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Comment by FormerBandmate | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo actually returned more than Microsoft for a while, up until about 2017, thanks to their huge stake in Alibaba. Twitter doesn't have that tho, they're entirely tied to their mediocre product.

Killing Vine was the dumbest thing they ever did.

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> Killing Vine was the dumbest thing they ever did.

100% this. People are always confused why Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram, and this was, I think, a bit part of why.

Vine was completely destroyed by Twitter's incompetent management, and prevailing wisdom was that Facebook would do the same to Instagram. "Okay Facebook has filters now! Time to shut down Instagram!"

TikTok is the biggest app in the world, and in a lot of ways it was initially just the Chinese clone of Vine. Truly mind-blowing how they squandered that opportunity, they could be many multiples higher than 54.20

Wait, you're saying FB was allowed to buy Insta because regulators assumed they'd fumble the ball? That they wanted Insta to die off?

I think more just that there was precedent for that type/scale of acquisition.

But Facebook bought Instagram before Vine was a thing, the causality is backward if you're interested in why FB/Insta was approved!

If nobody has noticed, Twitter aren’t very good at building software, it’s incredibly buggy what they’ve made, I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments. It’s seriously glitchy from the notifications to even writing tweets (the MAX chars counter went crazy for me the other day). Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event. Finally the spam is just totally next level and they still have people selling Bitcoin scams under every Elon tweet. Asleep at the wheel.

> I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments

As far as I can tell, that's because you're blocked by the commenter or the commenter is a private account.

Correct. In internal Twitter jargon, some data is "perspectival" and some for performance reasons isn't. Actually viewing a tweet is calculated on the fly based on your personal perspective, as honoring privacy settings, blocks, etc, is crucial. But that's not true for counts, so those will be off.

People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.

>People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.

This leaves such a poor taste in my mouth. Perhaps the proper UX is to then _not display comment counts_ if your performance/cost tradeoff has determined that you can't display comment counts accurately. For higher comment counts it might be fine where a user isn't expected to read all 5000 replies(ignoring the edge case where its 5000 private/blocked accounts replying), but if a tweet has 2 replies then the user who clicks it expects to see those.

Other large platforms have been able to solve this issue either in UX or implementation, so "web scale" isn't a good excuse.

A tweet you can't see still exists. I think it's perfectly reasonable to display accurate counts even if it's based on information you don't have access to.

The click-thru page could then display a clarifying “+ x more tweets that are private or not available at this time.”

Yeah, sure, and kill the platform's greatest feature by MILES, which is the comment to like to RT ratio.

Is this the "ratio" I hear people talk about?

I understand the idea but it feels a little too online for my taste. I'm probably not the target audience. Just feels like someone decided the tea leaves falling a certain way MUST indicate something.

It's not always the case that a high reply/like ratio is someone being "owned", but it's obviously more concrete than tea leaves. Twitter's lack of a real downvote/dislike incentivizes people to reply to a bad post without leaving a like, and in my experience it's a pretty good metric. (The main exception is when a tweet is a prompt that intentionally asks for people to reply.)

Also I feel like I should add that "ratio" is a confusing term, because it can refer to the above example `reply-count / likes`, but can also be when a reply gets more likes than the tweet it's replying to: `reply-likes / OP-likes`.

> Is this the "ratio" I hear people talk about?

Yes.

Personally, I don't think "solving" minor inconsistency by eliminating a feature people like is the best approach. And from the way you talk about it, I gather you're not much of a Twitter user, so maybe you should give some deference to the people more familiar with the problem to decide whether this is a good choice or not?

If you have proof that other platforms have solved this problem at scale, I would be very interested to see it. Fundamentally, those totals are never going to be perfectly correct because a) people will be adding and removing tweets continuously, and b) even if continuously updating the numbers were worth the resources, people would hate having the numbers changing frequently.

It seems like this could easily be solved with "Some replies are hidden. [Settings](https://...)"

I remember when Twitter worked like this as well. It doesn't any more. When I see a tweet with a dozen replies and only one is visible, even in a private tab, it's very unlikely that eleven out of twelve are from locked accounts. It's even less likely that there wouldn't be at least one visible reply to one of those replies. I see this sort of thing often enough that I have no doubt that twitter is futzing with the visibility both of certain posters and of interactions with certain posters.

Today op found out they're the problem lol

No, this happens to me (less replies shown than exist) and it's definitely a caching issue and I am using the app logged in. I have to literally open twitter in my web browser to try and get those tweets to load unless I want to wait until later for whatever caches to be invalidated. I don't block anyone.

I think its related to their efforts to make twitter near impossible to browse if you aren't signed in.

I'm signed in on the app though so I would think it would be fine.

True, but... that's still a bug.

> Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event.

What if everyone could see full edit history of each twitt?

Lol that’s because people have you blocked.

Perhaps it was too early to be a competitor, but I always see TikTok as the real Vine replacement. Short silly videos you can scroll through. They could have done so well with Vine.

I believe Microsoft offered a cash option so not sure subsequent returns are relevant.

> thanks to their huge stake in Alibaba

8.2 million shares of Google didn't hurt either.

Ugh, don’t remind me…I loved Vine, and find TikTok awful

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