5 ms·

I always considered Twitter's standard of holding even private conversations in public and always publicly disclosing your follower/following graph extremely da

I always considered Twitter's standard of holding even private conversations in public and always publicly disclosing your follower/following graph extremely dangerous for privacy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the "public-by-default" also contributed to the toxic "Twitter mob" culture because when every communication is public, everyone on the platform is much more encouraged to virtue signal (or attack those who say something you don't like). Unfortunately, even if you don't want to use Twitter, you're still affected by it. Aside from the risk of becoming the target of said mob, unfortunately, a large amount of public discourse and sometimes even official company or government announcements are only available through Twitter. I've started using nitter.net for the unavoidable Twitter usage. It proides an alternative UI for reading Twitter which at least does away with some of the pressure to sign up to see tweets with replies/search, offers RSS, and doesn't require you to reload the page each time you click on a link because "something went wrong". I'm not 100% sure their Tweet list is complete, and they're only as good as Twitter (i.e. if Twitter censors something, they still can't show it, the search for the banned hashtag is just as useless), but at least as a reader you're subject to a lot less of their dark patterns and hostile UX.

trav4225 6y ago
Yeah, what is the deal with that, anyway? Twitter is constantly giving me the "something went wrong" message or telling me that I'm being rate-limited even though I only hit the site about 10 times a week.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  My guess is their bot/scraper detection not liking anything that's not a 100% standard, extension-free browser. Although I've heard that even people without privacy extensions are getting hit by it, so it may just be a super aggressive bot detection that's randomly hitting everyone or some other bug that Twitter doesn't care because it presumably a) doesn't affect logged in users b) non-logged-in users who go there really want/need to see something (e.g. whether the US president is about to deport them) so they will put up with it and reload.
  - jen20 6y ago
    I see this constantly, but primarily when I click a link to Twitter in an app other than a browser (e.g. Slack). It's been years now, so I'm 100% sure Twitter must know about the issue and have just chosen to not care.
- nullc 6y ago
  Go to about:debugging#workers and remove all "service workers" for twitter (these are persistent background tasks that, among other things, can act as proxy servers for requests on pages). This will resolve the problem, at least temporarily. You can disable service workers entirely by setting about:config dom.serviceWorkers.enabled to false.
whoisjuan 6y ago
Is there anyone using Twitter with some expectation of having private conversations? I mean even the name of the service indicates the total opposite. I doubt Twitter would even exist without its current nature. 40% of Twitter users are lurkers and according to Twitter they have 500 million dormant users (people that visit Twitter without signing in).
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  The problem is, sometimes you don't have a choice because the people you need to talk to are only reachable through Twitter. I once bought tickets for a sold-out conference that way (at face value, not a scalper, just someone who had a ticket and couldn't go). I had to wire the money and would only learn at the entrance to the conference whether I got scammed or not. A quick scroll down the Twitter timeline of that person convinced me that I can most likely trust them, while at the same time clearly showing how much of a privacy disaster Twitter is.
  - whoisjuan 6y ago
    But this is tricky too. Like for example asking for user support via Twitter. People choose to expose the privacy of their purchases as long as they can gain some audience for their frustrations and solve their problem.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Do you mean that the person you bought the tickets from had obviously misunderstood the context that they were posting messages into? I follow a few dozen people and don't observe ~any~ misunderstanding that it is very public. There's people that like to share, but they are obviously clear on what they are doing.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
      I don't think the person misunderstood. I think they did realize that what they were saying was public, but didn't care too much - they just wanted to get a message to a specific person, and Twitter made the easiest way to do so to say it publicly. As a result, a lot of such messages ended up being public, and while each of them was innocent, all of them taken together were saying a lot about that person. And the latter may have been an implication that the person didn't realize.
CivBase 6y ago
> a large amount of public discourse and sometimes even official company or government announcements are only available through Twitter. What exactly are you afraid of missing out on? I've never had a Twitter account and that has never been a problem for me. The overwhelming majority of my exposure to the site comes from screencaps, embedded tweets in blogs and articles, and the occasional link on HN.

trav4225 6y ago

Yeah, what is the deal with that, anyway? Twitter is constantly giving me the "something went wrong" message or telling me that I'm being rate-limited even though I only hit the site about 10 times a week.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
My guess is their bot/scraper detection not liking anything that's not a 100% standard, extension-free browser. Although I've heard that even people without privacy extensions are getting hit by it, so it may just be a super aggressive bot detection that's randomly hitting everyone or some other bug that Twitter doesn't care because it presumably a) doesn't affect logged in users b) non-logged-in users who go there really want/need to see something (e.g. whether the US president is about to deport them) so they will put up with it and reload.
- jen20 6y ago
  I see this constantly, but primarily when I click a link to Twitter in an app other than a browser (e.g. Slack). It's been years now, so I'm 100% sure Twitter must know about the issue and have just chosen to not care.
nullc 6y ago
Go to about:debugging#workers and remove all "service workers" for twitter (these are persistent background tasks that, among other things, can act as proxy servers for requests on pages). This will resolve the problem, at least temporarily. You can disable service workers entirely by setting about:config dom.serviceWorkers.enabled to false.

whoisjuan 6y ago

Is there anyone using Twitter with some expectation of having private conversations? I mean even the name of the service indicates the total opposite. I doubt Twitter would even exist without its current nature. 40% of Twitter users are lurkers and according to Twitter they have 500 million dormant users (people that visit Twitter without signing in).

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
The problem is, sometimes you don't have a choice because the people you need to talk to are only reachable through Twitter. I once bought tickets for a sold-out conference that way (at face value, not a scalper, just someone who had a ticket and couldn't go). I had to wire the money and would only learn at the entrance to the conference whether I got scammed or not. A quick scroll down the Twitter timeline of that person convinced me that I can most likely trust them, while at the same time clearly showing how much of a privacy disaster Twitter is.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  But this is tricky too. Like for example asking for user support via Twitter. People choose to expose the privacy of their purchases as long as they can gain some audience for their frustrations and solve their problem.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Do you mean that the person you bought the tickets from had obviously misunderstood the context that they were posting messages into? I follow a few dozen people and don't observe ~any~ misunderstanding that it is very public. There's people that like to share, but they are obviously clear on what they are doing.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    I don't think the person misunderstood. I think they did realize that what they were saying was public, but didn't care too much - they just wanted to get a message to a specific person, and Twitter made the easiest way to do so to say it publicly. As a result, a lot of such messages ended up being public, and while each of them was innocent, all of them taken together were saying a lot about that person. And the latter may have been an implication that the person didn't realize.

CivBase 6y ago

> a large amount of public discourse and sometimes even official company or government announcements are only available through Twitter. What exactly are you afraid of missing out on? I've never had a Twitter account and that has never been a problem for me. The overwhelming majority of my exposure to the site comes from screencaps, embedded tweets in blogs and articles, and the occasional link on HN.