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> my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number.

I have repeatedly heard it said that Twitter does this for every single new account as a matter of course. Twitter wants your phone number, but don’t want you to bounce right at registration.

I would guess it started as a reaction to the many botnets used by companies and countries trying to maximize certain opinions

On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers

> reaction to the many botnets

Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at registration. Delaying it like this, claiming “suspicious activity” is hard to see any other way than how I described it.

bots can get phone numbers cheap, a cost of doing business. Speculation: Twitter wants your phone number so they can correlate you with existing marketing data so they can target you more effectively.

I would agree.

Twitter has massive data on your interests but collects only minimal information about you vs, say, Facebook which has your name, birthday etc etc. I would also argue that Twitter has BETTER interest data than Facebook b/c you are constantly interacting with thousands of tweets a day across multiple dimensions. Facebook tends to be your family and a couple pages you happened to like.

If they get your phone number, they get all of the available "data in the cloud" about you e.g. income, purchasing preferences etc. Cross reference the interests with that cloud data and you have a very precise target profile to sell to advertisers.

Twitter doesn't have the purest of intentions in harvesting user phone numbers, that's true. But the flip side of this, especially when I see people getting angry about apps that ask for phone number, is that it's not like 1990's or even 2000's anymore where you wanted to keep your phone number private. It's trivial to get a new phone number now and Signal makes it easy. There's also VOIP services like Google Voice (not sure if Twitter allows the use of VOIP numbers, though).

Because even a phone number is not enough to keep out bots.

Some VoIP providers do a PAYG model, so you can choose from any number of phone numbers, regional, local landlines or from mobile numbers for free and only pay when you make a call or answer their answerphone.

Now obviously Twitter will send text messages so you never incur a cost from the VoIP provider.

So how does a phone number solve bot activity?

Don’t you have to seed the PAYG account with a non-zero amount of money to initially get the number? Even a few dollars multiplied out becomes a significant spend if it’s a unique number per bot.

Totally free and that's just one VoIP provider. https://www.sipgatebasic.co.uk/

its a cat and mouse game. lately I've found many websites show an error when I put in my Google Voice number for sms verification

I don't know how the implementation works, if theres a way to check for virtual vs. real number, but some sms verification service provider seems to have successfully implemented a filter on Google Voice

If Twitter asked for the phone number at registration, they would have fewer signups due to people opting not to complete their registrations. Delaying the ask for a phone number increases the number of accounts they are able to claim.

The junk calls I ritually get whenever I need to use the app, specifically after about 1 minutes of opening the app while I am reading says otherwise.

Implementing (no opt in) 2FA on sites where that level of security is not really warranted is just a ploy to get data that can be resold in my opinion.

but don’t want you to bounce right at registration.

Instead, they end up filling their database with countless unused accounts created by those who gave up?

What are the odds that they still count those unused accounts towards that crucial user growth metric?

Worked for a CEO that used to require his Customer Service to create new accounts whenever a user would request their account be deleted. You can imagine where the company ended up when the CEO's solution to people wanting to delete their accounts is to replace them with fake ones for the vanity metrics.

Space in databases is essentially free.

... and they can say to investors "we have N million accounts".

Microsoft also do this.

I had to make a new MS account to migrate a 2nd minecraft account. The account has only ever been used from the game launcher, and they have the analytics that the account was created for the migration. But apparently there was "suspicious activity" that violates TOS and they auto locked it, and rather than contact the gmail address I used for the account, they demand a phone number.

Tbf, I'm considering just raising this with the authorities, given a lot of relevant authorities, as not everyone migrating an account will be ab adult, and asking for kids phone numbers seems like a GDPR slamdunk.

Wrangling MS accounts for Minecraft is weirdly hellish. I don't know if they're trying to get people to stop using the Java edition, or what. It feels like they don't want your money.

They already have my money, twice, and the second account was after release so "full price".

Its weird because they have to know that hurting Java edition is just stabbing the most evangelical members of the community. The ones that built it up and developed so much of the word of mouth marketing.

I hear you. I'd have already bought two more if buying the first (post-Microsoft-acquisition—family has two from before that already) copy hadn't been been such a pain in the ass.

My alternative isn't switching to the non-Java edition—it's finally getting around to looking into open source clones. I'm riiiiight on the edge of pushing my kids into one of those instead.

Do it.

> I have never encountered a more hostile website

I think Instagram and/or Pintrest often require you to log in before letting you see even the first picture you click on.

The Reddit mobile website might be the worst. Every aspect of it is geared to making it as annoying as possible to use so that you are forced to download their app (or go find a better 3rd party one).

old.reddit.com still works, and the day they disable it is the last day I am a Reddit user (which I have been since the YC days, as an original disaffected digg user)

On mobile i.reddit.com is probably a better fit.

Not for me, it repeats the same top ~20 posts over and over when I use i.reddit.com

And it's functional like a WAP site in 2001 was functional. It's incredibly barebones to the point of being useless. I reckon Reddit forgot it exists at all.

ditto, I always goto old.reddit.com, I think its tough to adapt to a new UX.

wait till they IPO. They will need to show growth and will erode away old reddit features, with more nags and modals to switch to the “new experience” — so they can boost ad revenue

The push to open web links in a mobile app has already become a PITA

they already do it in other ways like having certain features unsupported on the old reddit app. old reddit also shows a cookie modal that if you click it takes you to new reddit because it doesn't exist on old reddit

They're all as bad as each other, let's not waste time ranking them. They're all shit and shouldn't be tolerated.

And it is SLOW as ass ! I keep thinking I need to upgrade my phone (Xiaomi 8 core - Android) but I just can't do it from a principal point of view !

For my part, Teddit.net completely replaced the official website when it come to browse on mobile.

Quora as well.

I don't believe Quora does this any more. They used to blur the entire page without a login but they relaxed that a couple of years ago now. I do notice that sometimes extended threads still seem to be behind a login wall but it's seems somewhat sporadic and inconsistent.

No it still does force you to login upon loading the page, can't proceed past. I know because it just happened to me.

Quora even manages to break Archive Today, which is pretty good with most other sites' stupidity.

I ended up just making a Twitter account so I don't have to deal with it. Plus I can follow whoever as well.

I did the exact same thing for Instagram. I never post or like anything.

I really can recommend Nitter[0], which also creates RSS feeds so you can just add them to your RSS reader of choice.

[0] https://nitter.net/

Is there something similar for TikTok, that would simplify the interface, give you notifications for a few channels (if that's the right word), with privacy in mind, and all without the need to register there?

This is the solution I’ve been looking for, thanks for sharing it!

There's also https://fraidyc.at/ which provides a browser extension. It's an easy way to do exactly what the OP was doing and for more than just twitter.

It's almost impossible to sign up for an account with Twitter, Google, or Facebook without divulging your phone number with them and then confirming it. They're at the stage where their growth is scrutinized by investors and partners, and they're desperate to prove that their users have real eyeballs that can see ads. Before that, they had no problem with new accounts maybe being bots because it's good for growth numbers. Now advertisers want to know if real people are seeing their ads, or if just bots are.

>I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior.

Pinterest images in Google image search results would like to have a word with you.

Fuck. How much I hate Pinterest for basically being a huge spammer on image search...

Worst part is that when Pinterest launched I even used it for a short while, it was useful for some things (e.g. collecting examples of furniture I'd be eyeing, tattoo motifs inspiration) and over time it just became a huge cluttered unusable mess. And then the spam on image search came and I simply despise Pinterest, ranting about them convinced at least 2 close friends to abandon it as well.

giphy and a couple similar sites are the ones I hate. It's so goddamn hard to get ahold of a gif that's actually a gif, these days. Why does gif search take me to a site that makes it nearly impossible to see a gif? And then doesn't include "duplicates" from other sites that would actually give me a gif.

> The juice just ain't worth the squeeze.

Thus triggering the headline "missed user growth estimates".

In addition, even when fully logged in, having given a phone number, they censor the search function on the site. Not just the tweets you can post - the search - the tweets that they allow to be posted but you are not allowed to read.

This is abhorrent to me and led to me deleting my account after a dozen years of use and double digit thousands of followers.

If you won't let me read it, don't let it be posted.

I will no longer donate my writing and attention to censorship platforms.

Sadly, your outcome is an outlier. The conversion funnel using those hostile tactics is significantly higher than churn in short term, and that's all that matters for someone's promo packet.

> I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior.

Instagram pulled that same crap a couple of years back, and I haven't visited since.

> Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue.

you can no longer dismiss the modal, or in any other way bypass this as of a few days ago. (at least on mobile)

Replace twitter.com from the URL with nitter.kavin.rocks or nitter.fdn.fr .

copying the URL into a new tab usually seems to work.

F5 and clicking close is enough

This is also how I use Twitter. FYI, it still works for me in incognito mode.

If anyone reading this works at Twitter: WHY are you guys making these changes? I'm far more likely to just never use the service again out of outrage then make an account.

It might be difficult to measure this.

verified account status these days is meaningless. most of the truly interesting, unique thoughts come from accounts that are not. this is of course my own take after having been on the platform since 2010.

Do you know what verified means? It does not mean endorsement or "high quality user". It just means an account claiming to be a real life person is indeed actually that person.

Do you know that most old school (circa. 2010ish) users know that, but that new school users thinks it conveys "expert" or "authority"?

I had this exact same usage pattern and the exact same experience as what you describe. Although I refused to give them my phone number, my resolution and conclusion were also exactly the same as yours.

You can use https://nitter.net, or it's another instance, https://nitter.kavin.rocks/. You can view tweets normally as you do it via official twitter site. Moreover, you can have RSS feeds for twitter profiles (main timeline or timeline with replies).

...and to think that Twitter used to be viewable easily without even JavaScript. Once they blocked that I started using Nitter, but most recently it seems that it's been more intermittent and randomly stops showing tweets.

(I've also never created an account there, and only ever used it in "read-only" mode.)

Same experience except I discovered that, at least on iOS, browsing in a private window still works to go to an individual user’s feed. It’s just a matter of time before they close that loophole and I too go away. FWIW, I do pay many of the people I manually follow on Twitter, but through substack or PayPal.

When you scroll on the page the full screen overlay locks you out unless you sign in, just tried on the latest iOS and safari

There is a query param in the URL, something like ?s=21. If you remove that, the login wall doesn't pop up.

When login page is displayed I did one of these: - go to the address bar and just enter it - clear all cookies related to twitter

The latter give me longer annoyance displayed.

As of you account deactivation maybe twitter think you are a bot scanning an account.

I have never created an account either, and eventually added the entire Twitter domain to my uBlock Origin block list the day they booted a certain politician from their platform. Different paths, same destination.

Easiest way to solve this is to disable cookies on twitter.com.

SAME exact scenario here! Twitter is a pile but its doing a good job doing away with traditional media companies so i hope it doesnt collapse just yet.

Yep, same here. It’s infuriating. I’ve been using nitter to get around the modal, but who knows how long that will continue working.

lol LinkedIn used to be famously horrible in dark patterns and auto-following everyone.

And what did it get them? Billions USD from Microsoft.

So dark patterns work.