Twitter starts to require login to view tweets
reddit.com
reddit.com
This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.
Their algo will just continually blast email you every category you ever clicked on
Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I never visited the site again.
They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.
This is why Facebook is SO very against what Apple is doing with iOS14+, particularly with cross-device and cross-app tracking opt-in, because they know it will decimate their ability to do what they do today.
Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.
You can also send requests via your own server, which would allow you more control over the requests that get sent out to your 3rd party APIs and just restrict tokens as much as possible to the minimal set of features necessary for your application.
Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a counter-RE one.
If it's executing on my device, you can be sure I can poke it and see what it's doing.
-a keypair is generated in secure hardware
- you send the public key to a server which encrypts the secret key with it
- the server sends the encrypted key back
- then it goes inside the secure hardware where it gets decrypted
The decrypted secret key is never in the userspace.
Additionally, while it's true (to my knowledge) that re-implementing a full safteynet spoof is not currently publicly available, a combination of Frida and MagiskHide is able to bypass SafetyNet for dynamic RE purposes, just launch the app as normal with MagiskHide enabled then attach to it with Frida as root. If they enforce full hardware attestation this may change in the future, but right now we're good.
Just out of curiosity, is there a marketplace for private APIs? I'd love if you could elaborate on the "charge someone else for it" part.
This from the site that used to indicate on every tweet the client used
That was years ago. Recently, I went looking for how to un-retweet something from an account that has since blocked me, and every single answer on every instance of someone asking that on Quora is more or less a copy of Twitter's documentation for an ordinary un-retweet. Useless search result pollution.
This is probably the only good content that existed on there before it became a cesspool: http://qsf.cf.quoracdn.net/best_of_quora_2010-2012.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most.
I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100% user-hostile, Twitter.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The problem comes if they don't provide any other way to access their information.
https://micronews.debian.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/micronews https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/otherSN
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
Safety, as it is commonly used, would better be translated, in French, as "sûreté". "Salut" would be a much, much stronger word.
Although I do see your point.
But I'm still not quite sure what the French word "salut" means. Is there not a simple one-word English translation? What exactly is the remit implied by the name Comité de salut public?
So, in this case, considering they considered themselves the defenders of the greatest ideology of all time and the (worthy) people, and were at war with both foreign countries and some of their own people, I’d say it'd mean something like:
"Committee in charge of delivering the country, the Republic (the idea of Republic itself; not just it’s French incarnation) and freedom / democracy (even though they weren’t quite democratic) from utter ruin and certain doom"
But that’s quite a mouthful.
Tiwtter's product is you.
A key difference is that in the Twitter case, there's no monetary penalty which can be imposed by the host class (that is, the unpaied content contributors).
Much of the "harvest as much data as possible" element is also driven by fundamental power and monopolistic differences.
That's actually an honest one, since they know exactly what the value is of the PII that they sell to third parties.
The T&C equivalent of "your call is very important to us"?
Alternatives included:
- pay a small fee but that requires a credit card
- send us government documents which is worse
- mine crypto for a while but it doesn’t stop people who are actually motivated
- send a selfie and then do some face matching, also worse.
Maybe there is room for some simple innovation here. Is it possible to do “coarse” address for tax purposes? After all I imagine they only care about which tax jurisdiction such as county / parish or something like that?
Let’s say you pay a fee for being able to view tweets without logging in. How will they know it’s you who’s trying to view a tweet if you don’t effectively log in?
Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious Fiverr-like spam accounts
> Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?
Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even asking for email, including this one. It seems what you really want to say is "What can we ask from you for it not to cost us anything?".
HN works because it's niche. It can be moderated by a handful of people. Once you cross the "can't be moderated by humans" threshold of size you're solving a completely different problem.
I won't knock you for saying "well then you shouldn't exist at that scale" but that's a non-answer for the real world where giving up PII in exchange for participating in a huge social network is a trade enough people are willing to make that you feel pressure to do it in order to get in.
It doesn't follow to me, those people open thousands of account for those scams, how are they clean? They are not sophisticated, they don't even use them like real humans and it's literally for $5!
> "can't be moderated by humans" threshold
Is it a threshold or simply a cost center that starts to be big and needs to be slashed in order to please shareholders?
To me it's perfectly possible to be big and have moderators, you just can't have it cheaply.
I want Tesla to give me a free car too, but it ain't happening. At some point a company makes decisions you aren't gonna agree with and your only recourse is to not use them. If that means you can't read Twitter, then that's the price you pay. You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
They're asking for a stop to major companies lying to the public. To stop harvesting people's data under false pretenses.
I think citizens can and should demand those things from companies that choose to incorporate in their country. That avail themselves of the legal systems and protections. That take advantage of the workforce present.
Companies are free to choose where they operate and incorporate.
It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so big and so central to our lives, to the point many news (including from police precincts or first responders) are only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's "they owe you nothing".
(But that's a ship that sailed long before the internet age. "Want to know the laws? Pay up!")
Public sector and publicly funded groups should be communicating through standards-based channels. Their content belongs to the digital commons. This exists today, via the ActivityPub and RSS sphere of ecosystems.
If we go that route of argumentation: Can Twitter please close shop and go away then? Their value is vastly overestimated: Most people don't want to use Twitter specifically, they are peer pressured into it because it is where everyone is. There are better free and open source alternatives without them trying to steal from me. Twitter burns all that money (do they generate a profit yet?) to stay on top, just so that nobody else can.
To stay with your analogy: Tesla rolled up and pushed every other car manufacturer out, now they are giving a somewhat free car and in return they want you to do everything they say, and the keys to your house "just in case".
We don't owe Twitter anything.
no you see, that's the problem. I don't WANT a twitter account, but I apparently need to use the site to view local updates in my town.
I'm perfectly happy continuing to not post there. I just don't see the benefit in making me find an extension around this annoyance so I can continue to not have a twitter account.
* Give us your Credit Card information
* Give us a picture of your real life self
Neither of these are solutions to the privacy and compromise potential problem that is the 'phone number or else' requirement. Its objectively worse, so that you go "oh, guess you can have my phone number instead".
- Combat spam.
- Be large.
- Allow (pseudo-)anonymous accounts.
A social network can only pick two.
Reddit has all three (no need for email even), they might not be perfect but I can't remember any time I saw "viagra links" or other obvious spam. They have problems with accounts obviously, but you can't frame it as a spam problem.
That does nothing to speak of “auto moderator”, fragmented rules/guidelines and ilk and the sheer effort involved by volunteers.
Even then: the spam gets through. But I agree that PII is not solving this.
Where? I've seens a couple of ghost subreddits with spam, but then you see the same with ghost fb groups, weird twitter profiles, youtube, etc On even moderately sized subs I've seen any that wasn't removed quickly by the mods.
People can say mods are too expensive for fb and twitter, but there is the dishonesty, instead of paying mods they pass on that cost to us with our pii while pretending it's free.
How does allowing people to read (but not post) without logging in produce "spam"?
https://herrjemand.medium.com/why-cloudflares-captcha-replac...
https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
But in the end it comes to the fact that your Google/Apple needs to have your app store account that is verified to be human enough (less fake accounts) and then a web browser confirms this via a login to this account.
Another option might be to rate-limit by things which don't require accounts, which won't strictly rate-limit individuals, but it's unlikely that's the terminal goal here. It's not actually clear what they are trying to accomplish. Reducing the amount of resources wasted on scraping bots ?
"Trust tokens" was built to deal with these issues just for this use case: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/trust-toke...
Reddit, Qora and Pinterest all tried it, shot themselves in the foot, lost a huge readership and reversed it or will reverse it.
It's hard to realise how bad it is as only lurker don't have a sunk cost fallacy and easily quit and their quitting is invisible.
10 years ago when a government banned Twitter it was almost universally seen as bad. That's probably not the case anymore. Will it be worse in the future?
I'm sure they have. And I, being used to being in the minority of users, will likely find some 3rd party solution around the problem they created. Win-win outside of me wasting a few minutes installing another extension.
In the case of posting, rate limiting / scoring w/o a phone number without explicitly banning until you build more reputation works pretty well from what I can see, and most legit twitter users, especially new ones, don't post a lot and mostly read anyway.
And in twitter's case, I think paying a small amount of crypto would actually be something the CEO is interested in this case for the private types who won't / can't get a phone number. Some of twitter best accounts are anonymous and the CEO is into crypto. Add a monero payment option for those small amounts who aren't fraudulent and are private people and you will probably get rid of a lot of complaints.
I want them to do nothing.
Last, customers of their data love being able to search/correlate by phone number, not by some pseudonymous identifier that might not be present in some other dataset.
I think this crackdown might in fact be a reaction to attempts by institutions like Apple to ensure better privacy. If fingerprinting isn't giving them the data, they ask for it directly at the threat of restricting access.
I imagine the data of 99.9% people they mostly care about are the ones who dont know what cookies are, let alone how to delete them or otherwise mask/misdirect various internet trackers.
Back then you could bypass captchas and other checks by changing Tor endpoint (some endpoints required captchas, some didn’t). Made a script that did just that.
It also worked for Facebook and I still receive facebook spam for those accounts daily.
I have no problem with asking for a phone number during registration, it complicates automated account registration and makes it quite expensive. But I dislike the idea of hiding content behind login page, internet should not be a walled garden.
They’ve added sign in/up with Google & Apple recently though.
Three, almost four months in and zilch. It’ll be a good test case anyways.
I can "lock in" an apparent IP address, i.e. ssh to some box with no-ops; but that's either per-connection or still NAT enough that I get flagged. att aggregates all such connections at F5 routers in large cities, mine is in Dallas, for both of my fixed wireless connections.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud...
I'd way rather have something that doesn't improve for 30 years than something that actively gets worse at a rapid clip.
When people say 'I miss IRC', they don't necessarily mean the technicalities of the protocol though.
So what? They're analogous not identical. The distinction you point out isn't relevant to the point of the analogy.
You wrote:
> switching to another network is literally as simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.
irc and http are the same in this respect, thus they are analogous.
That's an example of what corporate interests have brainwashed people into thinking. They didn't have to turn us against IRC. Most internet users don't even know it exists.
At one point it was easy enough for the average person to use, because the average person had to deal with a command-line. But tech, in its infinite quest to Make More Money, keeps chasing the dumbest of the dumb so that it can expand its market into an imagined infinity. It kinds of reminds me of the windshield repair shop that takes a baseball bat to nearby windshields at night to drive business
How about we work towards unwinding this whole mess and meet users in the middle??
FOSS and open protocols are criminally undervalued because of greed, and all the fake newbie empathy it generates
People have such a gap-filled view of the past. I barely had to learn any IRC command-line stuff because of mIRC
As for the chatbot craze? It was a craze. A fad.
Do you genuinely believe (1) IRC is anywhere near as usable as Twitter for the general population, or that (2) a real-time chat is an equivalent offering to Twitter?
EDIT: I should note that beyond being more usable than IRC, I have precious little good to say about Twitter.
Private DMs easily map to one-on-one privmsgs. Public replies and threads won't have an equivalent unless there was some meta-protocol to temporarily allow another person to talk in your channel + duplicate your posts in your channel to theirs + expire that access eventually.
Also subscribing to tags won't work without a similar "copy all messages from one channel to another" relay.
So in a way IRC is better. If for no other reason because it required some personal discipline and will to learn to use and it segmented the internet to prevent these monstrous echo chambers. Humans aren't ready for a global forum. We are still only good at small communities.
Or they read an article about one twitter group bashing another twitter group and clicked on one of the tweets.
There's no path from toxic Twitter to constructive Twitter, but there are thousands of paths the other way.
Which can only mean that toxic twitter is where Twitter wants its users, so it seems like you're using twitter wrong in their view.
Of course there are worthwhile interactions to be made. But the people making them would have been doing so on the less accessible older internet anyways.
The news seems just as negative as social media.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how emails work.
It's called NNTP
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
Attempting to resurrect Usenet at any scale simply won't work. Even with a lessons-learned set of improvements (Usenet II), it went nowhere.
People say they want the old early-90s internet, but that internet only worked that way because almost nobody outside of universities was on it and nothing on it actually mattered to anybody.
It took me way too long to find the usage numbers (which ironically were within an arm's reach on my bookshelf most of the time), but ~1988 Usenet was under 1 million potential users, and fewer than 150,000 active readers. Even by the mid-1990s, it was under 1 million active participants.
Google+ was considered a failed social network with at least 10--100 million active users (by my own conservative estimates based on sampled profile data, independently verified by a much larger analysis). Facebook has 3 billion MAUs (monthly active users).
Until ~1992 (the Eternal September), Usenet users were largely represented as cohorts of a few hundred to low thousands, each subject to the disciplinary authority of university network administrators. Privileges could be and were revoked. Netadmins had a hardcopy directory in which everyone's number was listed twice (forward and reverse search). They talked to each other.
I'm active on Diaspora (for over a decade) and Mastodon (for about five years now). Both are far smaller than their comparable commercial equivalents (FB and Twitter, respectively). Each already strains under abuse, spam, and propaganda efforts, though Mastodon seems to have a more robust containment toolkit. Much resembles the old Usenet model: individual instance administrators can determine what users (locally or remotely) or instances (remote federation) can interact, and to what extent. It's high-touch, and has issues, but at present scale it mostly works. (Not perfectly, but it's not completely blown up yet either.)
Diaspora ... seems on far shakier grounds. User controls, admin engagement, reporting tools, and the culture of active management are all far weaker. The saving grace is the lack of algorithmic amplification, but bad actors are a distinct presence, if largely walled off into their own small, sad world.
Google closed it down because they realize they never needed it. You were rarely providing new information to google because you already had an account and they already were tracking you everywhere. Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses. What sites you visit google knows about.
The only thing google+ gives google is your social graph. But not your friends/family social graph more of your professional social graph. I don't think there was a way to target that info through ads into more profit. They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
Source?
> They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
Speculation?
I sampled a random selection of ~50,000 profiles to find out how many were actually actively using the site.
9% of all profiles had ever posted anything at all to the site. This is somewhat fewer that 99.99%.
And only 0.016% of all G+ profiles had posted publicly in the first 18 days of 2015, when I performed my sampling.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
And again, you're talking to the guy who ran that experiment.
Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting independently replicated my analysis using a much larger sample of 500,000 profiles, confirming the results I'd found and providing additional details:
https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...
I had absolutely no idea Enge was doing this until he published his results. They're a completely independent validation. Which is how science is supposed to work.
Your other comments about G+ are at best speculation, and largely fail to match my knowledge and understanding of the site and service.
As well as NNTP (mentioned in a sibling comment), listserves work for that (and don't just work like email, they use email.) And both have been around longer than the web.
fediverse: mastodon, pleroma, pixelfed
indieweb: https://indieweb.org/
twtxt: https://indieweb.org/twtxt
scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/
hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/ (see iris.to for an implementation)
It still exists, it’s just harder and harder to find. For example, most of the tech blogs you see on HN are hosted on personal websites with no ads.
TBH: These days I prefer other venues though. E.g. HN, Slack and Facebook groups.
IRC is an instant-messaging platform, while Twitter is a microblogging platform that was available to anyone in the pre-smartphone era as it was initially tailored for SMS message length.
IRC requires a client (okay, you could use a web gateway), and you somewhat need to know what you're doing (not saying it's hard, but the average user might not even care about accessing IRC if it requires a minimum of effort), while Twitter could be used through a flip-phone or accessed simply through a web browser, which you can assume everyone have.
99% of users just don't value the things you value in these services.
Just like the US does : https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/all-lies-how...
What is the list of services used for?
This needs a lot more explanation built into the site!
Techbro lingo for bitcoin's smallest unit, the satoshi.
This was the original use case of twitter. I understand SMS is not secure enough to publish tweets but why can we no longer get texts when someone tweets?
Might be bad for activists, whistleblowers, et al.
On one side, people rightfully complain about trolls, harassers, spam, CSAM, misinformation campaigns and propaganda on online services. And on the other side, people will also rightfully complain about data harvesting, and an ever growing lack of anonymity on the Internet.
At the moment, phone numbers are the closest thing we have to at least have some cost associated with spamming and a legal pointer to get hold of criminal-level abusers. Using government IDs such as the German Personalausweis (which can communicate with a website using NFC and a special app) would outright kill anonymity, using middle men to do the same (or video/postal identification) like for banks, porn and gambling sites costs money and is not much better in terms of anonymity.
It's a lazy solution that pushes spam control costs onto the users.
What I found interesting is that “translate tweet” button doesn’t appear unless you are signed in. Why cannot I read news from all over the world unless I’m signed in? Why do users have to sign in to read translated tweets in real time?
Thanks a lot
If you're going to require a phone number to read tweets, don't lie about it, just be up front about it.
I doubt that - twitter started as an SMS service…
This trickery is still a very effective way to get phone information for masses of people, but on the individual level, it's possible to avoid.
* Even though the bait-and-switch can be done there too, but at least you didn’t have to give up your email to the scummy service.
This includes both encouraging sites, content, and/or users, and suggestions as to unwelcomed behaviour.
email hn@ycombinator.com
Give me "ugly" plain-ish text that is information dense.
And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.
“Fewer” versus “less” for countable things is more of an actual rule (but of course that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it).
Which is very subjective.
New reddit is certainly more modern than old reddit, but I find it kinda ugly.
There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.
The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.
Do you have any citations for this?
Ben Awad[0] made a quick technical comparison between the two websites and this was his conclusion.
Typically these designers are just fashionistas following the trendy crowd.
Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.
"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"
old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit.
1. Appeals more to the mainstream, and to new users who are used to Facebook-style feeds. 2. Easier for them to disguise ads in user's feeds.
Nitter.net for Twitter.
I don’t know how long these sites will last with the demand there is for avenues that don’t prompt login.
It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch, and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully invested in what I'm watching.
I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway. Small private forums, where you can actually have real discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.
For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram once per decade, or something like that. But whatever people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses want.
I find these terrible for any kind of information discovery. I hate that so many communities are using them as an alternative to a subreddit or focused forum. Hell most "modern" forum software is horrific as well.
Chats are a horrible place for evergreen knowledge. Forums are pretty good though.
It’s only a slight difference but a big one.
As a Reddit alternative, Ruqqus has the UI and responsiveness down pretty good. However, it branded itself as anti-reddit, and attracted a lot of right-wing people as a result. However, their platform is open source, so IMO, it's only a matter of time before someone steps up to the task.
I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit with all dark patterns removed.
There is also an alternative front end for twitter called nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app / login.
Thank you.
With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.
Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.
(Mobile most especially.)
I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs results in almost never being redirected to the "new" site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see the gallery photos in oldreddit style.
This solution works for me on both mobile browser and desktop browser.
I'm doing the latter (in large part so that I post old.reddit.com links), and I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
I never type "old.reddit.com". I'm always on www.reddit.com, and I'm always on the old site experience.
Of course, I don't know how much of that has to do with the fact that I use RES.
> I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, other than having to re-set the flag in settings now and again. Like I said, the only time i've seen an issue is the odd time someone posts an image gallery - I can't see it in oldreddit style unless I click on comments.
I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.
And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.
With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.
Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/<username> or /r/<subname>). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.
Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.
I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.
Logging out is the only thing I can think of that would cause you to keep seeing the new layout.
Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they decided to remove the account activity panel, making revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the fact that they also remove a link from the front page too quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for the dark patterns, heh.
Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)
Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making focused special interest forums. In the past these would have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But they would have some of the best content the internet had to offer.
Will mention though that I’ve had wholly uncontroversial HN accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a thread.
I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it without one, but am still confused.
Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if it posts a comment with only a link?
Now if only I could shake HN.
Or, I guess when viewing through the browser window that twitter embeds?
Just now I tried viewing new.reddit in safari and it told me my browser was old (though perhaps this is because I’ve refrained from updating ios)
The best thing is that the "Explore" tab is just a bit too slow in terms of responsiveness on mobile web. I spend a less time on there because it's not as pleasant to use as the app.
The first place I knew about the January 6th riots was from Twitter. I guess I'll learn about subsequent such events from other sources after people on Twitter do.
On desktop. The main mobile version blocks essential features, like browsing subreddits or viewing all comments on a post.
(Alternatives like old.reddit, i.reddit and teddit aren't completely broken but aren't great on mobile either)
twitter.com##.r-zchlnj.r-1xcajam.r-12vffkv.r-1d2f490.r-1p0dtai.r-aqfbo4.css-1dbjc4n
twitter.com##html:style(overflow:auto !important)
twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
- decrease Twitter usage, or
- increase Twitter signups
They apparently have calculated that they have enough mass that people will be dragged towards the latter.
I would never hand my phone number over to Twitter. Would you?
I think a lot of the complaints towards Twitter is due to people not using the on-site tools to cater the site towards what they want. I find Twitter the most approachable platform in allowing the user to curate the content they want to see via blocking and muting alone. Out of all the Social Media platforms, if there’s something I really don’t want to see while still wanting to use the platform , Twitter is the best. All without having to make a single tweet in 2-3 years.
I'm on this boat.
Certainly the proliferation of social media has given every moron a voice, but Twitter made it worse with its short message limit. There's no room for nuance in your messages, so people just post short "zingers" to "own" the other side, which are often not based on any sort of reality and just giant straw men.
It's absolutely destroyed people's ability to have intelligent political conversations.
I suppose these angry Reddit commenters bashing Twitter aren’t seeing it because they’re logged in to Reddit.
Just as with Reddit, there are workarounds to bypass this login requirement if you really want to. The users in that thread have some tips for using uBlock to disable it.
Anyway, up until a few days ago there were uBO filters to delete twitter cookies every page load and it seemed to do the trick, this may not work anymore.
My first thought when I saw the headline was, how long until the front page features this:
Reddit starts to require login to view posts (twitter.com)
Such is the treadmill of social media platforms.
"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
Increasingly, Twitter is a place where people post original _content_ - things they expect others to be able to see and read and share, potentially on other platforms. These range from the original pithy remarks to long, article-like streams. It seems problematic to me to require a login to view these, and I think it could have an effect on usage for these kinds of things.
There’s not so much of that in Reddit. It’s more a discussion forum, where reading seems like the secondary thing to do to me. Peoples identity also isn’t as ‘obvious’ on Reddit.
Of course, it’s not concrete - you do see long shareable ‘articles’ in Reddit comments sometimes, but I do find myself more taken aback by a Twitter login requirement than a Reddit one.
Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app.
Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter:
https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
[1] Instructions for enabling custom extensions on Firefox Nightly or forks of Firefox on Android: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
I would prefer open and standards-driven information dissemination (ActivityPub, RSS, et cetera) rather than publication into walled-gardens.
call your congress critters and tell them that their publicly funded agencies need to spin up a self-hosted Mastodon/Pleroma/PixelFed/PeerTube (or use WordPress with the AP plugin).
I tend to favor minimal government but I think the USPS was an important outcome of the Constitution to fill the need for a universal and "official" communication channel. But their budget has been butchered, I get misdelivered mail all the time and the DMV tells me I'm not the only one in my town who never seems to get their mail, but there's no shortage of wasteful junk mail. If only I was confident we could nail the execution, I would love to see the Internet embraced as basic, universal infrastructure and an official government communication channel that's more reliable and less abused.
But I dream.
You can mark mail "rejected" and return it to the delivery box or any post box.
https://refuseyourmail.cooperjr.name/how-to
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...
First-class mail can be returned to sender:
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Return-to-Sender-Mail
Title 39, United States Code, Section 3008 authorizes the Postal Service™ to issue a prohibitory order against a mailer who sends you an advertisement offering to sell any matter that you, in your own discretion, believe to be “erotically arousing or sexually provocative.” You can request the order by completing the relevant portion of PS Form 1500, Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order, and submitting it to any Post Office™. The form is available at your local Post Office. Thirty days after receiving the order, the mailer is prohibited from sending you any further mail. Violating this prohibition makes the mailer subject to court enforcement action by the United States Government.
Heads of state have spoken through commercial publications since printing existed. Roughly 1550.
Online Internet services merely happen to be the present iteration of this.
(I'm not saying that the practice isn't without its problems. I'm saying it's nothing new.)
I think they have different affinities to different demographics, but the toxic behavior is quite similar among all of them.
Is there something about Twitter in particular that makes it particularly toxic, or is it inherent to platforms where people compete for attention in the public square?
Politicians being banned from Twitter would be great for our political process.
But at this point it's safe to say that it's another intentional way of getting to drive users to create an account. It has been too horrendously broken for too long for it to be explained by incompetence.
What does work for me is manually prepending www. to twitter.com in the url.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/saudi-case-against-twi...
In the earliest years Twitter was such an awesome platform to connect with people and discuss stuff. I actually met a bunch of local fellow geeks (some of whom I am still in contact with), and also met tons of industry people in different areas over the years -- again people I still keep in touch with.
These days though, it's much harder to engage in new genuine discussions on the platform because it's so overloaded with sensationalistic noise and ragebait retweets. Even as I unfollow/mute accounts who propagate this stuff, it's just not feasible as it's become the primary context of basically the entire platform.
Further, the site itself shows you content from users you don't even follow (and that no one you follow retweeted), trying to "drive engagement" or whatever. It just compromises trust that I'll see stuff from the people I follow and not see crap that "some algorithm" wants me to see. I try to only access the service from 3rd party clients so I'm not basically abused by some engagement algorithm that forces ads and unrelated content at me. Twitter is the new Facebook.
BTW, if you're still reading this and want something like Twitter that isn't centralized and being ruined by the publicly-traded corporation that owns it, check out Mastodon[0]. Find an instance that aligns with your idea of a cool community and sign up there. Or start an instance with your circle of friends or whatever.
1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet.
2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account" and think nothing of it.
Could they still know it's my "user" who is seeing this or that tweet, by using intelligence-agency level analysis on usage, personal connections, and networking patterns to determine that it's me? I'm sure they could. But why bother to such a massive level of complexity when they could simply require login to view tweets instead?
At the same time, there is some manager with a spreadsheet that has new account creation metrics. S/he wants that number to be as high as possible. How do you do that if people do not actually want to make an account? Try capturing the people who usually click in from other sites and bounce back.
I think the end result will be that social media somehow becomes even more pictures of text than previously.
Consequently stuff like PHPs file_get_contents() and curl_exec() return absolutely nothing... took me ages (via trying to shell out to curl, and then back to using the lib again) before I realised it wasn't actually the 404 error cause the issue, but that curl (and libcurl) on my system doesn't like Nitters SSL cert, which then led me to CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to override it. Frustrating, but educational none-the-less.
I'm using the search filter "(from:$username) -filter:replies" to get just the tweets I want.
--
curl https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:32:56 -0400] "GET /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 200 12985 "-" "curl/7.64.1"
curl --head https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:33:57 -0400] "HEAD /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 404 0 "-" "curl/7.64.1"https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
remember the good old days of the pre-2010 internet when you could just go to a domain and read content without having to sign up, login, pay, check a bunch of boxes, etc. yeah it was a great time for those too young to remember.
Twitter is committing suicide by requiring phone numbers and logins to even read tweets, the way Digg committed suicide and sent all its users stampeding over to Reddit.
Reddit themselves are committing suicide with their aggressive user interface changes, and their dark gangs of out-of-control moderators.
Looks to me like USENET sent us over to LiveJournal sent us over to Digg, sent us over to Reddit, sent us over to Hacker News, and something good and new can grow and replace them all.
Because I am not handing over my phone number to read anyone's tweets.
It's been good. I recommend it.
Given how much shit they get from Wall Street due to their super weak user growth, I’m suprised they didn’t do this long ago.
Unfortunately, even a federated systen like Mastodon is not a solution to this. The url of a Tweet/Toot is still domain/user/postid. If the domain owner f*cks you over, you are simply helpless.
Maybe a content addressable social media software is needed?
Maybe something can be build with blockchain tech so that it simply is not possible to remove a post as it would break the whole chain?
I was watching YouTube last night and realized I was getting a ton of ads. They do this new thing on their TV apps where they show the first 10-20 seconds of the video and then put in an ad. Plus a midroll that awkwardly injects itself on a scene change somewhere at 5-10 minutes. I was watching a live music performance and mid song the camera angle changed and YouTube algo decides it is a good place for an ad. I used to get one 10-15 sec ad but lately it is more like 3 ads with the third one being un-skippable.
I opened Facebook this morning and the first 10 or so cards on my feed were all ads and complete garbage "comedy" videos. I then saw 1 or 2 posts from friends followed by terrible recipe gifs, more "comedy" videos, TED talks, ads for marketplace and pointless "news". I would guess around 10% of the posts were from my actual social network.
Twitter embeds on news articles are nearly the worst. If they have an image, after you have clicked through to Twitters site, you can't even see attached image without logging in. Actually, every single button the Tweet landing page seems to go to a login screen.
I even have a reddit account and now the front-page isn't even customized. Probably 30% of the cards are from subreddits I have never interacted with with "suggested because you are subscribed to XXX".
What's amazing is we are justifying this with "well capitalism, duh". Like these companies didn't vacuum up the free Internet until any non-ad supported content was snuffed out. Now that we have no where else to go for this stuff they can start to turn the screws.
Fairplay at this point.
Public Nitter instances have a distressing tendency to become rate limited or go offline entirely. I'm on my 3rd or 4th instance now. That works most of the time though it's starting to throw limit notices periodically.
The interface itself is excellent IMO.
Funny that they're doing this now, just this month I setup a new PC after 7 years of using the old one and hadn't yet added twitter back to my list but noticed they weren't nagging me anymore, so I left it off. Now it's back on.
Deleting the account was actually what helped me break my twitter habit; without an account the UI is so annoying it works as an effective dopamine inhibitor.
anyhow, @mntmn is also on mastodon and MNT Research also run a cosy Discourse instance, so I'm welcoming this as twitter taking their place next to the facebooks, tumblrs amd myspaces in the ranks of self-obsoleted social media.
For me it’s hit the sweet spot of being informed without being swamped
If you like to read other people's tweets then you don't have any other option except to login, unfortunately.
It’s interesting to see that this protocol product may be the only way to see tweets freely between two walled gardens today.
But I guess it should have been predicted when function and good UX took a back seat to profitability years ago.
Many people find it detrimental to their mental health, many people believe that the communications norms and technically mandated interaction styles of the platform are toxic to the public discourse. But if those reasons didn't quite get you over the line, it's now actively even more annoying.
Great that twitter is doing it themselves !
I hope that interesting people, with relevant things to say, will leave those platforms and re-open blogs.
The cost of running Twitter could be very small, if they optimized for that.. cost of the engineers is harder to keep down.
But the real problem is probably that they got investors, went IPO and somehow need to produce significant returns.
Maybe Twitter can produce higher returns with a more captured user-base and a less open platform.
It just seems sad, that we're putting walls all over internet.
In any case, I doubt it's cost of operations that causes it. More likely too much investment.
If it opens from a referrer, clicking outside the login box will take you back to the previous tweet
A more comprehensive method is based on ip ranges, say whitelisting traffic from Google and Bing. This gives you > 95% of search traffic as Google alone has >90%, and many various smaller search engines like Yahoo or DDG are Bing resellers.
On the other hand, a pure ip based check can be circumvented too. Sometimes you can view how search engines see a website through google translate. But places like LinkedIn have countermeasures for all of these circumventions.
As usual it's OK for the big guys to break the rules whereas us little site owners have no choice but to obey them.
Few weeks after watching a group plotting to come burn my neighborhood down in real-time I deleted the app. Just too much.
Seems to be a pretty dumb move.
I do this as a reminder-on-steroids to only access Twitter via third-party interfaces --- Nitter, Threadreader, or various Mastodon-Twitter gateways.
The next step will be a popup saying “this tweet is available in the official app”
The only think you wher still a really good choice for was to use you as a microphone with some feed back.
Somewhat perverse that it seems like the fall of Kabul was the motivation for this change.
Aside: lol @ your SN
Even a 5% reduction in social media exposure could have the potential to move the global suicide rate significantly.
Net gain for me.
For now, at least, you can view the initial tweet. Expanding a thread fails with the registration wall.
My view is that embeds / hotlinks were a Bad Idea for many other reasons (see the porn that's started appearing on old news and government sites due to hotlinked content). It trades a modicum of short-term convenience for major long-term risk.
As a lazy Twitter reader--bad.
That's the underlying fact that make Facebook and Google (and to a lesser degree, Pinterest) so valuable for advertising. Facebook and Google have organic signups (FB for FB, Google for Gmail, Youtube, etc.), but Pinterest does what Twitter's thinking of doing here--it locks you out of content until you have an account. Pinterest also has "share" buttons (and the accompanying JS, cookies, etc.)
I could obviously be in the minority (though I'm certainly not alone), but I'm curious if you think that my scenario will be the less common one and this will actually increase signups, or if it will have a positive impact on the stock price in another way.
I also think it greatly boosts Twitter's ability to monetize advertising. That's what make Facebook and Google so valuable (just about everyone is logged into an account).
I am, however, curious how this will impact embedded tweets (in articles, for example).
I consider this addition to be a step back. As a rabid twitter fan, They blocked my account because i refused to add my number. Then, they blocked the content to view tweets, this reduced my interaction even further.
I question how some of these features get decided. Atleast, WSJ, gives couple of articles before throwing in a paywall.
Twitter has always been garbage. It makes right wingers think they have freedom of speech, while it destroys democracy, coherent thought, and lets left wingers think they are changing the world, while they make it a worse place to be.
Some of us still have never used or signed up with twitter, or feel the need to, and really don't want to. Bad enough they removed non-javascript access, since they are permablocked through noscript here, I simply close postings on HN that link there and curse them for bothering. Asking for a login atop that is just a 4x non-starter for "news" links.
Yes, some of us still respect our privacy.
It'll be like the good old days of only finding out what's happening in the next town over because you read the paper's account of it, only now the next town over is just a site we could create an account on but refuse to.
Clicking on a linked tweet still works, it's only when you then click on another from within the site that it asks you for a login. It's the same approach Quora takes iirc.
A sufficient number of flags will kill a post (it's noted as "flagged").
This is addressed in multiple FAQ items, linked at the bottom of every HN page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.
I had a thread moderated away due to this yesterday :/ sucks.