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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, will be interesting how they are received and utilised. Whilst they don't allow reshares, it is common for people to screenshot a tweet and share that screenshot - this won't prevent that and wonder how Twitter will police that.

Also wonder if they will allow customisable expiration (up to a point), say 36 hours etc. Or allow shorter duration posts, say an hour for spot promotions - which would be a great use for this.

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Snapchat has all these problems and people still enjoy the ephemeral nature of them.

Snapchat at least warns you that someone screenshotted it.

It's not like that can be enforced in general, there will always be ways to duplicate it without notifying.

Snapchat sends a notification to the sender when someone screenshots their content, will be interesting to see if Twitter does the same.

Twitter can't. Lots of people use third-party clients or the website, where detecting a screenshot simply isn't possible.

This feature might not be available in 3rd-party clients, like polls and cards.

If it's not on the website it'll be DOA.

Facebook usage is > 80% mobile, and they often don't bother adding features to the website. Do you have reason to believe that Twitter is different?

What features aren't available on the website that are available in the mobile app?

I've seen some news stuff that isn't I suppose, but not much actual functionality.

Worst case, take a photo of your screen with another phone. The harder it is to scrape the content, the more vulnerable the content posted there will be, which will make it that much more desirable a target to scrape.

It is possible to detect when that screenshot is subsequently shared within the platform. Twitter could prevent blocked users from sharing screenshots of tweets by the people who have blocked them, they just choose not to because eNgAgEmEnT.

Only when using the native screen shot app, which you can use many on Android.

You cannot prevent that and it cannot be policed.

I concur about preventing, though T&C's could enable policing. Also a nice (c) notice would enable self-policing upon such infractions to some extent.

But certainly it will not be a fluid process currently. Let's see if they update T&C's to accommodate that aspect.

T&Cs stop at Twitter's border.

Why would they want to police it? Surely Twitter is perfectly fine with you posting screenshots of things of interest (obviously within obscenity and legal restrictions).

Because if users posting screenshots of fleets becomes a common thing, users would be averse to post fleets?

I don't know. Twitter reposts of TikTok videos seems ubiquitous, but it seems like TikTok is still thriving. I don't think the primary reason people post a story rather than a permanent post is that they want to ensure the story only lasts for a day. At least for Instagram, I think it's more about keeping your main feed highly curated while still being able to hammer out tons of stories.

Copyrighting tweets? I love the idea as a demonstration of the absurd extent of copyright, but I'd expect virtually no tweets to be considered copyrightable.

IANAL, but I feel like an original tweet to @bbcmicrobot should be copyrightable. Maybe adding a little © at the end to signal original authorship?

This idea has been looked at - https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_faq_post/tweet-protected-co... Seems that if you posted an original joke it should be copyrightable.

Because the other twitter terms and conditions on harassment are so well policed. That some people are concerned about screenshots instead of bullying, harassment, etc that we see every day on the platform is quite something.

Well, you often find screenshots ARE used for harassment in as stealth retweets that make it hard for the original poster to counter the re-contexting and perversion of what they wrote.

That happens all the time, so yeah - it is a tool used to bully and harass, used all the time upon twitter.

It seems pretty trivial (though perhaps not scalable) to do some kind of image recognition that looks for the Fleet format and flag it for review / policing.

Why can't it be prevented? Doesn't seem like they should have much difficulty recognizing that it was a screenshot of a "fleet", but other commenters make it sound like it's too difficult. So I'm wondering what others are taking into account that I'm missing.

How exactly would twitter know if something is screenshotted? The way snapchat does this is check screenshots folder for new files while you are watching the story - to avoid this all you need is an different screenshot app that saves screenshots somewhere else.

Now twitter has multiple apps, multiple platforms including desktop. You'd need some absurd DRM that would be broken anyway to enforce this.

> The way snapchat does this is check screenshots folder for new files

Does this mean that the Snapchat screenshot detection doesn't work if you don't give it the storage permission?

It may be possible to watermark the ux so that at least posting the screenshot could be blocked on their own platform.

The advantage is that the tweet still doesn't show up in search.

Google has begun OCRing text inside screenshots to show up in search. I've seen it happen first hand.

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