Hacker News Reader

Comment by kemotep | Hacker News Reader

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.

But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!

Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).

It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.

View on HN

Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.

It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.

Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.

Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?

Signal is an improvement, but not federated.

Signal requires a mobile phone for an account; so it's not entirely web-friendly. Plus, can you read what's posted to signal without an account?

For now: https://aboutsignal.com/news/signal-login-registration-witho...

I think my main communication is probably the last tool that I want to be government backed tbh.

Even if it's communication/announcements from the government?

I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.

Communications/announcements from the government can easily be posted on the government's website or, if really needed, sent as an SMS

My local government still lets you sign up for email notifications about services and local alerts. It’s great!

Too expensive, bad idea.

What do you mean? They'll just pass a law saying carriers have to deliver them for free

SMS are virtually free for every carrier. The prices for the customers exist to partially offset the fixed costs of the infrastructure (which already exists).

Here unlimited free SMS for customers has been the norm for most plans.

This is how you get the Andy Burnham "don't use disposable BBQs" announcement sent via the emergency system.

are those your "main communication" tools?

I agree that I don't trust governments today to provide the necessary confidentiality guarantees but remember that both physical mail and the phone network are government backed - in the sense that they set the rules even if they are operated by private entities in some countries.

what country are you from that you trust US corps more than your own government?

That bar is low. Less than 8% of the world population lives in a full democracy (Economist Democracy Index).

US corporations aren't full democracies either

Arguably that number is 8℅ too high

I hear this sentiment a lot from people in the USA. They deeply distrust their government and can't imagine it being different anyway else in the world.

I think the lessons of 2026 must be:

- the dangers of fascism are very real

- technological choices won't save you from the snatch squads, although grassroots use of tech by communities can help

- fascism is extensively promoted by some corporations and their owners

- a non-captured government that is willing to push back is much better than relying on corporations

- anything headquartered in America is potentially subject to arbitrary sanctions against non-US users

- just because we don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem isn't real (see age verification debate)

Fascinating! Where I live, fascism is not the threat, it is rampant socialism. It is spreading like cancer and destroying lives and economies.

Where do you live? Because I’m guessing you’re wrong.

Probably he lives on Twitter.

Lmao

Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.

It's for the best.

So true. Even within a country, different states would argue for their own version of it. (Looking at you, Bavaria)

Mastodon instances would be a drop-in replacement, no? Federated instances and as a bonus, it solves the biggest problem of new users not knowing which server to join. Just join your local government's if you don't know of another.

You speak as if these are simple operations, and technically they are but socially they are not.

Funny, it has already happened: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/me...

> For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp

Fine, let's say the Netherlands should do it for their own citizens only (but in a broad way to keep the door open for EU adoption)

> to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks

Banking apps are already restricted to locked Android and iOS devices, and they are all but mandatory, unless you want a very difficult life.

> And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists

I don't see how. We all already have the Digid app?

There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.

Not even remotely close.

For natural disaster emergency annoucememt it is more reliable than whatsapp.

Cell Broadcast yes, SMS no.

Isnt the one just "mass usage" of the other?

Like Cell Broadcast just duplicates the SMS on carrier level?

Nah, Cell Broadcast has a lot less overhead since it does not have to do any routing or delivery confirmation and such. The load does not scale based on recipients which makes it far more reliable during an emergency.

Sorry, maybe I did "carrier replication" wrong - I used the word in a sense of "it is duplicated at the local cell by the towers", instead of getting "fed with 1mio receivers in region X by the telco servercentral HQ"

Im wrong, I guess?

Cell broadcast, depending on the emergency level set by the sender, also makes your phone vibrate until you read the message, and may also cause it to play a loud siren noise. Which is the sort of thing you want in a real emergency.

Why, because it can't be monetized by Facebook?

Because it doesn't do the job well. It's difficult to send any media, group chats are a pain, international messages often incur fees, it doesn't work on wifi-only, and so on.

Whatsapp is used by a lot of "neighbourhood watch" groups, so you'd need an IRC-like channel to replace it.

Yes, no, try to have group chat with SMS, and tell me how that went...

RTS is the SMS replacement and is quite old. And as evidence it works, I direct your attention to the ubiquitous iMessage, which only "couldn't" interop with Android because Apple was trying the vendor lock-in approach and actively enshittifying its own users' experience and blaming it on Android users.

Do you mean RCS or are these 2 seperate things?

Which it also had to do because SMS doesn't have half its features, like encryption and sending images.

Assuming you mean RCS, to which Google built a proprietary E2EE extension, remains the only client with no API to build off of and if I recall requires play attestation.

Hardly a complete solution, it devolved into a Google power grab, in my opinion.

For once I half agree with apple when they say its less secure, as apple-to-google comms are not E2EE like they are for google-to-google. While that is fixable with a hack its still a hack, not part of the protocol.

Whatsapp etc. only took off because SMS is so limited, and the mobile companies are so profit-focused they can't make a decent competitor.

(how is whatsapp paid for again?)

It's not all about profit as European SMS is now free. It is however about decentralisation stifling feature development - a trap we run into again and again, from email to IRC to SMS to Fediverse/ATProto.

WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.

SMS made you pay by character. RCS is the current free alternative.

so instead using Meta product you suggest using Google product, great alternative for Europe independence

it's like when they wanna get rid of Visa/MC by switching to EU apps, which will require Google/Apple verification, what an improvement...

RCS is an international standard. Google only adds their client (and running the service if your mobile provider doesn't).

Don't know what EU apps are you talking about, but yes, mobile apps need Google services. Web interfaces don't.

please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...

Pretty much all banking apps for Android won't work without Google Play Services, so once again if you are using Lineage or Graphene, you are still stuck with US company to use your European banking services on the phone.

> please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...

Nice red herring. The number of implementations is irrelevant here, although Wikipedia says Samsung had one too.

Here's the standard, try Ctrl+F "Google": https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...

TLDR there is only Google product if you wanna use RCS on Android phone

nobody cares about standards, if they are pretty much monopolized by one comapny

Cell towers failed in my region after a hurricane. SMS is pointless in that situation.

So can internet.

Not neutral if you are Apple. That's their battlefield

Which is one of the many many reasons Zuckerberg needs to be investigated the hell out of for every single thing he does

I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is

Zuckerberg stole it like he steals everything

People insisted then that paying tens of Instagram for WhatsApp was too much.

I have no idea. The point is they took competition out back, and shot it

Whether that's 'too much' depends on your view of it

I'm tired of people calling them 'savvy acquisitions'. Not when Zuck's on record as saying 'Instagram can hurt us'

Why not just a website?

Hard to keep up with lots of sites. At least provide a common interface, like an atom feed.

Are you supposed to keep up with lots of sites? Which ones would you want to keep up with?

Government, municipalities, bank, large corporations, the list is endless. A curated RSS feed would work, but someone would have to do the curating.

The problem is that an EU-mandated digital communicating tool would look like the Minitel.

Anyone remembering the French minitel?

I think it was quite good for the 1980s, it just got stuck there.

Touché. Getting stuck with an obsolete service/protocol for decades is a nightmare, even if it is just ye olde user inertia. If it is mandated by law or pushed by the government, it becomes nearly impossible to update.

In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.

That's the fate of all government-backed systems as well as all decentralised systems. The former can't evolve because of extreme bureaucracy and the latter can't evolve because of incompatibility trauma and fragmentation.

But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.

People seemed to like it being stuck in the 1980s.

The EU should rather embrace open standards rather than building a closed competitor here. We already have XMPP and Matrix, all that's required is for public institutions to use them.

For what purpose? All this discussion about open alternatives to closed systems always leaves out what the purpose is. For broadcasting public information that is not time critical, I think they should use HTTP and HTML.

It is ubiquitous, but as a Dutchie who's never had WhatsApp, it is not quite at the level of an email address yet, luckily.

> It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.

I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.

Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?

My phone can’t even open most of the apps since it’s so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).

It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.

Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.

I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.

Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.

Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?

Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?

Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.

It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).

I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.

Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.

Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762

But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.

Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.

Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!

But I don't think that's the case for Bluesky

It's because of spam. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.

AI would classify anything disagreeing with the government as spam. For example right now it would classify anything opposing Israel as spam.

Are you sure that's not just people getting fed up with you and hitting the mute button? I just mute those people.

That trains the AI

Yes and most importantly when the black box flags something as spam there will be no appeal.

> Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company

Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?

in the US? no.

If you think Walmart buying your digital info is bad, get this: cops and feds are allowed to buy it, too

Can you use Google voice still without providing another phone number ?

I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.

I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky

I didn't

You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.

> Reddit is now this way too.

Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.

The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.

Notably this was called a “temporary emergency measure” by Elon Musk — yet another promise he couldn’t keep

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...

“Temporary emergency” should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.

I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.

Because it worked without an account before Elon came to Twitter and changed it?

Would've happened either way. Data is more valuable and also trivial to scrape now.

Which is the root of the problem - that we have allowed companies to claim ownership over and sell their user's data.

Usenet worked without any antispam, until the first spammer appeared.

That's when the LLM labs emerged and started collecting the data en masse. Likewise, virtually all other major social media players added barriers to unfettered anonymous access. Reddit worked without an account, and with multiple alternative client apps, until spez changed it, right?

Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.

Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.

I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.

At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.

I think stackoverflow jobs was better than all the alternatives we ever had or have now (which are ridiculous).

If there is one thing I miss on the internet is indeed stackoverlow jobs. Crazy that it didn't work out.

LinkedIn is the Facebook of people who don't want to be on Facebook but want to post Facebook kind of stuff.

totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.

The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.

But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.

The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.

Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.

In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.

ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isn’t fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.

Thats entirely how atproto works now!

Except for the part where bluesky maintains a central registry and also the part where the protocol is really complicated with its authenticity stuff.

https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org

> As the next step of maturing governance of the PLC identity system, Bluesky Social PBC is supporting the creation of an independent organization to operate the directory.

someone related to bluesky maintains a central registry*

If the US government sanctions you, your PLC will get deleted. Only the US government will have this power.

PLC's board composition and country of residence are designed to shield from that. At best it will only ever be as effective at this as ICANN, which is roughly our target.

It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies

We actually don't need to accept that. When they become big enough for network effects to become inescapable they need to be treated as utilities more than random private companies.

Are you saying that they should be regulated or controlled by the government in some ways?

They already are. For example they're not allowed to kill people or publish child porn

Okay, so I imagine they must agree that age verification is good as well

My 81 year-old mother has never owned a computer. So yes it's not good to have critical government services only on apps or websites that require log in or subscriptions. Although to her it doesn't matter since she has no clue of these sites.

We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.

After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.

My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.

For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.

Re the "land lines", I think the answer to that is not "keep 100+ year old copper infrastructure running" but "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago".

Of course, neither will happen, so there's that.

> "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago"

Sadly, I don't think that makes sense. Switches have a lot more to do a lot faster when it comes to the internet as compared to a phone. 100 years ago, calls were completed by a person physically moving one or more wires from one plug to another.

Better to have an emergency system that will always work - and maybe the only way to keep an emergency system maintained is to use it during non-emergencies. Hard phone lines and radio.

Just a nitpick - by 1926, about 20-30% of Bell exchanges were already automatic, on Strowger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch equipment.

They also have better, more ubiquitous technology. Is an off-the-shelf managed Ethernet switch on a UPS really less reliable per user than a 5ESS? I don't know, but surely only marginally because both are pretty close to 100%, and the main cause of failures is human errors on both systems.

The actual problem people have with VoIP landlines is that they require power at the customer end. A traditional analog POTS line supplies power from the central office so it doesn't need any from the customer, unless they want to use a cordless phone, which takes more power than the central office provides. A fiber VoIP line requires power at both ends no matter what.

Note the original phones actually didn't have "central battery" as they call it. Instead each phone had its own battery, designed for about 6 months of usage, and every 6 months the phone company sent a wagon around to replace everyone's phone batteries.

> Even Bluesky has this problem!

Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?

Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.

It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.

I don't understand why they have this option. Why would anyone toggle this on?

Maybe to minimize bots scraping your info.

If bluesky ever becomes popular boots will just scrape the firehose directly.

I mean it's 3x the size of HN by monthly active users

I agree. I run a small community organisation and we've come off all social media and created a single website. You want information about us? That's where it is - the website.

Nobody should be relying on any social media company to share information widely, and citizens shouldn't be required to sign up for Facebook, X, or anything, to get that information.

I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.

Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.

Or you sue them and (if they did something wrong) they're SOL.

But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.

...because the overhead of even small claims is bigger than what you can possibly recover in most regular disputes. There needs to be something like a class action for small claims - government regulators where you can submit complaints with evidence to and if enough people complain about a company the government has to look into it.

Isn't small claims designed for, well, small claims and therefore low overhead? That's why you can't bring a lawyer. Which is super annoying for a company, because a company has no physical embodiment and has to send a lawyer or other representative just by virtue of being a company.

There is a browser addon https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect to view Old Reddit without an account.

A workaround that will surely be patched in the next site update.

>Reddit is now this way too.

You can still use https://old.reddit.com with no login. It's cleaner and snappier.

Is this a cruel joke?

Why ?

Old Reddit now requires login and ID verification

Not in the US thankfully.

I'm in the USand I have the authwall. Maybe it is a california thing I dunno.

They're starting to block that and are starting to require logins for old reddit

You can use Old Reddit Redirect [1] to fix it (for now).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

I would support a law requiring official government messages to be promulgated only via channels that do not require an account to view. It's not the most important thing to spend political capital on, but it would have the positive effect of directly interfering with government officials publishing their messages on proprietary login-only social media because it's the most expedient thing to do or it's the only thing they know how to do.

Isn't that just "the World Wide Web"?

The reason these sites require login is because they also want to control the resulting conversations, whether for moderation (generous) or selling your data (more likely).

Announcements/political campaigning doesn't require feedback in the same way so no reason for them to use X, FB or anything else.

Seeing the state of most conversations on X or FB, I'm quite happy with limiting the general public's ability to broadcast to the world.

That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)

So HTTP and IP

I think if you think that technologies which were around for decades before social media took off are equivalent to social media, then it's actually on you for missing what the difference is.

See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.

Yeah but you have to think about what that convenience actually is. You can't just say "twitter is convenient". Visiting someone's website is actually much easier than visiting their Twitter, so what happened?

Scrolling Twitter is a lot easier than visiting a thousand websites, and it auto suggests new content. In its case, the power of suggestion is used for bad, but it's important.

Also, replies and retweets.

We're just reinventing moderated Usenet newsgroups.

This is Mastodon, and there are instances such as https://ec.social-network.europa.eu.

Exactly, we don't need any more closed silos when there are open options that governments can adopt.

The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.

At least for now Reddit doesn't require neither phone number nor email address (I think)

In practice you wont be able to comment if you don't provide email. Though, you will be able to view.

I just don't want to be logged in. I used to be an active user. It sucks up too much time and there's a lot of toxicity. I finally got off when they blocked third party apps. Their official app is horrible and the website has enough annoyances that I don't want to use it. I was content to click on the occasional search result though. Now that they finally took that away I'm done.

It requires email now. It used to not. And if you don't want to be shadowbanned you also need phone, and if you want to view NSFW you need government ID.

The NSFW part definitely depends on where you live, Switzerland doesn't require it for example

Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?

Newspapers never required logging in to buy a copy.

You had to pay for a copy though and that's worse

Geez, it's much better. A copy of a newspaper is usually cheaper than printing the same articles 9n paper, and you don't need to bother with printing, and you have a hard copy automatically.

And zero digital trace, which beats everything said above.

Newspapers were regulated.

From Musk in Dec 2022 (right after purchasing Twitter):

> we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll

Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s

I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.

[0] https://elonmusk.today

Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.

Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.

He thinks Twitter data is valuable for AI training. He also blocks archive.org.

Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon.

Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.

I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was.

It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.

Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.

I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate.

You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.

Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.

Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.

Hallucination is not something specific to LLM by any means.

Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".

Yes, but LLMs are hallucination machines by design. What I mean by this is that everything the LLM generates is a hallucination, untethered from truth or reality, since the data is generated purely based on statistics around what word is most likely to come next. This type of algorithm can never model "truth" or "fact."

To the extent that an LLM generates something factual or realistic, it's doing so either accidentally, or because of the various band-aids that the grandparent post describes which will never fully solve the problem.

Yeah, but humans are just as hallucinatory when speaking about pretty much anything other than their flat or kids.

99% of people learn by memorising facts, not by testing reality.

> Yeah, but humans are just as hallucinatory when speaking about pretty much anything other than their flat or kids.

Do you have a source for this? I vehemently disagree.

> 99% of people learn by memorising facts, not by testing reality.

I disagree with this too, but whether or not it’s true, LLMs don’t learn via either of these methods, so it’s not relevant to the discussion.

Gees... it never occurred to me that such an obvious thing needs a proof. I used to think that it's enough to kinda... just go out of one's luxury office at Y-Combinator and try talking to a janitor or a taxi driver...

https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/onud4u/anon_research...

>I disagree with this too, but whether or not it’s true, LLMs don’t learn via either of these methods, so it’s not relevant to the discussion.

Em... I think it is relevant. In my mental model, an LLM is basically a giant hash table, so memorizing is about 90% of what it does.

> Gees... it never occurred to me that such an obvious thing needs a proof.

I didn’t ask for a proof, I asked for a source, and it is not obvious to me. Your claim is that “humans are just as hallucinatory [as LLMs] when speaking about pretty much anything other than their flat or kids.” This is a quite an outlandish claim to make given that LLMs hallucinate literally every single thing they produce; as I said previously they have no concept of “truth,” or “fact.”

> https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/onud4u/anon_research

I’m not sure what you’re trying to show with this link but posting an image of an anonymous message board with people using ableist slurs is not a great look.

I have spoken to janitors and taxi drivers and had great intellectual conversations with many of them. Are you trying to say that they aren’t as smart on average as a Y Combinator employee? Because I’ve met some pretty stupid YC employees.

> Em... I think it is relevant. In my mental model, an LLM is basically a giant hash table, so memorizing is about 90% of what it does.

You specifically said “memorizing facts,” which an LLM definitely does not do at all.

But as I said, I also disagree with your assertion. Pretty much the entire first several years of a child’s life consists solely of learning through testing reality, and we continue to test reality in other ways as we grow. And to say that 99% of people learn by any single method seems obviously false; we all learn through several different methods, depending on our brains and the particular situation at hand, and a portion of the learning that every person does is via testing reality.

Come on, just come on.

That isn't responsive to anything I said.

I'll summarize my position in case you're confused:

* You said that humans are just as hallucinatory as LLMs when speaking about anything other than their flat or kids, and I think this is incorrect, because LLMs don't model "facts" at all.

* So even if a human you're conversing with is purely reciting memorized facts back to you and not actually creatively thinking or "testing reality" at all (which, I repeat, is a wild claim), that person would not in any way be hallucinating in the same way an LLM does.

* You then claimed that 99% of people learn by memorizing facts, not by testing reality. I think this is false on its face for multiple reasons, the most obvious one being that humans learn in varied, complex ways, and so it's nonsensical to treat a person as only being able to learn via a single method.

Where did I go wrong? I'm happy to be set straight with facts/sources if I'm incorrect.

Mainstream LLMs are trained on tests that contain vast amounts of falsehood, so even if they did work by memorizing facts, they would be memorizing counter-facts.

Pick any topic in which misinformation is spread by crackpots. (Especially a topic that is not "policed" by the system prompt). Ask questions using terminology, phrases and ideas that the crackpots use, and you will tend to get crackpot answers; the AI will confirm crackpot theories, backd by links to crackpot forum posts.

What we have is a technology that can reproduce sentences that are grammatical with a very high probability, paragraphs that are coherent with a high probability and true with a lower probability if all the input training data is true. Then, true with an even lower probability when the input data contains vast numbers of untrue sentences, as is the case for all the mainstream, cloud-hosted AI public offerings.

LLMs are not (and ever were) expected to produce truth. Just like humans. Most of the time humans have no idea about what they are talking about, they are just repeating patterns. Just like LLMs.

LLMs are doing what they are expected to be doing -- imitating humans, and they are very good at it, because humans are essentially doing the same thing -- imitating other humans. Kids imitate their parents, students imitate their teachers, employers imitate their boss, fans imitate their popstar.

It's hard to even have this conversation, because it's so bloody obvious that it is hard to understand why this even needs an explanation.

Just remember when was the last time you actually read the manual for a program rather than tried to fit your use-case into an example.

Generating original content and understanding anything from the first principles is not just hard, it's prohibitively hard. Nobody learns arithmetic by reading a book on Peano arithmetic, people just imagine putting some apples in a pot, which is the same principle -- analogy/ imitation.

Many people believe in crackpot theories, therefore an LLM has to faithfully imitate them.

That's what I'm saying. Musk corp guys seem ungrounded and hallucinating a ton like early GPTs.

He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked

He bought twitter because he was forced to. He got it at twice any valuation (based on fake usage stats) and at least 4x what it was worth. Criticism of him was not "shut down" either off or on twitter.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...

Why did he ban the maker of this twitter unblocker thing and the maker of elonjet?

You are both correct. He originally wanted to buy it because his feelings were hurt by lots of Twitter users (like the Elon Jet guy), and I can only speculate that he thought it’d fill the emotional void in his soul to own it and do what he wanted with it.

Later, when he realized that this was a stupid idea and that his amazing business acumen resulted in him drastically overpaying, he tried to back out of the sale by giving the excuse that the number of bots/spam posts/etc were more than he thought. According to the agreement that he had signed, this was not a valid reason to back out of the deal. His lawyers advised him that he’d probably lose in court, hence he was “forced to” buy the site as your article states.

Now he's a nobody though. Wasn't the case previously.

> Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when

That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.

> but rational on product decisions

Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.

Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel; and the entirety of Neuralink (just to name a handful).

I am certifiably not a fan of Musk but the yoke in the cybertruck when combined with the drive by wire steering is an absolute engineering masterpiece and a masterclass in systems calibration. The yoke itself has a relatively narrow range of motion of .94 turns lock-to-lock and at slow parking lot speeds that means you can do a 3 point turn, park, parallel park, navigate around, without making large movements of the steering input and you never have to (because you physically cannot) go hand-over-hand. Then at highway speeds the steering ratio is vastly different and the vehicle feels solid as a rock. It's absolutely effortless.

Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.

> Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle.

Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.

This should be your prior for any public figure.

Agreed for sure. I think part of the problem is that at least for a while, he was good at selling the lie that he was an intelligent engineer, which caused a lot of people (especially tech-savvy ones) to trust him more than the average random public figure. Unfortunately it seems like some people never realized he was a fraud and still view him this way.

Likely the realization what AI companies (themselves included) are willing to pay for that data.

I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."

Twitter requires your phone number to sign up

The solution is clearly one that isn't controlled by any company:

Nostr.

Nostr people are like the Voat people the first time Reddit fucked up.

> get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable

The US House of Representatives posts their live hearings exclusively on YouTube. This is information that should be ungated and freely available, yet is a pain to acquire or archive because YouTube absolutely does not want you getting to the raw video.

I don't understand how this is legal, honestly.

And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.

Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.

Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.

In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.

They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.

Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links

Which is appropriate only for the extremest of extreme situations like an imminent open war our natural catastrophe.

Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.

You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?

That's a false premise - scraping itself isn't illegal, and reasonable also it should not be. But having most of the traffic be scrapers that don't behave well and brute force constantly refetch pages unnecessarily and unintelligently is the issue.

So it's just bad behavior requiring reduction of the openness. Like with any open things when people can't behave anymore :(

>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted

To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.

Disruption was never an unblemished positive for society.

Create an account then? Not sure why that's an issue.

You can't make new accounts on twitter. You can only use existing apple or google accounts.

I think you can, if you install their app.

I don't have a smartphone.

Then use one of the other options. It's not really that difficult.

The options are: install the app or register using a google or apple account. Since the former is the same as the latter it all collapses down to: register using a google or apple account.

I have neither a Google account, nor an Apple account.

>are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.

It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?

A couple years ago was the last time.

Try it again today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com