No Tweets

me on Twitter for 10 years

I don't have high expectations for online services like Twitter and Google search. However, I was intrigued when after almost ten years of posting tweets, Twitter told me that I had never received a single tweet.

Companies like Twitter and Google have a talent for "updating" the software that runs their user interfaces and not being aware that they have broken their own software. Users of the online services then have to report the problems and if enough people complain then maybe the problem will be fixed.

I started using Twitter in 2009. I am not a heavy user of Twitter. 2018 was the year when I finally reached 200* followers and 200 other users who I follow. In the middle of 2018, there was a period of time when Twitter became unusable. First, there was a day when only about 5-10 tweets would be displayed in my Twitter timeline.

virtual reality

Then came the completely empty timeline.
Then, 12 hours later, back to only about 5-10 tweets would be displayed in my Twitter timeline.
Then 4 hours later, back to "No Tweets yet".

Twitter shows a few tweets
and then, game over.

And then back to just not showing the whole timeline. I found that sometimes I could just keep trying to scroll down even when at the black bird "Back to top" tombstone (image to the right) and get to see a few more tweets.

how social are you?

When this problem started, the first time I saw "Back to top" there was a pop-up message saying that there was a problem, possibly slow server access and I should try to view my timeline later.

More likely, the "problem" is that I'm using an older computer and my browser no longer correctly deals with all the ads, cookies and pixels that Twitter sends to and from my computer.

Black bird of death

When seeing "No Tweets yet", the page kept trying to load and would spend a loooong time waiting for either ads from telapart.com or images from pbs.twimg.com. If I left Twitter running with "No Tweets yet", then a newly posted tweet would eventually become available and was be displayed in the timeline. Then by scrolling up and down the page I could sometimes get some older tweets to display.

Reloading the page during these times when my timeline would not load would cause Twitter to hang for a looong time waiting for useless scripts from abs.twimg.com.

After a couple of months, Twitter finally fixed their bug and I could again use the Twitter timeline correctly. Conclusion: during the months when this bug persisted during 2018, I learned that it was nice to get a break from Twitter.

*Purge
Birds of a feather flock together. However, there have always been some odd twitter accounts that for some inexplicable reason have followed my account. I've always ignored what look like bot accounts. Sometimes twitter cleans out bogus accounts and this week I suddenly lost 7 such "followers" and I'm now at 199 followers.

That's all, folks. Related: the end of Twitter.

Older blog posts about Twitter:
2014
2015
2016
2017