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Comment by mjfern | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, why does nearly every Twitter link take you to a page not found thus requiring a reload? This is a terrible user experience that should be easy to fix.

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They implemented a mitigation for an issue that had this as a side effect. See https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2... and the last time this came up at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20123942

Terrible engineering on their part.

thanks for this. when they released their new twitter version, i started getting all these pages where it would error out and none of the reload buttons would work. couldn't search the cause for this very well. i can't believe the resolution to this is to force users to reload yet again to load the site... ugh.

Whenever I get that error on my iPhone, I can just press the browsers reload button, and it works. (The reload button displayed on the page does not work)

lmao and I thought it was just the apps I was using, glad to know it is Twitter

Oh, when I open Twitter in Firefox on Android tweets fail to load in 95% of the cases, however the Twitter site itself loads fine enough to show me a Retry button I can press to fail at loading the tweet again. All the while accessing via 'app' and even embedded tweets on 3rd-party sites load fine. Can't recall when this started; must have been some time in 2018.

On the desktop (in Firefox also, same addons and addon config too) things always work (as far as that can be said for a site as horribly slow as theirs).

They have been completely below the bar in terms of UX for a long time now, at least for me. They used to have a lean, good/available and fast site, and now they don't.

I'd assumed it was on purpose to push you toward the app. I don't see it as much on desktop.

On Reddit, I almost always downvote the "broken" link, just to make Twitter marginally less visible.

At this point, the platform is so full of horrible UX and dark patterns that I want it to die.

It's worse than that...they provide a reload button even that does absolutely nothing, requiring you to manually reload the page. With all the money they've spent on engineering, it's mystifying why their system is such a dumpster fire.

"We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Would you like to proceed to legacy Twitter?"

> Clicks button

> Nothing happens

> Right Click Inspect Element

> Delete Delete Delete Delete Delete

Revenue US$3.04 billion Operating income US$453 million Net income Increase US$1.2 billion Total assets US$10.16 billion Total equity US$6.8 billion

> Hmm...

$ to support non-JS users > $ revenue from non-JS users

$ lost serving non-JS users < $ lost getting an engineer to spend his time implementing dark patterns targeting non-JS users

It's spiteful.

That is simply not true in this case. All I need to get twitter readable with no-script is this ublock origin rule:

    ! 7/24/2019 https://twitter.com
    twitter.com##form.NoScriptForm

The data (tweets) are there already, they just intentionally hide it.

Could you please explain how you add that (those?) rules to uBlock Origin?

I use UBO to block js across the web by default and would like to include twitter but their "no-js" site is garbage.

left click > options > filters

Like Amazon is intentionally enabling counterfeiting, Twitter's website is now intentionally broken. Somehow Twitter forgot how to build a functional website.

I've wondered the same thing. It seems to only happen on mobile browsers, and on both iOS and Android. I wonder if people who are logged in are subject to the same?

It seems to happen at least much less often when logged in.

But yes, it is by far the jankiest thing I've ever seen in a supposedly serious tech company. No idea what failure has allowed that to happen for so long, it seems to be a permanent feature at this point.

Holy moly. I thought it was a thing with my phone and not a wider problem...

This has been going on for years. Twitter is just really bad at this software thing

This has been going on for so long they simply must not give a shit.

I always thought this was some sort of rate limiting that twitter applies to visits from aggregators like reddit or hn. I'm not sure how I originally made that assumption, though.

Firefox on iOS simply won’t show me Twitter any more, even in private mode. Always says “something went wrong,” no matter how many times I reload. Oh well, didn’t need it anyway.

I think it has something to do with their cookie requirements. Not too sure, I just stopped opening Twitter links rather than debugging why I couldn't load their contents anymore.

I’ve specifically noticed it when using the embedded browsers in apps. If I “open in safari”, it will load.

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