What do y'all think about the new Twitter design?
It's obviously unfamiliar, but I have to say that I don't think it's that much worse than the one we had before. It does obviously follow the trend of making everything look so much more mobile-y, but unlike Reddit they haven't really messed with the core display of content - in fact, I'd say the tweets themselves have gotten a bit larger. I've heard that the timeline gets reset to algorithmic sorting every 24h, which is an absolute no-go for me, but I haven't experienced that aspect myself.
Related: I've recently started using Tweetdeck and honestly have no idea why I should ever switch back to the main Twitter feed, redesign or not. Columns, lists, the customisation - it's pretty much everything I've ever wanted. Any tips or opinions on that?
Tweetdeck is definitely the better option. So much cleaner. So much faster. So much more information dense. So much more configurable!
The mobilification of the web is honestly really annoying. They just look terrible on desktops. I get that it's a lot less design/UX work to make everything uniform, and maybe there are some arguments for a service all having a unified look and feel. But there is some value to the "if it ain't broke" line of thinking in web design. If companies didn't insist on crufting their websites up with tons of extraneous scripting and graphical doodads, it wouldn't occupy so much development time to maintain.
Incidentally, a lot of mobile web design seems designed for older people with less precise fingers and less sharp eyesight, so text needs to be big and any interactable interface elements need to be big. I think that's actually a good move overall, but then they undermine this generally good universal design thinking by putting light boxes and navigation bars and GDPR compliance dialogs in front of everything! The modern web is just a clusterfuck of designed-by-committee horseshit that's constantly working at cross purposes with itself. It's completely incoherent.
I with the column sizing was better. The narrowest is 270px and the widest is 350px, only 30% larger. A rough count on the widest is 45 characters, while the main website feed is a much more comfortable ~75. I know I could install an extension and set up custom css, but feels like a lot for one site.
My biggest peeve with Twitter's UI is that there's no controls for seeing Likes as there are for Retweets. I can turn off retweets for some users, but still have to see all of their Likes in my feed (what's the functional difference again?). I think Tweetdeck lets you have a feed without any retweets or likes, but I do genuinely enjoy some of my follows' retweets and would be sad to lose those to get rid of likes.
EDIT: Going back to check, it seems like setting timeline to "Latest" instead of "Home" might not include likes. Hard to tell, but I'll keep a closer eye on it now.
It feels so cathartic to hear someone else share this opinion. I hope someday we can go back to not having a mountain of javascript on every page, but I'm not gonna hold my breath for it.
Remember when you could view page source and actually be able to infer a rough idea of what the page would look like and say?
Simpler times. . .
ironically as a nearly-exclusive tweetdeck user because of its curation abilities, i find twitter's redesign much too claustrophobic for me. the space taken up by actual content is so tiny and seems really out of scale relative to all the other shit which now takes up i think just over half the screen. it looks glossy and nice, i guess, but the pros to me basically stop there and really don't outweigh the cons--not that really matters though since again, i almost exclusively use tweetdeck to browse twitter.
I hate it purely because they've clearly just taken their mobile app and turned it in to a webpage.
I manage multiple accounts so I've been using Tweetdeck for awhile anyway.
It's bad enough that I finally plopped down money for TweetBot.
The UI itself isn't what really bothered me - it was that it started doing all that algorithmic crap I don't want on Twitter. Stuff like showing tweets out-of-order, showing me tweets from people I don't follow, etc. I've got a carefully curated follower setup and Twitter seems hell-bent on ruining it.
I have no qualms with the design itself. Maybe I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but it seems pretty much the same to me. I do however take issue with them constantly injecting "X liked Y" in my feed, and playing with the order of tweets. It makes it very frustrating to pick up where I left off.
As others have said, it’s just a blown up version of their mobile app, which isn’t great on a desktop computer.
But I never, ever see it since I just use TweetBot on my iOS devices and Macs.
My main complaint is that the timeline and individual threads look too similar. I often forget which I'm in.
I just stumbled onto Twitter yesterday (I usually am more of a Mastodon guy) and it was terrible. I was impressed by how much I didn't like it. Too big, too cluttered; it felt like I was looking through a microscope at the webpage. And I usually like big-fonted sites! It just felt claustrophobic.
The trend of heavier and less accessible continues.
It now takes even longer and more downloading to display a feed of text and images.
I'll be back to check out the next redesign.
For now, I don't even click Twitter links.
Their handling of no-JS users is a giant fuck-you middle finger with not one but two confirmation buttons.
All to read some inane shit about politics, pop culture, or a repost meme.
Twitter is what you make of it. Literally; unlike Reddit it doesn't start you off with defaults in your feed. So if all you're reading is inane political and pop culture meme reposts, that is what you chose to follow.
What I do love about Twitter is if I regularly see content I actually don't want to see... Two clicks to unfollow that person. It's the perfectly configurable filter bubble.
The one thing I love about Twitter which I wish would make its way onto reddit and/or Tildes is the idea of muting something based on the key words or the user themselves.
It's such a powerful tool to have to be able to mute tweets based on key words without flat-out banning them, and furthermore muting but restrict it to a time slot like 24 hours or a week or even a month, so you aren't forever out of the loop.
I imagine it would be harder to do this on a forum, but there are some ways that it can be accomplished and I wish an attempt was made.
I mostly like it. I like a big font for content. I dislike that increasing the font size used for tweets will also increase the font size used in the LHS menu, which ends up being enormous.
Currently I get about 2 or 3 tweets on the screen which feels suboptimal.