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Twitter's website is absolute garbage, the feed is unresponsive, tweets fail to load, it's just terrible. If you're modeling your frontend off of anything pleas
by xgulfie 5y ago
Twitter's website is absolute garbage, the feed is unresponsive, tweets fail to load, it's just terrible. If you're modeling your frontend off of anything please do not pick Twitter because their web experience is awful.
- jdavis703 5y agoIs there any infinite scrolling website that works smoothly on mobile devices?
- selykg 5y agoI mean... I'm perfectly fine hitting buttons to goto the next page honestly.
- inbx0 5y agoI kinda want to agree but then, I practically never do hit that button. Not on google search results. Not on hacker news.
- progbits 5y agoWhich is probably a good thing. Neither of those sites wants you to "stay engaged" and keep scrolling forever. Old reddit was the same, but of course the redesign is infinite scroll.
- nfRfqX5n 5y agoI rarely experience any of these issues and think their front end is quite good. Just their a11y / keyboard nav stuff is some of the best I've seen. Some questionable design choices but that's more of a product thing
- unknownOrigin 5y agoYou literally can't use the site properly when you're not logged in (and I mean basic clicking on retweeted/quoted stuff shows a login page, clicking on people's names shows a login page etc.) - how is that good? (I mean sure, build your walled garden as you please, but then you have no business showing in search engine results.)
- babelfish 5y agoCertainly a dark pattern, but has little to do with the actual usability of the product once you’re logged in.
- setgree 5y agoI've been encountering this a lot today, because apparently the MTA (and the Metro North) have decided that Twitter is their official news distribution channel [0]. They're posting updates there more frequently than they are on their official website, and because we're in the middle of dealing with a hurricane, they're pushing me to interact with Twitter to figure out how to get home tonight. Apropos of that: the MTA is using threads now, and I can't click 'show thread' without being redirected to a login screen. I don't want to create an account because I find twitter painfully shallow but also addictive, as well as generally untrustworthy (I don't want them to have my phone number). I don't think that any part of the government should be using twitter the way the MTA is; but so long as they are, I think Twitter would do well to get out of the way of the distribution of vital info. [0] https://twitter.com/MetroNorth https://twitter.com/MetroNorth
- handrous 5y agoTwitter should be a protocol integrated into browsers, not a site.
- ambicapter 5y agoWasn't that RSS?
- 5y ago
- handrous 5y agoTweets not loading, with an error, except after several tries, is a commonly-reported problem. I've seen it for years, across multiple browsers & devices, happens all the time. It might go away if you log in. I wouldn't know.
- vultour 5y agoHappens to me _every single time_ on Firefox, logged out. I have to press the "Try Again" button 3-10 times before it actually loads.
- darepublic 5y agoIn fairness sounds like a backend problem. But I have the same experience and it's annoying
- dmitriid 5y agoFunnily enough their API endpoints report the actual error that happened in plain English. Their frontend never even tries to show the error. It's unbelievable incompetence coupled with unbelievable not-giving-a-damn attitude.
- LukeShu 5y agoAbout 90% of my interaction with Twitter is is clicking a link from HN. When I do so, there's about a 1/3 chance that tweet doesn't load.
- indiv0 5y agoI was under the impression this was an intentional dark pattern to get users to sign up / log in to twitter? The reason I believe this is because if you get that failure and back out and click the link again it works 100% of the time.
- y4mi 5y agoWhy would you attribute that to a dark pattern? I would think that your first visit loaded a resource/set a state somewhere which let's the second visit go through. Much more likely to be a programming error then a purposeful decision by a PO as the end result is objectively terrible. I cannot imagine anyone getting convinced to register to a webpage that cannot even load. It's not that content is hidden behind a pop-up or anything, it just errors out (at least for me, but I'm not the parent comment author)
- c-cube 5y agoBecause it's hard to believe that Twitter has been that incompetent for that long. It seems more likely that they're trying to push people to log in.
- y4mi 5y agoGTA online has had slow loading times for years until a fan reverse engineered the game to find a bad serialization issue which basically created a n*n computation. Some issues are fucking hard to detect and an initial page load breakage that only happens sometimes (likely a race condition that cannot be replicated in testing) is an example of that
- heavyset_go 5y agoTweets don't load a significant amount of the time even when I'm logged in.
- modeless 5y agoI wish they still did server side rendering for your feed. They switched to all client rendering a while ago and it takes a lot longer to load now. I wonder if the loading speed tradeoff was consciously made or if it was just a fait accompli after some rewrite or another.
- dionidium 5y agoThe thing that drives me crazy is that it breaks a basic feature of the browser, which is that if you load a bunch of tweets in your feed and then ctl-f to search for something, it doesn't work (on Chrome, at least); it doesn't find stuff that's on the page. This is particularly frustrating, because my normal use case for this is that a bunch of new stuff loaded, which throws everything that's on the page already out of order, so then I can't see something that I know was there, that I was just looking at, and now searching for it doesn't work, either.
- SilasX 5y agoYep, it breaks a ton of standards and UI expectations, I don’t know where people get off saying it’s good for accessibility. (Sorry, a11y.) Don’t reinvent the back button!
- dmitriid 5y agoCan't find the tweet now. Someone created a static HTML page with all their tweets, over 8 MB of HTML. It rendered faster than a single tweet by Twitter.
- midrus 5y agoAhhhh...The React Experience right there
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoAgreed, it's very heavy for no reason given it's doing pretty much nothing. It's buggy, slow, sluggish at times, with delay on clicks and scroll. It's really a terrible UI given how simple the problem is, and how much money they got. It's not like they have 1000 of concurrent events like facebook, and their frontend should have nowhere the complexity of their backend. I don't understand how it's even happening. The most absurd aspect of it is that how slow loading a single tweet is. The timeline could have the excuse of a slow and complicated backend call (but it doesn't, the backend is actually doing ok), but several seconds for one single tweet?
- timvisee 5y agoI was constantly experiencing tweet load failures on mobile web browsers on first load, because of some stupid rate limiting. It's insane how bad it works on a page that would have been perfectly fine to be simple and static.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoI'm thinking about building a Reddit-like Twitter client that has sane conversation threading and better discovery. Would that be of interest?
- specialist 5y agoI'd prob use Twitter more with an RSS style client, akin to NetNewsWire. I have zero interest in retweets, replies, threads, hearts, etc.
- lisowski 5y agoI built one of those. Twitter's API isn't going to do you any favors. There is no publicly available API to get the replies to a tweet. So building out a full thread is hard. Then once you figure out how to use their internal API you'll quickly hit rate limits </3
- nawgz 5y agoThe tweets not loading is clearly intentional. They want you signed in, preferably on a native client where they can track more invasively. That said, I fully agree - the website is literal garbage despite its insane simplicity, and there would be 0 reason to trust that their web tech works well because they have never demonstrated such a thing.
- 3g34g34g4y657 5y agoThey have been trying to kill their web experience longer than most other modern platforms have been alive. The latest iteration of that is requiring a Twitter account to see any posts at all now.
- superasn 5y agoYou're so right about this. Also their UX is absolutely horrible in my opinion. It's one of the worst designed sites both in terms of usability and load time (half the time it doesn't even load on my mobile on kiwi browser). The biggest irony is they have the best designers in the world (i.e. the guys who created bootstrap) but god I hate the tech they have used to make twitter.com because of that "something went wrong" retry button error message .
- overcast 5y agoI feel like an idiot trying to read threads on Twitter. I seriously get confused on where one begins, ends and everywhere in between. It's WAY too complicated of a layout for nothing more than a chronological list of text.
- superasn 5y agoI have no affiliation with this site(1) but it is godsend if you're trying to read twitter threads. Makes you wonder why they can't have this in-built in twitter instead of what it is now. (1) https://threadreaderapp.com/ https://threadreaderapp.com/
- newhotelowner 5y agoSame with the Facebook. Specially the business side of it. It is utterly garbage. Doesn't load or take forever to load. Navigation is cumbersome.
- tills13 5y agoAre we using the same website? Twitter is none of the things you mention for me.
- pier25 5y agoMy only complaint about Twitter on desktop web is that the feed auto updates itself. And it always happens just when I'm watching a video or I'm about to click on something...
- mistrial9 5y agoI pulled some raw twitter yesterday for the first time in a very long while. The amount of general purpose, world-wide javascript junk was hard to look at.. not as densely scrambled as Google js output in the past, but the number of special cases for "media in Taiwan" or whatever else, just went on and on.. per-tweet