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Is any further information available about how the app works before I authorise it to act as me on Twitter (change my profile, post tweets etc...)
I was baffled by the absurd permissions it requires too! I guess I'm never going to try what "a world without retweets" is...
Someone posted this [1] during a similar discussion yesterday. It shows you what a world without retweets is like without requiring anything beyond the minimal permissions required to do so.

[1] https://readmeapp.stream/

If you stop using Twitter, it becomes really obviously pretty much instantly.
Unfortunately, permissions are only configurable on a read only or read/write basis. Since this app changes settings, it has to have the read/write permissions. I don't save access tokens, so it reauthorizes every time you click enable/disable. I just posted the code on github for anyone who's interested. Here is the link to the code that messes with your twitter account: https://github.com/willcosgrove/retweet-rip/blob/master/app/...
This is the most overdue feature of Twitter. Since ages.

I have no idea, why they do not offer a global show/hide retweets option. If you follow a couple of hundred accounts—like I do—having retweets enabled pretty much ruins your entire timeline.

> I have no idea

Because it's in their interest to show you as much content as possible. Just guessing.

Hey HN! Thanks for checking this out! Sorry for the crazy permissions requirements, unfortunately I don't think there's any way around them. I also don't think there's anything I can do to assuage a highly skeptical person that I'm not a bad actor. But the code is here for anyone interested enough to look at it: https://github.com/willcosgrove/retweet-rip

The app also does not save the access tokens it gets back from twitter. They get thrown in a background job to be worked on, and once the job is done the access tokens are forgotten.