top | item 34499615

Tweak New Twitter

113 points| ivank | 3 years ago |github.com

37 comments

order

insin|3 years ago

Author here, this the website where you go to get customer support from Google, right? /s

Was everyone who reviews extensions at Google part of the cohort who were suddenly given a cardboard box and shown the door recently? The extension has been blowing up in Japan over the weekend (user numbers more than doubled from 29,000 to 68,000 over the last few days) so I internationalized it to add a Japanese locale (and incidentally accidentally used "en" for the default locale rather than "en_US" which everyone seems to default to, for which the Edge Extension Dashboard completely wiped my store listing in their interface - cheers).

New versions on Chrome Web Store are usually approved first within in a few hours, but it's been sitting for more than 24 hours now and their contact form suggests you only bother them after 3 weeks! It doesn't help that the version I submitted has invalid locale strings for Chrome (which worked fine in Firefox, the default browser launched by the web-ext extension development tool - thanks) and you can't back a known-bad version out of review.

Yes, I too have read all the rants about being beholden to Big Extension Store and have nobody to blame but myself :)

Also, happy to answer any questions you have about writing extensions on top of React Native for Web apps - New Twitter was a fix it or quit it situation for me, and I ended up getting lots of practice at the former when it's looking like I probably should have just done the latter.

abdullahkhalids|3 years ago

Here are some crazy features I really want. I doubt you can implement, but a man can dream.

1. For some accounts, I don't see what they tweet, but want to continue seeing their retweets.

2. For some accounts, I only want to see tweets that are replies to my other followers. Otherwise, I don't want to see their tweets on my timeline.

3. Some "famous" people will retweet every praise they get from someone. You know "I totally loved @famousperson's new book". I would love to just block any retweets by them that has their own username in it. And keep everything else.

4. Chronological timeline, but only show maximum of N tweets from a particular account.

5. Craziest feature. Flip the timeline around, so scrolling downwards shows me newer tweets. And at the start of the session, move me to the last tweet I viewed.

Effective use of twitter is about removing as much of the noise as possible from your timeline, so as to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

dom96|3 years ago

Another annoyance of the Chrome Web Store: you cannot publish a new version if another version is still pending publication. Ran into that once which meant an even greater time stuck waiting for the latest version to be published...

scotcha1|3 years ago

my experience with shipping updates to the google chrome store is that you typically are waiting days if not weeks, depending on the time of year. 24 hours seems incredibly fast! hopefully it will get approved soon, good luck!

mmastrac|3 years ago

The Elon acquisition forcing me to finally break my Twitter habit was awesome. Whenever I go back, I started to wonder why I spent so much time there. Mastodon has been positive in other ways - I'm posting less there than I did on Twitter, and the people there are generally less toxic overall (though I've been carefully curating who I follow this time around).

I think we'll continue to see social media fracture and federate as time goes on, and this will turn out to be a net benefit for society. For now, my mental health is definitely better.

MuffinFlavored|3 years ago

> Whenever I go back, I started to wonder why I spent so much time there

What about same question posed to yourself (and myself), but for this website (Hacker News) instead of Twitter? :)

arcticbull|3 years ago

I was also terminally online at twitter, and before the holidays I just dropped it. Got tired of all the complaining about how it was going to collapse, and my experience continually just got worse week over week. It's given me a lot of my time back!

crimsoneer|3 years ago

Instead of an extension to un-twitterfy twitter, I want one to tweetify Mastodon...

mjmsmith|3 years ago

Take a look at Elk [1], it's the closest thing I've seen to a Twitter UI.

[1] https://elk.zone/

HerbMcM|3 years ago

There are other frontends that are much more Twitter like pleroma, soapbox. Soapbox seems to be adding features more than others but the dev is persona non grata in many fediverse/mastodon circles.

Using plain pleroma right now, I want to try standing up misskey maybe on a weekend.

_han|3 years ago

Which Twittery features are you missing in Mastodon?

dom96|3 years ago

Really cool. It seems there are many such extensions for enhancing Twitter and other websites. I wonder if there are any `awesome-x`-style repos that list all such browser extensions.

I myself developed an extension for integrating Mastodon with Twitter recently[0]. It's a great way to get exposure to Mastodon without leaving the familiar Twitter UI.

[0] - https://chirper.picheta.me/

the_gipsy|3 years ago

I want to block accounts of the promoted tweets I get. If enough people did that...

insin|3 years ago

There is a longstanding Tweak New Twitter bug (forgot to add a case clause to a switch statement) which someone finally found this week and submitted a PR for, which was accidentally causing all promoted tweets to be hidden. Handing my programmer card in as we type.

pornel|3 years ago

Enough people did that once, and then Twitter changed blocking to ignore that. I've used a blocklist of top-500 advertisers that was making rounds, and it stopped working after a while.

You can't win with a platform on the platform's turf.

collinvandyck76|3 years ago

I tried that for a long time. The exercise got old after a while.

thomond|3 years ago

Am I the only person this works for?

hendersoon|3 years ago

I don't want to use another extension. If it could be done inside uBlock Origin, that's about the length I'm willing to go. Barring that, I've found myself simply going to twitter.com far, far less on desktop. And not at all on mobile.

huhtenberg|3 years ago

It can't be done with uBlock because Twitter randomized pretty much all DOM element class names. You really need to parse the content, then climb up the tree and trim grand/parent nodes to remove all the junk. Used to be much easier few years ago with descriptive class names, but they changed that.

* I'm not the OP, but I made a similar extension.

lpapez|3 years ago

Ok, so don't use it then or think of an alternate way of achieving the same thing. Why would you even comment something like this?

pawelduda|3 years ago

Idk, I appreciate them working hard to fix my compulsive Twitter scrolling habit

jdorfman|3 years ago

I'm going to give this a shot. I have been using "Minimal Theme for Twitter" extension for a couple of years and love it. I'm less distracted by hiding what's trending, etc.

andirk|3 years ago

Edge has a store?

ozten|3 years ago

Space Karen free labor task force... assemble! Form of... a Chrome extension.

insin|3 years ago

Well actually, we're the Twitter Product Decisions - Good For Their Bottom Line (yes, that turned out well), Bad For Humans Who Like Their Brain To Feel Good free labor task force, Est. 2018 [0] when Old Twitter started mixing algorithmic tweets into the main timeline (and when we discovered moving Retweets out of the main timeline is a _massive_ QoL bump)

[0] https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement