Friday, October 9, 2015

Twitter's Thread Killers: See all activity on, View other replies, Show more, and Other replies to

So far as I can tell, there's not a single page in Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go that includes all the Twitter thread killers, the labels that appear where tweets should be, that Twitter is using now because being able to chat in a coherent, organized, straightforward manner isn't what makes Twitter the most money.

Without any evidence other than timing, my suspicion is that abuse prevention is the driving force behind these coherent communication destroying techniques and the far too often appearance of their labels (link text):

"See all activity on"
"View other replies"
"Show more"
"Other replies to"
"View more in conversation →"
"This Tweet is unavailable"

Here's some Twitter users views of these thread killers:


This active thread by started by @anildash about Apple oddball vertical position for mouse charging is a great example of making following a conversation completely impossible.
If there's an explanation of the motivation behind these coherence destroyers in the Twitter support system, which there ought to be, along with an explanation of exactly when they are triggered, it eludes me so far.

The way Twitter is fragmenting conversation might be the stupidest thing I've seen since I started using the internet. Twitter is supposed to have world class people working for them and turn out a system that make avid users switch to a competitor, Blogger, to gripe about bad they are. It's baffling. 

I think this is an illustrative example of the saying "you get what you pay for", and how systems that are paid for by ads may end up not even being good for ads because they are so bad for the other non-ad-serving task that one tends to think, incorrectly, that they are really for. Twitter started out as a way to chat in short messages in chronological order, and long term users tend to think that's what still what it really is at heart.


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