I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates. Including all replies to a thread by default on a site with that amount of traffic will increase the load of ... everything. Dramatically.
Yes, their UI sucks. No, they haven't fixed it. I would not be surprised at all if that were due to necessity rather than incompetence. Even tiny changes at that scale make large differences.
And, honestly I would not be surprised if it were incompetence, either. The skill of the silicon valley developer (as demonstrated by the commenters here) does not impress me even a little.
I think it's a UI that's been designed for one very clear, specific use-case; that's been stretched beyond belief by people cramming it to fit radically different use-cases. Developers I'm sure are simply stuck; do they optimize for original use-case and its legions of users; or other use-cases and those legions of users; I genuinely believe they cannot make everybody happy.
But as a user:
1. As an author, you have a choice not to try to cram a square kitchen through a round sink (long-form articles onto twitter)
2. As a reader, you have a choice not to consume content from a platform not designed or well-supporting of that content.
There's a million lifetimes worth of fascinating, useful, interesting, readable content out there.
Puzzling through a maze that is Twitter long-form article threads... is not how I choose to spend my time :).
As I asked in another post, I'm not sure what your underlying point is - that the UI is good and fit for purpose? Or that we should put up with it? Or that we should be more understanding of it, and that implies not criticizing it?
> I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates. Including all replies to a thread by default on a site with that amount of traffic will increase the load of ... everything. Dramatically.
I understand fetching all the replies all the time is next to impossible, that's not what I was criticizing, I get the impression that Twitter is doing a good job performance wise anyway.
> And, honestly I would not be surprised if it were incompetence, either. The skill of the silicon valley developer (as demonstrated by the commenters here) does not impress me even a little.
I think incompetence is part of it, but not the only reason. Twitter probably wants its mobile users to interact through the native iOS/Android apps. It's not as obvious as with what Reddit is doing but making the website act flaky and a bit unpleasant to use is certainly a way to get more people to use the app.
I imagine the app looks and feels better. I never used it and I don't intend to, for unrelated reasons. But then I guess I don't really have a right to complain.
> I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates.
This website is full of employees (and ex employees) of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and any other company that has done stuff at global scale.
Scaling provides constraints, we all understand that. The interface being completely miserable to use is not because of that constraint.
Yes, their UI sucks. No, they haven't fixed it. I would not be surprised at all if that were due to necessity rather than incompetence. Even tiny changes at that scale make large differences.
And, honestly I would not be surprised if it were incompetence, either. The skill of the silicon valley developer (as demonstrated by the commenters here) does not impress me even a little.