To the posted article, I think it's impressive they are shipping a single codebase for mobile and desktop. Modular features you can turn off for different views. It's smart and I'll be curious to see if other sites follow suit.
Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive feature from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive.
Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy? Anyway it makes it a lot harder to modify the desktop HTML presentation with an extension or set of ad blocker rules.
One of the main things that keeps me using a third-party client (for as long as I can continue using one) is the Home vs.Latest Tweets feature. I NEVER want to see the home timeline. I always want a reverse-chronological list of tweets. It is user-hostile to have to continuously select Latest Tweets. I'm sure they see more engagement with the Home timeline, but I just want to be able to flip a switch and never see it.
> then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two
To my great rage, some Twitter design poobah was energetically explaining how they could "prove" that was better. Actual people saying no, it was actually worse for them were of course ignored.
As much as I love Twitter, the extent to which users are the product, not the customer is obvious. At best, you're a dairy cow, producing valuable content. Maybe you're a beef cow, carved up and sold to the real customers, the advertisers. And maybe you just end up eaten the rats that are always in the shadows and frequently come out in hungry swarms.
Nothing showcases the failure of the Twitter algorithm to deliver relevant, timely information than seeing yesterday's tweets about impending bad weather.
I've stopped using the timeline entirely: I follow nobody and create private lists of the people I'd like to keep up with. When you view a list the tweets show up in chronological order and as a bonus, you don't see promoted tweets.
As for obfuscated CSS classes, this is likely to use scoped CSS, which allows for components to share class names but not share class attributes.
That's kind of against the point of CSS, but it's also a useful dev tool to make your code more readable. I agree that it can be annoying on the user side, but it makes sense that they made this change.
Also, most likely, these change every deploy (when the depedency manager builds the app).
> Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive feature from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive.
The Aria attributes can be used to block at least some of the junk, eg in ublock origin:
twitter.com##div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
twitter.com##aside[aria-label="Who to follow"]
twitter.com##a[aria-label="Search and explore"]
twitter.com##a[aria-label="Bookmarks"]
there's stuff that's no longer easy to block this way, like promoted crap in the replies to a tweet. But if that gets to be an issue, I'll just greasemonkey it. Even with obfuscated classes, the injected content is easy to identify, it's just that css doesn't let you style 'elements containing (some complicated several layers deep selector)'
Sometimes it switched back to "Home" while you're using the app. I don't know why they're so against just letting me make the change constant. I really hate when companies think they know what I want more than I do.
ublock origin also seems to block the ads just fine at least.
> Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy?
I would be a little surprised if this wasn't just caused by using a library like styled-components for managing CSS. I'm sure it could also be partly anti-adblock or anti-scraping, though.
can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive.
Never forget: you are the product. On whatever is the ad industry equivalent of HN, there is probably someone gloating about how much they love that it does that.
I wonder also if it’s cheaper. Computationally I mean. You don’t need to worry about consistency if you don’t care about ordering. You can also just show the same few popular tweets to everyone without needing to compute an individual timeline for each person.
> Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything
Non-deterministic class names have been popular for a while, especially in React; open up Chrome inspector on a Gmail tab. Sometimes they are used for minification. This might not be a (strictly) hostile change.
It annoys me too, I write custom CSS for any site I use a lot.
One other thing I hate about the mobile app is that Lists are unordered (or ordered by creation date which isn't helpful). The website automatically alphabetizes lists, which is great, no idea why the mobile app can't too. For heavy Lists users it's physically painful hunting through the unordered list on the mobile app every time you want to add someone to a list.
I just get the impression the PM's at Twitter don't actually use it, and worse, engage with people who use it, enough. I follow a ton of CMOs, social media directors, agency heads, people who use Twitter to drive business and commentate regularly on their industry, and they have expressed disdain for product direction decisions for years around the "mobile-ification" of the desktop experience. Now it seems they're pushing total usability-hostile 'features' to their desktop webapp.
Really, who on earth over there made the call that two tweets visible if there's an embedded image, even on a large 27" 1080p monitor, was a good idea?
Twitter isn't going to make money with a bunch of power-user features for non-paying users. They're going to make onboarding painless and the overall experience as unintimidating as possible. That means minimizing features that don't keep people on the site and viewing ads.
Yeah, the feed is now just slightly awkward and oversized, for what I can't see as any good reason. Reducing the zoom to 90% makes it comfortable again to read a Tweet. I have trouble reading oversized text.
I find it all so bizarre. Everything from how big the font size is in the left nav, to the ordering of the nav items, to how the feed and right nav scroll together (can’t see the top of the right nav if you scroll down the main feed) to how huge tweets with images appear (can only see 2 tweets if they contain images on a massive desktop screen) to the fact that you cant resize the left or right nav on your own...
What's bizarre about it? It looks a lot like the reddit redesign to me, and seems to be focused on emphasizing sponsored content more, if I had to speculate.
Large-picture tweets taking up a lot of space means that large-picture interstitial ads and promoted tweets also take up lots of space. I would guess also that scrolling the right-hand column gives a lot more automatic eyeball space to trending stuff in sections below the fold, and is no longer constrained to just screen height for what everyone will usually see there. Who's going to willfully scroll down the trending column of promoted stuff separately from the main feed?
The left-nav stuff seems much more straightforward for new users, even if it's a useless change for long time users who already know how to operate the site.
It's just another example of the latest trend in UI/UX "experts" trying to create an "experience" for users, instead of letting the user create their own experience through customization of the UI.
Agree - 99% of what I do is read tweets, but now they take up only ~33% of my screen's real estate, and are outweighed visually by large distracting content on either side.
God, it's not only me then. I have to zoom in until the nav is in icon-link mode. But then the feed is too big. I don't want to bother styling extension (I don't love to have more).
I tried the new Twitter interface, it was so bad that if I hadn't been able to go back to the normal one, I would have stopped using twitter. It had successfully reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior.
A high percentage of the time when I attempt to view a twitter page on mobile the spinner times out and just gives a "something went wrong" error. There is a Try Again button but clicking on it is futile, as it always goes back to "something went wrong" error after a second. The only thing that seems to work is to ask the browser to refresh the page, sometimes more than once.
Is this only happening to me? I always wondered what the hell is going on.
Happens to me too all the time on mobile and boy is it infuriating. I either get the "something went wrong" or the "you're being rate-limited," neither of which make any sense for someone opening tweets every now and then inside other apps.
I assume it's because when you open tweets with in-app browsers etc. Twitter wants to make it a poor experience in order to get you to use their app instead. Same reason they have been gutting their API features and limiting API tokens for 3rd party apps for years now.
Bring back full historical search back to the UI. Every search I do is limited to the past week. It used to be you could keep scrolling down and you'd keep seeing past tweets.
I don't care about this new UI thing. Don't care one bit.
Am I in the minority of folks that enjoy Twitter's algorithmic sorting?
In the classic timeline view, I always felt the urge to check my feed all the time, in case i missed part of the conversation or the like (a la "FOMO.")
This strong sign of the confidence Twitter has in React Native for Web[1]. In 2017, Nicolas Gallagher gave a talk[2] about why it was used for mobile.twitter.com.
I have to use Tweetdeck, because not having a reverse-chronological timeline is such a dealbreaker. If they ever remove this ability from Tweetdeck, I will probably just leave.
I'm already on Mastodon and more active there anyway, it didn't turn into a ghost town like the last time I tried it.
It could have something to do with some of my extensions, but every time I open the new Twitter on Firefox, it has me logged out...but if I refresh the page, I'm back to being logged in and I can browse my feed.
My biggest pain as far as missing features is new tweets. In the old interface if I had someone's timeline open, There'd be a number '(n)' in the tab that indicated there were new tweets. If I went to the tab I could click on a show new tweets button and see them. A nice side effect of this was that you could easily view deleted tweets as they were queued and shown normally.
I know there are different opinions but I like it. I like the dark theme, the explore tab, the "data saver" option and also that the navigation experience got better (backward button points you back to the correct tweet). Well done!
I only hope they do not remove the "see latest tweets" in the home tab.
I am not sure they could have added more white space to the new Twitter if they tried. I would not kill them to adapt to the amount of screen real estate that I have.
The mobile-first page is a lot better than the old one. I've been using it for a while.
... When still using Twitter, that is. The platform decisions like showing me notifications of things I never subscribed to in any way ("look, some person you don't follow tweeted this") and can't unsubscribe from is 100% offensive to me and one of the major reasons I really don't like using the platform anymore (besides a crippled API and only now slowly improving mobile app).
That said: The website is amazing on mobile. It feels NOTHING like 99% of webapps out there. How are they doing it? Are they damn wizards?
Is the navigation on mobile for you on the left or on top? No matter how small I make the browser window on desktop it still shows the navigation on the left side as a vertical bar but on mobile it always shows as a top bar. It's a big difference in my opinion and I am curious which version you like.
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately they've now ported one of the most offensive feature from mobile to desktop. The "Home" timeline, with tweets out of order. And the real kicker; you can still select "latest Tweets first" but then the app literally undoes your preference every week or two, forcing you back to their "Home" view. It's offensive.
Also a small thing, but the new desktop Twitter now has obfuscated CSS classes for everything. The names change frequently too, maybe at every deploy? Anyway it makes it a lot harder to modify the desktop HTML presentation with an extension or set of ad blocker rules.
[+] [-] rasfincher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|6 years ago|reply
To my great rage, some Twitter design poobah was energetically explaining how they could "prove" that was better. Actual people saying no, it was actually worse for them were of course ignored.
As much as I love Twitter, the extent to which users are the product, not the customer is obvious. At best, you're a dairy cow, producing valuable content. Maybe you're a beef cow, carved up and sold to the real customers, the advertisers. And maybe you just end up eaten the rats that are always in the shadows and frequently come out in hungry swarms.
[+] [-] ilamont|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dejawu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takeout|6 years ago|reply
That's kind of against the point of CSS, but it's also a useful dev tool to make your code more readable. I agree that it can be annoying on the user side, but it makes sense that they made this change.
Also, most likely, these change every deploy (when the depedency manager builds the app).
[+] [-] nightfly|6 years ago|reply
Sounds just like Facebook now.
[+] [-] Pxtl|6 years ago|reply
Yeah I'm not a fan of the "Home" view.
[+] [-] bazzargh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawnerd|6 years ago|reply
ublock origin also seems to block the ads just fine at least.
[+] [-] notamy|6 years ago|reply
I would be a little surprised if this wasn't just caused by using a library like styled-components for managing CSS. I'm sure it could also be partly anti-adblock or anti-scraping, though.
[+] [-] goatinaboat|6 years ago|reply
Never forget: you are the product. On whatever is the ad industry equivalent of HN, there is probably someone gloating about how much they love that it does that.
I wonder also if it’s cheaper. Computationally I mean. You don’t need to worry about consistency if you don’t care about ordering. You can also just show the same few popular tweets to everyone without needing to compute an individual timeline for each person.
[+] [-] vernie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empyrical|6 years ago|reply
The previous design was very good about keeping whatever tweet you were scrolled to in focus when new tweets come in.
I'm not sure how widespread this issue it, but I have seen other people in my personal feed express frustration with this issue.
[+] [-] SippinLean|6 years ago|reply
Non-deterministic class names have been popular for a while, especially in React; open up Chrome inspector on a Gmail tab. Sometimes they are used for minification. This might not be a (strictly) hostile change.
It annoys me too, I write custom CSS for any site I use a lot.
[+] [-] lykr0n|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericzawo|6 years ago|reply
Really, who on earth over there made the call that two tweets visible if there's an embedded image, even on a large 27" 1080p monitor, was a good idea?
[+] [-] sp332|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mindwipe|6 years ago|reply
Genuinely hilarious thread from Twitter's design lead on information density claiming they are "careful" about it.
A Twitter profile page now presents literally zero tweets on screen (other than the pinned crap) now without scrolling on a Macbook.
The old design was also terrible, but this one is just a joke. Literally everything needs to be about twenty five percent of the size it is.
[+] [-] lanrh1836|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|6 years ago|reply
... are merely one class of users and by no means authoritative on what makes sense for users or Twitter itself.
[+] [-] lanrh1836|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Benjammer|6 years ago|reply
Large-picture tweets taking up a lot of space means that large-picture interstitial ads and promoted tweets also take up lots of space. I would guess also that scrolling the right-hand column gives a lot more automatic eyeball space to trending stuff in sections below the fold, and is no longer constrained to just screen height for what everyone will usually see there. Who's going to willfully scroll down the trending column of promoted stuff separately from the main feed?
The left-nav stuff seems much more straightforward for new users, even if it's a useless change for long time users who already know how to operate the site.
[+] [-] kccqzy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhalt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HugThem|6 years ago|reply
You see the navigation every day. You know where it is. Its not that you have to read through it. So if anything, shouldn't it be smaller?
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Existenceblinks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baud147258|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufo|6 years ago|reply
Is this only happening to me? I always wondered what the hell is going on.
[+] [-] jswny|6 years ago|reply
I assume it's because when you open tweets with in-app browsers etc. Twitter wants to make it a poor experience in order to get you to use their app instead. Same reason they have been gutting their API features and limiting API tokens for 3rd party apps for years now.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|6 years ago|reply
I don't care about this new UI thing. Don't care one bit.
[+] [-] bobblywobbles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s3r3nity|6 years ago|reply
In the classic timeline view, I always felt the urge to check my feed all the time, in case i missed part of the conversation or the like (a la "FOMO.")
[+] [-] ajmurmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] statenjason|6 years ago|reply
[1]: https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFn39lLO-U
[+] [-] kup0|6 years ago|reply
I'm already on Mastodon and more active there anyway, it didn't turn into a ghost town like the last time I tried it.
[+] [-] kpwags|6 years ago|reply
It could have something to do with some of my extensions, but every time I open the new Twitter on Firefox, it has me logged out...but if I refresh the page, I'm back to being logged in and I can browse my feed.
[+] [-] _zachs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cracauer|6 years ago|reply
Is anybody in there actually using that thing? (those in user-facing changes authority?)
[+] [-] russdill|6 years ago|reply
The new interface has none of this.
[+] [-] karussell|6 years ago|reply
I only hope they do not remove the "see latest tweets" in the home tab.
[+] [-] JaimeThompson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|6 years ago|reply
... When still using Twitter, that is. The platform decisions like showing me notifications of things I never subscribed to in any way ("look, some person you don't follow tweeted this") and can't unsubscribe from is 100% offensive to me and one of the major reasons I really don't like using the platform anymore (besides a crippled API and only now slowly improving mobile app).
That said: The website is amazing on mobile. It feels NOTHING like 99% of webapps out there. How are they doing it? Are they damn wizards?
[+] [-] Meai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|6 years ago|reply