Terrible Twitter Agenda

Twitter is an unusable mess of a platform and has been for years. Being taken over by Elon “Biff Tannen” Musk is making it worse in some ways, but the main narrative hasn’t really changed – it has a terrible user experience.

Some reasons why I think this:

• I had an account for a home business recently that operated for about seven years. I ended up selling the business in the last year but hadn’t used the Twitter account for at least a couple of years. For some reason, Twitter took it back in that time and now it’s used by a crypto scammer. Twitter’s support was useless, even though I could provide the original signup and activation emails to the email account originally associated with the handle. This negatively affected my sale price. I assumed I would still have access to my account of several years.
• I read sites that sometimes link to tweets and so-called conversations or threads. Sometimes when I click, I can see three or four related tweets before the random garbage appears, sometimes I only see the linked tweet standing atop the pile of refuse. There is no obvious method for me to follow a conversation or thread, which is baffling since it’s considered a feature of the platform (which I disagree with, incidentally).
• I get a lot of email from Twitter full of tweets I find either offensive (fuck off Trump, get out of my feed) or uninteresting (I don’t watch Cricket and doubt I’ve ever clicked on anything that might suggest otherwise). Whatever algorithm they use to offer up “related” tweets is truly terrible and has not been improved (in fact, I feel it’s gotten worse in the last few years).
• If I open the website and amn’t logged in for whatever reason, I can’t use the site at all. Fuck off, me, you’re not welcome here. Tweets are public (obviously, since they’re searchable and linkable), so there’s no reason aside from greed to make this decision. Signing in only marginally improves things since the page devolves into crypto and political bullshit almost immediately.

Twitter is the 90-minute time-share presentation of the tech world. Twitter is the branded credit card kiosk between you and your bubble tea in the mall. Twitter is a collection of the most user-hostile decisions ever made in a social network platform.

I’ve been told that I just don’t know how to use Twitter. My response is that I have no interest in using a site that requires any sort of actual training to achieve its most basic functionality. Even Facebook is pretty damn obvious for the basic feed/post functionality; most “training” for Facebook is around concepts and processes, not where the magical button is that lets you see complete conversations.

I am not making any suggestions for how Twitter could improve their experience. They’re a big company and can figure it out (I hope).