HACKER Q&A
📣 daveaiello

Why is HN replacing Twitter URLs with canonical URLs requiring login


Earlier today I submitted a URL from twitter.com because it was the URL for the content that I wanted to share. That URL was rewritten in the form:

https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login....

This causes fellow users to have to login to X / Twitter to have to view the content/tweet.

Why is this happening?


  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
Does the tweet have a canonical tag in the HTML? Asking because HN will redirect to the canonical name. That's why I use an addon to show me if that exists to save me some hassle when I submit URL's here. HN seems to ignore canonical for some domains like Youtube video URL's. Perhaps that exclusion list needs an update but probably best to email dang to ask.

👤 dataf3l
I am going to guess hacker news follows the "first" redirect, and this is just x.com being sucky and a piece of asterisk lately.

👤 rsynnott
Because twitter is broken. This is surely not news, a year in. You may want to submit a nitter link instead.

👤 progne
For me this is functionally equal to blocking twitter links.

👤 fyokdrigd
should redirect to nitter instead :shrug