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Comment by teiferer | Hacker News Reader

When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible.

Sorry, are you actually five years old? Until just a few years ago Twitter was entirely open. You could view any and all public tweets, replies, threads. All exactly like you were logged in. Their APIs were open and you could literally plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users on the actual planet in real time into your own application.

Actually, you definitely could not plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users in real time into your own application (without huge cost). You only would ever see a subset of tweets via twitters API's and search results, if you wanted the full thing you had to pay for 'the firehose' which was very expensive.

This openness is part of the reason governments (local, state, federal, sovereign) started using it for official comms. Seems rather shortsighted in retrospect, but it was a useful tool for a short period of time.

No, I'm with GP: Most of the time I'd just get errors and retries that don't work, even years before Elon. I also never had an account there and assumed it had something to do with that.

Some years ago you could even subscribe to an RSS feed for each user.

From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs.

The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you needed was an account + token.

I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).

At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.

> and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on

The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only.

You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate through the API. It wasn’t the complete firehose, though.

That sample was complete though as long as there wasn't too many tweets. I.e, as long as your query was specific enough, you _did_ get all tweets.

Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.

And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off.

Here's me complaining[1] about the login walls way back in 2021, this was before the Elon takeover.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365

Edit: Some more posts -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472

That's a completely unrelated issue. Once someone sent you a link to a tweet, you could read it.

Is it unrelated? From the parent comment:

> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.

I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.

(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)

Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you used to be able to read tweets without an account, but that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over.

There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.

Interesting; if you'd have asked me when Elon took over I'd have said something around 2020-2022. Probably why everyone assumes it's a result of him

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