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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a bug rather than deliberately blocked. The on-page retry button will continuously fail, but if you go up to the address bar and keep hitting enter it will eventually work.

Still embarrassing for a tech company of twitter's size. Displaying a tweet to a logged out user should be the single simplest job their service has, but it's usually broken.

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>embarrassing for a tech company of twitter's size

I'm a heavy user of Twitter. They have the most ridiculous bugs all the time

Let me list a few I can remind in recent two years:

1. A serious bug that makes the private lists' name, member count, and description visible to everyone for half a way

2. ANOTHER private list exposure bug after a year

3. Lots of their features are semi- or totally broken, the most obvious example being Moments. Some minor ones are like "twitter anniversary" etc.

4. Media files being totally lost/404, especially for some older tweets

5. UI: "Checked" mark for adding people to lists being invisible for at least a week

5.1. UI: some UI elements suddenly become black for a few weeks regardless what theme you use

6. Outage: Like function broken for almost a day

7. Outage: Timeline broken (no update) for half day

8. This probably isn't a bug but a "shadow block" feature, but I can't follow some accounts (and their following/follower count doesn't show) if my IP is in certain region.

9. Huge feature disparity between web and app, or iOS and Android

And needless to say, their support is beyond unhelpful, and they don't really have a proper place to report technical issues/bugs of their service.

Don't forget videos appearing as a blocky mess for the majority of playback time no matter how good your internet connection is.

Yeah Twitter’s video compression is practically a parody of bad video compression.

I was surprised by being able to see a tweet from a user who had blocked me after someone mentioned it in my replies.

The fact that threaded tweet links like this don't work on non-official apps (I use Talon on Android), to me, is a sign that this is deliberate.

https://github.com/klinker-apps/talon-for-twitter-android/is...

Twitter's thread/reply API has been changed a lot. It definitely works better now.

I will also be honest, Talon basically isn't really updated any more.

I remembered the last time I used it, it has a bug that it will always re-save/re-compress the image when you download, which is very easy to fix, but the author didn't do anything about it. I just checked, the bug is still there..

https://github.com/klinker-apps/talon-for-twitter-android/is... and https://github.com/klinker-apps/talon-for-twitter-android/is...

They need users, they rather avoid non-users that just want the content.

Twitter is a private company but it has also become a public space for political discourse.

The need for profits and open free speech are butting heads.

Thinking that it was intentionally made broken, or deliberately broken at some point is rather presumptuous. As has been said before, don't assume maliciousness when incompetence is a better explanation.

That said, I would buy that ignoring and any fix for it is deliberate.

Twitter has not fixed this bug for many many months. I think they are very happy to have it because I do not believe Twitter cannot fix it if they want to.

Years. I’ve never used a Twitter app, but this bug has occurred a high percentage of the time I view a tweet in the browser of every smartphone I’ve ever owned.

Thank you! I had given up on reading any HN post from Twitter because of this issue.

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