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0 pointstoyg5y ago0 comments

> there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet

My crusty old version of Tweetbot has been doing that for years...? Maybe not perfectly for tweets with hundreds of replies, but well enough.

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jdminhbg5y ago

I'm not sure which hack Tweetbot is using to do this (I think search as noted below), but you can tell it's a hack because it only works for recent-ish tweets. If you go to a tweet a couple weeks old and view details, you can see that it won't fill in the replies.

jeromegv5y ago

Can confirm, Tweetbot never has "all" the replies.

roberto5y ago

The way clients usually do this is by fetching all mentions to the user after a given timestamp (of the original tweet), and collecting only those that are replies to the tweet. Since there's a limit on how many mentions you can get, you might not get all the replies.

It's been like that at least since 2013.

Nav_Panel5y ago

Any idea how it's done in the API? I know you can retrieve a tweet's parent, but not its children.

anaphor5y ago

You have to use the search feature to look for tweets and then look at the parent tweet ID. This is what bots like threadreaderapp, etc do. You can construct it from the bottom up if you know the ID of the last tweet in the thread of responses too, but you wouldn't know that a priori unless the user gives it to your software somehow.

Nav_Panel5y ago

But... that's not a tree -- there's still no way to discover all leaves. That's just a thread/singly linked list.

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abluecloud5y ago

so the api is literally backwards

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wyldfire5y ago

Step 0: build a tree including all tweets,

...

;)

benmanns5y ago

Possibly using the HTML API.