When it comes to social media, Twitter is my drug of choice. What’s not to love? It’s fast and furious (more so than the latest instalment of the film franchise of the same name), with 280 characters there’s much less waffle, gifs aplenty (you can’t beat a good gif), no arty pictures of avocado on toast and the main plus point … it’s not Facebook!
Until now!
The newest desktop version of Twitter has been rolled out across the globe, and people are not happy.
The powers that be in Twitter Development have spent seven years, yes seven years, developing a new desktop version that effectively mimics the mobile app.
Newsflash Twitter, don’t you think if we’d wanted to use something that looked like and behaved like the mobile app we would, oh I don’t know, maybe use the mobile app and not our desktops?
Or is that just me?
Apparently not.
There have been rumblings across the Twitterverse.
New Twitter officially sucks! And with no option to roll back to old Twitter, we are stuck with this lumpy, clunky and very slow version.
Here are my top seven gripes about the new Twitter:
The default setting is to show ‘top tweets’ first
Oh yes. The powers that be thought that we’d want to see top tweets, as opposed to the real reason everyone loves Twitter in that fact that Tweets are chronological.
It was bad enough after the last update, when they introduced a ‘Tweets you may have missed’ section after about ten tweets that were from 18 plus hours previously.
Changing the default setting so you can see ‘latest tweets first’ is very easy. Simply click on the group of three stars, located just above where you type your tweets, and choose ‘see latest tweets’.
That will ensure you see tweets in chronological order.
But be warned, if you leave logging on to Twitter for a few days, the setting will revert back to the default of seeing top tweets.
Clunkiness points: 3 out of 5
Too much scrolling
The trouble with developing new Twitter as a desktop version of the mobile app is the amount of scrolling and trying to find where on your timeline you actually are. And yes, I know there’s always going to be an amount of scrolling, but, seeing as:
- You can only see 1½ tweets, maximum, in your feed before you have to scroll down
- If you go to ‘Notifications’ and then back to the main feed, you return to the tweet you left, which means you have press ‘click up’ to see new tweets or scroll down to continue seeing older tweets before clicking up and starting all over again
- Occasionally, if you have a lot of new tweets, it will just grey out a load and invite you to click ‘show more’, which leaves you wondering where on earth you are in your Twitter feed.
It’s all very well on a mobile to swipe up or down, but on a desktop using a mouse that’s extremely time-consuming.
[UPDATE: Something new has begun to happen this morning, when I move away and back to the main feed, sometimes I will get ‘click to see new tweets’, sometimes it will return me to the place I left with no further instructions and sometimes it will automatically (after a few seconds delay) ping me to the top of the screen and the newest tweets … how odd!]
With old Twitter, you could see more than 1 tweet at a time and if you went away from the main feed and returned, you would automatically go back to the top of the feed, rather than the new version where you go back to where you were, which could be in the middle of the page and it would tell you how many new tweets had been made, giving you the option to click to load the new tweets. So much easier.
Clunkiness points: 5 out of 5
Adding gifs
Twitter is gif central. It’s a well-known fact that tweets with images or gifs receive more traction than those with just text.
And adding gifs on old Twitter was a breeze. Simply hit the little gif icon, either choose a category or type in what you want your gif to be about, e.g., happiness, Twitter would automatically pull up all the gifs about that topic and you simply click on your favourite and it’s automatically added to the tweet.
So, who, in their right minds, thought that turning the process of adding a gif from a two-step process to a 4-step process was a good idea? And sometimes, if we’re really lucky it turns into a 6-step process.
In new Twitter this is how you add a gif:
- Click the gif icon
- Wait
- Type in what you want your gif to be about (if there’s no category about it)
- Click Search
- Wait
- Wait some more – it takes a really long time
- Scroll really slowly to find your favourite gif (if you go too fast Twitter can’t keep up and half of the gifs become impossible to see)
- Click on your favourite gif
- Wait
- Click Add
- Congratulations your gif is now inserted into your tweet
If you’re really lucky, sometimes after you press add, you get sent back to the gif selection, where you have to press exit twice to get back to your tweet.
Clunkiness points: 10 out of 5 (it’s that bad)
Inserting emojis
Inserting an emoji used to be so easy.
Click on the emoji
Profile picture and information have disappeared from the main feed
Do you remember the little box that used to sit quite neatly in the top left hand corner showing your details, number of followers and how many people you were following? Gone.
So now to see how many followers you have, you have to click on the ‘Profile’ menu option.
It’s not a major thing, but just one more that makes new Twitter that little bit more un-user friendly and clunky.
Clunkiness points: 2 out of 5
Who to follow
Instead of being shown an endless stream of people Twitter thinks you might like to follow based on your likes, this is now a limited list.
Once you get to the bottom of that list, which contains just 30 suggestions, that’s it. And even if you click all the suggestions, click away and click back to it. You will see no more options, until you hit screen refresh and another list of just 30 suggestions comes up.
Clunkiness points: 4 out of 5
Trends for you
The default for trends is for trends based on your locations and who you follow, theoretically.
However, nine times out of ten you very rarely see trends based on what you follow, only based on your country location.
For example, I’m based in the United Kingdom (UK) and my Twitter account is business based. Yet, at the time of writing the only trends showing in my timeline have nothing to do with business and everything to do with football, because that’s the only thing trending in the UK, even if I click on ‘Show More’ twice, I can find nothing about business.
If only there was an option to choose trending based on who you follow and ignore the location.
Clunkiness points: 3 out of 5 (purely for the annoyance)
Actually typing a tweet can be an experience
With this new ‘rolling’ screen feature, sometimes it can cause your actual tweet that you are trying to type to move as more tweets are loaded, meaning you have to do more scrolling back up to the tweet you were trying to type.
This has happened to me on more than one occasion, especially when I’ve moved away from the twitter page to, say grab a page link to enter into the tweet. Upon going back to the Twitter screen, I find I have to scroll to find the tweet.
Clunkiness points: 5 out of 5
That being said, new Twitter does have a couple of redeeming features:
Direct Messages
Direct messages are now a lot easier to read and reply to.
It looks like the Facebook message screen, where you can see all the messages on the left and you simply choose which message you want to read and it appears on the right.
This is much more user friendly than old Twitter, where direct messages were in a pop-up box and you had to move back and forth constantly.
User friendliness: 5 out of 5
Text size & screen brightness
The ability to adjust the font size makes new Twitter more accessible for those with sight problems.
Since 2016, Twitter’s best feature has been dark mode, which darkens the screen making it easier on the eyes. With new Twitter an even darker ‘dark mode’ called ‘Lights Out’ has been introduced, which can only be a good thing to help us protect our eyesight.
Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours staring at a digital screen, studies suggest that 60% of people spend more than 6 hours a day in front of a digital device, so our exposure to very strong artificial blue light waves has significantly increased.
These “Blue” or High Energy Visible (HEV) wavelengths flicker more easily creating a glare which may be one of the reasons for eyestrain, headaches, physical and mental fatigue we can feel after many hours staring at a digital screen, computer or other electronic device.
User friendliness: 5 out of 5
Despite its new found clunkiness, in reality nothing will change. So, I guess we’ll all just have to accept new Twitter and one day we’ll eventually get used to it, warts and all.
What do you think?
Now, I want to hear from you.
Does anything else bug you about new Twitter?
Or maybe, you love it.
Either way, let me know by leaving a comment right now.
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