Twitter has lost it’s charm

I am looking at my Twitter feed in Tweetdeck. Tweets fly by, and I try to distill something useful or interesting from the stream of information in the awfully blue client. Somehow, it doesn’t click. Without reading a single tweet, I decide to close the tab, and I start wondering what happened.

There was a time where I was obsessed with Twitter. I send dozens of tweets daily, and on a yearly basis I probably sent thousand of tweets. But now, i feel indifferent towards the medium. “Oh, you felt like you had to tweet that, person? That’s nice. I don’t care, but it’s nice.”

It’s hard to exactly pinpoint what changed the sentiment towards the micro blogging platform.

Perhaps it’s that it stopped being a micro blogging platform and wanted to be many things at once. Video, images and tweets up to 280 characters saturate a feed that once used to be pretty minimalistic. You could scroll through (or read) through a bunch of short tweets without having to filter through a lot of distractions. These times are long gone, now. Nowadays, your feed looks like a gigantic billboard where everyone is trying to advertize his or her product.

Twitter wanted to make changes to become relevant, of course. In order to do so they introduced ads. Personalised ads, based on your preferences. Or that is the theory, at least. In reality they probably have the least appealing ads in place.

Their ads don’t feel very relevant. Promoted tweets are often for companies I have no interest in whatsoever, and I don’t have a clue why Twitter thinks I would be interested in the tweets of yet another bank. Is it because I follow two banks on Twitter? Great job, Twitter. You just discovered I’m a customer for banks. Don’t need a third one, though. Sorry.  People might hate on personalised ads all they want and I am not excited to know that companies know a lot about me either, but if I have to watch ads at least make sure they’re not eye rolling bad. Facebook does a fairly good job at it. Not as good as Google, though. Their ads are usually pretty on point (minus the car ads, but I understand that that’s also a result of how their ads work).

But I didn’t want to talk about advertizing. This is a nostalgic “what happened” about Twitter.

Death of the desktop

One of the biggest reasons I lost interest is because Twitter decided to kill desktop clients.

They already pushed a lot of non-official apps out of the market, with API and other restrictions, which made it impossible to compete. What remained was then bought by, and folded into Twitter. But Tweetdeck is no longer, either. The “app” you download is a wrapper for the web version of Tweetdeck. The same, blue, chaotic, “How the hell does this work” mess, just downloadable. You can’t even start the app if you don’t have an internet connection.

Of course, that wasn’t enough. They also made an awful Windows 10 app to replace their official Windows entry. And things got worse on Mac OSX where they just killed the desktop client entirely.

So now, you are stuck with their website or the iOS version. Neither of which I have open all the time. I don’t feel an “urge” to check my phone or to check that one browser tab that’s lost in a forest of tabs.

Twitter basically killed the link between my eyeballs and tweets themselves. Nowadays, when I log in, it’s usually to post something myself or check my mentions. No point in checking my feed anyway, because they now also introduced a “Best of” algorytm. Which is also awful at it’s job. It lacks all the flexibility of Facebook and it’s predictions are not on YouTube’s levels. Youtube only sucks at suggesting new accounts to follow. No, YouTube, I don’t want to watch a video because I watched a slightly related video to the one this gamer douche once made.

Bottom line, I guess, is that I don’t like the “new Twitter” a lot, and since I lost touch with the people I used to talk to the most, Twitter is no longer a platform I am paying a lot of attention to. I might be using it occasionally, just like I check my mailbox daily despite not expecting a lot of letters. But the late night “Let’s check Twitter one more time” or the constant allure of the desktop client with interesting, short tweets I could read? Those days are long gone.