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Comment by wharvle | Hacker News Reader

It’s frustrating because some of Musk’s first moves were to make logged-out Twitter a ton better, but then a while ago he reversed course hard and made it entirely unusable. It’s the worst it’s ever been, I’m not employing “unusable” flippantly, it’s in fact almost pointless to follow a Twitter link while logged out now.

Yeah, in my circle if people want to share Twitter stuff, they’ve taken to using screenshots.

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The worst part is that it's not apparent _why_ the link sucks. If they would at least have a message "Log in to view the rest of the thread" it would be much better. But I have clicked around in futility several times before to try to find where the rest of it is.

I've stopped sharing Twitter links at this point and just send screenshots to people. I can never know if they have a Twitter account. He supposedly did this to stop "bots."

My suspicion has been that the well-publicized removal of many servers that used to be part of Twitter's infra had a negative performance impact, and the series of changes to how anonymous users and/or tweet embeds worked are a band-aid on that.

For an anonymous viewer, they still don't show you the rest of a thread a tweet is in, or even any indication of the fact that there is a thread that you're not seeing. This doesn't even make sense as a nudge to join Twitter, so load reduction feels like the most likely reason to me.

If you want to watch the presidential debate, you'll need to log in to Twxtter, is the gut check I'm getting with the push to streaming, but not adding clips.

You can go from there depending on how optimistic/pessimistic you want to be, but ultimately I do feel like I can see that being the path forward foe Twxtter.

I think it is a move to try and force people to sign up.

And then when you do your account gets locked immediately for 'suspicious activity' and they ask for phone details and/or photo ID. X is going to be WeChat with payments etc, they need real people's details.

What if we talked about the X-files in a post about the X-files, and talked about Elon Musk... Anywhere else?

When sufficiently broken links hit the main page, the brokenness is gonna be part of the discussion. Whatever the intentions of HN, it’s always the case, even for ones that are broken for boring and predictable paywall reasons rather than slightly-more-interesting walling-off-the-“town square” reasons.

Besides… “The Twitter Files”… Twitter renamed X… yep, that checks out, still on topic.

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