Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

193 pointsencryptluks2179 comments

In the last few months Twitter has went from letting you browse the site without signing in, to now prompting you to sign in to do pretty much anything. Even something as simple as scrolling down with my mousewheel in Twitter prompts me to sign in. This also happens with official government communication pages. I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media. When requiring users to sign in and agree to the companies terms, wouldn't this be considered a form of preventing access to those communications?

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I fixed my twitter feed by unfollowing anyone the first time something they did resulted in me being upset. Even if it was a like. It's just not worth it. For about a year or two my feed was great.

Then the topics started coming in. First it was infosec and cybersecurity and they were fine for a bit so I tolerated it. But then it turned into just a bunch of hot women saying basically nothing. If before it was some random person talking about finding a bug in X with a fuzzer, next it was someone talking about completely non-technical things like graduating from a university and starting a career in cybersecurity. Later it of course turned into culture war nonsense. So I unsubscribed. I could reasonably see this being a foreign influence campaign it was such an obvious slide from sometimes useful to total nonsense.

Then Twitter started flooding my account with topics and "based on your interests" and of course the feed turned to garbage again and I had to manually unsubscribe from all of them.

Twitter. Please. I'm begging you. I follow arms control people, software people, and government accounts. I've got this figured out. Please leave me alone I was happy.

Edit:

I forgot about the inability to turn of "[Somebody you follow] follows" tweets. Can I disable these? Doesn't appear like I can.

Most of those extras disappear if you switch from the "home" view to "latest tweets". It's the top right icon on the web version, but I suspect the app has it somewhere as well. It gives you only the directly followed content and in timeline order.

I just did that. Thanks for the hint. I'll see how it goes vs the other way. I don't mind Twitter selecting Tweet order from the people I follow, I want to see the most interesting content after all, I just want to be the one in control.

Consider a third-party client. You’ll get a chronological view of tweets from people you follow, without ads.

You do lose access to a few extras (like polls), but the tradeoff might be worth it to you.

Or don't follow anyone (or follow your friends if they think it's a nice social signal). Put all the interesting people in lists and view the lists in https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ instead of the usual UI.

This is pretty much what I do, although tweetdeck can be a little overwhelming at times if you are a casual viewer. Scrolling through this thread it seems that lists are an underrated feature.

I use Twitter to learn about tech, promote my stuff occasionally and nothing else. I have a similar rule for muting accounts that post things that upset me, or otherwise bore me. Same goes for anyone who retweets and likes those posts and it ends up in my feed.

When I am on Twitter, I don't care about US culture war stuff, I don't want to join you deplatforming everyone you dislike, I am not going to send you and your cat good vibes because you need a day longer to finish your Jira ticket. If I see posts like that, I automatically mute to keep me focused on things that matter.

I prefer the mute over unfollowing. I don't want to make a statement about you by unfollowing you (it can be tracked), I just decided that reading some of your tweets cause me more stress than the positive effect your other tweets bring. I don't dislike you, I just don't want to see you moan on Twitter.

It works well enough, but of course, there are some stuff that slip through.

I really hate what is happening to infosec/cybersecurity. There is this huge push to get anyone and everyone into the field due to the talent shortage, and now it is near impossible to find a signal in all of the noise that is marketing, hot takes, politics, "career building", and memes. Twitter is especially terrible.

100% agree, but there has "always" been that push.

What is sad is now there is no creativity, no exploration, no true fun.

the example the original poster in this thread said about "hot girls" in netsec.'

On Twitter, status, identity and gender play a big role vs just knowing content, or actually knowing how a computer "works." Then if you have enough followers, it seems your voice is that big .

I don't know if it's always been "like" that, or not. But, the more accessible something is, the more it seems to be diluted.

I played and broke operating systems and electronic devices, posted about my experiences online, and then it was magical when someone would take my info, add on to it and said they could do x, y, etc - jtag exploration, eprom copying (lol that old), finding root accounts on embedded devices and just breaking stuff.

So that's why I deleted my twitter account a couple of years ago, I never understood it, and I still don't. I just see screenshots of crypto scams and people stating opinions and then having to apologize for their opinions.

I think this is just the current state of the job market today, though.

In order to "be successful", it requires an almost constant engagement with your curated social/online identity. And for many fields, being an attractive candidate for employment means you should have: a blog promoting your side-projects; a Twitter account engaged in networking & self-promotion; a GitHub account linked to your identity; maybe even a YouTube channel; and, of course, a highly polished LinkedIn account.

Sure, if you have 20 years of experience and plenty of industry connections, this might not apply. But for anyone else? Hustle, hustle, hustle + Promote, promote, promote. Personally, I find it pretty gross...

Your problem is that you are looking at your feed. Do it this way: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

> In addition, the tweets will appear in chronological order, with no interpolated advertising nor any other junk, unlike in your timeline.

This is just another step in the rat-race that is fighting the platform itself. It merely prolongs the period before inevitable monetization and signal decay.

And the house always wins.

There is no self-respecting, intelligent way to use Twitter.

> You don’t follow an account because you want to read their tweets. Twitter is “social media”, and following is a social signal. When you follow someone you are declaring that you approve of that person. Whether or not this is what you intended, this is how your decision to follow someone will be interpreted.

This is horrifying. Believable, and understandable, but truly disturbing.

I don't care if people choose to interpret it that way. I can follow people or institutions I want to keep updated on, regardless of my approval of their actions. A more realistic interpretation is that your followers range from detractors to loyal supporters.

That's completely wrong to me. I don't follow somebody on twitter to read what they write specifically. I only know one or two people who write interesting content directly to twitter. I am in it specifically for the recommendations, and for content discovery.

And from a content producer's side, I want random people who follow me to read my tweets. How else could they find me in the first place? Just from retweets from my followers alone? If anything, I think that people are not seeing enough tweets outside of their filter bubble.

If you are going to do it "that way", then don't elect to participate in the TweetDeck Preview, because that nerfs Twitter in pretty much the same manner you are escaping.

It is a losing battle fighting for Twitter against... Twitter.

I have been using Tweetbot with the above strategy for over 5 years maybe longer. Works so wonderfully that sometimes I don't get what the fuss is about ... since I never use the timeline. The lists are easily visible in Tweetbot but I think in the Twitter client it is an extra click or 2 to get there and that makes me not use the official Twitter client.

Thanks this is helpful. I have been fortunate to have figured a few of these out on my own and kept twitter a source of useful insights. This article outlines solid holistic approach, adding lists was a particularly useful suggestion.

I have found that the three best ways to use twitter are: - use Tweetbot or Twitterrific - subscribe to the feed in NewsBlur - use nitter.net

In other words, don’t use twitter’s own website or app.

If you're on iOS/macOS, the new, open-source NetNewsWire[0] supports adding your whole follow feed, individual user feeds, mentions, and searches on specific terms.

https://netnewswire.com

https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

>I fixed my twitter feed by unfollowing anyone the first time something they did resulted in me being upset.

I'm not sure this is a good thing. I agree that you shouldn't be constantly hammering yourself with upsetting things but I don't think the polar opposite of avoiding anything you disagree with or get upset about it mentally healthy either. I think this could lead to you just being overly sensitive to anything that makes you a little emotional. Although, maybe you get enough "disagreement" in you regular life to balance it out.

The best option is to learn how to better deal with you emotions. For younger generations that aren't going to be able to avoid social media as well this might be the only option for them since that IS their entire social interaction in many cases. It's definitely harder though and the way social media berates you constantly maybe our minds aren't able to handle such a barrage.

> I fixed my twitter feed by unfollowing anyone the first time something they did resulted in me being upset. Even if it was a like.

For me, that is actually one of the biggest annoyances with twitter. People who threaten to unfollow me or to block me if I follow or give a like to somebody who they don't like. Granted, it's not a practical problem yet because I only have very few followers, but it still annoys me. One of the reasons I have two accounts is that I want to follow "mutually exclusive" people. Maybe twitter shouldn't even show to other people what I liked or who I follow. Or the culture has to be changed to be more relaxed.

Another thing that is related is that everybody is in their own cozy bubble, and when something from outside seeps in they get worked up.

For those reasons I think the "feed" model of social media is broken, and the "cozy filter bubble feed" even more so. I want the old "social network" model from early Facebook and MySpace back, where you have a page, you can present youself there, and you can see who knows whom IRL.

I understand you feel that way, but unfortunately the political spectrum has gotten too large and too dumb for me to tolerate it any more. I'm a centre leftist who thinks for himself and comes to right wing conclusions here and there. But when a non-trival number of people hold such obviously hostile or ill thought out opinions I'm going to filter them away. Twitter should let people have their likes as likes instead of making them a soft retweet based on data science, or at least let us mute it on a case-by-case basis.

For me it is even more than this. I don't care about people's politics on literally any level. I don't hold strong beliefs either way on anything.

If I want to think about politics I will read an old political science book.

There isn't even any discussion of politics on twitter anyway. It is a weird type of recreational negative infotainment.

I really want to make a profile that I don't delete in a few days but it is impossible. The platform is basically unusable unless one thinks starting the day off with a flood of negativity is a good idea.

I recently learned that much of the unwanted "suggested" tweet noise can be mitigated by muting the following terms:

suggest_recycled_tweet_inline suggest_activity_tweet suggest_who_to_follow suggest_recap suggest_recycled_tweet suggest_pyle_tweet suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet

source: https://twitter.com/stillnotsam/status/1490169409024892928?s...

Anecdotally, I've found that in virtually every social media platform I have used, if I actually make use of the feed preferences like "unsubscribe," "show me less of this," "this doesn't interest me," etc, I agree that eventually I just get flooded with useless content as their algorithms desperately try to find some new fresh content to put in front of my eyes. As a result, the overall quality goes way down and I spend less and less time looking at it. The completely opposite reaction that they were hoping for.

Social Media Companies: It's OK to not have any new content to show me every few seconds. It's OK if I see the same things for a while until new, meaningful content comes my way. Shoving content I don't want down my throat just makes me want to leave altogether.

> Social Media Companies: It's OK to not have any new content to show me every few seconds. It's OK if I see the same things for a while until new, meaningful content comes my way

You are not the one who decides whether it is "OK". Every dopamine microhit they give out reinforces dependence, and is another chance to backhaul surveillance telemetry and show ads. It may fail on you personally, but it seemingly works on the majority of people. Your (our) problem is allowing third party software, bound to its own incentives, to mediate our attention in the first place.

You should try Mastodon, it's exactly how it works.

Thank you, I'll check out Mastodon.

Scrolling through and accidentially touching saying a sponsored Tweet will mark it as an interest of yours so I look into the Interests quite frequently to dispose rubbish I'm not interested in even if they think so.

Same here. Got annoying enough I uninstalled the app. I was able to block Trending and You Should Follow using ublock origin but the ones inserted in my stream are shit. Same opinion.

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter

1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords

2) Not at all

I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) you won’t go back.

Granted, you need an account to use a third party client so the no-login thing is obviously not working there either, but at least you are protected from the constant front end churn in the official clients. This is just one such example.

I find the official website ok, assuming you use the option to sort the feed by time rather than algorithmically.

I’m maybe the only HN person that prefers the algorithmically sorted Twitter feed on the official site?

I really don’t want to see every post by everyone I follow. I prefer to just see the good stuff and get the hell out. Social media is a horrendous time sink.

In my opinion everyone should be doing all they can to spend less time on there.

What worked for me was to move all the time wasting apps off my phone’s Home Screen.

I like it and even the promoted content is quite often relevant (unlike facebook where I had literally 0% ads about anything I cared about in the decade+ I was on it; they can have to best AI people on earth, on paper, but they really seem to know nothing at all about me even though they know everything about me so i'm not sure what those people are doing /rant). I often see interesting stuff, but I do curate who I follow (more and more); I am interested in retro computers, startups and programming language theory/formal verification (including the math). I hardly get stuff that is not relevant to those things. During Covid people talked about the politics (polarised vaxxer/anti vaxxer shouting matches from generally very, very smart people) which I ignored and even unfollowed some who just went to far, but generally it's good content. I really hate the format it has; I wish it would auto-aggregate threads, but I know why it is the way it is and changing it would probably hurt it.

What does happen to every platform including twitter (and those are the people I unfollow the most) is that the 'internet marketing' people take over and use every opportunity to push in some affiliate link or product. Sometimes these products are good and welcome, but mostly they are just uninspired rehashes of other get-rich-quick drivel.

> Granted, you need an account to use a third party client

But that's basically what the OP wants to avoid. It's not a question of creating an account, but giving them your phone number.

> Granted, you need an account to use a third party client

You don't: https://fritter.cc ("A privacy-friendly Twitter frontend for mobile devices")

This is one I use. Very good. It even lets you subscribe to people so their posts show up on the home feed (like what NewPipe does!)

That sounds perfect, do you know of one that works on iOS?

You could build Fritter with Xcode and sideload it through AltStore: https://github.com/jonjomckay/fritter/issues/55

Thanks, I’ll look into this!

Twitter does have a "latest tweets" option in the standard client which spares you from most algorithmic manipulation (reshuffling, trends, showing stuff someone else "like"d), though not paid promotion. Putting all of your "follow"s into a large Twitter list is another way to get similar behavior (which I've used on the mercifully rare occasions where I'm opted into an experiment that messes with "latest tweets").

This option "accidentally" resets every so often.

I use the Brave browser on desktop and Tweetbot on iOS.

I get two completely different timelines on these devices.

I might be in the minority, but I actually really like the new features of the official twitter app. I mostly use twitter as a way to keep on top of interesting things that are happening in my fields, and I find that twitter is pretty good about introducing me to relevant content I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

That said, the reordering of the feed by inferred relevance is kind of annoying when someone does a rant without using threads - often the first tweet I see is like the 4th tweet in the series

thank you for the tweetbot tip -

I am not sure what happend to twitter. However if you just want to browser twitter you can use a nitter instance (there are quite a few public instances).

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

I use browser plugin that redirects me to nitter when clicking a twitter link.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...

Been using this as for more than year. Super impressed and highly recommend.

On rare occasions there's an issue with finding online instances where you reach deadlinks but that's so rare and otherwise it's all perfect.

Here's a version for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...

Definitely recommend hosting your own nitter. Costs next to nothing. I share mine with a very private group chat so it's not rate limited.

> I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media.

They have not.

They have ruled that when a government actor uses social media for official communication, the government actor involved cannot also restrict access to and interaction with that content in ways that they would be prohibit from limiting access to official government communications not made on a private platform (e.g., by engaging in viewpoint discrimination), applying the limited public forum doctrine which is much older than the web.

> I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media

[citation needed]

Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though. They've hit a growth plateau, the users are really fractious, management doesn't understand what they want out of it, and it's the venue for social strife.

It's truly amazing how despite all this twitter is as successful as it is.

Something about _very important people_ sharing their thoughts in 140/280 characters really is the addictive nicotine of the human attention span.

It is suffering though. Hollywood has largely moved to Instagram. What is left on Twitter is musicians and politicians, with their toxic communities. If musicians manage to find a better outlet, Twitter will become unable to escape the stigma of being the cesspool of humanity.

I see mainly propagandists that call themselves "journalists" all in a extremely sad feedback loop of ever recursive propaganda cycle...

All using each other as a "source" to create a false picture of reality

> Hollywood has largely moved to Instagram

AFAIK, they still announce the monkey JPEGs somebody overpaid for on their behalf on Twitter.

They broadcast on all channels, of course, but the actual authors and actors engage predominantly on IG.

Generally network business are very sticky and companies can do all kind shitty things before users leave.

It's not the fact that you can read what the important people are posting. It's the lottery-like hope that they might read your reply.

> might read your reply

Or better reply

I never really got twitter in the past. Terrible conversation flow, hard to find things, so. much. noise for very little benefit. Anything that is "only on twitter" finds its way to HN or reddit anyways, where its much easier to discuss the the topic.

And twitter in the present just seems outright toxic, I can't imagine being a new user on today's twitter.

> Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though.

I have never seen a for-profit social networking site that is immune to this on a long enough timeline. They all degrade eventually. By following what the money wants from users , not what the users want.

> "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

- William S. Burroughs

> They all degrade eventually. By following what the money wants from users , not what the users want.

I wonder what would happen if Twitter said "OK, we are going to charge $5 dollars a year" to use it.

Maybe it would not only be an improvement, but also viable from a business perspective.

App.net tried to do this, and failed miserably.

The Twitter "firehose" (all public tweets, delivered in real-time) is likely very valuable for news, research, and marketing interests; charging for access to the firehose is possibly a workable business model, and by limiting it to public tweets, side-steps many of the issues around privacy and user tracking (since the people writing the tweets are doing so with informed consent, even if individual tweets may be sent in error).

> [citation needed]

The poster you replied to may have been thinking of US court decisions related to the legality of politicians blocking members of the public, when those politicians are speaking in their official capacity [1][2]. That doesn't quite seem to be the same thing as "the public has a right to access official government communications on social media".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_First_Amendment_Institu...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/can-government-officia...

Yes I was but the way that I interpreted the ruling was that thr public has the right to access official government communications from social media.

I assume new CEO, new strategy.

Twitters profitability has always been a contentious issue, they launched their first subscription service (Twitter Blue) last year. My assumption is that they are potentially trying to move towards a more subscription based revenue model. The push back against ads is only going to get stronger and maybe they are trying to get ahead of the curve.

On top of that with GDPR and all the inevitable legislation that's coming, having people "registered" ensures that they have accepted Ts&Cs and can be tracked legally for advertising purposes. Maybe they anticipate not being able to run (particularly) profitable ads for unregistered users.

Finally, with the new CEO he probably wants a quick win on metrics, this could push more registrations, good news to report to the board.

.. more registration, and more active users.

No wonder there are frequent emails from Twitter with the subject "... don't be shy" and "... we miss you".

> with GDPR and all the inevitable legislation that's coming, having people "registered" ensures that they have accepted Ts&Cs and can be tracked legally for advertising purposes

The GDPR outlaws making tracking mandatory to access the service unless it's functionally necessary (as in the outcome can't be achieved without tracking). Targeted ads don't count as "functionally necessary".

> the public has a right to access official government communications on social media.

IANAL, but I do work in the public sector and my customers do have to make data public. This does not mean that anywhere they choose to post links to documents has to help out. It means they need their own site to post documents. It also can mean that documents are offline, but FOIA-able. Frankly, in the small town that I live in, some documents are still tacked to a bulletin board in the park.

So yes, documents have to be public, but no, it is not the responsibility of Twitter to ensure those regulations are met.

That being said, I do agree that Twitter is making "interesting" choices. Just not illegal ones.

On my machines twitter got blocked. That's what happened to twitter. At least for me.

It's a terrible website. Character limit leads to terribly shallow discussions that still need to be split into multiple posts. It's a dumb medium of exchange.

Yeah I've dropped it too. It's full of terrible people looking for excuses to abuse people, awful wannabe comedians making terrible jokes, and never-ending bitching. If FB and Instagram are where people go to show off, Twitter is where people go to moan, whine, and fight. No thanks.

As bad as Twitter is, blogging is essentially dead. Wordpress's free product is garbage that now runs block ads, breaking the flow of content, and Substack is Y Combinator, which to a lot of people is a turn-off given the incubator's historical association with DVFs (domestic violence founders).

Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon the redundancy) can, in a couple of seconds, search everything a target has ever written and find reasons either to reject him (after he has passed an interview) or reduce his offer on evidence of lower leverage. Social media is a fool's game. In ten years or so, the ultimate flex will be not to partcipate.

Twitter somehow survives in spite of this, because (a) it is an unserious format, a fact that lends some plausible deniability, (b) a fraction of people--arguably perversely, but also arguably nobly--enjoy gambling with their reputations, and (c) there is a defeated, demoralized understanding among the young that, given the destruction of the middle-class labor market, not to play the social media game is just as dangerous (it suggests having something to hide) as to play it. So today's savvy young people might tweet a little bit but mostly lurk, or use alternate accounts to post anything that might get serious.

>Substack is Y Combinator

wait till you find out about hacker news

or reddit

I find the character limit a interesting limitation, both negative and positive. On one hand, as you say, it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion in 280 chars. But on the other hand it forces (and allows) people to write interesting things in a very concise format.

Should be noted though that I only interact with twitter trough Tweetbot and with a extremely curated follow list. And in this specific way I find it's a great way to keep up to date on industry specific news and learn about new things (by following people in other industries).

It's far from perfect but I have not found any other way to keep up to date with the thoughts of people I look up to or find interesting. I had high hopes for micro-blogging but it has not caught on yet.

The "uBlock Origin" browser extension blocks Twitter's login prompt and enables you to read posts without logging in.

Upvoted because this answered my confusion about the initial question. I did not see any login prompts pop up where they need not be. :)

Yeah, a lot of annoyances just go away when you use uBlock Origin, and you tend to forget what the web is really like without it.

The default rules don't do it for me. Does it need some custom rules?

It doesn't need custom rules, but there are a variety of filter sets available on the "Filter lists" configuration page which may not be enabled by default. (Try enabling the filters under the "Annoyances" category.)

But first, make sure all the filters are updated (click the "Update Now" button on the filters page if it's enabled).

The annoyances lists only partially work for me. The following rules seem to catch everything:

    twitter.com##div[role=group]:has(div:has-text(/See more Tweets from/))
    twitter.com##div[role=group]:has(div:has-text(/See what’s happening/))
    twitter.com##html:style(overflow: visible !important)

Thanks for this, it fixed it but ofc twitter will soon find out and break it again. Even though, they know majority of internet users don't user uBlock Origin. I feel they'd still come after the few that do :/

This filter fixes the login wall. I don't expect it to work forever, but it works perfectly for now: twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)

I installed "uBlock Origin" and still get a modal login interruption when I scroll down on Twitter.

At least this will take a bit of load off my pihole :)

Does uBlock Origin enable you to read threads?

Opening a thread and scrolling down results in a login prompt being shown; but simply removing the login prompt still doesn't let me load further tweets from that thread, at least not when I remove the login prompt manually (via web inspector).

Oh... i have a friend who actually passes twitter links around and I was wondering why I never see a login prompt from his stuff. uBlock Origin must be it.

  twitter.com###layers > .r-1p0dtai
  twitter.com###layers > .r-ipm5af
  twitter.com##html:style(overflow:visible !important)

you can delete #layers altogether but you won't be able to bring up image modals, etc.

Just in case some of you don't know about it yet, you can browser Twitter without logging in using a nitter instance (e.g., https://nitter.net/). The url are the same just replace "twitter.com" with the nitter instance URL. The interface is clean and smooth, and makes twitter links actually sharable with anyone.

The main problem with this is that Nitter relies on the Twitter API, and they frequently run out of "request budget". In this case you need to switch to a different Nitter instance, but then your link sharing problem is back.

"courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media." - I'd like to know more about this.

I have been bothered often when finding that city council members (and others) use facebook to put info out there, and I refuse to use fbook on most days of the year, and who knows what fbook is doing with the feed/timeline or whatever they call it so I may miss what council person posted while I get distracted by the half-truth politic meme aunt B posted..

Am wanting to find some leverage to force gov stuff to be at least cross posted to a web site, even a wordpress.com or something with an rss so I can actually get notices about whats happening rather than reading later or hearing from someone about what happened (too late to add to discussions)

So, any court case stuff, I'd love to know more about. I thought of showing politicians how to cross post, or start a petition demanding easier access to info.. but I feel those would be feeble attempts to get nothing done compared to a court thing or some new fed regulation or something.

"courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media." - I'd like to know more about this.

Someone should tell YouTube this. They have removed videos of Rand Paul speaking on the senate floor.

I loved Twitter when it was about reading tweets and retweets from people I followed. I don't follow many people/companies, just around 30 or so in total, most of them are either people I know in person or popular companies or products.

Nowadays my feed is a total mess of ads, things somebody liked, things some others follow, uninteresting recommendations, random topics and a lot of bullshit I don't care and are just noise to me.

I already deleted facebook several years ago and not missing it any single bit. I think my twitter account is following the same destiny pretty soon.

Investors pushed in a new CEO/management to optimize for profit per user now that the days of never-ending user growth in social media are over.

In growth mode, investors hand out free candy to companies, companies hand out free candy to you. In consolidation mode, investors want their candy (+ returns) back, so companies start taking away your candy until they determine the minimum users will accept. Many such cases.

Twitter...official government communications?

You would be better served accessing official government communications via .gov sites. This is their purpose.

If you want official bot communications from troll farms, then Twitter is the best!

Right or wrong Twitter has censored at least one government official. It will happen again. The platform has no integrity.

I despise Donald Trump but I think this was a mistake. The failure of January 6 removed any short-term danger Trump presented, so there was no immediate need to ban the guy. At the same time, the use of a dodgy ban to censor an unpopular, failed public figure normalized the concept of private companies deplatforming people for political reasons--something they will use against the left more than the right, going forward--and also gave the world the sense of leftists and liberals (whom most of the country conflates) as cancelistas.

Social media is a huge liability for us on the left, as well as for society at large. Its structure and dynamics serve the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else, but it is associated with its public-facing apparent liberalism, which means that blowback against its failures and heavy-handed actions will diminish our reputation rather than the right's.

> normalized the concept of private companies deplatforming people for political reasons

Maybe there's an earlier example I can't think of, but I don't think this trend started with Trump. I think this trend really started with Alex Jones. Once it becomes acceptable to ban anybody for ideas, then nobody can be considered safe from the chopping block. That was the freedom of speech test that civilization failed.

> the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else

What property of social media makes it so that people on the right are more skilled at using it?

And how can you tell the difference between "people on the right are more skilled at social media" and "better ideas simply win out"? Which one is true if they both explain reality?

Lots of government agencies have "alert" twitter feeds which aren't as readily available on their own web sites; there certainly isn't an easy way to get a comparable aggregation of all of them.

Unfortunately that is not reality. Not even close, at least in my neck of the woods (Toronto, Canada)

Official government sites are largely static and slow to update.

Local emergency services, police, snow clearing, power and utility providers, etc all use Twitter for their most up to date posts anything else is hours or days behind if it gets updated at all.

I don't like that reality. I'd love to change that reality. I can not however wave it away :-/

I switched from twitter to Mastodon recently. It isn't a perfect replacement since the network effect keeps user counts low but I've found it generally scratches the same itch.

I've found the level of connection between people is stronger on Mastodon. YMMV

Government communications really should not be be on Twitter or Facebook. There should be a central site where different agencies can put their announcements. If you don’t have to do advertising and satisfy investors I don’t think such a thing would be very expensive to create and operate.

You can read directly linked tweets or the first few posts of a Twitter page but as soon as you interact with the page or try to navigate elsewhere, you get prompted for a login.

So technically they're not preventing access, but they nag you incessantly after you've scrolled past the fold.

“Nagging” could be measured and defined, IMO.

So they got on par with pinterest. Strange pattern.

Pinterest pioneered it but today most of the popular platforms are doing some sort of login nagging, including Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, etc. I'd say Twitter was an exception and this change doesn't surprise me, sadly.

to pvity I agree it's become a new normal, apparently no company managed to stay afloat in a 'free' model

It's a QoL improvement, exclusively for people without accounts. It's a great move. And no, I'm not sarcastic. I mostly visit twitter when a link is posted here (or other places occasionally), and thanks to that anti-timestealing service, I read the original tweet, the 4 top comments and then I get friendly reminded to close the tab again. Perfect!

They need contests, lotteries and the ability to offer services. They are struggling to grow and monetize. Twitter is a public venue, they need to give people what they want. It's the modern bazaar market except they are not letting people exchange goods and services. Imagine tweeting a pic of something you want to sell and someone pays you (like venmo,cashapp and all) to your handle. Escrow, reputation,etc... managed by twitter.

Imagine donald trump being able to sell his funny red hats to his angry followers. Or the powerball lottery except they buy from twitter and its open to the planet!

I am just saying, they have the money, the tech to get around legalities and the lawyers to skirt it exist.

Either way, to answer the question: new boss. @Jack left.

I could not solve Twitter, whether I used a third-party app, a separate account, or browser extensions.

The solution I came to has genuinely brought joy into my daily life: delete my account completely, and don't look back.

I highly recommend it!

Plugging my fe-alts repo [1], a way to launch your own instances of alternative website front-ends. Includes nitter (twitter) invidious (youtube) bibliogram (instagram) scribe (medium) and teddit (reddit). You can launch and configure them all with a single docker-compose, and since they are your own instances, there are no rate limits. They also support RSS.

My life has substantially improved once I replaced default front-ends

[1] https://github.com/jarbus/fe-alts

I use science twitter and, although I love the community for learning about new programs, fellowships, etc., I have noticed the the twitter alogrithm has been directing me to a lot of more negative science content. I will keep my twitter, but am really going to try to cognizant how when and how much I use it because I notice it gives me quite a negative feeling after being on it.

They also changed how it loads new tweets for logged-in users. Now it shows something like "Show 36 Tweets" and jumps back to the top of the timeline by clicking on it.

They crippled Twitter on the web with these changes because going back to the old position on my timeline has become too tedious. Consequently, I spent less time on Twitter.

I unfollow / mute or move to a 'news and politics' list anyone saying anyting political more than 3 times in a frame of time I notice.

That has been transformative for my enjoyment of the 'main feed'. That and sorting by recent - even if you have to keep re-toggling it.

Is there a Twitter client out there that uses lists, but also lets me dismiss red tweets? I'd like to be able to more easily remove stuff I've already seen, and ideally save tweets for future reference.

I used to use outwit (Twitter being fed into Outlook) for this.

Eventually you must produce income in earnest, which is something twitter has been avoiding as it provides and intimate look into their ability to do so. When you're a startup its okay to be "pre revenue", because once you separate entirely from the VC teat and make a sincere effort to subsist you're forced to sink or swim on your own instincts and that doesn't always pan out and the music stops. These are things that influence KPI data points to bolster or justify a value of twitter itself both to potential suitors but also to investors.

Expect an acquisition soon, or transition of management and ownership structure

Twitter has been on the stock market since 2014?

My mistake, I meant 'acquisition' but was watching the news and typed the word I was reading on screen which was IPO. I've since corrected the comment.

I posted this in a previous thread. here's some ublock origin filters to restore Twitter to logged-out usability:

https://pastebin.com/U9rpcCuq

Thanks for this. A question though, for someone who doesn't do web design. All those are CSS classes, or IDs I assume?

Is Twitter running some minification or obfuscation script on their HTML? Is there any guarantee those classes / IDs won't change later?

Filter syntax documented here https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax

It's despicable behavior isn't it?

There's a "normalization" that it's acceptable for companies such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc to enourage the world to post information on their website, and then block access to casual visitors once they got successful.

It's ABHORRENT FILTH and morally grotesque. They are causing human misery every day by deciding certain people are [outgroup] and do not have the same rights as logged-in users [ingroup].

Reddit, Twitter and Facebook are psychopath companies, and anyone working for them is part of the "ingroup vs outgroup" degradation of society.

I know someone that is high up there. Basically, twitter has struggled to get their ad cost per impression as high as FB or Google. They have ad placement volume but they are not worth anything due to the fact people are signed out. Google does ok with logged out users since the user is searching for something - and ads can be related to that. To make the real money twitter needs age,sex,geo on every impression. Twitter has learned there isn't much point serving pages where they can't monetize it.

I worked around these annoyances with simply blocking all twitter.com cookies. If you don't have an account, this shouldn't be an issue anyway.

Read it somewhere (maybe HN) and it worked quite well.

Every single time I touch Twitter I get this pop up explaining the stupid NFT avatars. I just want to avoid it completely now rather than reach through that layer of grime every time.

Regarding the official government communications/ court order, that was about the politicians, not Twitter. That is, if the politician was using it for official business, they couldn't block people on Twitter. It in no way obligated twitter to host the content. They wanted to, for business reasons. But they could shut down tomorrow (or kick off every elected official and government agency) and be within their legal rights.

Except for the shareholder lawsuit of course.

I want to follow up on all the Mastodon remarks here to also consider trying Pleroma. It's also ActivityPub but much lighter and with more features!

I only interact with Twitter via Tweetbot, so I don't see any of these weird things you describe. I see ONLY the accounts I follow.

Tweetdeck's filters have given me manageable Twitter feeds (I have multiple accounts for different purposes), but I see "The New Tweetdeck" removes these. When that's out of beta I guess I'll need to find a third party app. When I have to log into Twitter itself I'm appalled; I couldn't contemplate using it.

I thought twitter was OK as a link sharing site. But the idea that people would try and fit their entire message in to a a few words was just crazy to me. Literraly limiting the ideas you can communicate to those which fit in to a sentence or two.

Ironically, your post fits fine in a tweet.

bah! you kids and your oversized 280 character tweets! I'm old enough to remember when tweets were 140 characters and we had to push them uphill both ways, but we liked it like that. This generation has it too easy.

I've added code to my RSS reader to rewrite Twitter links as Nitter links instead. No sign in necessary.

https://nitter.net

Fwiw there’s a limited workaround for the issue: if you open things in new tabs twitter does not quora the content you were trying to access.

It’s a pain in the ass though.

It could be considered such, if you file a lawsuit. No one else seems to be, so until it reaches a judge, I don’t know if you’ll see any response.

I'm in Pakistan and on the rare occasions I browse Twitter I mostly see anti Pakistan propaganda by Indians and not much else.

Same is the story with Quora.

I subscribe to all my Twitter followings via Feedly as RSSs. It's a paid service but it's the best one I paid for in a while.

The Based on your likes: and X liked: sections are becoming way too common in my feed. It's getting annoying.

186+ upvotes for a complaint that isn't a thing. Tweet timelines aren't blocked behind logins. Can scroll endlessly

Probably depends on the OS/browser?

Twitter is doing private platform things.

DNS block twitter, news and all other social. Give it a week and you will probably feel much better mentally.

It scrolls endlessly without having to log in, what are you talking about.

Not for me. On desktop Chromium it was prompting me just trying to scroll down the page of any Twitter account.

yes, on desktop, Chrome, incognito mode, not logged in, opening various accounts, President Biden, Whitehouse etc.......scrolls endlessly, even can read the replies on tweets. There is a persistent bottom/top Sign in/up prompt but it's not in the way

I noticed the same thing as OP today. I need to log in. Firefox mobile on android.

I added two extensions that made Twitter 10x better: 1) Minimal Twitter, 2) Bot Sentinel.

Minimal Twitter lets me disable all advertisements, all topics, have a chronological feed, etc. Each of these things is individually toggleable so if you want topics but want to get rid of everything else, you can. It also makes the UI much better.

Bot Sentinel makes it easy for me to unfollow people who are constantly liking, retweeting, or replying to disruptive/misinformation accounts, or when they themselves drift into that area. It's not perfect. Completely normal, kind accounts who happen to be politically active and on the more conservative side will often have a higher disruption/bot score despite never doing anything disruptive themselves. I assume it's some NLP algo in the background lumping them in with the crazy misinfo bots based on some words in their tweets but really who knows.

Consider Twitter as a Shiri's Scissor: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

New management

thank god for nitter

What Has Happened to Twitter?

Answer: They hired a "ruthless" product manager, who believes in things like "we should do things that are good for Twitter, but not necessarily good for the world", and probably wants to be remembered as the PM who took the route that no one was willing to take. (S)he has the data to backup these decisions, like some analytics dashboard that shows very many unauthenticated users browsing twitter. Also wears a tough face in meetings.

Disable cookies for the site and you can browse all you want

On Android the only browser I have found to do this is brave

on Desktop I think all of them but I use Firefox, and just disable all cookies for Twitter.

I think this is one reason why "web3", social media with a decentralized storage layer, could become a thing.

As a user, when I tweet something, I do want the whole world to be able to read it. Without logging in. Ideally via the interface of their choice.

Orbis is a proof of concept:

https://orbis.club/

A Twitter clone that stores the tweets on Arweave.

Nothing about this requires blockchain. There are plenty of Twitter archive sites like nitter.net that are not only open source, but also have plenty[0] of distributed instances on good old "web 2"

[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

Nitter can only archive (and update) data Twitter allows them to access.

For example, you cannot see who liked a Tweet on Nitter.

> "Nitter can only archive (and update) data Twitter allows them to access."

That's exactly what you'd expect from a Twitter archive site. The author's point was that this is the same tech you'd need for a Twitter replacement, and this doesn't need blockchain or web3.

Reminds me of the comment on HN from a few months back "On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script." You don't need blockchain or web3 to fix that either - centralised solutions like bandcamp.com already give the artist 80-90%.

How would a Twitter replacement via Nitter tech help here?

The problem is that whoever builds the replacement can just fuck up the user experience any time in the future. Just like Twitter did.

If enough people don't like the changes in an open source system, they can get together and fix it or fork it. I see a number of others comments mentioning the already working (non web3) solution Mastodon - and that's a great example of this in practice.

To look at it another way, how would web3 actually help here? As far as I can tell it would only make this example worse - a more user hostile UI (faffing around with wallets and keys and whatnot), less decentralised (everything going through one API to interact with the blockchain), more resistant to change (forking blockchains is a big deal and only tends to happen when rich people at the top of the pyramid don't like something), more expensive (gas fees), less privacy (your wallet address being essentially an undeletable cookie), more likely to incentivise divisiveness and conflict (flamewars driven by the expectation of personal profit rather than just likes), etc. etc.

> For example, you cannot see who liked a Tweet on Nitter.

That's a positive feature.

Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org) and the rest of the fediverse (https://www.fediverse.to) are well established if you're looking for a good alternative to Twitter.

With Mastodon, you are still at the mercy of whoever runs the instance you use.

I expect most Mastodon instances will be shorter lived than Twitter. So changing from Twitter to Mastodon seems not like a good deal if I want my posts and the comments and likes I get to stay around.

You can run your own instance. It's probably not easy to do with Mastodon, but there's other server software aiming to be lightweight and easy to set up. Though I guess it will probably not be the normal way to use the fediverse in the near future.

I don't think self hosting will ever become the norm.

I have decades in the IT industry, and I don't want to self host.

As long as the majority does not self host their fediverse content, the fediverse is not a solution of the problem discussed in this HN story.

For that reason, I'd prefer an architecture, where the users don't belong to individual servers, but a transparent fediverse, where a few thousand servers disappearing won't even get noticed.

It would be important to ensure the integrity of the software running on such servers, though, perhaps via regular check of the binaries also at runtime.

Storing the data on a decentralized storage layer seems to achieve all of it and the tech is here now.

It really isn't. IPFS and the likes have to get pinned and pinning for federation still has issues. You'd need a descent amount of users and volunteers to keep something afloat.

Arweave does not need pinning. You pay upfront for 200 years. 1GB is about $10. So storing a tweet is about $0.000001.

And what happens if they shut down? I might as well pay Google $10 for 2TB.

Arweave has the same mechanics as Bitcoin: It is based on financial incentives.

While Bitcoin miners calculate hashes to get transaction fees, Arweave miners store data to get those fees paid upfront for storage.

So the question "what happens in they shut down" is similar to asking "what happens if Bitcoin shuts down?". It is not a single party the suddenly can decide to "shut down".

Arweave is not Bitcoin. It isn't even close.

This vision doesn't require blockchain whatsoever.

Mastodon[0] is a successful decentralized social media without the use of blockchain. Because of federation, users can like and reply to posts from other instances, and other people will be able to see it.

I can even follow a PeerTube channel and have recent videos show up in my feed, because of the ActivityPub federation protocol (a W3C standard).

Best of all, it doesn't require the linking of a crypto wallet and the payment of cryptocurrency to interact with people.

[0] https://joinmastodon.org/

Using Mastodon just shifts the power from Twitter to whoever runs the Mastodon instance you use.

The Crypto wallet you use for Orbis can be a fresh, empty wallet. No need to put any cryptocurrency in it.

I disagree about the power shift.

Twitter holds a complete information monopoly over all its content. This means they can make hostile changes, such as forcing a login in order to view public content, without much repercussion. If Twitter were to ban me, I would be completely cut off from all of my friends on Twitter. You can't easily move away from Twitter, because Twitter is a huge entity with swaths of content and users already on it.

On the other hand, Mastodon instances have only a fraction of that power. They have control over information only that is on their instance, in a world that contains thousands of such instances. They are tiny entities holding control over small fractions of the content available in the fediverse.

If a Mastodon instance started acting hostile, people can relatively easily move away to a different instance. If my Mastodon instance were to ban me, I can sign up on a different instance (or host my own) and still keep in touch with my friends; unless my friends used the same instance and the owners broke federation with the instance I moved to, at which point a lot of people would probably want to move away from that hostile instance immediately.

I recently ran across twtxt[0], which appears to be fully distributed, in the same way .plan files were.

[0]: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

Just finished setting up my twtxt account and searched HN to see what the life force looked like - and here is a fresh comment!

It took a little jiggering to make it part of my workflow within Sublime and my personal site, but I'm really liking it. I avoid Twitter completely - haven't touched it for a few years. This system allows for a NOW page on my personal site, a stream for communication, and even a private channel for short projects.

Go twtxt!

Making a Twitter account takes less than a minute to do and is free. It's not a big deal.

Edit: I'm not seeing the issue in an incognito tab.

> takes less than a minute to do and is free

You are also supposed to read and accept 13k words of terms of use. And I'm not even counting the ~50 pages of "Twitter Rules and Policies [...], which are part of the User Agreement"; most of which contain a couple thousand words.

If you are just browsing twitter like the OP, you aren't going to be doing anything against either of those.

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