A thread of dark patterns, poorly designed UX across popular products. The intent is to know them, and if possible, avoid them when designing for your audience. Do add your own
Twitter it seems has changed the way a person can change his/her timeline from algorithmic to ‘Latest first’
Ideally this should be a one click/tap thing. But Twitter, given its business considerations and for better engagement had a two step process: first tap the star at the top, then change to a Latest first feed
Now, they have made it even more cumbersome:
- first tap the star icon
- then ‘Pin your latest timeline’
- then tap latest Tweets
All of this, from a designer’s perspective may seem unnecessary. But it seems Twitter would rather not want its user to opt for a Latest first timeline
Possible reasons: lower engagement, poor quality content and maybe, even, a lack of good content.
An algorithmic feed, on the other hand, pretty much gives Twitter the steering wheel (to be fair most content properties are this way): this enables twitter to show more ‘relevant’ content leading, hopefully, to more engagement
Not a dark pattern, but a clear case of business considerations taking precedence over design considerations
(some may argue, well doing it this way helps give Twitter a ‘better experience’. I doubt that though)
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