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I've got lots of small tweaks I'd love to incorporate into a Twitter client. Unfortunately, I think many of them would violate the developer TOS. For example:

I've got lots of small tweaks I'd love to incorporate into a Twitter client. Unfortunately, I think many of them would violate the developer TOS. For example: hiding avatars completely or generating replacement avatars using the username to remove any chance of internal bias associated with an account's avatar. Another one: hiding images by default and forcing you to click to expand/open to see them (no previews). A lot of these ideas are intending to modify Twitter's default salience landscape. However disappointing it might be though that I can't do this, I get it. These kinds of modifications could totally change the ways in which a user experiences Twitter, and how Twitter would be able to monetize those users. Simply forcing Twitter (via legislation) to allow BYOC doesn't seem like a good idea because of this. It doesn't seem right to force them to run a service with a reduced potential for monetization -- e.g. many clients could just not show any ads, which would totally remove Twitter's ability to monetize at all. An idea might be to charge users money in order to allow BYOC, so Twitter could focus on building out the core offering, which is just basically the public messaging substrate of the internet. But I'm not at all sure how well that would work out in practice.

tshaddox 6y ago
Tweetbot on iOS supports hiding images in tweets (but not hiding avatars). It costs a bit of money, but I have bought every version so far.
nsgi 6y ago
Couldn't you accomplish that with a browser extension?
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  I think OP maybe made a meta point about a (company/team/project) having carte blanche ability to, or perhaps restated to not give you the ability to restrict someone from, modify your initiative towards your existing end users (who may prefer your setup) in a way which threatens your survival. Extending the analogy to absurdium, should (CompanyX/Twitter) be allowed to have ToS against a (browser extension/etc) which would reduce it's revenue to $0, and theoretically force it to shut down and lay off all the (engineers/employees)? If no, what rights does Twitter have to decide alterations to it's product if any, and where do they begin? If yes, who makes that decision: a government, a regulatory body etc? What if the ToS said "don't circumvent our API rate limiting" and someone made a browser extension doing just that. Is it okay to have it in the Google chrome store? If it got in, should it stay up? Note, against my points, the Supreme Court decision on scraping in the LinkedIn case.
t0astbread 6y ago
FWIW the Twitter web client can be somewhat easily hacked by blasting it with an interval from a web extension or userscript. It's a bit inefficient and you have to awkwardly navigate the DOM since they're using obfuscated class names but it works and it can be stable. Here's some example code from a web extension I wrote that removes promoted tweets: https://gitlab.com/t0astbread/no-promoted-tweets/-/raw/master/remove-promoted.js https://gitlab.com/t0astbread/no-promoted-tweets/-/raw/maste...
TimJRobinson 6y ago
Twitter is actually working on a new BYOC model for their platform. Called Blue Sky: https://twitter.com/bluesky https://twitter.com/bluesky

tshaddox 6y ago

Tweetbot on iOS supports hiding images in tweets (but not hiding avatars). It costs a bit of money, but I have bought every version so far.

nsgi 6y ago

Couldn't you accomplish that with a browser extension?

texasbigdata 6y ago
I think OP maybe made a meta point about a (company/team/project) having carte blanche ability to, or perhaps restated to not give you the ability to restrict someone from, modify your initiative towards your existing end users (who may prefer your setup) in a way which threatens your survival. Extending the analogy to absurdium, should (CompanyX/Twitter) be allowed to have ToS against a (browser extension/etc) which would reduce it's revenue to $0, and theoretically force it to shut down and lay off all the (engineers/employees)? If no, what rights does Twitter have to decide alterations to it's product if any, and where do they begin? If yes, who makes that decision: a government, a regulatory body etc? What if the ToS said "don't circumvent our API rate limiting" and someone made a browser extension doing just that. Is it okay to have it in the Google chrome store? If it got in, should it stay up? Note, against my points, the Supreme Court decision on scraping in the LinkedIn case.

t0astbread 6y ago

FWIW the Twitter web client can be somewhat easily hacked by blasting it with an interval from a web extension or userscript. It's a bit inefficient and you have to awkwardly navigate the DOM since they're using obfuscated class names but it works and it can be stable. Here's some example code from a web extension I wrote that removes promoted tweets: https://gitlab.com/t0astbread/no-promoted-tweets/-/raw/master/remove-promoted.js https://gitlab.com/t0astbread/no-promoted-tweets/-/raw/maste...

TimJRobinson 6y ago

Twitter is actually working on a new BYOC model for their platform. Called Blue Sky: https://twitter.com/bluesky https://twitter.com/bluesky