Re:Building the New Twitter.com
by guelo on Thursday July 18, 2019 @03:38PM
(#20473222)
I think it's more likely that this is a user-hostile feature to prevent scraping or styling scripts that might mess with ad views.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I really, really doubt that. At worst, it's both. CSS scoping and obfuscated class names are really popular and part of any modern JS framework.
Re:Building the New Twitter.com
by TolstoyDotCom on Thursday July 25, 2019 @10:57PM
(#20531989)
I wrote an open source application that uses Webdriver to scrape tweets; it used to show how heavily Twitter censors all kinds of users. Twitter used to have a tweet's "quality" (per them) right in the HTML: "HighQuality", "LowQuality", and "AbusiveQuality". They put some tweets in the "tombstone" section. I now need to change the app to deal with them obfuscating the "quality" and all the rest.
I've run a Twitter ad for the app so at least someone there knows about it. I don't know if the app was a factor, but certainly hiding what they think of their users' output is in line with all the other sneaky things they do to their users.
It's certainly not the primary driver. Twitter is built using React Native for Web, which uses a pattern called "Atomic CSS".[1] So it's just a result of the framework they're using.
[1] https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web/blob/master/docs...