A Tale of Two Twitters
‘For You’ is good. Breaking other clients is bad.
I come bearing ill tidings. Twitter, as we all know by now, is fucked up. And it may be fucking up more than ever before. More on that in a bit. But first, a twist: the latest product decision, to force feed us all a “For You” section as the main feed of the app, may actually be… good?
I know, I know, it’s crazy. Or maybe I’m crazy. I did, after all, lay out a plan to roll out pretty much exactly what Twitter has now rolled out as the main feed six years ago:
I often think about not using Twitter as much as I do simply so I can get the ‘While You Were Away’ summary at the top of my feed — or even better, a ‘Highlights’ notification when I’ve been away for a long while. The delight of these features is matched only by the ridiculousness of how buried they are. This should be its own tab. Let’s call it ‘Pulse’ or something. It really is the pulse of the planet, especially in the era of Trump.
Shift the current ‘Home’ tab over a notch and call this ‘Live’. This is the Twitter we all know and love. But trying to think about all the people who don’t currently use Twitter, this real-time feed is intimidating to start. It should always remain as a core component of Twitter as it’s vital once you’re hooked. But it’s hard to get hooked. We all know this by now.
This is all so obvious that I must be missing something. But I’ve also thought this for years at this point, and yet here we are, stuck with ‘Explore’. Twitter says it will get better over time. And it probably will. But conceptually, it’s just not correct. Again, this should be the drop-down menu when you go to search for something. Not a core tab. ‘Highlights’ should be the core tab.
So perhaps I’m biased in liking this move. Though it’s also a fairly obvious thing, which other social networks have more or less done for some time. Twitter, which has dabbled with a quasi-algorithmic feed for a while, for whatever reason, wouldn’t go all the way. Now it has.
And I’m discovering far more content than I ever have on Twitter as a result. And I don’t believe I’m alone as I see other users I follow retweeting content which I can only surmise is from this “For You” tab. Yes, some of it is RT-bait. Maybe a lot of it. But it’s not bad content. It’s a bit like OG Tumblr on steroids. I’m not sure it’s a good thing. It may be a bad thing. Nevertheless, it’s a compelling thing. I like it?
A lot of folks hate it. My wife, for one.¹ This was always to be expected. It’s antithetical to what Twitter has been to date. You follow people and you see their tweets. This is more like, you follow people and that’s a signal for which tweets you should see. But now just one signal. It’s like Twitter TikTok-ified itself. Again, kind of good?
And I think it’s getting better, fast?
Twitter has been a sort of comedy of errors in recent months. The person stepping on the rake and getting whacked in the face and then trying to blindly find a first aid kit and burning their house down. A clown car driving into a mine that’s already been stripped of the gold. But this just might work? I’m as surprised as you are. And again, I’ve long thought Twitter should do exactly what they did! I just didn’t think they could make it actually work. I think they’re close…
Okay, now that I’ve given Twitter credit for something good, let me also say that the API fiasco is the turdiest of all turds. If Twitter truly is starting to break third-party Twitter clients on purpose — which it sure seems like it is — what a dick move. After years of Twitter dicking over their developers, this is the final move. The dickening.
Assuming this is true — Twitter won’t officially weigh in which is a new level of corporate cowardice — it’s going to drive a lot more users from Twitter. Probably not enough to sink it, but certainly a certain segment of users that long made Twitter what it was. Maybe Twitter is okay with that. Maybe it even wants this? (See: above.) But it sucks. For you, for me, for developers. Maybe not for Twitter’s actual business, but then again, maybe!
Twitter, as mentioned, has a long history of jerking around their developers. Launching APIs and then pulling the rug. Am I taking crazy pills?² But previously, it always felt like it was more a matter of incompetence rather than malice. This feels like the opposite. It’s not a good look nor vibe.
Mastodon is not a great product,³ but this type of move makes Mastodon make all sorts of sense as a protocol. I’m using it more because others seem to be using it more. I think it’s still a small risk for Twitter — again, Mastodon leaves a lot to be desired as a product — but it’s bigger than yesterday as a result of all this. The question is how calculated this risk is…
So there you go. One nice thing to say about Twitter. And one shitty thing. Par for the new course, I guess.
Published on January 15, 2023 📆
Written from London, England 🗺
Written on a 2022 M2 MacBook Air 💻
Enjoying a Camden Canape IPA 🍺¹ For the record, I do think, as I wrote at the time, that Twitter should let you decide if you want to set their ‘For You’ or ‘Following’ to the default feed. I think it’s even fine to set ‘For You’ as the default to start as I suspect only OG power users of Twitter would and will swap to ‘Following’. And again, those users may be leaving Twitter…
² If you’re around long enough, you often feel like you’re taking crazy pills.
³ Incidentally, Tapbots, best known for making perhaps the most popular third-party Twitter client, Tweetbot, has created a Mastodon client named Ivory which is, by far, the best client for that service I’ve used to date.
