3

The Broken Timeline Fiasco

Twitter presents itself in a reverse chronological order, with the newest tweets showing up at the top of your feed. This can be a little weird when you first start using it, but it soon becomes second nature, and whether you read forward or backwards, all the tweets are in a nice, predictable order. Time's arrow flies true, and causality-crashing loops are kept to a minimum.

And then, in response to absolutely no one, Twitter changed this. There is now a feature which interrupts the timeline to show you whatever the algorithms deem to be the most important tweets you might have missed since you last wasted time on Twitter. There are a few issues with this. First, Twitter, I wouldn't say I've been "missing" these things, as these are just tweets and not loved ones returning from the Great War. Second, maybe like a quarter of these things are in any way more remarkable than what's already in my feed. Third, mixing old tweets with new ones is a little awkward. A big part of Twitter is replying to tweets, but that's really best done within the first few minutes after one goes up. Replying to a tweet 20 hours after it goes live is kind of lame, and here's dorky old Twitter gently encouraging us to accidentally do that.

So why'd you do that, Twitter? Did anyone ask you to do that? Or did essentially everyone ask you to do the exact opposite? Are you ... are you not reading all our tweets? That hurts, Twitter.

2

The Blue Line Fiasco

Twitter's always been a little bit ropey when it comes to handling conversations. For a long time, you'd see tweets out of context, or one side of a five-sided conversation between eight people you only sort of knew. It kind of worked, if you knew the interface. Your timeline would only ever show tweets from people you followed, and if you ever wanted context for a tweet, you could just tap on it and see all the tweets in the conversation which preceded it. Still, it wasn't straightforward, and you can see why Twitter tried to improve it.

Twitter did that by adding blue lines to thread related tweets together, and when the feature was first introduced, users, as dictated by ancient custom, hated it. I'm still not genuinely sure why; it seemed to bring more relevant information to the foreground, and made it easier to pick up on a conversation in progress. I guess some people thought it added clutter, or they just hated the color blue. After several days of fury ... everything more or less stayed the same. It looks like they changed the color of the lines . So that's something. Good yelling, everyone.

1

The Anti-Harassment Fiasco

Twitter has a harassment problem. Many users, in particular women and minorities, are regularly bombarded with threats and slurs, and lacking any effective way to deal with it on Twitter itself, many have responded by staying off the platform entirely. And although Twitter claims the issue is getting better, it took them ten years to get to that point, if that point is even true. Historically, their various responses to the harassment issue have been remarkably half-assed.

Initially, the only real tool to deal with harassers was to block them. This sounds like it should be feasible, but it has to be done one at a time, which is close to useless when it comes to blocking brigades of harassers, or anyone willing to create multiple accounts. More advanced blocking tools, which enable users to filter out notifications from new users, took years to arrive. And Twitter's reporting tool remains notoriously unhelpful. Reporting a clearly harassing tweet or account often results in nothing happening at all, the reports rejected with no explanation given.

It's this issue, more than anything else, which Twitter users have been begging the company to fix for several years now. That Twitter only evidently began taking it seriously in 2017 is baffling, and to the people who have endured years of abuse, probably a little insulting.

One of the key threads running through all these missteps seems to be Twitter's lack of understanding of what its users actually want or use the platform for. They keep adding features which no one is asking for, or ignoring features people desperately need, or tolerating Nazis a little more than is strictly necessary. Can it be so blind about the needs and appeal of its own product? They must have analytics telling them all this, and even if they didn't, they only need to find someone with an pregnant Mario avatar and 20,000 followers to fill them in on what they're missing.

Well, there is a reason behind almost all of these missteps, which is kind of an open secret to anyone who follows Twitter as a business, but is never stated plainly to the users.

0

What's Really Going On Here

Twitter needs to grow. Not "it'd be nice" or "it should try," but "needs" to. First, Twitter isn't profitable. Never has been. The financial details of large internet companies involve a lot of hand-waving and magical thinking, but as I understand it, many don't focus on profitability until they reach a certain size. Charging users money just turns them away, so a common business strategy is to just give your shit away for free until you have so many users that you accidentally become profitable selling their personal information to credit agencies or wig manufacturers or whatever. Whatever size that is, Twitter ain't there yet, and consequently has to keep trying to grow.