Time to put on Hot Like Sauce and ideate for 7 minutes about an alternative Twitter DM system.
9 tweets · June 2021 · 76 likes · 4 retweets · read on Twitter
Time to put on Hot Like Sauce and ideate for 7 minutes about an alternative Twitter DM system.
I could rant about all the problems I'd fix: - tweet/link previews above instead of below - can't see history if added to group DM - loading issues - no threading or specific-message-replying - no search - & countless more BUT! My man @hormeze demanded a total ground up version.
Okay so look guys, this is twitter. Why are the DMs even messages as opposed to just-between-the-two-of-us tweets? That seems like the starting point for ground-up redesign. Take advantage of epic threading & replying & resurfacing capability, & search comes for free!
Then could add all sorts of cool shit like the ability to later *publish* certain of the DMs that you wrote (with context obscured) or even mutually agree to publish a whole segment of conversation as ordinary tweets!
However! It's not that simple. In addition to DMs making it easier to express your thoughts by being private, they *also* make it easier to express your thoughts because you can publish (to the convo) simply by pressing *enter*. FB did that with comments to reduce friction
Plus of course there's a simplicity to just being able to type back & forth. And how do you handle parallel replies? I think you'd need a whole different tweet composer, basically, to solve this, that would turn out to be huge for ordinary tweeting too.
A tweet composer where enter is send (and shift-enter is newline). Not ideal by default outside DMs but a cool mode. And then maybe some way to indicate which specific message you're replying to, because everyone knows that good chat convos get 2-3 topics in parallel. "Tracks?"
Okay, song's over. I don't know what that UI should look like exactly but Glue is probably good partial inspiration. (Plus other improvements like @TwemexApp & @thlpr add)
Also bring more reactions to tweets.