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Comment by avs733 | Hacker News Reader

Did they properly remove it or does no one there even know it was/is happening. They didn’t shut it down, the seem to have left the lights on with nobody home.

Bigger picture - given the role news making and sharing in real time has always played in Twitter, it seems logical that services which may not provide obvious returns but which build a platform that journalists find useful would help do that.

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I agree, it seems like they left it to rot instead of shutting it down. But again it is irrelevant to the business so who cares?

My understanding is the onion service was launched to provide access for people in places where Twitter is blocked. How is this "irrelevant to the business"?

"Profit over everything."

I think it was laudable that Twitter ran one in the first place. Sad to see it languish.

What's benefit of onion service vs run of the mill VPN? I assume if you can access onion, you should also be able to access VPN

I'm not someone who's ever used the onion service, but as someone who accesses the site regularly over VPN, I can testify that it's a huge PITA. Tons of very aggressive captcha-type challenges (various tasks, never simple text recognition, but not Google ReCaptcha), often 5, 7, or 10 to be allowed to proceed.

If it's a safety mechanism that people relied on, leaving it to rot and getting people in the habit of clicking through on an expired or invalid certificate warning is irresponsible.

A degraded service can be worse than an offline one.

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