persistent expired notification badge glitch

[fanfare]

this is a long-standing bug on twitter that I believe results from a very specific sequence of events:

if you reply to someone's tweet, and then someone likes the reply you just made, will receive a badge (e.g. 1) on the 'notifications' link on the left side of the screen. however, if you delete the tweet you just made without ever clicking on the 'notification' link (which would normally make the notification badge go away, since you have 'seen' it), something happens in which the notification badge will disappear, yet from that point forward there will be a quick blip where a notification badge (showing 1) is temporarily shown and then disappears, when you navigate from page to page, even after closing the site and reopening it again. something is happening, somehow, in which the notification event (that someone 'liked' your post) is not fully removed on the server side (since the post you made was deleted) causing it to be stuck in limbo indefinitely.

to recap:

• reply to someone's tweet
• someone "likes" the tweet you just made
• you receive a notification badge (1)
• you do not click on the notification badge
• you delete the tweet you just made
• the notification badge goes away, but later keeps coming back and then immediately hides, stuck in a loop

[TolstoyDotCom]

This is probably part of their general censorship apparatus. For instance, when I load my feed (on a desktop browser) it will show a certain number of notifications and a certain number of followers. Then, those might change. I might have 19 notifications when I first load the page, then when I load another Twitter page or wait a bit, it will show "20+".

The moral of the story is: don't trust anything Twitter tells you because they're pathological liars.