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Comment by goldtownjac | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly.

Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service that is hostile to them_. Especially because you and I both know that these workarounds aren't going to work forever, and soon enough you'll be scrambling for another hole in the wall.

Cut the cord. You don't need twitter. You don't need reddit, which has been employing similar patterns recently. The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Take some time to reflect on your relationship to this technology and the people/ideas whose presence in your life/mind is dependent on it.

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> Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service that is hostile to them_. Especially because you and I both know that these workarounds aren't going to work forever, and soon enough you'll be scrambling for another hole in the wall.

Network effects are real.

I only use Twitter to read posts that someone linked to. I would prefer these posts to be hosted elsewhere, but I have no control over that, just like I cannot control the messenger apps that others are using. I currently have three options for communicating online:

1) use the platform/protocol that someone else picked, directly or through some other tool

2) convince them to use the platform/protocol that I prefer

3) stop sharing content with that person

I think the only way out of this is regulation that breaks up walled gardens. Companies have no incentive to open up their gardens to competitors, so we may have to apply some force.

> Cut the cord. You don't need twitter. You don't need reddit, which has been employing similar patterns recently. The internet exists beyond these walled gardens. Take some time to reflect on your relationship to this technology and the people/ideas whose presence in your life/mind is dependent on it.

The cost for that for many people is losing connections to friends, family and other contacts, unless their peers migrate at the same time. That Signal moment was a bit like that when many people moved from Whatsapp to Signal. My wife was finally able to get rid of Whatsapp without losing contacts.

There's a lot of content that only exists in these walled gardens. It's easy to say "don't watch that movie if you don't like it" but Twitter has a lot of information that you can't find anywhere else. Just like YouTube which can be a bad place but still has a lot of documentaries and valuable content that's only there and makes it worth jumping through hoops for.

There is vastly more great content out there than you could ever consume. Avoiding Twitter and or YouTube is hardly a major sacrifice.

This is something you don’t believe until you do it. I can only recommend to take the step to cut out these platforms from your digital life.

More importantly, don't let this happen again.

How many times does someone have to fall for the same scam before they deserve some of the blame?

Only support services that aren't blatantly trying to buy their way into becoming a monopoly and abusing their locked in customers.

> Only support services that aren't blatantly trying to buy their way into becoming a monopoly and abusing their locked in customers.

There are no such services. Everything that gets popular goes for abuse and lock-in and often they only start with that after they already have become wildly popular. There is nothing you can do against it.

I think OP is referring to Federated social networks like Mastodon and others.

The problem with Federation is that it can be switched off at any time. If you are on a federated server you are just as depend on them as you are on Facebook. It doesn't fundamentally solve the problem, at best it just delays it a little bit.

I don’t think this is understanding the strength of network effects. For people who are actually using Twitter for communication, networking, or being an influencer they can’t leave.

Gettr really drove this point home for me. Here’s a right wing Twitter alternative that’s actually not bad UX wise, it’s been recommended by big names including Joe rogan, yet what’s happened? Most conservative influencers have stayed on Twitter and complain on Twitter about Twitter censorship. They mirror their posts on gettr with some tool but that’s it, Twitter is still primary.

If you can’t even get these people to leave Twitter, that means something.

Twitter has barely changed for me the last 10 years. I only access Twitter from Tweetbot on my phone. Should Twitter decide to deny Tweetbot API access I’m pretty sure I’ll quit Twitter all together. Cause I don’t understand the web version or the native app.

> Should Twitter decide to deny Tweetbot API access I’m pretty sure I’ll quit Twitter all together.

Based on their new API efforts it's going in the different direction of actually making more third party apps possible. They just added a bookmarks endpoint that only used to exist in the official apps and not in the API, now everyone can implement that.

I use it because that's where everyone went after the Tumblr exodus. Many of them will post to other places as well, but Twitter is the only place where I can follow all of them without jumping between sites.

> The internet exists beyond these walled gardens.

Barely. The amount of content that is locked in Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Co. is enormous and I have never managed to find anything that can remotely compete with them. Worse yet, most alternatives are just clones of those services, they don't really change anything fundamentally. If they would ever get successful, they would go down the very same path. See imgur, which started as an image-sharing-but-good site and is now just another site trying to force you into their mobile app.

At this point I think the only way to solve this is legislation that forces those companies to open up the data and not wall it away. GDPR already did that for users personal data. The upcoming Digital Markets Act will force messaging services to interact with each other and maybe the walled gardens will be the next target.

I agree with you about content but maybe disagree about the cure. Legislation might not hurt, but if an alternative became popular that was more or less a clone, except it was federated or decentralized, it would also be enough.

The "regular" web and email get a lot of criticism for various things, but they can be thought of as federated platforms people adopted. They're the glue that makes these other things usable.

I'm not advocating for anything in particular, but if you could get enough people to start using a federated alternative, I think it would be enough.

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