Twitter Is a Clusterfuck of UI mistakes

Today an account with a very large number of followers mentioned my twitter handle, the problem is, he didn’t intent to do so, he just misspelled someone else’s twitter handle; people started re-tweeting, liking and replying that tweet, so I got to see a lot of notifications that were not intended for me at any point. I guess spelling mistakes are something very common on twitter, totally understandable, people are always in a hurry and they type as fast as possible in touch-based-keyboards; so twitter must have a a way to un-fuck this right? A way to un-track that tweet and every response/activity derived from it right? Nope, tough luck. Something that should be as simple as clicking “Mute this tweet and all related activity” or maybe “This tweet is not about me, it was a mistake” or maybe, just maybe there should be a way to select multiple notifications at once and then click on some sort of “mute” button right? Nope.

Yeah I know what you thinking, why make such a buzz? Just ignore it all; but the interesting thing is that this is not an edge case, this problem has ramifications beyond misspellings, lets say you tweet a funny video of your cat and it goes viral, your notifications then get flooded with “LOL”, “LULZ”, and hundreds of other inane responses, followers and notifications; but lets pretend you were in twitter in the first place to follow your favorite mathematicians and physicists, you just posted that funny video as a one-off thing, it was a Sunday morning and you just wanted to share a little laugh with your friends -and maybe a few of their friends-, but now that tweet ruined your notifications, and with it all the conversations you were having before that tweet, or even future ones because the tweet can still go viral for months and even years after being posted. So what are your options now? Not many, just one actually, delete that tweet and mute anyone who followed you expecting more funny videos and mute everyone who replied to it. So now you learned your lesson, from now on you will stick to tweeting math things only, because you don’t want any of that “viral dirt” again! You even wonder if you should have a twitter account for each subject you want to talk… Nah, that seems too overly complicated, changing accounts is another big UI pain so maybe the cure is worst than the disease.

This is probably the most embarrassing feature missing on twitter, meaning the inability to click a notification and hide it, you have to actually mute the creator of that tweet if you really want to hide all related notification, and if it is your own tweet, well, you have to delete it.



Other crappy UI practices can be found all over twitter, one of those is when a tweet from few years ago goes viral again -for one reason or another-, when you click that tweet you are unable to read recent replies, so even doing something as simple as ordering comments by date is impossible (functionality that even sites from 1999 had), no way to know why this tweet got revived, or if it was by chance then at least showing recent replies would allow people currently interested on it to talk about it, instead of replying to people who were interested about it long time ago and probably are no longer aware of it.

How can Twitter have some much money and talented employees and still be this bad? One of the reasons is that thanks to the number of users people are not willing to go to another social network no matter how crappy twitter is, an anyone else doing the “140 chars limit” will be written off as “another twitter clone”, so Twitter doesn’t have too much incentive to improve where it matters. Social networks are not like restaurants where you just can just jump one from the other, after so many million users they are moved by momentum not by quality (like a free market its supposed to work), then many get away with clunky interfaces as long as the number of users is good enough -and growing-, and thanks to that they also get away with extremely unethical practices, but I guess that’s a rant for another day.