Most newspapers cost and have costed money. So I think it would be fair to argue that newspapers gated non-paying users from read-accessing the platform. Even b

Most newspapers cost and have costed money. So I think it would be fair to argue that newspapers gated non-paying users from read-accessing the platform. Even before that, for the numerical majority of human history most people did not have access to newspapers because they were gated by illiteracy. The idea of openness can't be a hollow ideal; more people have access to communication under the closed system you're decrying than under the open one you're championing. The window of human history where newspapers might be considered moderately open, even in the West, is quite small. Probably from about the beginning of America's transformation into a car country -- around 1930 or so was the first time most people could a) read, b) afford, and c) conveniently get a paper delivered to home. And they were only probably truly "open" in the sense of not requiring any transaction to access them for the period between about 1996 (around when online newspapers came around) and let's say around 2010-2011 when the NYT implemented the first major metered paywall. So openness is good and I support it, but also am skeptical of a view of history that the world was open until Twitter closed it. But we are where we are, now. Given that Twitter is absolutely not going to do your daily tweet torrent idea (the Library of Congress stopped archiving Twitter after concluding the value in doing so was nil, and clearly the mechanism for open preservation of the social web would be through large, official cultural institutions and not Twitter exposing private functionality to you at their own expense), I think ultimately there are two questions to ask: 1) Are you willing to engage in some kind of membership transaction to access a service? 2) Given that the cost of membership is personal information, if this bothers you, what measures can you take to limit it?