Twitter is the playground for media types, so it's no surprise that some journalists have reacted to news of tweaks in the same the way a toddler reacts when seeing veggies hidden in his favourite snack: not well at all.
Twitter is a product defined by artificial scarcity (there are strict limitations on text, videos and the number of users you can share tweets with) built on top of a platform that deals in abundance (you can post almost any number of 140-character tweets from your feed and direct them at basically anyone). Its contradictions are part of the charm, and the frustration, for users.
On Tuesday, Twitter posted a blog announcing several changes to the platform in its continuing bid to become more user-friendly. The most important thing Twitter did is to stop counting the characters used in the links that provide some of the rich tweet content like GIFs, video, polls and still pictures. Removing some artificial restraints on links (hashtags will apparently still count toward your 140-character total) does ease using Twitter somewhat.
One slight misunderstanding many have is the new way that @replys will work: Right now, the more people who join a Twitter conversation, the fewer the words you can contribute. You end up with things like this: "@jack @ev @biz @gins @Stammy @Han @SwiftOnSecurity @Larakate @chrismoodycom @gracie @nataliekerris @rorycapern @cam_gordon I totes agree!"
The new system will no longer count all those handles against your character limit when you reply, but any new handles you add will count toward your limit. Which does suggest that very prolific repliers could chain together dozens of handles if they kept adding them; some reports say Twitter will limit such chains at 50 handles. That sounds like an old-school chain e-mail, but it strikes many as an opportunity for some truly epic spam and harassment campaigns.
In theory, this will not junk up your feed with 50 handles – the description in the developer section of the update suggests they will mostly be hidden in your app. But you could suddenly be part of a massive list of Twitter handles involved in a rolling Twitter fight that could blow up your mentions. But there's still no way to remove yourself from someone else's tweet cloud without muting or blocking them.
A lot of Twitter's product choices leave users scratching their heads. Despite the tweetstorm phenomenon of recent years, there's still no easy way to link together a dozen or so tweets so readers can find them organized usefully. Power users know you can reply to your own first tweet, and the others after, but also delete your handle as a way to create a Twitter thread. That's not an intuitive system.
The .@ convention is another poorly understood workaround for when you want to start a tweet with someone's handle. While writing "Jack Dorsey says a lot of interesting things" is a pretty normal sentence to type, on Twitter if you wrote "@Jack says a lot of interesting things" only people who follow @Jack and you would see that tweet. Because its product fails to account for normal language, an informal rule had to spring up to support it: By putting a period ahead of .@jack, blammo, it's as if you didn't really start your tweet with the handle.
Twitter's changes Tuesday claimed to "fix" this problem by letting you retweet your own tweets, which was not previously an option. On the one hand, this is described as a great way to promote old tweets (for reasons of ego, pride and other unpleasant motivations) and on the other, it means you could write your @jack tweet without the period and then retweet it so all your followers could see it. It gives me a headache just describing it.
Neither mechanism truly fixes what is a strange idea: that the circulation of some tweets should be limited in opaque and non-explanatory ways. The fix is not obviously easier, in a way that a new user would better understand, and these days Twitter is generally trying to make the service easier for newcomers.
Twitter's first quarter earnings report in April showed it had 310 million monthly active users and revenue of $595-million, slightly below expectations. In 2015 Twitter's MAUs were 302 million, up 3 per cent year over year. By contrast, in April Facebook reported 1.65 billion users, up 15 per cent year over year.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told the New York Times on Tuesday that when users have to futz with character counts to fit in links and pictures "you're just thinking a lot about Twitter instead of what you're saying. We shouldn't make you think about Twitter."
Despite all of these changes, Twitter still doesn't have an edit button. It still has a terrible record when it comes to harassment and trolls. There's still no point to the heart/fav button (keep your hearts, retweets only!). There's still no access to making Vines or live Periscope videos from the main Twitter app (despite Twitter owning and operating both social video startups).
Twitter has a lot of problems baked into its core idea that its "microblogging" platform should use artificial limits to make it distinct from Facebook and Medium and other broadcast-like Web platforms. Its power users will never be fully happy so long as the company attempts to ignore that central conflict and just fix the small issues that result from that choice.
So far, Twitter has decided not to change its service in more fundamental ways that might remove the constraints and allow its hundreds of millions of users different methods of expression, despite the evidence that there are other ways to build a popular social network. None of Twitter's competitors do exactly what it does, but several also have better user growth records. For instance, Snapchat uses exclusivity and ephemerality and video to compel users to stay on the network, and Facebook has almost no constraints on posts (it does have a very active censorship squad) but does use algorithmic voodoo to create "more relevant" and less "live" newsfeeds for users. It can also leverage its far greater size to promote new projects such as live video.