I tweeted a couple of times about Twitter weirdness this morning so I feel it's responsible to remind folks that most Twitter weirdness is their server architecture "failing gracefully" instead of crashing, by not returning all results.
If you feel like you're missing a *lot* of your followed folks' tweets, check to make sure it says "Latest Tweets" instead of "Home" at the top of your timeline.
Replies that are listed/counted but you can't see may be locked accounts. Tweets that are mysteriously unavailable are often a result of traffic problems among the Twitter servers.
They killed the whale because it became a stronger mascot for Twitter than the bird and now the whole service is haunted by its ghost.
The idea is that rather than having the whole site go down they'll just let processes that take too long sort of quietly fail in the background, but they haven't managed to gracefully tie this into the user interface. So you get weirdness, "tweet unavailable", random errors.
There's a lot of chatter about more ads, yeah.
My *suspicion* is that the frequent changes, great and small, to the interface are causing the front-facing bits of Twitter to drift further out of sync with how the back end expects it to act, and vice-versa. While the kludgy solutions to traffic problems pile up.
Massive social media sites constantly trying to push us away from the chronological timeline experience isn't just about controlling what we see - it's because if we accept curated timelines, then they can show us as much as is convenient for server load without it being "buggy".
Tumblr, at a certain point, came clean that their chronological timeline had a chance to fail when the volume of posts from accounts you followed grew too high. I recall it didn't go over too well, people interpreted it as Tumblr arbitrarily cutting them off.
I think greater transparency around this issue would help restore a lot of goodwill and prevent a possible collapse when the networks just grow beyond the ability to hold them together with duct tape and belief.
Does anyone remember when for a while quoted tweets would frequently show up as unavailable? But if you clicked through they were fine?
The symptoms change as they tinker but it never just works the way it's expected to.
The symptoms change as they tinker but it never just works the way it's expected to.
I think if there were a setting where you could accept a slower loading time but get more of your followed tweets chronologically, people would jump on it.
But the service prioritizes a quick, seamless experience. Tweets stuck in traffic miss the train.
But the service prioritizes a quick, seamless experience. Tweets stuck in traffic miss the train.
Is it possible that Twitter is manipulating the timeline in ways they don't admit to? I mean, yeah. But the scope of the problem is such that it would be hard to do it on purpose, with any kind of precision targeting.
(Shadowbanning does happen, but it affects search results, not the timeline. That's separate from restricted accounts - you know if your account is restricted. Shadowbanning is shadowbanning because they don't tell you.)
TL;DR - Twitter's power to control what happens on Twitter is more in who/what they ban and who/what they promote than sleight-of-hand with the timeline. It's all they can do to get most of the tweets you're supposed to see delivered in time for a page load, most of the time.
