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I feel like a lot of people complaining about Twitter only experience it through the twitter.com web interface. I'd hate it too if that was my only experience of it. Using Tweetdeck and/or just about any mobile client is worlds better. You don't get so much random dreck, which makes it much easier to see and engage with people you actually know or like.

As far as I can tell, using any social-media site other than with a friends-only reverse-chronological feed is just going to be a bad experience for anyone who values real engagement (i.e. not influencers or wannabes and not passive disinformation consumers). Also, any social-media site without a block button and a culture encouraging people to use it is broken too.



If that's really the only way to make twitter good, then it seems like a reasonable complaint that twitter is not that way. If twitter can't be bothered to make their own product tolerable, I don't feel any compulsion to do it for them.

I say this as someone who briefly attempted to dabble in twitter on a few occasions. I have an account. I've tweeted a few times. I now check it probably a few times a year.


Tweetdeck isn't anymore accessible than Twitter; It's for powerusers. It's better than vanilla twitter the same way an F1 car is better than a Toyota Camry. If you can't grok a Camry, then jumping into an F1 isn't going to make your experience better.

Twitter's strength and "problem" (to me), is that its just a firehose of senseless data and you have to manually figure out what you want. I only started enjoying Twitter, by accident, when in college I blacklisted Facebook, Instagram and Reddit on my computer. That said, over the years I've come to prefer it's arguably web-1.0 style of discovery to the curated feeds of today.

I don't think Twitter needs the instant gratification hooks that other platforms have. Sometimes you login, and there's nothing going on.


There are web browser extensions that are pretty good at improving the web site.


Such as?


I wrote one for iOS and macOS: https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/

There are some in the Chrome Web Store too, though I don't have links.


Looks opinionated and sketchy, sorry.


Heh, ok. I don't mind if you don't want to use it, but I'm puzzled by "sketchy" and even more puzzled by "opinionated".


Opinionated on UI changes, sketchy with the lack of details on how the click tracking removal works (the easier ways that come to mind on implementation are the same or worse for privacy)


> Opinionated on UI changes

There are more than 20 settings that can be individually enabled/disabled, so it's all up to the user how much they want.

> sketchy with the lack of details on how the click tracking removal works (the easier ways that come to mind on implementation are the same or worse for privacy)

Ah, ok. The word "sketchy" can be ambiguous. :-)

The real URL is actually already hidden in the DOM, so it's a simple matter of replacement.




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