Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

313 pointsahelwer242 comments

Occasionally a link to a tweet will be submitted here as a story by itself. Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium by making the site nearly unusable without an account. Until a few days ago you could read all the tweets you wanted but clicking any of them would pop up a “join twitter” screen. Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs.

View on HN

> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium

Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me.

> Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.

The only login-wall that doesn’t make sense to me is Medium’s, as the site is primarily designed as a publishing platform rather than a community platform. Forcing users to create an account to read a blog post isn’t a great way to generate wide viewership of your blog posts.

I disagree. When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia. This was the 'social' contract they presented to users.

They built their monopolies on top of the goodwill of users. I'm pretty sure that subject matter experts who wrote extremely long-winded and well-researched articles on Roman battle tactics, did not do so with the intent, that some nebulous internet money-man could charge $5/month in the future to view the articles they wrote for free.

All these internet companies are essentially engaging in rent-seeking behavior, but are trying to boil the frog only slowly, so they don't get swept away by the tides of user discontent.

Twitter specifically positions itself as a space for public conversation, and is sometimes the only place where people like world leaders and government organizations post their content. Blocking posts behind a login wall seems, at least to me, antithetical to their past messaging.

> Blocking posts behind a login wall seems, at least to me, antithetical to their past messaging.

If you are a space of “public conversation”, then banning users is also antithetical to that end.

So the question then becomes: Is there anything wrong with them deciding to go a different direction than their past messaging? Or should they forever be beholden to it?

I mean, bait-and-switch is a type of fraud right?

Presumably their ToS absolves them of any legal liabilities but it's still wrong to offer an open garden only to close it once the people created an arboretum.

Data/content portability is part of that conversation.

No, but those who valued Twitter for that mission may not anymore.

theres nothing wrong eith a vegan restaurant pivoting to become a steakhouse -- its jist a really bad idea.

What are the requirements for a twitter account these days? Just an email or also a valid phone?

Last time I tried, they allowed me to sign up without a phone number, but then almost immediately hit with a "we think you're sus and have blocked you, enter a phone number to unblock".

They seem to require a phone number for all new accounts. My guess is that they A/B tested it, and locking accounts after creation had better metrics than requiring it during the sign up process.

last I tried I could create an account just with email, but as soon as I used it I was flagged for bot-like activity and required to add a phone to prove my humanity (since we all know bots don't have phones)

It's not just a Twitter problem. Every major corp out there seems braindead on this issue. One would have thought that even major news publishers would at the very least whitelist their paywall on covid news coverage stories.

I believe both the NYTimes and the Washington Post made their COVID reporting free.

internet was supposed to be the savior. these sites were the vanguard of the brave new world.

instead it was the worst sellout ever, using the greatest power in time, to build megaliths that have humongous power of distortion.

yes, it hurts. and it should. much more. but they manage to make people to 'move on'.

in the end. we forgot. It's always about power.

why did this turn into an elliot smith poem at the end, lmao.

remember when twitter provided rss feeds for user accounts man the internet used to be cool

And you don't get the full twitter without the "app"

And worse, scraping for RSS is becoming harder and harder every day.

It's like Google search results, isn't it? Brands ruin themselves over time as they chase more market. We can be upset by this, but the bright side is that customer discontent eventually leads people to go to different products.

Yeah, isn't the market so fucking magical? We just have to rebuild Google of 2008 from scratch and with no funding! I'm sure somebody will have that done by 2100 or so.

Thank god Stack Overflow hasn't gone in that direction.

> hasn't yet

Sorry! But you never know.

> When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia.

You're misremembering, but please feel to prove me wrong by pointing to any of these services positioning themselves as the "Wikipedia of [thing they do]".

I used to use Quora a lot and that was pretty much Quora's mission statement. I can't find an explicit comparison to Wikipedia, although I've definitely seen that somewhere. But here are a few highlights from a post the founder wrote about the company's mission[1]:

"Quora's mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge."

"Quora aims to allow anyone to easily share their knowledge and in the process to dramatically increase the total amount of knowledge available to the world."

"We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, a place where hundreds of millions of people go to learn about anything and share everything they know."

[1]: https://quorablog.quora.com/Our-Mission

> "We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, a place where hundreds of millions of people go to learn about anything and share everything they know."

> be me

> be in Library of Alexandria

> row upon row of books as far as the eye can see

> any topic, any subject, all the collected information in the world available just because it's humanly possible to enable that

> you can practically see the titles on the book spines

> one of them looks familiar... could it be...?

> take a single step forward

> hologram stutters and flickers out

> "Phis service requires authorisation to perpetually access your Realtime User Feed in order to continue. Process authorisation?"

> (you later learn the book title that looked familiar was algorithmically constructed by a model that keyed off of the Realtime User Feeds of your public friends list.)

I don't think such pretty statements count for much, or that users ever put much weight in them. On the other hand, their behavior certainly posed them as a public space.

Temporary benevolence and promises can’t fix bad incentives. If we want to change the behavior, we need to change the incentives and we need to do it in a way that actually has a hope of working.

Show me where any of them ever offered this

Social contracts don't exist merely because you expect something

On the other hand, for example Tumblr never implemented a login wall, and as a result a large majority of tech folks (including most HN commenters) completely misunderstood the product.

It's primarily a social network, but that's never clear if your only exposure to Tumblr is some random blogs, some of which use blog themes that have usability issues. Most of Tumblr's functionality is literally invisible to you if you never create an account. It's a lot closer to "LiveJournal meets Geocities" than it is to WordPress.

However, a login wall was a no-go since it's obnoxious and interferes with users who want their blog to be a public-facing presence, or use Tumblr as a CMS, or as a traditional blogging platform etc.

In terms of the "login wall or no" question, for platforms that combine social networking with public-facing user-generated content, I don't really think anyone's found a good solution yet.

Why should I understand Tumblr or any other product? I and others as well were happy with just reading the ramblings of other Internet users. As for the other side, publishing your texts or photos on the Internet for others to view, isn't enough?

> Why should I understand Tumblr or any other product? I and others as well were happy with just reading the ramblings of other Internet users.

I mean, no one's forcing you to. That's my point though!

Casual web visitors to the public-facing (no account needed) portion of the product simply aren't exposed to the majority of the product, and have a sub-par experience as a result. This reduces the likelihood of the product being successful. Some products try to solve this with a hard login wall, but that's problematic for both casual viewers as well as a portion of the content creators. There's no good solution.

In the example of Tumblr, even if you just want to consume content without posting anything, the reading experience is much better in the logged-in dashboard (newsfeed / activity stream) vs separately visiting random blogs that all have different themes.

> As for the other side, publishing your texts or photos on the Internet for others to view, isn't enough?

If you want to just publish photos, you can use a product that specializes in this, rather than choosing a combination publishing site / social network where the community interaction is inherently a huge part of the product.

> Casual web visitors to the public-facing portion aren't exposed to the majority of the product, and have a sub-par experience as a result.

No, their experiences are perfectly fine.

Maybe the company believes that monetization is worse when account-free users read the site, but being account-free is an ideal experience for the majority of users. Companies love to lie about this, both externally and internally.

I'm talking strictly from the standpoint of a user of web-based social products. For any product with a substantial communication and/or community aspect, you inherently can't use most of the product's functionality if you don't have an account. And if the product doesn't do a good job of explaining its purpose, you won't even fully understand what functionality you're missing out on.

Going back to my Tumblr example, I've had a lot of conversations with people on HN who fundamentally didn't grok that there's substantially more to the product than the public-facing blog network, in part because there isn't a login wall. A few examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607197 (interesting quote further downthread "I never felt the need to make an account since I was just reading. They didn't make it clear that the service was incomplete without an account.")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29700519

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29958173

So instead of Tumblr providing a better user interface that includes timestamps or lets you filter "reactions" or commments, casual reards should sign up to Tumblr.

Your comments prove my point exactly. The public-facing blog network (which has no login wall and does not require an account) uses a templated theme system. The blog author can make it look however they want! Some blogs choose themes which omit these things, or use a custom theme and choose to omit these things. That makes the user interface worse!

Meanwhile the Tumblr dashboard (logged in user experience / social network side) has a uniform user interface which does provide these things.

But there is no way for Tumblr to prevent this problem on the blog side while still allowing users to have full control over their blog's public appearance. If they forced themes to contain specific template tags or design elements, it would no longer be usable as a freeform CMS.

Same reason Tumblr doesn't/can't have a login wall. But as a result of this, casual readers get a mistaken impression of the product and its capabilities.

On a cell phone, I can type "best driveway shovel" on my phone, and it will take me to google. Google will have an overlay that tells me searching for the best driveway shovels is better in an app. I close that overlay. The first hit is twitter. The second is reddit. I skip twitter. I get an overlay telling me to install a reddit app, or continue in the website. I click continue in website. There is an overlay telling me to get the reddit app. I close it. I have to click 'read more' to load the rest of the main content. When I scroll to the comments, the first one or two are visible, and then I get a popup telling me reddit is better in an app. If the information about shovels was rated as adult content, I have already seen the content, but then at the comments, I get a popup that tells me to go to the main reddit page, or an option to install the reddit app.

I click back. The third hit on google was also reddit. I repeat the above.

Old.reddit.com is the only remotely usable form of the website and seems to have none of the obnoxious popups.

I feel anxious every time I see old.reddit mentioned. If it gains traction, they may want to "improve" it.

They are already doing it. There are a lot of seemly intentional bugs, I suspect this is a strategy to force users to migrate to the new one. Galleries and some profile features are not supported, and it is (again intentionally) slowed down on mobile.

Reddit jumped the shark already and the current state of affairs is an offense to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Problem is that a new mass migration (as happened in the Digg→Reddit move) is way more difficult due to the inertia and amount of content available. I just hope that, when it finally happens, it would be to a distributed or federated system -- Lemmy.ml seems to be the most promising for now.

The amount of content available isn't a real problem, since Reddit deletes terabytes of that content on a whim. Consider it already deleted and migrate already.

Their CSS is completely broken and nearly unusable on mobile.

They're clearly "improving" it.

Old Reddit has never been mobile-friendly.

It gives a cookie popup on mobile telling you to go to the new website to accept the cookie popup. Insanity.

Not to justify how completely terrible it is, but you can click the accept once and never see it again.

The day old.reddit.com goes offline is the day I delete my account. There must be vocal internal holdouts keeping it up.

If you don't need to comment, libreddit is significantly better, especially on mobile, than old.reddit.com.

Also teddit.net, which I find even faster and lightweight without JS.

If you selfhost Whoogle you can have it rewrite all Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitter results to your own self-hosted, js-free alternative front-ends. I love it!

You can also set to Redirect all reddit links to old.reddit

Last time I checked i.reddit.com was pretty usable.

i.reddit.com is still the best version.

The normal Reddit is completely usable - this is complete hyperbole

On desktop, yes. On Mobile, the normal reddit is ridiculously obnoxious unless you tick "desktop site".

It's absurdly laborious to have to click "Continue this thread" on any subthread with more than a couple levels of replies, which takes you to a completely new page. A genuinely awful experience compared to the old site, and for what?

The fourth hit is Pinterest and the fifth hit is LinkedIn...

Sounds like an excellent reason to set your cell phone to default to a less-crappy search engine. (Not to assert that that exists, but there's ample reason to try a few.)

Reddit is a psychopath corporation. I cannot think of another description for a company with such a grotesque and obnoxious mobile experience. Pure unadulterated evil.

RedReader. You're welcome.

> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.

Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start. Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown enough so they could rely on network effects for dominance, did they turn hostile. A bait and switch, tricking people into relying on them, and then turning evil once switching to a different platform becomes too difficult.

> But then it should have been that way from the start.

Twitter is 15 years old. You can't except them to remain unchanged forever. Priorities change, people change, goals change. Didn't they change CEO some time ago? Then the latest change might be even something from the new managment.

Just like when a farmer decides to slaughter a pig for meat, it's because his "priorities changed" after he fattened it up.

So true. I'm old enough to remember when Google was really good at web search, and they had some cuddly motto to go along with their preskool logo. Can't quite recall what it was.

The problem is that a lot of companies are objectively making the user experience worse with the changes that they make. I don't know about how others respond to this. I'm not a Twitter user. When I can't easily access something linked on Twitter (or Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever) I just say "Oh well" and c-w.

From the capitalist perspective I guess it's just a decision based on lost revenue from eyeballs like mine going elsewhere vs. revenue/data gained by users who make an account that wouldn't otherwise.

Why would you not want an account on a website you rely on? It's one thing to complain that your occasional visits to twitter are more inconvenient now. But if you would go so far as to say that people rely on them, then it seems like a silly hill to die on for those people to resist creating an account.

For me, it’s because I’m on my work machine. I don’t move my personal credentials to my work machine. (In fact, I moved over to my phone to write this comment.)

We could discuss that aspect—sharing accounts on computers that don’t belong to me—but that’s why I’m often thwarted from reading content. I have the account, just not on me.

Any reason not to create a work twitter account?

Because you need another email and phone number?

The obvious solution is still for Twitter to not suck.

You can add up to 10 accounts per phone number, fwiw. It just kind of seems like people are investing more effort into coming up with reasons they don't want to or can't create a twitter account than it would take to just create an account :/

https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-numb...

Juste create a new account every time

No, please, you go first.

Because I don't want to give a phone number to facebook or twitter just to have an account to read some content.

Then don't use it

They don't ask for a phone number until you post something that alerts the Ministry of Truth. Then your home page and any page you try to visit is replaced with a form to verify who you are.

I have four accounts that have been soft-locked this way. The whole point in my use is I do not want an identity tied to them.

It slows down (but doesn’t completely prevent) the creation of spam and grief accounts. It’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

But the user is not interested in posting (or they would have an account already). They are only creating an account because twitter is making them.

Twitter doesn't seem to have an option of a read-only account, where a phone number is only required to post.

Plenty of people use websites (including this one!) without accounts to just browse around. I get my comments linked around all the time, and the freedom to share this information is a good thing for the internet. Putting up a login wall or other annoyances makes me cautious to want to share Twitter links with other people, or even perhaps want to post there in the first place if it’ll reduce my audience.

> Why would you not want an account on a website you rely on?

Since creating an account is both more work and causes privacy violations, the obvious question is the other way around. Why would I even want to create an account if not fundamentally necessary?

Yes. Also called "growth engineering" and pretty much the basic mode of operation of silicon valley companies.

Also called "being cunty", from a user perspective.

Yeah. And when they design the site to be addictive like a drug, it's "engagement engineering". When they spam us with noise, it's "advertising".

Doubleplusgood, this one.

It's analogous to those sea predators that disguise themselves as a rock so as not to scare away potential prey.

ackshually we call it "growth hacking". sounds better to investors ;)

> ackshually we call it "growth hacking". sounds better to investors ;)

Which is strange, because the term “hacking” used to set jimmies a’rustlin’ and underwear a’bunchin’ whenever it came up.

Hacking only rustles jimmies when it's happening to them.

The first thing a malicious nontechnical investor wants to know about your competition: "Well, can't you just hack them?!"

Russ on Silicon Valley came from somewhere, ha..

Yeah besides the whole idea is it's a broadcast. Like radio, you don't have to install an app to listen to a radio station (FM or AM, satellite radio does want you to install an app).

> Instead they were user-friendly at first,

Twitter’s experience for users today is the same as it was at the start.

The word “user” is key, though. The experience has only changed for people who aren’t yet users (with logged in user accounts) of Twitter.

> A bait and switch, tricking people into relying on them,

This doesn’t really make sense. If you rely on Twitter, you make an account. You can’t really rely on Twitter or even be a user without having an account.

I don’t really expect community platforms to cater to non-users of the community.

You're assuming that people with accounts don't care if people without accounts can't read their tweets (and can't read them anonymously), and that for some reason reading Twitter doesn't count as "using" it. Do they not show any ads if you're not logged in?

They don't show you ads based on your phone number's tie in to the real world. That's then problem they want to solve

I am confused.

It seems like there are two definitions of "user" here: someone that uses something, and someone that has an account. It's possible to use Twitter without an account (reading tweets seems like the primary use case of Twitter), and it's possible to have an account that you never use. People in the second case are counted as "inactive users" or, in other words, users that don't use Twitter.

When people talk about the UX or UI of a website, they usually aren't talking about whether you have an account or not. It's possible for a website's UX to be bad before you even make an account, e.g. if the sign up page is bad.

>If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.

You can't just make throwaway accounts on Twitter though, they ban them after a few hours if you don't verify by phone number. So really it's forcing you to hand over a lot of personal information just to read what is essentially a few forum posts.

We surely don’t expect that a business should have its value proposition make sense for everyone.

Different but feels somewhat the same shape as a previous point,

> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.

i'm fine with both of your alls-fair-in-love-and-war attitudes, but it makes me sick that twitter became a near defacto monopoly as the all-connected public-social-media before locking down & exploiting their position, before transforming into a propeietary closed experience.

and it makes me even more disturbed thinking what an epic project it would be to dislodge or replace this vast once public network. the switching costs are asteonomical, require millions of people of recognize how rudely governed their once open & reasonable platform has become, has fallen to.

the value propositions can keep changing. quickly. under society's feat. civil society has no control, the enemy has all the control. society has such a slow response time, our side of the free hand moves only over the course of decades, not days. it's a trashfire thing twitter is doing to us, and i fully support their right to self (re)define themselves as snakey lowlife punks who've renegged on their bargain of being the public social system, but damn i wish society could respond & shift course & adapt in some sort of fashion, and it just cant; this assemblage is trapped, and so things will only forever now get worse. it's terrible. platforms are social treachery, they all fall down.

These SV companies would have a lot less power over us if we all judged and acted as if the personal information whywhywhywhy is complaining about having to give away as being more important than reading some forum post, or watching some video stream, or some other transient dopamine hit gone in literally seconds vs. the near-permanent and very difficult to remove little tentacle the company gets to stick into your life now. Each one individually is no big deal, but the whole is.

Adopt an abundance mentality. Our world is awash in transient dopamine hits. Why do you need this one, when there's so many you can have for truly free, or for small amounts of money, or via any other mechanism that isn't trading such a transient personal value for some quasi-permanent cost?

No company even comes close to the transition that Reddit did that took them from a {clean,simple,dense,power-user friendly} interface to a horrible user-hostile shit show that it is now. The average Reddit user has to reach for a custom third party app on their phone or a browser plug-in that hacks a redirect to the old or third party interface. Quora doesn’t hold a candle.

Reddit is on a complete different level of abhorrent filth. The mobile experience is so obnoxious that it's fair to call it "evil".

And I'm only describing the technical aspect of it. The culture it encourages of people screaming divisive hate at each other, makes it possibly the worst corporation to have ever existed.

Notice that it's almost impossible to find people on HackerNews admitting they work there.

What I dont understand is why these companies are debasing their products integrity to scrape in more users.

What Reddit doesn’t seem to realise is that right now there is a primed opportunity for a competitor to take its market share.

If reddit ever dropped the old.reddit option, that would be the last time I ever use the site. They must know the new (several years old now, I suppose) layout is awful. I can't understand the rational. Maybe it cost a fortune to build and it's sunk-cost fallacy thing.

My theory is that it's easy to hand-wave away those complaints as just coming from Luddites. You don't get the new layout, and are only complaining because you like the old layout and don't want to learn anything new.

Administratively, it feels good to know that I'm doing the right thing, and to know that you will eventually come around to the new layout design. You have to, because I'm right.

That's my theory. Smugness, maybe? Is that it? Overconfidence?

Advertising. It's the root cause of it all. Reddit is actually an advertising company. Their business model consists of attracting people to the site with open forums and then spamming ads. They want people to switch to the app because that way they can collect more data and users can't block ads.

They already have the data and the name recognition. While each is powerful on its own, they are far more powerful (and sticky) together.

That data comes without e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or any real-world identity. They want to become more like Twitter, where people post with their IRL identity. That way your Reddit upvotes can translate into a salesman physically knocking at your door if that's what marketers decide would make the sale.

To be fair, one company did: Digg. And that's why no one uses or remembers Digg anymore.

Digg 4 remains a remarkable example of how you truly can kill a popular site and its entire community with a botched redesign.

I never liked the site, but plenty of people did, and they just accidentally destroyed it. A lesson that you should be able and willing to quickly revert major changes, at the very least.

I remember the Digg exodus. In my mind, it was a mass protest after the AACS key leaked. The redesign of Digg wasn’t the death knell. I could be misremembering with Rose colored glasses, though. Pun intended.

It also makes permanent bans a very harsh thing they can inflict...

I was "permanently" banned after over 12 years of contributing content to reddit by a random subreddit mod (banned from all of reddit) just for doing a music video cross posting to a music subreddit and suddenly my own subreddit was orphaned and I could not access content posted by others including on Google search because I then had no account. To this day, all of my posts are orphaned and now owned by reddit with no way for me to delete them, and all I got was vague boiler plate responses as to why with no means of requesting reinstatement.

The content wall also limits outreach for people that use Twitter to promote their business behind the scenes too, pretty much voiding a major benefit of posting to Twitter for everyone (unbeknownst to users).

It's completely hostile behavior that does not get addressed because it is inflicted on such an individual basis. Most people with user accounts don't know about the content blocking because they're always logged in and being tracked.

These sites do not own the content, the people that make the content are the actual content owners, if there was more awareness about underhanded things these sites do, this would not be seen as good business.

In the end no company is obligated to do much of anything. We see that twitter probably wouldn't have achieved the kind of market dominance they have if they had started out this way though. So it feels like a sort of bait-and-switch, which annoys. That now that they have we have to deal with it or be cut out of something so popular, that they can only get away with because they are so popular. But sure, they have no obligation to not do that.

> I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account

No no no, companies should not be allowed to this kind of bait and switch:

1) provide a free service

2) gain market dominance, push out competitors, and turn into a necessity for millions of users

3) create lock-in and exploit the userbase

Essential public utilities are regulated (properly, in many countries) to avoid this.

In 2022 services like ISP, mobile carriers, email and instant messaging are almost essential. Millions of people need them to work, buy food, have access to health and government services.

And yet tech companies are never held responsible.

It was never free. The bill was simply footed by investors who believed at some point, a viable product would bring in revenue. Sure, it was free TO YOU, (it still is) but do we really think the network provider, the servers, the administration, the code maintenance are something they are obligated to provide out of the goodness of their hearts?

I'd call Twitter many things, but never a necessity. And the contrived person for who it is, has an account and won't be bothered by a login prompt.

If Reddit or Twitter seems a necessity to you then you have problems and you should start working on them before you go around telling what someone should be allowed to do.

What’s exploitative about offering a free account?

A bit taken aback this still needs to be explained, but the point of having an account is so they can use your email address and phone number to correlate you & your actions across the entire internet to better surveil you & serve you behavior-modifying content.

The "free" service is also there to hurt competition, establish market dominance and later or do all sort of bait-and-switch.

Reminder: by dominating a market a company removes options and better alternatives from the end users.

I just explained how cornering a market works. What part of the 3 steps is unclear?

And let's not forget the idiotic "This site works better in App" crap that we get on our phones when browsing sites like Linkedin or reddit. No, I don't want to install yet another shitty app. Just let me browse the "net' on my phone directly.

This pisses me off. I don't need or want a specific APP for your website. I ALREADY HAVE an app that views websites. It's called damn web browser, and it's my choice of which one I use or install (currently). I don't want your shit designed, spyware filled app.

> If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.

This change happened during last summer. Funilly enough it was just ad I considered getting an account to share a bike trip live, but:

1. I didn’t want my new account to help their A/B-testing.

2. I didn’t want family and friends to have to sign up to follow my trip.

End result: No account, and I read twitter less since they don’t value my passive engagement.

>2. I didn’t want family and friends to have to sign up to follow my trip.

That's exactly what they want though. Their real user growth has slowed down and they're trying to juke the numbers by coercing the hold outs to sign up.

If you were suspended at 18 years old from twitter you are technically banned for the remainder of your life unless you can successfully appeal. Creating a new temporary account will eventually get you suspended again as it's against the rules and they functionally require a phone number as you quickly get flagged after a few follows. Considering twitter often makes the news it isn't reasonable to ban people from looking into what they market as the "public conversation" by blocking logged out read access.

> Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me.

Reddit's unusable with an account too. So annoying when I just want to read a thread and it want's to draw my attention every which way. Notifications and the reply text never work on Firefox and using old is getting more and more inconvenient.

Reddit is much more usable with the "old" version of the site, which you can set as the default in your preferences.

Frankly, I'm continually amazed that they haven't killed it off yet, but for now it's a big improvement.

Even if they do kill it off, you could use an alternate front end that goes through the Reddit APIs. I know I've seen https://teddit.net/ posted here on HN before as one option.

I actually love the new Reddit non-logged in experience. It self-limits how much value you can get out of it, and I get through the first page or whatever it lets me do and just put it away.

Reddit is trying its best to beat Twitter here. A recent option has turned on posts from subreddits you are not subscribed to with a tag "because you visited here previously".

I'm not sure if this is desperation or simply callous disregard for users intelligence.

Sending a text costs me 3 cents. 3G data used to cost 0.022-0.11 cents per 128 bytes. Nowadays it's like $75/mo. for 60GB, but at no point it had been free. Ultimately the source of problem is its lack of proper AAA which in turn enabled this ad economy.

paying 7€ for 50gb of internet in italy :D

To be fair creating a random account takes a second on Reddit , after which you can turn off a bunch of things, and also browse from https://old.reddit.com to remove all the junk.

> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.

I agree with this to a degree. However, it's so much easier to find and interact with/around content tailored to your interests on FB/Twitter/Reddit than to use the indie web. Network effects mean the silos are growing and the experience of using the more open internet is increasingly niche. This seems a shame to those of us who really enjoyed the more open internet. (I'm not saying it's dead, just that the people who missed it are so well catered for by the silos that they don't go looking for it, so it stays niche).

It's not just popups, whole subreddits are blocked without an account on the mobile site.

To be fair, it does work, because whenever I crack and register a new account, I end up commenting to avoid someone being wrong on the Internet.

> need to become a user of the website

Why? You can show people the same advertising either way so signifying up with a junk e-mail address and forcing a login is really kind of a pointless hoop.

It will make their metrics look better

That might help some middle managers at Twitter but it’s irrelevant to the company. If anything adding such pop up’s just costs them views and thus revenue.

The company _is_ middle management. Those are the people being served by the company the most.

> If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.

Not reasonable at all. If I'm not posting, an account doesn't serve any purpose (for me). I can read HN all day long without an account, same for blogs, normal websites, etc. Accounts on websites should not be the norm, and never was before.

Twitter doesn't even let you click links to other Twitter pages, it redirects you back to the original link you followed.

On reddit, I just switch the url to “old.reddit” and that’s it

Twitter doesn’t have “old twitter”… well… one time, I somehow magically summoned mobile interface that looked like from 2013, but I haven’t been able to repeat it. Something with Javascript I suppose

They killed that interface in December of 2020.

> Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me.

Try old.reddit.com (or i.reddit.com on mobile).

old.reddit.com still exists and doesn't have any pop-ups.

> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account

Sure, but then it should be banned from use by politicians for public announcements made in official fashion.

Would there be anyone left on Twitter?

It's an abomination that is - if it's a government announcement put it on gov.tld/announcements. For sure, mirror that content anywhere you want to.

If it's a party announcement put it first on your party's page.

Mind you, this whole thing of presidents/premieres/PMs making announcements as if they are making up the policies ... if they are then everyone is screwed (and their advisors and party should stop that immediately), if they're doing it right and the policy has gone through party committees, government departments, experts, then the head of that group should be announcing it. Why the heck do we need everything filtered through some ignorant dickhead; whither democracy.

The cult of celebrity is ruin for humanity. Urgh.

I've noticed this too, but that's also the reason why I use Nitter [0].

I'm also a bit lazy so I've also setup a redirector plugin to automatically redirect every twitter link to Nitter, been happy since then.

[0] https://nitter.nl

Nitter is great. The Privacy Redirect extension can automatically redirect your Twitter page loads to Nitter:

https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

If you are on Android, you can also use the free and open source Fritter client to view tweets and browse Twitter without an account:

https://fritter.cc

On Android there's also: https://framagit.org/tom79/nitterizeme. Get it on F-Droid.

Thanks for linking to that extension.

I want to see localized trends. not on nitter.

I recently quit Twitter (almost[0]) and have been much happier ever since.

It seems (to me) that the way Twitter increases "engagement" is to show you the tweets that will upset you the most, so that you can either reply with an angry thing of your own, or furiously "like" other angry responses.

I tried to unfollow a lot of people who tend to post about controversial topics but Twitter keeps showing me their tweets or similar ones from other people. It also insists on showing me things that are popular but that don't concern me (such as sports).

There doesn't seem to be a way to see only the tweets of the people you follow. And even if there was... random thoughts and bits from people I don't know are seldom interesting, and very unnecessary.

At some point I thought I was addicted to Twitter; but it turned out it's the easiest addiction to get rid of.

[0] "Almost": I didn't delete the account: I just logged out and stopped using Twitter completely.

> It seems (to me) that the way Twitter increases "engagement" is to show you the tweets that will upset you the most

I don't think upsetting you is an intentional design on the part of Twitter, it's just that optimising for engagement in the context of human psychology often leads to upsetting things being promoted because that's what humans naturally find engaging (though also unpleasant). I have a carefully curated Twitter, I've unfollowed anyone who posted anything that seemed to me ideological, and I rarely see upsetting content on Twitter anymore. Granted I'm following less than 100 people and unfollow people for ideological tweets about once a month.

Well, maybe you succeeded, and if so good for you. In my experience, unfollowing does almost nothing.

My problem was not especially "ideological" people as much as "concerned" people. For example I followed a brilliant young French doctor who was usually entertaining, but who's incensed by all the antivax noise and who would regularly retweet antivax rhetoric, not to defend it of course but to expose it.

That would get me all worked up... and for what? There is no benefit to this for anyone (and not even for Twitter, as I only used it on desktop with an adblocker).

If I want to read interesting articles about any topic by many other means (including HN!); Twitter isn't bringing anything useful to me (but again, that's just me, YMMV, etc.)

Just unfollow people who post content you don't want to see.

I have a simple solution: Don't use it.

I do occasionally follow a twitter link but these days I just skip by them on HN (or just read the comments) and most other places. I even have an account but don't bother to log in. I find the website atrociously slow anyways and I don't think 280 characters or whatever they are at now is an enjoyable form of content.

I see this as a feature and not a bug now that I no longer have an account on Twitter.

If I absolutely want to read a tweet, I can. But the barrier to entry is a _good_ thing to me.

It's delightful. All these trash sites are under pressure to deliver more profits (presumably) and they're going to find out how little we all need them.

Shame that that heroin needle is behind a sign-up/paywall barrier...

I came here to say exactly this. I have a Twitter account, but I stay logged out and let their door slamming act dissuade me from scrolling.

I can read the one linked Tweet from some article or post and then return to my life. It’s blissful.

Twitter also requires you to a have a cell phone to sign up for an account. I have a work cell and a land line, neither of which can be used for creating a personal twitter account. This barrier to entry is good for me too.

Yeah, same here. Especially with Instagram. ;-) Make me save so much time.

It gets worse. If you make a twitter account, then sign out, it will refuse to show you anything until you either sign back in or clear your cookies. I made a quick account to test out the API, then found that I'd need to give them a phone number actually generate an API key. Suddenly, every publicly-visible URL started stating that I must be logged in to view the content.

Thank you, I was wondering why they never even show me a tweet but people report that Twitter does allow that. I have a couple of accounts used to duplicate content to other streams, must be cookies lying around.

Note that a huge issue I see is that Twitter is used by a lot of governments for official announcements.

Back when Twitter was open, using it for goverment communication was OK, like it is OK for governments to make public announcements on public TV.

But imagine an important announcement is only made on a private TV channel!

Even if that private TV channel were free, but you have to accept FAANG ToS, it’s still wrong and probably must be unconstitutional in some way.

call your government representatives and let them know about alternatives then. I feel the public sector should be required to adopt open and interoperable standards for its communications.

Public money, public access, public infrastructure.

A single uBlock Origin filter fixes this for me: twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id) Still haven't found an easy fix that works for safari on iphone though.

Thanks, this works great. On Firefox Mobile as well!

I've found that on desktop at least, blocking Twitter from setting cookies also works as a fix.

It shouldn’t be all that hard to write a shortcut or web extension that runs the equivalent of that.

Consider my problem. I had an old account with my phone number associated with it. I closed the account two years ago. I went to open an account and they asked for my phone number, Twitter says my phone number is in use and will not let me get past that point.

So I am now shut out on both ends.

Have you contacted support about this?

They finally got me to sign up a few months ago with that crap. Suddenly other sites started working better, after I did: apparently that twitter cookie smooths the ad auctions and all the other underlayer horseshit on the modern web.

Kinda makes me wonder how hard it would be to anti-optimize a site so that if you have a twitter / FB / youtube / etc account and are not using private browsing the pages load slow or incomplete etc. Presumably most of use crotchety enough to use such a thing in anger have already bowed out and fallen off the web already.

The popup wall went up hard the weekend that Kabul fell to the Taliban. Perhaps they were doing it selectively before then, but that was when I first noticed it. Felt like particularly scummy opportunism at the time.

Between this and leaning so heavily into the NFT grift, which is likely to burn casual participants and retail-level investors, it seems like Twitter is charting a course to Tumblr-like levels of niche relevance or worse.

The first time I noticed it was when I couldn't find the Twitter search bar. I wanted to see someone's Twitter account so I went to http://www.twitter.com and I didn't know what to do from there. It's still like this today. Your obvious options are "Sign Up or Log In", and along the bottom there's "About Help Center Terms of Service Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Accessibility Ads info Blog Status Careers Brand Resources Advertising Marketing Twitter for Business Developers Directory Settings © 2022 Twitter, Inc." which could plausibly be the entire site map EXCEPT for http://www.twitter.com/explore .

Poking around, looks like a path to the search bar is Directory: https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles

More of this please. I want Twitter’s influence on our society to be less.

Use nitter. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

I set up a private Nitter instance to browse. It works well, and I would recommend other people give it a try. I'm using the Privacy Redirect extension in Firefox to auto-redirect to Nitter. I'm doing the same thing with Invidious for Youtube; Privacy Redirect also lets you redirect Reddit and Instagram if you use those sites.

The only real issue I've run into is that I don't have HTTPS set up for this private/local instance, so embeds don't always work. This is easily solved by getting a cert I just haven't done it yet.

This really bugs me!

This "join twitter" thing on the scroll is not even the worst experiment in user hostility that they have done.

Much worse was the time that if you clicked a tweet, it displayed that tweet with the "join twitter" dialog box, and if you dismissed it, it just took you back to the original tweet using history hijacking.

That was just bizarre -- how do they expect to sell the idea of twitter to a non-logged-in user if they make one of the most basic actions (navigating to a shared tweet) impossible with deliberate user hostility?

For those who are sick of it and would like to prevent it on desktop at least, here are some uBlock Origin blocker settings that currently work: https://pastebin.com/U9rpcCuq

I came up with these last night as I was irritated I couldn't just view the website.

Twitter employees who look here: Stop it, c'mon. Take your massive stacks of mony and do something more useful than locking users out of your platform to drive low-engagement signups.

I'm getting more like 4 or 5 before the pop-up. Problem is when I sign-in I only get one additional tweet. Plus I have to deal with all the extra screen clutter. I'm trying to read about the upcoming blizzard and I'm cursing Dave Epstein for posting a picture of a tree when all I want are his potential snowfall maps. Just switched to nitter.net. End of rant.

Wonder if a case could be made that since public officials like the US President or other "official" government accounts post to Twitter, that everyone should be able to view all the (public) tweets of those accounts without requiring an account for the viewer. Perhaps that is already the case?

public officials should be required to use public infrastructure. ActivityPub and ActivityStreams exist.

I cannot confirm. In Chrome, I visited Twitter in an incognito tab. I clicked each of the trending topics in turn, and held down the 'j' key to scroll through 1000s of tweets. There is a standing login/signup button at the bottom of the page but at no time was there some kind of pop-up.

I discovered nitter.net, a Twitter proxy, same vein as Whoogle. When you get a twitter link, just replace twitter.com with nitter.net and you're good to go. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

You can also use a privacy redirect extension to do it automatically.

Good. Perhaps it will encourage some people to not post on Twitter, and use something more appropriate?

One can hope...

My dream scenario would be Twitter and reddit effectively killing their api so we don’t have Apollo or Tweetbot anymore.

These apps doesn’t help with addictive behavior because they absolutely remove everything wrong from these networks and gives me a stellar user experience.

Companies are all about open data until they have enough to hold it hostage. Then they shut down APIs and require an account to do access any of the data.

You seriously should be using Nitter (find an instance that's not widely used so it doesn't get rate-limited as often), and install the Privacy Redirect plugin to redirect all Twitter links to your chosen Nitter instance. The speed and the quality of the UI are improved across the board. The only thing I miss with Nitter is seeing quote tweets.

Growing? Twitter stopped being usable years ago when they changed from being a HTML website to a javascript application you ran in your browsers VM. Now when you attempt to view it as a website there is no HTML to render. It's just a white page telling you to go away if you're not willing to be their product.

Make an account, find a workaround, or don't read tweets. Not sure why you think you're entitled to Twitter on your terms and not their's?

Are they making a bad business decision that is going to cost them dearly in the future? Maybe. But that's not a crime. If it is, lock me up and throw away the key.

Which is a problem if you've ever had an account suspended. Creating a new account can get you perma-banned for "trying to bypass suspension"

Government agencies and officials should be banned from using any broadcast platform which requires you to log in to see/hear what they've posted.

As a viewer (not user) of Weibo ("Chinese Twitter", if you say it), Zhihu ("Chinese Quora") and Tieba ("Chinese Reddit"), I've seen the UX of these America services going increasingly similar as the Chinese ones.

And it's certainly annoying.

Looking at the comments, users are even suggesting to use alternative hacks and frontends like Nitter, uBlock which may work temporarily but will ultimately be broken and everyone will lose again.

This is just the start and it will get much worse over time for all social networks.

I said it before but got downvoted at the time [0], now that Jack is gone it's likely going downhill from here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503384

Exactly.

It is the same with YouTube. Neither Twitter or YouTube will change and it will only get worse as I have said for years.

Requiring an account is not a problem - the so called "phone verification" is.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You want to use the product to some deeper degree, you should create an account, period. Don't like it, get off your pedestal and stop using the service. Geez.

Got rid of my Twitter account a couple years ago. Have not missed it once.

On twitter.com, you can read a Tweet without an account by opening it in a new tab.

I find [Nitter](https://nitter.net/) more usable.

Oh No. You don't like twitter. Oh No. Let's start a petition.

I also don't like Twitter. But unlike you, I would consider posting that I don't lke Twitter on HN terrible BANAL.

Is it just me or in the past couple weeks it felt like Twitter actually went the opposite way, allowing normal access again (no popups) like before?

It looks like they're A/B testing some stuff. Clear your cookies and refresh the page. You may get a different experience.

Are we moving back in the direction of walled Gardens ?

Did we ever stop?

Walled garden convent worked real well for the following portals:

* CompuServe

* AOL

* GeoCities

* MySpace

My two cents worth here.

Not everyone. Some people use Mastodon.

I, for one, welcome it when companies that should not exist in their current form take further actions that make their product obsolete.

I don’t like being logged into Twitter on my Desktop, but I often need to search Twitter. Now it appears I need an account to search?

Why do these companies enforce accounts?

I thought they could track you and advertise to you just as easily without an account, using cookies.

Many browsers have rolled out aggressive cookie deletion as a way to prevent exactly this kind of fingerprinting and personalization.

Phone numbers and emails are worth more

You can (for now) open a reply tweet a in a new tab (by clicking its date or time) and that allows you to read some more

suggest retitle: "Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable"

I am grateful to Twitter and Reddit for reminding me to stop wasting time.

I agree. I avoid Twitter as much possible due to this "feature".

It's not like it's useable much better even with an account...

For content that's essentially free (and using the labour of unpaid workers - aka users), what's the reason to complain? Their business model dictates that option and accept it and make peace with it.

I don't have an issue with it as far as Twitter the company goes, but I also don't think things that don't have a public way of reading them without an account should be used as sources on HN. Yes some paywalled content gets posted occasionally, but most of it has a public archive somewhere so others can still participate in the discussion. Otherwise HN will just end up a bunch of different cliques, each commenting on different things that they have access to, which seems to defeat the point of HN. At least to me. I mean, at that point you might as well just have the discussion on Twitter about info posted on Twitter as 100% of people with a Twitter account can participate.

Hasn’t it been like that for 2-3 years at least?

They do it every so often, but usually you could dismiss the popup/overlay by just clicking on the page.

Honestly, this seems like the most entitled thing ever. You want to use someone else's stuff for free but you get annoyed that they want you to have an account.

To be honest, once a company reaches the level of notoriety and dominance that Twitter has, "just don't use it" starts to sound like a pretty disingenuous argument. You can practically see the troll face appended to it.

Twitter sells eyeballs. Do they pay me to visit their site? To tweet?

Is Twitter entitled to my attention? In only narrowly proscribed ways that maximize their own benefit?

Quid pro quo.

> Twitter sells eyeballs. Do they pay me to visit their site? To tweet?

No, they provide you with a service free of charge with the open knowledge that they pay for it by selling your attention.

This is Quid pro quo.

> Is Twitter entitled to my attention?

If you're using Twitter, yes, because you are explicitly entitling them to it

> In only narrowly proscribed [sic] ways that maximize their own benefit?

Yes

I killed my accounts when they gave me the GDPR consent to tracking or close account ultimatum so nowadays I have the privacy redirect browser extension send me to nitter instead when I need to read tweets.

Try using instagram without an account :S.

Great! Twitter is a cesspool and terrible for our society. The sooner it dies off, like quora and medium, the better.

Are you aware that it's free to register for an account?

What's the use case of reading Twitter but not having an account?

Why must I get dragged kicking and screaming into a walled garden just to look at a funny cat video from a friend?

Tell that friend you refuse to click his Twitter links.

Twitter doesn't owe you anything. Play ball or don't.

Is it possible to do that without having to give a phone number?

I tried to join once, several years back. I could create the account, and then use it for a few minutes. But even before posting anything, the account was suddenly locked and I was prompted to give a phone number to unlock it.

I didn't want to do that, obviously, so I ended up with an account that was pretty much unusable.

That's by design

Twitter is unusable even with an account. It's 50% ads, 50% vitriol.

Twitter seeks profit. Twitter is not offering free information to other company. Or it still does but you need to give a bit of yourself to them in exchange.

It's basic capitalism, man. All company needs to make money.

Move to Gettr.

Have you tried clearing your cookies and your local storage?

There also are alternative interfaces such as nitter

I guess there isn't much we can do besides creating an account in 30 seconds and not using it, it's not that bad

On medium, when I logged out and saw what sort of experience the site was giving the readers of the things I worked so hard to post there, I stopped posting there.

Last time I tried to create an annoymous account ,they asked for tel verification. (not exactly when you sign it up but after a few day)

Same. It allowed me to create an account with just an e-mail address, but soon after the account was suspended for "unusual activity" and the only way to unlock it was with a phone number. At this point I gave up.

Had that exact same problem, I emailed customer service via their webform asking what went wrong and a few days later Twitter replied, removing the "suspension"

I think they're just fishing for mobile numbers for targeted advertising identifiers.

After creating an account, you will be prompted to give them your phone number, and afaik, you cannot skip this step

Reply on news.ycombinator.com