In January, on the heels of @realDonaldTrump’s second year in office, shortly after Elon Musk had been fined $20 million and Kevin Hart’s Oscar-hosting gig had been canceled because of controversial tweets, and weeks following Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's return from a 10-day silent meditation trip to Myanmar, about which he praised the food and the beauty of the monasteries but neglected to mention the ongoing regional genocide, Twitter made it clear that some things were about to change.

Just not the tweets. Though the company had spent the better part of the year promoting “healthy conversations,” it wasn't much interested in putting the screws on its users. Debates, disagreements, the occasional blow-out controversy—that was all stuff that made Twitter Twitter. No, instead, Twitter decided to change itself from the outside in. It was time to give the experience of using Twitter a makeover.

A redesign of Twitter’s website was long overdue. The desktop interface hadn’t been refreshed in seven years, and the technology stack was so old that it was hard for the engineering team to issue any improvements. The team had begun fiddling with a web redesign back in 2017, and opened it up to beta testing in September 2018. By January, it was time to show more users how the new Twitter would look.

But as soon as Twitter invited people to opt into a prototype of the new design—a new twitter.com was coming!—the peanut gallery began to weigh in, and not altogether kindly. What could Twitter do to improve its web design? “Delete it.” “Edit button.” “ALL WE WANT IS AN EDIT BUTTON.” “Did you get rid of the Nazis?” “Eh, looks ugly,” one user offered, perhaps charitably, “but I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

For Twitter’s design team, none of this was surprising. “We used to launch a feature and then search for it and put up a projector of the tweets coming in,” says Biz Stone, Twitter’s cofounder, who rejoined the company two years ago. “We’d be like, ‘Champagne?’ And then it would be like, ‘Oh. Maybe we shouldn’t.’”

So for the desktop redesign, Twitter's design team chose to proceed with caution. The preview back in January was just a heads up. A small percentage of Twitter users could opt in to a series of design “experiments,” but nothing was final, feedback was welcome, and no one had a new design foisted upon them. And those “experiments”? Nothing explosive. Twitter just wanted to see how its users would interact with bookmarks, or dark mode, or a search bar that had been moved to a different spot on the page.

"Our purpose is to serve the public conversation. Once that became clear, it was like, wait a minute. How well are we doing that?" Biz Stone, Twitter cofounder

Today, Twitter is rolling out the new website to absolutely everyone. Those who see it (or those who already have it) may find the new design refreshing in its subtlety. A few things have been rearranged in the new three-column design, and the site is noticeably faster, but there aren’t a lot of drastic updates. (No, there still isn't an edit button.) That, to Twitter, is the whole point.

“Some of it is subtle, but a lot of it is a simplification of design,” says Mike Kruzeniski, Twitter's senior director of product design. “We are trying to find the right places to be bold again, but it’s a resetting of that foundation. Starting with the best stuff and building from there.”

That foundation will prove important for Twitter. The redesign comes at a time when the company is beginning to revise its policies about hate and harassment on the platform, and is leaning more heavily on human moderators to do the janitorial tasks of keeping the place nice. There's still more work to be done in cleaning up the toxic swamp. In the meantime, Twitter is planting a community garden.

The web redesign isn't just about making the place prettier. It's also about sending a message to users: Twitter is listening to what you want—even if it doesn’t always seem like it.