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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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