
Refined Twitter - mofle
https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-twitter/blob/master/readme.md
======
chippy
> The new mobile web version of Twitter is much faster and better looking than
> the desktop one.

It's certainly much faster. I'm using it on my netbook which used to run the
desktop version equally as fast.

Why can't big development teams think about accessibility as it applies to
older hardware? It's clear that it's getting to be a big problem for Twitter
let alone other companies (see previous discussions about Bloat)

The only thing I can think of is that the developers use the shiny new
hardware and it runs okay for them. Or if the devs want to change, the
management and board runs the fast hardware and it's "working for them".

~~~
phamilton
You're missing the point. The goal is to maximize a small set of metrics.
Engagement, New User Experience, etc.

They make these changes and roll them out. They look at the numbers. They see
that 5% of their users (those on older hardware) spend 20% less time on the
site. They see that 20% of their users are spending 50% more time on the site.
They file a ticket about the drop in engagement for older devices. It goes
into the backlog. Next sprint/quarter rolls around, they see a couple of
options. One is to speed up the site on old devices another is to add a new
feature that they estimate will increase engagement by another 20%. The second
option seems to increase their bottom line more, so it gets funded and the old
device support stays on the backlog. Repeat cycle.

I can guarantee that at any sufficiently high traffic site they don't use
developer hardware as a benchmark. They see the numbers, they know its slow
for you and they make a conscious decision that you aren't worth the
opportunity cost of new features.

~~~
laumars
This but with one minor correction, the developers usually want to fix the
experience. It's the management / project owners / etc that use the
aforementioned analytics to make their judgement.

Perversely, I've also often observed that those who spend the most time
judging a sites performance on its analytics are usually the ones who actually
use the site the least. or at least this is what I've observed with past
projects I've worked on.

~~~
derefr
> those who spend the most time judging a sites performance on its analytics
> are usually the ones who actually use the site the least

It's a weird part of human tribal/social dynamics. People who already
generally like a thing are open-minded to new information that presents the
thing in a positive light, and just generally ignore new information that
presents the thing in a negative light. Likewise, people who already generally
dislike a thing filter out the prosthelytizations of people who like the
thing, but pay attention when they notice reasons to dislike the thing.

Basically, our brains' belief-evaluation machinery is really just a wrapper
around a core "generate excuses to keep thinking what I'm thinking" algorithm.

We can exploit this—adversarial justice systems work much better than non-
adversarial ones, because you've got two sides who each have paid attention to
half the evidence, brought together in the same room to present it all. But if
we aren't exploiting it, aren't even aware of it, it can become a real
problem.

------
nemothekid
Amazing, if I click a tweet, and go back, I don't lose my place. Wondering why
desktop twitter had this problem (until they made that pop-up UX).

~~~
KB1JWQ
I find myself consistently wondering why I pay money for a third party client
five years into my use of Twitter (I was late to the party).

What's more is that Twitter knows what I follow, what I read, what I like, and
what I retweet. So why is it still suggesting I follow pop celebrities instead
of well known developers? It seems that despite everything they know about me,
they don't know me at all.

~~~
rewrew
Moments is a prime example of how out of touch Twitter is. I've clicked on it
three times to see, and each time the stories are celebrities or sports. They
know enough about who I follow, what I tweet about and the hashtags that come
up to target enterprise technology ads to me, why can't they use the same data
to customize that page? It's utterly useless in its current form.

~~~
justinsaccount
Before Moments there used to be a tab that showed you tweets that your
followers were replying to. I used to use that all the time to find new people
to follow.

~~~
will_hughes
Way back in the beginning, when you followed someone you got all their tweets
- including replies to people you don't follow.

Then they made it an option to not get these, then they took away that option
and made it mandatory.

This, plus their really terrible behavior towards developers (still going on,
as evidenced by their continuance of the 100K tokens limit per app) has seen
me basicly stop using the service entirely.

------
mofle
Author here. I also made a desktop app for this:
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/anatine](https://github.com/sindresorhus/anatine)

------
ssahoo
This is why Grease Monkey existed. How many per-site plugins can someone have?
[http://www.greasespot.net/](http://www.greasespot.net/)

~~~
unethical_ban
To your question: A lot. How easy is it to install a chrome plugin vs. install
a packaged, auto-updating Greasemonkey script? What is the real difference in
performance?

~~~
sjs382
Realistically? Not much.

But I just installed it and while Chrome is running, it's taking up an
additional 57.1MB of memory right now.

That said, I've installed it and I think I'm going to keep using it.

~~~
mofle
A greasemonkey script in Chrome would take the same amount of memory or more,
as Chrome just repackages it as an extension on install.

~~~
silverwind
I'm pretty sure that's not how Tampermonkey works.

------
pducks32
Does anybody have any insight into Twitter's development structure? Do they
have a separate mobile and desktop team; a single team; or separate teams
where the desktop team just keeps the thing going until the mobile team can
scale theirs up to desktop? Just curious.

~~~
swanson
I met an engineer from Twitter at a conference and he said he was on a team
(6+ people) that worked full-time on the Lists page for the Twitter.com
desktop site. So anecdotally, they have (or at least had) very specific teams.

~~~
mountaineer
would be cool if one of them could add lists to the mobile web site since
lists are completely left out of there.

~~~
0942v8653
Interestingly, if you have the URL to one it works, but there is no interface
to get to them.

------
agumonkey
Mobile web is the new tru web. (it's clean, simple, fast, just like it used to
be ~_~).

That said, I do miss the keyboard shortcuts, and the TT. But I see below it's
incoming.

------
soheil
A while back I created this client that lives in OSX Menu Bar also based on
the mobile version of Twitter, it includes a few handy keyboard shortcuts.

[https://github.com/soheil/BirdDrop-OSX](https://github.com/soheil/BirdDrop-
OSX)

------
melvinmt

        <div id="react-root" style="height:100%;">
    

Made with React apparently. Interesting.

~~~
skeletonjelly
I saw that too! I've recently dipped my toe in, making a module for a small
project using React instead of Angular 1.x as I usually would do. One thing
I'm still working out is how to look at how complex websites use React, as in
the Chrome DevTools React plugin there's a lot of complexity in the React
hierarchy, and code uglifying that appears to have been run on it for
performance reasons makes it hard to reverse engineer

~~~
melvinmt
I would recommend to look into a well organized boilerplate repo to learn how
to structure larger projects. Here's one for react/redux/react-router:
[https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-
kit](https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit)

------
_puk
Thanks for releasing this, and seriously, thanks for the ridiculous amount of
effort you seem to put into the open source tools I'm using daily.

/gush

------
jra101
Very nice.

Hopefully it also gets rid of the super annoying "While you were gone"
sections.

~~~
jra101
Downside is you see ads in your stream with mobile twitter which I don't see
with desktop twitter.

~~~
chejazi
Your stream doesn't feature ads? Mine is chock-full of them on desktop web.

~~~
jra101
None on desktop. Possibly due to uBlock?

~~~
chejazi
Ah yes. What's curious is that uBlock doesn't block the mobile ones as well!

------
vinhnx
I have been using Twean + uBlock element blocking for awhile now:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twean/mgdbopghpkjm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twean/mgdbopghpkjmgnhjfdnfeihnjgndjnbp)

Since I always disable image preview in the mobile app, I find Twean suits my
needs perfectly.

------
balladeer
Since we are talking about refined Twitter experience here, I thought I will
share my issue and hopefully one of you has a solution.

So I follow a lot of lit mags and other literature related accounts and
persons. Often the same story is (re)tweeted multiple times by the mag
accounts and even by persons. Now, getting lesser tweets for a given time is
one of the criteria I follow for following any twitter account so that I don't
miss others or I've to look at one tweet exactly once in my feed.

How do I achieve that? Is there a Twitter setting for that? I doubt it -
because many of those tweets are actually different tweets with the same link
(but different shortened URLs) and separate comments about the article. Add to
that many other tweets that fans and followers make and the magazines retweets
them.

That's just too many tweets for one article. I understand that the mags have
to do it for the reach and everything but, personally for me, it's very
inconvenient. What do you do when you face such problems? (I could just
subscribe to their feeds but I wanted to know about cleaning my Twitter feed
if at all that's possible)

An example:

[https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/728087014407475200](https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/728087014407475200)

[https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/728026712894738432](https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/728026712894738432)

[https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/727951285488631808](https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/727951285488631808)

[https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/727860663515746304](https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/727860663515746304)

[https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/727830459175084032](https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/727830459175084032)

(I love this mag btw)

------
MattHeard
If the mobile Twitter site supported the keyboard shortcuts of J/K for
next/previous, then this would be perfect.

~~~
mofle
I intend to add some keyboard shortcuts. Comment your needs here:
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-
twitter/issues/5](https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-twitter/issues/5)

------
andremendes
I'd really use a Firefox version of this. Wondering how far am I from knowing
how to port it myself.

~~~
mofle
It should work in Firefox 48. See [https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-
twitter/pull/3](https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-twitter/pull/3) and
[https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-
in-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-
firefox-48/)

Happy to add something to the readme if anyone can test and confirm.

------
timf
Unfortunately Twitter's mobile site does not support lists

~~~
mountaineer
Exactly, still unsure why Twitter left Lists out of the mobile web version of
the site.

~~~
scholia
Lists are pretty much hidden in the desktop version, along with Advanced
Search. I assume these are too geeky for the target audience....

~~~
tomitm
I wrote an extension to bring lists out of hiding. Haven't done anything for
the new mobile web app yet, waiting to see if they'll make an appearance
officially soon.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-lists-
redu...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-lists-
redux/kcincllgjifchjihkklkcfdniofcjahb)

Unfortunately, I don't think Twitter gives lists enough attention because it's
an underused feature, but at the same time, if lists are unusable.. of course
no one is going to use them.

~~~
mountaineer
Nice, I remember seeing this on ProductHunt. I'm working on electoralhq.com
which provides Twitter Lists search and management tools. Shifting into
building scoutzen.com now though in order to be more independent of Twitter
Lists since they get such little attention from Twitter.

------
nikolay
"Dumbed Down" != "Refined". I see value in his Refined GitHub, but Refined
Twitter I had to disable and will have to revisit.

~~~
quarterto
This isn't really the same thing as Refined Github though. It's just
redirecting to the new Mobile Twitter. I've yet to notice a missing feature
(although there are things missing that I don't consider "features", like
trending topics and moments). It also works _far_ more reliably for me: for
example, try scrolling several dozen tweets down the feed in both Mobile and
Desktop Twitter, clicking on a tweet, then clicking back. I've yet to see
Mobile lose my place, whereas Desktop does more often than not, and when it
doesn't it has to spend a minute triggering its own infinite scroll.

~~~
nikolay
Similar branding suggests similar functionality, i.e. not overhauling, but
"refining," i.e. making useful small improvements. Yes, there are missing
features - from account management ones to little things like being able to
mention somebody while on their profile.

------
nailer
> > "Chrome extension that enforces the mobile web version of Twitter and
> improves its interface"

What does 'enforces' mean? What does this do?

~~~
unethical_ban
Let me direct you to the next sentence:

"When you open a link that would normally be to desktop Twitter, this
extension redirects you to the mobile web version and makes it wider."

~~~
nailer
Ah. Here's a simpler explanation:

> This makes Chrome always use the mobile web version of Twitter, which has a
> different UI to the desktop web version.

------
scoggs
My group DM's aren't showing up in my Messages section! Otherwise, this would
be the perfect extension for me!

------
smpetrey
A heads up on missing features on mobile.twitter.com:

\- No moments feature

\- No trending hashtags

\- Can't tweet polls

\- Gif search missing

\- Tweet analytics missings

------
sp332
Is there any way to read notifications on mobile twitter?

~~~
sp332
Update: I spoofed my user-agent string to get the normal mobile version in
Firefox. It mostly works except images don't load! I'm done digging into this
for now, but it's kinda bizarre.

~~~
wxs
I use Twitter on Firefox mobile and didn't know until this article that it's
for some reason forcing an old ugly version. What UA string are you using? I
tried the Android (Phone) one, and the Chrome one that the Phony extension
provides but it still shows the ugly FF version of mobile twitter.

~~~
h_ar
Any user-agent that mentions a recent Chrome and Android build should shows
the new mobile.

I test one that has Chrome 43 and Android 5.0.2

Still, the no-image-load grind my gears, so I switched to desktop.

------
hans
How long until they block it? har har

~~~
mofle
They can't. For them it's just a normal browser.

------
hackaflocka
Apparently Twitter can't find good engineering talent. I hope it considers
hiring this developer.

~~~
zeemonkee3
I'm sure Twitter has great engineering talent. Whether they're allowed to do
their jobs is another matter.

------
Animats
Can you add ad blocking?

------
krmmalik
Any plans for a Safari plugin?

