Seeking reference to all the ways Twitter shows referenced tweets
October 1, 2022 8:36 PM Subscribe
I'm looking for a site that documents the ins and outs of how tweets display on Twitter. For example, I've seen quote tweets where the quoted tweet contains a video, but it is not displayed and you only see the pic.twitter.com URL of the video. But I've also seen quote tweets where the video is shown as a player.
There's a lot of combinations, because each of the "parent" and "child" tweets could contain text only, pictures and text, pictures only, video and text, video only, off-site card and text, etc. and then there's multiple ways of referencing a tweet (posting its URL, quote tweet, maybe others.) That's many dozens of scenarios already and I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Sometimes the child tweet's image is converted to thumbnail, other times it's shown as the normal size. etc.etc.
What I'm really after here is that sometimes you want to refer to another tweet but the effect is ruined when Twitter doesn't show pics/video/etc in that tweet and you have to click through to get the joke. Other times that's desirable for the joke. I just want to know all the combinations and it's almost impossible to know ahead of time without trying it first and then deleting the tweet.
I hope that makes sense.
There's a lot of combinations, because each of the "parent" and "child" tweets could contain text only, pictures and text, pictures only, video and text, video only, off-site card and text, etc. and then there's multiple ways of referencing a tweet (posting its URL, quote tweet, maybe others.) That's many dozens of scenarios already and I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Sometimes the child tweet's image is converted to thumbnail, other times it's shown as the normal size. etc.etc.
What I'm really after here is that sometimes you want to refer to another tweet but the effect is ruined when Twitter doesn't show pics/video/etc in that tweet and you have to click through to get the joke. Other times that's desirable for the joke. I just want to know all the combinations and it's almost impossible to know ahead of time without trying it first and then deleting the tweet.
I hope that makes sense.
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This is because a lot of the variation depends on what the linked-to page has implemented in terms of Twitter Cards . You could try a URL in their Twitter Card Validator (although when I just tried it with the URL of a YouTube video it just showed a message, "Unable to render Card preview").
However, even having tested a link, you can't guarantee how other people will see it. I expect the result varies depending on whether they're using the Twitter website, or iPad app, or iPhone app, or Android app, etc. And then there are people who use other clients - TweetDeck, Tweetbot, etc. - which (a) will display previews differently again and (b) offer options for each user to customise what they see (e.g., large/small/no thumbnails, auto-playing video/GIFs or not, etc).
posted by fabius at 5:37 AM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]