Whoa! Game changing! I never thought to search for aria-labels.

I immediately and joyfully added your rules to uBlock, and it works like a charm!

I ended up expanding on the concept:

  twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]

great!

Paradoxically, I do need to start using twitter to market my game, but I dread spending time on that site.

I'll probably try to only go there once a week. Social media is weird.

About a year ago I tried getting into Twitter because it seemed like there were a few people I might want to follow, so I dutifully read a few people I knew about and added people they retweeted that seemed interesting.

About a week or two in I tried engaging on a topic in a HN style way where I tried to ask questions and probe for something deeper (my first mistake), and on something where I sort of questioned the party line on a trending topic (my second mistake). I was actually wrong in some of my assumptions I was using at that time, but everyone was so busy assuming I was acting bad faith and trying to troll (and responding how they thought appropriate) that not one person could actually engage with me enough to even figure that out even though I tried to keep it entirely civil, I had to learn it myself a few hours later (and I did go back with a mea culpa). I only lasted about another week reading items on the platform regularly as it became obvious that this is just the expectation of how discourse happens on Twitter.

I mean, I don't expect it to be like HN, but I also don't expect people to assume racist troll is the obvious and most likely option when I open my mouth, and that's how it feels on Twitter. What's worse, I'm not sure that's not a rational approach on the platform given how people on it act, which is why I don't want to be there.

Twitter's like a giant set of improv performances where everyone is performing for their friends and private audiences in an effort to be the most extreme version of themselves, but all those performances are banging into each other and feeding off each other. Interesting and weird at first, until you realize it's all so terribly draining.

If I get a chance to look closer I will, but want to lazily suggest it'd be ideal, if possible, to use some identifier that's not a11y-related -- in case this takes off and Twitter's incentivized to remove the labels (at the expense of those who depend on the aria-labels to access the site's content).

>a11y

I understand a16z is a name but writing other words in this style is very difficult to understand. It would be great for people to use the full term 'accessibility'.

I hear you, but in this case (A) there was a ton of relevant context about aria-label, and (B) HN (HackerNews) is a technical community, and on the web, "a11y" has been in very widespread, even mainstream usage for many years, to refer to "accessibility". Notice how "a11y" looks like lowercase "ALLY", as in ally or friend, of the differently-abled.

... and (C) I was commenting from my phone.

One might even say it makes the conversation less “accessible”

Huhm, I don't know a16z, but I do know a11y and i18n...

I know of them, but I can never remember them, and I wouldn't know how to search for them. I'm not sure what they were thinking when they came up with inaccessible accessibility terms.

Neat fact: I learned the other week that this exact format(first, last, number of characters in between) is how old Forths compressed the word encoding. It has a very low collision rate.

That comment is a perfect example of what I love about HN; a polite tangential discussion about abbreviations unearthing a wholly unexpected connection to a clever technical hack. Thank you for sharing! :)

"I wouldn't know how to search for them"

I don't believe you are incapable of typing "a11y" into your browser's location bar.

Not likely. Accessibility is required by law, no way twitter’s legal would be down with arguing “yes well you see we had to make it inaccessible because people were using accessibility labels to block the sidebar with trending topics from showing up on their page”

Well, bet you the next version of Twitter will say "Fuck you, blind people" for all aria-labels.