Twitter’s new beta TweetDeck is so bad I’m ready to rage

I counted: 31 tweets. This is the number I was able to see in my traditional TweetDeck window the other day. But at that same moment, the new TweetDeck preview only showed me 21 tweets – 38% fewer, and that’s with the narrowest columns and smallest font available, just to be clear.

For over a decade, people have sworn by TweetDeck as the alternative for advanced users to the original Twitter app, but what most people really mean is one specific thing: it allows you to see more tweets. TweetDeck lets you see more tweets without needing to scroll. It gives you a full dashboard of tweets that you can throw on a monitor, unattended. The power of TweetDeck is that it is watchable, a way to passively tap into a fire hose of personal interests. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool for newsrooms around the world, and a tool The edge uses daily.

This is also why I cannot understand how Twitter was able to let this new version of TweetDeck out into the world, even in beta form. Now I’m afraid Twitter has forgotten why we are using TweetDeck.

If you break it down, there are easily half a dozen little culprits, each one perhaps forgivable on their own:

• There is a lot of wasted space around tweets.
• The Reply, Retweet, and Like buttons have been spaced out and take up more space.
• TweetDeck’s left rail is wider, for no discernible reason.
• Twitter lists inexplicably come with a “preview” at the top, a button that leaves an ugly “preview” button even if you play it down.
• Tweet previews inside tweets (i.e. quote tweets) now take up much more vertical space.
• Scroll bars are bulkier now, because they’re browser native unlike previous custom bars – and on Chrome, they don’t seem to display properly in dark mode.

Together, these changes add up to a less noticeable TweetDeck, whether you’ve installed it on a dedicated portrait monitor (like me) or not. I’m frustrated that my 16:10 monitor can’t fit four full columns anymore without changing my browser’s zoom, but honestly it could be worse in landscape mode: if you follow people who retweet a lot, you’ll be in luck see four at a time in a given column before they disappear from view.

When Twitter teased the new TweetDeck on Tuesday, the gut reaction was that our precious columns could have been deleted for good, due to a teaser image that, to say the least, was not aimed at experienced TweetDeck users. A few hours later, Twitter realized its mistake, Tweeter “Don’t worry! Your favorite TweetDeck features aren’t going away,” suggesting the columns are alive and well. Twitter’s Eric Zuckerman, who helps the company partner with news editors, even championed the design in tweet a photo of him:

And yet, some Zuckerman columns only let you see two big tweets at a time. Of them.

The new TweetDeck has some silver linings. I’m glad that Twitter brings its new composer and direct message box to Twitter.com. It’s good to have finer-grained control over images, for example, and you could argue that the pop-up message box saves you from having to create a dedicated column for them (although, for The edgeprivate news account, it just blocks part of our view). And while I don’t care if I can switch between column-filled “decks” from a single Twitter account, much like virtual desktops, I’m sure some social media managers are enthusiastic.

The new Notifications column is also great, making it easy to see alerts for particular users and when your tweets have been liked and retweeted, instead of just seeing when you’ve been mentioned. That, along with columns for your own profile, Twitter’s Explore tab, Events, Topics, Times, and advanced Boolean search could make TweetDeck a complete alternative to Twitter, instead of sometimes having you switch between them. of them.

But other than the comforts of a few critters, I’m not trying to make TweetDeck look more like Twitter.com. Vanilla Twitter already exists, and it’s just a click away. (Or at least, that was until TweetDeck Preview added its own TweetDeck.com URLs for individual tweets, yuck.) I chose TweetDeck because it was Following effective, just as I chose a number of third-party Twitter apps at the time, before Twitter limited most of them to death and prevented them from properly updating tweets as they came up. arrival.

Ironically, I also have a bit of trouble with the TweetDeck preview: if I step away from the new TweetDeck window for a while, I find that the auto-refresh feature doesn’t always keep showing new tweets. in my sight. . Twitter says that TweetDeck is currently trying to keep your current scroll position so that you don’t lose sight of when other tweets come in but want comments. (My comments: Make “do not scroll automatically” toggle.)

Twitter tells me that it’s already getting a lot of feedback that tweet density is important to people, and that the feedback is point to push this insight into the world. The company wants to explore what it should actually include in the final version, and reviews like mine can help. Oh, and it’s especially important here because Twitter expects people to pay for this new version of TweetDeck. “With this test, we hope to collect feedback to explore what an improved version of TweetDeck might look like in Twitter’s subscription offerings later,” wrote a spokesperson.

I hope so, because there aren’t a lot of things holding me back on Twitter these days other than the effectiveness of TweetDeck, and this preview is less effective on pretty much every front. If Twitter blows up TweetDeck, I won’t just refuse to pay – I’ll probably quit Twitter for good.