Every time Twitter comes up on HN people complain about missing reverse chronological order and hating on the liked by tweets feature. The old classic mode is one click away. Or am I in a weird long running A/B testing group still having access to this feature? I know the default mode is not what most people here like but is it really that hard to switch the display mode?
Twitter regularly switches you back to garbage mode without telling you, and you have to mute all the words in this submission to make classic mode work. muting all these words does nothing if you are in garbage mode.
> Twitter regularly switches you back to garbage mode
Right. The other problem is that garbage mode is two-way.
I don't want to see other people's likes etc, and I don't want to have my own garbage jammed into anyone else's feed either. Short of going private there's no fix for this.
On my intentionally not updated install of iOS twitter, it doesn’t have the garbage mode (still has some inserted garbage, but is otherwise chronological)
Except the list doesn't show more than 200 tweets (unless there's some trick to avoid this). If there's a sudden spike of activity, or you check it only once a week, it's easy to miss something important.
If you are scrolling more than 200 texts you need to break the list into two. Or examine who you are following. If you miss something is it that important?
and it doesn't update automatically, and it doesn't update when you click the header, and it's just basically a static list of the tweets from the last time you refreshed.
It's a very common HN trope! "I don't even own a television" on threads about cable TV, or "I don't have a Facebook account" on threads about Facebook. These 10x hipsters never want to do anything fun and easy that "the masses" do -- and they have a compulsion to let everyone else know they're special. I think it comes from parents that made a mediocre kid believe he's special and gifted and that all his ideas are profound.
i don't have a twitter either but i follow important people there. (it works on the web version at least).
john carmack for example often updates on his twitter. a couple of programmers & artists i like too. also the trends column is the most accurate "mood indicator" ever.
Seems perfectly reasonable. Here are some reasons:
1. The fraction of people on the world on Twitter is very small. Either most people in the world are missing important information, or not being on Twitter doesn’t cause one to miss important information.
2. If something important does occur on Twitter, it will be repeated on other news sources. It seems like half the news stories these days are just a bunch of tweets surrounded by boilerplate.
I think that listening to emergency radio is a good model for Twitter. It might provide you with information earlier than relying on conventional sources, and it might provide you with more blips of information, but not all of that information is necessarily correct, and you will spend a lot of time and not gain much of value over traditional sources.
I don't think the emergency radio analogy makes much sense since Twitter's value is more than just reading tweets. It can be used for initiating and participating in discussions.
Fair point. Maybe radio in general is a better model. Some people use it to have conversations with friends, and some people use it to listen to the emergency channel.
It still means that cutting it out of your life won’t doom you to missing important information.
I could live without Twitter obviously, but I could say that for pretty much every Internet service other than maybe email. What's great about Twitter is the serendipity; I've been able to follow people with perspectives that I just don't have in my professional or personal circle, and reading/chatting with them over the years has profoundly expanded my worldview. It's not much different in that sense than HN – I could never call any thread or single day of browsing "important", but I know that what I've learned cumulatively over time has been very important.
Actually they don't do that, and neither would I if I could run 50 mph, was huge, and preferred breathing air, but anyway: Importance (which is import, meaning) is mostly subjective. If there's such a thing as objective importance, attention is probably orthogonal to it. And to subjective importance too, at least at first, but then extended attention probably increases perceived/subjective importance just as protracted inattention decreases it.
I dunno, it's a tool, you can use it how you'd like to use it.
Twitter is kinda weird in that there are some blindly obvious UX improvements everyone is aware of that Twitter refrains from because the poor UX is subsidizing their business model.
This has improved quite a bit on recent versions of the official mobile clients. If you go to your lists, you can "pin" a list, which has the effect of making it an alternate timeline from the app's home screen.
It's a little subtle, but on home you'll now have "Home" and your list's name at the top of the screen, with the active one getting a blue underline. Swipe left or right to select one or the other.
I think they couldn't care less about lists. They are super annoying to access and ever since the last update which brought the mobile layout to desktop you can't even create a new list from the "add to list" screen anymore.
Sadly the entire update still feels half-baked and not thought-through and given that it's been months I don't feel too optimistic. There's so many small things that worked fine before and are just missing completely or broken now. It's a shame because I've been using Twitter for a decade but it's hardly useable now.
Thank you for writing that and mentioning it. I used it 3x without regenerating credentials the last two times. When Twitter stopped processing, I just waited 15 minutes and ran it again.
Unfortunately, you cannot turn off retweets in lists, at least on the Twitter website or iOS app. I disable retweets for most of the people I follow. Fortunately, in Tweetdeck you can filter retweets for each list individually.
Similar to what I do (lists are public, not private). One recent change has annoyed me, though - won’t let me view my public lists unless I am logged in.
- instead of following people, add people to the list
Bam. No ads, no suggestions, no "x liked this", reverse chronological order with no missing posts.