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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

They need to stop ruining the experience for those of us without an account. Everyone was using Twitter as basically an open bulletin board and then they go and make it visitor-hostile. I look at ads either way.

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I have an account and every time I hit that signup/in wall I just close the page rather than sign into my account

+1, for anyone who doesn't stay signed in it's a "go away" signal - which is ironic because those people are more likely to sign in if they are allowed to read more.

You can get a much better experience by using nitter[0]. Easiest way to do it is by replacing twitter.com with nitter.it (or some other nitter instance) in your link.

0: https://nitter.net/about

I use it but it's slow at times. Other than that it's great.

It always loads much faster than Twitter for me. Maybe it depends on which instance you're using, if nitter.net is slow for you, the other popular instances I know of are nitter.42l.fr and nitter.kavin.rocks; these two have been around for some time and been stable, you can settle on whichever one is fastest for you.

Nitter is so much better. It successfully loads every time, is faster, and has less junk.

Question is: why is it allowed, and will Musk continue to allow it.

This is literally THE reason I don’t use twitter. Somehow my 2FA is associated with an old phone number and I’ve tried once or twice to fix but… bleh, at least let me read.

On Android I use Fritter. You can even follow people and get notification without an account. Great for following news and feed type accounts that are only on Twitter.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jonjomckay.fritter/

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Someone told me a while ago that if you hit "log in" a close button appears in the top left, and you can close the dialog without signing in.

Absolutely. Too many people (especially managers) have Monthly Active Users drilled into their heads and can't comprehend that there is a bottom line ($$$) that is the real KPI.

It's possible that the reduced usage from a bad experience costs less than the gain from de-anonymizing visitors. Because they are under FTC consent orders, their ability to connect shadow profiles to anonymous visitors for improved targeting may be limited, and they are willing to piss you off because that's more effective from a metric perspective.

Not saying it's the right way of doing business or that it won't bite them in the butt... but they definitely don't "need" to do it to save the business if the analytics point otherwise.

I agree, it is super annoying. I can see why they do it though. They want to be able to serve you more lucrative ads, and they want to be able to count you as an active user. (Now that I think about it, they probably count anon visitors somehow, but IDK how they would count them without massively overcounting.)

There are a few ublock filters that solve those issues. Alternatively, disabling cookies for twitter used to get rid of a lot of the nagware features since they would only pop up on the 'second' interaction that would cause a page load.

That implies I care enough to read it. I don't. And neither do the majority of people who don't have to use it for work.

Twitter seems to have become a cool kids club and now everyone is panicked that someone bought there it was in.

not sure if you have seen it today but they added a "x" (ability to close) the nag screen that shows up after a few seconds while browsing not logged in, and the main page now goes to a generic feed of news posts and cat videos instead of the signup page. was probably a few clicks in the a/b testing system.

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