slightly OT but clicking at all those twitter threads, and not being a twitter user myself, I'm having an extremely hard time understanding how the conversation(s) flow. What a terrible interface !
I know how to read Twitter and yeah, this one is really hard to read. It's got all these numbers with slashes behind them scattered throughout. It's got a list of numbers with slashes in the middle. It's got random links. It's got the occasional sentence without punctuation
It's just kind of a mess.
I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.
I don't understand how to read Twitter threads. It's like instead of someone handing you a book, they tear up all the pages and throw the pieces at your feet.
Agreed. Ive been frustrated looking at the tweet at the root of what I know is a long, branching conversation with many participants, unable to see the flow or follow it at all. Slashdot and Kuro5hin solved threaded/nested conversations over a decade ago. How does Twitter still suck at it?
I know it's not an either or situation -- but in my opinion this is a step up from Twitter. Technical discussions on twitter is super frustrating to follow along. And almost impossible to have intelligent conversations in 140 chars.
I'm a normal person, and I can't figure it out. Every time I see a link to twitter, I can't tell who is responding to who. It looks like snippets of conversations, but I can rarely figure out the context. I don't think I'm looking at a timeline view, just a particular tweet.
I had the same feeling. It is awkward to read. Supposedly, they are working on longer form entries that can follow the short form entries. Some seem to think that would ruin twitter.
Dave Rubin did a thread recently after being invited in to twitter. He claims the twitter codebase is so bad that its hard to understand what is going on. They are seriously considering just rebuilding from scratch. It might be easier, considering some of the changes they want to do.
I've never been a twitter user myself, but every now and then I end up following a link to a Twitter discussion, only to bounce right off again because I can't figure out what's supposed to be happening. Who is saying what to whom, in what order, in response to what? I can't tell. I imagine that there must be some context-literacy I don't have, which regular Twitter users somehow pick up on; or, possibly, Twitter only makes sense if you're following the stream of posts in real time.
I have a love-hate relationship with that feature.
On the one hand, some of the most insightful things that I've seen on Twitter have been written in such way.
On the other, it's just so effin ugly. You can't reply/share/like the whole thing at once, so you end up with splintered conversation trees with different people replying to different parts of the mega-tweet.
These are great write ups! Just a shame they are in the format of a twitter “conversation”. The readability really sucks and don’t let me get started on the UX :/
Well, not all discourse needs to happen on twitter.
Sure, it is nice when there is something you can actually convey in just a few sentences but I have a hard time reading this.
It is hard to follow because my reading gets interrupted, and I need to focus on where I am instead of what information I am receiving. I donno. I just think it's hard and it's very annoying so I'm rather inclined to stop reading because honestly I don't care enough to make the hassle worth it.
I have nothing against this model of sharing information. In fact, I think that Twitter has a very interesting way of getting people who wouldn't usually sharing information to post stuff you can't find elsewhere. But the UI for it…really sucks. It's awful. I and everyone else struggles through them because the content is just so good, but Twitter could do so much here to make the experience better.
Yeah, hacky and annoying af when fifty people use it on the same thread, as is usually the case. Makes Twitter’s long-form readability and usability even worse.
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