For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.
It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.
If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage now pops a modal you can't dismiss.
This is on mobile browsers, of course both sites are pushing their apps.
I am sure it doesn't align with their incentives so they don't care, I will never have an account and never install the app, but why block me from viewing the site if I am still seeing the ads? Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?
That's not inconsistent, that's a deliberate dark pattern that every social media site uses. Let them see the first page, then when they want to engage: force creating an account.
When you just put a "log in to see this page" up front, people will bounce. When you have them engaged a little bit, chances are they are already invested enough to create an account.
It's not only social media anymore, many mainstream websites have started doing it.
For example on IMDB, you used to be able to read the comments, now they locked them behind a signup box.. it's only a matter of time until they lock the whole site down.
I wish we had the old internet, with simple html forms, texts and pictures.
The peek was really Web 2.0 design, it introduced just enough styles and interactivity to get rid of TABLES but no more than that.
They already AI shadowbanned me and nuke all of my accounts for participating in historical discussions that mentioned violent upheaval of power, thats why I can't login. I appreciate them helping me ween off using the site completely.
Thank you reddit, never thought I'd quit you. And I'm missing nothing but the exact same conversations over and over again.
Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely.
And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.
This will presumably make many on this site happy, since for many years an ad supported open web was consistently railed against.
With the shuttering of nitter if this is what twitter wants then the least they could do is let you create an account. You need apple or google for that. It seems like they shut the front door some time ago and now drew the curtains so people couldn't peer in.
They managed to make it enticing enough for me just to see one person's posts to enter my email but said "fuck off and get the app". I'll have to make do with the 5 posts they show without login
I don't believe it.
I guess that's their traffic so that's their market but ugh. Imagine if flickr or some other photo site was run over by people posting photos of text messags.
I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link, so for farming you should post a picture of text then follow up with a link to a blog post a day later as a comment reply to the post to double-dip the activity.
And, eurgh, so many bad incentives to just make everything worse.
If you earnestly just post a link to a blog, it weights you don't because they don't want people leaving their feed.
And actual text people spend less time hovering than photos of text, so again, down the ranking your post goes.
I don't spend much time on other social media but if Imgur is all just photos of text that won't be an accident, but it'll be what sites optimise for.
Twitter is just the same. It honestly sucks.
Reddit users would post an image in Imgur and the "community" would reply complaining about the lack of context, judging appearances or just being mean in general. The nicest ones would ask users (that would never read anything) to make the images private.
It was a very strange alternate universe.
This is the company that refers to its users as “daily active shitheads.” That’s a real quote.
They’re just screaming and pointing to anything they can so they can lock it down and gain more favorable data to sell and more legitimate accounts to show advertisers. That’s what it always is.
I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.
If you truly believe this, then you should probably seek therapy.
https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgu...
― Imgur access in the United Kingdom – imgur
I had some success with these for logged-out browsing ever since old.reddit was locked down completely
Reddit isn't so badly impacted, but there are still age-walls around some of the content where it's been deemed "adult" (which encompasses more than just graphic adult imagery).
I dare say something similar also exists for Firefox
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mirrorimage/mglldpk...
So fuck that. Bye Reddit. I'll miss some of the communities.
To the aggrieved I say: 403 Forbidden.
In their defense, you're not getting the full YouTube experience without ads of an AI doctor selling you suppositories.
Also, blocking scraping is very rich (and expectedly hypocritical) for an AI company, which SpaceX is now.
And of course, Google is an AI company, too.
It failed because it didn’t make any technical sense. The RIAA was trying to argue that YouTube’s proof-of-work JavaScript challenges were some kind of DRM and by running JavaScript YouTube-dl was circumventing DRM
This is the sensible response. I'm always bemused by the reactions that go: "this is a garbage site but I am forced to use it every day". Be grateful that your social media addiction is now automatically mitigated! Go outside!
You won't miss much.
What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get?
Asking because things don’t always magically get better, for example phones are still mostly using locked down Android that bends to corporate whims and the alternative phone options are quite limited (how many Linux phones have failed to get mass market adoption?).
Ofc not all is grim, like Framework is doing some good work on repairable hardware in general and also in regards to software there are quite a few FOSS projects that respect the user etc., like Mastodon also exists and is actually decent to use.
I just think it’s important to acknowledge that the network effects of some of these established players are quite major.
I know this might not be a popular view but I'd be fairly content with a fediverse that never scales to the size of platforms like reddit, a lot of the reasons I use the fediverse is because it resembles older forums or even reddit before it was enormous.
Facebook Messenger didn't have an XMPP API because Zuck was a nice guy back then.
I am talking more about on the level of things like the migration of time spent watching television to time spent on Facebook on a pc to time spent swiping TikTok on an iPhone. None of these are inherently good or bad, but many of them exhausted their ability to grow and attract costumers and as a result doubled down on extracting value from an existing base - that’s what enshitification is or so I thought.
Though I think Pinterest takes the cake for being just the ugliest example of this.
I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.
Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!
And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204535759-I...
Maybe it’s time to just download it and Wikipedia, then point an LLM / vectordb at it.
Perhaps the way to solve for X is having a scraper serve the data via torrent and/or IPFS vs centralized systems like nitter and xcancel.
It’s managed to do what years of self-imposed content blockers etc. on my own side have failed to do - finally broke my Reddit addiction!
A/B tests in general should require informed consent just like any other study on human participants. But then most software developers don't care about ethics so this is nothing new.
I've not taken the effort to understand fediverse yet, but it feels very old-internet.
Fail upwards. That's all they know how to do
Reddit users are not customers. The advertisers and AI labs are the customers because they're the ones paying. The users are the cattle in the pen being sold to the advertisers and the monkeys at the typewriters whose output gets sold as AI training data.
The people using their product. The people who, if the product were shit from day 1 - as Reddit wasn't - would have never signed up for it. Who have been effectively and literally lied to
As the saying goes: “If it’s free, you’re the product.”
Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in. And as much as I hate the UX too… Reddit user numbers have grown a ton in the last few years. It’s difficult to make the argument that these changes are a failure.
I am an existing Reddit user, but don't want to be logged in everywhere and always. Sometimes I had a few free moments and wanted to kill some time, so until recently I could go to Old Reddit on my mobile phone and just see what the 'general human zeitgeist' was discussing: from something serious in /r/worldnews to some pop culture news story.
When this happens I use uBlock origin to remove that popup and the grey background behind it. Scrolling and loading more comments remains usable (unlike Facebook)
The EU is first and foremost a business club. So the majority of EU rules are there to create a common market. If one participant is trying to be dodgy, then oftentimes a rule valid for all market participants is created, to re-establish the common market.
Sometimes it's even the producers that ask the EU to regulate it. E.g. all of those classes for vegetables originated from the producers. As a result, an egg of size "M" from Netherlands has the same size as an egg of the size "M" from France. And both can be sold in e.g. Belgium, since we now have a common market and common attributes. A customer seeing an "M" sized egg in the shelves doesn't need to ponder, he knows what he gets.
If some website needs a login so that you can view contents is completely outside of this. That is actually common, many newspapers and magazines do that. Its entirely to their discretion if they allow free public access, limited access, or paid access. One doesn't need to be Google Search, one can also be Kagi, so to say.
Only if you're part of the club. If not, fuck off!
I choose to fuck off.
Nitter and xcancel traffic must be negligible, they're doing this just to pretend they're doing stuff to justify their legal department wages.
Makes sense that they want to consult legal experts rather than just going with their gut though but I hope those legal experts will work something out that gets them back online.
And the manbaby in charge will absolutely go after you.
Where does this come from? You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal to no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
I have no X account, but I read content there all the time without issue.
Not the giant X in the middle.
Horrible UI choices.....
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. Am I seeing something different than everyone else? I just tried with private browser, multiple browsers, multiple devices, and they're all the same: I click any twitter post link I can find, and I see the post, no login screen. I'm not using adblock or and javascript is turned on.
Only 5 posts, and when you click on any of them, you don't see the post, you see a sign up popup
It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.
And so I gladly oblige.
On mobile right now, I can't scroll past the second post of [1] without getting blocked by an undismissable popup.
If I click on the "read more" button of the first post, I can't scroll down at all before getting that same non-dismissable popup. It makes it hard to read the post itself, because even scrolling a tiny bit (e.g. to get what I'm reading closer to the center of my vision) triggers it.
I've also had other times where I couldn't play a video someone linked to me, but sometimes I can, don't know why.
6 years ago, pre-Musk, they started forcing the JS-only webapp and everyone absolutely hated it: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/twitter-war...
I wonder if there's a group of developers at X, especially with Musk's cost-saving direction, who are slowly bringing back the static pages.
That's not true for X. You can read content without being signed in.
https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/public-and-protect...
Edit: also can't read a thread because each new post is considered a "reply", so blocked too.
But that's beside the point. I was pointing out that X does allow non-logged in users view posts.
But try to go anywhere 'related' or follow a trail of replies and you're blocked by either a login prompt or a post limit or some other guest-unfriendly pattern. And that means, for me personally, that the original 'thing' is not worth the time because I can't follow the train of thought that it creates - which is probably why it's designed that way: annoy people into signing up.
I can not and will not reward that (mostly, I'm probably hypocritical in a couple of facets of my life choices).
While inconvenient, I would be surprised if isn't a relatively small use case. Most people who use X on their phones are using the app.