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Comment by Nav_Panel | Hacker News Reader

> conversation threading

Actually, this was a major point of API failure when I last tried to use it. Did you know that, with the current API, there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet? This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread, because you simply can't fetch the thread.

So I'll say that, as a casual, social, and informational user of Twitter (i.e. not business, not adtech, not academia), this announcement gives me a little hope that we might see a resurgence in 3rd party apps that provide more powerful ways of interfacing with Twitter. At least, that's my hope, maybe I'm naive that they'd really allow this.

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> This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread

it is possible -- it unfortunately happens to be part of my job description to do so

one of the sibling comments basically has it right. you can build it from the bottom up (where "bottom" is the deepest tweet in the thread you know about, one way or another).

let me tell you though, i am _very_ excited for this new API, because there is some absolutely horrible code i will be able to delete as a result of it

Is your work open source/viewable anywhere? I've written a few (probably ToS violating) plugins for Twitter myself, and would be curious to see.

unfortunately not, but luckily with this new api it shouldn't matter for too much longer :-)

Conversation threading is huge. I've had to use a few tools that keep getting broke to try to manually capture replies and threads to tweets for academic use. (https://www.exquisitetweets.com/ and https://treeverse.app/ which seems broken now)If a tool comes out that can do this easily (I'm no programmer so command line stuff if a little beyond me) then I will be very happy.

> there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet

My crusty old version of Tweetbot has been doing that for years...? Maybe not perfectly for tweets with hundreds of replies, but well enough.

I'm not sure which hack Tweetbot is using to do this (I think search as noted below), but you can tell it's a hack because it only works for recent-ish tweets. If you go to a tweet a couple weeks old and view details, you can see that it won't fill in the replies.

Can confirm, Tweetbot never has "all" the replies.

The way clients usually do this is by fetching all mentions to the user after a given timestamp (of the original tweet), and collecting only those that are replies to the tweet. Since there's a limit on how many mentions you can get, you might not get all the replies.

It's been like that at least since 2013.

Any idea how it's done in the API? I know you can retrieve a tweet's parent, but not its children.

You have to use the search feature to look for tweets and then look at the parent tweet ID. This is what bots like threadreaderapp, etc do. You can construct it from the bottom up if you know the ID of the last tweet in the thread of responses too, but you wouldn't know that a priori unless the user gives it to your software somehow.

But... that's not a tree -- there's still no way to discover all leaves. That's just a thread/singly linked list.

Yes, I forgot to mention that. You need to know the IDs of all the leaf nodes of the thread or else you can only partially reconstruct it.

so the api is literally backwards

Step 0: build a tree including all tweets,

...

;)

Possibly using the HTML API.

The final frontier

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