Tweak New Twitter
github.comAuthor 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.
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.
Those are all very doable except for 5, but they're so (relatively) niche I think they'd belong together in a separate extension dedicated to selectively trimming down your timeline.
Personally, after I moved Retweets to their own tab, I found I just never missed them or looked at them again, and if I put them back in it just seems like random noise now.
> And at the start of the session, move me to the last tweet I viewed
This one I would like to do, but... Twitter has at least some built-in ability to do this (if you scroll your timeline a few screens worth, navigate away from the home timeline then eventually navigate back, it can restore your previous position), but I haven't found a way to make use of it for this feature - I _suspect_ they're caching the current state of whatever way they do their windowing of timeline tweets, then restoring that later, which means it's probably not possible to leverage it to jump to a particular tweet from a cold start.
Automatically scrolling through tweets until you hit a particular last-seen one isn't great alternative either, as it's pretty slow and the timeline currently seems to end after about a day and a half.
Thanks for the detailed answer.
> Personally, after I moved Retweets to their own tab, I found I just never missed them or looked at them again, and if I put them back in it just seems like random noise now.
Depends on who you follow. I follow a limited set of intellectual minded people who themselves follow a lot of people and retweet the good stuff. So, I would quite like to continue reading them.
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...
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!
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.
> 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? :)
Personally, I find the average quality of discussion on Hacker News to be much higher than the average quality of discussion on Twitter. There are fewer incentives for flame wars, and fewer bots trying to get me to buy random T-shirts.
A lot of that can definitely be chalked up to the excellent moderation by dang! It's the last real place on the internet for me, a line saloon in the wild west if you will.
I don't disagree, I just wonder if you (and myself) should spend as much time as we do on this site :)
Let’s hope for some onerous SPA overhaul of HN somewhere down the line. ;)
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!
Instead of an extension to un-twitterfy twitter, I want one to tweetify Mastodon...
Take a look at Elk [1], it's the closest thing I've seen to a Twitter UI.
Elk is amazing. Even running it as my primary client on mobile. Really shows how good PWAs can be.
One of my favorite features is the built-in code highlighting.
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.
Which Twittery features are you missing in Mastodon?
Automatically pulling in more posts from the graph and automatically linking to people on their server rather than mine; trying to not feel as "isolating".
If someone reposts a poll into my timeline, the poll shows as having 0 answers, or 1 answer if I answer it.
If someone posts a reply that's visible in my timeline, the post they're replying to isn't reliably visible.
If I'm on someone's (remote) profile on my (local) server, there isn't a giant obvious link for "go to the real profile so I can view all their posts". I have to manually construct the URL for their profile.
Conversely, if I'm on someone's profile on their server, I have to copy-paste their URL into my instance's search bar before I can follow them; that should be one click, which could be done with some browser integration.
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.
I want to block accounts of the promoted tweets I get. If enough people did that...
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.
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.
You are right, it would just get stomped down. Either by detecting that the block was automated, or because it stems from a promoted tweet.
The only winning move is not to play the game. Or play a game that you can own.
Blocking accounts still prevents them from showing you promoted tweets. I think the only thing that stopped working was the ability to share and subscribe to block lists.
I tried that for a long time. The exercise got old after a while.
Am I the only person this works for?
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.
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.
It's a React Native for Web app, so it's kinda like a reverse Tailwind - you write your styles using the usual CSS property names (instead of having to learn new shorthand names for all of them), then it deduplicates everything at build time and generates one-property-per-selector class names.
They've handily left a bunch of data-testid attributes on some of the major elements you need to identify, like the primary column.
Since it's a React app, manually removing stuff from the DOM will either have your changes get blown away the on the next render, or cause issues on the next render. A good trick is to add your own descriptive classes to <body> for the current screen so you can limit the scope of some of the incredibly gnarly CSS selectors you'll need to use to hide things.
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?
This is a discussion forum in which participants contribute their take on the issue at hand. That was my take, on-topic.
Your response instead attacked another poster, which did not contribute to the discussion at all.
Idk, I appreciate them working hard to fix my compulsive Twitter scrolling habit
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.
Edge has a store?
Space Karen free labor task force... assemble! Form of... a Chrome extension.
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)