Author Topic: Twitter Issues  (Read 9684 times)

Offline Hamish.Student

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Twitter Issues
« on: 08/30/2021 05:17 am »
Hi all,

These concerns have been voiced over in the Starship Prototype thread and were (rightfully) removed, I apologise to the mods for my off-topicness in this. 
 
Twitter has recently begun bringing in changes (via A/B testing so it only affects some users at any one time) that greatly reduce the ability of the public to use their website, without logging in. These changes include, but are not limited too: Blocking the viewing of photos in tweets, Blocking the ability to scroll public profiles, as well as just general crapiness on their servers such as pages not loading or pages loading slowly. 
 
Additionally there is a segment of the user base here who cannot access twitter at all, be it through internet filtering by Govt or Employers.

Then there's the issue of the twitter embeds in the updates thread slowly things down to a crawl until they spring into existence. I don't have data caps, but some people do! 
 
Now, I'm not sure what the best solution would be. I previously mentioned banning twitter, that's probably too much. Maybe a switch to control the embeds? Maybe if we could rehost the images here, which would also preserve them for posterity. Twitter may not be around forever. This would help with the twitter.com issues, as well as bandwidth and filtering. 
 
This is becoming more of an issue now with the changes Twitter are implementing, and the fact that for some reason it seems that the majority of updates are just twitter links these days, other than Mary's posts. It didn't use to be this way even 6 months to a year ago.     
 
Id like to hear everyone's thoughts on this. 
 
Thankyou
« Last Edit: 08/30/2021 05:22 am by Hamish.Student »

Offline raivo45

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #1 on: 08/30/2021 06:50 am »
There are some answers to this topic in this this thread: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36636.0


Offline ugordan

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #2 on: 08/30/2021 08:04 am »
I've been running into the blocked access without being logged in constantly and it's really annoying. I already have to wait ages for the forum page to load up all the twitter embeds on that particular forum page and then I can't even access the original tweet if I want to look at original high res images etc.

Offline Star One

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #3 on: 08/30/2021 09:46 am »
There are some answers to this topic in this this thread: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36636.0
These are very recent changes on Twitter’s end of things. I don’t see them noted in that thread?

Offline Hamish.Student

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #4 on: 08/30/2021 10:21 am »
There are some answers to this topic in this this thread: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36636.0
These are very recent changes on Twitter’s end of things. I don’t see them noted in that thread?
 
 
The last post there was on: 11/29/2018; That thread is so outdated as to not be relevant now. 
Especially given the recent issues.

Offline capoman

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #5 on: 08/30/2021 01:10 pm »
Definitely an issue, and I'm also one that gets blocked from Twitter on certain computers. Elon is an example of someone who will likely not join the forum to put in posts. I really don't know that there is a good solution to this. In Elon's case, he can be quoted, but sometimes he does post interesting photos of Boca Chica and such, that are very useful.

Offline Mark S

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #6 on: 08/30/2021 01:36 pm »
Someone posted a question in one of the update/photo threads this weekend why he couldn't see any pictures. I gave a quick reply that they were Twitter links and would fill in asynchronously. Both posts got deleted, but hopefully the OP saw the reply before that happened.

Some people really don't understand why this happens, and I think the slow photo backfill and/or non-visibility reflects poorly on NSF. It also makes the page jump around while you are trying to read or look closely at something in the thread.

Thanks.
« Last Edit: 08/30/2021 01:36 pm by Mark S »

Online Orbiter

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #7 on: 08/30/2021 02:28 pm »
Screenshots of tweets & embedding them seems the best route to go, IMHO.
KSC Engineer, astronomer, rocket photographer.

Offline Hamish.Student

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #8 on: 08/30/2021 02:35 pm »
Screenshots of tweets & embedding them seems the best route to go, IMHO.
 
 
I'd tend to agree, however then we lose the high res version. But I guess we've lost that anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Offline JCopernicus

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #9 on: 08/30/2021 03:23 pm »
FWIW,  I've noticed that clearing your cache/cookies for the twitter site will reset the annoying pop ups.

Offline ugordan

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #10 on: 08/30/2021 03:43 pm »
FWIW,  I've noticed that clearing your cache/cookies for the twitter site will reset the annoying pop ups.

Only for a while, though.

Offline joek

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #11 on: 08/30/2021 04:34 pm »
FWIW... With the exception of very few sites (NSF and twitter *not* included), I operate in incognito or private mode the vast majority of the time, and rarely have incognito browser instance open for more than a few hours at a time. Have never had the problems others seem to have viewing these twitter's. May be inconvenient for some depending on your habits, but works for me as that is my standard MO.

Offline joek

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #12 on: 08/30/2021 04:47 pm »
...
Some people really don't understand why this happens, and I think the slow photo backfill and/or non-visibility reflects poorly on NSF. It also makes the page jump around while you are trying to read or look closely at something in the thread.

Happens on many sites and can be annoying... especially when you click on something only to discover it moved during the page update and I end up going somewhere I didn't want. Would you prefer synchronous loads and wait until all of them complete before displaying page? Think most would say no. How does this "reflect poorly on NSF"?

Offline OTV Booster

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #13 on: 08/30/2021 06:02 pm »
NSF is NSF and Twitter is Twitter. One a labor of love and one sees its users as its product. Can you guess which is which?


What Twitter has done is a universal improvement. Following a linked tweet from my phone now limits me to three replies and the opening tweet of related threads. When was the last time you saw anything past the third reply that went beyond vapid? Twitter has improved its overall signal to noise ratio from .0175% to .189%. If they keep it up they will climb to the S/N of a loud fart in a bar.


IF you have a Twitter account, and IF you are interested, Elon Tweets COPIED here would be appreciated, but not crucial. Maybe write a weekly compilation. The rest of it? Blahh! We've enough people posting here directly that we don't miss much, except Nomadd.


Ban Twitter imbeds? Not worth the effort. Quote Twitter Inbeds? That's your decision. The more you inbed the lower the quality of this site. The update thread has gotten so noisy it's getting to be not worth the effort to read. Any twitter crap stuck in there usually shows up in the discussion thread again and again and again and again.


Maybe a compromise. A second update thread for Twitter only. In 10 years its content will have evaporated and Twitter can take it's true place in the historical record.
We are on the cusp of revolutionary access to space. One hallmark of a revolution is that there is a disjuncture through which projections do not work. The thread must be picked up anew and the tapestry of history woven with a fresh pattern.

Offline alugobi

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #14 on: 08/30/2021 06:47 pm »
Quote
The update thread has gotten so noisy it's getting to be not worth the effort to read.
Agreed.  It's turned into a twitter aggregator.

I wait for the nightly video and look at that.  Also, at the end of her day, Mary puts up her stills to complement the video. 

Most of the rest of it, meh. 
Quote
Any twitter crap stuck in there usually shows up in the discussion thread again and again and again and again.
Yeah, that.  Crossposting is also lowering the quality.

Offline joek

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #15 on: 08/30/2021 06:59 pm »
..
Maybe a compromise. A second update thread for Twitter only. In 10 years its content will have evaporated and Twitter can take it's true place in the historical record.

We kinda-sorta have (had?) that with the  Starship Epoch Ecosystem Tweet History - UPDATES,. But I don't pay much attention to it; just go directly to the appropriate threads.

Life in the Internet age. If information posted on site X is subject to restrictions and potentially ephemeral, that's their business and not much NSF can do about it.  If some folks want to record those tweets for posterity, more power to them.

That said, the complaints about Twitter access by NSF users is simply whining IMO. (E.g., I have no problem, what is yours?) If NSF users want to record those tweet's for posterity, again more power to them; there are several options.

Offline joek

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #16 on: 08/30/2021 07:31 pm »
Agreed.  It's turned into a twitter aggregator.
...
Yeah, that.  Crossposting is also lowering the quality.

Agree; seeing the same post in multiple threads and replication of twitter posts is annoying. Then again, would generally prefer over- rather than under-communication. Load is on the consumer-reader to sift through, but reduces load on NSF mods-whoever to consolidate-curate.

That said, as guests on this forum (and my go-to site) , think we need to be considerate of our hosts and what we ask of them.

Offline Mark S

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #17 on: 08/30/2021 11:09 pm »
...
Some people really don't understand why this happens, and I think the slow photo backfill and/or non-visibility reflects poorly on NSF. It also makes the page jump around while you are trying to read or look closely at something in the thread.

Happens on many sites and can be annoying... especially when you click on something only to discover it moved during the page update and I end up going somewhere I didn't want. Would you prefer synchronous loads and wait until all of them complete before displaying page? Think most would say no. How does this "reflect poorly on NSF"?

By "reflects poorly", I mean it makes NSF not look so great when the pages are slow to display and the page jumps around under your mouse. One solution would be for the forum content server to generate HTML with the size of the tweet that will be fetched by the javascript and include it in the img tag. I'm no HTML or javascript slinger, but I know you can specify the size of an image so the browser can size the page before all the content is retrieved. That would stop the jumping around and the user would see the blanks to be filled in, and maybe not sit there wondering what's going on.


Offline D_Dom

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Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #18 on: 08/31/2021 04:01 pm »
It is the internet folks. Personally I choose to ignore anything twitter related. If some nonsense is going on that attracts my attention as a moderator on this site my habit is wholesale deletions, admittedly I am not very active as a moderator so it isn't much of a problem. Spending more time on a small screen these days I fat finger trigger twitter links more often than I like, that is totally operator error and I wouldn't think of imposing my preferred solution on the community as a whole. That would not be excellent.
Space is not merely a matter of life or death, it is considerably more important than that!

Online Chris Bergin

Re: Twitter Issues
« Reply #19 on: 08/31/2021 04:06 pm »
It should be a simple straight forward thing to get the original twitter poster to agree to allow the pics on nasaspaceflight.com.

That is a non-starter and we're not going to be hosting other people's content. Embedding is the only allowed way so this thread is somewhat of a non-starter. I'm sure Mark will look at the loading side of things. But that's a website side thing, not a "twitter issues" thread thing. Also, this is an issue for a handful of people, so - like spacecraft - making changes could cause a problem for everyone else.
« Last Edit: 08/31/2021 04:10 pm by Chris Bergin »
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