Twitter is a perpetual fire in dumpsters, partly because of mismanagement and partly because of abuses and bot accounts that plague. The company has tried many different tactics to improve the platform, but it is not excellent. A new photo-driven update is being rolled out and Twitter has quietly introduced some other tweaks.

The main attraction of this update is the new screen of the camera. Like Snapchat, sliding to the left now opens a camera view. By tapping the shutter, you take a picture and by holding it, you capture a video. You can also select the "Live" mode to launch a Periscope stream.

This feature is extremely basic at the moment. There are no filters, stickers, enhancement tools or anything else, all available when you embed an image in the composer's main view. Photos and videos published from this screen appear as regular tweets. Fortunately, Twitter does not clone (still) Snapchat's stories.

The update also includes major changes to Twitter's main features. The number of replies, retweets and mentions I like about each message is now hidden. This could be a response to the "ratio", where tweets are considered bad if the number of responses far exceeds the number of retweets and likes.

Twitter has only said that the update "will run on all over the next few days", and it's not clear if the changes are server-side or require a specific APK. If you're tired of Twitter being awful, there's always Mastodon.

Twitter
Twitter