The business model where you need to stop your users from hiding ads was not compatible with things like user stylesheets. If CSS compilation didn't obfuscate class names and such, it'd be quite compatible.
Look at the source code of Twitter or Facebook. It's intentionally obfuscated and mangled, probably in part to fuck with ad blockers.
I have a few user stylesheets (even a little custom Firefox extension to block one user's comments on a site I frequent), but the sites I'd really like to use them on largely don't make it possible to do so.
Look at a Facebook ad in your browser's web inspector, for example. The "Sponsored" tag is made up of 31 different randomly named span tags. https://imgur.com/a/AHZL8ko
It took a while to setup, but fixing the problem in the font rendering layer has worked really well. Several years ago - after being annoyed by blurry/bad fonts, extremely bad hinting, and other font problems - I spent a few weeks investigating the way fonts are rendered and a few more weeks comparing many different fonts and various permutations of rendering/hinting methods. The result of all that work included a set of fontconfig files with long lists like this;
<fontconfig>
<alias>
<family>Arial</family>
<prefer><family>Ubuntu</family></prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>Helvetica</family>
<prefer><family>Ubuntu</family></prefer>
</alias>
<!-- Many more aliases that -->
<!-- force fonts to Ubuntu. -->
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer><family>Ubuntu</family></prefer>
</alias>
</fontconfig>
This way, my font overrides happen in any software that uses fontconfig (i.e. most X11 software that uses TrueType fonts).
I assume any problem or slowness I have with a website on Safari in MacOS or iOS using a content blocker is due to the website wanting to track me or otherwise for advertisement purposes.
> Look at a Facebook ad in your browser's web inspector, for example. The "Sponsored" tag is made up of 31 different randomly named span tags. https://imgur.com/a/AHZL8ko
Tangential, but I love the image of a frustrated PM at Facebook hearing the news that "hey, you still have to make this label readable to screenreaders," necessitating an `aria-label` with the plain-text content "Sponsored", which makes all their span-chopping junk completely irrelevant to adblocker rules that can now just look for that string as an anchor :)
Even with user stylesheets targeting elements reliably on social networks is a nightmare. We're approaching a future where the markup isn't even human readable.
You don't need to use website font's. You can configure the browser to use your chosen fonts. It's a normal accessibility option on the browser config page.
The only problem is devs who use fonts for icons, which is as stupid as it sounds.
(It would be nice to also have minimum font weight setting, not just minimum size, because some designers just can't be helped and use <=200. Then most of the issues with typography on the web would be solved.)
The new Twitter font looks so weird, and at the same time, it looks quite strong on the eyes. They should revert it to the classic one and bring back the fleets.
is it actually objective qualities of the font that are giving people headaches, or is it just because it looks different from what the user expects, and twitter users are used to looking at twitter many times a day, so it throws their brain for a loop?
I don't use twitter that much. I find the font uncomfortable to look at on my windows desktop but not my macbook. Especially the left hand navigation bar. so, for me, it's not about the change but about the font in specific rendering environments.
Windows' font rendering just plain sucks compared to macOS, to a point I'm actually getting headaches. I know, subjective anecdata and all of that, but I haven't been able to pinpoint why exactly...
I find handles and other bolded text are objectively difficult to read. Take a look at a bolded 'e' for a prime example; there is not enough whitespace, and the horizontal line is too thin, making it all but disappear in the middle of the bold curve.
While it's hard to prove that this (or anything) directly causes headaches, Chirp has an unusually small x-height (stem width to x-height ratios would normally be around 1:6 for a legible font – Chirp's ratio is 1:4, very small) and an extreme x-height to body height ratio (the capitals are MUCH taller than the non-capitals).
The net effect is that even at the same "font size" you have to squint more to read anything, because non-capital text is very very small and tight relative to the rather large capitals.
> is it actually objective qualities of the font that are giving people headaches
The typeface pulls your left and right eyes toward each other, making you look at it cross eyed. It's incredibly nauseating, like the feeling you have right after stepping off a poorly-designed amusement park ride.
I can't stand this "twitter hates x" trend where articles use a handful of embedded tweets to make their case, but then you look at the engagement on those tweets and they have like 2 likes. Good job, you found a couple of random people on twitter talking to themselves. You can do that for any opinion under the sun.
Maybe people really do hate the font, but use some real numbers to make your case, not this anecdotal vox pop fluff.
Same here. It's like all those sensationalist political / culture war articles that frame some out-there fringe idea as a mainstream agenda (e.g. "Curry considered racist"). Then you actually read past the headline, and it turns out some unknown blogger or tweeter was just looking for attention.
Anyone going purely off of headlines, and taking them at face value, would have an absolutely bizarre worldview by now.
There's something really strange that happened to me for over a year, and it's stopped. I can't remember what it was or why. I think using https://twitter.com (without the www), forcing https, and using Safari. Some combo of those things made the site almost never load properly. Try adding in a WWW or a different browser if you're interested.
I stared it for a good minute thinking maybe I wasn't being served the new font, but no, it's just so similar to Helvetica (Roman) that I have to deliberately look for the differences to tell. I compared Chirp and Helvetica side by side and the only significant differences in the characters themselves are in the upper case J, Q, and R, then lower case g and the numeral 2.
Am I missing something or is it just that I go to twitter so seldom that I assumed it was always Helvetica?
Edit: it seems it's not the font itself, but rather something going on with the rendering making it blurrier for some people than the previous typeface.
Why not try, though? First and foremost, I think it's a good thing that designers are getting work. I also think huge "for fun" webapps are in a particularly advantageous place when it comes to pushing the boundaries of design, mostly because they have people on hand who can do it and who probably want to do it. Next, it's really a low risk preposition.
Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts. Twitter can push boundaries, though. I wish they'd push boundaries more, ala Bertone or Memphis Group, but I guess the risks are larger the more you push the boundaries.
> "Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts. Twitter can push boundaries, though."
What's the difference between Office and Twitter here? Both are apps that should just get out of the way of the content.
Most software should just have native UI that follows the platform guidelines. Unfortunately software companies hire graphic designers who know nothing about interaction design, and generalist programmers who want to do one-size-fits-all UIs. And that's how you get unreadable fonts in slow Electron apps.
Why not try? Because the cognitive dissonance when people's eyes and brains run into a large variety web-based and app-based screen fonts. Web based font performance is still terrible. So.. because: the brain doesn't like it.
Different presentation fonts in web pages, desktops, etc. can start to have the experiential impact of (gui) skins, or non-standard dotfiles.
Please note the things I'm leaving out of this... print, books, static things, etc.
I forget when this has been discussed before but a lot of major digital companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) end up creating their own fonts for legitimate business reasons that are totally unrelated to design/usability. I can't seem to find the reference, but I think it had to do with licensing/commercial reasons.
A lot of font foundries switched from one-time lump-sum payments to pay-per-use, thinking they’d make a whole bunch of money from the scale of big digital companies, and not realizing this would just cause these companies to design their own fonts instead. Really short-sighted IMO.
From your description it looks to me like the foundry industry moved from one-time lump-sum for everyone, to one-time lump-sum (font designing cost) for some rich companies, and pay-per-use for everyone else.
I'm sure you know this, but for others: This is a cost-saving move.
It's always more economical for a company of Twitter's size to develop their own font because 1) Then they don't have to pay per-use licensing fees, which are huge at the billion user scale, and 2) a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own.
> a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright
Warning: offer not applicable in UK and most countries in EEA. They have the concept of protecting designs there. Japan excludes most designs of fonts because of its utilitarian use BUT if the font (technically typeface) is distinctive and used in a way that can be defended as an artistic choice, it's protected under copyright.
That's obviously true for system-provided fonts but fonts like Helvetica Neue aren't typically available on any platform by default and has to be loaded in...
> a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own.
IANAL but this is only true in some jurisdictions, primarily the US and Japan.
Also, I don’t think it’s quite that simple either. The actual type face may not be eligible for copyright, but the computer code describing the particular curves and hinting rules and etc. is. So I think you can’t just trivially copy a font and modify it and call it your own.
Primarily, any license fees your don't have to pay for billions of per-use occurrences is money saved. In Twitter's case: that's a lot of money.
But there's of course also the whole "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content/communication is claimed to have originated on Twitter, but does not use our official typeface. We move to dismiss this case/be awarded damages based on the fact that we were not part of this particular incident", paired with "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content uses our proprietary font, but did not originate at twitter. We move to dismiss this case because we were not involved/be awarded damages on the basis us defamation and will be filing a counter-suit for impersonation".
There was that incident a while back where a bunch of government leaks were outed as fake because they were printed with a (default MS Word) font that was not available or in use when the document was purportedly created
Then Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tried to cover up a scandal that was revealed in the Panama papers back in 2014. He forged a document purportedly from 2006 using Microsoft's not-yet-released font Calibri as an attempted cover story.
To anyone saying "Users will complain about anything", I'm on a Windows desktop and this is honestly the most unpleasant reading experience I've had on any big website in recent memory.
There seems to be an issue with the OS antialiasing that is rendering characters slightly blurry to feel it's not focused, further straining my eyes.
Seems to have only been tested on Bay Area Apple devices.
Funny, all the e's look about the same to me. Do you just not like the style? That's not my complaint about the o's. I'm complaining that some are square and some are round. Specifically the o In "Notice" looks roundish and the O in "Today" is squared off.
Look very closely at the o in "Notice" and the o in "Today"... I see that if I zoom in to the image it looks better than when I zoom out, so there is clearly some interaction going on with the video driver on my screen at 100% zoom that makes it more obvious for me. But the two o's are not the same, the o in Today is narrower, and ends up looking squared off on my screen, and the o in "Notice" looks rounder and more open.
Now I realize that for you to see it, a good zoomed photo with my phone will go a long way:
I think this is just horizontal antialiasing kicking in.
The o in “Notice” happens to start slightly to the left of a pixel boundary, so it has a narrow strip of very light pixels on its left side (pixels with maybe 10-20% coverage). That makes the boundary look fuzzier and rounder.
The o in “Today” is probably more or less flush with the pixel boundary, so its left side has dark-coloured pixels (80-90% coverage).
It’s likely also the case that it isn’t scaling the luminance to account for sRGB properly. If a pixel is say 20% covered by black-on-white text, you multiply 255 by 20% to give a linear brightness of 51; but for onscreen display this should be converted to sRGB, which is around 124 (gamma ~2.2). If you don’t correct the gamma, the left edge of that o is much darker than it should be, so it looks square rather than rounded off.
Opinions differ as to whether text should be gamma-corrected! If you don’t correct the gamma, it looks darker and sharper, which many people prefer. But it’s actually sharper because it’s more aliased, which exacerbates the kind of moire glitches you’re seeing.
I personally prefer text with no hinting and correct gamma, as I think macOS and iOS do it, but it does look much fuzzier on low-res screens that way so some people dislike it.
It looks like they've put a picture of an apple in the Private Use Area as well at U+F8FF. Weird; there's no need for the PUA there; just pick (heh) U+1F34E (red apple) or U+1F34F (green apple).
That’s a holdover from MacRoman.[1] If you’re on a Macintosh, Option Shift K at least on the standard US layout. Still comes up in Apple docs and user forums.
Interestingly that means Twitter text is no longer fully portable. If you copy some text from Twitter, you specifically need Chirp to render it properly or else characters like their special logo character will be broken for all other fonts
Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly...
Maybe I'm paranoid but I'm feeling like this is an intentional decision in order to push other fonts/foundries to start adding the Twitter logo as a standard Unicode character. Basically bypassing the need for consensus by just forcing the matter and cementing their logo in typography standards.
I don't think this will push fonts/foundaries to add the twitter logo any more than I feel pushed to use the twitter logo in handwriting. Fonts are very nice in that the user still enjoys a high level of choice in the matter. Heck, even the twitter nonsense could be fixed with a stylus/tampermoney script of one or two lines.
This seems a little paranoid, yes. :) What text do you envision copying from Twitter that's going to specifically include their special logo character? It's not going to be in anybody's tweet text.
> Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly...
Uh, isn't putting your own characters in Unicode's private use area specifically what that area is for? Isn't that where fonts that have dingbats unique to them, for instance, would put them?
Not likely perhaps, but could this be one way to retain more copyright over tweets in the future?
Most companies based on user generated content try to claim ownership over it by way of agreements. That has always been murky legal territory and it's not easy to know what value they have.
If the proper rendering of content was made dependent on proprietary fonts, that could be one way to exercise control over where that content can be used.
It's not impossible that making users pick proprietary emoticons could have economic value. Remember where you heard it first...
Not a lawyer, but if the Unicode Consortium even tried to add their logo to the specification, wouldn't Twitter have to actively sue to stop them or risk having their trademark genericized?
Gut check: are there currently any trademarked symbols in Unicode? I can't think of any offhand, and it I find it difficult to imagine it happening for precisely that reason.
The well-known laundry symbols are trademarked apparently, and while there is a proposal to include them into Unicode, this might in fact be blocking it…
These are trademarked for other reasons than a company logo though, and I don't really see the point in including company logos (which might change or disappear tomorrow if they go bankrupt or are taken over by another company—and then what with the company logo in Unicode?).
To complement srfvtgb's point, even official unicode characters are not guaranteed to be included in all fonts. Having the glyph disappear on other platforms will probably be accepted as a fact of life, especially as it's a corporate logo.
Yes, welcome to Corporate Typograhism™ where big corp takes an already existing (copyrighted) font -- change it a little -- then release it as their own.
The implication that this is a practice being used to skirt copyright is wrong. In almost all cases the font foundry is commissioned by a company to produce a distinct (or not so distinct as the case may be) variant of a typeface/family, licensed to them for their use - as an alternative to having the foundry create an entirely new typeface from scratch.
Ironically making it not even that unique amongst "social networks", since Depop adopted GT America as their brand typeface back in 2017. Whilst Depop is technically a shopping app, it's one with a heavy skew towards social networking functionality.
Though to be fair, Depop uses GT America Extended and Expanded, rather than Standard.
Not only that, but when they inevitably change the font again, it would be nice to be able to read a then-old article to see what the font looked like when it was announced.
You never know when something is going to crop up that causes you a headache. Personally, I can't use a phone with curved screen edges or a curved monitor without incurring a piercing headache after fifteen minutes or so.
I'm usually terrible at noticing typefaces (especially when developing to a design). But now this has been pointed out to me, I can't not see it. It's tricky to focus on and I can see why people are finding it troublesome...
The font rendering feels broken on my Windows machine to me. Like the designer only tested it on a Mac and didn't account for how Windows renders fonts differently.
Noticed it yesterday and thought the stylesheet had glitched on my browser as the font was soo bad but then later on it was trending so realised Twitter had just been stupid.
Was getting a headache from it.
This change can be undone for now using this JS: document.cookie="ab_decider=responsive_web_chirp_font_enabled=false&responsive_web_nav_visual_refresh_enabled=false"
I personally can’t stand reading Twitter, but I do like posting jokes and comments for my small group of friends. I built this to delegate posting to Twitter via GitHub actions from markdown files in the repo.
https://github.com/reidjs/markdown-tweet-scheduler
The new font is also destroying Arabic and Farsi text. Does Twitter not have a single Farsi or Arabic speaking employee?
This is an indication that they really don't value diverse employees there. Can't believe no one was like "hey this is destroying readability of these two major languages."
I don't know about Twitter, but HN font (or colours, or spacing, I don't know) has always given me headaches. And I almost never have headaches otherwise.
263 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadThe transformation from web page to web application was not compatible with things like user stylesheets.
Time was the web was for everyone, and enthusiasts were the main stakeholders.
Now the web is just another marketplace run by corporations.
Look at the source code of Twitter or Facebook. It's intentionally obfuscated and mangled, probably in part to fuck with ad blockers.
I have a few user stylesheets (even a little custom Firefox extension to block one user's comments on a site I frequent), but the sites I'd really like to use them on largely don't make it possible to do so.
Look at a Facebook ad in your browser's web inspector, for example. The "Sponsored" tag is made up of 31 different randomly named span tags. https://imgur.com/a/AHZL8ko
https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-th...
Tangential, but I love the image of a frustrated PM at Facebook hearing the news that "hey, you still have to make this label readable to screenreaders," necessitating an `aria-label` with the plain-text content "Sponsored", which makes all their span-chopping junk completely irrelevant to adblocker rules that can now just look for that string as an anchor :)
The only problem is devs who use fonts for icons, which is as stupid as it sounds.
https://megous.com/dl/tmp/0199107a482b8f75.png
(It would be nice to also have minimum font weight setting, not just minimum size, because some designers just can't be helped and use <=200. Then most of the issues with typography on the web would be solved.)
javascript:document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend','<style>*{font-family: arial !important;}</style>')
Using "mono" instead of "arial" also makes for an interesting Twitter experience.
Did anyone use fleets?
Differently broken hinting on some versions of Android: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1425545266757779463
The net effect is that even at the same "font size" you have to squint more to read anything, because non-capital text is very very small and tight relative to the rather large capitals.
The typeface pulls your left and right eyes toward each other, making you look at it cross eyed. It's incredibly nauseating, like the feeling you have right after stepping off a poorly-designed amusement park ride.
It’s like high schoolers gaming word counts have taken over publishing.
Maybe people really do hate the font, but use some real numbers to make your case, not this anecdotal vox pop fluff.
Anyone going purely off of headlines, and taking them at face value, would have an absolutely bizarre worldview by now.
I wouldn't be surprised if this change was never tested outside Figma/Sketch mockups.
Am I missing something or is it just that I go to twitter so seldom that I assumed it was always Helvetica?
Edit: it seems it's not the font itself, but rather something going on with the rendering making it blurrier for some people than the previous typeface.
(I say as the former head of a type foundry.)
Maybe Office 365 needs to be conservative with fonts. Twitter can push boundaries, though. I wish they'd push boundaries more, ala Bertone or Memphis Group, but I guess the risks are larger the more you push the boundaries.
https://twitter.com/Twitter is 1.6mb. (200k+ of fonts, 500k+ of JS)
What's the difference between Office and Twitter here? Both are apps that should just get out of the way of the content.
Most software should just have native UI that follows the platform guidelines. Unfortunately software companies hire graphic designers who know nothing about interaction design, and generalist programmers who want to do one-size-fits-all UIs. And that's how you get unreadable fonts in slow Electron apps.
Different presentation fonts in web pages, desktops, etc. can start to have the experiential impact of (gui) skins, or non-standard dotfiles.
Please note the things I'm leaving out of this... print, books, static things, etc.
Was it effectively a bad move ?
It's always more economical for a company of Twitter's size to develop their own font because 1) Then they don't have to pay per-use licensing fees, which are huge at the billion user scale, and 2) a peculiarity of copyright law means that the actual shapes of the letters aren't actually protectable by copyright -- you can copy an existing font virtually 100%, tweak a thing or two, and legally call it your own.
Warning: offer not applicable in UK and most countries in EEA. They have the concept of protecting designs there. Japan excludes most designs of fonts because of its utilitarian use BUT if the font (technically typeface) is distinctive and used in a way that can be defended as an artistic choice, it's protected under copyright.
If they're just specifying a font (e.g. 'Helvetica') in their CSS, it's loaded from the users' machine and doesn't cost anything.
Otherwise every site on the internet would be paying fees for fonts.
I could be wrong. Please inform me if I am.
IANAL but this is only true in some jurisdictions, primarily the US and Japan.
Also, I don’t think it’s quite that simple either. The actual type face may not be eligible for copyright, but the computer code describing the particular curves and hinting rules and etc. is. So I think you can’t just trivially copy a font and modify it and call it your own.
But there's of course also the whole "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content/communication is claimed to have originated on Twitter, but does not use our official typeface. We move to dismiss this case/be awarded damages based on the fact that we were not part of this particular incident", paired with "Your honor, as the evidence makes plain, this content uses our proprietary font, but did not originate at twitter. We move to dismiss this case because we were not involved/be awarded damages on the basis us defamation and will be filing a counter-suit for impersonation".
Do you have real-world examples of the hypothetical you invented?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/not-for-the-firs...
I'm sorry, this is a change HOW?
There seems to be an issue with the OS antialiasing that is rendering characters slightly blurry to feel it's not focused, further straining my eyes.
Seems to have only been tested on Bay Area Apple devices.
It's weird how unpleasant it is. The new font seems rather nice, and I would not even notice it looks different, but... it really hurts to look at.
edit: here's a comparison with helvetica https://i.imgur.com/BJlHQhf.gif
I'm getting Roboto on Linux which (a) looks great and (b) is very similar to the new font
https://imgur.com/a/0LcqKej
Many things seem to change because people need to change things to rationalize their job title. Is that what's going on here?
Now I realize that for you to see it, a good zoomed photo with my phone will go a long way:
Here's where twitter's font goes oh-so wrong: https://imgur.com/a/Wpw97He
The o in “Notice” happens to start slightly to the left of a pixel boundary, so it has a narrow strip of very light pixels on its left side (pixels with maybe 10-20% coverage). That makes the boundary look fuzzier and rounder.
The o in “Today” is probably more or less flush with the pixel boundary, so its left side has dark-coloured pixels (80-90% coverage).
It’s likely also the case that it isn’t scaling the luminance to account for sRGB properly. If a pixel is say 20% covered by black-on-white text, you multiply 255 by 20% to give a linear brightness of 51; but for onscreen display this should be converted to sRGB, which is around 124 (gamma ~2.2). If you don’t correct the gamma, the left edge of that o is much darker than it should be, so it looks square rather than rounded off.
Opinions differ as to whether text should be gamma-corrected! If you don’t correct the gamma, it looks darker and sharper, which many people prefer. But it’s actually sharper because it’s more aliased, which exacerbates the kind of moire glitches you’re seeing.
I personally prefer text with no hinting and correct gamma, as I think macOS and iOS do it, but it does look much fuzzier on low-res screens that way so some people dislike it.
The line wrapping I can quasi-forgive as this being a place for discussion rather than dumping <pre> code blocks.
¹ https://twitter.com/jeffjose/status/1425626162219286529
² https://www.grillitype.com/typeface/gt-america
[1] http://www.alanwood.net/demos/macroman.html
Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly...
Maybe I'm paranoid but I'm feeling like this is an intentional decision in order to push other fonts/foundries to start adding the Twitter logo as a standard Unicode character. Basically bypassing the need for consensus by just forcing the matter and cementing their logo in typography standards.
* https://www.nerdfonts.com/
* https://fontawesome.com/
I don't think this will push fonts/foundaries to add the twitter logo any more than I feel pushed to use the twitter logo in handwriting. Fonts are very nice in that the user still enjoys a high level of choice in the matter. Heck, even the twitter nonsense could be fixed with a stylus/tampermoney script of one or two lines.
> Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly...
Uh, isn't putting your own characters in Unicode's private use area specifically what that area is for? Isn't that where fonts that have dingbats unique to them, for instance, would put them?
Most companies based on user generated content try to claim ownership over it by way of agreements. That has always been murky legal territory and it's not easy to know what value they have.
If the proper rendering of content was made dependent on proprietary fonts, that could be one way to exercise control over where that content can be used.
It's not impossible that making users pick proprietary emoticons could have economic value. Remember where you heard it first...
Gut check: are there currently any trademarked symbols in Unicode? I can't think of any offhand, and it I find it difficult to imagine it happening for precisely that reason.
These are trademarked for other reasons than a company logo though, and I don't really see the point in including company logos (which might change or disappear tomorrow if they go bankrupt or are taken over by another company—and then what with the company logo in Unicode?).
Some Copyright is more Copyright than others...
This is essentially what happened with Arial w/ Helvetica; and companies have been doing this ever since to create new licenses that they can control.
We are drowning in Grotesk/Sans-Serif/Helvetica type fonts! Do we really need another "Big Tech Sans"? Or rather, why can't Twitter just use X? xD
Though to be fair, Depop uses GT America Extended and Expanded, rather than Standard.
I thought it's something with antialiasing or whatever on Mac, figured out I will solve it later with some setting or whatever.
It literally physically hurts to read it.
edit: although if I click into the tweets and view them on Twitter, it then uses Chirp.
But more importantly I just want to see a side-by-side comparison.
Was getting a headache from it.
This change can be undone for now using this JS: document.cookie="ab_decider=responsive_web_chirp_font_enabled=false&responsive_web_nav_visual_refresh_enabled=false"
This is an indication that they really don't value diverse employees there. Can't believe no one was like "hey this is destroying readability of these two major languages."
cnet's font is kind of ugly, too...