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> 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 t
by Nav_Panel 6y ago
> 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.
- toyg 6y ago> 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.
- Nav_Panel 6y agoAny idea how it's done in the API? I know you can retrieve a tweet's parent, but not its children.
- wyldfire 6y agoStep 0: build a tree including all tweets, ... ;)
- benmanns 6y agoPossibly using the HTML API.
- not_really 6y agoThe final frontier
- anaphor 6y agoYou 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.
- Nav_Panel 6y agoBut... that's not a tree -- there's still no way to discover all leaves. That's just a thread/singly linked list.
- anaphor 6y agoYes, 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.
- abluecloud 6y agoso the api is literally backwards
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jdminhbg 6y agoI'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.
- jeromegv 6y agoCan confirm, Tweetbot never has "all" the replies.
- roberto 6y agoThe 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.
- draw_down 6y agoTweetbot actually doesn't do this very well. Look at a tweet that's a week old or so, you won't see replies. Open it in Safari and the replies appear. (The limit may be a little longer, perhaps a month, but either way you won't see replies past a certain freshness.)
- blueline 6y ago> 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
- jccalhoun 6y agoConversation 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/ https://www.exquisitetweets.com/ and https://treeverse.app/ 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.