Reading Social Sites.
Why is the design stuck on making it harder to read?
I currently use two social sites: Mastodon and Bluesky, but I previously used Twitter as well. And as far as I know other sites use similar formats.
Social media, once you join, is mostly a push. You can go check dozens of profiles individually. You don’t and won’t. You follow people and their content gets pushed to your feed. Like RSS. But a little dumber.
Dumber:
- Each paragraph in a thread is surrounded by account information, along with little action buttons in case you want to republish each item to your followers or reply to each.
Quoted posts are always displayed below the quoter’s thoughts, usually misdirecting the proper reading flow.
- Similarly, link cards (those with images, a headline, and a summary) misorder their contents. It should put the text content first, above the image.
- On mobile apps, some feeds load new items above where it starts you, and you scroll up, seeing the bottom of a post first, as though you can read text backwards and have it make sense!
- The medium of quoting off-site text is taking a screenshot (or otherwise formatting an image of text), despite text being smaller and easier to handle and more useful in every way. (If you’re thoughtful and using a device that makes it practical or using a platform that tends to encourage it socially, you might also include the text as alternative-text data alongside the image. But the image is still given priority.)
- Each item is fully-loaded as you scroll, rather than giving you a subject line. This wastes bandwidth and makes scrolling past take more time.
The Not-Work Thesis.
I stopped to ask why. I wanted a thesis for why what’s seen as appropriate design has nothing to do with any real ergonomic or didactic considerations. In doing so, I expanded the problem to some of the design issues with news websites (including of prominent newspapers). Why do the bad designs prevail?
The Not-Work thesis states that those who direct these sites do not see social site browsing (or newsreading) as activities meant to accomplish anything. They don’t believe those activities have ends beyond time-occupation (or perhaps, that any benefits other than wasting time are incidental and not something to be encouraged), and therefore, adding affordances for ease-of-use or reading comprehension or avoiding time-wastage, all fall beyond the scope of what anyone would expect.
The editors, designers, developers, and owners are wrong, and they should learn better. (As further evidence, I’ll point to my long-standing gripe with mobile apps: they lack current-document search (i.e., find-in-page), something that text-editors and web-browsers have basically always had.) But they are wrong in a peculiar way. They do not understand that their own products have value beyond what they offer, and so they actively undermine expansive development.
Contrast that with most other technologies. They add cupholders, icemakers, disposals, all sorts of little features that are intended to increase ease of use, to remove rough edges. It feels like social sites are more preoccupied with their back-ends and things than with any benefits to use. And for news sites, the goal has long-been to increase ad-impressions (pageviews) at the cost of usability.
Ideally, whether the thesis stands, some standards would be adopted. Let us have information presented and a test given, similar to the standardized tests for reading comprehension. Are these interfaces fit-for-purpose? If so, usability testing of that kind should bear it out. If not, they should be improved.
Wouldn’t it be a more-interesting world where various sites mention their usability testing scores and advertised their ease-of-reading?