After a prod from @Sean last night I did a bit of experimenting and we’ve got two solutions to Twitter embeds now that we can choose from.
I appreciate there are a lot of reasons to consider Twitter a complete danger, but nonetheless there’s still a lot of important stuff there too, so it’s probably worth fixing regardless.
It is more or less permanent - it pulls the data from twitter when you post and embeds it in discourse.
It’s fairly concise
It replaces the original link with the embed content
It runs once per tweet on the discourse server.
It doesn’t show all the content available with a tweet: No image, video, timestamp, like, retweet etc. This lack of context can render some tweets to make no sense when embedded.
Elon may break it at any time, but when he does, existing embeds will remain as-is.
It embeds in a “rich format” with all the added context around a tweet.
It takes quite a bit of space on the page
It leaves the original link in place which can look a little ugly.
It runs on your own device, each time you view a post with the tweet link in it - placing additional load on your own internet and device. It will also cause the page to “jump” as the tweet renders.
Elon may break it at any time and when he does, all previous embeds relying on this method will break and revert to simple links.
Currently option 2 is live on the site, but I figured it’s probably worth seeing if there’s a strong preference for either. You can see both options properly for yourself at Twitter embeds don't work anymore - #14 by zeal
Voted for option 1, as option 2 doesn’t seem to work on my setup (possibly because it’s not compatible with the tracking blocker I’ve got set up or something).
I’d be happier if people would post screenshots of posts along with links, as it’s not the only social site that doesn’t embed well, but I know it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to do that every time.
Hahaha had completely missed this was a week old, I’m a genius
@svenrokk makes some good points also that I had overlooked. I generally always clicked through for videos but not being able to see images is kinda a pain.
I often clicked through for images due to the sizing limitation here but without them in there at all it’s going to make me less likely to bother clicking through.
This new one is mega clunky but it’s not fundamentally broken, which is something. The old option 1, before Elon fucked it and stopped it taking images/videos, was the best of course. You could still read Tweets after the right-wing fools had deleted them or locked their accounts because of too much blowback and you could click to download the videos.
I’ve come to appreciate the function of option number 1 but I think it’s influenced by my waning enthusiasm for Twitter in general
In other words, I prefer a better functional experience on this message board compared with being able to view and interact with content posted on Twitter
I’ve begun to adjust my scrolling and so forth to take account of it. As I said to guntrip up there, the other option is actually broken so I’m not sure there’s any point in having it at all. If it said “click through for image” or something then maybe but you wouldn’t even know there was something missing.
Better to just have no plugin at all and go back to posting screenshots under URLs to the Tweet if people find the current one annoying I think.
