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Comment by jevoten | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Juste create a new account every time

No, please, you go first.

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...

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.

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..

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.

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.

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