Twitter isn't showing tweets unless you're logged in

The garden wall just grew a few more feet.

from the vantagepoint of Twitter, the glass-half-full view is it will force idle browsers to serve up their data by forcing them to create accounts. But the glass-half-empty view they seem to be ignoring is the out of sight, out of mind principle. The less exposure to the larger public conversation, the less we will think about twitter, the less we will wonder what people are saying on it.

On mobile it's really a hassle now. I was in an app that wouldn't let me decide how to open a tweet link. So it kept opening the tweet in a web view, where I'm not logged in. The usual "open in twitter" banner with button kept showing, but when I tapped it it would open the twitter app and immediately bring me to a new user registration page. Closing that just brought me back to the feed. No way to open the tweet except, I suppose, logging in again through the web view. Great UX.

There's a certain lack of predictability for users, both viewers and content creators, that may be disquieting for both. And advertisers being unable to reach non-logged viewers diminishes return. I would also expect the growing distaste for the owner's antics additionally diminishes a pleasant experience for some. So returns in value for all involved, in short, is not growing but decreasing. It doesn't seem a trend useful for maintaining engagement, and certainly not for growing it.

Funny thing is, shortly after Musk took over, they "made an effort" to spend some pennies on removing the login wall. Wasn't that related to this George Hotz personality?

Whatever, I am not especially surprised by any part of how this played out.

But I'd still like to say: 1984 is treated as an instruction manual today for tech marketing. And of course sadly and increasingly for politics, when democracy has often been reduced to a competition for the most convincing lie.

Users are trapped.

For a while, there was no login wall anymore... this is now reverted.

Mind you, governments, police, local authorities, they all were keen to adopt twitter for distributing short text messages with a payload size of 1KB and below.

More features that people didn't ask for. How does twitter benefit by not allowing peopel to see the tweets?

Muck Fusk.