Tell HN: X stopped requiring authentication, nitter works again | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: X stopped requiring authentication, nitter works again

nitter.lucabased.xyz

120 pointso99996 comments

X will keep playing games to optimize their user count. I suggest not falling for these games. I have already Xed out X from my life.

Most of the HN crowd is the long tail. The vast majority will continue to use whatever mass surveillance/monetization platform their friends use and so news outlets, government bodies, etc. will continue to post on that platform. You can either throw in the towel and join the masses or continue to use technical means of circumvention to access information there when necessary.

Very, very few average people actually use Twitter/X

It's significants was always massively overstated in tech circles and various echo chambers.

With journalism having years ago devolved to quoting Twitter takes on air and in print, that is a strange thesis to make.

Journalism was already dying when Twitter came to market, that makes your argument extremely weak. All news organizations have been hemorrhaging value since the Internet went mainstream.

But besides that: today's journalists don't chase news, they chase gossip. And Twitter does indeed provide them with plenty of that. Very few average people are interested in such information however, even if various groups are hyper focused on it.

It's still a gigantic group of people though, even if it's a tiny minority from the perspective of society

I strongly disagree.

> Very few average people are interested in such information, even if various groups are hyper focused on it.

On the contrary, I find it that very few average people are interested in anything but gossip. Gossip is the distilled form of information, stripped free of complex ideas and difficult topics, refined to serve the single purpose most people care about: being a social object. That is, giving people something to talk about with other people. To bond over it, or argue over it - doesn't matter. For most people, the only thing that matters is relationships with other people - truth, or objectivity, or reality be damned.

People who care about accuracy of their news either actually need it for their jobs, or are just nerds. Which is what I personally prefer to be, but that's still a small minority.

> On the contrary, I find it that very few average people are interested in anything but gossip.

I'd actually agree with that statement, but with a gigantic caveat: everyone loves "gossip", but only if it's about people in their own life.

And Twitter only provides this gossip for celebrities.

Let's do a thought experiment: let's say Taylor Swift decided to announce that she's pregnant on Twitter (random example). Now image you ask the first 100 people you encounter on the street. Journalists would be interested for sure, and yet... The people on the street won't care whatsoever.

I still disagree with your caveat, which I mentioned in the previous reply: people are after social objects, so the gossip very much doesn't have to be about people in their own life - it just has to be about people they're paying attention to, or caring to gossip about.

Taylor Swift? I don't know, but probably yes for large segments of the US population. For near-universal worldwide gossip success, try mentioning Trump. For those above 30, Obama and Bush will also work. We may be past peak celebrity gossip, but politics always works. Which is why it's banned to talk about in polite company.

(And yes, I'm counting talking about political issues as gossip too, because even if it's about multiple people or no one in particular, the level of understanding and quality of exchanged "knowledge" is the same as when conversing about random actors' extramarital affairs.)

Otherwise, a big part in two people getting to know each other and bonding is in learning what topics they're both interested in gossiping about.

What journalists are interested in as people doesn't really matter. Journalism is long past that, and 100% devoted to ad impressions now. Which means journalists (are told/allowed to) wite about things the paper expects will interest people. If they're writing a lot about celebrities, they're likely right that this will interest a lot of people. Meanwhile, social media - like Twitter - is algorithmically self-organizing for engagement, which means it's a prime tool to discover what most people care about (in a hooked up drug addict sense) in real-time.

> Taylor Swift? I don't know, but probably yes for large segments of the US population. For near-universal worldwide gossip success, try mentioning Trump.

Less then 0.01% of the global population cares about what trump says on Twitter. Significantly more care about Tylor Swift.

I personally don't care what either of them post there. Nor has anyone I've worked with to date.

You're living in a tech bubble

> Less then 0.01% of the global population cares about what trump says on Twitter.

No, that's what they say, because it's fashionable to say they're Not Like Trump, and Do Not Like Trump. But being able to state and insist on that necessitates caring about what shenanigans Trump is (accused of) pulling any given moment, which is why if you try and ask, you'll get strongly emotional reactions out of approximately everyone. If they genuinely didn't care, they'd roll their eyes or be confused about who the fuck Trump is anyway.

Now, I picked Trump because it's one current politician that approximately everyone on the planet has an opinion about, by virtue of him being the president of the United States, and the United States having nukes and aircraft carriers parked in everyone else's rectums. But beyond Trump and Obama and maybe GWBush, you'll get this reaction when mentioning locally relevant politicians and political structures (like, everyone in the EU has an opinion on "the EU").

> You're living in a tech bubble

Am I? "Don't care what [politician, celebrities] post [on Twitter]" is a distinctly tech-bubble attitude. Normies outside of the bubble are busy throwing shit about their current misinterpretation of a social media article misinterpretation of a misquote of a local politician, and/or commenting under reaction videos to some pathological YouTube vlogger reacting to the newest pathology on TikTok.

> Now, I picked Trump because it's one current politician that approximately everyone on the planet has an opinion about

In a global audience, very few people care at the moment. That won't change until he comes back into office and starts to use these nukes.

I encourage you to actually interact with native people on the street the next time you go on a trip abroad. It is very rare to find someone interested in US politics that doesn't live in the USA.

American pop culture, which is what I consider Tylor Swift to be a part of, continues to have strong influence globally. Though that's also on a diminishing trend - mainly because their productions have been getting way worse over the last decade (at least wrt movies and TV shows)

/Edit: we've also gotten quite offtopic with this discussion, because being interested in trump is something very different to caring about what he writes on Twitter

Fair enough RE offtop. For the sake of clearer context, however, I want to add that I'm Polish and live in Poland (though work with international teams, mostly non-US), and my statements about relevance of US politicians to regular non-US folks was written from that perspective and daily experience.

Propagandists would create fake twitter accounts and then quote them, but nobody reads that.

Yes, nobody reads press anymore.

Or you think the papers people read aren't writing propaganda?

No-one who actually work for a living is on Twitter more than a day a week. Maybe some huge sport fans, but even them, they don't have time to spend on stupid, useless gossip.

Twitter is used by about 5% of online people. They're an obnoxious 5% but they're really not that big of a group. I mean, Microsoft has about 25% of online users. Facebook has bout 35% of online people and Google has almost 60% of online users. Twitter is tiny.

It is yes. But a lot of notable people like politicians are on it. Considering the shift in atmosphere I don't understand why left wing politicians still use it but I guess they think they can still reach their voters there. I think they're mistaken but anyway

I do the latter yes. I use SearXNG to shield my searches, I use matrix bridges to keep the privacy invading chat apps off my phone. I use a local LLM and home assistant to shield from datamining IoT. I run DNS based and in browser adblockers.

It's a lot of work but I still consider it very viable. It's also very educational.

The problem is just that it doesn't scale. Google will block SearXNG if it becomes more than a fringe phenomenon used by some geeks. WhatsApp will start fighting bridges again if significant amounts of people start using it.

I don't really care about fixing society as a whole to be honest, but it's important to realise that this can never be a solution for everyone, even when talking the technical difficulty level out of the loop. These things work because they are niche.

I thought this the point of nitter?

Has it? I see this:

    Instance has been rate limited.
    Use another instance or try again later.

Potentially related:

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-168...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38970676

Linked GitHub comment is from August 2023.

Enablement mechanism; as fallingsquirrel mentions, there are adversarial countermeasures that continue to take place as X updates access requirements on a whim. I assume the "cat and mouse" game to continue as long as X operates. Shoutout to those putting the effort in, and anyone archiving along the way.

Edit: I'm unsure how many tech folks are left at X, but publicly available information indicates that the org is in financial peril and its owner is unable to pay the liabilities coming due out of their personal finances [1] without liquidating public equity components of their wealth. It should be assumed that X could shut down at any time, without notice, and any data that has not be archived will be lost to time. I am not attempting to talk about anything here except "this data is at risk, this system should not be treated as if there is any permanence."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41270878

The amount of opinions predicting imminent destruction of X in the year forces me to treat every comment of type "any time now" with a grain of salt.

Also, it's not like other X-like clones (Mastodon) are any different. Mastodon loses replies even if every server is running correctly.

I’m not predicting when, I am simply advocating to be prepared if it disappears. Mastodon activity can be archived in the Internet Archive, X not always.

I applaud people who do whatever is possible to work around an issue. But it just gives me tremendous anxiety to imagine trying to run a product using hacks like “proxy thousands of guest accounts”

This feels like those hilarious and fascinating projects to glue together free tier services or use YouTube or email for data storage or whatnot.

I mean, we used to call this "adversarial interoperability" (and now half of the time it’s evil scraping or some such, with Cloudflare selling countermeasures...).

I tried using nitter the other day to view my utility company's tweets and got that message on three different instances before finally giving up.

Twitter doesn't work any more without an account, and it's high time we in the tech world led out in refusing to participate in a platform that deliberately locks its content up behind an auth wall. Twitter links don't belong on HN, convoluted sometimes-functional workarounds notwithstanding.

You can view an accounts tweets without logging in.

That's new as of the last 48 hours, and threads still don't work. When they restore threading I'll stop flagging Twitter links.

No, it’s not. I’ve been viewing tweets on profiles for months now, all without an account.

It is accurate that threads don’t work. I don’t particularly care about follow ups, if it was important they should have said it at the top level. People making a bunch of lede burying 1/N threads and expecting the masses to wade through Twitter’s molasses UI to get to the damn point is why I left.

> I’ve been viewing tweets on profiles for months now, all without an account.

And I tried to visit my utility's tweets Friday night and got a sign in page. And I just tried again and I once again can't see profiles.

Maybe it's just inconsistent in enforcing the login on profiles?

Looks like it does vary from account to account. All the famous people I’ve seen are open access, as is my electric company. My water company however is closed.

That makes sense in a very X kind of way.

What’s the URL to see tweets on a specific hashtag?

> What’s the URL to see tweets on a specific hashtag?

Example: https://x.com/hashtag/earthquake

thanks!

it requires a login.

And what alternatives do you suggest?

HN rightly complains about proprietary closed platforms, and enshittification.

Here is an open source alternative to Twitter and Facebook: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Mastodon links still work just fine.

> And what alternatives do you suggest?

The utility company could post on their own website.

> it's high time we in the tech world led out in refusing to participate in a platform that deliberately locks its content up behind an auth wall.

Maybe the tech world should stop using bots to rape and pillage user-generated content without payment to feed their AI models no one asked for.

Which is what caused X to install the auth wall in the first place.

Have you asked your utility to post status updates on Mastodon? Explain the challenges of consuming their updates on X, and why their customer base would be better served elsewhere. If not, you should do so. If they need someone to manage the instance for them, we can find them a commercial provider. Failing that, have them create a Threads account with federation enabled. Default to action, be the change.

The eyeballs go where the content is; tell the content where to go.

Edit: @edflsafoiewq Why are we ignoring their uses cases? If they feel the need (outages, relevant customer information) and have the desire to have the mechanism in addition to or in lieu of email, paper mail, and/or SMS, enable them. The cost is very low to do so.

Normies don't understand Mastodon, which incidentally make up 99.999% of a utility company's customers.

If Mastodon is too much of a lift in the near term (social network effects are admittedly hard and humans are tricky), Threads is an option for a Fediverse-compatible managed solution.

Not hard to get the top 10 folks over to threads (except a few folks who probably wouldn't migrate): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_... (https://www.threads.net/@barackobama, https://www.threads.net/@whitehouse, https://www.threads.net/@potus demonstrate popular accounts will make the effort)

Fediverse posting is then a checkbox. Drag the normies. Popular social management tools already support Threads as well (Buffer comes to mind).

https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/21/networking-traffic/thr...

https://help.instagram.com/760878905943039

https://buffer.com/threads

(think in systems)

That might be why I like mastodon. May we never suffer an eternal September.

If a normie can sign up for a Twitter account they can sign up for mastodon. It's not difficult.

The problem is more marketing. The commercials have the ability to spend money where mastodon has to rely on enthusiasts' word of mouth. They simply lack the reach to the normie community.

Why does a utility company need to post status updates on a microblogging platform?

If my utility posts updates on any social media, I will not see them. There are two legitimate ways for a utility to post updates: on the utility's own website, or via email (or maybe SMS) to its customers.

I've been using nitter.poast.org for the last 3-4 months at least.

It works fine 90% of the time, but sometimes there are too many people trying to use it and the connection gets timed out. If you refresh 5-6 times, it usually becomes fine.

Presumably it has some accounts it is rotating through and they are being rate limited in some capacity.

Let's not hammer the nitter instance of last resort.

Aaand... it's gone.

There are some nitter instances that work, but they probably just use a lot of accounts.

Posting them on the frontpage may not contribute to their longevity.

It's not working for me...

I'm guessing it was working an hour ago when this was first posted?

--------

EDIT: I dunno what happened. I tried again right now and it looks like it's working. Maybe the first page cache had issues or something on my phone?

No it doesn't, try xcancel.com instead, works most of the time

That's literally an instance of Nitter

A couple of these instances have been working for several weeks now. They don’t always have recent data and have resource limits , but they work.

Makes it much more viable to be the platform Twitter tried to be from the start. It seemingly was such a bad move to require auth...

There's still a few working nitter instances, but they're far from reliable.

It's kinda funny that the link proposed here is only ads for Twitter premium, lol

Should the tittle be changed? The link doesn't explicitly say what the OP says.

one of the few online sites where "rate limited" errors are a feature and not a bug - as far as I am concerned.

*Twitter stopped requiring authentication.

Really now? Please don't credit X for this. Nitter operators are working hard behind the scenes to keep as many usable IPs and accounts in operation as they can. Give credit where credit is due.

This is nice and all, but also let's not forget that X can arbitrarily undo this decision too. Remember folks, fediverse.

I don't understand the attraction to Twitter especially after Musk took over. If you're not logged in, the site barely works which prevents a lot of people from seeing your post or staying up-to-date.

I thought for sure the rebrand + enshittification would completely kill it but I guess some are still latching on for some reason.

It’s not Twitter itself, it’s the people and conversations. Probably the same reason you use HN.

> some are still latching on for some reason.

Reason being the network effect. I'd rather use Mastodon but everyone i'd follow posts on Twitter - even the people i follow on Mastodon at best put the same posts on Twitter and -way more often than not- barely put anything on Mastodon.

Yeah, I thought the network effect would be "wow this site is even more garbage than before" and then go somewhere else, but I guess not.

It did happen. We just learned that the networks in network effect are not that well connected. For example most of the security community did migrate to Mastodon. But there are many groups that make up Twitter and lots of them stayed.

There's a few communities stubbornly remaining on Twitter for some reason. In particular, communities built around anything coming out of Japan - e.g. rhythm games, anime, or vtubers.

An better competitor would likely kill twitter in less than a year.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be one. Mastodon is significantly worse in so many ways, for normal people. Other services are not significantly better, which makes it impossible to break the huge network effects that Twitter/X have built over more than a decade.

Funny how we talked about it 24hrs ago on HN.

Does Elon Musk read HN and did he suddenly realized how much of a mistake it had been, how much it harmed the platform to require login, moving people on to Mastodon or others? Seems typical from him to move in 24hrs.

Really? I just tried visiting a friend's twitter page in incognito mode and it just redirects to the sign-in page. Only big accounts like @X, @POTUS or @iaeaorg seem to not trigger the auth wall

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