Funny, I literally just noticed this 3 minutes ago. Was replying to a tweet with two people on the reply but couldn't figure out how to get what I was trying to say under the limit so I clicked out of reply. Then I decided to try again and was confused at why the auto reply names that are usually there were gone.
Huge fan of this, being able to express more of what you want to respond about is great.
> While Twitter is making these changes as a means of trying to simplify its service for users, it’s really just swapping out one set of rules for another. And that can be super confusing [link a].
This is spot on and buried further down the article. To me, the UX of this change just makes Twitter even more complicated now. Their UI/UX is getting so bogged down with rules that it's incredibly hard to explain Twitter to a new user. It's even confusing for a current active Twitter user to keep track of what's what.
I recently helped a friend get setup to use Twitter and until I had to explain it out loud for the first time to someone who didn't already use the service, I never realized how confusing all the rules are. They are not black and white like they used to be, and it's not easy to follow.
The worst part is that they make big splashy announcements about these changes, but then don't actually roll the changes out until much later. Not counting @-replies was announced nearly a year ago (see https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-from-14...), for instance, but it's only taking effect now. The long delay is guaranteed to confuse people, lots of whom will have (understandably) assumed that Twitter stopped counting @-replies when they saw a headline in the news reading "BREAKING: Twitter stops counting @-replies."
If i remember correctly they ACTUALLY enacted that a long while ago. Just ... you could only access it via the mobile twitter clients. What changed today is that they updated the website itself to act like that.
I've only recently started casually using Twitter. I have no idea how anything works. Threads make no sense to me. Am I supposed to respond to myself? How do @-mentions work? There seem to be a few different rules, but I have no idea what they are or when they apply. What counts against the character limit? It seems like links don't, but I'm not sure exactly how that works, either.
As far as I can tell, Twitter is a site with nondeterministic UX where the same folks who insist on civility on HN get to call other people monsters for their politics.
I, too, started using Twitter semi-seriously as of late. I'd like to see Twitter conversations in a tree interface, like Hacker News and reddit. It's too much scrolling around to see such small nuggets of text.
It's a terrible service for almost every user who thinks their microblog messages are even being seen and the UI is cluttered with noise. The design of the platform itself prevents any sort of meaningful conversation; so it's not good for that.
It's really good to follow celebrities, experts or other personalities as a news digest though. And a good place to find a pulse on social topics. I killed my account I had for many years and just use it to search news and follow certain people or tech topics.
It's not worth the time investment for me to publish. It might be for those trying to build an audience to sell stuff to or get speaking engagements or prep their profile for optics to get a new job. But even then, most people would be better off focusing on building an email list instead of a follower list for those things.
I agree. I just recently signed up for the very first time, simply because news stories seem to break on twitter first. I can't see why I would bother with personal followers. Seems to work great, like you said, as a central place to receive updates for You Tube channels, journalists and industry experts.
When Twitter was simpler without all these new "features" the community did a significantly better job finding its own practices for using it effectively than Twitter has ever done since it started trying to undo all of that.
When I originally tried Twitter ~6 years ago, I found reading these soups of compressed writing, forced bad grammar, tags and @'s so weird, cryptic and confusing that I gave up immediately. It took me a while to rejoin and slowly get to 'get' it. I don't really imagine any of these new rules will be any more confusing to new users than the wild west of Twitter behaviours that was and still will be the norm.
I really wish Twitter would work on better tools and policies to prevent stalking, harassing and toxic behaviour. I understand it's a hard problem (no, "just remove nazi, sexist and racist pigs!" does not cut it at all) but I'd like to see them try.
I had the exact same experience. Could NOT for the life of me figure it out for the reasons you cite. Came back after the election, mostly because I kept seeing it as the single source of breaking news (NOT Facebook, my traditional social media platform). And I can confidently say I had it figured out! Until now.
I can't believe how long it took for them to actually implement this. This was a braindead obvious change to make ever since it was clear no one cared about sending tweets by SMS anymore.
Now they need to do the same with hashtags. Fitting what I want to say and including more than 1 hashtag (usually I just want 2, sometimes 3) is really difficult for me.
They can already do what you're suggesting. I actually include the hashtag mid-message sometimes for that reason. You're right, though, and I don't know how to fix it. I see lots of hashtags on Instagram posts and it's not amazing but whatever.
Actually I don't even think the hashtags need to be visible, necessarily (although some people start viral movements with them, like #blacklivesmatter, so I'm not sure). Like when I add "#boardgames #gamedev #magicaloctopus" or something like that, I really don't care that they're visible to people seeing my tweet in their feed, I just want my tweet to appear when people are looking for those topics.
If they do the same for hashtags, they shouldn't appear in the tweet body. This seems like it could lead to what tags on Instagram are like (people piling on 20+ tags), which is pretty ridiculous.
I wonder if as they started to make this change they started finding numerous areas of the code where devs went "eh, it'll never be more than 140 chars... that's our thing".
I don't think this change invalidates it. What they're basically doing is moving the list of reply-to's out of the body of the text into another field, which is being shown differently in the UI. What remains in the text field is still <=140 characters.
Speaking of interesting writeups, their writeup on Snowflake, the system they use to generate unique 64-bit integers for tweets is itself a great read: https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake
You reply as normal and then retweet your own reply. All of your follower's will be able to see the tweet regardless of if they're following whoever you responded to.
i just tried this out on the web. if you reply to a tweet, and that tweet mentions someone else's name, your tweet will have both their names included just like before (except their names are now in a link above the textbox). however if you want to remove their names, you have to click on the link, click on their checkbox to deselect them.
so it's harder to remove people from a reply, and harder for others to remove you from threads you don't want to be a part of.
The problem of Twitter is that many people (including me) have tried to use the platform n number of times, but either it is too cryptic or too useless for us in day to day life. I don't use Facebook much, I do use HN/Reddit/Quora and sometimes stackoverflow. I use the platforms which teach me something, reddit taught me a lot of things across all domains, HN teaches me new things everyday (it is also my news source), Quora and Stackoverflow are also nice, they give me some advantage.
but I can't say the same with Twitter, if you see my twitter page, I use it only to tweet to nasty companies who keep pestering me with SPAM text messages despite my DO NOT DISTURB feature!
For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium, I really do not understand why they do not make this a feature. A friend had got a counterfeit phone from an Indian ecommerce site, he found out after a month, after calling the site, they said "sorry, 7 day return policy", I put that on twitter, one month later, he got his money back.
I think this is making the same mistake that you see from a lot of new programmers asking "what should I write?" Unless there's a specific group you want to follow, maybe Twitter isn't for you.
On the other hand, if you have some interests and you know some people who are active online about those issues, odds are extremely high that they're on Twitter. Follow them, then follow people they retweet, then follow people they retweet, and so on. Don't hesitate to unfollow people who are crapping up your feed with stuff you're not interested in.
Twitter is a beautiful web of connections, and you really only need a handful of starting points to build a feed tailored to your interests.
That's sort of my point though, unless you have that one person or group you know you want to follow there's no reason to sign up. Which makes sense, but isn't really good for Twitter.
I use Twitter to keep up efficiently with all the things I care about. I think where Twitter shines is as a very finely tuned filter for specific interests. I am interested in certain specific health topics. I am interested in certain tech topics. I also am interested somewhat in some niche political/economic topics but don't want to see THE BIG POLITICAL STORY OF THE DAY because that's everywhere. I have three different accounts for each of these interests. If someone crosses topics, like posts THE BIG POLITICAL STORY OF THE DAY politics in the tech or health account, and politics has been leaking into just about every social stream on the planet lately, I block the retweet source for that account or drop them if they tweet off-topic enough. So I think that's the strength of Twitter right now vs all the other social sites: With some work you can create a relatively distraction free feed of highly specific news. In contrast, on Google News I tried to do this, but you can't get rid of the "Top Headlines". It won't let you do it, probably because somebody somewhere relishes the power of telling everybody what to think is THE BIG POLITICAL STORY OF THE DAY.
I found twitter incredibly useless and had many fits and starts. Now I'm at the point where I use the mobile app everyday multiple times per day.
I gave up tweeting entirely. I have 6 followers and only 3 of them are people I know in real life, however none of them tweet. So twitter isn't a text messaging replacement for me.
I just accepted that Facebook is a much better place for me to put a thought and get feedback from people I know.
I follow ~150 people. The main blobs are pros in a video game I play seriously, and politics professionals, and science/tech professionals, and media outlets.
I don't follow any celebrities or people who I think are just brand pushers.
Now every time I go to twitter I know that I will have a new set of interesting content to pursue. New conversations about strategies or video archives from the game universe. Breaking news with commentary by politics minds I care about (no hacks or rank partisans). Interesting science and tech links from other like minded people who are keeping up.
The real problem with twitter is that it is completely nonobvious how I eventually came to like it. I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.
> I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.
The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client:
Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them.
That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.
Twitter's problem is that the vast majority of tweets are never seen, or barely seen, by anyone. This means that for most people, there is no incentive, in the form of social acceptance, to tweet anything.
I've actually grown a bit fond of twitter over the last months. For some communities, it's very much the place where the news happens, and you can watch it unfold life.
That being said, I wish they'd do more with the potential they have. For example, I have tried at various times to find out what's happening when I heard the distant noises of a large demonstration (I'm in Berlin, Germany and it's a weekly occurrence, at least in the summer). Not once did I succeed with twitter's search, not even in cases where I later found out that there were many tweets about the event.
There's a lot of hate circulating around my Twitter feed this morning because of this, but I think it makes perfect sense. New users signing up for Twitter have to get longer usernames - everything else is taken. Then, when they try to reply to a couple of their friends, they only have like 50 characters to type a message. It's a non-starter. 140 characters enforces concise thoughts but somewhere around 90 characters you basically can't express yourself anymore.
This change evens the playing field for new users, allowing them to use the platform the same way og users like @alex and @ow do (having meaningful threads with 3+ people.)
1. They failed to provide a way to remove @s from thread replies. Edit: Whoops, there is a UI for this. Which jarringly takes you to a different dialog and back! So my new complaint is that they made it harder and weird. I stand by my opinion that they screwed this up.
2. They failed to provide a way to change the visibility, aka 'dot replies'
They fixed one thing, and broke two. Par for the course for Twitter UI designers. It has always baffled me how consistently bad every part of the Twitter UI is. Just try using lists sometime.
You can remove people from replies. Click on the usernames in the 'Replying to @personA and @personB' and it'll open a list of people you're replying to, each with a checkbox that can be used to remove them.
Dot replies haven't been necessary since Twitter added the ability to retweet yourself. You respond to someone as usual and then retweet it, so all of your follower's will see it, even if they aren't following the person you responded to.
It can definitely be a bit confusing for old users (and the UX for the first one isn't the greatest), but nothing's been removed, it's just been changed.
Whether or not you think they're still necessary, dot replies are a different thing than retweets. The ability to reply while at the same time making that reply visible to your followers has been removed.
There are actually even more things broken. Just incredible, for one simple feature change. Every reply-to-self now helpfully includes your name right below your name. It's confusing, looks ridiculous, and it's everywhere now. Also, you should see what notifications look like now that threads can have unlimited participants. Each notification lists every. person.
Does this mean you can now reply to an unbounded number of people? i.e. one enormous reply chain where new people hit reply on the latest reply to add their own handle to the list. Possible?
Twitter is gradually moving to final policies that will actually get me tweeting regularly. When I'm able to publish my memoir -- which incidentally, is coming along very nicely -- as a single tweet, I will know that I, and Twitter, have finally arrived. God speed the memoir tweets!
I'm not the kind of person who hates changes, but everything that Twitter does certainly irritates me. I liked the service ten years ago when it was IRC-like. This is just one step towards their target of making it annoyingly complicated for power users. I've had this for weeks on Android (A/B testing?) and I was kind of hoping they'd drop it... nope.
The problem is unwanted notifications of conversations (easy way to target you with spam, for example) you don't want to participate in. And there is no easy way to opt out.
now each time you click the search icon on the left hand side, when you do a search in the pop up box, rather than inline the results in the pop-up search window (all still on the left hand side), it now automatically generates a new column. for each search. that appears to the right of the last column in tweetdeck.
as a ux decision this is awful. searches in tweetdeck were ephemeral. you search, 99% of the time you close your search once satisfied with the results, and that was it. the number of times you actually want to convert a search into a permanent column is very small.
as it is with the changes to search every single time you search now you instantly generate a new column. if you dont delete each search the columns just keep on building up and up. this is an awful and unrequested change to tweetdeck search, and there seems to be zero public facing community managers for tweetdeck who this can be raised with.
I am actually a fan of this change, simply because the enclaves on Twitter have expanded pretty significantly, and communicating with the whole group is pretty hard in a single conversation tree...
I think it's a bit awkward in the UX, but at least now you haven't wasted 110 characters on people's variably-lengthed names...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 67.9 ms ] threadHuge fan of this, being able to express more of what you want to respond about is great.
This is spot on and buried further down the article. To me, the UX of this change just makes Twitter even more complicated now. Their UI/UX is getting so bogged down with rules that it's incredibly hard to explain Twitter to a new user. It's even confusing for a current active Twitter user to keep track of what's what.
I recently helped a friend get setup to use Twitter and until I had to explain it out loud for the first time to someone who didn't already use the service, I never realized how confusing all the rules are. They are not black and white like they used to be, and it's not easy to follow.
[link a] https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-hard-e9ff...
As far as I can tell, Twitter is a site with nondeterministic UX where the same folks who insist on civility on HN get to call other people monsters for their politics.
I sure don't get it.
It's really good to follow celebrities, experts or other personalities as a news digest though. And a good place to find a pulse on social topics. I killed my account I had for many years and just use it to search news and follow certain people or tech topics.
It's not worth the time investment for me to publish. It might be for those trying to build an audience to sell stuff to or get speaking engagements or prep their profile for optics to get a new job. But even then, most people would be better off focusing on building an email list instead of a follower list for those things.
I really wish Twitter would work on better tools and policies to prevent stalking, harassing and toxic behaviour. I understand it's a hard problem (no, "just remove nazi, sexist and racist pigs!" does not cut it at all) but I'd like to see them try.
Now they need to do the same with hashtags. Fitting what I want to say and including more than 1 hashtag (usually I just want 2, sometimes 3) is really difficult for me.
Plus the most common tags are all over-saturated at this point, so including many of them reaches more bots than people.
Actually I don't even think the hashtags need to be visible, necessarily (although some people start viral movements with them, like #blacklivesmatter, so I'm not sure). Like when I add "#boardgames #gamedev #magicaloctopus" or something like that, I really don't care that they're visible to people seeing my tweet in their feed, I just want my tweet to appear when people are looking for those topics.
Summary: the probably did find problems like that, but long before this change when they encountered different languages and character sets.
I'm sure running into the int32 limit for object ids was more of a hassle.
Today though, I wouldn't expect it.
Not seeing it on iOS.
Yikes.
so it's harder to remove people from a reply, and harder for others to remove you from threads you don't want to be a part of.
but I can't say the same with Twitter, if you see my twitter page, I use it only to tweet to nasty companies who keep pestering me with SPAM text messages despite my DO NOT DISTURB feature!
For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium, I really do not understand why they do not make this a feature. A friend had got a counterfeit phone from an Indian ecommerce site, he found out after a month, after calling the site, they said "sorry, 7 day return policy", I put that on twitter, one month later, he got his money back.
I feel maybe you haven't been lucky enough to find your content-suppliers.
There's some gold there in the nooks and crannies.
On the other hand, if you have some interests and you know some people who are active online about those issues, odds are extremely high that they're on Twitter. Follow them, then follow people they retweet, then follow people they retweet, and so on. Don't hesitate to unfollow people who are crapping up your feed with stuff you're not interested in.
Twitter is a beautiful web of connections, and you really only need a handful of starting points to build a feed tailored to your interests.
I gave up tweeting entirely. I have 6 followers and only 3 of them are people I know in real life, however none of them tweet. So twitter isn't a text messaging replacement for me.
I just accepted that Facebook is a much better place for me to put a thought and get feedback from people I know.
I follow ~150 people. The main blobs are pros in a video game I play seriously, and politics professionals, and science/tech professionals, and media outlets.
I don't follow any celebrities or people who I think are just brand pushers.
Now every time I go to twitter I know that I will have a new set of interesting content to pursue. New conversations about strategies or video archives from the game universe. Breaking news with commentary by politics minds I care about (no hacks or rank partisans). Interesting science and tech links from other like minded people who are keeping up.
The real problem with twitter is that it is completely nonobvious how I eventually came to like it. I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.
The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client:
Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them.
That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.
And that's fine. Is it OK for other people to get more out of it, though?
That being said, I wish they'd do more with the potential they have. For example, I have tried at various times to find out what's happening when I heard the distant noises of a large demonstration (I'm in Berlin, Germany and it's a weekly occurrence, at least in the summer). Not once did I succeed with twitter's search, not even in cases where I later found out that there were many tweets about the event.
This change evens the playing field for new users, allowing them to use the platform the same way og users like @alex and @ow do (having meaningful threads with 3+ people.)
1. They failed to provide a way to remove @s from thread replies. Edit: Whoops, there is a UI for this. Which jarringly takes you to a different dialog and back! So my new complaint is that they made it harder and weird. I stand by my opinion that they screwed this up.
2. They failed to provide a way to change the visibility, aka 'dot replies'
They fixed one thing, and broke two. Par for the course for Twitter UI designers. It has always baffled me how consistently bad every part of the Twitter UI is. Just try using lists sometime.
Dot replies haven't been necessary since Twitter added the ability to retweet yourself. You respond to someone as usual and then retweet it, so all of your follower's will see it, even if they aren't following the person you responded to.
It can definitely be a bit confusing for old users (and the UX for the first one isn't the greatest), but nothing's been removed, it's just been changed.
With regards to UX, it's debatably more or less confusing, but the functionality is still there.
now each time you click the search icon on the left hand side, when you do a search in the pop up box, rather than inline the results in the pop-up search window (all still on the left hand side), it now automatically generates a new column. for each search. that appears to the right of the last column in tweetdeck.
as a ux decision this is awful. searches in tweetdeck were ephemeral. you search, 99% of the time you close your search once satisfied with the results, and that was it. the number of times you actually want to convert a search into a permanent column is very small.
as it is with the changes to search every single time you search now you instantly generate a new column. if you dont delete each search the columns just keep on building up and up. this is an awful and unrequested change to tweetdeck search, and there seems to be zero public facing community managers for tweetdeck who this can be raised with.
I think it's a bit awkward in the UX, but at least now you haven't wasted 110 characters on people's variably-lengthed names...