5 ms·

Tweak New Twitter

113 points by ivank 4y ago

dom96 4y ago
Really cool. It seems there are many such extensions for enhancing Twitter and other websites. I wonder if there are any `awesome-x`-style repos that list all such browser extensions. I myself developed an extension for integrating Mastodon with Twitter recently[0]. It's a great way to get exposure to Mastodon without leaving the familiar Twitter UI. [0] - https://chirper.picheta.me/ https://chirper.picheta.me/
crimsoneer 4y ago
Instead of an extension to un-twitterfy twitter, I want one to tweetify Mastodon...
- _han 4y ago
  Which Twittery features are you missing in Mastodon?
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    Automatically pulling in more posts from the graph and automatically linking to people on their server rather than mine; trying to not feel as "isolating". If someone reposts a poll into my timeline, the poll shows as having 0 answers, or 1 answer if I answer it. If someone posts a reply that's visible in my timeline, the post they're replying to isn't reliably visible. If I'm on someone's (remote) profile on my (local) server, there isn't a giant obvious link for "go to the real profile so I can view all their posts". I have to manually construct the URL for their profile. Conversely, if I'm on someone's profile on their server, I have to copy-paste their URL into my instance's search bar before I can follow them; that should be one click, which could be done with some browser integration.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- HerbMcM 4y ago
  There are other frontends that are much more Twitter like pleroma, soapbox. Soapbox seems to be adding features more than others but the dev is persona non grata in many fediverse/mastodon circles. Using plain pleroma right now, I want to try standing up misskey maybe on a weekend.
- mjmsmith 4y ago
  Take a look at Elk [1], it's the closest thing I've seen to a Twitter UI. [1] https://elk.zone/ https://elk.zone/
  - seabea 4y ago
    Elk is amazing. Even running it as my primary client on mobile. Really shows how good PWAs can be. One of my favorite features is the built-in code highlighting.
pawelduda 4y ago
Idk, I appreciate them working hard to fix my compulsive Twitter scrolling habit
KerrAvon 4y ago
[flagged]
jdorfman 4y ago
I'm going to give this a shot. I have been using "Minimal Theme for Twitter" extension for a couple of years and love it. I'm less distracted by hiding what's trending, etc.
hendersoon 4y ago
I don't want to use another extension. If it could be done inside uBlock Origin, that's about the length I'm willing to go. Barring that, I've found myself simply going to twitter.com far, far less on desktop. And not at all on mobile.
- lpapez 4y ago
  Ok, so don't use it then or think of an alternate way of achieving the same thing. Why would you even comment something like this?
  - hendersoon 4y ago
    This is a discussion forum in which participants contribute their take on the issue at hand. That was my take, on-topic. Your response instead attacked another poster, which did not contribute to the discussion at all.
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  It can't be done with uBlock because Twitter randomized pretty much all DOM element class names. You really need to parse the content, then climb up the tree and trim grand/parent nodes to remove all the junk. Used to be much easier few years ago with descriptive class names, but they changed that. * I'm not the OP, but I made a similar extension.
  - insin 4y ago
    It's a React Native for Web app, so it's kinda like a reverse Tailwind - you write your styles using the usual CSS property names (instead of having to learn new shorthand names for all of them), then it deduplicates everything at build time and generates one-property-per-selector class names. They've handily left a bunch of data-testid attributes on some of the major elements you need to identify, like the primary column. Since it's a React app, manually removing stuff from the DOM will either have your changes get blown away the on the next render, or cause issues on the next render. A good trick is to add your own descriptive classes to <body> for the current screen so you can limit the scope of some of the incredibly gnarly CSS selectors you'll need to use to hide things.
mmastrac 4y ago
The Elon acquisition forcing me to finally break my Twitter habit was awesome. Whenever I go back, I started to wonder why I spent so much time there. Mastodon has been positive in other ways - I'm posting less there than I did on Twitter, and the people there are generally less toxic overall (though I've been carefully curating who I follow this time around). I think we'll continue to see social media fracture and federate as time goes on, and this will turn out to be a net benefit for society. For now, my mental health is definitely better.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > Whenever I go back, I started to wonder why I spent so much time there What about same question posed to yourself (and myself), but for this website (Hacker News) instead of Twitter? :)
  - WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
    Personally, I find the average quality of discussion on Hacker News to be much higher than the average quality of discussion on Twitter. There are fewer incentives for flame wars, and fewer bots trying to get me to buy random T-shirts.
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      I don't disagree, I just wonder if you (and myself) should spend as much time as we do on this site :)
    - spoils19 4y ago
      A lot of that can definitely be chalked up to the excellent moderation by dang! It's the last real place on the internet for me, a line saloon in the wild west if you will.
  - layer8 4y ago
    Let’s hope for some onerous SPA overhaul of HN somewhere down the line. ;)
the_gipsy 4y ago
I want to block accounts of the promoted tweets I get. If enough people did that...
- pornel 4y ago
  Enough people did that once, and then Twitter changed blocking to ignore that. I've used a blocklist of top-500 advertisers that was making rounds, and it stopped working after a while. You can't win with a platform on the platform's turf.
  - plushpuffin 4y ago
    Blocking accounts still prevents them from showing you promoted tweets. I think the only thing that stopped working was the ability to share and subscribe to block lists.
  - the_gipsy 4y ago
    You are right, it would just get stomped down. Either by detecting that the block was automated, or because it stems from a promoted tweet. The only winning move is not to play the game. Or play a game that you can own.
- collinvandyck76 4y ago
  I tried that for a long time. The exercise got old after a while.
- thomond 4y ago
  Am I the only person this works for?
- insin 4y ago
  There is a longstanding Tweak New Twitter bug (forgot to add a case clause to a switch statement) which someone finally found this week and submitted a PR for, which was accidentally causing all promoted tweets to be hidden. Handing my programmer card in as we type.
insin 4y ago
Author here, this the website where you go to get customer support from Google, right? /s Was everyone who reviews extensions at Google part of the cohort who were suddenly given a cardboard box and shown the door recently? The extension has been blowing up in Japan over the weekend (user numbers more than doubled from 29,000 to 68,000 over the last few days) so I internationalized it to add a Japanese locale (and incidentally accidentally used "en" for the default locale rather than "en_US" which everyone seems to default to, for which the Edge Extension Dashboard completely wiped my store listing in their interface - cheers). New versions on Chrome Web Store are usually approved first within in a few hours, but it's been sitting for more than 24 hours now and their contact form suggests you only bother them after 3 weeks! It doesn't help that the version I submitted has invalid locale strings for Chrome (which worked fine in Firefox, the default browser launched by the web-ext extension development tool - thanks) and you can't back a known-bad version out of review. Yes, I too have read all the rants about being beholden to Big Extension Store and have nobody to blame but myself :) Also, happy to answer any questions you have about writing extensions on top of React Native for Web apps - New Twitter was a fix it or quit it situation for me, and I ended up getting lots of practice at the former when it's looking like I probably should have just done the latter.
- scotcha1 4y ago
  my experience with shipping updates to the google chrome store is that you typically are waiting days if not weeks, depending on the time of year. 24 hours seems incredibly fast! hopefully it will get approved soon, good luck!
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  Here are some crazy features I really want. I doubt you can implement, but a man can dream. 1. For some accounts, I don't see what they tweet, but want to continue seeing their retweets. 2. For some accounts, I only want to see tweets that are replies to my other followers. Otherwise, I don't want to see their tweets on my timeline. 3. Some "famous" people will retweet every praise they get from someone. You know "I totally loved @famousperson's new book". I would love to just block any retweets by them that has their own username in it. And keep everything else. 4. Chronological timeline, but only show maximum of N tweets from a particular account. 5. Craziest feature. Flip the timeline around, so scrolling downwards shows me newer tweets. And at the start of the session, move me to the last tweet I viewed. Effective use of twitter is about removing as much of the noise as possible from your timeline, so as to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.
andirk 4y ago
Edge has a store?
ozten 4y ago
Space Karen free labor task force... assemble! Form of... a Chrome extension.
- insin 4y ago
  Well actually, we're the Twitter Product Decisions - Good For Their Bottom Line (yes, that turned out well), Bad For Humans Who Like Their Brain To Feel Good free labor task force, Est. 2018 [0] when Old Twitter started mixing algorithmic tweets into the main timeline (and when we discovered moving Retweets out of the main timeline is a _massive_ QoL bump) [0] https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement

113 points by ivank 4y ago

Really cool. It seems there are many such extensions for enhancing Twitter and other websites. I wonder if there are any `awesome-x`-style repos that list all such browser extensions. I myself developed an extension for integrating Mastodon with Twitter recently[0]. It's a great way to get exposure to Mastodon without leaving the familiar Twitter UI. [0] - https://chirper.picheta.me/ https://chirper.picheta.me/

crimsoneer 4y ago

Instead of an extension to un-twitterfy twitter, I want one to tweetify Mastodon...

_han 4y ago
Which Twittery features are you missing in Mastodon?
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  Automatically pulling in more posts from the graph and automatically linking to people on their server rather than mine; trying to not feel as "isolating". If someone reposts a poll into my timeline, the poll shows as having 0 answers, or 1 answer if I answer it. If someone posts a reply that's visible in my timeline, the post they're replying to isn't reliably visible. If I'm on someone's (remote) profile on my (local) server, there isn't a giant obvious link for "go to the real profile so I can view all their posts". I have to manually construct the URL for their profile. Conversely, if I'm on someone's profile on their server, I have to copy-paste their URL into my instance's search bar before I can follow them; that should be one click, which could be done with some browser integration.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
HerbMcM 4y ago
There are other frontends that are much more Twitter like pleroma, soapbox. Soapbox seems to be adding features more than others but the dev is persona non grata in many fediverse/mastodon circles. Using plain pleroma right now, I want to try standing up misskey maybe on a weekend.
mjmsmith 4y ago
Take a look at Elk [1], it's the closest thing I've seen to a Twitter UI. [1] https://elk.zone/ https://elk.zone/
- seabea 4y ago
  Elk is amazing. Even running it as my primary client on mobile. Really shows how good PWAs can be. One of my favorite features is the built-in code highlighting.

pawelduda 4y ago

Idk, I appreciate them working hard to fix my compulsive Twitter scrolling habit

KerrAvon 4y ago

[flagged]

jdorfman 4y ago

I'm going to give this a shot. I have been using "Minimal Theme for Twitter" extension for a couple of years and love it. I'm less distracted by hiding what's trending, etc.

hendersoon 4y ago

I don't want to use another extension. If it could be done inside uBlock Origin, that's about the length I'm willing to go. Barring that, I've found myself simply going to twitter.com far, far less on desktop. And not at all on mobile.

lpapez 4y ago
Ok, so don't use it then or think of an alternate way of achieving the same thing. Why would you even comment something like this?
- hendersoon 4y ago
  This is a discussion forum in which participants contribute their take on the issue at hand. That was my take, on-topic. Your response instead attacked another poster, which did not contribute to the discussion at all.
huhtenberg 4y ago
It can't be done with uBlock because Twitter randomized pretty much all DOM element class names. You really need to parse the content, then climb up the tree and trim grand/parent nodes to remove all the junk. Used to be much easier few years ago with descriptive class names, but they changed that. * I'm not the OP, but I made a similar extension.
- insin 4y ago
  It's a React Native for Web app, so it's kinda like a reverse Tailwind - you write your styles using the usual CSS property names (instead of having to learn new shorthand names for all of them), then it deduplicates everything at build time and generates one-property-per-selector class names. They've handily left a bunch of data-testid attributes on some of the major elements you need to identify, like the primary column. Since it's a React app, manually removing stuff from the DOM will either have your changes get blown away the on the next render, or cause issues on the next render. A good trick is to add your own descriptive classes to <body> for the current screen so you can limit the scope of some of the incredibly gnarly CSS selectors you'll need to use to hide things.

mmastrac 4y ago

The Elon acquisition forcing me to finally break my Twitter habit was awesome. Whenever I go back, I started to wonder why I spent so much time there. Mastodon has been positive in other ways - I'm posting less there than I did on Twitter, and the people there are generally less toxic overall (though I've been carefully curating who I follow this time around). I think we'll continue to see social media fracture and federate as time goes on, and this will turn out to be a net benefit for society. For now, my mental health is definitely better.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> Whenever I go back, I started to wonder why I spent so much time there What about same question posed to yourself (and myself), but for this website (Hacker News) instead of Twitter? :)
- WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
  Personally, I find the average quality of discussion on Hacker News to be much higher than the average quality of discussion on Twitter. There are fewer incentives for flame wars, and fewer bots trying to get me to buy random T-shirts.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    I don't disagree, I just wonder if you (and myself) should spend as much time as we do on this site :)
  - spoils19 4y ago
    A lot of that can definitely be chalked up to the excellent moderation by dang! It's the last real place on the internet for me, a line saloon in the wild west if you will.
- layer8 4y ago
  Let’s hope for some onerous SPA overhaul of HN somewhere down the line. ;)

the_gipsy 4y ago

I want to block accounts of the promoted tweets I get. If enough people did that...

pornel 4y ago
Enough people did that once, and then Twitter changed blocking to ignore that. I've used a blocklist of top-500 advertisers that was making rounds, and it stopped working after a while. You can't win with a platform on the platform's turf.
- plushpuffin 4y ago
  Blocking accounts still prevents them from showing you promoted tweets. I think the only thing that stopped working was the ability to share and subscribe to block lists.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  You are right, it would just get stomped down. Either by detecting that the block was automated, or because it stems from a promoted tweet. The only winning move is not to play the game. Or play a game that you can own.
collinvandyck76 4y ago
I tried that for a long time. The exercise got old after a while.
thomond 4y ago
Am I the only person this works for?
insin 4y ago
There is a longstanding Tweak New Twitter bug (forgot to add a case clause to a switch statement) which someone finally found this week and submitted a PR for, which was accidentally causing all promoted tweets to be hidden. Handing my programmer card in as we type.

insin 4y ago

Author here, this the website where you go to get customer support from Google, right? /s Was everyone who reviews extensions at Google part of the cohort who were suddenly given a cardboard box and shown the door recently? The extension has been blowing up in Japan over the weekend (user numbers more than doubled from 29,000 to 68,000 over the last few days) so I internationalized it to add a Japanese locale (and incidentally accidentally used "en" for the default locale rather than "en_US" which everyone seems to default to, for which the Edge Extension Dashboard completely wiped my store listing in their interface - cheers). New versions on Chrome Web Store are usually approved first within in a few hours, but it's been sitting for more than 24 hours now and their contact form suggests you only bother them after 3 weeks! It doesn't help that the version I submitted has invalid locale strings for Chrome (which worked fine in Firefox, the default browser launched by the web-ext extension development tool - thanks) and you can't back a known-bad version out of review. Yes, I too have read all the rants about being beholden to Big Extension Store and have nobody to blame but myself :) Also, happy to answer any questions you have about writing extensions on top of React Native for Web apps - New Twitter was a fix it or quit it situation for me, and I ended up getting lots of practice at the former when it's looking like I probably should have just done the latter.

scotcha1 4y ago
my experience with shipping updates to the google chrome store is that you typically are waiting days if not weeks, depending on the time of year. 24 hours seems incredibly fast! hopefully it will get approved soon, good luck!
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
Here are some crazy features I really want. I doubt you can implement, but a man can dream. 1. For some accounts, I don't see what they tweet, but want to continue seeing their retweets. 2. For some accounts, I only want to see tweets that are replies to my other followers. Otherwise, I don't want to see their tweets on my timeline. 3. Some "famous" people will retweet every praise they get from someone. You know "I totally loved @famousperson's new book". I would love to just block any retweets by them that has their own username in it. And keep everything else. 4. Chronological timeline, but only show maximum of N tweets from a particular account. 5. Craziest feature. Flip the timeline around, so scrolling downwards shows me newer tweets. And at the start of the session, move me to the last tweet I viewed. Effective use of twitter is about removing as much of the noise as possible from your timeline, so as to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

andirk 4y ago

Edge has a store?

ozten 4y ago

Space Karen free labor task force... assemble! Form of... a Chrome extension.

insin 4y ago
Well actually, we're the Twitter Product Decisions - Good For Their Bottom Line (yes, that turned out well), Bad For Humans Who Like Their Brain To Feel Good free labor task force, Est. 2018 [0] when Old Twitter started mixing algorithmic tweets into the main timeline (and when we discovered moving Retweets out of the main timeline is a _massive_ QoL bump) [0] https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement