Twitter has started blocking unregistered users | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has started blocking unregistered users

theverge.com

107 pointsmfiguiere64 comments

This actually pisses me off because for some reason governments, scientists, researchers, and developers all use twitter way too much and i often have check their twitter for info that should be on their own site. Now I cant even do that ?

Twitter is the dumbest site on the internet, and for some reason it has been given an air of legitimacy by all of those groups. I don't get it.

When working at a utility twitter was great for public announcements when there were major storm events or other things people wanted event driven information for. This was done with the understanding anyone with/without an account could see the information. If this change wasn't a mistake, it would invalidate using twitter for that. It is kinda too bad, but also oh well.

Great for whatever tiny proportion of your affected customers knew to look on Twitter.

You put it in the bill, on the website, in pamphlets, it's not rocket science. It's the kind of thing they announce on local news.

I've never had a Twitter account, but I vaguely remember way back when it came out, that people were able to get tweets as SMS messages (IIRC, smart phones were already popular, but maybe not 100% saturation like now, or maybe internet data was still spotty/expensive).

That actually seems like a reasonable way to use it as a broadcasting channel.

Too bad all of these social media sites are in a race to the bottom for most hostile user experience...

Twitter was originally SMS-based. That's the origin of the 140 character limit. Smartphones as we know them came a couple of years later.

I really hate it when government agencies or public utilities do this (or, worse, when they use Facebook), personally. Hopefully, this move by Twitter will finally put an end to it.

Probably you should email them and explain the problem, for starters. That’s not going to help you with the old info, but it can help you and the others with the new one.

It's temporary thankfully.

> Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505

We have no reason to believe that it will be temporary. Musk using the phrase “data pillaged” for what users intended to publicly post shows us how he thinks of his walled garden.

It seems like a bizarre and self-destructive decision, if it is a decision rather than just a temporary glitch. If nobody can post external links to tweets readable by everyone, that destroys a lot of public interest in Twitter. No more news stories linking to tweets. Which may drive the already wary news media off Twitter entirely.

Twitter even advertises itself as a "news" app in the App Store.

The biggest surprise is, I can't believe that Musk would want to stop people from reading his own tweets!

My guess is they did it intentionally and will lift the login-wall after 1-2 days to see how many people were desperate enough to create an account. As a quick and dirty way to boost registered users.

Or it is a legitimate glitch (highly unlikely). Or they lost their minds.

Perhaps a week a month where you need an account would make sense for them.

I've never heard that before, and it seems really doable.

> It seems like a bizarre and self-destructive decision

I mean, well, see ~all decisions made by Twitter in the last year.

Please tell me this means that Twitter links will be banned from HN.

That's the dream

The other day there was a twit on the frontpage with just the text "some people change their mind some times". I'm 14 and this is deep.

You can see when the change happened because all new Twitter submissions are pointing to the /home redirect!

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com

I guess hn tries out the submitted urls?

> I guess hn tries out the submitted urls?

It does indeed. I know that they try to get the canonical page URL in the meta tags, for example. Then your submission URL is changed to that.

Interesting, thanks for the explanation!

Aren't people getting tired of Musk's antics? For a couple of days no links to competitors were allowed, then he reversed it.

A Daily Wire video was deboosted for 20 hours, then he reversed it.

There is free speech, but people are "community-noted".

Now he ruins all existing links and scares away new users. What is next? How about ruining Twitter like eBay and requiring a PayPal account with full access to your bank account?

If this is an anti-AI scraping measure, I can understand, but it should be communicated. In which case: Thanks "Open"-AI for ruining the Internet.

> Thanks "Open"-AI for ruining the Internet.

Shocked, shocked to find that group to have poisoned the well long term for short term gain.

> There is free speech, but people are "community-noted".

Whether or not there's actually free speech notwithstanding, how is community notes antithetical to that?

For a lot of people, free speech means nobody should be allowed to challenge what they say.

eBay doesn't use PayPal any more. You can use a regular credit card checkout like any other shopping site now.

re: ebay

Buyers have had the option to pay directly with credit cards since 2008. Though (most of) the transactions were processed by paypal until 2020, they did not require an account. They've been adding more CC processors since 2015 and diversifying.

Sellers haven't needed a Paypal account since 2015. Though there were still many benefits to having one. Also, since 2020, ebay actually steers sellers into using other methods to receive funds.

Just thought I'd clarify because this change in 2015 finally made ebay usable to me both as a seller and a buyer and I wish someone had told me earlier.

>If this is an anti-AI scraping measure, I can understand, but it should be communicated. In which case: Thanks "Open"-AI for ruining the Internet.

If it makes people stop using Twitter, this is an improvement for the internet.

I’d like to thank Elon for helping me kick the last remnants of my Twitter habit. Meta is going to eat his lunch if rumors are true. Weird position to be in, finding myself rooting for Meta.

> Meta is going to eat his lunch if rumors are true.

Facebook and Instagram have always been more locked down than Twitter.

The other day my IP address was getting banned by Instagram — on both fiber and cellular! — while I was trying to test something logged out.

> Facebook and Instagram have always been more locked down than Twitter.

So did twitter need that advantage to compete?

They’ve been A/B testing this for weeks, I rarely log into Twitter and over the past two months there’s been multiple days a week where I am redirected to the login page for every linked tweet or profile

All those twitterers whose reach has now just plummeted must be real excited about the service they're paying for.

So Reddit will of course do this in the following months. Monkey see, monkey do.

I'm not sure about that. On the one hand, they might mistakenly think that this will drive engagement by encouraging people to sign up for accounts. On the other, a lot of their traffic comes from Google searches by people who are looking for a specific solution to a specific problem, and losing that Google traffic would hurt their metrics even more.

What I could see them doing is something like:

1. Allow anonymous browsing of the default front page

2. If you want to browse through to someone's profile, or browse a subreddit, or maybe even seeing the comments section entirely in some cases, you need to log in

Pinterest did a great-slash-horrible approach, where you can see a result on Google image search, you can click through to it, but if you want to actually see where it came from or get any useful information (like browsing the board the poster put it in) then you need to log in. Pinterest has done a great job of weaponizing their user's posted (or, more commonly, stolen) content against the internet as a whole, and even though Reddit fucks up everything they touch I can imagine them trying something similar.

reddit already blocked being able to select text and use the right click menu to do anything. It immediately de-selects text. The walled garden is coming

I have one Reddit account that allows me to log into it but won’t let me do anything without providing an email address. The account is over 10 years old but the request for an email address happened about the time they announced the new charges for accessing their api. I am not certain there is a cause and effect but there certainly is a time line correlation. I can easily see them blocking unregistered user access which is essentially what a non-email address account is.

Wasn’t making tweets available to see without a login again one of Musk’s first actions upon buying Twitter?

No; tweets have always been viewable without an account. What he did do early on was make it so you could view someone's entire profile without signing in (previously after you scrolled down a bit you'd get hit with the login flow). But then he started restricting things again; first he restricted Twitter search to logged in users, and now the entire site.

You could actually close the login thing by hitting the X button after login or register instead of actually logging in/signing up. Of course Twitter was counting on most people not knowing this.

I browsed Twitter without an account at the time and I don't remember this being the case; there wasn't a way to exit the login flow. These[0][1] Reddit thread seems to confirm that.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/sno1md/login_deman...

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/sod9ej/twitt...

It worked for me exactly as described by GP. It stopped working today.

I don't know if it was requested by Musk, but the legend goes that George Hotz made the login popup dismissable in december last year.

You could always see a direct tweet without login, but his change made it possible to also see timelines or tags or use search.

Which is apparently being reverted now.

I was literally just reading through Foone's back catalog so this is just great. Technically I have a functional account, but like hell I'm logging into it to boost Musk's numbers and feed his ego

foone is in the process of downloading their archive according to some toots on Mastodon. Maybe they'll put some of it online.

Nitter and Mastodon bridges are still operational.

What are the Mastodon bridges? Lua.party went dark for us a month or two ago. Thanks!

https://bird.makeup

https://sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/

I tried bird.makeup; for @google it succeeded, but for my own account it gave me a 500 error and suggested I enable development mode in order to get a more detailed explanation (i.e. the stock HTTP 500 response from the application stack).

Very curious.

From the bird.makeup developer:

https://social.librem.one/@vincent/110633805942411949

"Looks like Twitter is rejecting many bird.makeup requests today. Expect degraded performance until I figure a workaround"

Nitter is not operational.

Yeah, it went down a few hours after making that post.

This is an insult to the open web etc....but Facebook and the walled-garden are not a new thing. The balance that twitter struck between public tweets visible by lurkers but no threads/etc worked....closing it off is a mistake (and this may just be another A-B/broken test etc as is often going on there these days)

Somebody please rewrite that thing over URLs, static site generators, rss and cloud functions. We would loose search (delegated to internet search engines) and perhaps hashtags (at least for a while) but it would be largely the same for the main features and scalable without need of federation.

You would still not be able to edit tweets to some extent, and we would be back to be able to get just the last x tweets for a given user, but for sure we would stop this madness.

There are a lot of tradeoffs to be made, but the core functionality to get things working for the core use cases would still be there.

Instagram does this as well.

I no longer browse Instagram, as I don't have an account.

If Twitter wants to shoot themselves in the foot, so be it.

Screenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmdWe2ydrDYiTL7p3rQPseEw7oV...

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36531477 (85 comments)

I'm looking at the brighter side: no fucking twitter threads any more, the drip-feed of infinite wisdom.

Twitter has gone on and off doing this over time. I believe the last time they stopped was during 2020.

Inevitable with the data scraping for AI issue

But wouldn’t you just make a burner account then?

thats fine because it can be rate limited. the issue was companies collecting massive amounts of data

Thank goodness we've got that crutch to lean on now. Any criticism of a shitty move can now be dismissed by pointing to "AI scrapers".

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