Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Turns 8; May Drop Hashtags and @replies
Twitter has only just turned eight years old, but in that time it's become so pervasive that some of its conventions have spread beyond Twitter itself, and its character limit seems almost like a natural law. Now, Buzzfeed reports that some Twitter-isms may be about to change: based on screenshots of interfaces in alpha testing, it seems that hashtags and "at" replies may be on the chopping block, or (based on some updates made to the story) at least made less visible for some readers.
:D
Up the character limit to 160 to harmonize with SMS.
Sure sounds like another site I heard of recently where the users got upset about people stripping away the things that made the site the site.
the @userid and the trick with the . in front, combined with "hashtag" DEFINES twitter. Twitter wants to kill that off? Sure. Here comes Flit-it with @userid, hashtags, and 255 character Fleets. Flit it. Fleet it like it's 2013.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
#savethehashtag
You forgot to say #FUCKBETA.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
There's no way to disable Twitter pictures in your feed, searches or @history.
The most common use of a Twitpic is to post a meme. And if that isn't bad enough, the second most common use of Twitpic is to post a shock picture. It is unacceptable that we can't have them disabled in the options.
God spoke to me
Slashdot might be removing comments. Or at least replacing threaded discussions with flat 255-character one-liner responses, with no HTML markup features.
Twitter is an excellent news aggregator. Maybe you are too busy making clever little "jokes" to notice.
Twitter turns 8; seeks free advertising
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
1. Build Twitter with features people love.
2. Remove said features infuriating the masses.
3. Re-introduce said features as a premium feature.
4. Profit?
Nothing else seems to be working for them...
no, real news aggregators exist and are superior, twitter ones are far too disorganized
I almost clicked on the link, but then I saw it was buzzfeed. You can safely assume the whole "story" is clickbait nonsense.
Remove two essential elements of how people use their product, wait for the uproar, then return them back to much fanfare.
Sure sounds like another site I heard of recently where the users got upset about people stripping away the things that made the site the site.
Digg?
These jokes wouldn't involve Erris, Mactrope, gnutoo, inTheLoo, westbake, Odder, Ibane, deadzero, and the rest of the sockpuppet brigade, would they?
Sure it's not twits tweeting to themselves?
The various kinja based sites I believe.
How could they eliminate hashtags, other than not allowing non alphanumeric characters? What's going to stop someone from putting a "#" in front of a word or phrase?
They'd have to make their search engine ignore the hash mark, which is just dumb.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Penny Arcade Twitter comic: https://lh6.googleusercontent....
News aggregators have become much less useful thanks to the all-out war on RSS that we're seeing from publishers and news sources.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Except in this case twitters user interface and navigation system has always been a completely shitty experience.
Yes, popular things can have shitty interfaces and their popularity can hide that fact from the creators.
MobyGames?
Agree with MrBigInThePants. As best I can tell, Twitter's interface builders are actually some chimpanzees they borrowed from the zoo.
Like many other people, I have been using TweetDeck on the desktop for years. When it was acquired by Twitter a couple of years ago, they managed to completely mess it up.
Now, things that one used to be able to do right in a column of TweetDeck (i.e., more or less in-line), requires 4 different interfaces that pop up. Search is another (completely superfluous) interface. Direct messages no longer allow links. Seeing a larger version of someone profile picture requires you to go to their Twitter page in a web browser. Filtering a column is now a multiple-step process when it used to be just one click and type.
I could go on for ages. While the Twitter team has finally managed to restore much of the functionality of the original TweetDeck (though not all... links in DMs for just one example), what used to be a simple and elegant interface is now an outrageously wild hodgepodge of completely different interfaces that work in inconsistent ways.
TweetDeck's interface is now an usability engineer's worst nightmare. Twitter pages in the browser aren't that much better. I would be embarrassed to admit I worked for them; thank Grid I don't have to.
The hashtag was stripped to streamline the comment and hide the scaffolding.
signature is pants
(Disclaimer: by "thank Grid I don't have to", I mean I don't work for Twitter and never have. I would not work for them, because their development environment probably resembles their interfaces: an outrageous mess.
The only reason I still use TweetDeck is because Twitter managed to kill off the competing products by limiting their API calls. That's called anti-competitive Bad Business.)
I dont use twitter so i could be wrong, but if you remove one of their key foundations, what is left?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So how am I going to find out the hashtag for a topic if they aren't displayed? This is beyond stupid.
I still don't get twitter.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
Now get off my lawn.
46137
Why not just shutdown the site? I would hurt less, and the results will be exactly the same.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
It's unfortunate, too. It was a short-sighted attempt at making a profit. Would've made more sense to offer developers a cut of any ads/promoted tweets they displayed in their applications.
MH370 is still missing; events eerily similar to the lead-up of a World War are occurring in Crimea; conflict and strife still continues in Syria -- but I'm sure this will be the top front page news today. #handzovmahtwitter
"Again proving what a moron you are."
When I see them, I have to wonder what the motivation of the writer was.
Publicly denouncing me? Not very effective; not only does it not have anything specific to say, it's a zero-point AC comment.
Just pissed off at me? Again not very effective; it's hard to tell who it is behind the AC mask. (Sometimes I can tell, but that comment left few clues.)
About the only other thing I can think of is "projection" or Dunning-Kruger. But even if it were the latter it would seem to be a rather pointless exercise.
Why is twitter blocked in India?
When I first heard about this I wondered how or what they replace them with, but really don't care much ether way.
I get those spiky ACs every now and then and, these days just give them a belly laugh.
The Modern UI app snap feature is really nice for snapping the Twitter client to the side of your desktop.
What war on RSS is that?
I love it when big companies gets really really arrogant and makes everything possible to insult their userbase by doing everything in their power to destroy their attachment to product.
I hope it doesn't end up like the stupid Facebook autocomplete, where typing "the danger of misleading completions" has you undoing:
The Daniel Waternam
The danger of Missie Marks
The the danger of misleading Commie Pinko
People were using "@replies" at least as early as the 90s, though nobody called it that. They can have (and keep) hashtags, but they aren't in any way responsible for the pervasive nature of the "@" symbol -- its very name lends it to natural use.
#NewCoke
I actually got banned for a day for "over-replying", not to one person mind you, but just in general. Replying to peoples tweets is apparently disruptive, funny as I thought it was the point and that I was participating.
It's a social networking site that doesn't encourage social behavior, unless it pleases, and puffs-up the poster.
The site is ridiculous as anything but a corporate announcement site -- and this is why it's going to ultimately fail. My guess is that it will be dominated by "news" and product marketing more and more each year until it's irrelevant.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
aw, some twitter twat moderators got butthurt
they think facebook and twitter are news sources, ha
While you are one of the rare twitter enthusiasts that can actually give examples of how twitter has been useful (most say it is useful, but can never think of an example), I think you are leaving out the endless hours you spent sorting through all the garbage to find something worth talking about. . What the creators of Twitter are trying to resolve is a problem that is inherent to the service, it is a huge time investment for very little return. The issue isn't learning how to use the service; the twitter clients already hide this from the user. The effort required to sift through all the garbage, misinformation and useless rhetoric does not pay off in the end for the majority of users.
Also, I have yet to see anything on Twitter that cannot be obtained from other sources. As a matter of fact, the move away from IRC to Twitter to cover live events has resulted in an extremely poor experience and reduced functionality.
The IPO is the worst thing that could have happened to Twitter. Now they have to find a way to monetize the service to keep their shareholders happy, and like those who invested in Facebook, Twitter's shareholders are in for a huge disappointment.
Millions of people use twitter and Facebook to keep up with the news, as well as their friends and families lives. Meanwhile, you're a grown man replying to himself on a message board and using phrases like "butthurt". You sure showed them!
Don't bring up ancient history, next thing you know you'll be talking about Slashdot.