All Twitter content seems to be behind a login wall today | Hacker News Reader

All Twitter content seems to be behind a login wall today

masto.ai

116 pointsmg99 comments

This effectively breaks 15 years of links to tweets posted all over the Internet. Just another reason to keep the web open.

This takes Twitter to the same level as Facebook, a website that only lives of its internal posts, where no young people open accounts, and where eventually the only ones who post are the ones who opened an account in its time.

It's already having some effects on my googling, just like the reddit blackout.

I wonder if recent Reddit/Twitter events might have finally given blockchain a real problem to solve.

The problem is centralized entities can take away access to data you generated at anytime. They can also ban you for whatever reason they want. So if your livelihood depends on these services, it can cause a huge disruption.

If Reddit/Twitter's data is stored on a blockchain, then anyone can build a client to access that data and Twitter would essentially have much less power.

The problem I see is that blockchains are too slow, and too expensive for mass products like Reddit and Twitter. Heck, I'm sure it's already a huge challenge for centralized databases to have as much data as Twitter/Reddit - let alone a decentralized one. Maybe at some point, we'll have a quantum computer breakthrough and blockchains performance is solved for use cases like this.

What if I want to delete one of my own tweets? I do this regularly.

People can archive data from Reddit/Twitter, and Bitcoin/Ethereum... nodes can prune old blocks and stop serving them.

When people say "blockchains are a solution in search of a problem" they aren't kidding huh? We already have decentralized Twitter, it's called Mastodon (we have more of those as well).

it really hasn't.

I still have a few accounts I glance at from time to time. Hockey, Game Devs, Artists, etc. who haven't migrated away despite everything, so this is kinda obnoxious.

I created some Redirector (https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/) rules to redirect Tweet and Twitter Profile URLs to their HTML embed equivalents.

Should be able to just import the rules and it seems to work alright with some caveats.

  * I have no idea if this will continue to function.
  * I've only tested some random links from my Discord and Slack groups.
  * Profile links only show the most recent 20 tweets.
  * Tweets will show quote-tweets, but no replies (though maybe that's a good thing).
  * Obviously won't work for mobile.

https://gist.github.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a919cf9720f9ae...

ty!!!!

This worked for a couple of days but it doesn't now

Login wall for me. I'll give it a day and then delete the dozen or so remaining twitter accounts I had bookmarked and checked in occasionally. I did delete my account a few months before Elon took over, guess we are watching its final days.

It isn’t final until people actually leave there. As long as there’re users. Otherwise not gonna happen :(

yeah still waiting on this so called twitter sudden death as people keep hyping up.

"this isn't an airport you don't need to announce your departure" - aristotle probably

twitter's a bit of fun. i'm loving this wrestling match hype between zuck and musk.

and watching wagnerPMC storm moscow was no snoozefest

Un/fortunately, they didn’t storm Moscow. It was rather interesting to see them advance, however. Though whether this was a distraction to hide something else (say, “banishing” a PMC closer to the border) or a genuine coup has yet to be seen.

I stopped using Twitter months ago. Stopped Tweeting and only visit the site if I need to follow a link. I never announced it. There was a trend of high profile Tweeters announcing their departure, and some may well have relapsed (I don't keep track) but it would be interesting to see how many people just stopped bothering with the site and all its drama.

you're announcing it to me right now, must I quote Aristotle again?

if twitter is dead to you, let it rot and die in the corner. free yourself from caring about its outcomes

It probably is polite to announce when you switch communication channels if you have any kind of audience.

With the notable exception of Digg, big-bang deaths are rather rare for social networks (and even Digg's wasn't _quite_ as big-bang as people tend to remember); they drift slowly into obscurity. While there might be a triggering factor that could be remembered as the cause of the decline, it's generally hard to pinpoint a time of death.

Very few sites die entirely. Usenet, BBS, AOL, nethack.alt.org, AskJeeves, MySpace, and Facebook all still exist. That doesn’t mean they remain culturally relevant.

> AskJeeves

dogpile too

Ah, Dogpile. The search connoisseur's choice before Google.

Users will remain, they will just represent a much more narrow slice of society than before. They will be smaller in number and Twitter itself will be less of an 'approved' service — I feel like we already see less promotion of it on TV and on news sites.

Well, depends how you're defining 'final', really. Like, one way of looking at it is that Livejournal hasn't had its final day yet; there are still people on Livejournal. Another is that it had its final day in 2006 or so; from that point on (at least in the English-speaking world; I think it stayed relevant in Russia for longer) it was kind of a legacy semi-zombie social network.

Twitter's whole thing is its outsized cultural relevance for a rather small user base. If that goes, well, arguably, it's had its final day. This particular change seems like it might go a long way towards ending its relevance; an awful lot of people used twitter only via clicking links from news articles etc, and never actually had an account.

Nitter mirrors usually offer RSS feeds (e.g. <nitter>/<user>/rss) which is how I've been keeping up with a few accounts for years now.

We'll see how long the feeds continue working for.

Those stopped working for me last night.

Weird, mine have updated since 3hrs ago.

nitter is having all kinds of issues. My personal instance decided to go into a restart loop and I had to kill it.

rsshub still seems to work.

Yeah Nitter is now completely dead unfortunately.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/919

What in the world gives you the impression Twitter is in its final days? Naysayers have been saying Twitter fill fail any day now for about 8 or 9 months now.

When people talk about Twitter dying, they are talking about its relevance. No one means "Twitter.com will redirect to a domain squatter".

E.g, despite it being dead since the redesign in 2010, you can still go to digg.com right now, create an account and all. Fark.com still exists. Slashdot still exists. None of these sites are relevant anymore though.

While I have been and still am a fark user, I don’t know that it’s ever been widely relevant.

Baffling decision. The fact that tweets were, by default, essentially public and easily linkable was a big differentiator between Twitter and other social networks (particularly Facebook) and made them very attractive for things like news sites to link, vs, say, Facebook posts.

You can use this opensource service to at least read other people's tweets:

https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/about

See an example: https://nitter.net/elonmusk

god bless nitter.net

Nitter is also broken right now. I'm sure they'll work around it.

There's no trivial way to work around it.

Without API and without web access, where are you going to read the tweets from?

The only option left is unofficial API stubs, which essentially scrape the web requests, but those also will require a login, so the high activity will be easy to spot and block by Twitter.

Unless they have a whole network of accounts. That'd work but it's work to do.

There's a nitter fork (in the sense of 'PRs not merged yet') that uses the admin's burner accounts to retrieve tweets, and it still works. But I think it hits rate limits fairly often.

edit: Well, worked. Seems down right now, possibly because it was the only instance that still worked.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/919

I suspect that this is going to deter news sites from using tweets in articles. Imo this is probably a good thing, but what twitter thinks it well get out of this isn't clear to me.

I've recently noticed a few places screen-grabbing tweets rather than embedding them. Presumably for this reason.

Bad move on Elon's part. Many people deleted their accounts when he took over, but some portion of them are still "addicted" to twitter and browse it anonymously. Thus still generating views and revenue for the company. Once the login wall comes up, most of them are leaving for good, as their egos will not allow them to create another account.

I hope you realize the login wall was something that came up before musk aquired twitter. one of the first things he did was remove it.

I am not a prolific twitter user. I am one of the "anonymous lurkers" I mentioned in my original comment. But your observation makes sense, as I only started visiting Twitter after Elon's takeover. The removal of the login wall must have been the reason.

Yep it used to be you could view individual tweets but nothing else. Elon came in removed it and made everything free to view. A couple months ago I noticed they went back to the old system. And now you can't even view individual tweets. Embedded tweets still work I guess

I think there must have been some kind of nuance beyond that, at some point. The number of people claiming that they couldn't view twitter links — and I'm sure this started pre-Elon — suggests to me that, like someone else has mentioned, there might have been different behaviour for 'anonymous' vs. 'not-logged-in' viewers.

The main difference to me was that I could see the "trending" tweets and additional "recommended" tweets after the comments on the one that I was reading. That started post Elon. There was also the login popup that was trivial to X out that seemed to appear more frequently after Elon took over.

The pre-Musk behaviour was fairly straightforward to my recollection: All logged out accounts could view a single tweet and some percentage of the replies. They could also view a profile but, similarly, scrolling down a certain number of tweets triggered the modal.

It was a good compromise.

That's little consolation now that he's, apparently, put it back (possibly 'worse' than before).

It never worked like this, though. You could always view a single linked tweet/thread; it was if you tried to view a timeline that you ran into difficulties.

Should it be legal for politicians and institutions to post in a walled garden?

Of course this could be Musk trolling us for 24 hours to increase engagement and then revert the decision, leading to even more engagement.

I can't see why it wouldn't be _legal_, but it would certainly seem less _desirable_ for the politicians concerned.

Not everything has to be illegal just because you’re annoyed by it.

Maybe contact the politicians you’re interested in and make them aware of the problem. Get them to swap to Mastodon or even better, a blog/website.

> Not everything has to be illegal just because you’re annoyed by it.

No, some things should be illegal because they're public officials using semi-private communications channels for public communications in the course of their work, that the public won't have access to without agreeing to a TOS with that private company.

Well, Donny's long awaited come-back to twitter may be longer delayed then.

I can't see this decision standing. The traffic drop is going to be immense. Advertisers, already wary, will not like it yet again.

Plus, a long weekend in the US is starting. Lots of leisure time to figure out alternatives.

Hasn’t Trump completely abandoned Twitter, and very much prefers his de-federated Mastodon instance? I’d say you can’t put an indefinite delay on for any longer than, well, indefinite.

That aside, you’re absolutely right. It’ll be interesting to see why Elon would hide away his money sink, especially when they made such a big hoopla about removing this very thing from the beginning.

> Hasn’t Trump completely abandoned Twitter, and very much prefers his de-federated Mastodon instance?

yeah, he's been pretty steadfast in rejecting Twitter. maybe if truth dies or something, but...

I thought it was just me. Terrible decision

Didn't George Hotz do an "internship" at twitter to remove the login wall? Rip twitter even more.

I think he was supposed to fix search.

Probably a way to sell data to AI labs. These "free" social networks have finally found another way to make money from their users besides ads.

Hmm, I wonder if this is just an experiment, a bug, or something permanent.

Posting twitter links to places like HN will be a no-no, since a good portion of the people can't view the content. Will that stop people from using Twitter to inform?

Tweets will still be posted but there'll be an accompanying archive link as with paywalled articles.

Posting Twitter links anywhere should've been a no-no long time ago with the login popups. Before nitter I just skipped them entirely.

Unfortunately, many things posted to HN are not on the Internet. Paywalled links, links to articles where the publisher does the idiotic IP-based regionalization and denies access to those not in his "region", etc.

I believe HN should make a rule that only links to things on the Internet are allowed. If it's not readable by anyone with an IP address, it shouldn't be on HN.

Agreed; clicking on a paywall link is such an unedifying experience. Direct links to paywalled content should almost always be avoided, not just on HN!

> Hmm, I wonder if this is just an experiment, a bug, or something permanent.

Twitter appointed a new CEO earlier this month. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the new policy from the new leader.

Ars Technica ran a story yesterday detailing her plans, which include full-screen video ads with sound.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/linda-yaccarinos...

Reddit is essentially the same. Default ordering of comments is “best”. That means that many comments are not displayed at all. You need to log in to be able to change that. I only noticed that after deleting my account.

For now you can still use old.reddit.com.

Good. Maybe they'll start blogging instead.

I see it as a chance to wean off of twitter.

Yep.

And finally, now please break the login-system, too and there will be silence.

I came here to post the same. It seems Musk has finally pulled the plug...

Nitter is still working, although searching for users seems to have stopped working you can still use the tweet search tab or manually type a twitter username on the end of the URL.

List of nitter instances:

https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances

They unpredictably say "This nitter instance has been rate limited", you can try a few from the above list to find one that is getting less traffic.

Does Nitter have the trending tab? I couldn't find any but found this elsewhere. https://twitter-trends.iamrohit.in/

Update: nitter has stopped working

Interesting opportunity for TikTok (which [currently] allows non-logged-in access) to start allowing text posts.

Looks like it occurs in private windows as well. In the past, twitter set cookies to distinguish between visitors who never had an account, and visitors who have an account but are logged out. Publicly visible posts were displayed to no-account visitors, but blocked from logged-out visitors.

Fun. I tried to create an account again but cannot get passed the captchas. What a joke twitter has become.

for the desperate: https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-...

from https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ and https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a91...

No longer works

People are trying to find a method to here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/919

(check out https://rsshub.app/twitter/user/elonmusk)

For the very desperate, this is still "working" for some reason: https://tweettunnel.com/ggreenwald

At the end of each snippet is a t.co link with a /{tweet id} at the end. You'll have to click on it and copy the status/tweet id from the url after the "%2Fstatus%" part. Paste that number into an embed link: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16763153424...

... And nothing of value was lost.

Silence, at last.

Oddly enough tweets that are age/content restricted do not get the login wall, so while you cannot see the age-restricted tweet, you can still see the replies.

Login walls, paywalls, etc., are fine, I just wish google would not index these sites. There has to be a cost for every move. This whole have_and_eat(cake) needs to stop.

Can we bring back blogs now?

They've always been there! But they're not the new thing as they were more than a decade ago :)

I have no problem with this as I don't use the twitter.

Same here.

So a return to the status quo then?

I don't remember the ability to view any individual tweet being locked behind a login screen before - timeline scrolling yes, but not this. This is a new approach.

This is a hard stretch. That login wall is easily dismissible. Haven't come across any tweet, even content that could be considered "premium" like Tucker's long form video commentaries, that is not available behind the login wall.

EDIT: I was wrong. This was the behavior not so long ago, seems like any link now redirects to homepage.

not for me, it redirects to another page entirely

How do you dismiss it? I just get redirected to /home from everything. Even if I click the "X", I just end up on the frontpage instead of the page I wanted to see.

(It's different from the "please login" in-page popup that came up before occasionally. That one indeed was easily dismissable)

Not on my phone, click a link to something somebody shares, no way to get away from logging in.

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