Still embarrassing for a tech company of twitter's size. Displaying a tweet to a logged out user should be the single simplest job their service has, but it's usually broken.
I'm a heavy user of Twitter. They have the most ridiculous bugs all the time
Let me list a few I can remind in recent two years:
1. A serious bug that makes the private lists' name, member count, and description visible to everyone for half a way
2. ANOTHER private list exposure bug after a year
3. Lots of their features are semi- or totally broken, the most obvious example being Moments. Some minor ones are like "twitter anniversary" etc.
4. Media files being totally lost/404, especially for some older tweets
5. UI: "Checked" mark for adding people to lists being invisible for at least a week
5.1. UI: some UI elements suddenly become black for a few weeks regardless what theme you use
6. Outage: Like function broken for almost a day
7. Outage: Timeline broken (no update) for half day
8. This probably isn't a bug but a "shadow block" feature, but I can't follow some accounts (and their following/follower count doesn't show) if my IP is in certain region.
9. Huge feature disparity between web and app, or iOS and Android
And needless to say, their support is beyond unhelpful, and they don't really have a proper place to report technical issues/bugs of their service.
Twitter's thread/reply API has been changed a lot. It definitely works better now.
I will also be honest, Talon basically isn't really updated any more.
I remembered the last time I used it, it has a bug that it will always re-save/re-compress the image when you download, which is very easy to fix, but the author didn't do anything about it. I just checked, the bug is still there..
https://github.com/klinker-apps/talon-for-twitter-android/is... and https://github.com/klinker-apps/talon-for-twitter-android/is...
Twitter is a private company but it has also become a public space for political discourse.
The need for profits and open free speech are butting heads.
That said, I would buy that ignoring and any fix for it is deliberate.
Dunno why Twitter seems to have completely deprioritized the issue though. They change the error message every once in a while but nothing else.
It's pretty amusing to me that this modern, high-res, multi-megabyte page has worse usability than when we could just "finger" Carmack's .plan from a terminal 20 years ago.
Maybe we should try to bring finger back. We could pretend that it uses the blockchain to drive adoption.
I basically wont read Twitter threads because of it, perhaps I am better off for it.
And yes, it's absolutely horrible that there are all those buttons and a repeated profile pic intruded at random points in the text, like in the middle of a damn word.
I get that you need to tweet to get views and nobody reads blogs any more but this "Twitter thread" concept is a UX horror.
My only complaint is when the thread is long, Twitter will start not showing it all at once. You have to click the last tweet to see anything after it.
But again, threadreaderapp itself also has trouble to feed all the parts of a super long thread.
edit: in case anyone is interested, here's the code for the bookmarklet to turn the current tweet into a threadapp thread. This is not very deeply tested but it worked with the current tweet above so YMMV:
javascript:(function(){window.location.href = 'https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/' + window.location.pathname.split('/').pop(); })();When it does load, chances are that it only shows one tweet from a thread followed by half a dozen unrelated tweets that twitter thinks I might want to read instead.
But I’d rather him use Twitter than the centralized broken mess that is medium.
On Twitter Carmack posts a paragraph as it comes to him. Could do the whole thing at once. Could take days to complete the thread or longer. It could be as long as he wants. One tweet or one thousand. No real expectations of edits. No one would be surprised if it's only a three paragraph thought whereas going to read an essay that might feel a little brief. Nobody expects really profound or serious insight, just the thoughts on top of his head.
Readers also have the same low barrier to entry. No need to go to a separate page or app. Look at the first or first n paragraphs. Scroll by anytime.
The user experience for something like this may not be perfect on Twitter, but I think Twitter has a lot to recommend itself as the appropriate tool for sharing thoughts like this.
I have opted out and blocked their bot on Twitter which apparently currently suffices to prevent their scraping. I'm more than happy to point anyone who asks to a text file. God, I miss blogs.
Sorry about the rant.
He has enough material to gain a good following.
> Before the iPhone existed, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones": Doom RPG 1&2, Orcs&Elves 1&2, and Wolfenstein RPG. Qualcomm's native-code BREW platform had better versions, but I haven't seen any emulators and archives for it, so they may be lost at this point. The J2ME (java mobile) versions are still floating around, and can be emulated.
> My son wanted to get O&E2 running, so we set out on a little adventure. Kemulator ran the game, but audio was glitchy and it hung after you died in game. Well, we are programmers, we should be able to fix it. Unlike most emulator projects, Kemulator turned out to be closed source abandonware, so we moved over to freej2me, which is a live github project.
> The hang didn't happen, but audio was even worse. Missing sound effects was a simple bug fix -- MIDI sounds weren't seeking to the start on replays. We will submit a patch. Still, everything was glitchy with audio underruns. We noticed that the emulator was taking an absurd amount of CPU, despite the game being built for <100 MHz mobile CPUs.
> We spent a frustrating afternoon exploring java profiling tools, but finally, Flight Recorder and JDK Mission Control pointed out the root cause: explicitly invoked garbage collection. A vague memory of having to call system.GC() every frame to avoid problems on some mobile phones bubbled up. We couldn't change the source on the game, but the jvm has a handy option -XX:+DisableExplicitGC that fixed everything right up.
> This is an interesting case where an operation is >10x slower on a modern computer.
> A GC sweep on a phone with 128k of heap is a very different thing than a desktop with a multi-GB heap.
> Some old writing about the early cell phone work: https://web.archive.org/web/20060502175605/http://www.armadi...