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Ask HN: Why is the Twitter UI so bad?

14 points by rrradical ↗ HN
I've been using a third-party Twitter client on my phone for a number of years. I'm no power user, but it fits my needs perfectly.

Recently I've been checking a specific account for automated covid vaccine availability info. I opened it on my laptop so I could refresh it while doing other work.

I could not believe how awful the official Twitter UI is. This is the tweet timeline that I see on my laptop for this account:

- Pinned tweet

- Tweet

- Promoted tweet (takes a full screen)

- Tweet

- Tweet

- Who to Follow (list of suggested accounts) (half a screen)

- Tweet

- Tweet

- Topics to Follow (half a screen)

- Promoted tweet (full screen)

- Then a pretty a reasonable mix of tweets and promoted tweets

That's 5 screens of scrolling to see just the first 6 tweets. And this is Twitter, whose whole concept is based on short, digestible bits of information. I think it's fair to say if the service had started with this UI, it never would have taken off in the first place. I imagine the ecosystem thrives on most content generating users using 3rd party clients, and then serving ads to the suckers who don't even know there are other clients.

So, I understand the ads. The company needs to make money, and that's the best way to do that they've come up with. But what about the 'suggested' bits? Are they actually supposed to be helpful, or are they revenue generating as well? There's no way to turn them off, so I'd think they have to be.

I don't pretend to know better than them, so I'm sure there's good reasons, lots of data, and many hours of meetings behind the design, but I really am mystified. Why did it evolve this way and how does this service even still exist?

20 comments

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emptyparadise
It keeps lots of engineers and designers employed.
throwaway4good
It is n years old and was started as a sort of group sms service. In social media ui doesn’t matter as much as network effects.
enhdless
This goes for a lot of services – why do YouTube recommendations take up the majority of its homepage? Why are Instagram account suggestions pinned to its sidebar? Why are there news article recommendations below the article that you just read? Suggestions are meant to help users discover content. It's like how there were curated link directories before search engines existed, to help users discover new websites on the internet. This is the same idea, but limited to a specific platform so that you spend time on only their share of the internet.

As an extreme example, what if all forms of suggestion/recommendation/curation features on all platforms were gone, and only a search bar exists? Then your engagement is limited to the scope of your own thoughts, and you would just leave when you have nothing in mind that you want to search (and thus see fewer ads, generate less revenue, etc). I think there is a balance to be achieved, but companies certainly error on the side of more opportunities to drive engagement.

Anyway, your best bet is probably to cook up a browser extension/script to hide what you don't want to see. Maybe it even exists already. Though of course, the DOM probably changes all the time.

rrradical
I actually thought about youtube as a contrasting example. Youtube has their recommendations on their homepage— that makes sense to me. I haven't chosen any content yet, so they want to help me.

But in this case on Twitter I've already chosen a specific profile to view, and now they're obscuring that with recommendations.

enhdless
But then where do you go once you're done viewing that one specific profile? You probably close the tab because you finished catching up on their tweets, and/or go to some other webpage that they linked to in one of their tweets.

The suggestions implore you to continue browsing on Twitter, instead of leaving Twitter altogether. The cynical take is that the purpose is to drive engagement and revenue, while the UX design take is that this helps users find more conversations that they're interested in, that they wouldn't otherwise find ("you follow Foo, people who follow Foo also follow Bar, so you might like Bar").

rrradical
Well if it were designed as an earnest feature, it would go on the side right? I can't imagine any UX pro saying 'let's plop this right in the middle of their requested content'. So I see it as pretty cynical. Any time software says 'I know what the user wants more than they do' I tend to think that's a mistake. But I think the consequences of this sort of thing plays out over a long period of a time. Maybe past when some executive leaves for a new job.
tracer4201
I don’t know the answer to your question. I read on kindle and the main page is just a bunch of up sell ads.
Jermaine_Jabi
To add to the list, searching in the Android app brings you to a page without a search bar and you need to scroll up to search, after waiting for the recommended content to load
[deleted]
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jesterson
Wonder about it as well, however Twitter UI is nowhere near as bad as Instagram is. Mobile client is barely bearable, but desktop version is just as bad as it can be.

And it's not a bootstrapped startup with limited budget, it's a multi-billion company where few millions to fix it (that's including c-level bonuses) is just a rounding error in accounting.

Would be interesting to hear reasonable explanations.

easton
It’s by design I think to prevent scraping and adblocking, neither of which you can do (easily) in the Instagram app. Since it started on mobile, it’s not like they cut off a bunch of users like they would if they did the same thing to Facebook.

(And, presumptively, they provide access to a fancy Instagram for Business for a few bucks that allows you to post from desktop, but I don’t know about that one. I know Facebook’s API is limited to businesses acting on their own pages for the most part these days, because at one point I was looking into getting my Instagram feed into a better interface and realized it wasn’t possible.)

dehrmann
Twitter's fundamental problem is the interaction model doesn't scale, so getting started has a high learning curve. Since it's hard to drive organic user engagement, they force feed engagement. I'm sure the metrics show they work, but they're at a relative maxima for tweet-style interactions.
cblconfederate
you can't link to a specific tweet. only to topmost tweet. There are threads with hundreds of tweets.

everything is clickable by accident and the back button often breaks. no option to have paged navigation

Thankfully they have chronological mode which kind of helps because i can keep up with what i subscribed to, and they finally stopped 'randomly' changing my setting to it.

ElectricMind
Because according to "day in life of Twitter developer" day is filled with 5 different meals and snacks and call to gf and end of the day at 5 PM? so what you expect ? :D
hypertele-Xii
The single worst part in Twitter UI is that when you're viewing a tweet that is a reply to another, there's no way to see the tweet being replied to. It just says "replying to @user". How am I supposed to follow conversation?
ck0d3r
Is any good third-party twitter client? Tweetbot was a bit better I recall