Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com