Ask HN: How and why does Twitter trap its users?

3 points

15 years ago

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, when you click on a link to Twitter you are unable to navigate back to the page that gave the link. That's because Twitter somehow disallows you from doing so when pressing the back button and instead keeps you on twitter.com.

For example, look at this article: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/twitter-let-the-tweets-flow/

Then click on the link at the top of the 3rd paragraph that says "#jan25 movement". You should not be able to return to the Wired article unless you click the back button a few times repeatedly. Otherwise, you will alternate between the url's https://twitter.com/#, https://twitter.com/search/%2523jan25#, and https://twitter.com/search/%2523jan25#search?q=%2523jan25. This seems to always be the case when an article links to a Twitter page without opening a new window/tab.

As this is obviously quite frustrating, I was wondering why they have chosen to do it. It'd also be great to hear a technical answer on how they do it if it's not too complicated.

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