So … the world’s richest man is buying Twitter. Free speech is coming (apparently), journos are screaming, rightwing accounts are getting mystery boosts in follower counts and engagement … but we’re not here to talk about that.

A change in owners provides an opportunity for long-overdue improvements in design of the general Twitter experience. As Elon’s people move in at the top, old internal fiefdoms will be smashed and ossified decisions can be reconsidered. It’s my hope in publishing this that someone, somehow at Twitter in the finds these ideas and gets them implemented.

Context for Tweets

As it stands, it is very difficult to get context and meaning around tweets that are more than a few days old. Old controversies, arguments, flash-in-the-pan trends can become impossible to understand when linked to an old tweet. Twitter can help with this through automagic context buttons and feed mixers:

  • A button or menu option to “Jump to this tweet on the owner’s timeline”. If you’re linked to a years-old tweet (say by a modern day outrage-farmer doing archaology on a person’s tweets or just perhaps an old webpage you found that links to something that would have been current then), you could click this option and go to that person’s profile and have the next 10 and previous 10 tweets displayed around it, top and bottom.
  • An automagic argument or discussion contextualiser. The automagic could grab any of the following as it deems appropriate, and display it all on one page:
    • Tweets before and after the tweet in question by that users. It could grab only the popular tweets in the days before and after, or all of them depending on heuristics and user choice.
    • What the big news stories of the day were (if keywords in those stories match keywords in tweets)
    • Twitter trends from that day
  • A way to nominate two or more users, along with a timespan, and create a temporary timeline consisting of all their tweets woven together in chronological order.

Private Likes

Not many people realise Likes are browsable and will randomly show up in other people’s feeds if the other person has nonlinear browsing on their Home feed. This can catch people out, as a Like on a risque image or controversial post may suddenly get broadcast to friends or colleagues without warning. Offering the option to just take Likes private without locking down your whole account will be welcomed by many.

Lists of likes on tweets could simply have an entry alongside the visible users for “X anonymous likes”.

Twitter does have a “bookmarks” feature, but it’s not quite the same, and takes several clicks for each use as opposed to a like’s single tap or click which would be safe under a universal setting.

Make Verified Users Just Verified, Not Approved

Verified users acting as a ‘superclass’ of twitter users has long been an issue for the site. The “bluecheck” was originally supposed to be just a mark to stop impersonators, but then it morphed into a mark of approval by Twitter headquarters, and “bluecheck” became a (often contemptuous) synecdoche for approved users in general.

On top of that, their original functions of “identify a user” and “prevent impersonation” are broken as well. As user biography fields, locations, and display names are all changeable, it is a semi-common occurence to run into a mid-to-low follower Verified account with a non-representative display name and uninformative or just strange biography paragraph and have no idea who they are.

You won’t be able to figure it out from the information given either. (Imitiation of other ‘bluechecks’ is technically against the Twitter rules … but it’s not enforced, and by the nature of the tooling cannot be enforced widely.)

To solve the ongoing issues with verification, I propose a few steps:

  • Move away from the blue checkmark. As the checkmark very much stands for “Approved (Or Tolerated) By Twitter” at this stage, it would be best to move to a more representative iconography for “verification”.
    A stylised ID card (like the newest ID Card emoji approved in 2021), or stylised stamped passport book would indicate “this person is who they say they are” without the implication that Twitter approves of them in totality.
  • Being Verified adds an extra field to a user’s profile - but it is totally uneditable by them. It quickly lists who they are, and the thing they were verified for and notable for. This eliminates the problem of people who are verified but unidentifiable, and allows for the common Twitter user behaviour of joke name edits and the like without sacrificing understanding.
  • Remove the ability of Verified accounts to filter out non-verified users. It’s not widely known, but Verified users get an extra tab in their clients to only see other verified users. This greatly contributes to the echo-chamber effect on Twitter. Removal of this and returning verification to its original claimed purpose of being an anti-impersonation measure will greatly improve conversations on the service.

A Way To Append Corrections or Followups to Tweets

Many people have already commented on the issues with giving Tweets an edit function. (Drastically changing what other people quote-tweet or reply to could make them look like fools for no reason.) Still, there’s a need for ways to provide followon messages from a tweet.

As it is now, if you tweet something wrong now and it gets popular, you are left with a dilemma. Do you keep it up and make a later tweet with the correct information that nobody may notice? Or do you delete the tweet and get accused of trying to hide you were wrong?

It would be good to be able to link an old tweet to a new tweet that corrects or expands on it. The correction should be marked similarly to the current ‘health warnings’ Twitter attaches to certain posts right now.

(It should be noted that tweets can be linked together somewhat in threads right now - but what happens if a single tweet in the middle of a thread needs correction? The UI doesn’t support the concept of appending to the middle of a thread.)

A New Slogan and a New Mission: “Follow Everyone, Everywhere”

Twitter faces a major limitation - to be useful, each relationship on the platform needs two people. A consumer of tweets, and a producer. Lose either of those and the content consumption relationship disappears. Twitter as a company is in a constant battle to ensure both sides of the relationship stay on Twitter so they can sell the eyeballs of the consumers.

Greatly expanding the scope of Twitter by turning it into a universal following machine is the answer. If you can not only follow other Twitter users’ personal accounts, but any website, Twitter becomes even more of a one-stop-shop for people to find out what’s going on. (In the background, this would be based on RSS/ATOM, but users do not necessarily need to be exposed to that detail at first glance.)

Twitter Lists can not just be lists of users, but bundles of websites as well. (Perhaps even OPML-compatible!) Tweeting about a feed entry could automatically show other account’s comments attached to that URL.

Twitter no longer has to always convince producers to update on Twitter - so long as a website has a web feed, they can be followed on Twitter. This will also have the nice side effect of putting massive social pressure on the rest of the internet to make sure their websites have web feeds, and the web will get more open and interoperable as a result.

…and more?

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Comments? Questions? You can also get in contact with me on Twitter.