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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Twitter much, but every time I click on a Twitter link from my Android phone...it pops an error page.

The page says either something about an error, or that I'm rate limited. A page refresh usually then works fine and displays the page.

Is this related to similar attempts to block bots/spammers? Or maybe just something wrong on my end?

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Are you trying to do so from Firefox / a reddit app? This is fairly normal and the general conspiracy theory is that it's an erroneous error to get you to download the Twitter app once and for all.

Stock chrome on an Android phone. Most often from a Twitter link on HN. I'd say I get an error 90+% on the first try, and the refresh usually works the first time... occasionally, I need to do two.

Bone stock phone, nothing notable about it or the browser. Doesn't happen on my Windows or Linux desktops.

I have the same problem. I don't really use twitter, but sometimes I get a link to there from Reddit or HN. Twitter never works on the first try with Firefox or Chrome on Android. Often a refresh helps, but sometimes it does not work at all.

I too think it is done intentionally to get users to install the app. I can't think of a reason this is a simple bug. But the again... Hanlon's razor.

Open the links in desktop mode and see if the errors go away.

Why would you run stock chrome on android? Use a privacy respecting browser like firefox or Brave and install an ad-blocker like Ublock before browsing the web.

Chrome does not respect user privacy and is designed to not support add-ons as it will hurt Google's core advertising business.

^This guy privacies. Let me add the suggestion of CanvasBlocker, since browser fingerprinting is a thing that all of the kids are doing, nowadays.

Ok it’s not just me. Twitter works fine on my desktop, but whenever I seem to use it on mobile I get the rate limited error. I swear it’s 70% of the time. Usually if I go back and try again or refresh it works the second time.

Always regular mobile Safari.

Now I'm wondering if there is maybe a repeated, but not infinite, redirect loop from regular twitter.com to mobile.twitter.com

Repeated enough to trigger the rate limited error.

I think they rate limit based on the HTTP referrer. That happens to me but it's always gone away when I manually copy-paste the URL.

It happens to me too, only when linked from HN.

Ahh, so rate limit by referer? That's weird. I wonder why. Almost guarantees viral events make Twitter look broken.

I mostly only navigate to Twitter from here, so I didn't make that connection.

> Ahh, so rate limit by referer?

I don't know. Maybe they just don't like HN and this is a better way of saying it than a photo of a testicle.

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