Recently I've been checking a specific account for automated covid vaccine availability info. I opened it on my laptop so I could refresh it while doing other work.
I could not believe how awful the official Twitter UI is. This is the tweet timeline that I see on my laptop for this account:
- Pinned tweet
- Tweet
- Promoted tweet (takes a full screen)
- Tweet
- Tweet
- Who to Follow (list of suggested accounts) (half a screen)
- Tweet
- Tweet
- Topics to Follow (half a screen)
- Promoted tweet (full screen)
- Then a pretty a reasonable mix of tweets and promoted tweets
That's 5 screens of scrolling to see just the first 6 tweets. And this is Twitter, whose whole concept is based on short, digestible bits of information. I think it's fair to say if the service had started with this UI, it never would have taken off in the first place. I imagine the ecosystem thrives on most content generating users using 3rd party clients, and then serving ads to the suckers who don't even know there are other clients.
So, I understand the ads. The company needs to make money, and that's the best way to do that they've come up with. But what about the 'suggested' bits? Are they actually supposed to be helpful, or are they revenue generating as well? There's no way to turn them off, so I'd think they have to be.
I don't pretend to know better than them, so I'm sure there's good reasons, lots of data, and many hours of meetings behind the design, but I really am mystified. Why did it evolve this way and how does this service even still exist?
As an extreme example, what if all forms of suggestion/recommendation/curation features on all platforms were gone, and only a search bar exists? Then your engagement is limited to the scope of your own thoughts, and you would just leave when you have nothing in mind that you want to search (and thus see fewer ads, generate less revenue, etc). I think there is a balance to be achieved, but companies certainly error on the side of more opportunities to drive engagement.
Anyway, your best bet is probably to cook up a browser extension/script to hide what you don't want to see. Maybe it even exists already. Though of course, the DOM probably changes all the time.
And it's not a bootstrapped startup with limited budget, it's a multi-billion company where few millions to fix it (that's including c-level bonuses) is just a rounding error in accounting.
Would be interesting to hear reasonable explanations.
everything is clickable by accident and the back button often breaks. no option to have paged navigation
Thankfully they have chronological mode which kind of helps because i can keep up with what i subscribed to, and they finally stopped 'randomly' changing my setting to it.