Comment by hrvbr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrvbr | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's website has so many annoyances it is no more a pleasure for me to check it. For example:

- Photos are very badly cropped and clicking on the tweet does not diplay them full size anymore. We have to click a second time on the photo.

- Photos are now displayed above the text which somehow makes the bad cropping even worse.

- People who want to post photos have all moved to Instagram anyway. Twitter is an actor, not a victim, of this move. They seem to consider photos as a feature for advertisers, not for users.

- Embedded tweets (retweets with a comment) don't have functionnal links. Clicking them opens the tweet's page in a way that ruins the auto-scrolling of the main stream. The trick against that is to right-click on the embedding tweet's time and open the link in a new tab. WTF, designers?

- If one wants to post a longer text, Twitter leads them to create an account elsewhere. Twitter could easily just display the title and hide the longer text behind a click. WTF, strategists?

Twitter definitely needs a new leadership.

Your post is interesting.

Your first three points are about photos, and then the third point says anybody who wants to post photos is already on Instagram. This is ironic considering most of the people I follow post their Instagram photos - on Twitter.

I do agree however on the embedded tweets. In a world where apps go to great lengths to minimize the amount of clicks people have to make to get to their content, it seems Twitter is incredibly behind the times in this regard.

As for longer tweets, I've read several interviews with the founders and they said they will steadfastly defend a limit on the amount of characters for posts. They say this is what separates Twitter from other social media platforms. As a user, if I have something I need to write about, I never do it on Twitter, there are an abundant other options to do this.

I do agree they need new leadership. As other social media platforms have morphed to keep pace with the changes their users want, Twitter has effectively done nothing to help make their platform any better than when I joined almost five years ago.

I think you're totally correct to harp on design and functionality. I'm sure it's a business problem, too, but it's also the fact they keep screwing with the app with no real improvement. I continue to think removing Discover and Activity were big mistakes, and, no, Search does not replace them at all. Tweetdeck is similarly embarrassing.

I don't even bother with the Twitter website anymore, I only check twitter on my phone.

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