alt Hacker NewsI find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par user experience.
I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
Replies
There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it.
They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly.
I have a great user experience on it.
Here's what I do:
I follow people who are consistently interesting and don't post too much.
Then I only use "Following". "For You" is an algorithmic attention vortex for the proles.
The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from the social circle around the people I follow and the topics they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by which topics you are interested in, you might get served more slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any unusability.
It's good people like you who consider free speech some laughing matter don't lead the conversation.
I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be without him having taken over.
I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually kinda bad before too, but it got way worse.
The algorithm is a mirror: it show more of what you interact with. You see “shady content” because you pay attention to it.
But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself.
X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.