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Randi Harper: Putting out the Twitter trashfire

8. Fix Tweetdeck. Fix Twitter for Android. Fix Twitter for OSX. Twitter for OSX still has a hard limit on how many blocks it can apply because they didn’t bother updating the API call when they switched to paged requests. It also crashes a lot if you’re receiving a lot of notifications. Tweetdeck doesn’t use server side mutes. The ability to mute users originated from Tweetdeck prior to Twitter buying it. They then added this functionality to Twitter itself, but never updated the client to store these mutes server side.

What a fantastic to-do list for the people at Twitter. Reading this, what strikes me most is that the product really is a shitheap on fire sailing down a river with passengers onboard. It’s got so much legacy crap; so much inscrutable complexity built up from rounds of careless iteration and business priorities, that it’s really hard for a team still working under said priorities to fix it all within further digging the UX a grave. Same goes for iTunes, really, but so much harder for a real-time social service that people are posting to thousands of times a second.

The good news is that the most toxic parts of Twitter, the abuse and management of noise, are probably the most within reach for a quick fix without anyone having to relearn anything.