Ask HN: Should we stop posting X links on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should we stop posting X links on HN?

102 pointstheGeatZhopa67 comments

Just of today, i see a lot of postings on HN with linking to X/Twitter. Obviously X decided to not present the content.

just like here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392157

If you want to see how Prince of Persia animations have been done, you'll see nothing.

By now, i saw quite a few entries on HN that will lead into the literal nothing.

I dont have a twitter/X account. And i don't think it won't change anything, if I make one, because the HN URL is already not the proper one...

View on HN

I would prefer that as I also don't have a twitter account and don't intend to get one. But obviously that's just me.

No, it's not just you.

Paywals might be debatable, but login-walled links to social media are not in the spirit of HN as I imagine it.

Everyone has twitter and it's for free, paywall is not debatable imo

I don't have Twitter anymore and I'm not planning to change that.

With "debatable", I meant that paywalls are more acceptable to me.

Luckily, anything worthwhile originally posted on X tends to surface on the open web after a while anyway. And most of the times, the value of xitter threads is entirely in external links anyway.

So OK, to each their own.

I hope this won't extend towards tolerating links to Instagram or Facebook groups as HN submissions.

Not for me to decide.

As of a few days, X.com tries to trick you into disabling Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection. Any link shows only a completely black page that says "[WARNING] Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com"

> is known to cause issues on x.com

Interesting, other sites do not have this problem. Maybe they shouldn't have fired all those people.

Yes - no more links to Twitter/X.

PS: Twitter was the only social media website I used for the last decade. Unfortunately it’s a cesspool now.

While we’re on the subject: For the last ~4 months on my desktop, when I click a Twitter link, there is nothing displayed at all. Cleared my cache multiple times and everything. It works on my phone, it’s actually so bizarre it makes me laugh rather than upset.

For at least a year, Twitter links have only loaded the one message, not any other messages in the thread, or other irrelevant tweets like it used to. Happens across browsers, with configurations that aren’t particularly exotic. No idea what’s going on.

This is, from what I understand, intended behavior. The worst is when people link the final tweet in a thread so you just get the last message and see no other context. For me, I don't see the value in people posting twitter links.

It’s certainly not how it used to work, or a behaviour that makes any sense. And I’m pretty sure it was behaving this way even when I was logged in (before I finally deleted my ancient account that I hadn’t used for five years).

If this is a vote, I vote yea.

That example HN submission is useless. It is like submitting a redirect URL. The X account name is only provided in a comment.

https://nitter.poast.org/jmechner

This X account holder is probably just using X to promote content that is found somewhere else, e.g., on his website, in his book, in the games, etc.

Suggestion: Submit to HN the original source not the X promotion.

Is there no one here who works at Twitter and can chime in?

What is the deal with these new weird links?

Also, I would vote no, but if links no longer render for logged out users then I would be willing to discuss alternative measures. I am just not entirely sure about the link you shared and its URL structure.

Twitter has a lot of people using it and posting stuff there exclusively, a lot of which is genuinely interesting and provokes curiosity.

yes absolutely. But if no one can read it / logged out user cant read it - so whats the purpose of it, then? So, hence, my question

I think anyone still working at Twitter would be too nervous about getting the boot to post in a thread like this.

I vote for yes, we should stop posting X links in as many places as possible. I don't have an account and do not plan to create one.

I simply don't click on X links since I don't have an account and can't see context of the links like tweets before and after. People should feel free to continue posting for those who have an X account. It's not such a big deal to move on with my day.

... but it's a post about Prince of Persia and how that animations have been made. Such an iconic content for a legend! If you don't click on it, you never lived :))

I need to see it!

I remember reading an article about this in the Before Times, and I found it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2017/12/19/how-the-o...

Oh, and you can't forget this:

"Jordan Mechner offers a postmortem on the classic platforming game Prince of Persia." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjE4JyfMVLc

Deleted my Twitter account since Musk took over and don't intend on getting a new one.

Apart from getting login-walled for threads it also happens quite often that the link simply won't load even the original message, I cannot see what's being discussed and the apps I used to rely on to unroll threads stopped working after the API changes.

It's simply unusable for me and whenever I see a link to Twitter I have to ignore it, as much as the discussion could be interesting there is no way I can participate in it.

Didn’t HN use to have actual polls? Anyway my vote for this is no

I didn't find the polling. Sorry.

Do you mind to elaborate why no? I mean, there is obviously content, but it cant be accessed. Its different with like paywalls, where some nice hacker-human posts an archive link. For twitter it isn't possible the same way.

There’s too much signal on there for a blanket ban. Make an account and you can access it that’s probablh the reason

Content that can't be accessed without creating an account or paying should be banned imo. Regular paywalled sites can be accessed through archive. You could access Twitter content through Nitter before, now that no longer works.

Take a screenshot of the...whatever it's called now...and post a link to the hosted image.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

It's a little-known and barely-used feature that's mentioned in the sites' FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Yes wholeheartedly. Their site has changed to make it hostile and difficult to access information. There has no need to encourage that behaviour.

This is incredibly stupid, but I think we've reached the stage where it's time to add a new rule to the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html page: "links must be working (i.e., show content that matches the title of submission)"

Was gonna say the submitted links are just broken, but I think it's HN code rewriting them that's breaking the posts. x.com/ link submitted becomes twitter.com/whatever, but then it pulls it again or something and x is returning a migrate/redirect and HN is then rewriting the link with that url instead. Sure we can fix this. NBD

We should stop posting them, yes. But it seems unlikely that "we", meaning all the users of HN, will.

Musk has deliberately repositioned X as a social network that encourages hate speech, and the users have followed. It maintains a veneer of respectability only because of it's pre-Musk history, and because of the number of corporations and media outlets who continue to use it, presumably out of inertia rather than anything else.

If it were up to me, HN would not support any site that supports hate speech. And it mostly already doesn't. X is a weird quirk as it is in transition from what it used to be to what Musk wants it to be, and a lot of people haven't really accepted it yet.

I would friggin love it if we did OR if the posts had a [twitter/x] flag in the title so I can avoid them.

I would appreciate that. I don't want to login, so any thread is useless

So it seems like all twitter.com links break? But x.com links are ok and and don’t require logging in?

If we decide to stop submitting X/Twitter links, then we should do the same for NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Medium, Threads and a ton of others.

I don't like the idea of picking and choosing a flavor of the week to cancel. So let's cancel every single site that requires a sign-in or has set up a paywall ..or.. leave them all alone.

As solutions... I like what slashdot does with their comprehensive summaries. It is a thing of beauty. Not only does it help solve some of these issues, it has found a way to archive content. osnews.com is another site that's similar.

If you go back even just a few months on HN, you'll see that lots of the submitted links are dead, 404s. We still have the (opinionated) conversation but not the actual content.

I also like archive.ph as another solution that can be used to bypass many paywalled sites.

I think we need to look to solutions to these problems. Just look at the subscription model... and things are just going to get worse as far as accessing linked content.

Yes, please. At least for NYT, WSJ and others it's possible to link to an Internet Archive version to be read which isn't possible with Threads/Twitter.

I'd like at least a screenshot of the Twitter thread being discussed, or a copy pasted version of it.

This behavior changed before, and it'll probably change again.

Ok, so.. next question: how does it help now? I would like to see Prince of Persia jumping's doing. But I cant. It would be interesting, if I'm the only one that can't even access it..

They are flipping some things over from twitter.com to x.com, so maybe this is just a transition bug.

I have a bunch of embeds in a story written a few days ago, and those are fine. But embeds from a Oct 2023 are all screwed.

If newer embeds work and older don't maybe the calculus was that the older embeds weren't worth migrating.

I feel like such an idiot for ever embedding content from Twitter, especially after Musk took over.

on edit: well evidently I just have no patience or am cynical because the Oct 2023 ones are working now, I better turn everything into images though - will perform better anyway.

Yeah the links are useless now. Elon’s changes briefly made them (a lot) better than before, then totally ruined them (for logged-out users). It’s far worse even than Instagram, which has the second-worst following-a-link-as-a-non-user experience I can think of.

We just share screenshots in my friend group. Used to share links. It may as well not be on the Web at all anymore.

[edit] and also it’s now actually broken, but it was so close to broken before that I think they should have been blocked here, and most places, months ago.

I would love if this site distanced itself from Twitter, both for the technical reasons you reference and the higher-order impact it has on post quality. I doubt that it can happen given Y-Combinator’s obvious industry-wide entanglements relying on a friendly Elon Musk, but it would be great to see. Would make me respect this forum’s independence a lot more, personally.

Yes.

Yes, please, but not just for the stated reason. Most of the interesting people on Twitter have fled for Mastodon or elsewhere and much of the rest of the time, there is an original source better capable of leading to high quality discussion than the tweet itself.

At the very least, Twitter (and Youtube) should be whitelisted and rated by individual accounts, and not sitewide, so that the wheat can be separated from the chaff.

Who keeps flagging these? I suggested this years ago in a comment before it even became X due to the same reason but got downvoted.

They just migrated to X today, just wait until this is fixed. I don't think it's worth posting about it.

Now, since this post is on the frontpage, I'll ask a better question: should we stop posting paywalled articles on HN? (I'm in favor, I wish more people were in favor.)

Ok, I didn't know that.

The paywalled was also a nail in my eye. But, people pointed out, that there's still a possibility to ask for an archive link. Thats true. So no hard arguments against it.

100% yes, or with a field for a work-around link and not accepting the link without it.

It’s really weird to try to build a culture of “do read TFA before posting” when a high percentage of links can’t actually be read by most posters. Relying on someone to comment with a working link is silly and backwards.

Given the stance on submission with paywalled content being ok, I don't think HN would ban userwalled content. While I highly disagree with this, there have been many discussions about it before and nothing has changed so far.

Is there a competent redirect/repost service for X posts?

People have no problem posting links to paywalls, there's just always someone kind enough to come along and post an archive.org link.

no, nitter got destroyed.

I still use nitter.poast.org for threads and it has been fine.

I still use nitter.poast.org for threads and search. It works. For brief period it was presenting a homegrown CAPTCHA but not anymore.

Having many instances was great; however even when there were many to choose from, in practice I only chose to use one, whichever one worked the most consistently.

Yes

Bro, that's because that dude didn't post the right link. It's this https://x.com/jmechner/status/1791226510336045286 And it's sick! You're missing out by not checking it out.

That works for me even when I'm in incognito. Asking for the smallest amount of agency from this crowd may well be trying to make a cow do calculus. Industrial-grade complaint merchants.

best man! Prince of Persia was one of the first games I played. So cool to see that! <3 (heart lol)

By this logic paywalled links should also not be posted.

This would eliminate like what, 30% of HN content?

Those could or should already be prepended in the title with PAYWALL or alike, so one can already at point of reading the title decide not to click on it.

HN shows you the link origin from the main page.

Don't open X links or set up ad blocker to remove posts linking to it from the DOM.

True but my memory doesn't seem to tell me which sites are paywalled upon reading the links often.

... One can ask for archive links. Usually the request will be fulfilled. I do it all the time on articles of interest. Most of the time, there's already an archive link under the post.

Thats good service by some fellow hackers. thanks!

Yes, same with paywalls.

Yes. Please.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com