Thank you! The reason for experimenting with a sort of blow-by-blow report style here and detailing the full and true journey of the idea was that I feel the whole process from idea to artifact is not written about enough.

That said, it can often be hard to fully pinpoint the actual inception of an idea and just thinking about this one yesterday I realised that the idea likely came up while traversing a long chain of quote tweets. I really appreciate the feedback though—it's especially useful as I'm only starting to publish regularly now so have lots to learn—so thanks again.

There seem to a be a couple of "camps" in HN. Broadly, those who enjoy reading, and those who don't, but endure it as a means to obtain information.

I'm in the former camp, and enjoyed your writeup quite a bit.

The latter camp will reliably show up when writing is any more long-winded than it absolutely must be, and will a) summarize (good) and b) complain (annoying).

It is what it is. Congrats on your whimsical creation!

Maybe a constructive message would be 'please post a summary at the top and a stronger conclusion at the bottom' since we're conditioned this way by various written structures.

I would argue that @OisinMoran followed this exact structure, the first section (above the fold) has this:

> Fundamentally the challenge is just correctly guessing what ID a given tweet is going to get, then appending that onto the URL for our profile and tweeting it.

And of course, the strong conclusion at the bottom is the Tweet itself.

Thank you!

I loved the write up, especially those basic things all experienced programmers know but sometimes makes newer ones scared, like sometimes you don't quite know how the answer works exactly at first, or sometimes you have a big idea and a lack of double quotes is your problem, etc etc

Thank you! Yes, I think you put what I was trying to capture here really well. When I first attempted to learn programming I got stuck on how to _actually_ run the code and eventually gave up but then started in an actual class in college. So being painfully aware of the gaps that can be left in explanations I try to avoid creating more of them.

The ultimate solution that will probably happen at some point is a kind of collapsable/expandable explanation that takes your knowledge into account and can omit the bits you are overly familiar with. One of the difficulties with this would be adoption from the creators so it needs to not have too much overhead—writing is already difficult enough.

Also loved the write-up (have to, really, it's how I do it too.)

HN, 1950s edition: "Look, Mr Tolkien, what I want to know is does the ring go in the mountain? Why do I have to read about this journey?"

The write-up was great, actually. The whole point of sharing the article is to read about the process and the technical details, I don't know why people insist on these cheap TL;DRs.

I think enough people want that kind of TL;DR that it's reasonable to put one right up front. I see a similar sort of thing with DIY projects, where they tend to get better attention if the first picture is the finished product, and then it works you through the process. It's partly to placate people who only want to see the finished product, but it also gives enough of a hook to everyone else that I suspect some people will read the article who otherwise wouldn't.

Thank you!

As I said, the write up was quite interesting, so don’t take it the wrong way! A long read - including the journey taken to get there - can be educational itself (including wrong turns, proof of concepts etc).

The only reason I posted the tweet was because the lede was well and truly buried at the end of the article, and you may have lost some readers’ interest by the time they get there.

You could have started with something like “This is how I managed to post a self referential tweet [link]” which would both bring it up front and centre, as a means to entice readers to find out more.

Sort of like how some TV episodes begin with “[record scratch] You may wonder how I ended up here...” – deadpool is a movie that begins in that way, for example.

For really long posts you might want to have a kind of table of contents that sets up the structure which you can link to parts.

Anyway, don’t take my abbreviated summary as negative; I enjoyed it.

I'm seeing this:

> This is not available to you

Yes unfortunately Twitter's UI doesn't seem to handle recursive quote tweets, which was the main disappointment for me. I'm puzzled at those saying it does work as all I've ever gotten for the _quoted_ tweet was:

> This Tweet is unavailable.

But perhaps they are just talking about the actual tweet.

Anyone at Twitter here that can give an indication of where this is on the roadmap?

That's a common Twitter bug, just try again a few times.

Alternatively, replace twitter.com in the URL with nitter.net. It points to an alternative client.

sure, if you want to give your twitter credentials to some random company based in the caribbean.

What? https://nitter.net/quinetweet/status/1309951041321013248 doesn’t ask for credentials and AFAIK there’s no place to enter them on the whole site, unless you type them into the search bar.

It still shows up as "tweet unavailable" for me, though, in this link

What you're seeing is an available tweet with an embedded tweet that is kept from being displayed. Because the embedded tweet is itself, it is handled by showing the same UI as any embedded tweet that is not available.

Right, but my point is the behavior is the same on Twitter and nitter

"tweet unavailable" is a different error from the "This is not available to you" message. Got that message earlier today when I tried to open a different linked tweet. Changing to nitter fixed it for me.

Ah, I get tweet unavailable from both, thus my confusion.

If it's the same bug I frequently see, manually refreshing the page by hitting enter in the address bar always fixes it for me.

You were right, it worked this time.

Nope, I'm assuming that's someone on Twitter noticing what he did and hiding it.

It's definitely a common Twitter bug.

"This is not available to you." is something different from "This Tweet is unavailable."

I have "This Tweet is unavailable."

Yes, that is a completely different thing. "This is not available to you." comes up in place of the content in the Twitter UI.

Or the software just doesn't handle it.

Why the speculation from you and the parent? You can literally click on the Tweet and see that it works fine.

When I click on the tweet, it shows the URL in the text and where the quoted inset should be it instead reads "This Tweet is unavailable."

The parent and grandparent are speculating because it works for them but not for others here.