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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

Most excellent first step.

Now please get rid of the 'have you signed in yet?' popup, and you'll be back to being an actual useful resource on the internet.

[edit]: and in the meantime, I'll keep on using nitter.net

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(and if you DO want me to sign up, do not mandate a telephone number; you don't need it, I don't want to give it to you)

Oh they don't - you can sign-up without one, and iirc, Twitter doesn't indicate anywhere that one is needed. But all new accounts just happen to exhibit suspicious activity and are blocked until submitting a phone number. This is all mere coincidence, and certainly not an effort by Twitter to conceal how much personal information they want for an account.

I agree, but I do find this take funny considering the history of Twitter.

Right, I remember you used to be able to sign up for Twitter solely with a phone number (and post tweets via SMS, a feature which I used every so often). You can see that if you look at an old archive of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20061203201128/http://twitter.co... (heh, also gotta love that the site was so small they can just show some random recent tweets and users right on the homepage)

This was in the days before legit smartphones so running an actual "twitter client" was out of the question. Of course that all quickly changed with the advent of smartphones like the iPhone.

Plus the "it's better in the App!" popup on mobile, and the requirement for Javascript just to serve 280 characters...

And when I click the "open in the app", it doesn't even work.

Reddit has the same bullshit problem. The website works perfectly fine on mobile, except it keeps trying to force you to use the app for absolutely no reason, and the app often works poorly.

Not to mention the iPhone App made by Reddit is that one giant sucking sound of your privacy.

In order to begin being an actual useful resource on the internet they have to, among other things, get rid of the feature where you have to click "load more" 10 times to read the small fraction of replies to a Tweet that Twitter does not censor completely.

If a tweet has 100 replies, it generally only shows the most pro-neocon/PC response, and you have to click "Load More", then it will show 1 more response, you keep clicking "Load More", and eventually there's no more "Load More" button, and you've only seen 5 responses. Where are the other 95 responses that Twitter deemed to be wrongthink?

Why would anyone use a website like that when you're only getting curated propaganda? It's like sitting in front of the TV and only watching ads with no actual content.

That "load more" is extremely annoying. I believe it's an a/b test because I only see it with one of my accounts. It seems to get triggered when the http referer is from another social site. I found you can get rid of it by re-opening the link in another tab by control-clicking on the tweet timestamp.

You don't think the shows on TV are curated?

This is not a real problem as tweets and their replies are all publicly available. Likely brought on yourself by using ad-blocker or something triggering it (which Twitter has every right to try to encourage you to log in or use the site more regularly)

What's in it for Twitter?

If they want to be a walled garden, they can be a walled garden. But no embeds, no free traffic from all the news sites and blogs. No free traffic from google. You can't have the cake and eat it too. All of this scumbaggery with serving X to google and serving Z to the humans has to go. It's internet cancer. And I don't use that word ligthly. It's not just Twitter that does this, instagram, facebook, etc. all do this. It should have been regulated away a long time ago and harshly fined because THAT is what makes the current internet not open. Internet is about free(ish) access to information, and like it or not, Twitter is the current "breaking news" creator and aggeregator #1 (by orders of magnitude). If an adult voluntarily posts content to twitter, content that is intended to be public, an twitter tries to prevent public access to that information, a reaction to that should be disgust, not saying "what's in in for twitter". What's in it for ME. Me. Me. Me. I. My family. Maybe my friends. My company. Everyone else can go fuck themselves, right?

The situation with Ukraine and a lot of news and media breaking on twitter are a current, glaring representation of how twitter makes money on people's suffering... but it isn't the first and sadly won't be the last, because of people like you.

Maybe they want to improve their fingerprinting heuristics by providing an illusion of anonymous communications over Tor? /shrug

This a million times

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