14 ms·

The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

295 points by matrixagent 4y ago

helloworld11 4y ago
It's really not hard to just..... not use twitter. I've had an account since nearly ten years ago and maybe logged in or posted 5 or 6 tweets, nearly a decade ago, then just stopped using it completely. Now, on rare occasions, I open a twitter thread, read some particularly relevant content (to me), click any links available and bug right out again until months later. Or I used to until they did one more shitty little thing in terms of making logins even to scroll a few moments obligatory. So, nitter then, if the original Twaddler link is something I absolutely think is worth checking out for a few moments. As for actually participating in that toxic, naval gazing shit show of hostile tribalism, insipid 140 character nonsense and random incoherent snark, no thanks. I can't even fathom why so many people give a damn at all.
xg15 4y ago
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.
- eminence32 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pseudo0 4y ago
  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.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Opening a private window clears cookies, which typically resets these kinds of things.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Just block Twitter from setting cookies and you won't need to keep manually deleting them.
- makeworld 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- MockObject 4y ago
  I browse it with an incognito window.
eminence32 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
- HellsMaddy 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      >the obvious strategy is to make apps as hard to use as possible. And this is exactly what they're doing. They as in facebook and twitter.
- brimble 4y ago
  No, it's very confusing. I also found Facebook too confusing to use back when I briefly tried it around 2009. A friend who'd been on it since it was still exclusive to some universities assured me it made a lot more sense a year or two before that, but by then, it was too confusing for me and I bounced off fast. Maybe it's on purpose?
Havoc 4y ago
The quality of the experience is also going down. My feed is rapidly approaching 50% ads by pixel count now.
emerged 4y ago
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.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  You seem to have a lot of biases about large swaths of people
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kbelder 4y ago
    Particularly excrement-spreaders and twitter posters. But I repeat myself.
  - svnpenn 4y ago
    You seem to be salty.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Walled gardens have proven over and over again that the only model capable of respecting users is communication via an open protocol. If you can't take your entire profile and move it to a raspherry pi in your living room on a forked server via a forked client (possibly losing your handle) and continue communicating with your social network then this is inevitable.
saagarjha 4y ago
> My other accounts don't have it yet, so I wasn't able to confirm if it identifies the account. It's an encrypted session, to identify your account to Twitter. It's encrypted to prevent an outside party from figuring out which user shared the link, but if you share multiple links from the same session and someone knows you were the source of one of them, they'd be able to link the other ones to you as well.
mostlysimilar 4y ago
This drives me insane. Does nobody develop software for actual humans anymore?
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  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.
- rado 4y ago
  No, the goal is metrics leading to bonuses and promotions. UX has been User Exploitation for a decade now.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Of course. But they just don't prioritise the interests of developers and technical people who are often the ones writing these blog posts.
- rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Yes but not the humans primarily using the software - for the humans that want to extract profit from those human's eyeballs.
- topspin 4y ago
  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 4y ago
Bit off topic, but I managed to use old reddit on windows 98 not that long ago
standardUser 4y ago
"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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dmart 4y ago
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.
- threeseed 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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.
  - Someone 4y ago
    > 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. I always use the (small) button in the top left of the screen that appears left of the clock, e.g. “◀ Twitter”.
- nneonneo 4y ago
  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)
- 4y ago
allenu 4y ago
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.
rado 4y ago
The rampant tracking is a ticking time bomb.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  how would you expect it to go off?
  - rado 4y ago
    There will be a huge scandal when somebody's personal info leak leads to irreparable damage: exposed political affiliation, health issues, sexual orientation etc.
    - smegsicle 4y ago
      i guess so, maybe a massive leak across several sensitive demographics? just seems like boiling the frog how things like doxing is now mostly ignorable outside whatever immediate drama-circle is involved- even hunter biden's laptop is just, "who doesn't smoke crack?" and "of course he's involved with shady deals, who isn't?" ot: still haven't seen the eli5/timeline of the relationship between ukraine and the dem party, maybe i've only heard exaggerations..
egypturnash 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    "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.
ajmurmann 4y ago
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!
- nabaraz 4y ago
  I use Reddit is fun app and there is an option to use external browser. So clicking on Twitter link in Reddit app loads Twitter app for me.
woodruffw 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > 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.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    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.
thewebcount 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- grumbel 4y ago
  Reddit doesn't make it very obvious that there are subreddits on the site or how to find and navigate them. The front page is just memes, which makes the site not look all that useful. A normal web forum or Usenet in contrast has the hierarchy of groups/forums always directly visible. Even 4chan has a big box with all the boards on their first page.
- hemloc_io 4y ago
  Twitter is functionally a giant group chat of all your follows. Impossible to get into until the algo kicks in for me.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  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.
- silisili 4y ago
  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...
pipeline_peak 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
bitwize 4y ago
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 4y ago
  In case anyone doesn’t know the reference: https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4 https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4
throwaway81523 4y ago
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.
- manmal 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jrockway 4y ago
  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.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Disagree with that assessment. The readers go where the good authors are as well - and so it is with Groupon, Doordash, Etsy, etc
- userbinator 4y ago
  You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. For a very long time, if you went to mobile.twitter.com and set your User-Agent to that of some old browser, you'd get a sane plain-HTML version. Apparently you can still get plain HTML if you use Googlebot instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464280
anothernewdude 4y ago
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.
Animats 4y ago
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.
dymk 4y ago
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/mohaicophfnifehkkkdbcejkflmgfkof?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
- lobocinza 4y ago
  > assuming you don't mind read-only interaction That can be framed as a feature.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  I just do it manually: Replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.net", keeping the rest of the URL the same.
  - tomatowurst 4y ago
    wow! that is nit!! but unfortunately doesnt render retweets
  - dymk 4y ago
    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.
- Tenoke 4y ago
  For what is worth, I'd much rather just create an account than install an extension (especially since sometimes one of my many extensions ends up slowing the whole browser and I have to hunt which one is it). It's not like I don't have thousands of accounts to random sites anyway and it typically takes less time than confirming if an extension is good.
  - rektide 4y ago
zeruch 4y ago
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.
- riffic 4y ago
  Mastodon is really my favorite thing out there. quick disclaimer I am a mod of the /r/Mastodon subreddit so there may be a bit of a bias there (not really though, I just like the software).
  - zeruch 4y ago
    It's got it's quirks (and could improve in that regard) but its consistent and has a much more responsive ecosystem. I'm pleased with it so far.
grishka 4y ago
It's really funny how Twitter manages to somehow do both these things at the same time: 1. Promise everyone to decentralize itself, aka the "bluesky" project. Except it's been a thing for ~2 years and exactly zero meaningful progress has been made. Related: didn't Jack say they wanted to open up the API again? 2. Become ever more manipulative and get in my way more and more with its engagement growth bullshit.
- pcmoney 4y ago
  The did open up the API again, or rather are in the process of doing so. Look at the new essential access tier and v2 endpoints. Its early but they are launching more and more.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Okay so there still are nonsensical per-app limits, and they still act as if building a third-party client is not a use case that exists. Yeah, right, because of course people primarily use APIs of social media services for research and business. How hard would it be to simply comment out all the checks in the code to give everyone the same access official apps have? Why is it taking them months? It's as if they don't actually want to open up their API.
    - pcmoney 4y ago
      I think there is a balance here. Open the API and make shareholders happy. If they cannibalize their own traffic they violate fiduciary duty and get sued into the ground. Otherwise they inject ads into the API endpoints themselves and make it part of TOS to not strip them out. You can pay for higher and higher access levels but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. They have spent and spend millions and millions building that physical infrastructure.
      - grishka 4y ago
        > fiduciary duty Ah yes, the one reason why everything eventually turns to shit unless it's a nonprofit. > but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. But they are contemplating doing exactly that with the Bluesky project. Not just that, but federation, as in, you'd be able to interact with tweets without a Twitter account, but from an account you host on your own infrastructure. This is why I'm asking the question in my original comment. These two efforts feel so misaligned to me. If you're going to federate, you could as well provide completely unauthenticated API to access public content — you'll have to anyway.
holler 4y ago
Agree with the core points, and it's not just Twitter these days. Perhaps some of it is in the name of spam prevention? But it's hard not to be turned off when every social site's mobile web url tries to get me to install an app or flat out says "not available on mobile web". For anyone looking for alternatives, I've been building https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im and welcome you to check it out. Sqwok is all about live discussion with fully public topical chatrooms, a simple interface, small community, and driven by desire for building a better place for conversation on the web.
lbrito 4y ago
My reaction to pushy "sign up to view" is nearly always of revulsion and mentally pledging to never ever sign up. I'm obviously not alone here.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I refuse to sign into my rarely used account specifically for this reason.
- kayson 4y ago
  Ditto. Instagram and tik tok are the biggest offenders in my mind. I will never ever install either.
SubiculumCode 4y ago
Sometimes a project does not need innovation, and pushes to monetize only breaks what people liked. If it is even mildly profitable, better in my mind to not shoot yourself in the foot by changing what people like.
civilized 4y ago
I literally can't make an account on Twitter. Attempting causes it to throw an error. Probably for the best.
- riffic 4y ago
  user hostility. there are tons of reports on /r/Twitter about phone number requirements and other sign-up flow bugs.
WesleyLivesay 4y ago
I feel like Tweetdeck fixes 99% of the UI problems with Twitter, even in a mobile browser. UI clean of suggested tweet garbage, pure chronological feed, just a more compact view, the list goes on and on.
matusf 4y ago
It's more of a cure of symptoms rather than a cause, but these uBlock Origin filters work for me. They hide the signup popup. There is also a filer list called EasyList Cookie[0], which hides the cookies popup. twitter.com##div#layers div[data-testid="sheetDialog"]:upward(div[role="group"][tabindex="0"]) twitter.com##html:style(overflow: auto !important;) 0: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_cookie https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_co...
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Maybe it's a band-aid over a chainsaw wound, but the add-on "Tweak New Twitter" turns twitter into precisely what I expected Twitter to be. I see only actual tweets from people I follow (not uncommented retweets). No trending anything. No popups/popovers from twitter itself. It's a little quiet compared to life without it, but that's not such a bad thing.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
On the one hand, I’m invested enough in Twitter now that I don’t think any of these things would bother me with the benefit of hindsight. I get enough value out of Twitter as a social space that future me would recommend just sucking it up and getting an account. I like that I can still use a fairly low-engagement-driving chronological view (even if they keep trying to kill it, only to backpedal each time). I hate the embedded browser, but as the author notes this is more of a platform-wide problem. But here’s the thing: I never would have listened to future me about any of this had Twitter not been freely browsable when I started to give it a try. I wasn’t opposed to a closed social network even then—I was fairly active on Facebook at the same time. But they’re used in vastly different ways. I never would have understood the appeal of Twitter at all if I needed to sign up just to see all the weird rando stuff I’ve since come to follow and appreciate.
riffic 4y ago
I like to call it user hostility. You would not believe the amount of disdain Twitter, Inc, has for its users. What's cute is that Twitter has always been a walled-garden, since its founding. We have better alternatives now. Don't matter though, because there's a centralization/decentralization pendulum in big picture computing trends. If you skate to where the puck is going to be (not where it's been), we're in the middle of a swing to the decentralization side. Look at W3C recommendation ActivityPub (a specification for the federated social web with a vibrant and fun ecosystem of communities). You may know of Mastodon, its biggest implementation. Or, for the free speech* types out there, just host a WordPress site where you agree with the terms of the AUP.
Lamad123 4y ago
The problem is even when you sign up, they restrict your account for commenting or liking something!! Now they want your phone number!!! Fuck you Agorwawol!! I hope this musk do something about it, although I doubt it!! They are all scumbags!!
- userbinator 4y ago
  They ask for a phone number even for mere read-only access.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Terry_Roll 4y ago
Too many bots on Twitter passing the Turin test.
brettermeier 4y ago
Offtopic, but the "bad design" of Reddit is the old one, not the new one :P
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
goldtownjac 4y ago
Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service that is hostile to them_. Especially because you and I both know that these workarounds aren't going to work forever, and soon enough you'll be scrambling for another hole in the wall. Cut the cord. You don't need twitter. You don't need reddit, which has been employing similar patterns recently. The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Take some time to reflect on your relationship to this technology and the people/ideas whose presence in your life/mind is dependent on it.
- grumbel 4y ago
  > The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Barely. The amount of content that is locked in Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Co. is enormous and I have never managed to find anything that can remotely compete with them. Worse yet, most alternatives are just clones of those services, they don't really change anything fundamentally. If they would ever get successful, they would go down the very same path. See imgur, which started as an image-sharing-but-good site and is now just another site trying to force you into their mobile app. At this point I think the only way to solve this is legislation that forces those companies to open up the data and not wall it away. GDPR already did that for users personal data. The upcoming Digital Markets Act will force messaging services to interact with each other and maybe the walled gardens will be the next target.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    I agree with you about content but maybe disagree about the cure. Legislation might not hurt, but if an alternative became popular that was more or less a clone, except it was federated or decentralized, it would also be enough. The "regular" web and email get a lot of criticism for various things, but they can be thought of as federated platforms people adopted. They're the glue that makes these other things usable. I'm not advocating for anything in particular, but if you could get enough people to start using a federated alternative, I think it would be enough.
bluescrn 4y ago
Has anybody developed an app-nag-blocker yet? Or even better, why can't we say goodbye to the 'mobile web' and have the option for mobile browsers to always load the real (desktop) site?
teekert 4y ago
I don't click on twitter links anymore, when I start scrolling some black screen covers my entire screen and you can't scroll back! I mean, we moan when some site breaks our back button here, twitter breaks back scrolling! People invariably suggest to replace the twitter part of the url with nitter, I'm not doing that every time, so maybe HN could do it by default? F twitter man, it's worse than that mess reddit (when not logged in, using the website, as I do).
lizard_heart 4y ago
[Tweaks for Twitter](https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/ https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/) fixes this issue. It’s great when small indie developers can improve the web for all of us and this is a great example.

295 points by matrixagent 4y ago

It's really not hard to just..... not use twitter. I've had an account since nearly ten years ago and maybe logged in or posted 5 or 6 tweets, nearly a decade ago, then just stopped using it completely. Now, on rare occasions, I open a twitter thread, read some particularly relevant content (to me), click any links available and bug right out again until months later. Or I used to until they did one more shitty little thing in terms of making logins even to scroll a few moments obligatory. So, nitter then, if the original Twaddler link is something I absolutely think is worth checking out for a few moments. As for actually participating in that toxic, naval gazing shit show of hostile tribalism, insipid 140 character nonsense and random incoherent snark, no thanks. I can't even fathom why so many people give a damn at all.

xg15 4y ago

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.

eminence32 4y ago
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 4y ago
[deleted]
pseudo0 4y ago
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.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Opening a private window clears cookies, which typically resets these kinds of things.
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Just block Twitter from setting cookies and you won't need to keep manually deleting them.
makeworld 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
MockObject 4y ago
I browse it with an incognito window.

eminence32 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
HellsMaddy 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >the obvious strategy is to make apps as hard to use as possible. And this is exactly what they're doing. They as in facebook and twitter.
brimble 4y ago
No, it's very confusing. I also found Facebook too confusing to use back when I briefly tried it around 2009. A friend who'd been on it since it was still exclusive to some universities assured me it made a lot more sense a year or two before that, but by then, it was too confusing for me and I bounced off fast. Maybe it's on purpose?

Havoc 4y ago

The quality of the experience is also going down. My feed is rapidly approaching 50% ads by pixel count now.

emerged 4y ago

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.

hackernewds 4y ago
You seem to have a lot of biases about large swaths of people
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kbelder 4y ago
  Particularly excrement-spreaders and twitter posters. But I repeat myself.
- svnpenn 4y ago
  You seem to be salty.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Walled gardens have proven over and over again that the only model capable of respecting users is communication via an open protocol. If you can't take your entire profile and move it to a raspherry pi in your living room on a forked server via a forked client (possibly losing your handle) and continue communicating with your social network then this is inevitable.

saagarjha 4y ago

> My other accounts don't have it yet, so I wasn't able to confirm if it identifies the account. It's an encrypted session, to identify your account to Twitter. It's encrypted to prevent an outside party from figuring out which user shared the link, but if you share multiple links from the same session and someone knows you were the source of one of them, they'd be able to link the other ones to you as well.

mostlysimilar 4y ago

This drives me insane. Does nobody develop software for actual humans anymore?

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
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.
rado 4y ago
No, the goal is metrics leading to bonuses and promotions. UX has been User Exploitation for a decade now.
threeseed 4y ago
Of course. But they just don't prioritise the interests of developers and technical people who are often the ones writing these blog posts.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Yes but not the humans primarily using the software - for the humans that want to extract profit from those human's eyeballs.
topspin 4y ago
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 4y ago

Bit off topic, but I managed to use old reddit on windows 98 not that long ago

standardUser 4y ago

"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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dmart 4y ago

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.

threeseed 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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.
- Someone 4y ago
  > 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. I always use the (small) button in the top left of the screen that appears left of the clock, e.g. “◀ Twitter”.
nneonneo 4y ago
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)
4y ago

allenu 4y ago

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.

rado 4y ago

The rampant tracking is a ticking time bomb.

smegsicle 4y ago
how would you expect it to go off?
- rado 4y ago
  There will be a huge scandal when somebody's personal info leak leads to irreparable damage: exposed political affiliation, health issues, sexual orientation etc.
  - smegsicle 4y ago
    i guess so, maybe a massive leak across several sensitive demographics? just seems like boiling the frog how things like doxing is now mostly ignorable outside whatever immediate drama-circle is involved- even hunter biden's laptop is just, "who doesn't smoke crack?" and "of course he's involved with shady deals, who isn't?" ot: still haven't seen the eli5/timeline of the relationship between ukraine and the dem party, maybe i've only heard exaggerations..

egypturnash 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  "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.

ajmurmann 4y ago

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!

nabaraz 4y ago
I use Reddit is fun app and there is an option to use external browser. So clicking on Twitter link in Reddit app loads Twitter app for me.

woodruffw 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > 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.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  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.

thewebcount 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
grumbel 4y ago
Reddit doesn't make it very obvious that there are subreddits on the site or how to find and navigate them. The front page is just memes, which makes the site not look all that useful. A normal web forum or Usenet in contrast has the hierarchy of groups/forums always directly visible. Even 4chan has a big box with all the boards on their first page.
hemloc_io 4y ago
Twitter is functionally a giant group chat of all your follows. Impossible to get into until the algo kicks in for me.
marssaxman 4y ago
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.
silisili 4y ago
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...

pipeline_peak 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

bitwize 4y ago

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 4y ago
In case anyone doesn’t know the reference: https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4 https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4

throwaway81523 4y ago

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.

manmal 4y ago
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 4y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 4y ago
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.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Disagree with that assessment. The readers go where the good authors are as well - and so it is with Groupon, Doordash, Etsy, etc
userbinator 4y ago
You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. For a very long time, if you went to mobile.twitter.com and set your User-Agent to that of some old browser, you'd get a sane plain-HTML version. Apparently you can still get plain HTML if you use Googlebot instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464280

anothernewdude 4y ago

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.

Animats 4y ago

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.

dymk 4y ago

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/mohaicophfnifehkkkdbcejkflmgfkof?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...

lobocinza 4y ago
> assuming you don't mind read-only interaction That can be framed as a feature.
pmoriarty 4y ago
I just do it manually: Replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.net", keeping the rest of the URL the same.
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  wow! that is nit!! but unfortunately doesnt render retweets
- dymk 4y ago
  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.
Tenoke 4y ago
For what is worth, I'd much rather just create an account than install an extension (especially since sometimes one of my many extensions ends up slowing the whole browser and I have to hunt which one is it). It's not like I don't have thousands of accounts to random sites anyway and it typically takes less time than confirming if an extension is good.
- rektide 4y ago

zeruch 4y ago

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.

riffic 4y ago
Mastodon is really my favorite thing out there. quick disclaimer I am a mod of the /r/Mastodon subreddit so there may be a bit of a bias there (not really though, I just like the software).
- zeruch 4y ago
  It's got it's quirks (and could improve in that regard) but its consistent and has a much more responsive ecosystem. I'm pleased with it so far.

grishka 4y ago

It's really funny how Twitter manages to somehow do both these things at the same time: 1. Promise everyone to decentralize itself, aka the "bluesky" project. Except it's been a thing for ~2 years and exactly zero meaningful progress has been made. Related: didn't Jack say they wanted to open up the API again? 2. Become ever more manipulative and get in my way more and more with its engagement growth bullshit.

pcmoney 4y ago
The did open up the API again, or rather are in the process of doing so. Look at the new essential access tier and v2 endpoints. Its early but they are launching more and more.
- grishka 4y ago
  Okay so there still are nonsensical per-app limits, and they still act as if building a third-party client is not a use case that exists. Yeah, right, because of course people primarily use APIs of social media services for research and business. How hard would it be to simply comment out all the checks in the code to give everyone the same access official apps have? Why is it taking them months? It's as if they don't actually want to open up their API.
  - pcmoney 4y ago
    I think there is a balance here. Open the API and make shareholders happy. If they cannibalize their own traffic they violate fiduciary duty and get sued into the ground. Otherwise they inject ads into the API endpoints themselves and make it part of TOS to not strip them out. You can pay for higher and higher access levels but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. They have spent and spend millions and millions building that physical infrastructure.
    - grishka 4y ago
      > fiduciary duty Ah yes, the one reason why everything eventually turns to shit unless it's a nonprofit. > but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. But they are contemplating doing exactly that with the Bluesky project. Not just that, but federation, as in, you'd be able to interact with tweets without a Twitter account, but from an account you host on your own infrastructure. This is why I'm asking the question in my original comment. These two efforts feel so misaligned to me. If you're going to federate, you could as well provide completely unauthenticated API to access public content — you'll have to anyway.

holler 4y ago

Agree with the core points, and it's not just Twitter these days. Perhaps some of it is in the name of spam prevention? But it's hard not to be turned off when every social site's mobile web url tries to get me to install an app or flat out says "not available on mobile web". For anyone looking for alternatives, I've been building https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im and welcome you to check it out. Sqwok is all about live discussion with fully public topical chatrooms, a simple interface, small community, and driven by desire for building a better place for conversation on the web.

lbrito 4y ago

My reaction to pushy "sign up to view" is nearly always of revulsion and mentally pledging to never ever sign up. I'm obviously not alone here.

bombcar 4y ago
I refuse to sign into my rarely used account specifically for this reason.
kayson 4y ago
Ditto. Instagram and tik tok are the biggest offenders in my mind. I will never ever install either.

SubiculumCode 4y ago

Sometimes a project does not need innovation, and pushes to monetize only breaks what people liked. If it is even mildly profitable, better in my mind to not shoot yourself in the foot by changing what people like.

civilized 4y ago

I literally can't make an account on Twitter. Attempting causes it to throw an error. Probably for the best.

riffic 4y ago
user hostility. there are tons of reports on /r/Twitter about phone number requirements and other sign-up flow bugs.

WesleyLivesay 4y ago

I feel like Tweetdeck fixes 99% of the UI problems with Twitter, even in a mobile browser. UI clean of suggested tweet garbage, pure chronological feed, just a more compact view, the list goes on and on.

matusf 4y ago

It's more of a cure of symptoms rather than a cause, but these uBlock Origin filters work for me. They hide the signup popup. There is also a filer list called EasyList Cookie[0], which hides the cookies popup. twitter.com##div#layers div[data-testid="sheetDialog"]:upward(div[role="group"][tabindex="0"]) twitter.com##html:style(overflow: auto !important;) 0: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_cookie https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_co...

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

Maybe it's a band-aid over a chainsaw wound, but the add-on "Tweak New Twitter" turns twitter into precisely what I expected Twitter to be. I see only actual tweets from people I follow (not uncommented retweets). No trending anything. No popups/popovers from twitter itself. It's a little quiet compared to life without it, but that's not such a bad thing.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

On the one hand, I’m invested enough in Twitter now that I don’t think any of these things would bother me with the benefit of hindsight. I get enough value out of Twitter as a social space that future me would recommend just sucking it up and getting an account. I like that I can still use a fairly low-engagement-driving chronological view (even if they keep trying to kill it, only to backpedal each time). I hate the embedded browser, but as the author notes this is more of a platform-wide problem. But here’s the thing: I never would have listened to future me about any of this had Twitter not been freely browsable when I started to give it a try. I wasn’t opposed to a closed social network even then—I was fairly active on Facebook at the same time. But they’re used in vastly different ways. I never would have understood the appeal of Twitter at all if I needed to sign up just to see all the weird rando stuff I’ve since come to follow and appreciate.

riffic 4y ago

I like to call it user hostility. You would not believe the amount of disdain Twitter, Inc, has for its users. What's cute is that Twitter has always been a walled-garden, since its founding. We have better alternatives now. Don't matter though, because there's a centralization/decentralization pendulum in big picture computing trends. If you skate to where the puck is going to be (not where it's been), we're in the middle of a swing to the decentralization side. Look at W3C recommendation ActivityPub (a specification for the federated social web with a vibrant and fun ecosystem of communities). You may know of Mastodon, its biggest implementation. Or, for the free speech* types out there, just host a WordPress site where you agree with the terms of the AUP.

Lamad123 4y ago

The problem is even when you sign up, they restrict your account for commenting or liking something!! Now they want your phone number!!! Fuck you Agorwawol!! I hope this musk do something about it, although I doubt it!! They are all scumbags!!

userbinator 4y ago
They ask for a phone number even for mere read-only access.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Terry_Roll 4y ago

Too many bots on Twitter passing the Turin test.

brettermeier 4y ago

Offtopic, but the "bad design" of Reddit is the old one, not the new one :P

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

goldtownjac 4y ago

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service that is hostile to them_. Especially because you and I both know that these workarounds aren't going to work forever, and soon enough you'll be scrambling for another hole in the wall. Cut the cord. You don't need twitter. You don't need reddit, which has been employing similar patterns recently. The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Take some time to reflect on your relationship to this technology and the people/ideas whose presence in your life/mind is dependent on it.

grumbel 4y ago
> The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Barely. The amount of content that is locked in Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Co. is enormous and I have never managed to find anything that can remotely compete with them. Worse yet, most alternatives are just clones of those services, they don't really change anything fundamentally. If they would ever get successful, they would go down the very same path. See imgur, which started as an image-sharing-but-good site and is now just another site trying to force you into their mobile app. At this point I think the only way to solve this is legislation that forces those companies to open up the data and not wall it away. GDPR already did that for users personal data. The upcoming Digital Markets Act will force messaging services to interact with each other and maybe the walled gardens will be the next target.
- derbOac 4y ago
  I agree with you about content but maybe disagree about the cure. Legislation might not hurt, but if an alternative became popular that was more or less a clone, except it was federated or decentralized, it would also be enough. The "regular" web and email get a lot of criticism for various things, but they can be thought of as federated platforms people adopted. They're the glue that makes these other things usable. I'm not advocating for anything in particular, but if you could get enough people to start using a federated alternative, I think it would be enough.

bluescrn 4y ago

Has anybody developed an app-nag-blocker yet? Or even better, why can't we say goodbye to the 'mobile web' and have the option for mobile browsers to always load the real (desktop) site?

teekert 4y ago

I don't click on twitter links anymore, when I start scrolling some black screen covers my entire screen and you can't scroll back! I mean, we moan when some site breaks our back button here, twitter breaks back scrolling! People invariably suggest to replace the twitter part of the url with nitter, I'm not doing that every time, so maybe HN could do it by default? F twitter man, it's worse than that mess reddit (when not logged in, using the website, as I do).

lizard_heart 4y ago

[Tweaks for Twitter](https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/ https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/) fixes this issue. It’s great when small indie developers can improve the web for all of us and this is a great example.