Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible.
This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.
No idea. I used it a while and enjoyed the content, then they changed something in the algorithm and I'd suddenly get basically the same content every single day, often >30% of the feed would be the exact same as the week before. They also removed the list of topics, so there was no obvious way to escape the near static feed.
Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I never visited the site again.
It's a real shame. I used to really enjoy my daily Quora digest email. One of the only automated emails I truly dug into and read in detail. Over time I read it less and less. Then switched it to be weekly, then turned it off. I miss the old Quora.
I could imagine they're trying to prioritize things like user retention and ad revenue, both of which can be done better by tracking user behavior. Losing a percentage of their logged out user base could very well be worth it to them in order to increase what helps their business.
It's because they need to start collecting more first-party data from users who land on their site. This is a result of Apple (and others in the future) blocking third-party cookie tracking.
They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.
They sure do; however, digital media and social in particular, absolutely rely on significant investment in their audiences, attribution, etc in order to drive more revenue and thus higher CPMs. More traditional media (such as OOH, Print, etc) all rely on very high-level metrics such as daily traffic volumes and lack of direct impact evidence in their attribution of value.
This is why Facebook is SO very against what Apple is doing with iOS14+, particularly with cross-device and cross-app tracking opt-in, because they know it will decimate their ability to do what they do today.
Bingo. They need this for user-level measurement and targeting. Wouldn't be surprised if this also supports part of their audience extension work with twitter audience platform as well.
Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You no longer just ”get” them. You need to apply. I was rejected for getting key to export my own tweets.
Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.
Interesting. As someone who hasn't done any mobile dev at all, is there a way to prevent something like this from happening? Can't you somehow encrypt such secrets in the app?
You can try, but you won't succeed against a dedicated reverse engineer, simply dropping a hook in on the API calls would be enough to grab the decrypted key in a case like that, if not simply statically reading the encryption keys and decrypting it. That's not to say it's useless - some reversers will simply move on to the next app when there's a list of dozens.
You can also send requests via your own server, which would allow you more control over the requests that get sent out to your 3rd party APIs and just restrict tokens as much as possible to the minimal set of features necessary for your application.
That achieves nothing against someone who uses something like apktool/baksmali to do static RE, let alone inject something like Frida to perform dynamic RE. There are even Xposed modules designed to just bypass certificate pinning.
Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a counter-RE one.
Unless an API you're looking at requires/supports attestation via SafetyNet or you're willing to proxy via your own server this is likely not an option.
Additionally, while it's true (to my knowledge) that re-implementing a full safteynet spoof is not currently publicly available, a combination of Frida and MagiskHide is able to bypass SafetyNet for dynamic RE purposes, just launch the app as normal with MagiskHide enabled then attach to it with Frida as root. If they enforce full hardware attestation this may change in the future, but right now we're good.
Please don't legitimize SafetyNet. It is an existential threat to real ownership of your phone as any flavor of Android but that blessed by Google trips SafetyNet. It's the equivalent of barring people from running software on their laptop because they've installed a flavor of Windows that wasn't shipped from the factory. People everywhere have a right to do with their phone what they want to.
I agree with all your points, but what's the reasonable alternative? There is a reason that apps have decided to go with SafetyNet as a requirement. It dramatically reduces abuse.
Quora ended for me when spun/copy+pasted Google results started to replace answers. For example: I asked for the science behind the EPA's recommendations on UV exposure, and the answers were all word-for-word copies of the first result in Google, which had no detail on the science behind it. Just "avoid going out before x," "wear x SPF sunscreen," but nothing about the basis for the recommendations.
That was years ago. Recently, I went looking for how to un-retweet something from an account that has since blocked me, and every single answer on every instance of someone asking that on Quora is more or less a copy of Twitter's documentation for an ordinary un-retweet. Useless search result pollution.
this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most.
I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100% user-hostile, Twitter.
Beyond the Login wall, Public Sector Agencies should not be using Twitter as a Primary communication method, it would be Ok to have the messages Copied their from Official Sources, but there should be Official Sources to obtain the same info, at the same time, update in the same frequency.
I like Debian's approach to this; publish short news on their own site and also automatically republish those items on social networks. Full blog posts get similar treatment.
On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront).
Of course, in order to help out the unfortunate website operators, people should willingly give up pii that the same companies have shown they don’t give a damn about protecting. /s
The translation is inaccurate.
It means safety in the same way as the salvation of the soul for Christians, but in a non-religious way, and applied to all of society. Yes, they were both quite grandiose in their wordings and full of themselves.
Safety, as it is commonly used, would better be translated, in French, as "sûreté". "Salut" would be a much, much stronger word.
But I'm still not quite sure what the French word "salut" means. Is there not a simple one-word English translation? What exactly is the remit implied by the name Comité de salut public?
Exactly. "Committee of Public Salvation". Sounds weird.
So, in this case, considering they considered themselves the defenders of the greatest ideology of all time and the (worthy) people, and were at war with both foreign countries and some of their own people, I’d say it'd mean something like:
"Committee in charge of delivering the country, the Republic (the idea of Republic itself; not just it’s French incarnation) and freedom / democracy (even though they weren’t quite democratic) from utter ruin and certain doom"
We criticize free services all the time for this, but I think that paying users are monetized all the same. Using American examples, the DMV sells data, internet providers are selling user data, credit card companies are selling user data... so it's not like any other companies don't monetize their users in other ways.
This is true. Paid services also tend to parasitise their legitimate users and maximise revenues.
A key difference is that in the Twitter case, there's no monetary penalty which can be imposed by the host class (that is, the unpaied content contributors).
Much of the "harvest as much data as possible" element is also driven by fundamental power and monopolistic differences.
I mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Like seriously I’ve implemented at a company I worked for and it’s the least invasive thing to actually rate limit people.
Alternatives included:
- pay a small fee but that requires a credit card
- send us government documents which is worse
- mine crypto for a while but it doesn’t stop people who are actually motivated
- send a selfie and then do some face matching, also worse.
Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?
Personally I'm a fan of the fee idea. You can quickly outstrip the yearly revenue per user with even a small fee, and the fee payment could e.g. happen via PayPal which doesn't require credit cards, to give one example. The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes which renders this entire exercise pointless.
> The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes.
Maybe there is room for some simple innovation here. Is it possible to do “coarse” address for tax purposes? After all I imagine they only care about which tax jurisdiction such as county / parish or something like that?
Let’s say you pay a fee for being able to view tweets without logging in. How will they know it’s you who’s trying to view a tweet if you don’t effectively log in?
>I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?
Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious Fiverr-like spam accounts
> Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?
Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even asking for email, including this one. It seems what you really want to say is "What can we ask from you for it not to cost us anything?".
Obvious to a human manually looking at the account isn't obvious to a computer system that has to pick them out a huge dataset. You will never be able to ban Fiverr type accounts because for the same reason residential VPNs work well. You're paying someone who has a clean record and will send all the right signals.
HN works because it's niche. It can be moderated by a handful of people. Once you cross the "can't be moderated by humans" threshold of size you're solving a completely different problem.
I won't knock you for saying "well then you shouldn't exist at that scale" but that's a non-answer for the real world where giving up PII in exchange for participating in a huge social network is a trade enough people are willing to make that you feel pressure to do it in order to get in.
It doesn't follow to me, those people open thousands of account for those scams, how are they clean? They are not sophisticated, they don't even use them like real humans and it's literally for $5!
> "can't be moderated by humans" threshold
Is it a threshold or simply a cost center that starts to be big and needs to be slashed in order to please shareholders?
To me it's perfectly possible to be big and have moderators, you just can't have it cheaply.
They've already rejected doing nothing, as it doesn't work.
I want Tesla to give me a free car too, but it ain't happening. At some point a company makes decisions you aren't gonna agree with and your only recourse is to not use them. If that means you can't read Twitter, then that's the price you pay. You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
They're asking for a stop to major companies lying to the public. To stop harvesting people's data under false pretenses.
I think citizens can and should demand those things from companies that choose to incorporate in their country. That avail themselves of the legal systems and protections. That take advantage of the workforce present.
Companies are free to choose where they operate and incorporate.
> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so big and so central to our lives, to the point many news (including from police precincts or first responders) are only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's "they owe you nothing".
Public sector and publicly funded groups should be communicating through standards-based channels. Their content belongs to the digital commons. This exists today, via the ActivityPub and RSS sphere of ecosystems.
But you can’t blame that on Twitter, no matter how much they welcome it and how evil they are. Blame it on unspeakably bad judgement on the part of government employees. Making Twitter the conduit for official communications? I can’t even fathom the mindset.
> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
If we go that route of argumentation: Can Twitter please close shop and go away then? Their value is vastly overestimated: Most people don't want to use Twitter specifically, they are peer pressured into it because it is where everyone is. There are better free and open source alternatives without them trying to steal from me. Twitter burns all that money (do they generate a profit yet?) to stay on top, just so that nobody else can.
To stay with your analogy: Tesla rolled up and pushed every other car manufacturer out, now they are giving a somewhat free car and in return they want you to do everything they say, and the keys to your house "just in case".
no you see, that's the problem. I don't WANT a twitter account, but I apparently need to use the site to view local updates in my town.
I'm perfectly happy continuing to not post there. I just don't see the benefit in making me find an extension around this annoyance so I can continue to not have a twitter account.
Neither of these are solutions to the privacy and compromise potential problem that is the 'phone number or else' requirement. Its objectively worse, so that you go "oh, guess you can have my phone number instead".
Reddit has all three (no need for email even), they might not be perfect but I can't remember any time I saw "viagra links" or other obvious spam. They have problems with accounts obviously, but you can't frame it as a spam problem.
Where? I've seens a couple of ghost subreddits with spam, but then you see the same with ghost fb groups, weird twitter profiles, youtube, etc On even moderately sized subs I've seen any that wasn't removed quickly by the mods.
People can say mods are too expensive for fb and twitter, but there is the dishonesty, instead of paying mods they pass on that cost to us with our pii while pretending it's free.
uptimeporn, for a very specific example from today. I wont link it because the spam is NSFW and probably removed by now, but- I saw it, so moderation effort is obviously not effective.
But in the end it comes to the fact that your Google/Apple needs to have your app store account that is verified to be human enough (less fake accounts) and then a web browser confirms this via a login to this account.
One option might be to allow people to view tweets if they have accounts from reputable federated identity providers, then you have an identity of an individual person without having to do the validation yourself. You can then rate-limit based on that individual ID.
Another option might be to rate-limit by things which don't require accounts, which won't strictly rate-limit individuals, but it's unlikely that's the terminal goal here. It's not actually clear what they are trying to accomplish. Reducing the amount of resources wasted on scraping bots ?
It doesn't achieve the stated goal of rate-limiting individual people, which sounds like an instrumental goal for an actual (unstated) business objective.
Currently federated identity providers do not provide a separate identity to each site you are authenticated on. At that point any collaborating sites can pull together all the information you give to any one of them. Hell, in most cases your "identity" is your email address, so every site you authenticate with can spam you directly.
The Shibboleth Idp also support per SP opaque nameID but nobody like SAML based protocol and as far as I know outside the academical identity federations, no one deploys Shibboleth ...
Shibboleth is terrible -- so terrible it was easier for me to write my own SAML IdP from the specification than try to make it useful. Lots of people use Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS), which has a SAML IdP.
I just want to be able to occasionally read a few tweets with no required login or account. Just the same with Instagram and similar, I just won't use it and I'll forget about it. I guess Twitter is next. No, I've never had a Twitter account. I don't have a Facebook account.
I don't think Twitter cares that you won't use it. They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.
The rule of thumb is that 99% of users are lurkers. Since more and more people are privacy focused and it's clear that forcing lurker to register is not in their best interest they obviously miscalculated.
Reddit, Qora and Pinterest all tried it, shot themselves in the foot, lost a huge readership and reversed it or will reverse it.
It's hard to realise how bad it is as only lurker don't have a sunk cost fallacy and easily quit and their quitting is invisible.
How do you make that kind of calculus though? Presumably Twitter will want to stay around for a very long time. If people like BTCOG take away a negative experience from it then doesn't it seed a future negative opinion of Twitter?
10 years ago when a government banned Twitter it was almost universally seen as bad. That's probably not the case anymore. Will it be worse in the future?
>They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.
I'm sure they have. And I, being used to being in the minority of users, will likely find some 3rd party solution around the problem they created. Win-win outside of me wasting a few minutes installing another extension.
Twitter is stopping viewing, which isn't a fraud / abuse issue at low rates.
In the case of posting, rate limiting / scoring w/o a phone number without explicitly banning until you build more reputation works pretty well from what I can see, and most legit twitter users, especially new ones, don't post a lot and mostly read anyway.
And in twitter's case, I think paying a small amount of crypto would actually be something the CEO is interested in this case for the private types who won't / can't get a phone number. Some of twitter best accounts are anonymous and the CEO is into crypto. Add a monero payment option for those small amounts who aren't fraudulent and are private people and you will probably get rid of a lot of complaints.
Cookies don't track you nearly as well. What happens if you delete a cookie? Fingerprinting isn't a universal solution either as iDevices all look extremely similar to each other. As to IP addresses, they only work if you connect from your home WiFi. Not every phone has that set up. Often they use carrier grade NAT so you only have a few IPs to work with.
Last, customers of their data love being able to search/correlate by phone number, not by some pseudonymous identifier that might not be present in some other dataset.
I think this crackdown might in fact be a reaction to attempts by institutions like Apple to ensure better privacy. If fingerprinting isn't giving them the data, they ask for it directly at the threat of restricting access.
I imagine the data of 99.9% people they mostly care about are the ones who dont know what cookies are, let alone how to delete them or otherwise mask/misdirect various internet trackers.
~10 years ago I made about 10k Twitter accounts just for fun. I never used them. They still exist, no one deleted them. A while ago I lost the script and password for them.
Back then you could bypass captchas and other checks by changing Tor endpoint (some endpoints required captchas, some didn’t). Made a script that did just that.
It also worked for Facebook and I still receive facebook spam for those accounts daily.
I have no problem with asking for a phone number during registration, it complicates automated account registration and makes it quite expensive.
But I dislike the idea of hiding content behind login page, internet should not be a walled garden.
Their fraud problems don't justify anything though. Nobody outside Twitter cares about Twitter's problems. Just because they have a problem doesn't mean they should get to solve it, especially if it involves personal information disclosure which can get people killed.
You can get away with that on a residential IP sometimes, but don’t count on it. Log in from the wrong location or a VPN or do certain patterns of behavior and it drops you.
I exclusively use it via VPN, with a ProtonMail address from the web (so many login notifications) while like, commenting, and subscribing on politically controversial content and soccer.
Three, almost four months in and zilch. It’ll be a good test case anyways.
Fixed wireless ISP in the US and I hit a captcha on every site from time to time when logging in (and sometimes just trying to read-only) - and I'm effectively blocked from anonymous sites.
I can "lock in" an apparent IP address, i.e. ssh to some box with no-ops; but that's either per-connection or still NAT enough that I get flagged. att aggregates all such connections at F5 routers in large cities, mine is in Dallas, for both of my fixed wireless connections.
Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30 years. There have been attempts to make it friendlier with things like IRCCloud, but then the beards just scoff at the idea of a $5/month bouncer-as-a-service and go right back to wondering why the protocol is dying.
Can't tell if you're being ageist on purpose but "the beards" don't _have_ to use IRCCloud and can just keep using their TUI clients and bouncer daemons if they want instead of having their UX change weekly at the whim of some resume-driven front-end team.
Well, here's one issue: I can tell you what a reply and hashtag is but I'm going to fail the quiz that asks me to define a TUI client. (And don't get the Chrsmistian Fundamentalists hellbent on taking downn Tumblr et al. starter anything involving a "daemon".)
Me being far too confident in Samsung's spellcheck, is what. It's too late to edit but you get the gist: nerd stuff must don user-friendly garb for to not scare the customers. UX.
The point was that the stereotypical "beards" in question can continue using their TUI clients, not that someone who doesn't know what a TUI client is should be forced to use one.
I think my point was that the insistence on interface purity is part of what (or emblematic of the ethos that) killed the chance of the protocol reaching mainstream adoption. But I take your point.
I think the lack of channel history is a big showstopper for many people but personally I think that's a feature. The idea that I should have to dig through slack history and its rambling conversation format to find information pertinent to my work is downright dumb.
It is immune, precisely because it's a protocol. Freenode is dead but switching to another network is literally as simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.
It's not apples to oranges, it's directly analogous: both represent federated networks on the internet where users have the freedom to decide which client they want to use and which servers they want to connect to.
They are not analogous. IRC is a chat protocol with semantics suitable for a chat protocol. HTTP is at this point just a transport level thing for whatever you want to send. It doesn't have any significant semantic implications for sites like Twitter.
I often hear people suggest that the internet couldn't exist without corporate interests and surveillance capitalism.
usually along the lines of "If there were no ads, we wouldn't have any internet at all!"
That's an example of what corporate interests have brainwashed people into thinking. They didn't have to turn us against IRC. Most internet users don't even know it exists.
So, in this fictitious world where IRC is a stable protocol and easy enough for the average layperson to use, who pays for the IRC server bills and how?
At one point it was easy enough for the average person to use, because the average person had to deal with a command-line. But tech, in its infinite quest to Make More Money, keeps chasing the dumbest of the dumb so that it can expand its market into an imagined infinity. It kinds of reminds me of the windshield repair shop that takes a baseball bat to nearby windshields at night to drive business
How about we work towards unwinding this whole mess and meet users in the middle??
FOSS and open protocols are criminally undervalued because of greed, and all the fake newbie empathy it generates
Really? We almost saw a resurgence with the chatbot craze that recently passed. And frankly command-line is something that GUIs do easily, or have we as a field forgotten that too?
People have such a gap-filled view of the past. I barely had to learn any IRC command-line stuff because of mIRC
I don't understand the question. IRC is a real-time chat protocol and twitter is a proprietary micro-blogging website. I don't see how the two are related, other than they are both something to do with the Internet.
If my only current understanding of a question is "that's a silly question," then I'm also going to assume first that it's my failure to understand rather than assuming something worse about someone else.
The above commenter is correct, the original question is silly, however much flak they may get as people here love IRC.
Do you genuinely believe (1) IRC is anywhere near as usable as Twitter for the general population, or that (2) a real-time chat is an equivalent offering to Twitter?
I'll add (3) the only reason IRC isn't equally abused is because it's so bad that it can't attract enough people to justify any kind of ad-based (or otherwise) monetization model. IRC is the opposite of being a victim of one's own success.
EDIT: I should note that beyond being more usable than IRC, I have precious little good to say about Twitter.
No, it would be one channel per person. Only you would be able to talk (post) in your channel. People who want to read your posts would join your channel.
Private DMs easily map to one-on-one privmsgs. Public replies and threads won't have an equivalent unless there was some meta-protocol to temporarily allow another person to talk in your channel + duplicate your posts in your channel to theirs + expire that access eventually.
Also subscribing to tags won't work without a similar "copy all messages from one channel to another" relay.
Channels are basically tags, without history for those who join. Anyone can PRIVMSG a channel by default, it is prevented by setting the common +n mode.
I'm beginning to seriously believe the general population doesn't deserve services like Twitter and giving it to them was a mistake. When something can be had so easily there is no respect for it. A lack of respect for the technology and a lack of thoughtfulness into its implications have caused a lot of harm. The hope of the internet was that it would increase communication and understanding. But nobody is communicating. They are talking at each other. They should be listening but have just become more self absorbed.
So in a way IRC is better. If for no other reason because it required some personal discipline and will to learn to use and it segmented the internet to prevent these monstrous echo chambers. Humans aren't ready for a global forum. We are still only good at small communities.
My point isn't that meaningful conversation is impossible on twitter. Its that the majority isn't and most abuse the gift of an instant global platform. Its tragedy of the commons on an unprecedented scale.
Of course there are worthwhile interactions to be made. But the people making them would have been doing so on the less accessible older internet anyways.
These things existed, but you usually had to go seek them out specifically. You weren't reading a friend's, say, blog, when suddenly a link to some exciting online argument about some nonsense appeared. That does happen on ~all social media. Unfortunately, many news(paper) websites are baiting with "hot" controversial topics now as well.
It's not a silly response. The thing about IRC is that there's channels, and you chat with people in those channels. The deal with Twitter is you both publish and subscribe to short messages, but there's no enforcement of reciprocity -- I don't have to follow someone just because they follow me. There are replies, but that's not the same thing, and Twitter is starting to give people more tools to restrict replies to their Tweets, making the platform even less reciprocal. Everyone in an IRC channel gets the same experience, everyone on Twitter gets a unique experience.
People say they want the old early-90s internet, but that internet only worked that way because almost nobody outside of universities was on it and nothing on it actually mattered to anybody.
It took me way too long to find the usage numbers (which ironically were within an arm's reach on my bookshelf most of the time), but ~1988 Usenet was under 1 million potential users, and fewer than 150,000 active readers. Even by the mid-1990s, it was under 1 million active participants.
Google+ was considered a failed social network with at least 10--100 million active users (by my own conservative estimates based on sampled profile data, independently verified by a much larger analysis). Facebook has 3 billion MAUs (monthly active users).
Until ~1992 (the Eternal September), Usenet users were largely represented as cohorts of a few hundred to low thousands, each subject to the disciplinary authority of university network administrators. Privileges could be and were revoked. Netadmins had a hardcopy directory in which everyone's number was listed twice (forward and reverse search). They talked to each other.
I'm active on Diaspora (for over a decade) and Mastodon (for about five years now). Both are far smaller than their comparable commercial equivalents (FB and Twitter, respectively). Each already strains under abuse, spam, and propaganda efforts, though Mastodon seems to have a more robust containment toolkit. Much resembles the old Usenet model: individual instance administrators can determine what users (locally or remotely) or instances (remote federation) can interact, and to what extent. It's high-touch, and has issues, but at present scale it mostly works. (Not perfectly, but it's not completely blown up yet either.)
Diaspora ... seems on far shakier grounds. User controls, admin engagement, reporting tools, and the culture of active management are all far weaker. The saving grace is the lack of algorithmic amplification, but bad actors are a distinct presence, if largely walled off into their own small, sad world.
On the google+ 99.99% if offered would gladly take google+ for free. It was a huge success.
Google closed it down because they realize they never needed it. You were rarely providing new information to google because you already had an account and they already were tracking you everywhere. Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses. What sites you visit google knows about.
The only thing google+ gives google is your social graph. But not your friends/family social graph more of your professional social graph. I don't think there was a way to target that info through ads into more profit. They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
And again, you're talking to the guy who ran that experiment.
Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting independently replicated my analysis using a much larger sample of 500,000 profiles, confirming the results I'd found and providing additional details:
I had absolutely no idea Enge was doing this until he published his results. They're a completely independent validation. Which is how science is supposed to work.
Your other comments about G+ are at best speculation, and largely fail to match my knowledge and understanding of the site and service.
> Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how emails work.
As well as NNTP (mentioned in a sibling comment), listserves work for that (and don't just work like email, they use email.) And both have been around longer than the web.
The only way to do this is with blogrolls/linkrolls and other decentralized mechanisms. Making a centralized repo of links like a Yahoo! style web directory is only going to lead to that directory monetizing its gatekeeper status.
You don't have to be on twitter. If we can get more people off that platform, then the world has become a better place. I deleted mine years ago. Never felt better.
IRC is an instant-messaging platform, while Twitter is a microblogging platform that was available to anyone in the pre-smartphone era as it was initially tailored for SMS message length.
IRC requires a client (okay, you could use a web gateway), and you somewhat need to know what you're doing (not saying it's hard, but the average user might not even care about accessing IRC if it requires a minimum of effort), while Twitter could be used through a flip-phone or accessed simply through a web browser, which you can assume everyone have.
plenty of people never left IRC, but Twitter right now is probably a thousand times larger than IRC was at its peak. IRC is a niche community for nerds, not a platform with mainstream appeal. The same is even true for more user friendly, modern services like Mastodon.
99% of users just don't value the things you value in these services.
it depends how much you value your privacy. People that get their phone number/email leaked and get phished would tell you it's worth more than 50 cents.
so it's subjective.
Personally, I don’t mind giving them my phone number because my number is already public information. It sucks though that I can’t get tweets by text.
This was the original use case of twitter. I understand SMS is not secure enough to publish tweets but why can we no longer get texts when someone tweets?
I'm pretty sure you can still get SMS notifications by turning it on in your Settings[0] and then also clicking on the "Notifications" button on the specific profile for which you want to receive notifications. I haven't used it in ages but all the settings appear to be there still :)
It's probably permanently held in their databases. Some services use immutable data models that "append deletes". (GDPR made those types of systems fun to deal with.)
Might be bad for activists, whistleblowers, et al.
I'm not sure I'll blame Twitter for (effectively) requiring phone numbers - they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
On one side, people rightfully complain about trolls, harassers, spam, CSAM, misinformation campaigns and propaganda on online services. And on the other side, people will also rightfully complain about data harvesting, and an ever growing lack of anonymity on the Internet.
At the moment, phone numbers are the closest thing we have to at least have some cost associated with spamming and a legal pointer to get hold of criminal-level abusers. Using government IDs such as the German Personalausweis (which can communicate with a website using NFC and a special app) would outright kill anonymity, using middle men to do the same (or video/postal identification) like for banks, porn and gambling sites costs money and is not much better in terms of anonymity.
You can request phone numbers when creating a certain number of tweets, or trying to reply to a well known account, or if upvoting a comment that is controversial or reported as spam.
It's a lazy solution that pushes spam control costs onto the users.
I want to be able to read the New York Times without a subscription too, yet here we are. Corporations don't have to give all their services to us for free. They can charge, require free registration, whatever.
>> it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront
What I found interesting is that “translate tweet” button doesn’t appear unless you are signed in.
Why cannot I read news from all over the world unless I’m signed in?
Why do users have to sign in to read translated tweets in real time?
unless they've changed their policy on this you can email support and say you don't have a phone number and they'll re-active your account, has worked for me in the past.
At some point there will only be people who don't care at all about their privacy that use twitter, Facebook, Instagram... All these American services in "social" media.
I have noticed that most those services (twitter, Skype and so on) block login without giving phone number...until few months later they automatically unblock. I simply check out in every week, are they removed block or not.
Once I was stupid and gave phone number one of those kind services, that was bad idea. Account went into some weird state after giving code received from SMS.
So my personal experience: wait, never give phone number.
That's odd. I've never given Twitter a phone no. (Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish.) Still use Twitter daily without any issue. Perhaps it's because I'm still logged in and not trying to re-login?
Same experience, and why I do not use a twitter account. Plus the last thing in the world I would do is to let some woke SV company associate the political opinions I follow with a real identity, not in the current environment.
Unrelated, but does anyone know if Facebook does this? They seem to allow signing up with just an email address, but I haven't tried going through with it and seeing if they'll eventually require a phone number.
You can petition them (via email) to not require your phone number and if your emails are persuasive enough they will activate the account without a phone number. But yeah, that is an extra step, and usually takes 2-3 emails that say something like "this account is vital to our business"
When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's great if you want to get off them.
What I've noticed is a few of the newer things breaking on it (unsurprisingly). I think over time it'll get to a point where there's enough of these new things where they'll just pull the plug, which is really too bad. Also love it much more than the "new" experience.
The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me. I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand why they chose this new disastrous design.
That's their objective, to get rid of users who they can't monetize. Including veteran users with ad blockers who refuse to use the new site or any of its features.
It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.
The post-view in compact mode is actually denser than before (thought it has some ugly spacing issues at the top). It’s amazing. Sadly, there seems to be no compact mode for comments, so those look horrible.
And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.
Reddit has had 5 second page loads for over a decade. Extremely embarrassing of them to be honest. I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement, but you always want your site to be fast. I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors.
>I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors
There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.
The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.
What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a copious number of round button-icons that are not intuitive? It's fucking insulting.
Several years ago, I went to a tech roundtable hosted by a well-known company, and this topic came up.
Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.
"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"
I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view its contents. On the new design most of the post contents are right there on the list page.
I exclusively use new Reddit. The increased friction around every single interaction is great for limiting the amount of time I spend there: it raises the bar for deciding to actually view a discussion, and the incomprehensible nesting-collapse algorithm keeps me from going down rabbit holes in threads unless it's something that genuinely interests me.
It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch, and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully invested in what I'm watching.
Sounds like how I like my afternoon coffee, bitter without any additives. It reminds me I need to leave work if I've finished the important stuff for the day. A much needed kick in the guts that makes you purse your lips as you drink it down that puts the rest of the day in perspective.
If you click the button to get rid of the cookie prompt on the bottom of the site while on old.reddit.com, it redirects you to new.reddit.com. Amazing.
You can just uncheck "Use new Reddit as my default experience" in settings and get the old experience without an extension, if you have an account anyway.
Exactly. This is good since this corporations are basically killing themselves since people, slowly but steady, are realizing they can get info elsewhere on the internet (and people start sharing outside them). So yeah, they are basically forcing users to migrate to more open services.
Eh maybe. The problem is that IMO there aren’t any obvious alternatives to Reddit. I remember when Digg committed suicide with a pretty bad redesign and most disgruntled users moved to Reddit. I’ve been pretty annoyed with the changes Reddit has implemented in the past couple of years, but I haven’t found another place to go (that’s not necessarily a bad thing). HN is the closest alternative but the scope of topics we discuss is limited. That’s probably part of HN’s success but then where do you go for other topics?
My Reddit habit has been all but replaced with private Slacks and Discords these days. Either hobby / interest groups, or an "alumni Slack" full of old work friends from a company I worked at a long time.
I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway. Small private forums, where you can actually have real discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.
For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram once per decade, or something like that. But whatever people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses want.
I rather like my reaction GIFs and discussion threads. What I want to see is a modern IRC with these features, and an optional per-channel/per-server message persistence to deal with not knowing what happened while you were away, or while the mobile IRC app of your choice was killed by the Google/Apple background task manager that only allows you to dodge it with proprietary push support.
Slack also smacks of terrible usability, and is proprietary up the wazoo. There is no way to automate anything on it unless your organisation gives some approval.
I find these terrible for any kind of information discovery. I hate that so many communities are using them as an alternative to a subreddit or focused forum. Hell most "modern" forum software is horrific as well.
I think that the advantage in using some kind of instant-message system like Discord/Slack is that you might end up getting a faster response, which is quite helpful when I'm feeling impatient and want my problem to be solved faster. On the other hand, the questions aren't as easily searchable and archived for future people to find.
I used to feel the same way, but even the smaller ones are increasingly being co-opted by partisan screechers. Especially in the State/City/Town subreddits.
IMO they are just creating an opening in the market by continuously shooting themselves in the foot like that. I don't really understand it. Requiring a login to view content is the reason why I never got into Tumblr or Pinterest... I'm not going to bother signing up for your site if you don't first show me it has content that is worth my time, these people have it the wrong way around.
As a Reddit alternative, Ruqqus has the UI and responsiveness down pretty good. However, it branded itself as anti-reddit, and attracted a lot of right-wing people as a result. However, their platform is open source, so IMO, it's only a matter of time before someone steps up to the task.
For reddit, IMO the simplest things you can do to improve the experience is to force the old reddit design (old.reddit.com) when on desktop, and use any app except the official app when on mobile.
That's the one I use. The downside is you can't see pictures or gifs in comments nor the rules of a sub-reddit if you want to submit something. Also submit doesn't work correctly sometimes, especially when you need to tag a submission with flair.
I've been using red reader for the better part of a decade. Its far from the flashiest but its clean, easy to read and performant. Its also FOSS. Since my reddit experience revolves mostly around special interest subs with text heavy discussion, it suits my needs well. If you wanted something to scroll through the media heavy meme subs or the front page there are better options.
The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.
With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.
Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.
> The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.
I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs results in almost never being redirected to the "new" site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see the gallery photos in oldreddit style.
This solution works for me on both mobile browser and desktop browser.
uh... I go to www.reddit.com not old.reddit.com - I don't actively do anything at all, other than change a flag in my user settings. Looking at old.reddit.com in an incognito window looks the exact same as what i see at www.reddit.com. Firefox, ublock origin, no other addons. On mobile and desktop.
> I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, other than having to re-set the flag in settings now and again. Like I said, the only time i've seen an issue is the odd time someone posts an image gallery - I can't see it in oldreddit style unless I click on comments.
I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.
And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.
With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.
Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/<username> or /r/<subname>). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.
Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.
Disabling JS makes you keep going back to the new layout? Interesting that it's essentially being done client-side then.
I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.
Unfortunately, I think they are going to decommission that version eventually.
Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they decided to remove the account activity panel, making revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the fact that they also remove a link from the front page too quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for the dark patterns, heh.
Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)
I second red reader. To you SNR point, I think that is entirely due to the communities you join and how you manage it. Unsub from all of the default subs. They are all garbage. And any that gets beyond a certain size will inevitably fall to low effort reposts and click bait.
Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making focused special interest forums. In the past these would have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But they would have some of the best content the internet had to offer.
Thanks. I broke my reddit habit when I realized that most of the communities on reddit are just ideological echo chambers where you get banned for saying anything the community doesn't agree with. It lost most of it's value when honest conversations couldn't take place anymore. Now the only time I use reddit is when the only search results with the answer to a question I have point to reddit, and I've grown very weary of their tracking and harassing me to use their spyware app. Teddit is a nice way to get the information I'm looking for without being jerked around by those stalkers at reddit. We'll see how long it lasts before being blocked.
A lot of it has to do with being able to see the points. People think “it has a lot of points so it must be right”, which is rarely true, especially on Reddit. HN hides the points on comments and has a bit of unpredictability to the sorting to allow things to float up provided they haven’t been flagged/downvote bombed. I think it is the largest reason HN is still healthy, other than the great moderation.
While HN definitely becomes a bit of an echochamber at times too, at least you can still voice opinions that go against it without people going through your history to attack you rather than your arguments. Occasionally you get downvoted/flagged enough that people can't reply anymore, but again: That stays with just that comment/thread.
Will mention though that I’ve had wholly uncontroversial HN accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a thread.
I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it without one, but am still confused.
Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if it posts a comment with only a link?
New accounts that post links often get auto-flagged, because they're mostly spammers. You can probably recover your account by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
I always saw some comments of people saying "RIP Inbox" after one of their posts became popular in Reddit. I kid you not, it was not until earlier today that I found out that the reason for those comments is that apparenlty Reddit sends replies to your post to your email inbox. My reddit account is so old that it doesn't have a linked email, so I never realized that.
I don’t have Chrome installed on any of my devices but I’ve noticed when I’m on reddit.com on my iPhone it prompts me to either use the Reddit app or “continue browsing” using the Chrome app. Does Google pay for this as some sort of an advertisement? Or is Reddit incentivized in some way to plug Chrome over Safari or DDG “browser”? When I click “continue” it lets me just keep using my current browser but I always wonder if it would open in Chrome if the app were available on my device.
I’m on ios using firefox (though I think I’ve heard that under the hood it is using Safari’s renderer or something like that because of application store requirements? Not sure.), and it shows the chrome logo for me, uh, when I click a link that goes to new reddit, or something.
Or, I guess when viewing through the browser window that twitter embeds?
Just now I tried viewing new.reddit in safari and it told me my browser was old (though perhaps this is because I’ve refrained from updating ios)
I think the Instagram experience is better on mobile web than it is on the app with regards to consuming less. The "timeline" on mobile web is only people I follow with no inserted ads. Same with stories, there are no ads.
The best thing is that the "Explore" tab is just a bit too slow in terms of responsiveness on mobile web. I spend a less time on there because it's not as pleasant to use as the app.
Reddit is unusable without which app, the official one? Because I've been on reddit for a decade and never once used their app. It's either reddit is fun on android or the browser. Never had a problem. Even if you don't have an account, old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com (for mobile) bypass all the atrocious new UI changes
Probably referring to the regular reddit mobile website. It constantly bombards you with requests to open the app, you can't open anything from NSFW subs. It's pretty unusable. At least Twitter and Instagram I can use in the browser without 3rd party sites or apps.
Slide is also a pretty good FOSS(?) Reddit client for Android. I don't use it anymore since I'm trying to get myself to use Reddit less and less but Slide was a pretty good experience for me.
It's going to be tough because of how much of the Internet treats Twitter as a primary source. So this in effect becomes yet another stream behind a pay-wall (in information, not in money) that balkanizes people's view of "what is happening" in the world.
The first place I knew about the January 6th riots was from Twitter. I guess I'll learn about subsequent such events from other sources after people on Twitter do.
I used to love reddit, it was my favourite social media but I can't use it since they redesigned it, they really need to look at hacker news for inspiration.
Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user. I know they present a more spammy version to users landing from google, but nothing is blocked behind more than a click or two. I think that's just good business sense because you want to monetize your firehose of less engaged users and coddle the ones that are more engaged and producing content.
I find that you can get used to a change of habit very quickly. Youtube introduced unblockable commercials for iOS/safari. After 15 years of adblockers and not watching TV, I have developed an intolerance to ads and I just lost the reflex of clicking on any youtube link or going on youtube to find something. Don't really miss it.
This is what has prevented me from joining tik tok. Now it also requires a login after you view like three videos. I just close the tab afterwards. It works great!
methink the coming decade will be a few websites, a bit of IRC and a whole lot of non digital things. the information highway of freedom is becoming a parkour competition
Blocking cookies for twitter.com in settings is a much more reliable way to disable the login popup, for now anyway. Your first filter there uses a randomly generated ID that will change when Twitter pushes an update to prod.
Honestly, this seems like a plus for humanity. I don't think Twitter has really improved the world in any significant way, and maybe made it worse. Anything that prevents the twitter universe from seeping into mine is a good change.
On the other hand I think Twitter and these platforms are a net gain for Human connectivity and sharing of knowledge and expansion of interest. There are many things, including humor, events , people, technology, that I would have never discovered without the existence of many of these platforms. I’m someone who pushes for greater globalization and I believe the transfer of culture that Twitter provides is a good effort towards that.
I think a lot of the complaints towards Twitter is due to people not using the on-site tools to cater the site towards what they want. I find Twitter the most approachable platform in allowing the user to curate the content they want to see via blocking and muting alone. Out of all the Social Media platforms, if there’s something I really don’t want to see while still wanting to use the platform , Twitter is the best. All without having to make a single tweet in 2-3 years.
Certainly the proliferation of social media has given every moron a voice, but Twitter made it worse with its short message limit. There's no room for nuance in your messages, so people just post short "zingers" to "own" the other side, which are often not based on any sort of reality and just giant straw men.
It's absolutely destroyed people's ability to have intelligent political conversations.
There’s a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content.
I suppose these angry Reddit commenters bashing Twitter aren’t seeing it because they’re logged in to Reddit.
Just as with Reddit, there are workarounds to bypass this login requirement if you really want to. The users in that thread have some tips for using uBlock to disable it.
I don't have a reddit account, but it has (for now) the old, usable interface available, so the issue does not persist. Twitter doesn't, and one needs third party services such as nitter or other front ends to avoid the bloated, buggy, purposefully worthless UI.
This tendency to build walled garden communities can't end well, but at the same time the platforms introducing these dark patterns themselves aren't particularly honest, so not much of value is going to be lost as hopefully better alternatives get more adoption.
Anyway, up until a few days ago there were uBO filters to delete twitter cookies every page load and it seemed to do the trick, this may not work anymore.
> There’s a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content.
My first thought when I saw the headline was, how long until the front page features this:
Reddit starts to require login to view posts (twitter.com)
Then I realized this has probably already happened a while ago.
But signing up for Reddit is much easier than signing up for Twitter. You just need to specify a username and a password. You don't need an email or a phone number.
I’m not sure it’s as much ‘the same’ as it appears at first glance.
Increasingly, Twitter is a place where people post original _content_ - things they expect others to be able to see and read and share, potentially on other platforms. These range from the original pithy remarks to long, article-like streams. It seems problematic to me to require a login to view these, and I think it could have an effect on usage for these kinds of things.
There’s not so much of that in Reddit. It’s more a discussion forum, where reading seems like the secondary thing to do to me. Peoples identity also isn’t as ‘obvious’ on Reddit.
Of course, it’s not concrete - you do see long shareable ‘articles’ in Reddit comments sometimes, but I do find myself more taken aback by a Twitter login requirement than a Reddit one.
Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app.
Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter:
How does this affect Twitter users that are publishing official tweets, like police departments announcing emergency situations? Am I going to miss a school shooting because I don't have a Twitter account? Some of these accounts have mandated public visibility
mandatory public visibility should be regulated and enforced through legislation.
I would prefer open and standards-driven information dissemination (ActivityPub, RSS, et cetera) rather than publication into walled-gardens.
call your congress critters and tell them that their publicly funded agencies need to spin up a self-hosted Mastodon/Pleroma/PixelFed/PeerTube (or use WordPress with the AP plugin).
It bothered from the other angle when POTUS started pushing Twitter as an important channel to keep up on what was going on because it's hardly ideal for that. My local government has similarly been making Nextdoor a de facto requirement if you want to know what's happening or want to give feedback (especially in an era of frequent town office closures).
I tend to favor minimal government but I think the USPS was an important outcome of the Constitution to fill the need for a universal and "official" communication channel. But their budget has been butchered, I get misdelivered mail all the time and the DMV tells me I'm not the only one in my town who never seems to get their mail, but there's no shortage of wasteful junk mail. If only I was confident we could nail the execution, I would love to see the Internet embraced as basic, universal infrastructure and an official government communication channel that's more reliable and less abused.
For what it’s worth, you can sign-up through DMAChoice to stop receiving junk mail [1]. It takes a few months after you sign up to really take effect, but it has easily eliminated 90% of the mail I used to receive. Well worth it IMO for the $2 fee every 10 years.
I'll take your word for it that it works, but I would have been skeptical. Am I correct in understanding that they essentially function is a communication medium with the companies maintaining these unsolicited mailing lists, and those companies voluntarily remove people that pay DMAchoice?
Title 39, United States Code, Section 3008 authorizes the Postal Service™ to issue a prohibitory order against a mailer who sends you an advertisement offering to sell any matter that you, in your own discretion, believe to be “erotically arousing or sexually provocative.” You can request the order by completing the relevant portion of PS Form 1500, Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order, and submitting it to any Post Office™. The form is available at your local Post Office. Thirty days after receiving the order, the mailer is prohibited from sending you any further mail. Violating this prohibition makes the mailer subject to court enforcement action by the United States Government.
I think of the issue a different way. The problem isn't having an official communications channel, but rather, being able to communicate somewhere where the average person will actually be exposed to it. POTUS puts out memos and briefings all the time on the official whitehouse.gov site, but who actually reads those? I see the fundamental problem as attention based, rather than infrastructure based.
Especially when accounts could be hacked to say anything, like the incidents a couple years ago. Imagine the POTUS account pissing off an unstable dictator in some country, or posting of some sensitive information.
When has it been any different? Before twitter, it was TV and radio. Before RV and radio, it was newspapers. All of these are commercial entities (with a few non-profit exceptions).
television and radio were at least publicly available and based on published/known standards. you didn't need to ask anyone permission to receive signals.
On top of that the FCC governs the airwaves and (at least in theory) works to ensure they meet public need. There are also other rules such as the Equal Time Rule. Twitter is subject to nothing like these things.
Twitter has to be one of the most dystopian apps ever created. Not just from a UX perspective, but from a cultural perspective as well. Some of the most evil people I’ve ever come across are avid users of Twitter and wield it like a sword to destroy people’s lives. I’m confident it’s been a net negative for society.
Are Twitter, Facebook and Reddit meaningfully different in this regard?
I think they have different affinities to different demographics, but the toxic behavior is quite similar among all of them.
Is there something about Twitter in particular that makes it particularly toxic, or is it inherent to platforms where people compete for attention in the public square?
Wouldn’t this prevent US politicians and government agencies from using Twitter? I believe there is some standard about official communications being freely available.
Politicians being banned from Twitter would be great for our political process.
I don't have a twitter account because I have nothing I want to say or post in the twitter-verse. I do occasionally read threads on twitter when they're the primary source of something significant. E.g. when they are linked to from a news article or HN. I ran into their block a few days ago and my gut reaction wasn't to sign up and keep reading, it was to leave. I doubt I'll be back.
I deactivated my account the other day in frustration over this. They would send me emails and I would sometimes click a tweet, only to be prompted to log in, which I didn't want to do because I wanted to avoid being sucked in. Okay, fine, I get that I wanted to use the site in a way that the site doesn't want me using it and that's their business decision. It still seems hard to believe that it's better for them to have someone completely off Twitter rather than receiving and occasionally clicking through emails to use the site.
I recall an HN comment a year ago that went into some detail about how Twitter botched their webworker implementation, leading to these errors.
But at this point it's safe to say that it's another intentional way of getting to drive users to create an account. It has been too horrendously broken for too long for it to be explained by incompetence.
It seems to happen to me when I have an ad blocker. On occasion I try without an adblocker and don't seem to have the issue. It could just be a coincidence though.
Great news. I deactivated my account a few months ago, but once in a while I still find myself opening the site to read tweets from people I used to follow. Now I won't waste time any more.
US and Saudi citizens who work for Twitter are allegedly involved in serious human rights violations because they have shared users' email addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses with the Saudi government. The recent imprisonment of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan is an example.[1]
I share funny tweets to people all the times in chats, to people that don't have Twitter accounts. Those people will never sign up for Twitter, now they will simply stop being visitors/consumers. I don't see how this is good?
I knew Twitter has been going downhill for a long time, but I actually didn't think they'd stoop to this level. Super disappointing.
In the earliest years Twitter was such an awesome platform to connect with people and discuss stuff. I actually met a bunch of local fellow geeks (some of whom I am still in contact with), and also met tons of industry people in different areas over the years -- again people I still keep in touch with.
These days though, it's much harder to engage in new genuine discussions on the platform because it's so overloaded with sensationalistic noise and ragebait retweets. Even as I unfollow/mute accounts who propagate this stuff, it's just not feasible as it's become the primary context of basically the entire platform.
Further, the site itself shows you content from users you don't even follow (and that no one you follow retweeted), trying to "drive engagement" or whatever. It just compromises trust that I'll see stuff from the people I follow and not see crap that "some algorithm" wants me to see. I try to only access the service from 3rd party clients so I'm not basically abused by some engagement algorithm that forces ads and unrelated content at me. Twitter is the new Facebook.
BTW, if you're still reading this and want something like Twitter that isn't centralized and being ruined by the publicly-traded corporation that owns it, check out Mastodon[0]. Find an instance that aligns with your idea of a cool community and sign up there. Or start an instance with your circle of friends or whatever.
Im just curious, what are the motivations for a company to make this move? It seems like a death sentence to me but I cant think of any examples off-hand.
KPIs can work well or not. In this case, some VP's KPI about increasing signups and % of tweets viewed by signed in users is making Twitter worse (actually better because I hate Twitter).
It's being spreadsheeted to death. When, as a manager, all you look at is some Excel spreadsheet that tracks the numbers you think are important, you get reactionary management.
1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet.
2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account" and think nothing of it.
They would if I meant "not logged in by default" on the same browser, but I mean on completely separate devices which have never even touched my Twitter account—not out of paranoid sandboxing on my part, mind you, just no motivation to log in. I barely tweet anything at all, so why bother login in.
Could they still know it's my "user" who is seeing this or that tweet, by using intelligence-agency level analysis on usage, personal connections, and networking patterns to determine that it's me? I'm sure they could. But why bother to such a massive level of complexity when they could simply require login to view tweets instead?
One way of cutting down usage is to reduce the amount of data you volunteer. Logging out is an easy way to reduce usage. This change compels light users to stay logged in and participating.
I am thinking that Twitter has reached saturation for the most part. Pretty much everyone has heard of it and has an opinion about it. The areas of the world that do have an untapped audience also have authoritarian regimes that do not like Twitter very much.
At the same time, there is some manager with a spreadsheet that has new account creation metrics. S/he wants that number to be as high as possible. How do you do that if people do not actually want to make an account? Try capturing the people who usually click in from other sites and bounce back.
I think the end result will be that social media somehow becomes even more pictures of text than previously.
I've literally just spent a couple of hours integrating Nitter.net's RSS feed into my custom feed reader. Why a couple of hours? Because Nitter for some reason returns a 404 header instead of 200 when it gives you the RSS feed data.
Consequently stuff like PHPs file_get_contents() and curl_exec() return absolutely nothing... took me ages (via trying to shell out to curl, and then back to using the lib again) before I realised it wasn't actually the 404 error cause the issue, but that curl (and libcurl) on my system doesn't like Nitters SSL cert, which then led me to CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to override it. Frustrating, but educational none-the-less.
I'm using the search filter "(from:$username) -filter:replies" to get just the tweets I want.
Ah I was using --head (actually -I) as part of my debugging. It's still not correct though is it? (I was thinking about opening an issue on the github repo)
remember the good old days of the pre-2010 internet when you could just go to a domain and read content without having to sign up, login, pay, check a bunch of boxes, etc. yeah it was a great time for those too young to remember.
This entire comment section is proof positive that there is much room for innovation and improvement in the space for interactive, online discussion of news items.
Twitter is committing suicide by requiring phone numbers and logins to even read tweets, the way Digg committed suicide and sent all its users stampeding over to Reddit.
Reddit themselves are committing suicide with their aggressive user interface changes, and their dark gangs of out-of-control moderators.
Looks to me like USENET sent us over to LiveJournal sent us over to Digg, sent us over to Reddit, sent us over to Hacker News, and something good and new can grow and replace them all.
Because I am not handing over my phone number to read anyone's tweets.
I recently deleted my Twitter and Reddit accounts. Both services seem to rely on an outrage->comment->outrage cycle to produce engagement, and I decided I didn't need to encourage more outrage in my life.
Everyone is afraid of what the social media giants will do next. Everyone prays every day "Please let them keep me on their platform". How can we get rid of this fear and achieve peace of mind?
Unfortunately, even a federated systen like Mastodon is not a solution to this. The url of a Tweet/Toot is still domain/user/postid. If the domain owner f*cks you over, you are simply helpless.
Maybe a content addressable social media software is needed?
Maybe something can be build with blockchain tech so that it simply is not possible to remove a post as it would break the whole chain?
Twitter started asking me for my phone number about a week ago to sign in. I did not provide it and complained that I should be able to verify my account with just the email on file. Then a few days ago I could login again, but my account was suspended. All the images on my tweets are blank and the list of people I follow is gone. I have appealed for reinstatement. We'll see how that goes. I was surprised not to see this new phone number requirement for twitter on HN or other sites sooner.
In the early days of the Internet I recall warnings that once these companies successfully grabbed all of the users then they would turn from benevolent to even worse than the existing media companies.
I was watching YouTube last night and realized I was getting a ton of ads. They do this new thing on their TV apps where they show the first 10-20 seconds of the video and then put in an ad. Plus a midroll that awkwardly injects itself on a scene change somewhere at 5-10 minutes. I was watching a live music performance and mid song the camera angle changed and YouTube algo decides it is a good place for an ad. I used to get one 10-15 sec ad but lately it is more like 3 ads with the third one being un-skippable.
I opened Facebook this morning and the first 10 or so cards on my feed were all ads and complete garbage "comedy" videos. I then saw 1 or 2 posts from friends followed by terrible recipe gifs, more "comedy" videos, TED talks, ads for marketplace and pointless "news". I would guess around 10% of the posts were from my actual social network.
Twitter embeds on news articles are nearly the worst. If they have an image, after you have clicked through to Twitters site, you can't even see attached image without logging in. Actually, every single button the Tweet landing page seems to go to a login screen.
I even have a reddit account and now the front-page isn't even customized. Probably 30% of the cards are from subreddits I have never interacted with with "suggested because you are subscribed to XXX".
What's amazing is we are justifying this with "well capitalism, duh". Like these companies didn't vacuum up the free Internet until any non-ad supported content was snuffed out. Now that we have no where else to go for this stuff they can start to turn the screws.
This is user hostile a bit maybe but the content wasn't blocked, you read what you linked to. If you want to browse around and do something more than passively consume, aka actually be a user of the site, then log in. Don't really hate them for this. All you lurkers that just consume consume and then demand some input over how a site works (coincidentally this post is on reddit which is the other one that comes to mind often complained about on here) will just have to create an account to participate and be part of a site. This has been going on with other things like IG and FB forever, with even IG being app-only until recent years where they made it more web browsing friendly (but still have to log in to actually see more/do anything on the site.)
How does Nitter[0] work then? Does it use a Twitter account to grab tweets that reside in Twitter's walled garden. If the tweets are no longer public, how does such a thing work?
Public Nitter instances have a distressing tendency to become rate limited or go offline entirely. I'm on my 3rd or 4th instance now. That works most of the time though it's starting to throw limit notices periodically.
I thought they did this years ago. I added it to my uBlock Origin list way back when because of it. In addition to that, that kind of pattern across so many sites had inspired me to make an FF add-on for my self to completely remove links to sites I know I never want to visit from whatever page I'm on, that way I didn't have to manually vet every link, or waste time opening a new tab just to have uBO tell me it's blocked.
Funny that they're doing this now, just this month I setup a new PC after 7 years of using the old one and hadn't yet added twitter back to my list but noticed they weren't nagging me anymore, so I left it off. Now it's back on.
yeah I'm also just waiting for nitter to break. but frankly by now I'm just there to follow @mntmn and the comments in their threads.
Deleting the account was actually what helped me break my twitter habit; without an account the UI is so annoying it works as an effective dopamine inhibitor.
anyhow, @mntmn is also on mastodon and MNT Research also run a cosy Discourse instance, so I'm welcoming this as twitter taking their place next to the facebooks, tumblrs amd myspaces in the ranks of self-obsoleted social media.
I’ve been able to hide the modal wall via the chrome DOM inspector (right click on parent element in markup view, click “hide element”). Not a great experience but if you really want to see a tweet it works.
If this goes further it's going to be frustrating to get information about public services. My local fire department has a Twitter feed where they tell the public about areas to avoid. Both local public transit systems use Twitter and it's often the best way to know about real time delays and issues (often in replies rather than main-feed tweets). It's already bad enough when these things are on Facebook, but I always appreciated when they're on Twitter and visible to everyone. It seems like now that might be changing.
For people who post tweets, but don't often read tweets, I recommend creating an app to post on your behalf. It is pretty straightforward through their developer tools. That way, you can also save your tweets locally, instead of having to view your own writing through their platform.
If you like to read other people's tweets then you don't have any other option except to login, unfortunately.
My use case is archiving historical or noteworthy tweets. My infrastructure up to this point used Wayback Machine to retrieve and store the content, will have to build something now.
This is a great opportunity to stop reading twitter.
Many people find it detrimental to their mental health, many people believe that the communications norms and technically mandated interaction styles of the platform are toxic to the public discourse. But if those reasons didn't quite get you over the line, it's now actively even more annoying.
I used to install browser extensions to make twitter and fb usage as un-user friendly as possible, to limit the time wasted reading useless nonsense on social media.
Great that twitter is doing it themselves !
I hope that interesting people, with relevant things to say, will leave those platforms and re-open blogs.
This would break the social contract of Twitter, as it was preceived my many people. Unlike Facebook "walled garden" model Twitter was ultimately an open web publishing platform. Changing this will move them into a different category and many users will look elswhere.
A lot of folks seem to forget that Twitter also has electricity bills they have to pay directly or indirectly. Serving every tweet, along with everything else you see on the internet, does cost money. Usually it’s so small we don’t worry about it but it’s certainly not zero.
The trick is to click the next tweet, then manually press 'Go' or hit enter in the url bar to reload the page, only the will clicking outside the login will make it disappear.
If it opens from a referrer, clicking outside the login box will take you back to the previous tweet
Sometimes they use user agents for this, but those are easily faked, so it's only done by websites that don't have comprehensive auth walls.
A more comprehensive method is based on ip ranges, say whitelisting traffic from Google and Bing. This gives you > 95% of search traffic as Google alone has >90%, and many various smaller search engines like Yahoo or DDG are Bing resellers.
On the other hand, a pure ip based check can be circumvented too. Sometimes you can view how search engines see a website through google translate. But places like LinkedIn have countermeasures for all of these circumventions.
Which by Google's own T&Cs is illegal and could get your site dropped from their index... They state that you should not present a different site experience to their crawler compared to what normal users get.
As usual it's OK for the big guys to break the rules whereas us little site owners have no choice but to obey them.
I deleted my Twitter account years ago. This won't motivate me to make a new one; it will just ensure that I spend even less time on their site than I already do ("ugh, paywall" close tab) and give them fewer ad impressions.
Good twitter is probably the worst social media out of the lot and the only reason people use it is because famous influencers use it to get publicity. If they go walled garden that kills twitter usp vs facebook.
Requiring phone numbers for what is for the majority of their user base a consumption activity seems like completely over stepping the relationship. Gmail doesn't even require that.
Good that means less time on there, which should make my anger level go down. This is a plus plus for society as a whole. Now if only twitter would completely disappear off the planet...
Isn’t this an old thing now? I’m sure it’s been like this for a while?
Nitter is a good alternative if you want to view tweets but not actually have an account, also supports RSS
Sounds like a great move, Twitter is a premium real-time news source and it makes sense to require more engagement to access the content. Comparison behavior: Instagram.
Great, this means less time wasted on crap. The next thing they should do is to ban Google crawler lest someone sees the tweets without giving them the personal data.
But why? Why does it matter if a user is authenticated or not? This is just some moron PM’s arbitrary metric they’re chasing, and it serves no value to anyone.
First I've heard of that being mentioned as the catalyst, and - forgive my ignorance - I can't imagine why the fall of Kabul would prompt this decision. Care to elaborate as to why, and/or provide a source?
Perhaps just a coincidence (though I doubt it), but the full-screen login pop-ups on mobile became constant that weekend. Seemed like most of the videos coming out of Kabul airport that weekend were sourced off Twitter.
This could probably have one of the single greatest global impacts on mental health ever take by anyone/anything/any-organization ever. If users respond in the negative.
Even a 5% reduction in social media exposure could have the potential to move the global suicide rate significantly.
Twitter is getting worse and worse. It was so cool in 2010-12 with a amazing API, a real vision, and future. Now it's just a machine learning assisted, comment hiding, news blocking, left leaning facebook.
For now, at least, you can view the initial tweet. Expanding a thread fails with the registration wall.
My view is that embeds / hotlinks were a Bad Idea for many other reasons (see the porn that's started appearing on old news and government sites due to hotlinked content). It trades a modicum of short-term convenience for major long-term risk.
Everyone is logged into an account + Tweets (and share buttons) embedded all around the web -> way more data for advertising.
That's the underlying fact that make Facebook and Google (and to a lesser degree, Pinterest) so valuable for advertising. Facebook and Google have organic signups (FB for FB, Google for Gmail, Youtube, etc.), but Pinterest does what Twitter's thinking of doing here--it locks you out of content until you have an account. Pinterest also has "share" buttons (and the accompanying JS, cookies, etc.)
I don't have a Twitter account, and this now makes it far, far less likely that I will even click on a Twitter link or engage with the platform whatsoever.
I could obviously be in the minority (though I'm certainly not alone), but I'm curious if you think that my scenario will be the less common one and this will actually increase signups, or if it will have a positive impact on the stock price in another way.
Yes I do think this will boost sign ups. It's free and Tweets, for better or for worse, have come to be a sort of "source material." I think many, particularly younger, news-savvy users will seek to access Twitter.
I also think it greatly boosts Twitter's ability to monetize advertising. That's what make Facebook and Google so valuable (just about everyone is logged into an account).
I am, however, curious how this will impact embedded tweets (in articles, for example).
Within HN, there are alot of people who might not be targeted audience for twitter.
I consider this addition to be a step back. As a rabid twitter fan, They blocked my account because i refused to add my number. Then, they blocked the content to view tweets, this reduced my interaction even further.
I question how some of these features get decided. Atleast, WSJ, gives couple of articles before throwing in a paywall.
If they made The Day The World Stood Still today, the aliens wouldn't even mention nukes - they would ask us to get rid of Twitter.
Twitter has always been garbage. It makes right wingers think they have freedom of speech, while it destroys democracy, coherent thought, and lets left wingers think they are changing the world, while they make it a worse place to be.
So can people please quit posting twitter feeds finally?
Some of us still have never used or signed up with twitter, or feel the need to, and really don't want to. Bad enough they removed non-javascript access, since they are permablocked through noscript here, I simply close postings on HN that link there and curse them for bothering. Asking for a login atop that is just a 4x non-starter for "news" links.
Unfortunately, given the nature of network effects, I suspect those who use Twitter will continue to use it, news media will continue to treat it as a primary source for comments from people, and those of us who wish to refrain from using it just... Won't have access to that channel of data. I don't see a scenario where a mass-walkout happens... Certainly not from this.
It'll be like the good old days of only finding out what's happening in the next town over because you read the paper's account of it, only now the next town over is just a site we could create an account on but refuse to.
Is that so bad though? Nothing I idly read about online much less twitter has any bearing on my daily life. It's mindless content masking as some important cultural zeitgeist. It's no different than netflix or any other time sink.
I fully share your sentiment. Tip, though: threadreaderapp.com will proxy them for you if you do really want to see them for some reason. I've also heard nitter.net mentioned, but haven't tried it yet.
I mostly use theoldreader.com, which doesn't, and honestly don't mind they don't capitulate and work-around privacy walls. Watching twits tweet with twats is mostly a non-starter anyways, nor would I believe anything I see there any more than facebook or other scandal rag links anyways.
I think some people have misunderstood this change. It's been active for me for about a week, I suspect most others without accounts just haven't noticed.
Clicking on a linked tweet still works, it's only when you then click on another from within the site that it asks you for a login. It's the same approach Quora takes iirc.
I don't have an account, and the change has been noticeable and annoying. It's more than just clicking on another tweet, though from what I can tell they've been A/B testing this behavior (sometimes I get it and sometimes I do not). On mobile, you can't click through to someone's profile from the tweet without creating an account. If the tweet chain is more than 4 or 5 tweets, you cannot read the rest without creating an account. It's prevented me from normal browsing habits multiple times, like reading the ASML twitter thread that was posted on HN a couple of days ago.
I cannot view threads or expand images or see people's responses to threads any longer. This does not compel me to sign up at all. Quite the opposite effect. Twitter is not the ideal place for long form threads anyways. *yes lets just keep adding more 140 character mini blogs to make a long form news posting*
It would be great if the community here just started downvoting stories that are twitter links. If it's not worth a blog post somewhere, why should we care?
Twitter threads are a confusing mess to look at and usually I can't figure out OP was trying to convey by posting a link to 30 tweets that probably should have been a text post somewhere.
Some of the highest upvoted content on HN is tweet storms with really awful takes (that driver one yesterday was full of them). I think it's fine to link to quality tweet threads but a lot of them are quite bad.
Considering how difficult is to follow lengthy posts that are split up in reverse chronological order, and how unintuitive it is to find replies, I surely disagree. The medium is very poor for centralized discussion of a single topic, in contrast to something like a single Reddit or HN article.
I mean, sure, but that's one tweet. 40 tweets in a row that you're supposed to read in order, comprise one large whole, nothing "micro" about it. I actually respect when someone follows the rules as it were, and spends the effort to post one tweet that conveys a lot concisely with a little. That to me is deserving of the label microblogging. Although unfortunately right alongside that is all the idiotic shallowness, sloganeering and fascistic tendencies posted by people who are like "thank god, a place where the format is as tiny as my thoughts." That's fitting a little into a little, so if there's a counter-argument to be made legitimacy-wise, that's it right there. But spreading something longer over a bunch of tweets, that's just regular blogging, on the wrong platform. I'm not fooled. It's a nuisance. Like when someone decides to pay you $5 as 500 pennies.
I don’t understand the HB obsession with not creating accounts or reading Twitter. I haven’t logged into Twitter in years I stay logged in. Also reading Twitter is trivial people have consumed countless billions of tweets. Yet for some reason programmers on HN struggle with it.
I am just as confused as to how literally multiple people have figured out how to use and navigate Twitter. I have probably failed at many other things in my life too though. Maybe it's me.
I there's a better compromise for both parties. A website that you give a twitter link, it scrapes the content and rehosts without the login banner or bloat. You share this link instead of the original twitter link. Twitterers get to share the content they want and anyone can read without issue.
> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.
I had a thread moderated away due to this yesterday :/ sucks.
Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible.
This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.
Quora is such a shit show though - what happened there ?
Their algo will just continually blast email you every category you ever clicked on
No idea. I used it a while and enjoyed the content, then they changed something in the algorithm and I'd suddenly get basically the same content every single day, often >30% of the feed would be the exact same as the week before. They also removed the list of topics, so there was no obvious way to escape the near static feed.
Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I never visited the site again.
It's a real shame. I used to really enjoy my daily Quora digest email. One of the only automated emails I truly dug into and read in detail. Over time I read it less and less. Then switched it to be weekly, then turned it off. I miss the old Quora.
I could imagine they're trying to prioritize things like user retention and ad revenue, both of which can be done better by tracking user behavior. Losing a percentage of their logged out user base could very well be worth it to them in order to increase what helps their business.
It's because they need to start collecting more first-party data from users who land on their site. This is a result of Apple (and others in the future) blocking third-party cookie tracking.
They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.
Broadcast radio, television, and print newspapers still exist without these things.
They sure do; however, digital media and social in particular, absolutely rely on significant investment in their audiences, attribution, etc in order to drive more revenue and thus higher CPMs. More traditional media (such as OOH, Print, etc) all rely on very high-level metrics such as daily traffic volumes and lack of direct impact evidence in their attribution of value.
This is why Facebook is SO very against what Apple is doing with iOS14+, particularly with cross-device and cross-app tracking opt-in, because they know it will decimate their ability to do what they do today.
Bingo. They need this for user-level measurement and targeting. Wouldn't be surprised if this also supports part of their audience extension work with twitter audience platform as well.
Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You no longer just ”get” them. You need to apply. I was rejected for getting key to export my own tweets.
Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.
I prefer to just steal keys by reverse engineering mobile apps. So easy to get keys for just about anything and charge someone else for it that way.
Interesting. As someone who hasn't done any mobile dev at all, is there a way to prevent something like this from happening? Can't you somehow encrypt such secrets in the app?
You can try, but you won't succeed against a dedicated reverse engineer, simply dropping a hook in on the API calls would be enough to grab the decrypted key in a case like that, if not simply statically reading the encryption keys and decrypting it. That's not to say it's useless - some reversers will simply move on to the next app when there's a list of dozens.
You can also send requests via your own server, which would allow you more control over the requests that get sent out to your 3rd party APIs and just restrict tokens as much as possible to the minimal set of features necessary for your application.
Mobile developers can implement certificate pinning to prevent man in the middle snooping. Twitter's app does this.
That achieves nothing against someone who uses something like apktool/baksmali to do static RE, let alone inject something like Frida to perform dynamic RE. There are even Xposed modules designed to just bypass certificate pinning.
Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a counter-RE one.
Certificate pinning is neither a good security measure nor a good obfuscation one.
I hope you did not just assume that general purpose computing and device ownership can be subverted by mere certificate pinning.
If it's executing on my device, you can be sure I can poke it and see what it's doing.
What about secure key import on Android? It's still not that widely available, but should be everywhere in a few years. The idea is:
-a keypair is generated in secure hardware
- you send the public key to a server which encrypts the secret key with it
- the server sends the encrypted key back
- then it goes inside the secure hardware where it gets decrypted
The decrypted secret key is never in the userspace.
I believe solutions like SafetyNet on Android might help here. AFAIK no one has successfully reversed SafetyNet enough to spoof it.
Unless an API you're looking at requires/supports attestation via SafetyNet or you're willing to proxy via your own server this is likely not an option.
Additionally, while it's true (to my knowledge) that re-implementing a full safteynet spoof is not currently publicly available, a combination of Frida and MagiskHide is able to bypass SafetyNet for dynamic RE purposes, just launch the app as normal with MagiskHide enabled then attach to it with Frida as root. If they enforce full hardware attestation this may change in the future, but right now we're good.
Please don't legitimize SafetyNet. It is an existential threat to real ownership of your phone as any flavor of Android but that blessed by Google trips SafetyNet. It's the equivalent of barring people from running software on their laptop because they've installed a flavor of Windows that wasn't shipped from the factory. People everywhere have a right to do with their phone what they want to.
I agree with all your points, but what's the reasonable alternative? There is a reason that apps have decided to go with SafetyNet as a requirement. It dramatically reduces abuse.
You could proxy requests over a server you control. This might just shift your problem, depending on the use case.
Rate-limiting works really well in most cases, though CGNATs makes that a horror nowadays too.
Frontend is in the hand of enemy. There is no secret on the client side.
But as a developer, I won't put the API key in the client.
How will the client communicate with the API then?
Excellent replies to everyone in this thread. You're spot on.
Just out of curiosity, is there a marketplace for private APIs? I'd love if you could elaborate on the "charge someone else for it" part.
I know of RapidAPI by rakuten, it operates as an API marketplace like this
And this is likely because there were a few years of "insert your own API key" third party clients after Twitter limited their max user count.
This from the site that used to indicate on every tweet the client used
Quora ended for me when spun/copy+pasted Google results started to replace answers. For example: I asked for the science behind the EPA's recommendations on UV exposure, and the answers were all word-for-word copies of the first result in Google, which had no detail on the science behind it. Just "avoid going out before x," "wear x SPF sunscreen," but nothing about the basis for the recommendations.
That was years ago. Recently, I went looking for how to un-retweet something from an account that has since blocked me, and every single answer on every instance of someone asking that on Quora is more or less a copy of Twitter's documentation for an ordinary un-retweet. Useless search result pollution.
This is not about measurement. This is about tracking people across third-party websites.
This is about growing users, they are stagnant now and had been for a while just like facebook.
Opening Quora links in a new private tab each time solves the issue for me. But agreed, it sucks.
With Quora you can just add ?share=1 at the end of the url and you can view the content without logging in.
Quora's not a great resource anymore. It's just peoples' opinions boosted by an echo chamber.
This is probably the only good content that existed on there before it became a cesspool: http://qsf.cf.quoracdn.net/best_of_quora_2010-2012.pdf
I posted this yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most.
I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100% user-hostile, Twitter.
Beyond the Login wall, Public Sector Agencies should not be using Twitter as a Primary communication method, it would be Ok to have the messages Copied their from Official Sources, but there should be Official Sources to obtain the same info, at the same time, update in the same frequency.
Seriously, how is Twitter better than an RSS feed for this use?
the people in the public sector don't know any better. It's going to take regulation and legislation to force a position into standards-compliance.
I’ve complained to government agencies about using Facebook and not making their posts public. Maddening.
reply because I can't edit. even HN knows how User Hostile Twitter is:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The real culprits here are these public sector agencies. They shouldn't use inaccessible mediums like Twitter as their primary channel of information.
Yes, and no. They use what's available and what gets them in front of the users. IMO I don't see anything wrong with that.
The problem comes if they don't provide any other way to access their information.
I like Debian's approach to this; publish short news on their own site and also automatically republish those items on social networks. Full blog posts get similar treatment.
https://micronews.debian.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/micronews https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/otherSN
On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront).
Here is a research how much phone number verification decreases account fraud a.k.a. spam bots
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
Of course, in order to help out the unfortunate website operators, people should willingly give up pii that the same companies have shown they don’t give a damn about protecting. /s
"For your protection."
The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
They always add that incorrect “y”.
Along with "For your own safety".
"safety" is a term that's been abused since at least 1793: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_Safety
The translation is inaccurate. It means safety in the same way as the salvation of the soul for Christians, but in a non-religious way, and applied to all of society. Yes, they were both quite grandiose in their wordings and full of themselves.
Safety, as it is commonly used, would better be translated, in French, as "sûreté". "Salut" would be a much, much stronger word.
Although I do see your point.
Well damn, that ruins one of my favourite points.
But I'm still not quite sure what the French word "salut" means. Is there not a simple one-word English translation? What exactly is the remit implied by the name Comité de salut public?
"Salut" in this context translates as "salvation" in the sense of "preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss".
Exactly. "Committee of Public Salvation". Sounds weird.
So, in this case, considering they considered themselves the defenders of the greatest ideology of all time and the (worthy) people, and were at war with both foreign countries and some of their own people, I’d say it'd mean something like:
"Committee in charge of delivering the country, the Republic (the idea of Republic itself; not just it’s French incarnation) and freedom / democracy (even though they weren’t quite democratic) from utter ruin and certain doom"
But that’s quite a mouthful.
uh, 'to protect the children' would like to have a word.
Wait — you mean "Sanitized for your protection" on glasses at cheap motels isn't true?
I think it stopped being true at the word, "Sanitized".
"For purposes of National Security . . .", a close second.
Next to: 'no need to worry about privacy if you've got nothing to hide'.
Right there with "for us to deliver better user experience"
Twitter's users are its advertisers.
Tiwtter's product is you.
An important finesse.
We criticize free services all the time for this, but I think that paying users are monetized all the same. Using American examples, the DMV sells data, internet providers are selling user data, credit card companies are selling user data... so it's not like any other companies don't monetize their users in other ways.
This is true. Paid services also tend to parasitise their legitimate users and maximise revenues.
A key difference is that in the Twitter case, there's no monetary penalty which can be imposed by the host class (that is, the unpaied content contributors).
Much of the "harvest as much data as possible" element is also driven by fundamental power and monopolistic differences.
Also at top of the list: “We care about your privacy” (and not that we are required by law to give you these options that follow)
"We value your privacy" is even better.
That's actually an honest one, since they know exactly what the value is of the PII that they sell to third parties.
"They know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
> The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
The T&C equivalent of "your call is very important to us"?
Right before "We are experiencing higher than usual call volumes."
I mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Like seriously I’ve implemented at a company I worked for and it’s the least invasive thing to actually rate limit people.
Alternatives included:
- pay a small fee but that requires a credit card
Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?
Personally I'm a fan of the fee idea. You can quickly outstrip the yearly revenue per user with even a small fee, and the fee payment could e.g. happen via PayPal which doesn't require credit cards, to give one example. The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes which renders this entire exercise pointless.
> The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes.
Maybe there is room for some simple innovation here. Is it possible to do “coarse” address for tax purposes? After all I imagine they only care about which tax jurisdiction such as county / parish or something like that?
I don’t understand that in this context.
Let’s say you pay a fee for being able to view tweets without logging in. How will they know it’s you who’s trying to view a tweet if you don’t effectively log in?
MetaFilter's been doing this for decades and it seems to be working well for them
>I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?
Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious Fiverr-like spam accounts
> Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?
Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even asking for email, including this one. It seems what you really want to say is "What can we ask from you for it not to cost us anything?".
Obvious to a human manually looking at the account isn't obvious to a computer system that has to pick them out a huge dataset. You will never be able to ban Fiverr type accounts because for the same reason residential VPNs work well. You're paying someone who has a clean record and will send all the right signals.
HN works because it's niche. It can be moderated by a handful of people. Once you cross the "can't be moderated by humans" threshold of size you're solving a completely different problem.
I won't knock you for saying "well then you shouldn't exist at that scale" but that's a non-answer for the real world where giving up PII in exchange for participating in a huge social network is a trade enough people are willing to make that you feel pressure to do it in order to get in.
> someone who has a clean record
It doesn't follow to me, those people open thousands of account for those scams, how are they clean? They are not sophisticated, they don't even use them like real humans and it's literally for $5!
> "can't be moderated by humans" threshold
Is it a threshold or simply a cost center that starts to be big and needs to be slashed in order to please shareholders?
To me it's perfectly possible to be big and have moderators, you just can't have it cheaply.
They've already rejected doing nothing, as it doesn't work.
I want Tesla to give me a free car too, but it ain't happening. At some point a company makes decisions you aren't gonna agree with and your only recourse is to not use them. If that means you can't read Twitter, then that's the price you pay. You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
No one's asking for a free car.
They're asking for a stop to major companies lying to the public. To stop harvesting people's data under false pretenses.
I think citizens can and should demand those things from companies that choose to incorporate in their country. That avail themselves of the legal systems and protections. That take advantage of the workforce present.
Companies are free to choose where they operate and incorporate.
Yet customers love free stuff, aslong as they can send cat pictures they dont care.
> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so big and so central to our lives, to the point many news (including from police precincts or first responders) are only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's "they owe you nothing".
If they have a monopoly on the public square, arguments could be made...
There should not be a channel for government communications that is only available upon giving money or information to a private party.
(But that's a ship that sailed long before the internet age. "Want to know the laws? Pay up!")
talk to your electeds about regulation then.
Public sector and publicly funded groups should be communicating through standards-based channels. Their content belongs to the digital commons. This exists today, via the ActivityPub and RSS sphere of ecosystems.
... to break them up?
Play nicer as a start.
But you can’t blame that on Twitter, no matter how much they welcome it and how evil they are. Blame it on unspeakably bad judgement on the part of government employees. Making Twitter the conduit for official communications? I can’t even fathom the mindset.
First they came...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
If we go that route of argumentation: Can Twitter please close shop and go away then? Their value is vastly overestimated: Most people don't want to use Twitter specifically, they are peer pressured into it because it is where everyone is. There are better free and open source alternatives without them trying to steal from me. Twitter burns all that money (do they generate a profit yet?) to stay on top, just so that nobody else can.
To stay with your analogy: Tesla rolled up and pushed every other car manufacturer out, now they are giving a somewhat free car and in return they want you to do everything they say, and the keys to your house "just in case".
We don't owe Twitter anything.
>You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account
no you see, that's the problem. I don't WANT a twitter account, but I apparently need to use the site to view local updates in my town.
I'm perfectly happy continuing to not post there. I just don't see the benefit in making me find an extension around this annoyance so I can continue to not have a twitter account.
Sure, instead of a phone number you can:
* Give us your Credit Card information
* Give us a picture of your real life self
Neither of these are solutions to the privacy and compromise potential problem that is the 'phone number or else' requirement. Its objectively worse, so that you go "oh, guess you can have my phone number instead".
I want to go further here.
- Combat spam.
- Be large.
- Allow (pseudo-)anonymous accounts.
A social network can only pick two.
> A social network can only pick two.
Reddit has all three (no need for email even), they might not be perfect but I can't remember any time I saw "viagra links" or other obvious spam. They have problems with accounts obviously, but you can't frame it as a spam problem.
I see a lot of spam on Reddit.
That does nothing to speak of “auto moderator”, fragmented rules/guidelines and ilk and the sheer effort involved by volunteers.
Even then: the spam gets through. But I agree that PII is not solving this.
>I see a lot of spam on Reddit.
Where? I've seens a couple of ghost subreddits with spam, but then you see the same with ghost fb groups, weird twitter profiles, youtube, etc On even moderately sized subs I've seen any that wasn't removed quickly by the mods.
People can say mods are too expensive for fb and twitter, but there is the dishonesty, instead of paying mods they pass on that cost to us with our pii while pretending it's free.
uptimeporn, for a very specific example from today. I wont link it because the spam is NSFW and probably removed by now, but- I saw it, so moderation effort is obviously not effective.
Okay, I'll bite.
How does allowing people to read (but not post) without logging in produce "spam"?
There are some attemps to make proof-of-human
https://herrjemand.medium.com/why-cloudflares-captcha-replac...
https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
But in the end it comes to the fact that your Google/Apple needs to have your app store account that is verified to be human enough (less fake accounts) and then a web browser confirms this via a login to this account.
We get into the Ex Machina situation. It was a pretty good movie about Android (robot?} proving itself human.
One option might be to allow people to view tweets if they have accounts from reputable federated identity providers, then you have an identity of an individual person without having to do the validation yourself. You can then rate-limit based on that individual ID.
Another option might be to rate-limit by things which don't require accounts, which won't strictly rate-limit individuals, but it's unlikely that's the terminal goal here. It's not actually clear what they are trying to accomplish. Reducing the amount of resources wasted on scraping bots ?
One option would be to just allow people to view public tweets without requiring sign in.
It doesn't achieve the stated goal of rate-limiting individual people, which sounds like an instrumental goal for an actual (unstated) business objective.
Currently federated identity providers do not provide a separate identity to each site you are authenticated on. At that point any collaborating sites can pull together all the information you give to any one of them. Hell, in most cases your "identity" is your email address, so every site you authenticate with can spam you directly.
"Trust tokens" was built to deal with these issues just for this use case: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/trust-toke...
The Shibboleth Idp also support per SP opaque nameID but nobody like SAML based protocol and as far as I know outside the academical identity federations, no one deploys Shibboleth ...
Shibboleth is terrible -- so terrible it was easier for me to write my own SAML IdP from the specification than try to make it useful. Lots of people use Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS), which has a SAML IdP.
I just want to be able to occasionally read a few tweets with no required login or account. Just the same with Instagram and similar, I just won't use it and I'll forget about it. I guess Twitter is next. No, I've never had a Twitter account. I don't have a Facebook account.
I don't think Twitter cares that you won't use it. They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.
The rule of thumb is that 99% of users are lurkers. Since more and more people are privacy focused and it's clear that forcing lurker to register is not in their best interest they obviously miscalculated.
Reddit, Qora and Pinterest all tried it, shot themselves in the foot, lost a huge readership and reversed it or will reverse it.
It's hard to realise how bad it is as only lurker don't have a sunk cost fallacy and easily quit and their quitting is invisible.
How do you make that kind of calculus though? Presumably Twitter will want to stay around for a very long time. If people like BTCOG take away a negative experience from it then doesn't it seed a future negative opinion of Twitter?
10 years ago when a government banned Twitter it was almost universally seen as bad. That's probably not the case anymore. Will it be worse in the future?
>They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.
I'm sure they have. And I, being used to being in the minority of users, will likely find some 3rd party solution around the problem they created. Win-win outside of me wasting a few minutes installing another extension.
Twitter is stopping viewing, which isn't a fraud / abuse issue at low rates.
In the case of posting, rate limiting / scoring w/o a phone number without explicitly banning until you build more reputation works pretty well from what I can see, and most legit twitter users, especially new ones, don't post a lot and mostly read anyway.
And in twitter's case, I think paying a small amount of crypto would actually be something the CEO is interested in this case for the private types who won't / can't get a phone number. Some of twitter best accounts are anonymous and the CEO is into crypto. Add a monero payment option for those small amounts who aren't fraudulent and are private people and you will probably get rid of a lot of complaints.
Proton mail requires a small fee which can be paid pseudo-anonymously via cryptocurrency.
> I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?
I want them to do nothing.
So maybe don’t require an account to view tweets, or don’t let me tweet until I provide phone number but still let me view… lots of options
But then they don't get data on which tweets you viewed.
They can't set a cookie? Associate my phone with my desktop by IP address correlation on home ISPs? C'mon, they oughta be more capable than that.
Cookies don't track you nearly as well. What happens if you delete a cookie? Fingerprinting isn't a universal solution either as iDevices all look extremely similar to each other. As to IP addresses, they only work if you connect from your home WiFi. Not every phone has that set up. Often they use carrier grade NAT so you only have a few IPs to work with.
Last, customers of their data love being able to search/correlate by phone number, not by some pseudonymous identifier that might not be present in some other dataset.
I think this crackdown might in fact be a reaction to attempts by institutions like Apple to ensure better privacy. If fingerprinting isn't giving them the data, they ask for it directly at the threat of restricting access.
>What happens if you delete a cookie?
I imagine the data of 99.9% people they mostly care about are the ones who dont know what cookies are, let alone how to delete them or otherwise mask/misdirect various internet trackers.
~10 years ago I made about 10k Twitter accounts just for fun. I never used them. They still exist, no one deleted them. A while ago I lost the script and password for them.
Back then you could bypass captchas and other checks by changing Tor endpoint (some endpoints required captchas, some didn’t). Made a script that did just that.
It also worked for Facebook and I still receive facebook spam for those accounts daily.
I have no problem with asking for a phone number during registration, it complicates automated account registration and makes it quite expensive. But I dislike the idea of hiding content behind login page, internet should not be a walled garden.
How is that relevant to read-only access, which is what is reportedly being newly blocked?
If reading content generates spam, You Have A Bigger Problem.
Their fraud problems don't justify anything though. Nobody outside Twitter cares about Twitter's problems. Just because they have a problem doesn't mean they should get to solve it, especially if it involves personal information disclosure which can get people killed.
That is genuinely a very interesting paper - thanks for sharing
I created an account in May 2021 without a phone number to follow some people without blogs etc, and it’s still working with just a disposable email.
They’ve added sign in/up with Google & Apple recently though.
You can get away with that on a residential IP sometimes, but don’t count on it. Log in from the wrong location or a VPN or do certain patterns of behavior and it drops you.
I exclusively use it via VPN, with a ProtonMail address from the web (so many login notifications) while like, commenting, and subscribing on politically controversial content and soccer.
Three, almost four months in and zilch. It’ll be a good test case anyways.
They flagged my phone number-less account after four months, probably because I replied to a high traffic thread.
I think the key to using a phone number less account is to use it as much as you can in read only mode.
Fixed wireless ISP in the US and I hit a captcha on every site from time to time when logging in (and sometimes just trying to read-only) - and I'm effectively blocked from anonymous sites.
I can "lock in" an apparent IP address, i.e. ssh to some box with no-ops; but that's either per-connection or still NAT enough that I get flagged. att aggregates all such connections at F5 routers in large cities, mine is in Dallas, for both of my fixed wireless connections.
Which is not reassuring considering their past abuse of phone numbers provided for allegedly only security reasons. [0]
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...
It's worse: Twitter staff sold private user PII to the Saudi government (the one that assassinates journalists):
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud...
Remind me again, why did we leave IRC?
Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30 years. There have been attempts to make it friendlier with things like IRCCloud, but then the beards just scoff at the idea of a $5/month bouncer-as-a-service and go right back to wondering why the protocol is dying.
> Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30 years.
I'd way rather have something that doesn't improve for 30 years than something that actively gets worse at a rapid clip.
Can't tell if you're being ageist on purpose but "the beards" don't _have_ to use IRCCloud and can just keep using their TUI clients and bouncer daemons if they want instead of having their UX change weekly at the whim of some resume-driven front-end team.
Well, here's one issue: I can tell you what a reply and hashtag is but I'm going to fail the quiz that asks me to define a TUI client. (And don't get the Chrsmistian Fundamentalists hellbent on taking downn Tumblr et al. starter anything involving a "daemon".)
.....what is this comment?
Me being far too confident in Samsung's spellcheck, is what. It's too late to edit but you get the gist: nerd stuff must don user-friendly garb for to not scare the customers. UX.
This sounds like the release candidate of GPT-3 which hasn’t made it.
Begone print daemon, thou shall not infect mine systems.
This is a crusade I could get behind.
The point was that the stereotypical "beards" in question can continue using their TUI clients, not that someone who doesn't know what a TUI client is should be forced to use one.
I think my point was that the insistence on interface purity is part of what (or emblematic of the ethos that) killed the chance of the protocol reaching mainstream adoption. But I take your point.
I'd argue that Twitter hasn't been improved meaningfully in the past decade either, certainly no more than how IRCCloud has 'improved' upon IRC.
What does IRC lack that is an improvement you missed in the last 30 years?
I think the lack of channel history is a big showstopper for many people but personally I think that's a feature. The idea that I should have to dig through slack history and its rambling conversation format to find information pertinent to my work is downright dumb.
IRC is just a protocol; it’s not immune to these issues (see the last Freenode debacle).
It is immune, precisely because it's a protocol. Freenode is dead but switching to another network is literally as simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.
So the same as the HTTP protocol (i.e. switching from a website like Twitter to another, similar, website).
Comparing protocols like that is comparing apples to oranges, but I think I see your point.
When people say 'I miss IRC', they don't necessarily mean the technicalities of the protocol though.
It's not apples to oranges, it's directly analogous: both represent federated networks on the internet where users have the freedom to decide which client they want to use and which servers they want to connect to.
They are not analogous. IRC is a chat protocol with semantics suitable for a chat protocol. HTTP is at this point just a transport level thing for whatever you want to send. It doesn't have any significant semantic implications for sites like Twitter.
> HTTP is at this point just a transport level thing for whatever you want to send.
So what? They're analogous not identical. The distinction you point out isn't relevant to the point of the analogy.
You wrote:
> switching to another network is literally as simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.
irc and http are the same in this respect, thus they are analogous.
TIL people use twitter for its "HTTP protocol". Great comparison!
Most use it through the app protocol which is cross platform.
And recreating all existing channels
IRC does not require your phone number to work.
That would be up to the server
you can host your own server and it's so simple it's hardly a problem.
Because corporate interests have brainwashed us into thinking that IRC isn't good enough any more
I often hear people suggest that the internet couldn't exist without corporate interests and surveillance capitalism. usually along the lines of "If there were no ads, we wouldn't have any internet at all!"
That's an example of what corporate interests have brainwashed people into thinking. They didn't have to turn us against IRC. Most internet users don't even know it exists.
So, in this fictitious world where IRC is a stable protocol and easy enough for the average layperson to use, who pays for the IRC server bills and how?
> easy enough for the average layperson to use
At one point it was easy enough for the average person to use, because the average person had to deal with a command-line. But tech, in its infinite quest to Make More Money, keeps chasing the dumbest of the dumb so that it can expand its market into an imagined infinity. It kinds of reminds me of the windshield repair shop that takes a baseball bat to nearby windshields at night to drive business
How about we work towards unwinding this whole mess and meet users in the middle??
FOSS and open protocols are criminally undervalued because of greed, and all the fake newbie empathy it generates
Having better things to do with your time than learning an obscure CLI is not the same thing as being dumb.
Really? We almost saw a resurgence with the chatbot craze that recently passed. And frankly command-line is something that GUIs do easily, or have we as a field forgotten that too?
People have such a gap-filled view of the past. I barely had to learn any IRC command-line stuff because of mIRC
I know that GUI IRC clients exist. You’re the one who brought up CLIs.
As for the chatbot craze? It was a craze. A fad.
I don't understand the question. IRC is a real-time chat protocol and twitter is a proprietary micro-blogging website. I don't see how the two are related, other than they are both something to do with the Internet.
You do understand the question, you've just decided to respond in a silly way.
If my only current understanding of a question is "that's a silly question," then I'm also going to assume first that it's my failure to understand rather than assuming something worse about someone else.
The above commenter is correct, the original question is silly, however much flak they may get as people here love IRC.
Do you genuinely believe (1) IRC is anywhere near as usable as Twitter for the general population, or that (2) a real-time chat is an equivalent offering to Twitter?
I'll add (3) the only reason IRC isn't equally abused is because it's so bad that it can't attract enough people to justify any kind of ad-based (or otherwise) monetization model. IRC is the opposite of being a victim of one's own success.
EDIT: I should note that beyond being more usable than IRC, I have precious little good to say about Twitter.
You just need to make an IRC channel that contains everyone in the world.
Well to compare that to Twitter you'd also have to have everyone in the world on Twitter which is overwhelmingly not the case.
No, it would be one channel per person. Only you would be able to talk (post) in your channel. People who want to read your posts would join your channel.
Private DMs easily map to one-on-one privmsgs. Public replies and threads won't have an equivalent unless there was some meta-protocol to temporarily allow another person to talk in your channel + duplicate your posts in your channel to theirs + expire that access eventually.
Also subscribing to tags won't work without a similar "copy all messages from one channel to another" relay.
Channels are basically tags, without history for those who join. Anyone can PRIVMSG a channel by default, it is prevented by setting the common +n mode.
My point is that IRC messages need to be duplicated across multiple channels to be the equivalent to how Twitter works.
Make all channels -n and you now have Twitter hashtags, kind of.
That's basically what twitter is.
I'm beginning to seriously believe the general population doesn't deserve services like Twitter and giving it to them was a mistake. When something can be had so easily there is no respect for it. A lack of respect for the technology and a lack of thoughtfulness into its implications have caused a lot of harm. The hope of the internet was that it would increase communication and understanding. But nobody is communicating. They are talking at each other. They should be listening but have just become more self absorbed.
So in a way IRC is better. If for no other reason because it required some personal discipline and will to learn to use and it segmented the internet to prevent these monstrous echo chambers. Humans aren't ready for a global forum. We are still only good at small communities.
If this is your takeaway you’re following toxic people. I have learned a lot and changed my mind on several issues just from Twitter discourse.
Or they clicked on a trending topic on the wrong day.
Or they read an article about one twitter group bashing another twitter group and clicked on one of the tweets.
There's no path from toxic Twitter to constructive Twitter, but there are thousands of paths the other way.
Which can only mean that toxic twitter is where Twitter wants its users, so it seems like you're using twitter wrong in their view.
That would imply that Twitter has total control about such paths; I find it hard to believe.
My point isn't that meaningful conversation is impossible on twitter. Its that the majority isn't and most abuse the gift of an instant global platform. Its tragedy of the commons on an unprecedented scale.
Of course there are worthwhile interactions to be made. But the people making them would have been doing so on the less accessible older internet anyways.
The old internet was filled with hate, racism, sexism, people fighting, hating and swearing. Things are actually better.
The news seems just as negative as social media.
These things existed, but you usually had to go seek them out specifically. You weren't reading a friend's, say, blog, when suddenly a link to some exciting online argument about some nonsense appeared. That does happen on ~all social media. Unfortunately, many news(paper) websites are baiting with "hot" controversial topics now as well.
I see you were not part of the "old internet".
In general social media is a big negative for people. Just because some of them find it useful doesn't change that.
Malicious bots are definitely more effective and reliable on Twitter.
IRC is just a protocol... one could potentially implement a client (or website if you wish) which presented IRC comments as a "tweet stream".
It's not a silly response. The thing about IRC is that there's channels, and you chat with people in those channels. The deal with Twitter is you both publish and subscribe to short messages, but there's no enforcement of reciprocity -- I don't have to follow someone just because they follow me. There are replies, but that's not the same thing, and Twitter is starting to give people more tools to restrict replies to their Tweets, making the platform even less reciprocal. Everyone in an IRC channel gets the same experience, everyone on Twitter gets a unique experience.
Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Don't be disingenuous.
A combination of we couldn't agree on what character encoding to use, and no one made a good mobile client.
Have you tried Irccloud? It’s good! And it’s available for both Android and iOS.
We need to revive the ad free, commercial interest free Internet of the 90s. It will be small in size, but so was the internet back then.
Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how emails work.
mstdn.social
How about email?
pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how emails work
It's called NNTP
More commonly known as Usenet. (Or maybe google groups, lol)
Usenet died of its own inability to handle scaling issues, ranging from culture and posting conventions to various forms of abuse and criminality.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
Attempting to resurrect Usenet at any scale simply won't work. Even with a lessons-learned set of improvements (Usenet II), it went nowhere.
The culture issue alone is a killer.
People say they want the old early-90s internet, but that internet only worked that way because almost nobody outside of universities was on it and nothing on it actually mattered to anybody.
Yep.
It took me way too long to find the usage numbers (which ironically were within an arm's reach on my bookshelf most of the time), but ~1988 Usenet was under 1 million potential users, and fewer than 150,000 active readers. Even by the mid-1990s, it was under 1 million active participants.
Google+ was considered a failed social network with at least 10--100 million active users (by my own conservative estimates based on sampled profile data, independently verified by a much larger analysis). Facebook has 3 billion MAUs (monthly active users).
Until ~1992 (the Eternal September), Usenet users were largely represented as cohorts of a few hundred to low thousands, each subject to the disciplinary authority of university network administrators. Privileges could be and were revoked. Netadmins had a hardcopy directory in which everyone's number was listed twice (forward and reverse search). They talked to each other.
I'm active on Diaspora (for over a decade) and Mastodon (for about five years now). Both are far smaller than their comparable commercial equivalents (FB and Twitter, respectively). Each already strains under abuse, spam, and propaganda efforts, though Mastodon seems to have a more robust containment toolkit. Much resembles the old Usenet model: individual instance administrators can determine what users (locally or remotely) or instances (remote federation) can interact, and to what extent. It's high-touch, and has issues, but at present scale it mostly works. (Not perfectly, but it's not completely blown up yet either.)
Diaspora ... seems on far shakier grounds. User controls, admin engagement, reporting tools, and the culture of active management are all far weaker. The saving grace is the lack of algorithmic amplification, but bad actors are a distinct presence, if largely walled off into their own small, sad world.
On the google+ 99.99% if offered would gladly take google+ for free. It was a huge success.
Google closed it down because they realize they never needed it. You were rarely providing new information to google because you already had an account and they already were tracking you everywhere. Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses. What sites you visit google knows about.
The only thing google+ gives google is your social graph. But not your friends/family social graph more of your professional social graph. I don't think there was a way to target that info through ads into more profit. They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
> Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses.
Source?
> They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
Speculation?
Google+ literally had billions of registered profiles. Somewhat fewer than 99.99% actively used the site.
I sampled a random selection of ~50,000 profiles to find out how many were actually actively using the site.
9% of all profiles had ever posted anything at all to the site. This is somewhat fewer that 99.99%.
And only 0.016% of all G+ profiles had posted publicly in the first 18 days of 2015, when I performed my sampling.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
And again, you're talking to the guy who ran that experiment.
Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting independently replicated my analysis using a much larger sample of 500,000 profiles, confirming the results I'd found and providing additional details:
https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...
I had absolutely no idea Enge was doing this until he published his results. They're a completely independent validation. Which is how science is supposed to work.
Your other comments about G+ are at best speculation, and largely fail to match my knowledge and understanding of the site and service.
> Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how emails work.
As well as NNTP (mentioned in a sibling comment), listserves work for that (and don't just work like email, they use email.) And both have been around longer than the web.
There's gemini. Not the web, but maybe has the vibe you're looking for.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
I would love that but think adding in any kind of automated service will keep it from being the back-then internet.
Mastodon and diaspora* might fit this description, especially the "small in size" part.
The only way to do this is with blogrolls/linkrolls and other decentralized mechanisms. Making a centralized repo of links like a Yahoo! style web directory is only going to lead to that directory monetizing its gatekeeper status.
gemini https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
fediverse: mastodon, pleroma, pixelfed
indieweb: https://indieweb.org/
twtxt: https://indieweb.org/twtxt
scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/
hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/ (see iris.to for an implementation)
https://quitsocialmedia.club/solutions
I would add RetroShare to the list.
Also, hit up a bulletin board or two: https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/?step=name&all=0
On the IM side there's also https://delta.chat/en/
> We need to revive the ad free, commercial interest free Internet of the 90s. It will be small in size, but so was the internet back then.
It still exists, it’s just harder and harder to find. For example, most of the tech blogs you see on HN are hosted on personal websites with no ads.
Did you? Some of "us" never did.
How do you show programmatic ads to people on IRC?
bots? seems possible if you don't mind those ads being text
I didn’t :-p
TBH: These days I prefer other venues though. E.g. HN, Slack and Facebook groups.
You don't have to be on twitter. If we can get more people off that platform, then the world has become a better place. I deleted mine years ago. Never felt better.
Completely different communication paradigm.
IRC is an instant-messaging platform, while Twitter is a microblogging platform that was available to anyone in the pre-smartphone era as it was initially tailored for SMS message length.
IRC requires a client (okay, you could use a web gateway), and you somewhat need to know what you're doing (not saying it's hard, but the average user might not even care about accessing IRC if it requires a minimum of effort), while Twitter could be used through a flip-phone or accessed simply through a web browser, which you can assume everyone have.
plenty of people never left IRC, but Twitter right now is probably a thousand times larger than IRC was at its peak. IRC is a niche community for nerds, not a platform with mainstream appeal. The same is even true for more user friendly, modern services like Mastodon.
99% of users just don't value the things you value in these services.
> Saudi government (the one that assassinates journalists):
Just like the US does : https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/all-lies-how...
Just use a verification service like https://sms4sats.com
What is a 'sats'?
What is the list of services used for?
This needs a lot more explanation built into the site!
>What is a 'sats'?
Techbro lingo for bitcoin's smallest unit, the satoshi.
Techsis use a different one?
Twitter is not listed there for my region. So no, I can't just throw some sats at this problem.
Ah yes, $0.5 per SMS, what a bargain!
it depends how much you value your privacy. People that get their phone number/email leaked and get phished would tell you it's worth more than 50 cents. so it's subjective.
Personally, I don’t mind giving them my phone number because my number is already public information. It sucks though that I can’t get tweets by text.
This was the original use case of twitter. I understand SMS is not secure enough to publish tweets but why can we no longer get texts when someone tweets?
I'm pretty sure you can still get SMS notifications by turning it on in your Settings[0] and then also clicking on the "Notifications" button on the specific profile for which you want to receive notifications. I haven't used it in ages but all the settings appear to be there still :)
[0] https://twitter.com/settings/sms_notifications
You can remove the number after you've used the account for a while and not get locked, but they shouldn't require it in the first place.
It's probably permanently held in their databases. Some services use immutable data models that "append deletes". (GDPR made those types of systems fun to deal with.)
Might be bad for activists, whistleblowers, et al.
The point is to never give it to them.
And yet that account will still get suggestions to follow people who have that phone number in their address book. Thinking face emoji
I'm not sure I'll blame Twitter for (effectively) requiring phone numbers - they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
On one side, people rightfully complain about trolls, harassers, spam, CSAM, misinformation campaigns and propaganda on online services. And on the other side, people will also rightfully complain about data harvesting, and an ever growing lack of anonymity on the Internet.
At the moment, phone numbers are the closest thing we have to at least have some cost associated with spamming and a legal pointer to get hold of criminal-level abusers. Using government IDs such as the German Personalausweis (which can communicate with a website using NFC and a special app) would outright kill anonymity, using middle men to do the same (or video/postal identification) like for banks, porn and gambling sites costs money and is not much better in terms of anonymity.
You can request phone numbers when creating a certain number of tweets, or trying to reply to a well known account, or if upvoting a comment that is controversial or reported as spam.
It's a lazy solution that pushes spam control costs onto the users.
But all I want to do is read the tweets? I'm not contributing to spam if I don't even have an account.
I want to be able to read the New York Times without a subscription too, yet here we are. Corporations don't have to give all their services to us for free. They can charge, require free registration, whatever.
NYT pays people to write its content, but Twitter users post their content for free.
That doesn’t make the rock-and-hard-place point apply to that situation though, which is what the comment you replied to was a reply to.
People is giving content for free to Twitter. Should they start charging for it? Twitter is not on the same league as the NYT.
It's not you. It's scraper bots they are trying to protect against.
>> it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront
What I found interesting is that “translate tweet” button doesn’t appear unless you are signed in. Why cannot I read news from all over the world unless I’m signed in? Why do users have to sign in to read translated tweets in real time?
Does Twitter have to pay to use Google or MS's translate API?
I have no idea but twitter uses google translate API
Apparently it costs money. https://cloud.google.com/translate/pricing
Now it makes sense!
Thanks a lot
And Tweetdeck uses Microsoft's API.
unless they've changed their policy on this you can email support and say you don't have a phone number and they'll re-active your account, has worked for me in the past.
I can confirm this as recently as June 2021
couldn't you just call them instead?
While this works, I still hate the lie that they have suspended your account for "suspicious activity".
If you're going to require a phone number to read tweets, don't lie about it, just be up front about it.
At some point there will only be people who don't care at all about their privacy that use twitter, Facebook, Instagram... All these American services in "social" media.
I have noticed that most those services (twitter, Skype and so on) block login without giving phone number...until few months later they automatically unblock. I simply check out in every week, are they removed block or not. Once I was stupid and gave phone number one of those kind services, that was bad idea. Account went into some weird state after giving code received from SMS. So my personal experience: wait, never give phone number.
That's odd. I've never given Twitter a phone no. (Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish.) Still use Twitter daily without any issue. Perhaps it's because I'm still logged in and not trying to re-login?
Twitter doesn't seem to care much about established accounts, but every attempt I've made to make a new account under a new name gets suspended.
> Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish
I doubt that - twitter started as an SMS service…
Doubt all you like - that's how it is.
Ideally, there should be an option to not give it. It’s a security risk for those with MFA elsewhere.
Same experience, and why I do not use a twitter account. Plus the last thing in the world I would do is to let some woke SV company associate the political opinions I follow with a real identity, not in the current environment.
Unrelated, but does anyone know if Facebook does this? They seem to allow signing up with just an email address, but I haven't tried going through with it and seeing if they'll eventually require a phone number.
Facebook do require a phone number to access their API (or otherwise manage a Facebook App).
You can remove your phone number easily under account settings.
This trickery is still a very effective way to get phone information for masses of people, but on the individual level, it's possible to avoid.
Yes, but once you've added it, they have it, even if you can't see it in your settings.
You're assuming they keep it, but is there evidence of that? Regardless, it's a good assumption. I'll actually ask twitter support right now!
And this is why things like Sign In With Apple are a godsend* for users, which predatory devs rail against on HN.
* Even though the bait-and-switch can be done there too, but at least you didn’t have to give up your email to the scummy service.
FWIW: HN are receptive to member feedback about improvements to Hacker News itself.
This includes both encouraging sites, content, and/or users, and suggestions as to unwelcomed behaviour.
email hn@ycombinator.com
You can petition them (via email) to not require your phone number and if your emails are persuasive enough they will activate the account without a phone number. But yeah, that is an extra step, and usually takes 2-3 emails that say something like "this account is vital to our business"
When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's great if you want to get off them.
I'm using old.reddit.com, and it's ok. Shame if they would turn that off though.
There is also i.reddit.com, which is more mobile friendly than old.reddit.com.
What I've noticed is a few of the newer things breaking on it (unsurprisingly). I think over time it'll get to a point where there's enough of these new things where they'll just pull the plug, which is really too bad. Also love it much more than the "new" experience.
The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me. I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand why they chose this new disastrous design.
That's their objective, to get rid of users who they can't monetize. Including veteran users with ad blockers who refuse to use the new site or any of its features.
It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.
It’s more buggy, less responsive, has less features and consumes more resources. Literally its only pro is that it looks pretty.
It looks "pretty" in the crappy modern way though where there's loads of whitespace and everything is hidden in a menu or tab somewhere.
Give me "ugly" plain-ish text that is information dense.
The post-view in compact mode is actually denser than before (thought it has some ugly spacing issues at the top). It’s amazing. Sadly, there seems to be no compact mode for comments, so those look horrible.
And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.
fewer features
I thought it is one of these “don’t end sentences with prepositions” weird rules no one really follows.
The prepositions one was invented after the fact, it has never been a real grammatical rule.
“Fewer” versus “less” for countable things is more of an actual rule (but of course that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it).
> Literally its only pro is that it looks pretty.
Which is very subjective.
New reddit is certainly more modern than old reddit, but I find it kinda ugly.
Reddit has had 5 second page loads for over a decade. Extremely embarrassing of them to be honest. I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement, but you always want your site to be fast. I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors.
>I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors
There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.
The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.
> "I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement..."
Do you have any citations for this?
What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a copious number of round button-icons that are not intuitive? It's fucking insulting.
It is slow because very few people can write effective and fast React code. And then they use WebGL to do fancy overlay animations
It seems that, at least in reddit's case, the issue is preloading a lot of stuff that on the old website wasn't preloaded. Like videos.
Ben Awad[0] made a quick technical comparison between the two websites and this was his conclusion.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jkSiIBDDZ8
That's also what makes it pretty much unusable when you are on a slow mobile connection
It's that companies let the designers design without any constraint on usability.
Typically these designers are just fashionistas following the trendy crowd.
Several years ago, I went to a tech roundtable hosted by a well-known company, and this topic came up.
Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.
"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"
I think Reddit knows it too, that's why old is still around. The Digg fiasco was a long time ago but must be still in their corporate subconscious.
They wanted to give Digg some company.
I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view its contents. On the new design most of the post contents are right there on the list page.
You use RES for that. It shows everything and plays every video.
Get RES
Same.
old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit.
RES is godsent.
It isn't hard for me to understand their reasoning at all;
1. Appeals more to the mainstream, and to new users who are used to Facebook-style feeds. 2. Easier for them to disguise ads in user's feeds.
They are killing the feed, I don't know for you, but for me it has seemed static.
Give teddit.net a look.
Nitter.net for Twitter.
I don’t know how long these sites will last with the demand there is for avenues that don’t prompt login.
There are a lot of mirrors, too, as anyone can host an instance, so if those don't work you can always try others.
I exclusively use new Reddit. The increased friction around every single interaction is great for limiting the amount of time I spend there: it raises the bar for deciding to actually view a discussion, and the incomprehensible nesting-collapse algorithm keeps me from going down rabbit holes in threads unless it's something that genuinely interests me.
It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch, and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully invested in what I'm watching.
Actually that's a great idea - actively feeling pain every time you interact - whats more effective limiting consumption than that.
Sounds like how I like my afternoon coffee, bitter without any additives. It reminds me I need to leave work if I've finished the important stuff for the day. A much needed kick in the guts that makes you purse your lips as you drink it down that puts the rest of the day in perspective.
If you click the button to get rid of the cookie prompt on the bottom of the site while on old.reddit.com, it redirects you to new.reddit.com. Amazing.
Wow... I forgot how much better reddit on desktop used to be.
There's a Chrome extension for redirecting to old.reddit.com: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
You can just uncheck "Use new Reddit as my default experience" in settings and get the old experience without an extension, if you have an account anyway.
Exactly. This is good since this corporations are basically killing themselves since people, slowly but steady, are realizing they can get info elsewhere on the internet (and people start sharing outside them). So yeah, they are basically forcing users to migrate to more open services.
Eh maybe. The problem is that IMO there aren’t any obvious alternatives to Reddit. I remember when Digg committed suicide with a pretty bad redesign and most disgruntled users moved to Reddit. I’ve been pretty annoyed with the changes Reddit has implemented in the past couple of years, but I haven’t found another place to go (that’s not necessarily a bad thing). HN is the closest alternative but the scope of topics we discuss is limited. That’s probably part of HN’s success but then where do you go for other topics?
My Reddit habit has been all but replaced with private Slacks and Discords these days. Either hobby / interest groups, or an "alumni Slack" full of old work friends from a company I worked at a long time.
I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway. Small private forums, where you can actually have real discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.
For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram once per decade, or something like that. But whatever people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses want.
Ok, shows over. Everyone back to IRC.
I rather like my reaction GIFs and discussion threads. What I want to see is a modern IRC with these features, and an optional per-channel/per-server message persistence to deal with not knowing what happened while you were away, or while the mobile IRC app of your choice was killed by the Google/Apple background task manager that only allows you to dodge it with proprietary push support.
This is Slack, mostly, kinda.
Slack also smacks of terrible usability, and is proprietary up the wazoo. There is no way to automate anything on it unless your organisation gives some approval.
> Slacks and Discords
I find these terrible for any kind of information discovery. I hate that so many communities are using them as an alternative to a subreddit or focused forum. Hell most "modern" forum software is horrific as well.
It is a problem for ephemeral vs evergreen.
Chats are a horrible place for evergreen knowledge. Forums are pretty good though.
It’s only a slight difference but a big one.
And we are back to a "decentralised" web, although it's only decentralised between a few servers in Discord's and Slack's basements.
I think that the advantage in using some kind of instant-message system like Discord/Slack is that you might end up getting a faster response, which is quite helpful when I'm feeling impatient and want my problem to be solved faster. On the other hand, the questions aren't as easily searchable and archived for future people to find.
The sooner reddit dies the better. What a toxic and manipulated hellhole it has become.
For larger subs, yeah. For smaller, specialised topical subs, I will defend them until Reddit forces a similar requirement as Twitter here.
It already does on mobile. It is impossible to view subreddits unless you sign in, you only get a "preview"
I used to feel the same way, but even the smaller ones are increasingly being co-opted by partisan screechers. Especially in the State/City/Town subreddits.
In the UK, at least one sub has adopted the "no politics" role. Political subs still exists, so there are places to vent political views too.
IMO they are just creating an opening in the market by continuously shooting themselves in the foot like that. I don't really understand it. Requiring a login to view content is the reason why I never got into Tumblr or Pinterest... I'm not going to bother signing up for your site if you don't first show me it has content that is worth my time, these people have it the wrong way around.
As a Reddit alternative, Ruqqus has the UI and responsiveness down pretty good. However, it branded itself as anti-reddit, and attracted a lot of right-wing people as a result. However, their platform is open source, so IMO, it's only a matter of time before someone steps up to the task.
I agree but unfortunately their mobile website got better (when logged in) and now works really well on my phone.
The flipside is that anyone now signing in now are going to have harder time getting off later.
I don't know my facebook password or save it on any of my devices save for the home pc for this reason.
I almost hesitate to share these because I too found that Reddit's dark patterns were a large part of what helped me break that habit.
I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit with all dark patterns removed.
There is also an alternative front end for twitter called nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app / login.
+1 for teddit.net, I discovered it because it’s a default Insight Browser extension, as is old.reddit.net.
This is the same reason I don’t tell people how I get around HN’s “noprocrast.”
Just log out, I guess? I don't comment very frequently, the links are what keeps me coming back.
My trick for getting around noprocrast is being too dumb to set it up correctly.
For reddit, IMO the simplest things you can do to improve the experience is to force the old reddit design (old.reddit.com) when on desktop, and use any app except the official app when on mobile.
The old mobile interface (i.reddit.com) works well too
You have changed my life.
Thank you.
That's the one I use. The downside is you can't see pictures or gifs in comments nor the rules of a sub-reddit if you want to submit something. Also submit doesn't work correctly sometimes, especially when you need to tag a submission with flair.
I use old.reddit on mobile as well. Personally I prefer panning & zooming on the desktop version of a site to the mobile design in general
You might like i.reddit.com
Yeah, heartily recommend the Apollo app and you don't have to sign in.
I've been using red reader for the better part of a decade. Its far from the flashiest but its clean, easy to read and performant. Its also FOSS. Since my reddit experience revolves mostly around special interest subs with text heavy discussion, it suits my needs well. If you wanted something to scroll through the media heavy meme subs or the front page there are better options.
I'm speculating but recently they added a gdpr/cookie popup that forces you to got on non-old reddit to opt-in/out.. they're trying hard.
The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.
With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.
Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.
With RES I've never seen new reddit, everything always goes to old.reddit.com
Not all browsers support extensions. Even those that do may support only a subset.
(Mobile most especially.)
I'd be amazed if many people are using reddit via browser on mobile, when there are so many good open source reddit apps out there.
> The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.
I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs results in almost never being redirected to the "new" site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see the gallery photos in oldreddit style.
This solution works for me on both mobile browser and desktop browser.
Are you using "old.reddit.com" to visit, or "www.reddit.com" and relying on JS for the old-site experience?
I'm doing the latter (in large part so that I post old.reddit.com links), and I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
Personally, I do the latter.
I never type "old.reddit.com". I'm always on www.reddit.com, and I'm always on the old site experience.
Of course, I don't know how much of that has to do with the fact that I use RES.
I don't use RES but otherwise have the same experience as you. I never end up in new reddit.
uh... I go to www.reddit.com not old.reddit.com - I don't actively do anything at all, other than change a flag in my user settings. Looking at old.reddit.com in an incognito window looks the exact same as what i see at www.reddit.com. Firefox, ublock origin, no other addons. On mobile and desktop.
> I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, other than having to re-set the flag in settings now and again. Like I said, the only time i've seen an issue is the odd time someone posts an image gallery - I can't see it in oldreddit style unless I click on comments.
That's a significant difference.
I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.
And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.
With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.
Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/<username> or /r/<subname>). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.
Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.
Disabling JS makes you keep going back to the new layout? Interesting that it's essentially being done client-side then.
I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.
Curious, do you stay logged into reddit?
Logging out is the only thing I can think of that would cause you to keep seeing the new layout.
It occurs regardless of status.
there are browser addons to auto-redirect to old.reddit.com
Unfortunately, I think they are going to decommission that version eventually.
Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they decided to remove the account activity panel, making revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the fact that they also remove a link from the front page too quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for the dark patterns, heh.
I don't care, because as soon as they do that I'll be quitting.
Android has a client called RedReader that makes Reddit highly tolerable: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)
I second red reader. To you SNR point, I think that is entirely due to the communities you join and how you manage it. Unsub from all of the default subs. They are all garbage. And any that gets beyond a certain size will inevitably fall to low effort reposts and click bait.
Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making focused special interest forums. In the past these would have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But they would have some of the best content the internet had to offer.
Using a 3rd party mobile client also does the trick - no ads either. Apollo on iOS is awesome.
Thanks. I broke my reddit habit when I realized that most of the communities on reddit are just ideological echo chambers where you get banned for saying anything the community doesn't agree with. It lost most of it's value when honest conversations couldn't take place anymore. Now the only time I use reddit is when the only search results with the answer to a question I have point to reddit, and I've grown very weary of their tracking and harassing me to use their spyware app. Teddit is a nice way to get the information I'm looking for without being jerked around by those stalkers at reddit. We'll see how long it lasts before being blocked.
the hive-mind propaganda circle jerk took over, and many dont even realize they are still jerkin'
I'd argue that any site with like/dislike functions which influence the visibility of posts end up this way.
A lot of it has to do with being able to see the points. People think “it has a lot of points so it must be right”, which is rarely true, especially on Reddit. HN hides the points on comments and has a bit of unpredictability to the sorting to allow things to float up provided they haven’t been flagged/downvote bombed. I think it is the largest reason HN is still healthy, other than the great moderation.
While HN definitely becomes a bit of an echochamber at times too, at least you can still voice opinions that go against it without people going through your history to attack you rather than your arguments. Occasionally you get downvoted/flagged enough that people can't reply anymore, but again: That stays with just that comment/thread.
Second teddit
Will mention though that I’ve had wholly uncontroversial HN accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a thread.
I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it without one, but am still confused.
Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if it posts a comment with only a link?
New accounts that post links often get auto-flagged, because they're mostly spammers. You can probably recover your account by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
There’s also libredd.it
I always saw some comments of people saying "RIP Inbox" after one of their posts became popular in Reddit. I kid you not, it was not until earlier today that I found out that the reason for those comments is that apparenlty Reddit sends replies to your post to your email inbox. My reddit account is so old that it doesn't have a linked email, so I never realized that.
Is there no similar frontend for facebook? It seems like its impossible to view facebook posts and timelines without an account.
Yes this. Life is getting progressively better now Twitter, Reddit and Apple pissed me off. I’ve got more time, money and a healthier outlook on life.
Now if only I could shake HN.
The noprocrast option in the user settings can help. You can set minaway to a much longer time to avoid checking in constantly.
I tried it, but it didn't make it any easier. I just shifted devices and back on the front page. If that works for you, then that's cool!
I did that once, 10 years ago or so. My reddit account is coincidentally 10 years old now. Beware of unintended consequences.
I use RSS to stay updated on news. Complete control over what I receive.
I don’t have Chrome installed on any of my devices but I’ve noticed when I’m on reddit.com on my iPhone it prompts me to either use the Reddit app or “continue browsing” using the Chrome app. Does Google pay for this as some sort of an advertisement? Or is Reddit incentivized in some way to plug Chrome over Safari or DDG “browser”? When I click “continue” it lets me just keep using my current browser but I always wonder if it would open in Chrome if the app were available on my device.
I get a button for Safari on my iPhone and iPad.
I’m on ios using firefox (though I think I’ve heard that under the hood it is using Safari’s renderer or something like that because of application store requirements? Not sure.), and it shows the chrome logo for me, uh, when I click a link that goes to new reddit, or something.
Or, I guess when viewing through the browser window that twitter embeds?
Just now I tried viewing new.reddit in safari and it told me my browser was old (though perhaps this is because I’ve refrained from updating ios)
Probably just classifies webkit based browsers as Chrome.
pretty sure that's reddits doing
I think the Instagram experience is better on mobile web than it is on the app with regards to consuming less. The "timeline" on mobile web is only people I follow with no inserted ads. Same with stories, there are no ads.
The best thing is that the "Explore" tab is just a bit too slow in terms of responsiveness on mobile web. I spend a less time on there because it's not as pleasant to use as the app.
Reddit is unusable without which app, the official one? Because I've been on reddit for a decade and never once used their app. It's either reddit is fun on android or the browser. Never had a problem. Even if you don't have an account, old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com (for mobile) bypass all the atrocious new UI changes
Probably referring to the regular reddit mobile website. It constantly bombards you with requests to open the app, you can't open anything from NSFW subs. It's pretty unusable. At least Twitter and Instagram I can use in the browser without 3rd party sites or apps.
It's also started blocking subs that aren't on r/popular, so it's become even more unusable.
Slide is also a pretty good FOSS(?) Reddit client for Android. I don't use it anymore since I'm trying to get myself to use Reddit less and less but Slide was a pretty good experience for me.
It's going to be tough because of how much of the Internet treats Twitter as a primary source. So this in effect becomes yet another stream behind a pay-wall (in information, not in money) that balkanizes people's view of "what is happening" in the world.
The first place I knew about the January 6th riots was from Twitter. I guess I'll learn about subsequent such events from other sources after people on Twitter do.
I used to love reddit, it was my favourite social media but I can't use it since they redesigned it, they really need to look at hacker news for inspiration.
Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user. I know they present a more spammy version to users landing from google, but nothing is blocked behind more than a click or two. I think that's just good business sense because you want to monetize your firehose of less engaged users and coddle the ones that are more engaged and producing content.
> Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user.
On desktop. The main mobile version blocks essential features, like browsing subreddits or viewing all comments on a post.
(Alternatives like old.reddit, i.reddit and teddit aren't completely broken but aren't great on mobile either)
I find that you can get used to a change of habit very quickly. Youtube introduced unblockable commercials for iOS/safari. After 15 years of adblockers and not watching TV, I have developed an intolerance to ads and I just lost the reflex of clicking on any youtube link or going on youtube to find something. Don't really miss it.
This is what has prevented me from joining tik tok. Now it also requires a login after you view like three videos. I just close the tab afterwards. It works great!
Remarkably, Reddit has managed to organize two teams of programmers competing to make a worse experience between their app and website
methink the coming decade will be a few websites, a bit of IRC and a whole lot of non digital things. the information highway of freedom is becoming a parkour competition
For now, adding the following to your uBlock Origin filters works:
twitter.com##.r-zchlnj.r-1xcajam.r-12vffkv.r-1d2f490.r-1p0dtai.r-aqfbo4.css-1dbjc4n
twitter.com##html:style(overflow:auto !important)
twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
thanks
Blocking cookies for twitter.com in settings is a much more reliable way to disable the login popup, for now anyway. Your first filter there uses a randomly generated ID that will change when Twitter pushes an update to prod.
I prefer using nitter.net. Also on mobile I don't have uBlock.
Honestly, this seems like a plus for humanity. I don't think Twitter has really improved the world in any significant way, and maybe made it worse. Anything that prevents the twitter universe from seeping into mine is a good change.
Realistically, though, is this going to:
- decrease Twitter usage, or
- increase Twitter signups
They apparently have calculated that they have enough mass that people will be dragged towards the latter.
Realistically, though, is this going to decrease Twitter usage.
I would never hand my phone number over to Twitter. Would you?
I wouldn't, but almost everyone I know would.
I guess it worked for Instagram so they're copying them?
On the other hand I think Twitter and these platforms are a net gain for Human connectivity and sharing of knowledge and expansion of interest. There are many things, including humor, events , people, technology, that I would have never discovered without the existence of many of these platforms. I’m someone who pushes for greater globalization and I believe the transfer of culture that Twitter provides is a good effort towards that.
I think a lot of the complaints towards Twitter is due to people not using the on-site tools to cater the site towards what they want. I find Twitter the most approachable platform in allowing the user to curate the content they want to see via blocking and muting alone. Out of all the Social Media platforms, if there’s something I really don’t want to see while still wanting to use the platform , Twitter is the best. All without having to make a single tweet in 2-3 years.
> and maybe made it worse
I'm on this boat.
Certainly the proliferation of social media has given every moron a voice, but Twitter made it worse with its short message limit. There's no room for nuance in your messages, so people just post short "zingers" to "own" the other side, which are often not based on any sort of reality and just giant straw men.
It's absolutely destroyed people's ability to have intelligent political conversations.
There’s a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content.
I suppose these angry Reddit commenters bashing Twitter aren’t seeing it because they’re logged in to Reddit.
Just as with Reddit, there are workarounds to bypass this login requirement if you really want to. The users in that thread have some tips for using uBlock to disable it.
I don't have a reddit account, but it has (for now) the old, usable interface available, so the issue does not persist. Twitter doesn't, and one needs third party services such as nitter or other front ends to avoid the bloated, buggy, purposefully worthless UI. This tendency to build walled garden communities can't end well, but at the same time the platforms introducing these dark patterns themselves aren't particularly honest, so not much of value is going to be lost as hopefully better alternatives get more adoption.
Anyway, up until a few days ago there were uBO filters to delete twitter cookies every page load and it seemed to do the trick, this may not work anymore.
> There’s a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content.
My first thought when I saw the headline was, how long until the front page features this:
Then I realized this has probably already happened a while ago.
Such is the treadmill of social media platforms.
The modern internet: four websites each filled with nothing but screenshots from the other three.
Ah yes, the classic. This was the earliest mention I could find: https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040?lan....
"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
FTFY: https://nitter.eu/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040?lang=...
There's a sad amount of "news" content on the web that amount to listicals of a Reddit post.
The people complaining on Reddit are already logged in
But signing up for Reddit is much easier than signing up for Twitter. You just need to specify a username and a password. You don't need an email or a phone number.
I’m not sure it’s as much ‘the same’ as it appears at first glance.
Increasingly, Twitter is a place where people post original _content_ - things they expect others to be able to see and read and share, potentially on other platforms. These range from the original pithy remarks to long, article-like streams. It seems problematic to me to require a login to view these, and I think it could have an effect on usage for these kinds of things.
There’s not so much of that in Reddit. It’s more a discussion forum, where reading seems like the secondary thing to do to me. Peoples identity also isn’t as ‘obvious’ on Reddit.
Of course, it’s not concrete - you do see long shareable ‘articles’ in Reddit comments sometimes, but I do find myself more taken aback by a Twitter login requirement than a Reddit one.
Another workaround for Android users is the FOSS app Fritter:
https://fritter.cc
Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app.
Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter:
https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
[1] Instructions for enabling custom extensions on Firefox Nightly or forks of Firefox on Android: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
Or the web based “nitter” project https://nitter.domain.glass or https://nitter.cc
How does this affect Twitter users that are publishing official tweets, like police departments announcing emergency situations? Am I going to miss a school shooting because I don't have a Twitter account? Some of these accounts have mandated public visibility
mandatory public visibility should be regulated and enforced through legislation.
I would prefer open and standards-driven information dissemination (ActivityPub, RSS, et cetera) rather than publication into walled-gardens.
call your congress critters and tell them that their publicly funded agencies need to spin up a self-hosted Mastodon/Pleroma/PixelFed/PeerTube (or use WordPress with the AP plugin).
Do they whitelist accounts of public officials? For instance, having the POTUS account behind an auth wall seems like a horrible practice.
It bothered from the other angle when POTUS started pushing Twitter as an important channel to keep up on what was going on because it's hardly ideal for that. My local government has similarly been making Nextdoor a de facto requirement if you want to know what's happening or want to give feedback (especially in an era of frequent town office closures).
I tend to favor minimal government but I think the USPS was an important outcome of the Constitution to fill the need for a universal and "official" communication channel. But their budget has been butchered, I get misdelivered mail all the time and the DMV tells me I'm not the only one in my town who never seems to get their mail, but there's no shortage of wasteful junk mail. If only I was confident we could nail the execution, I would love to see the Internet embraced as basic, universal infrastructure and an official government communication channel that's more reliable and less abused.
But I dream.
For what it’s worth, you can sign-up through DMAChoice to stop receiving junk mail [1]. It takes a few months after you sign up to really take effect, but it has easily eliminated 90% of the mail I used to receive. Well worth it IMO for the $2 fee every 10 years.
https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php
I'll take your word for it that it works, but I would have been skeptical. Am I correct in understanding that they essentially function is a communication medium with the companies maintaining these unsolicited mailing lists, and those companies voluntarily remove people that pay DMAchoice?
There are a number of other options.
You can mark mail "rejected" and return it to the delivery box or any post box.
https://refuseyourmail.cooperjr.name/how-to
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...
First-class mail can be returned to sender:
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Return-to-Sender-Mail
Title 39, United States Code, Section 3008 authorizes the Postal Service™ to issue a prohibitory order against a mailer who sends you an advertisement offering to sell any matter that you, in your own discretion, believe to be “erotically arousing or sexually provocative.” You can request the order by completing the relevant portion of PS Form 1500, Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order, and submitting it to any Post Office™. The form is available at your local Post Office. Thirty days after receiving the order, the mailer is prohibited from sending you any further mail. Violating this prohibition makes the mailer subject to court enforcement action by the United States Government.
https://about.usps.com/publications/pub307/welcome.htm
I think of the issue a different way. The problem isn't having an official communications channel, but rather, being able to communicate somewhere where the average person will actually be exposed to it. POTUS puts out memos and briefings all the time on the official whitehouse.gov site, but who actually reads those? I see the fundamental problem as attention based, rather than infrastructure based.
The POTUS relying on a commercial entity to communicate with the public seems like a more fundamental horrible practice.
Especially when accounts could be hacked to say anything, like the incidents a couple years ago. Imagine the POTUS account pissing off an unstable dictator in some country, or posting of some sensitive information.
When has it been any different? Before twitter, it was TV and radio. Before RV and radio, it was newspapers. All of these are commercial entities (with a few non-profit exceptions).
television and radio were at least publicly available and based on published/known standards. you didn't need to ask anyone permission to receive signals.
On top of that the FCC governs the airwaves and (at least in theory) works to ensure they meet public need. There are also other rules such as the Equal Time Rule. Twitter is subject to nothing like these things.
It is older than the Republic.
Heads of state have spoken through commercial publications since printing existed. Roughly 1550.
Online Internet services merely happen to be the present iteration of this.
(I'm not saying that the practice isn't without its problems. I'm saying it's nothing new.)
Twitter has to be one of the most dystopian apps ever created. Not just from a UX perspective, but from a cultural perspective as well. Some of the most evil people I’ve ever come across are avid users of Twitter and wield it like a sword to destroy people’s lives. I’m confident it’s been a net negative for society.
Are Twitter, Facebook and Reddit meaningfully different in this regard?
I think they have different affinities to different demographics, but the toxic behavior is quite similar among all of them.
Is there something about Twitter in particular that makes it particularly toxic, or is it inherent to platforms where people compete for attention in the public square?
I'd argue that the lack of characters per tweet is what makes Twitter so toxic, since it essentially destroys the ability to convey nuance.
Wouldn’t this prevent US politicians and government agencies from using Twitter? I believe there is some standard about official communications being freely available.
Politicians being banned from Twitter would be great for our political process.
I don't have a twitter account because I have nothing I want to say or post in the twitter-verse. I do occasionally read threads on twitter when they're the primary source of something significant. E.g. when they are linked to from a news article or HN. I ran into their block a few days ago and my gut reaction wasn't to sign up and keep reading, it was to leave. I doubt I'll be back.
I will probably never read another tweet again, and I'm a little bit glad about it too. Maybe next reddit can close the old interface too.
I deactivated my account the other day in frustration over this. They would send me emails and I would sometimes click a tweet, only to be prompted to log in, which I didn't want to do because I wanted to avoid being sucked in. Okay, fine, I get that I wanted to use the site in a way that the site doesn't want me using it and that's their business decision. It still seems hard to believe that it's better for them to have someone completely off Twitter rather than receiving and occasionally clicking through emails to use the site.
Can somebody chime in why in the world I get so often "Something went wrong" errors when viewing hotlinked tweets? I need to refresh like 5-10 times.
I recall an HN comment a year ago that went into some detail about how Twitter botched their webworker implementation, leading to these errors.
But at this point it's safe to say that it's another intentional way of getting to drive users to create an account. It has been too horrendously broken for too long for it to be explained by incompetence.
Refreshing never worked for me, although I admit I probably never tried refreshing ten times.
What does work for me is manually prepending www. to twitter.com in the url.
It seems to happen to me when I have an ad blocker. On occasion I try without an adblocker and don't seem to have the issue. It could just be a coincidence though.
Great news. I deactivated my account a few months ago, but once in a while I still find myself opening the site to read tweets from people I used to follow. Now I won't waste time any more.
My life is perfectly fine without tweets, likes and stickers. One less thing to waste time on.
give this guy a round of applause, everyone.
Yes, I like to posture on HN instead, too! :)
US and Saudi citizens who work for Twitter are allegedly involved in serious human rights violations because they have shared users' email addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses with the Saudi government. The recent imprisonment of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan is an example.[1]
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/saudi-case-against-twi...
Why I feel that RSS and personal blogs will resurrect and become the norm? The benefits of centralization are diminishing day by day.
We thought the same when Posterous finally died, but then Medium happened.
I share funny tweets to people all the times in chats, to people that don't have Twitter accounts. Those people will never sign up for Twitter, now they will simply stop being visitors/consumers. I don't see how this is good?
I knew Twitter has been going downhill for a long time, but I actually didn't think they'd stoop to this level. Super disappointing.
In the earliest years Twitter was such an awesome platform to connect with people and discuss stuff. I actually met a bunch of local fellow geeks (some of whom I am still in contact with), and also met tons of industry people in different areas over the years -- again people I still keep in touch with.
These days though, it's much harder to engage in new genuine discussions on the platform because it's so overloaded with sensationalistic noise and ragebait retweets. Even as I unfollow/mute accounts who propagate this stuff, it's just not feasible as it's become the primary context of basically the entire platform.
Further, the site itself shows you content from users you don't even follow (and that no one you follow retweeted), trying to "drive engagement" or whatever. It just compromises trust that I'll see stuff from the people I follow and not see crap that "some algorithm" wants me to see. I try to only access the service from 3rd party clients so I'm not basically abused by some engagement algorithm that forces ads and unrelated content at me. Twitter is the new Facebook.
BTW, if you're still reading this and want something like Twitter that isn't centralized and being ruined by the publicly-traded corporation that owns it, check out Mastodon[0]. Find an instance that aligns with your idea of a cool community and sign up there. Or start an instance with your circle of friends or whatever.
[0] https://joinmastodon.org/
Im just curious, what are the motivations for a company to make this move? It seems like a death sentence to me but I cant think of any examples off-hand.
Chasing metrics.
KPIs can work well or not. In this case, some VP's KPI about increasing signups and % of tweets viewed by signed in users is making Twitter worse (actually better because I hate Twitter).
It's being spreadsheeted to death. When, as a manager, all you look at is some Excel spreadsheet that tracks the numbers you think are important, you get reactionary management.
I imagine that they have two motivations in mind:
1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet.
2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account" and think nothing of it.
They still have cookies and your browser fingerprint. You might be surprised how complete their picture already is.
Have you been introduced you to Firefox containers? Best feature the masses will never use.
They would if I meant "not logged in by default" on the same browser, but I mean on completely separate devices which have never even touched my Twitter account—not out of paranoid sandboxing on my part, mind you, just no motivation to log in. I barely tweet anything at all, so why bother login in.
Could they still know it's my "user" who is seeing this or that tweet, by using intelligence-agency level analysis on usage, personal connections, and networking patterns to determine that it's me? I'm sure they could. But why bother to such a massive level of complexity when they could simply require login to view tweets instead?
To draw back in those seeking to cut down their social media usage, in part
I don't see how that makes sense. If you're looking to reduce your social media usage, this change will make that easier..
One way of cutting down usage is to reduce the amount of data you volunteer. Logging out is an easy way to reduce usage. This change compels light users to stay logged in and participating.
I am thinking that Twitter has reached saturation for the most part. Pretty much everyone has heard of it and has an opinion about it. The areas of the world that do have an untapped audience also have authoritarian regimes that do not like Twitter very much.
At the same time, there is some manager with a spreadsheet that has new account creation metrics. S/he wants that number to be as high as possible. How do you do that if people do not actually want to make an account? Try capturing the people who usually click in from other sites and bounce back.
I think the end result will be that social media somehow becomes even more pictures of text than previously.
Thanks for the considered responses, this was all super illuminating! And thanks for the hot tip on Firefox containers too :~I
I'm fine with this, I'll just never look at Twitter again.
I love this. It makes it impossible to view Twitter as nothing could compel me to actually sign up for an account.
I've literally just spent a couple of hours integrating Nitter.net's RSS feed into my custom feed reader. Why a couple of hours? Because Nitter for some reason returns a 404 header instead of 200 when it gives you the RSS feed data.
Consequently stuff like PHPs file_get_contents() and curl_exec() return absolutely nothing... took me ages (via trying to shell out to curl, and then back to using the lib again) before I realised it wasn't actually the 404 error cause the issue, but that curl (and libcurl) on my system doesn't like Nitters SSL cert, which then led me to CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to override it. Frustrating, but educational none-the-less.
I'm using the search filter "(from:$username) -filter:replies" to get just the tweets I want.
--
https://nitter.net
I've found that only happens when you're not doing GET:
curl https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
vs
curl --head https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
Ah I was using --head (actually -I) as part of my debugging. It's still not correct though is it? (I was thinking about opening an issue on the github repo)
By the way, the Feedbro RSS reader lets you subscribe to twitter accounts like an RSS feed:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
yup another popular website walling itself in
remember the good old days of the pre-2010 internet when you could just go to a domain and read content without having to sign up, login, pay, check a bunch of boxes, etc. yeah it was a great time for those too young to remember.
This entire comment section is proof positive that there is much room for innovation and improvement in the space for interactive, online discussion of news items.
Twitter is committing suicide by requiring phone numbers and logins to even read tweets, the way Digg committed suicide and sent all its users stampeding over to Reddit.
Reddit themselves are committing suicide with their aggressive user interface changes, and their dark gangs of out-of-control moderators.
Looks to me like USENET sent us over to LiveJournal sent us over to Digg, sent us over to Reddit, sent us over to Hacker News, and something good and new can grow and replace them all.
Because I am not handing over my phone number to read anyone's tweets.
I recently deleted my Twitter and Reddit accounts. Both services seem to rely on an outrage->comment->outrage cycle to produce engagement, and I decided I didn't need to encourage more outrage in my life.
It's been good. I recommend it.
Additionally, at least Twitter has a pretty nice offline webapp that gets downloaded when you archive your account.
See you never, walled gardens; I don't belong to a prison!
Doesn’t Twitter report that they have north of 500 million dormant users (people who use Twitter without an account)?
Given how much shit they get from Wall Street due to their super weak user growth, I’m suprised they didn’t do this long ago.
When I first noticed this I found a workaround to block all cookies from Twitter.
Everyone is afraid of what the social media giants will do next. Everyone prays every day "Please let them keep me on their platform". How can we get rid of this fear and achieve peace of mind?
Unfortunately, even a federated systen like Mastodon is not a solution to this. The url of a Tweet/Toot is still domain/user/postid. If the domain owner f*cks you over, you are simply helpless.
Maybe a content addressable social media software is needed?
Maybe something can be build with blockchain tech so that it simply is not possible to remove a post as it would break the whole chain?
Twitter started asking me for my phone number about a week ago to sign in. I did not provide it and complained that I should be able to verify my account with just the email on file. Then a few days ago I could login again, but my account was suspended. All the images on my tweets are blank and the list of people I follow is gone. I have appealed for reinstatement. We'll see how that goes. I was surprised not to see this new phone number requirement for twitter on HN or other sites sooner.
This is a positive change for world mental health, bravo.
In the early days of the Internet I recall warnings that once these companies successfully grabbed all of the users then they would turn from benevolent to even worse than the existing media companies.
I was watching YouTube last night and realized I was getting a ton of ads. They do this new thing on their TV apps where they show the first 10-20 seconds of the video and then put in an ad. Plus a midroll that awkwardly injects itself on a scene change somewhere at 5-10 minutes. I was watching a live music performance and mid song the camera angle changed and YouTube algo decides it is a good place for an ad. I used to get one 10-15 sec ad but lately it is more like 3 ads with the third one being un-skippable.
I opened Facebook this morning and the first 10 or so cards on my feed were all ads and complete garbage "comedy" videos. I then saw 1 or 2 posts from friends followed by terrible recipe gifs, more "comedy" videos, TED talks, ads for marketplace and pointless "news". I would guess around 10% of the posts were from my actual social network.
Twitter embeds on news articles are nearly the worst. If they have an image, after you have clicked through to Twitters site, you can't even see attached image without logging in. Actually, every single button the Tweet landing page seems to go to a login screen.
I even have a reddit account and now the front-page isn't even customized. Probably 30% of the cards are from subreddits I have never interacted with with "suggested because you are subscribed to XXX".
What's amazing is we are justifying this with "well capitalism, duh". Like these companies didn't vacuum up the free Internet until any non-ad supported content was snuffed out. Now that we have no where else to go for this stuff they can start to turn the screws.
I wonder how much of this was a result of India pressuring folks like Twitter to implement "traceability": https://scroll.in/article/999171/why-is-the-government-of-in...
This is user hostile a bit maybe but the content wasn't blocked, you read what you linked to. If you want to browse around and do something more than passively consume, aka actually be a user of the site, then log in. Don't really hate them for this. All you lurkers that just consume consume and then demand some input over how a site works (coincidentally this post is on reddit which is the other one that comes to mind often complained about on here) will just have to create an account to participate and be part of a site. This has been going on with other things like IG and FB forever, with even IG being app-only until recent years where they made it more web browsing friendly (but still have to log in to actually see more/do anything on the site.)
Fairplay at this point.
Twitter's track record is nothing but user-hostility at this point. Look at the bigger picture please, people.
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641366
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304
How does Nitter[0] work then? Does it use a Twitter account to grab tweets that reside in Twitter's walled garden. If the tweets are no longer public, how does such a thing work?
[0] https://nitter.net/
You can host your own instance if you want.
Public Nitter instances have a distressing tendency to become rate limited or go offline entirely. I'm on my 3rd or 4th instance now. That works most of the time though it's starting to throw limit notices periodically.
The interface itself is excellent IMO.
I thought they did this years ago. I added it to my uBlock Origin list way back when because of it. In addition to that, that kind of pattern across so many sites had inspired me to make an FF add-on for my self to completely remove links to sites I know I never want to visit from whatever page I'm on, that way I didn't have to manually vet every link, or waste time opening a new tab just to have uBO tell me it's blocked.
Funny that they're doing this now, just this month I setup a new PC after 7 years of using the old one and hadn't yet added twitter back to my list but noticed they weren't nagging me anymore, so I left it off. Now it's back on.
Alternative frontends like Nitter[1] should hopefully continue to work. They could always scrape as an authenticated user if that becomes necessary.
[1] https://nitter.net/
All Instagram frontends are broken now, so if Twitter goes through with the change Nitter's days are numbered.
yeah I'm also just waiting for nitter to break. but frankly by now I'm just there to follow @mntmn and the comments in their threads.
Deleting the account was actually what helped me break my twitter habit; without an account the UI is so annoying it works as an effective dopamine inhibitor.
anyhow, @mntmn is also on mastodon and MNT Research also run a cosy Discourse instance, so I'm welcoming this as twitter taking their place next to the facebooks, tumblrs amd myspaces in the ranks of self-obsoleted social media.
I’ve been able to hide the modal wall via the chrome DOM inspector (right click on parent element in markup view, click “hide element”). Not a great experience but if you really want to see a tweet it works.
Somewhere a Twitter employee is patching this now!
“Thanks for testing our feature without getting paid for it, suckers! Uh, I mean hackers.”
If this goes further it's going to be frustrating to get information about public services. My local fire department has a Twitter feed where they tell the public about areas to avoid. Both local public transit systems use Twitter and it's often the best way to know about real time delays and issues (often in replies rather than main-feed tweets). It's already bad enough when these things are on Facebook, but I always appreciated when they're on Twitter and visible to everyone. It seems like now that might be changing.
It’s not the full Twitter experience but I’ve been using huginn to turn tweets (not replies, likes, or retweets) into an RSS feed.
For me it’s hit the sweet spot of being informed without being swamped
Is there a third party app/viewer that can get around this? Twitter is getting increasingly problematic, what with the new font and so forth.
For people who post tweets, but don't often read tweets, I recommend creating an app to post on your behalf. It is pretty straightforward through their developer tools. That way, you can also save your tweets locally, instead of having to view your own writing through their platform.
If you like to read other people's tweets then you don't have any other option except to login, unfortunately.
My use case is archiving historical or noteworthy tweets. My infrastructure up to this point used Wayback Machine to retrieve and store the content, will have to build something now.
You will probably have to write a scraper :(
I created a free data exchange product between Twitter and Facebook in the form of a chrome extension https://2fb.me
It’s interesting to see that this protocol product may be the only way to see tweets freely between two walled gardens today.
But I guess it should have been predicted when function and good UX took a back seat to profitability years ago.
This is a great opportunity to stop reading twitter.
Many people find it detrimental to their mental health, many people believe that the communications norms and technically mandated interaction styles of the platform are toxic to the public discourse. But if those reasons didn't quite get you over the line, it's now actively even more annoying.
Tip: you can replace www in Reddit URLs (like in the submission) with old to get past it encouraging you to log in.
I used to install browser extensions to make twitter and fb usage as un-user friendly as possible, to limit the time wasted reading useless nonsense on social media.
Great that twitter is doing it themselves !
I hope that interesting people, with relevant things to say, will leave those platforms and re-open blogs.
This would break the social contract of Twitter, as it was preceived my many people. Unlike Facebook "walled garden" model Twitter was ultimately an open web publishing platform. Changing this will move them into a different category and many users will look elswhere.
A lot of folks seem to forget that Twitter also has electricity bills they have to pay directly or indirectly. Serving every tweet, along with everything else you see on the internet, does cost money. Usually it’s so small we don’t worry about it but it’s certainly not zero.
> A lot of folks seem to forget that Twitter also has electricity bills they have to pay directly or indirectly.
The cost of running Twitter could be very small, if they optimized for that.. cost of the engineers is harder to keep down.
But the real problem is probably that they got investors, went IPO and somehow need to produce significant returns.
Maybe Twitter can produce higher returns with a more captured user-base and a less open platform.
It just seems sad, that we're putting walls all over internet.
In any case, I doubt it's cost of operations that causes it. More likely too much investment.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter...
Too many bluechecks publicly roasted.
The trick is to click the next tweet, then manually press 'Go' or hit enter in the url bar to reload the page, only the will clicking outside the login will make it disappear.
If it opens from a referrer, clicking outside the login box will take you back to the previous tweet
More time to work on important projects instead of me mindlessly scrolling and clicking in circles.
When a login is required to view content, how do Google, Bing, and the others crawl the site?
Login is typically disabled for crawlers.
How do they identify a crawler? Can a user not masquerade as a crawler somehow?
Normally by user agent. You can adopt the same UA to get past some paywalls, but it doesn't always work.
Sometimes they use user agents for this, but those are easily faked, so it's only done by websites that don't have comprehensive auth walls.
A more comprehensive method is based on ip ranges, say whitelisting traffic from Google and Bing. This gives you > 95% of search traffic as Google alone has >90%, and many various smaller search engines like Yahoo or DDG are Bing resellers.
On the other hand, a pure ip based check can be circumvented too. Sometimes you can view how search engines see a website through google translate. But places like LinkedIn have countermeasures for all of these circumventions.
Which by Google's own T&Cs is illegal and could get your site dropped from their index... They state that you should not present a different site experience to their crawler compared to what normal users get.
As usual it's OK for the big guys to break the rules whereas us little site owners have no choice but to obey them.
Don't they have an explicit exception for login screens on their T&C?
Company asked everyone retweet something. Awkward silence. Finally many people mentioned they had deleted Twitter for mental health reasons.
Few weeks after watching a group plotting to come burn my neighborhood down in real-time I deleted the app. Just too much.
I deleted my Twitter account years ago. This won't motivate me to make a new one; it will just ensure that I spend even less time on their site than I already do ("ugh, paywall" close tab) and give them fewer ad impressions.
Well, if Gab is clever, they can position themselves here as a privacy alternative.
Gab hitched itself to a political section of the right, and so they've walled off a lot of potential users.
Good twitter is probably the worst social media out of the lot and the only reason people use it is because famous influencers use it to get publicity. If they go walled garden that kills twitter usp vs facebook.
Requiring phone numbers for what is for the majority of their user base a consumption activity seems like completely over stepping the relationship. Gmail doesn't even require that.
Good that means less time on there, which should make my anger level go down. This is a plus plus for society as a whole. Now if only twitter would completely disappear off the planet...
Less range for twitter users means less twitter users.
Seems to be a pretty dumb move.
Isn’t this an old thing now? I’m sure it’s been like this for a while? Nitter is a good alternative if you want to view tweets but not actually have an account, also supports RSS
I only bother viewing tweets through Nitter instances nowadays.
Won't this break nitter, since nitter would need to sign in to view tweets?
Sounds like a great move, Twitter is a premium real-time news source and it makes sense to require more engagement to access the content. Comparison behavior: Instagram.
Great, this means less time wasted on crap. The next thing they should do is to ban Google crawler lest someone sees the tweets without giving them the personal data.
But why? Why does it matter if a user is authenticated or not? This is just some moron PM’s arbitrary metric they’re chasing, and it serves no value to anyone.
I'm sure it's been like this for some time already. I often click links (many from HN) and end up on their login screen. It might as well be a 404.
I hope this helps kill the 20 tweet roll blog replacement.
Just turn JavaScript off for Twitter to “solve” the issue.
For those unaware: this prevents tweets from showing at all.
I do this as a reminder-on-steroids to only access Twitter via third-party interfaces --- Nitter, Threadreader, or various Mastodon-Twitter gateways.
It's likely done as an anti-scraping mechanism in my opinion. Scraping Twitter is rampant as most companies find their API to be too expensive...
Great feature! This will help me stop using twitter!
Hopefully this will reduce the amount of embedded tweets in articles and my accidental exposure to Twitter and the problems it produces.
Finally an article where people can state publicly their hate to this decision without polluting all the other posts linking to tweets.
Guess I'm not viewing Twitter links any more. Hopefully they realize that not everyone cares. We just opt-out, 100%. Oh well.
I wish this had the effect of politicians no longer being allowed to use Twitter in order to express any type of public opinions.
Isn’t it a regular path for this kind of services nowadays?
The next step will be a popup saying “this tweet is available in the official app”
It's probably just a few scraper bots that cause all this inconvenience for millions of innocent people.
Great, now I will see even more Twitter screenshots on all the other websites (reddit, imgur)... /s
Good, hopefully this is the beginning of the end of Twitter… at the very least the end of its influence.
By by Twitter.
The only think you wher still a really good choice for was to use you as a microphone with some feed back.
The beginning of the end.
Somewhat perverse that it seems like the fall of Kabul was the motivation for this change.
First I've heard of that being mentioned as the catalyst, and - forgive my ignorance - I can't imagine why the fall of Kabul would prompt this decision. Care to elaborate as to why, and/or provide a source?
Aside: lol @ your SN
Perhaps just a coincidence (though I doubt it), but the full-screen login pop-ups on mobile became constant that weekend. Seemed like most of the videos coming out of Kabul airport that weekend were sourced off Twitter.
Hopefully this will be the end of news articles including links to tweets or embedded tweets.
Happened to me too. An easy workaround: just refresh the browser when shown the login page.
So will I now need a 2nd account to view all the users who have blocked me? Lame.
I don't get it. You're still fed ads either way? Why do they care?
This could probably have one of the single greatest global impacts on mental health ever take by anyone/anything/any-organization ever. If users respond in the negative.
Even a 5% reduction in social media exposure could have the potential to move the global suicide rate significantly.
All it does is that i wont be consuming this, behind a login bye bye.
If this drives people away from the Great Banality Laser, good.
Monetising demands proof of eyeballs. Its all about money.
Twitter is getting worse and worse. It was so cool in 2010-12 with a amazing API, a real vision, and future. Now it's just a machine learning assisted, comment hiding, news blocking, left leaning facebook.
What happens when a tweet is embedded in a news article?
I don't know, they get blocked by my browser plugins along with all the other parasitic embedded widgets, adverts and internet cancer.
Damn, this really sucks for internet archiving. :/
Boy that's nice. I read a whole lot less Twitter.
Net gain for me.
How will this work with embedded tweets?
As with any pusher: the first one's free.
For now, at least, you can view the initial tweet. Expanding a thread fails with the registration wall.
My view is that embeds / hotlinks were a Bad Idea for many other reasons (see the porn that's started appearing on old news and government sites due to hotlinked content). It trades a modicum of short-term convenience for major long-term risk.
As a shareholder--good.
As a lazy Twitter reader--bad.
Why do you think this is good for the stock price?
Everyone is logged into an account + Tweets (and share buttons) embedded all around the web -> way more data for advertising.
That's the underlying fact that make Facebook and Google (and to a lesser degree, Pinterest) so valuable for advertising. Facebook and Google have organic signups (FB for FB, Google for Gmail, Youtube, etc.), but Pinterest does what Twitter's thinking of doing here--it locks you out of content until you have an account. Pinterest also has "share" buttons (and the accompanying JS, cookies, etc.)
I don't have a Twitter account, and this now makes it far, far less likely that I will even click on a Twitter link or engage with the platform whatsoever.
I could obviously be in the minority (though I'm certainly not alone), but I'm curious if you think that my scenario will be the less common one and this will actually increase signups, or if it will have a positive impact on the stock price in another way.
Yes I do think this will boost sign ups. It's free and Tweets, for better or for worse, have come to be a sort of "source material." I think many, particularly younger, news-savvy users will seek to access Twitter.
I also think it greatly boosts Twitter's ability to monetize advertising. That's what make Facebook and Google so valuable (just about everyone is logged into an account).
I am, however, curious how this will impact embedded tweets (in articles, for example).
You're a shareholder seeking short-term gains. That doesn't really absolve you of this opinion.
Within HN, there are alot of people who might not be targeted audience for twitter.
I consider this addition to be a step back. As a rabid twitter fan, They blocked my account because i refused to add my number. Then, they blocked the content to view tweets, this reduced my interaction even further.
I question how some of these features get decided. Atleast, WSJ, gives couple of articles before throwing in a paywall.
If they made The Day The World Stood Still today, the aliens wouldn't even mention nukes - they would ask us to get rid of Twitter.
Twitter has always been garbage. It makes right wingers think they have freedom of speech, while it destroys democracy, coherent thought, and lets left wingers think they are changing the world, while they make it a worse place to be.
Disappointed by this move.
good. the sooner it fades to irrelevance the better
twitter is cancer
Twitter is to society as cancer is to life.
this belongs in reddit.com/r/thanksihateit
So can people please quit posting twitter feeds finally?
Some of us still have never used or signed up with twitter, or feel the need to, and really don't want to. Bad enough they removed non-javascript access, since they are permablocked through noscript here, I simply close postings on HN that link there and curse them for bothering. Asking for a login atop that is just a 4x non-starter for "news" links.
Yes, some of us still respect our privacy.
Unfortunately, given the nature of network effects, I suspect those who use Twitter will continue to use it, news media will continue to treat it as a primary source for comments from people, and those of us who wish to refrain from using it just... Won't have access to that channel of data. I don't see a scenario where a mass-walkout happens... Certainly not from this.
It'll be like the good old days of only finding out what's happening in the next town over because you read the paper's account of it, only now the next town over is just a site we could create an account on but refuse to.
Is that so bad though? Nothing I idly read about online much less twitter has any bearing on my daily life. It's mindless content masking as some important cultural zeitgeist. It's no different than netflix or any other time sink.
I fully share your sentiment. Tip, though: threadreaderapp.com will proxy them for you if you do really want to see them for some reason. I've also heard nitter.net mentioned, but haven't tried it yet.
I mostly use theoldreader.com, which doesn't, and honestly don't mind they don't capitulate and work-around privacy walls. Watching twits tweet with twats is mostly a non-starter anyways, nor would I believe anything I see there any more than facebook or other scandal rag links anyways.
I will not take the time to take a Twitter link and send it through that website. Anything on Twitter is time wasted as far as I am concerned.
I think some people have misunderstood this change. It's been active for me for about a week, I suspect most others without accounts just haven't noticed.
Clicking on a linked tweet still works, it's only when you then click on another from within the site that it asks you for a login. It's the same approach Quora takes iirc.
Pretty sure their sign up rates are going down the shitter, so they need some creative ways to satisfy the execs or whatever
I don't have an account, and the change has been noticeable and annoying. It's more than just clicking on another tweet, though from what I can tell they've been A/B testing this behavior (sometimes I get it and sometimes I do not). On mobile, you can't click through to someone's profile from the tweet without creating an account. If the tweet chain is more than 4 or 5 tweets, you cannot read the rest without creating an account. It's prevented me from normal browsing habits multiple times, like reading the ASML twitter thread that was posted on HN a couple of days ago.
Except that you often have to click something in Twitter to see the "thread", or a decent resolution of a tweeted picture, etc.
I cannot view threads or expand images or see people's responses to threads any longer. This does not compel me to sign up at all. Quite the opposite effect. Twitter is not the ideal place for long form threads anyways. *yes lets just keep adding more 140 character mini blogs to make a long form news posting*
It would be great if the community here just started downvoting stories that are twitter links. If it's not worth a blog post somewhere, why should we care?
Twitter threads are a confusing mess to look at and usually I can't figure out OP was trying to convey by posting a link to 30 tweets that probably should have been a text post somewhere.
I just gave up railing against it and run it through threader.app or threadreaderapp.com.
That doesn't make it into something the original poster re-read after themselves as a whole before posting.
Some of the highest upvoted content on HN is tweet storms with really awful takes (that driver one yesterday was full of them). I think it's fine to link to quality tweet threads but a lot of them are quite bad.
Microblogging is no less legitimate than blogging.
Considering how difficult is to follow lengthy posts that are split up in reverse chronological order, and how unintuitive it is to find replies, I surely disagree. The medium is very poor for centralized discussion of a single topic, in contrast to something like a single Reddit or HN article.
I mean, sure, but that's one tweet. 40 tweets in a row that you're supposed to read in order, comprise one large whole, nothing "micro" about it. I actually respect when someone follows the rules as it were, and spends the effort to post one tweet that conveys a lot concisely with a little. That to me is deserving of the label microblogging. Although unfortunately right alongside that is all the idiotic shallowness, sloganeering and fascistic tendencies posted by people who are like "thank god, a place where the format is as tiny as my thoughts." That's fitting a little into a little, so if there's a counter-argument to be made legitimacy-wise, that's it right there. But spreading something longer over a bunch of tweets, that's just regular blogging, on the wrong platform. I'm not fooled. It's a nuisance. Like when someone decides to pay you $5 as 500 pennies.
Can you even downvote posts here? I thought you can only downvote comments
There is no downvoting for submissions, although I wish there were.
Oh, I assumed for higher karma users they could downvote actual story posts... ohwell
Posts can be flagged, though there's a karma threshold required to do so.
A sufficient number of flags will kill a post (it's noted as "flagged").
This is addressed in multiple FAQ items, linked at the bottom of every HN page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I don’t understand the HB obsession with not creating accounts or reading Twitter. I haven’t logged into Twitter in years I stay logged in. Also reading Twitter is trivial people have consumed countless billions of tweets. Yet for some reason programmers on HN struggle with it.
It lets them track you across sites that use their iframes.
Scary. Patagonia might show me an ad when i read the WSJ since i follow their twitter account.
Where I go on the Internet outside of Twitter dot com is none of their business.
It’s how sites with billions in expenses are run without having to charge directly. I never click on ads so google and Twitter are free for me.
Twitter destroyed in myopic greed what was once a sensible service that shared in our vision of an open web. The “struggle” you refer to is protest.
I am just as confused as to how literally multiple people have figured out how to use and navigate Twitter. I have probably failed at many other things in my life too though. Maybe it's me.
If, for any reason, you stop using Twitter, your life will be going to be far more pleasant.
Yeey, finally someone says it! I've been trying to flag all possible Twitter links on here simply because their content isn't accessible to me.
I there's a better compromise for both parties. A website that you give a twitter link, it scrapes the content and rehosts without the login banner or bloat. You share this link instead of the original twitter link. Twitterers get to share the content they want and anyone can read without issue.
Keyword here being some
Funny, I got downvoted for mentioning the same thing in a post about a Tweet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.
I had a thread moderated away due to this yesterday :/ sucks.