It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way that you gain new users and don't lose the current.
Really? I can describe pretty precisely why I hate it. I don't have an account, so when I get a link to Twitter, I see one or more of the following:
- A reply to someone else that I can't see, so I now have no context about what I'm looking at. It's like coming in in the middle of a conversation.
- A normal tweet followed by a set of replies that appear to be incomplete. There are a bunch of buttons to press to "see more". Often when you click on them there's only a single additional response, not a very long thread, so it's unclear why I had to click to "see more". Other times there are several back-and-forth replies in a row shown, most of them inconsequential. What decides whether I need to click to "see more"?
- Bots, crypto scams, misinformation, ads
- The entire interface appears to be an overlay over something else. Like it looks like you're reading a popup that you can dismiss to see the actual content. But when you do that, it shows you something unrelated.
- Sometimes, but not always, I see the tweet I was intended to see, but instead of seeing replies, there's a bunch of completely unrelated tweets below that where the replies normally are
I'm old, so it's probably me, but I just can't parse a Twitter page because it's so bizarrely laid out, and so much of the expected content either isn't shown, or is hidden by default, and so much unexpected content is shown. Call me crazy, but I don't have time to figure it out just to read someone's hot take on the latest trend.
It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way that you gain new users and don't lose the current.