[abdulmuhaimin]

let me rephrase your word, but negatively. The text is interrupted by the space-wasting "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet.

Not to mention that on the desktop, the text is literally only quarter of the screen. Add that to the very frequent interrption bars, you are in for a very long scroll while reading

[klodolph]

> Not to mention that on the desktop, the text is literally only quarter of the screen.

A quarter of the width? Well, naturally! The optimal line length for readability is somewhere in the 50-100 character range. This is one of those things that is actually backed by empirical research (lots of research... experiments in readability are cheap and easy to conduct, and people have been doing these experiments for a long time). The width of lines of text in tweets is on the shorter end of that range.

Hacker News, for example, is an example of a site with poor readability. The text is as wide as the window. To address this deficiency, I open Hacker News in a narrower window. It's still harder to read.

[readflaggedcomm]

Now assume your and Twitter's research is wrong. How do I make it readable?

Not with CSS, their markup is impenetrable. You have to have another site scrape and reformat the content. Shameful.

[klodolph]

Why would I assume that the research is wrong? We’re talking about a century’s worth of readability research, here. Cheap, easy-to-replicate studies which have been done over and over again over the decades. Backed by simple-to-explain theories that explain why. Seems like a completely unreasonable assumption, to be frank.

[kbenson]

> Why would I assume that the research is wrong?

Because it's highly that even if it's correct in aggregate, there will be outliers that the opposite is true, and they'll benefit from different formatting.

That is, even if it's right, it might still be wrong for them. So the question being asked is, why is it made so hard to change?

[aseipp]

The context of the thread here wasn't about people with different visual abilities or anything complaining about the fact they're being left behind by Twitter's UX team, it was literally someone asking "Why do you think this is unreadable", some whining that "The text only uses a quarter of the screen", which was responded to with "A century of readability research has shown that's pretty good idea, actually!", which is a literal fact. This is very easy to understand and it isn't remotely computer-centric -- imagine a book where the "margins" didn't exist in any form and words just filled the page from edge to edge. It's not some random thing these basic margin rules also came to computers, and it's not some UX fad; you only need to ask what the difference is between a 1998 CRT and a 2021 4k screen to see why.

Like, you're talking about "what's right for them" as if that's supposed to pull my heartstrings, but the grandparent even literally said "I am going to re-phrase your question negatively", it's not like they're going to magically be convinced or actually argue about any readability metrics in any kind good faith, it's literally just a reflex. I wouldn't waste my time defending it on some egalitarian principles or whatever.

[abdulmuhaimin]

Dont get me wrong, twitter UX is great for what it is, for tweets. Because theyre at most 280 character length. A blog/essay is a different story

[readflaggedcomm]

My hatred of Twitter's layout is not principled, I assure you. It's purely aesthetic and visceral.

[mrec]

> The text is as wide as the window

Only on a small screen. An HN `div.comment` has a `max-width: 1215px;` rule.

[klodolph]

Ah, well I typically don’t have super wide windows, because it has a negative impact on readability. The difference between 1215px and higher widths isn’t really significant anyway… above a certain line length, readability has already reached its minimum and doesn’t decrease further as the lines get longer.