[thewebcount]

I found this statement really bizarre:

> Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don’t use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design.

I've always found Twitter to be horribly confusing. It's mishmash of replies, re-tweets, and completely unrelated other tweets has been there for years and never made any sense to someone who doesn't have an account.

I don't have a Reddit account but know enough to use old.reddit.com for everything. It's ugly, but it's not at all confusing. It's about as straightforward as it could be.

[marssaxman]

Likewise! Every time I accidentally follow a twitter.com link, I find myself lost in an incoherent crazyland of intense emotions. Threadreader is OK, but I prefer to interact with Twitter in the same way that I used to enjoy Eve Online: wait for someone involved to write up a summary of whatever it was that just happened, then read it at a distance from all the shouting.

[silisili]

Glad it's not just me. It's especially infuriating when clicking a specifc tweet to see replies, scrolling down, then seeing god knows what random mess. Oops, you had to click the tiny 'see more replies' text to see more relevant replies, we're just showing you random unrelated tweets. Who designs such a mess and why...

[marcosdumay]

Hum... I never saw that "see more replies" link. That's probably why people talk about replies here that I never see on Twitter.

But yeah, I only go there when I get a link to something specific anyway.

[egypturnash]

Someone whose paycheck comes from keeping you on that mess and “engaged” as long as possible.

[grumbel]

Reddit doesn't make it very obvious that there are subreddits on the site or how to find and navigate them. The front page is just memes, which makes the site not look all that useful. A normal web forum or Usenet in contrast has the hierarchy of groups/forums always directly visible. Even 4chan has a big box with all the boards on their first page.

[cuddlybacon]

Same here.

I found old reddit really easy to understand and found twitter to be much harder.

I bounced off twitter a few times just because I didn’t understand the UI.

[hemloc_io]

Twitter is functionally a giant group chat of all your follows.

Impossible to get into until the algo kicks in for me.

[jimmaswell]

Are you serious? It's a very simple thread-based design. Threads are separated by approptiate dividers or whitespace or indentation. I don't get it.

[Razengan]

The Twitter UI is a mess.

It’s infuriating me to even try to explain the problem to someone who doesn’t see it.

For example, can you explain to me - without going to try it out first - where exactly to tap (on a phone) to view the comments on a picture post in your home feed?

[kzrdude]

It's messy but as a whole it's not that complicated because the basic model is simple. There's one thing - tweets - and various ways they are listed or threaded.

[Jcowell]

Can’t you just tap the post (not the picture , but the post).

[Razengan]

What do you mean by the “post”? The picture is the post..

[Rusky]

The post is a rectangle that spans the width of the column, which contains the picture, and any text commenting on the picture, and the author's name/avatar, etc. It's got a divider above and below to indicate the boundary, and it (at least used to) lights up when you hover the cursor over it.

[jimmaswell]

I do find this annoying now that I recall, but it's the same way to go to a thread here, the timestamp.

[jimmaswell]

This is only in some specific case too - now that I look again, it's simply tapping the post in most all cases. The annoyance I remembered was that tapping the comments icon with the number by it just opens a view to add a comment, not see them.

[cryptoz]

I also find Twitter nearly impossible to follow. The threaded model is difficult to build a mental model around, you must click/tap endlessly to read a whole thread, I see error messages daily that are incorrect ("this tweet has been deleted" when it has not, or "offline" notices when it is not, etc), significant confusion on tweet metrics (reply count is sometimes visible, sometimes not?), etc. I could go on forever about my issues with it.

Been on since 2009, follow/followed by a few hundred people, use reddit since 2006, blahblah. Reddit isn't great either but I find it a lot less confusing to read on a day-to-day basis. At least old reddit...new reddit is quite confusing IMO in many of the same ways twitter is.

If I had to guess I would vote with other commenters here who are saying that the UX is likely on purpose, and has been built with metrics in mind and not user comprehension.