Twitter Needs to Do a Better Job With Threads
tl;dr: Problems with Twitter threads, inspiration from Instagram’s introduction of gallery posts, proposals for improvement, and the ‘desire path’ approach to product development.
In 2018, Twitter’s doubling of the tweet character limit from 280 to 140 was the first time it indicated a willingness to rethink the basic building block of its service. Ever since then, there have been some differing opinions as to what exactly a tweet should represent. An increasing number of users discovered that, with duct tape and bubblegum, they could make atoms into molecules:
Twitter didn’t design the platform with this micro-blogging/threading use case in mind. While they’ve partially accommodated it in the UI (you can see above that they join the tweets with a line and generate a ‘Show this thread’ link), it’s messy stuff.
Problem #1: It’s Difficult To Identify Threads
Users have found an astonishing number of ways to self-identify their tweets as belonging to a thread. @KyleSamani was the first Twitter user I saw prepending numbers onto his tweets to sequence them (e.g. “0/” above), but I also see users adding:
- “THREAD” at the start of a tweet
- “THREAD” at the end of a tweet
- (1/n) at the end of a tweet
- (1/x) at the end of a tweet
- “a thread” at the end of a tweet
- “{FIN}” at the end of a tweet
- Nothing (they rely entirely on Twitter’s “Show this thread” link)
In theory, this doesn’t seem that problematic. In practice, when you’re scrolling and see all of the above in the span of 3 minutes, it adds to your cognitive load. As a reader, it’s hard to immediately identify a tweet as belonging to a thread: you don’t know precisely where to look for the indicators, because they differ from thread to thread.
Problem #2: It’s Difficult To Write Threads
Tabling difficulties with the creation of thread content, there’s friction even in the numbering of threaded messages. Imagine how laborious it would be if in order to number the pages of a Google Doc, you had to number each new page you created and re-number all of the later pages if you added one to the beginning. That is the state of affairs for a Twitter content creator threading messages in 2020. Already users have gotten in the habit of dropping the denominator (you won’t see 1/8 nearly as much as 1/x), because adding a tweet beyond the initially prepared set would require editing every single tweet’s denominator.
That is the type of problem so easily solved by code (even punch cards can increment a value), that forcing the content creator to take care of that manually seems almost hostile.
On the content side, things are great, provided that you came to Twitter hoping to replicate Jack Kerouac’s experience of taping pages together into a scroll to write “On the Road.” If that’s what you’re looking for, minus the Benzedrine, this view is for you.
Admittedly, I don’t have a clear picture of what the alternative might look like, but I suspect that the creation experience would be smoothed over considerably if Twitter would plant them on a dedicated editor screen rather than a pop-up. The modeling feels off to me here: I get that each entry is represented by its own tweet, but adding an avatar next to each one feels like unnecessary UI noise — seeing a picture of myself at the end of every sentence makes writing threads on Twitter feel more self-indulgent than it already is.
Problem #3: It’s Difficult To Engage With Threads
Imagine if there were a book you wanted to recommend to a friend, but instead of sending them a link to the Amazon page where the book could be purchased, you sent them the Amazon preview of Page 1.
That is the thread-sharing experience on Twitter today. You can only ‘like,’ ‘retweet’ or ‘share’ the first post in the thread. (Alternatively, I guess, you could copy the URL of the thread page manually from the browser and send it to someone that way, but that’s outside of Twitter’s product). I am a slothful person, so I will confess that at least once in my life I’ve seen a thread worth sharing, realized that the share button would only link to the first tweet, and abandoned the effort.
Weirdly, the first tweet in the set is given much more visual weight, making subsequent tweets look more like its comments than its siblings.
What Twitter Can Steal from Instagram’s Playbook
A few years ago, Instagram had a similar user behavior it was attempting to productize: users wanted to link posts together. In the description for one photo, users would sometimes include an external link to a Facebook or Flickr album where the rest of the photos from the set had been uploaded. This was obviously a problem for Instagram, as every time a user clicked that external link, they left the app. This is not unlike Twitter’s situation today, where users will write a tweet that links off to a longer-form blog post.
This is how Instagram added support for molecules where only atoms previously existed:
All Instagram had to do, in order to keep users on the platform and create a separate content type that users consistently make use of and understand, was 1) add a colored progress dot under the photo pane in the main feed (indicating there are other photos), and 2) add a standardized “gallery” icon in the top right of photos on the profile page.
What you don’t see on Instagram are users starting a post with something like “A GALLERY…” or captioning the first photo “1/x”.
One positive side-effect that came from this expanded scope was that users started to post new types of content made possible by this feature: before-and-after photos: home renovations, fitness transformations, and adopted rescue animal recoveries are some of the posts that previously didn’t fit well with the Instagram post model, but fit into the re-scoped version.
Solution #1: How to Make Threads Easier to Identify
The highest-impact, lowest-effort change that Twitter could make to threads would be to automatically generate numbering at the start of a thread, like this:
This would not only stop content creators from having to self-number their tweets, but would also give users a standardized indication that this tweet is the beginning of a thread.
Prepending it onto the tweet would ensure that any user reading this thread starts the first word knowing not only that the tweet belongs to a thread, but also the thread’s length. Both may factor into a user’s decision to break from scrolling to read it.
Going on step beyond that, Twitter could better distinguish the thread identification from the body of the text by breaking it up like this:
Presumably, clicking the “1/12” above would accomplish the same navigation as clicking the “Show this thread” link would below, and because they share the same link style, there’s an implicit association between them.
Going one step beyond that…
Moving the numbering over to the left of the tweet would even more cleanly separate the body of the tweet from the numbering.
This layout feels more familiar to me as a reader, since when reading a book I want to have the page number accessible but in a place that doesn’t distract from the content.
In reading a thread, that numbering would serve as a running indicator of your progress, rather than breaking up your reading at the start of every new tweet.
Solution #2: How to Make It Easier to Engage with Threads
There’s probably some hidden complexity here, but fixing thread engagement seems like it could be fairly straightforward:
In the above screenshot, I’m just proposing adding an action bar (comment, retweet, like, share) to the same row as the “Thread” header, so the relationship between the thread and those actions is clear.
Users can still engage with any of the constituent tweets, but now the first tweet in the thread can be represented correctly in visual weight as the sibling of tweets 2 through x, rather than their parent.
As the user scrolls down the thread, the action bar would remain fixed to the top of the thread, so that it can be liked or shared any time while reading.
There’s likely additional room for improvement by making the comments a bit easier to read within the thread, without having to expand them outwards from the tweet they’re pegged to, but that seems like a larger overhaul than would ever be required for the MVP of this feature.
Why Twitter Should Care About Adding Better Support For Threads
In the same way that Instagram’s addition of gallery posts gave rise to new types of content, like before-and-after pictures and wedding albums, it’s plausible that if Twitter thoughtfully incorporated threading, it could give rise on the platform to top 10 lists, slideshows, flash fiction, and other content that benefits from threading. It’s even plausible that Twitter could eventually serve as a better fit for casual bloggers who might be intimidated by more traditional blogging platforms.
Conclusion: On “Desire Paths” In Products
In the first version of Twitter, ‘support’ for retweets, @ messages, and hashtags was nonexistent. All three of those features grew out of users’ attempts to better organize and contextualize information on the platform.
Tweets originally included only text:
Then this suggestion was made:
Twitter eventually added support for these features, and they’ve become so embedded into the core Twitter product that the hashtag symbol is now a top-level navigation icon for the “Explore” page.
This is the right way to build a product.
When looking for logical places to build a sidewalk in an existing park, good urban planners will observe the places where pedestrians have already worn the grass down into a “desire path”:
@ symbols, hashtags and retweets were the digital equivalent of desire paths — users wanted and needed them, so they worked around the limitations of the platform to create something that fit their needs.
Twitter then smoothed over the experience by automatically creating links out of @ symbols and hashtags, and creating a native button for retweeting another user.
In the current version of the platform, threads on Twitter are like a single square of sidewalk over a desire path, where a full sidewalk is needed.
Tweet threading is the latest organic user behavior that Twitter would benefit from building native support for in their platform.
From a metrics perspective:
- Readers who have less difficulty reading a thread will spend more time on site, by reading more threads in their entirety (time on site++)
- Content creators who have less difficulty writing a thread will add more content to the platform (time on site++, tweets per user++)
- Content creators whose blogging needs are better served by a more casual platform will migrate to Twitter if better tools for thread creation are provided, increasing monthly active user count and user sign-ups. (MAUs++, sign-ups++)
