Twitter finally broke me

It only took nearly their entire existence, but here I am, using their iOS client. At long last I’ve given up on trying to understand why Twitter hates filling in timeline gaps and viewing tweets in chronological order. I’m going all in on their algo.

Do I like to admit this? No. Do I even remotely like it? No. Yet here we are. Twitter slowly but surely kept draining 3rd-party clients of features, to the point that I eventually felt certain I was missing out on something (other than ads 🙃) by not using the offical client. Now, that may or not be true, but I wanted to find out for myself.

Looking back, it’s insane the lengths some of us went to to get the kind of experience we wanted. Remember Brizzly? TweetDeck (before Twitter bought it)? Hashtags, @s, and retweets before they were officially implemented? URL shorteners (TinyURL, bit.ly, etc.)? Lack of native image embedding/hosting (TwitPic, yfrog, TinyPic, etc.)?

Hell, even I built afewthings along the way to make Twitter better.

And the biggest issue of all for me—the one I’ve complained about most over the last decade—is that Twitter simply refused to do a proper detect-gap-and-fill. “Oh, hey Twitter, you just want to throw me into some random spot in my timeline that isn’t even really a ‘timeline’ like I’m NOT AN OBSESSIVE COMPLETIONIST?! Cool, cool.”

I will say this though of the current version of the official app: it’s much better now at retaining state when you’re jumping in and out of the app, which makes the experience a little less…grating.

Anyway, hit me up on Twitter, but realize I may not see a notification for your @mention/DM because, well, I’m using the offical client and it seems like it shows me shit like that at random. 🤷🏼‍♂️