HN Explorer

Ask HN: Twitter now only showing old Tweets on profiles when not logged in?

13 points by aosaigh ↗ HN
This isn't something I've noticed before, but I now see that if you aren't logged into Twitter, you don't see the latest posts on profiles.

For example, not logged in (top unpinned post from 2022):

https://imgur.com/a/t3D2NaD

Logged in (top unpinned post from a few hours ago):

https://imgur.com/a/dAgKO1g

Is this something new or has it always been like this?

10 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] thread
esus_dev
I think so, it keeps changing for me. A while back (depending on country) it was showing me nothing if I wasn't logged in lol.
PaulHoule
It is just totally random what you see when you look at Twitter whether your are logged in or not. Move along folks, nothing more to see here. Ask your sysadmin to redirect twitter.com to 127.0.0.1 and you'll feel a lot better.
haltist
It's an optimization to avoid querying the database and ML models. The pages are essentially static if you are not logged in. This is basically what I would do if I was told to reduce the number of queries for non-paying customers of Twitter.com
hightrix
This is fun to watch. The race to profitability by cost cutting while simultaneously hemorrhaging users seems like an interesting battle.

I imagine the only winners at the end will be those that either never used or have left twitter.

I wonder when the unskippable full screen video ads will be introduced.

stephenbez
For the logged out profile page, it appears that the posts are ordered in approximately descending order based on the number of likes.

I've noticed this for the past month or two.

ChrisLTD
I noticed this a while ago. I used to use profile links to check in on tweets from a couple folks without logging in. I know I'm not the ideal user for X, but it is funny that public profiles now make the site look abandoned since the majority of the tweets I see on profiles are from 2+ years ago.
userinanother
Nitter still seems to work fine. Actual twitter is dead to me
KomoD
> Is this something new or has it always been like this?

Been like it for some time now

rsynnott
Yeah, been like that for since Naughty Ol' Mr Car backed off from full paywall. I'm not sure what the thinking behind it is; it just makes the site look broken/abandoned. I suppose it's possible it's just broken rather than intentional.