more relevant replies,
| we're just showing you random unrelated tweets. Who designs
| such a mess and why...
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Are you serious? It's a very simple thread-based design.
| Threads are separated by approptiate dividers or whitespace or
| indentation. I don't get it.
| Razengan wrote:
| The Twitter UI is a mess.
|
| It's infuriating me to even try to explain the problem to
| someone who doesn't see it.
|
| For example, can you explain to me - without going to try it
| out first - where exactly to tap (on a phone) to view the
| comments on a picture post in your home feed?
| Jcowell wrote:
| Can't you just tap the post (not the picture , but the
| post).
| cryptoz wrote:
| I also find Twitter nearly impossible to follow. The threaded
| model is difficult to build a mental model around, you must
| click/tap endlessly to read a whole thread, I see error
| messages daily that are incorrect ("this tweet has been
| deleted" when it has not, or "offline" notices when it is
| not, etc), significant confusion on tweet metrics (reply
| count is sometimes visible, sometimes not?), etc. I could go
| on forever about my issues with it.
|
| Been on since 2009, follow/followed by a few hundred people,
| use reddit since 2006, blahblah. Reddit isn't great either
| but I find it a lot less confusing to read on a day-to-day
| basis. At least old reddit...new reddit is quite confusing
| IMO in many of the same ways twitter is.
|
| If I had to guess I would vote with other commenters here who
| are saying that the UX is likely on purpose, and has been
| built with metrics in mind and not user comprehension.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Twitter is functionally a giant group chat of all your follows.
|
| Impossible to get into until the algo kicks in for me.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Likewise! Every time I accidentally follow a twitter.com link,
| I find myself lost in an incoherent crazyland of intense
| emotions. Threadreader is OK, but I prefer to interact with
| Twitter in the same way that I used to enjoy Eve Online: wait
| for someone involved to write up a summary of whatever it was
| that just happened, then read it at a distance from all the
| shouting.
| rado wrote:
| The rampant tracking is a ticking time bomb.
| smegsicle wrote:
| how would you expect it to go off?
| rado wrote:
| There will be a huge scandal when somebody's personal info
| leak leads to irreparable damage: exposed political
| affiliation, health issues, sexual orientation etc.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since
| its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long
| posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or
| else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging
| platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288
| character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so
| they can increase the bloat to 10MB instead of 1MB to read a
| tweet. Finally, it is stupendously influential in the real world,
| yet Musk was able to buy 10% of it for around $3B, so it has a
| fraction of a percent of Facebook's market cap. I don't know
| anyone who uses Facebook any more or cares what happens on it,
| but Twitter steers everything. It's weird.
| jrockway wrote:
| You go where the readers are, not where the best author UX is.
| The draw of Twitter is that your random thought can be forced
| upon millions of people ("the algorithm"), and you get feedback
| like "31,000 people gave you a <3". You aren't going to get
| that anywhere else.
| manmal wrote:
| It simply is the place where people post relevant, up-to-date
| stuff. People put up with bad UX all the time to get what they
| want.
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| They don't want you to leave either of course. I'm an artist and
| there's a constant discussion with other artists over how to get
| people to ever see tweets where you mention things like "my
| Patreon" or "commissions" or other little things like this that
| involve going elsewhere or exchanging money, all that shit gets
| hidden by the algorithm.
|
| Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms
| makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or
| something.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| > Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms
| makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or
| something.
|
| It's been bizarre watching the increasing prevalence of these
| types of behaviors the last few years. There was a period of
| time when I remember seeing a number of consumer tech youtubers
| discussing supply chain issues but having to avoid using the
| words "COVID" or "pandemic" for fear of demonetization or being
| buried by the algorithm. You see similar behaviors everywhere
| on TikTok, where a whole new vocabulary has sprung up to talk
| about taboo topics. "Unalive" instead of "kill", "seggs"
| instead of "sex", and so on. My understanding is that some of
| the TikTok vocabulary originated among kids communicating over
| school-monitored channels.
|
| The most unsettling part is that it seems like in many of these
| cases nobody can point to concrete evidence that a word is
| actively being punished by the algorithm. The simple existence
| of these black-box moderation tools has a panopticon-esque
| effect where people will preemptively alter their behavior just
| in case.
| bitwize wrote:
| "Un-alive" comes from a Marvel animated cartoon series called
| _Ultimate Spider-Man_ , in which Spider-Man teams up with
| Deadpool, who expresses his intent to "un-alive" a certain
| villain. To which Spidey replies, shocked, "You mean KILL
| him?!"
|
| Deadpool's circumlocution around killing and death is a
| parody of similar linguistic gymnastics from 1980s cartoons,
| which were considered "for children" and so addressing death
| directly was forbidden. And given that Deadpool's mental
| illness makes him genre-savvy, it was probably deliberate in-
| universe and out. The writers then paired that with Spidey
| using "kill" directly in an animated kids' block show, to
| show how ridiculous such censorship was.
|
| The sheer irony is that we're now self-censoring to 1980s
| cartoon levels to avoid robotic censors we can't even argue
| with.
| [deleted]
| xg15 wrote:
| Meanwhile Twitter just straight-up put up a loginwall. Whenever I
| scroll down more than a few tweets, I get an undismissable popup
| prompting me to login.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Delete all Twitter cookies. If you're not logged in you don't
| need them. The wall disappears for awhile.
|
| Up until the Ukraine war started, this worked for a few days
| and then I'd get the login wall. Delete cookies again, buy a
| few more days. Since the war started though they seem to be
| acknowledging a lot of non-logged-in people need to see tweets
| and I haven't seen the login wall since.
| makeworld wrote:
| Just block Twitter from setting cookies and you won't need to
| keep manually deleting them.
| makeworld wrote:
| There are a few options:
|
| - Switch to an alternate Twitter frontend like nitter.net.
| There are extensions that can redirect to this automatically as
| well.
|
| - Block Twitter from setting any cookies. This will prevent
| loginwalls.
|
| - Add this custom uBlock Origin filter:
| twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
|
| Personally I use the last two options, and sometimes use
| Nitter, especially on mobile.
| xg15 wrote:
| Thanks for the filter! I've been kind of looking for one and
| had already assumed Twitter would randomise the IDs and page
| layout so that setting up a static filter would be
| impossible. But apparently it's not!
|
| I've mostly been using the Fritter app for now for whenever I
| want to read some tweet. So far, I like it very much: Native
| performance with no nag screens and no engagement bullshit,
| just tweets and replies. The only problem is the often
| replies don't load. My suspicion is Twitter is doing some
| shady stuff with the API again.
| eminence32 wrote:
| I also see this loginwall sometimes when trying to click
| through to related images or tweets. The workaround I've found
| is to open the click in a new tab. It seems if there is no
| browser history, twitter is less aggressive about throwing up
| the login wall
| [deleted]
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Amusingly opening a private window avoids that. I speculate
| they left that loophole so that people who get into slapfights
| and block each other can still view each others' tweets.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Leaving the philosophical issues out for a moment, this is a
| problem for me even as someone who had a Twitter account and
| wants to be signed in. Every time I click on a link to Twitter in
| the Reddit app on iOS it opens in the embedded browser where I'm
| not logged in and don't know how to open it in the Twitter app
| instead. It's a pain!
| Animats wrote:
| If you want to read Twitter without a Twitter account, the search
| function lets you read more before the paywall stops you. Until
| they plug that hole.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| This drives me insane. Does nobody develop software for actual
| humans anymore?
| rado wrote:
| No, the goal is metrics leading to bonuses and promotions. UX
| has been User Exploitation for a decade now.
| threeseed wrote:
| Of course.
|
| But they just don't prioritise the interests of developers and
| technical people who are often the ones writing these blog
| posts.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I would say the opposite- every design step of the software in
| social media is for humans the same way the corral is for the
| livestock.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Yes but not the humans primarily using the software - for the
| humans that want to extract profit from those human's eyeballs.
| topspin wrote:
| This is developed for humans. Certain humans want you to submit
| to their 'engagement' regime, and these humans have tailored
| their platform to pressure you accordingly.
|
| The Russian invasion of Ukraine led me to seek alternatives,
| and I now use nitter for those few Twitter accounts that I care
| to follow. It's no panacea, but it's better than being punished
| by Twitter for not logging in.
| KSPAtlas wrote:
| Bit off topic, but I managed to use old reddit on windows 98 not
| that long ago
| eminence32 wrote:
| One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is
| that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet
| it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a
| linear timeline. I've always struggled to understand the full
| context of the tweet I'm reading (that is, where is this tweet in
| the full conversation?). Do others also struggle with this? Am I
| just Doing It Wrong?
| thewebcount wrote:
| OMG, Yes! I can't understand anything about it's interface.
| Sometimes there's a moderately straightforward discussion,
| other times, random, completely unrelated things show up
| looking like replies, but obviously aren't. Still other times
| the thing being linked to is a reply to something I can't see.
| It makes zero sense and I avoid going to Twitter if at all
| possible.
| mikestew wrote:
| I think it's a variation of Stockholm Syndrome at this point.
| I've used Twitter since early days, and the only reason I even
| keep an account is to keep the user name. But I quit regularly
| viewing Twitter going on probably close to ten years ago, and
| open it in some form maybe once a week to look at a specific
| post (not just browse).
|
| So, as one who doesn't use the interface very often: it's a
| fucking dumpster fire. If one were one of today's 10K, seeing
| Twitter for the first time, imagine explaining how to read a
| thread (no, you are not allowed to direct the n00b to a 3rd-
| party tool such as Nitter). It would appear to me, a not-
| regular user, that Twitter tries to do threaded conversations
| and fails miserably. As with parent comment, finding the
| context quickly turns into actual work. Someone must get value
| out of Twitter if they put up with all this, but that someone
| is not me. At the end of the day, I find Twitter to just not be
| worth the trouble anymore.
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| I think it's intentional on Twitter's part. It's FOMO: you see
| a hot take out of context and now your brain ~~wants~~ needs to
| know what the hell is going on, so you reward Twitter's
| algorithm with lots of tasty engagement in your effort to
| figure out who pissed everyone off.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yeah, this seems to be the endgame of the whole engagement
| maximizer craze: If struggling with an app because you can't
| find the function you're looking for counts as "engagement",
| then the obvious strategy is to make apps as _hard_ to use as
| possible.
| aeturnum wrote:
| First: you are not alone, that's normal.
|
| Second: I think they are leaning into the surprising and
| sometimes pleasing juxtaposition of conversations that can be
| happening "close" to each other. Like, I'll click into a tweet,
| and generally the first "thread" is the one where the OP
| replies to themselves - but that's not always the case!
| Sometimes another reply is more popular and they will swap it.
|
| I think they are trying to give you a sense of how the
| conversation has gone - when they break the thread they are
| showing you that, based on activity, other people are ignoring
| the thread and paying attention to this other thread. It messes
| you up if all you want to do is see what the OP said, but if
| you are there to see "why people care about this tweet" (also
| common) it's important to understand where things fell apart.
| pram wrote:
| There are so many things that make it an unpleasant ordeal.
|
| Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over.
|
| Having to click on individual tweets to see their replies.
|
| Pressing back and having your window reset to the top of the
| replies page, and now you have to click 'see more replies' all
| over again.
|
| Having your history completely broken somehow so pressing back
| doesn't even take you to the right place.
|
| etc etc
| twofornone wrote:
| >Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over.
|
| I don't know if I'm just suffering from confirmation bias but
| it seems like this feature is used as a form of soft
| censorship, to discourage users from reading certain threads,
| as it appears to disproportionately pop up on "controversial"
| topics where right of center opinions are likely to be
| expressed.
| standardUser wrote:
| "Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don't
| use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design."
|
| My first thought was that the unrepentant bizarreness of
| Twitter's layout was going to be the "wall" in this case. But the
| idea that Reddit - a mild variation on the timeless forum format
| - is somehow more confusing than Twitter? No.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Twitter seems to be slowly asphyxiating itself in a number of
| ways: login walls, artificially curated timelines, and turning a
| blind eye to spam (it seems to be okay as long as it's terrible
| autogenerated NFT "art"?) all make it a thoroughly unpleasant
| service to use.
|
| I'm at the point where I'd rather not have it, but it's
| effectively the LinkedIn of my professional sphere.
| redmen wrote:
| Interestingly, I think login walls are to stop spam. It
| interests me how many design decisions by youtube, for example,
| were to stop spam and getting rid of fake views and likes. Not
| directly for the user's experience.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| > I think login walls are to stop spam
|
| You need a login in order to spam. What a stupid theory.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| While I agree with your first sentence, I don't think your
| second sentence is constructive.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Interestingly, I think login walls are to stop spam.
|
| I don't think that holds up in general, and especially not in
| Twitter's case. Logged-out users can barely interact with the
| site -- all of the important interactions (and, in
| particular, all of the ones that would be concerning from a
| spam-prevention standpoint) require the user to be logged in.
|
| I'm not sure it applies to YouTube either. The site has very
| few login requirements, other than for age-restricted videos.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I'd believe that! It's entirely possible and even likely that
| they're well intentioned. But they _just don 't work_,
| because the spam is coming from inside the house.
| xg15 wrote:
| I don't buy it. You always needed an account in order to
| post - that's nothing new.
|
| What's new is that Twitter now locks you out just for
| _reading_ tweets without an account.
| ineedasername wrote:
| You've always had to login to post, so I don't see how
| twitters increasing push to force logins would impact a
| preexisting spam problem.
| chias wrote:
| I feel the same way about LinkedIn ;)
| marssaxman wrote:
| Good lord. I deleted my linkedin account some 10-15 years ago
| now, and I've never regretted it. What a ridiculous spam-farm
| that place was.
| exfascist wrote:
| I was going to say this. I tried LinkedIn a few weeks as an
| intern ~10 years ago (oh man I feel old now) and was
| extremely underwhelmed.
| emerged wrote:
| Twitter is the homeless encampment of social networks.
|
| Sometimes I'll click the wrong link and end up there. It's
| uncomfortable.. lots of people screaming and spreading their
| excrement around.. I just avoid eye contact, keep quiet and close
| the tab as quickly as possible.
| dmart wrote:
| The sub-rant about every app having its own browser really rang
| true for me. I never gave it much thought until now, but wow,
| what a horrible experience. Frequently I click a link to a
| private GitHub repo (404!) or a news article (paywall!) inside an
| app and then have to clunkily "Open in Safari" to actually apply
| my session cookie.
|
| To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I
| only logged in some of the time?") Terrible UX.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| More frustrating still is often they remove the option to opt-
| out of their in-app browser so you have to do it on a link by
| link basis as you mentioned. Even more annoying on Android is
| it then breaks "smart" app links like opening Youtube for those
| links instead of the browser.
| nneonneo wrote:
| But it lets the app developers track engagement! How will the
| poor app developers know exactly which sites you choose to
| browse to otherwise?
|
| (/s, since that's not obvious on the internet anymore)
| threeseed wrote:
| The confusing part for non-developers is how to get back from
| Safari to Twitter. Very few people are actually jumping between
| apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.
|
| And so they end up going Home, getting distracted by some other
| app and not going back to Twitter at all.
|
| That's why in-browser UIs exist. Because it makes a big
| different to keeping users in the app.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so
| they don 't know the swipe left/right gestures._
|
| I mean, maybe that could be an indication that cryptic and
| completely arbitrary swiping gestures without any sort of
| discoverability or visual feedback might not be the best
| interface for fundamental user actions like navigating the
| history.
| xg15 wrote:
| I agree so much! I was puzzled when Google introduced that
| feature to android and even advised it as the recommended way
| for apps to open links.
|
| Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind that feature?
|
| I mean, I can sort-of understand that individual apps want me
| to stay inside the app as long as possible. But why would the
| _platform vendor_ actively support or even push that pattern?
| exfascist wrote:
| It probably has to do with the (lack of) window management on
| mobile platforms and the coupling of which window is
| foreground to the (often also lack of) behavior of the
| application.
|
| Man I don't miss owning a smartphone, this stuff is really
| pants on head retarded.
| bitwize wrote:
| Twitter has reached that "party's over" phase. Till now it's been
| focused on growth, but... "At the end of the day, we must
| moooooooonetize our assets..."
| psyc wrote:
| In case anyone doesn't know the reference:
|
| https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4
| dymk wrote:
| Best thing I ever did was install Nitter redirect. Even though
| Nitter breaks every once in a while, it makes Twitter usable
| (assuming you don't mind read-only interaction).
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I just do it manually:
|
| Replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.net", keeping the rest of
| the URL the same.
| dymk wrote:
| I was doing it manually too for a while, until I made a
| bookmarklet, but eventually I got tired of doing that as
| well. The redirect browser addons also intercept the request
| before it ever hits Twitter directly.
| allenu wrote:
| It's funny because I don't even see "Related Tweets" anymore.
| It's just "More Tweets" immediately underneath a tweet and its
| threads. They're not even bothering to find tweets that related
| to what you're reading. They've gone to the Buzzfeed or Daily
| Mail strategy of finding the most engaging things and putting
| them in your periphery to ensure you stay on the site.
| zeruch wrote:
| I was excommunicated from Twitter on fairly laughable grounds
| (like all social networks these days, they elude exposure by
| being as oblique/obtuse in moderation as possible), and then
| allowed endless nonsense because it was 'engaging' which is
| basically why we have the goat rodeo of today.
|
| I went to Mastodon a while ago, and while I miss some of the
| pocket communities of Twitter (mostly academic/political science
| and the arts type of stuff), the UX for Mastodon is far more
| sanity-friendly.
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(page generated 2022-04-07 23:00 UTC)