Twitter design tweak alienates existing user base but is preparing the company for IPO

Today, Twitter made an interesting tweak to the way that the website presents conversations amongst users. The company added a new indicator and way to surface conversations across their site. Behold.

The new view always shows the original tweet that started the conversation at the start, then it lists the replies below. The problem is, if you follow a lot of people that talk to each other frequently, you start seeing the same tweet repeating throughout your timeline. Over and over.

Every time someone you follow replies to the tweet, it’ll pop up again. At time of writing, a tweet by a friend is showing up five times on one page because everyone is engaging with him. It ultimately clutters the experience and ruins it for long time active users. Tweets are jumping all over the place through the feed and it jumbles the view very quickly when you follow just a few hundred people.

I haven’t seen many positive tweets about the change in my feed, many people are complaining about the fact that tweets are surfacing repeatedly in their feed, something that used to happen before native retweeting was invented to fix that problem. The experience is even worse on small screens and makes the reading experience awfully difficult.

The thing about this update is, it’s not targeted at me or you, the educated Twitter user. This is about the next 100 million Twitter users. The update makes conversations easier to read and follow for new users.

I’ve heard it over and over from those that don’t already use Twitter actively that they had a hard time getting on board when they joined up for the first time and struggled to understand how to use the network and this update fixes that significantly. It makes Twitter make more sense for them.

This is about monetization. Getting more users in the door. Twitter might tell you that this design tweak will make your experience better, but ultimately their intentions are headed towards an imminent IPO and there’s one metric that’s important there. Monthly active users.

Twitter is trading their current small and verbose user base (by comparison to what Twitter is hoping will come) for the mass market. This is another step in the road to IPO. Advertising is next.

It’s unfortunate that the current user base has to suffer at the expense of attempts to grow the network. I’m a big fan of Twitter and believe the company really should have given options to disable the new view, but ultimately I suspect that isn’t part of their greater vision. They’re hoping to get people to engage more by showing them the original tweet, which in theory, should increase engagement across the network.

Twitter’s IPO is coming, expect more changes like this in the near future as attention inside the company switches to gaining more users and lowering the barrier to entry for them.

Like the view? Don’t like it? Let me know on Twitter.

P.S - Here’s a Stylish script that removes the new view on the web.