Hacker News Reader

Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

How big is twitter’s engineering department? Their mobile website doesn’t even load the content of the tweet. Yesterday it was throwing an error that the api was rate limited. For their own site! They’ve been systematically destroying their own foundation by alienating the developer community for years and they can’t even get their own product to work reliably.

View on HN

Mobile Twitter is maybe the single most useless website I’ve ever had to use lol.

Clicking on a link to a tweet has 1/20 chance of ever actually loading the tweet. All other occurrences are evenly split between loading nothing except the top bar and calling it a day, and throwing an error message. Reloading the directly or using the reload button they provide will usually result in the rate limiting message.

I don’t even bother clicking on twitter links anymore. I just hope it worked for someone else and they paste the contents in the comments.

> Mobile Twitter is maybe the single most useless website I’ve ever had to use lol.

Pinterest would be up there too. It's useless if you don't have an account on mobile and desktop.

‘Useless’ isn’t a strong enough word. The way it’s broken Google image search puts it way into negative a value.

Try adding -site:pinterest.com to your search query.

Edit: Just tried it myself, might want to add a -site:pinterest.co.uk as well.

Im amazed googles allowed them to pull those seo tricks so long considering they put the hammer down on ehow with the panda update.

I get that I can exclude results, but it’s a little like “you’re holding it wrong”. On mobile it’s prticularly horrible. Maybe this is exactly what a clipboard manager is for.

I turned off Javascript and it worked fantastically.

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve had to learn to use frameworks like React for work, but I’ll never be a fan. I’ll always be prefer to build websites as simply and close to the metal as I can.

I feel like every week I get another reason to turn JS off.

Really says a lot doesn’t it.

The downside is the (disquietingly common frequency of) sites which return a jumbled mess of incoherent elements or a blank page(!) when Javascript is disabled.

I blame SPA’s.

Nearly impossible to test properly (or was), breaks the whole html model, results in bugs just like this one.

This bug has nothing to do with Twitter's SPA-ness; it's a failed server-side validation.

I've seen the rate limit message a lot. Almost seems like it always happens when there is a Referer header. If you refresh after the error, it usually works. Not sure why they would punish people for linking to tweets...

It may be from your cell network's NAT hitting rate limits on their IP.

My network’s NAT is my router in the basement. There is no CGNAT, and yet I hit rate limits. No one else in our house accesses twitter, logging at the router reveals usually one to two attempts of accessing twitter per day.

And yes, rate limits.

It's definitely because of the Referer header. It has only happened to me when I am linked to a tweet from somewhere else and refreshing always solves the problem. I think Twitter wants you to download their app instead of using your phone's web browser.

... And they literally just have to show you 280 characters. Thank God they are not building flying cars..

And to show you that 280 characters they need to download about 6 kbyte css, 4 kbyte javascript, 17 kbyte Google analytics, 26 kbyte jquery, 1.5 kbyte favicon, and some images... Total about 100 kbytes.

It's almost as if "they literally just have to show you 280 characters" is a bit of an oversimplification.

I think the point they were making was that they do all this extraneous stuff as well: if I’m looking at a single tweet, why on earth does it need to serve that much JS up? Why on earth is it not a simple HTML page with the information on it?

Mobile twitter site is shit, but the real irony here?

Twitter came up with the ui framework "Bootstrap" long ago and it was a game changer for responsive frontend layouts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com