Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#101

Post by specialist » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #80

xgulfie wrote: post #31

Twitter's website is absolute garbage, the feed is unresponsive, tweets fail to load, it's just terrible. If you're modeling your frontend off of anything please do not pick Twitter because their web experience is awful.

I'm thinking about building a Reddit-like Twitter client that has sane conversation threading and better discovery. Would that be of interest?

I'd prob use Twitter more with an RSS style client, akin to NetNewsWire.

I have zero interest in retweets, replies, threads, hearts, etc.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#102

Post by bastawhiz » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

It feels very unnatural to me to use React Native semantics and bolt on props for headings and the like; it seems like it would be better to write than , even just from a DX perspective.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#103

Post by superasn » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

xgulfie wrote: post #31

Twitter's website is absolute garbage, the feed is unresponsive, tweets fail to load, it's just terrible. If you're modeling your frontend off of anything please do not pick Twitter because their web experience is awful.

You're so right about this. Also their UX is absolutely horrible in my opinion. It's one of the worst designed sites both in terms of usability and load time (half the time it doesn't even load on my mobile on kiwi browser).

The biggest irony is they have the best designers in the world (i.e. the guys who created bootstrap) but god I hate the tech they have used to make twitter.com because of that "something went wrong" retry button error message .

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#104

Post by y4mi » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

indiv0 wrote: post #100

LukeShu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 90% of my interaction with Twitter is is clicking a link from HN. When I do so, there's about a 1/3 chance that tweet doesn't load.

I was under the impression this was an intentional dark pattern to get users to sign up / log in to twitter? The reason I believe this is because if you get that failure and back out and click the link again it works 100% of the time.

Why would you attribute that to a dark pattern?

I would think that your first visit loaded a resource/set a state somewhere which let's the second visit go through.

Much more likely to be a programming error then a purposeful decision by a PO as the end result is objectively terrible. I cannot imagine anyone getting convinced to register to a webpage that cannot even load. It's not that content is hidden behind a pop-up or anything, it just errors out (at least for me, but I'm not the parent comment author)

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#105

Post by tomgp » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

rgbrgb wrote: post #79

Lots of classic HN dismissals here, though I am glad we as a community have finally gotten past the anger around requiring JS to use the site. In my mouth, Twitter is probably the best, most responsive web app I've ever used. It is not trivial to make a responsive infinite scroll that remembers your place on back, live updates gracefully, has useful shareable URLs, keeps memory usage low, loads quickly, etc. To me it…

Maybe not trivial but these are all solved problems - media queries, http get requests and history state manipulation are all mature and well understood. In common with 90% of the web twitter’s performance and memory usage is utterly abysmal. We’ve been trained to accept this kind of thing but it doesn’t have to be this way. Im prepared to accept that there are complications that i don’t know about but Twitter is not that complicated a front end and it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of a tech company the size of Twitter to make something that y’know actually shows a tweet when you click a link to see a tweet.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#106

Post by overcast » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 8:06 PM UTC

xgulfie wrote: post #31

Twitter's website is absolute garbage, the feed is unresponsive, tweets fail to load, it's just terrible. If you're modeling your frontend off of anything please do not pick Twitter because their web experience is awful.

I feel like an idiot trying to read threads on Twitter. I seriously get confused on where one begins, ends and everywhere in between. It's WAY too complicated of a layout for nothing more than a chronological list of text.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#107

Post by lucideer » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 8:11 PM UTC

rgbrgb wrote: post #79

Lots of classic HN dismissals here, though I am glad we as a community have finally gotten past the anger around requiring JS to use the site. In my mouth, Twitter is probably the best, most responsive web app I've ever used. It is not trivial to make a responsive infinite scroll that remembers your place on back, live updates gracefully, has useful shareable URLs, keeps memory usage low, loads quickly, etc. To me it…

> Twitter is probably the best, most responsive web app I've ever used

What machine are you running it on?

I'm a regular Twitter user and it is hands down the slowest most unresponsive webapp I use: worse than Slack or Gmail.

Fwiw probably the best complex responsive webapp I use is YouTube (loathe as I am to compliment anything produced by Google's web frontend teams as the rest of their webapps have been consistently poor for so long)

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#108

Post by kilroy123 » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 8:11 PM UTC

spiderice wrote: post #71

chmod775 wrote: post #64

I consider any site that loads 3 seconds to display about 100 bytes worth of unicode text to be utter garbage. I actually wanted to check the precise loading times before posting this, but would you look at this: https://i.imgur.com/VWOlNHu.png I rest my case.

This is genuinely what I see 50% of the time I go to Twitter. Every other big website can keep their site loading >99% of the time. The fact that Twitter can’t is beyond me, and speaks to their incompetence.

Same here. I truly do not understand why.

For a while I thought it was some weird blocking from Privacy Badger.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#109

Post by newhotelowner » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

xgulfie wrote: post #31

Twitter's website is absolute garbage, the feed is unresponsive, tweets fail to load, it's just terrible. If you're modeling your frontend off of anything please do not pick Twitter because their web experience is awful.

Same with the Facebook. Specially the business side of it. It is utterly garbage. Doesn't load or take forever to load. Navigation is cumbersome.

Re: Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained

#110

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

handrous wrote: post #66

nfRfqX5n wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely experience any of these issues and think their front end is quite good. Just their a11y / keyboard nav stuff is some of the best I've seen. Some questionable design choices but that's more of a product thing

Tweets not loading, with an error, except after several tries, is a commonly-reported problem. I've seen it for years, across multiple browsers & devices, happens all the time. It might go away if you log in. I wouldn't know.

Funnily enough their API endpoints report the actual error that happened in plain English. Their frontend never even tries to show the error.

It's unbelievable incompetence coupled with unbelievable not-giving-a-damn attitude.