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Comment by evanjonr | Hacker News Reader

Having to login to Twitter to read a thread is really annoying.

I know this is an overused trope but I have had enough of every social media platform becoming increasingly hostile and annoying. It's like they have hit the cap of how many people on the planet are actually interested in signing up for twitter and now have to tighten the screws on every aspect to try to force the last bits of possible growth.

Dumb question I know, but why can't we just have platforms that are satisfied with what they are and not expect constant growth at any cost.

Yep, platforms are getting silly. On Reddit the other day I got the usual popup about accepting cookies, but once clicked, instead of just setting the cookie it showed a popup saying that I need to switch to the new theme to accept cookies. As in, I'm forced to use their new theme just to click a button and then switch back to using the old theme (like any sane person).

> like any sane person

I wonder if the sluggish UX that comes with a heavy JS SPA cuts into their sales.

I spend more time on HN now, though I was a heavy Reddit user, because Reddit users on the new UI being able to comment with images cramp my well-thought-out arguments.

Because if you do, your competitors won't, and will poach your customers with hard sell techniques until they reach a network effect required to make you irrelevant.

In the long run, there can be only one, the little diversity we have is the effect of national network effects established in the first years of growth that proved hard to overcome, especially Twitter in US. Without US, Twitter will be steamrolled and you will only have exotic alternatives like vkontakte and weibo.

That’s a good point. If I had to guess, I think over time there is a natural limit to the amount of user saturation. People are mostly aware of the platforms and their features and have probably made up their minds as to whether they want to join. Parts of the existing user base are probably getting sick of the engagement and lessening their usage.

I mentioned this elsewhere, and I don't mean to copy-paste, but take a look at some public nitter instances if this is a problem you regularly run into: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

Nitter allows viewing threads like these without logging in or even enabling Javascript. For example, this post's thread can be viewed at both https://twitr.gq/joelburgess/status/1428008043556622336 and https://nitter.42l.fr/joelburgess/status/1428008043556622336.

Nitter has donation links on both Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/nitter) and Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/zedeus). Unfortunately, there isn't a way to donate to public instances that I'm aware of, but the software itself is worth supporting.

I should also mention Privacy Redirect as an add-on to automatically redirect you to nitter, openstreetmaps, invidious and others: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

I especially like how it replaces Youtube embeds with invidious embeds.

I'd given up even clicking twitter links anymore because I'd get stuck in a "you have to enable js/you have to login" dead end... this is brilliant - I'd never heard of it before. Thanks for pointing it out!

You don't need to - I've just read it in incognito (firefox focus).

Agree on the terrible UI tho

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