30 ms·

Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

912 points by oenetan 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
Monetising demands proof of eyeballs. Its all about money.
dleslie 5y ago
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.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Additionally, at least Twitter has a pretty nice offline webapp that gets downloaded when you archive your account.
tdeck 5y ago
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.
ddingus 5y ago
Boy that's nice. I read a whole lot less Twitter. Net gain for me.
treeman79 5y ago
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.
echlipse 5y ago
Happened to me too. An easy workaround: just refresh the browser when shown the login page.
lenkite 5y ago
Well, if Gab is clever, they can position themselves here as a privacy alternative.
- noobermin 5y ago
  Gab hitched itself to a political section of the right, and so they've walled off a lot of potential users.
modzu 5y ago
good. the sooner it fades to irrelevance the better
okonomiyaki3000 5y ago
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.
egfx 5y ago
I created a free data exchange product between Twitter and Facebook in the form of a chrome extension https://2fb.me 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.
frankydp 5y ago
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.
r_singh 5y ago
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...
loughnane 5y ago
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
kadomony 5y ago
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.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
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.
- 0x_rs 5y ago
  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.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > 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. Such is the treadmill of social media platforms.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    The modern internet: four websites each filled with nothing but screenshots from the other three.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Ah yes, the classic. This was the earliest mention I could find: https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040?lang=en 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."
badkitty99 5y ago
Wow this is so greedy wtf
Taylor_OD 5y ago
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.
- Theizestooke 5y ago
  I'm using old.reddit.com, and it's ok. Shame if they would turn that off though.
  - est31 5y ago
    There is also i.reddit.com, which is more mobile friendly than old.reddit.com.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
    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.
  - system2 5y ago
    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.
    - xdfgh1112 5y ago
      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.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
When I first noticed this I found a workaround to block all cookies from Twitter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
logicalmonster 5y ago
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.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  With Quora you can just add ?share=1 at the end of the url and you can view the content without logging in.
- nerdwords 5y ago
  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 http://qsf.cf.quoracdn.net/best_of_quora_2010-2012.pdf
- foogazi 5y ago
  Quora is such a shit show though - what happened there ? Their algo will just continually blast email you every category you ever clicked on
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    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.
    - city41 5y ago
      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.
reidjs 5y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  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.
  - reidjs 5y ago
    You will probably have to write a scraper :(
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
johnrob 5y ago
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.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  Somewhere a Twitter employee is patching this now!
  - mypastself 5y ago
    “Thanks for testing our feature without getting paid for it, suckers! Uh, I mean hackers.”
bejelentkezni 5y ago
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)
- oenetan 5y ago
  thanks
- makeworld 5y ago
  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.
- timdaub 5y ago
  I prefer using nitter.net. Also on mobile I don't have uBlock.
kordlessagain 5y ago
Just turn JavaScript off for Twitter to “solve” the issue.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  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.
pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
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.
- pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
  Thanks for the considered responses, this was all super illuminating! And thanks for the hot tip on Firefox containers too :~I
- dawnerd 5y ago
  Chasing metrics.
  - gsibble 5y ago
    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).
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  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.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  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.
  - queuebert 5y ago
    They still have cookies and your browser fingerprint. You might be surprised how complete their picture already is.
jordemort 5y ago
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.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Funny, I got downvoted for mentioning the same thing in a post about a Tweet.
- blueflow 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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.
Cream-Corn-11 5y ago
I only bother viewing tweets through Nitter instances nowadays.
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  Won't this break nitter, since nitter would need to sign in to view tweets?
commoner 5y ago
Another workaround for Android users is the FOSS app Fritter: https://fritter.cc 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 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-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
- lgats 5y ago
  Or the web based “nitter” project https://nitter.domain.glass https://nitter.domain.glass or https://nitter.cc https://nitter.cc
criddell 5y ago
When a login is required to view content, how do Google, Bing, and the others crawl the site?
- tjpnz 5y ago
  Login is typically disabled for crawlers.
  - johnc1231 5y ago
    How do they identify a crawler? Can a user not masquerade as a crawler somehow?
    - tjpnz 5y ago
      Normally by user agent. You can adopt the same UA to get past some paywalls, but it doesn't always work.
    - est31 5y ago
      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.
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago
jgwil2 5y ago
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.
riffic 5y ago
I posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472 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.
- syshum 5y ago
  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.
  - OrangeMusic 5y ago
    Seriously, how is Twitter better than an RSS feed for this use?
    - riffic 5y ago
      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.
- macintux 5y ago
  I’ve complained to government agencies about using Facebook and not making their posts public. Maddening.
- riffic 5y ago
  reply because I can't edit. even HN knows how User Hostile Twitter is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=twitter%20%22user-hostile%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- 5y ago
mattowen_uk 5y ago
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 https://nitter.net
- icehawk 5y ago
  I've found that only happens when you're not doing GET: curl https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss 2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:32:56 -0400] "GET /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 200 12985 "-" "curl/7.64.1" vs curl --head https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss 2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:33:57 -0400] "HEAD /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 404 0 "-" "curl/7.64.1"
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    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)
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  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/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
NowhereMan 5y ago
Do they whitelist accounts of public officials? For instance, having the POTUS account behind an auth wall seems like a horrible practice.
- macksd 5y ago
  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.
  - Svetlitski 5y ago
    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 https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php
    - macksd 5y ago
      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?
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
est31 5y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304
jojo2000 5y ago
See you never, walled gardens; I don't belong to a prison!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
solmag 5y ago
Too many bluechecks publicly roasted.
wildpeaks 5y ago
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).
- sova 5y ago
  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"
- miohtama 5y ago
  Here is a research how much phone number verification decreases account fraud a.k.a. spam bots http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/43134.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
  - ben-gy 5y ago
    That is genuinely a very interesting paper - thanks for sharing
  - ecf 5y ago
    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
    - queuebert 5y ago
      "For your protection." The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
      - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
phtrivier 5y ago
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.
elcapitan 5y ago
How will this work with embedded tweets?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
noisy_boy 5y ago
My life is perfectly fine without tweets, likes and stickers. One less thing to waste time on.
- riffic 5y ago
  give this guy a round of applause, everyone.
- megous 5y ago
  Yes, I like to posture on HN instead, too! :)
croes 5y ago
Less range for twitter users means less twitter users. Seems to be a pretty dumb move.
darkwater 5y ago
Finally an article where people can state publicly their hate to this decision without polluting all the other posts linking to tweets.
DrBenCarson 5y ago
As a shareholder--good. As a lazy Twitter reader--bad.
- mnd999 5y ago
  Why do you think this is good for the stock price?
  - DrBenCarson 5y ago
    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.)
- jjulius 5y ago
  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.
  - DrBenCarson 5y ago
    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).
- Andrex 5y ago
bastard_op 5y ago
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.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  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.
  - asdff 5y ago
    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.
- b3morales 5y ago
  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.
  - bastard_op 5y ago
    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.
Kye 5y ago
Tip: you can replace www in Reddit URLs (like in the submission) with old to get past it encouraging you to log in.
throw149102 5y ago
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.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > 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.
- b3morales 5y ago
  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.
  - zigradett 5y ago
    Realistically, though, is this going to decrease Twitter usage. I would never hand my phone number over to Twitter. Would you?
    - b3morales 5y ago
      I wouldn't, but almost everyone I know would.
  - conradfr 5y ago
    I guess it worked for Instagram so they're copying them?
- Jcowell 5y ago
  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.
partiallypro 5y ago
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?
saos 5y ago
Disappointed by this move.
monkeybutton 5y ago
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.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  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.
dangerface 5y ago
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.
3maj 5y ago
I'm fine with this, I'll just never look at Twitter again.
whoisjuan 5y ago
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.
RicoElectrico 5y ago
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.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  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.
- anonymousab 5y ago
  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.
- WaltPurvis 5y ago
  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.
ecommerceguy 5y ago
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...
phy6 5y ago
This is a positive change for world mental health, bravo.
gregors 5y ago
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.
zthrowaway 5y ago
Good, hopefully this is the beginning of the end of Twitter… at the very least the end of its influence.
rc_mob 5y ago
this belongs in reddit.com/r/thanksihateit
dathinab 5y ago
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.
shaan7 5y ago
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-india-at-war-with-twitter https://scroll.in/article/999171/why-is-the-government-of-in...
koreanguy 5y ago
what is the point of twitter ? why do people even use it.
petee 5y ago
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
petee 5y ago
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
- riffic 5y ago
  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).
Dopameaner 5y ago
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.
kgwxd 5y ago
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.
pbreit 5y ago
So will I now need a 2nd account to view all the users who have blocked me? Lame.
batman-farts 5y ago
The beginning of the end. Somewhat perverse that it seems like the fall of Kabul was the motivation for this change.
- jjulius 5y ago
  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
  - batman-farts 5y ago
    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.
nixroot 5y ago
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/ https://nitter.net/
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  All Instagram frontends are broken now, so if Twitter goes through with the change Nitter's days are numbered.
  - black_puppydog 5y ago
    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.
SamuelAdams 5y ago
What happens when a tweet is embedded in a news article?
- quesomaster9000 5y ago
  I don't know, they get blocked by my browser plugins along with all the other parasitic embedded widgets, adverts and internet cancer.
dustymcp 5y ago
All it does is that i wont be consuming this, behind a login bye bye.
zigradett 5y ago
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.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
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.
- riffic 5y ago
  Twitter's track record is nothing but user-hostility at this point. Look at the bigger picture please, people.
paulpauper 5y ago
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.
justinzollars 5y ago
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.
f00zz 5y ago
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.
nullc 5y 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.
reggieband 5y ago
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.
qwertox 5y ago
I wish this had the effect of politicians no longer being allowed to use Twitter in order to express any type of public opinions.
TekMol 5y ago
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?
nostromo 5y ago
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.
emptybits 5y ago
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-twitter-user-may-have-its-roots-in-us/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/saudi-case-against-twi...
batch12 5y ago
I hope this helps kill the 20 tweet roll blog replacement.
nrvn 5y ago
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”
koolba 5y ago
I love this. It makes it impossible to view Twitter as nothing could compel me to actually sign up for an account.
nbzso 5y ago
Why I feel that RSS and personal blogs will resurrect and become the norm? The benefits of centralization are diminishing day by day.
- slig 5y ago
  We thought the same when Posterous finally died, but then Medium happened.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I don't get it. You're still fed ads either way? Why do they care?
breakpointalpha 5y ago
Great, now I will see even more Twitter screenshots on all the other websites (reddit, imgur)... /s
rubyist5eva 5y ago
twitter is cancer
- timbit42 5y ago
  Twitter is to society as cancer is to life.
fridif 5y ago
More time to work on important projects instead of me mindlessly scrolling and clicking in circles.
stevebmark 5y ago
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.
tomlin 5y ago
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.
njarboe 5y ago
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.
amatecha 5y ago
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/ https://joinmastodon.org/
cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
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.
wavefunction 5y ago
Hopefully this will reduce the amount of embedded tweets in articles and my accidental exposure to Twitter and the problems it produces.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jdeaton 5y ago
Great feature! This will help me stop using twitter!
MiddleEndian 5y ago
Hopefully this will be the end of news articles including links to tweets or embedded tweets.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ryanSrich 5y ago
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.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  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?
  - yosame 5y ago
    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.
lodonnell9213 5y ago
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
abstractbarista 5y ago
Guess I'm not viewing Twitter links any more. Hopefully they realize that not everyone cares. We just opt-out, 100%. Oh well.
sysadm1n 5y ago
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/ https://nitter.net/
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  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.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
It's probably just a few scraper bots that cause all this inconvenience for millions of innocent people.
dredmorbius 5y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter_starts_to_require_login_to_view_tweets/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter...
bitwize 5y ago
If this drives people away from the Great Banality Laser, good.
nikisweeting 5y ago
Damn, this really sucks for internet archiving. :/
lykahb 5y ago
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.
vzaliva 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MichaelZuo 5y ago
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.
- jopsen 5y ago
  > 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.

912 points by oenetan 5y ago

ggm 5y ago

Monetising demands proof of eyeballs. Its all about money.

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.

brailsafe 5y ago
Additionally, at least Twitter has a pretty nice offline webapp that gets downloaded when you archive your account.

tdeck 5y ago

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.

ddingus 5y ago

Boy that's nice. I read a whole lot less Twitter. Net gain for me.

treeman79 5y ago

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.

echlipse 5y ago

Happened to me too. An easy workaround: just refresh the browser when shown the login page.

lenkite 5y ago

Well, if Gab is clever, they can position themselves here as a privacy alternative.

noobermin 5y ago
Gab hitched itself to a political section of the right, and so they've walled off a lot of potential users.

modzu 5y ago

good. the sooner it fades to irrelevance the better

okonomiyaki3000 5y ago

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.

egfx 5y ago

I created a free data exchange product between Twitter and Facebook in the form of a chrome extension https://2fb.me 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.

frankydp 5y ago

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.

r_singh 5y ago

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...

loughnane 5y ago

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

kadomony 5y ago

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.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

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.

0x_rs 5y ago
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.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> 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. Such is the treadmill of social media platforms.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  The modern internet: four websites each filled with nothing but screenshots from the other three.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Ah yes, the classic. This was the earliest mention I could find: https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040?lang=en 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."

badkitty99 5y ago

Wow this is so greedy wtf

Taylor_OD 5y ago

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.

Theizestooke 5y ago
I'm using old.reddit.com, and it's ok. Shame if they would turn that off though.
- est31 5y ago
  There is also i.reddit.com, which is more mobile friendly than old.reddit.com.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
  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.
- system2 5y ago
  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.
  - xdfgh1112 5y ago
    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.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

When I first noticed this I found a workaround to block all cookies from Twitter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

logicalmonster 5y ago

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.

_-david-_ 5y ago
With Quora you can just add ?share=1 at the end of the url and you can view the content without logging in.
nerdwords 5y ago
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 http://qsf.cf.quoracdn.net/best_of_quora_2010-2012.pdf
foogazi 5y ago
Quora is such a shit show though - what happened there ? Their algo will just continually blast email you every category you ever clicked on
- alpaca128 5y ago
  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.
  - city41 5y ago
    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.

reidjs 5y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
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.
- reidjs 5y ago
  You will probably have to write a scraper :(

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

johnrob 5y ago

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.

kordlessagain 5y ago
Somewhere a Twitter employee is patching this now!
- mypastself 5y ago
  “Thanks for testing our feature without getting paid for it, suckers! Uh, I mean hackers.”

bejelentkezni 5y ago

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)

oenetan 5y ago
thanks
makeworld 5y ago
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.
timdaub 5y ago
I prefer using nitter.net. Also on mobile I don't have uBlock.

kordlessagain 5y ago

Just turn JavaScript off for Twitter to “solve” the issue.

dredmorbius 5y ago
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.

pkdpic_y9k 5y ago

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.

pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
Thanks for the considered responses, this was all super illuminating! And thanks for the hot tip on Firefox containers too :~I
dawnerd 5y ago
Chasing metrics.
- gsibble 5y ago
  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).
comeonseriously 5y ago
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.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
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.
- queuebert 5y ago
  They still have cookies and your browser fingerprint. You might be surprised how complete their picture already is.

jordemort 5y ago

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.

encryptluks2 5y ago

Funny, I got downvoted for mentioning the same thing in a post about a Tweet.

blueflow 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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.

Cream-Corn-11 5y ago

I only bother viewing tweets through Nitter instances nowadays.

Ajedi32 5y ago
Won't this break nitter, since nitter would need to sign in to view tweets?

commoner 5y ago

Another workaround for Android users is the FOSS app Fritter: https://fritter.cc 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 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-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

lgats 5y ago
Or the web based “nitter” project https://nitter.domain.glass https://nitter.domain.glass or https://nitter.cc https://nitter.cc

criddell 5y ago

When a login is required to view content, how do Google, Bing, and the others crawl the site?

tjpnz 5y ago
Login is typically disabled for crawlers.
- johnc1231 5y ago
  How do they identify a crawler? Can a user not masquerade as a crawler somehow?
  - tjpnz 5y ago
    Normally by user agent. You can adopt the same UA to get past some paywalls, but it doesn't always work.
  - est31 5y ago
    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.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago

jgwil2 5y ago

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.

riffic 5y ago

I posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472 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.

syshum 5y ago
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.
- OrangeMusic 5y ago
  Seriously, how is Twitter better than an RSS feed for this use?
  - riffic 5y ago
    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.
macintux 5y ago
I’ve complained to government agencies about using Facebook and not making their posts public. Maddening.
riffic 5y ago
reply because I can't edit. even HN knows how User Hostile Twitter is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=twitter%20%22user-hostile%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
5y ago

mattowen_uk 5y ago

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 https://nitter.net

icehawk 5y ago
I've found that only happens when you're not doing GET: curl https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss 2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:32:56 -0400] "GET /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 200 12985 "-" "curl/7.64.1" vs curl --head https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss 2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:33:57 -0400] "HEAD /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 404 0 "-" "curl/7.64.1"
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  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)
0-_-0 5y ago
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/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...

NowhereMan 5y ago

Do they whitelist accounts of public officials? For instance, having the POTUS account behind an auth wall seems like a horrible practice.

macksd 5y ago
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.
- Svetlitski 5y ago
  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 https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php
  - macksd 5y ago
    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?
  - dredmorbius 5y ago

est31 5y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304

jojo2000 5y ago

See you never, walled gardens; I don't belong to a prison!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

solmag 5y ago

Too many bluechecks publicly roasted.

wildpeaks 5y ago

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).

sova 5y ago
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"
miohtama 5y ago
Here is a research how much phone number verification decreases account fraud a.k.a. spam bots http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/43134.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
- ben-gy 5y ago
  That is genuinely a very interesting paper - thanks for sharing
- ecf 5y ago
  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
  - queuebert 5y ago
    "For your protection." The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
    - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

phtrivier 5y ago

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.

elcapitan 5y ago

How will this work with embedded tweets?

dredmorbius 5y ago
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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

noisy_boy 5y ago

My life is perfectly fine without tweets, likes and stickers. One less thing to waste time on.

riffic 5y ago
give this guy a round of applause, everyone.
megous 5y ago
Yes, I like to posture on HN instead, too! :)

croes 5y ago

Less range for twitter users means less twitter users. Seems to be a pretty dumb move.

darkwater 5y ago

Finally an article where people can state publicly their hate to this decision without polluting all the other posts linking to tweets.

DrBenCarson 5y ago

As a shareholder--good. As a lazy Twitter reader--bad.

mnd999 5y ago
Why do you think this is good for the stock price?
- DrBenCarson 5y ago
  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.)
jjulius 5y ago
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.
- DrBenCarson 5y ago
  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).
Andrex 5y ago

bastard_op 5y ago

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.

shadowgovt 5y ago
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.
- asdff 5y ago
  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.
b3morales 5y ago
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.
- bastard_op 5y ago
  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.

Kye 5y ago

Tip: you can replace www in Reddit URLs (like in the submission) with old to get past it encouraging you to log in.

throw149102 5y ago

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.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> 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.
b3morales 5y ago
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.
- zigradett 5y ago
  Realistically, though, is this going to decrease Twitter usage. I would never hand my phone number over to Twitter. Would you?
  - b3morales 5y ago
    I wouldn't, but almost everyone I know would.
- conradfr 5y ago
  I guess it worked for Instagram so they're copying them?
Jcowell 5y ago
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.

partiallypro 5y ago

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?

saos 5y ago

Disappointed by this move.

monkeybutton 5y ago

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.

marcosdumay 5y ago
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.

dangerface 5y ago

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.

3maj 5y ago

I'm fine with this, I'll just never look at Twitter again.

whoisjuan 5y ago

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.

RicoElectrico 5y ago

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.

_-david-_ 5y ago
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.
anonymousab 5y ago
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.
WaltPurvis 5y ago
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.

ecommerceguy 5y ago

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...

phy6 5y ago

This is a positive change for world mental health, bravo.

gregors 5y ago

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.

zthrowaway 5y ago

Good, hopefully this is the beginning of the end of Twitter… at the very least the end of its influence.

rc_mob 5y ago

this belongs in reddit.com/r/thanksihateit

dathinab 5y ago

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.

shaan7 5y ago

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-india-at-war-with-twitter https://scroll.in/article/999171/why-is-the-government-of-in...

koreanguy 5y ago

what is the point of twitter ? why do people even use it.

petee 5y ago

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

petee 5y ago

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

riffic 5y ago
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).

Dopameaner 5y ago

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.

kgwxd 5y ago

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.

pbreit 5y ago

So will I now need a 2nd account to view all the users who have blocked me? Lame.

batman-farts 5y ago

The beginning of the end. Somewhat perverse that it seems like the fall of Kabul was the motivation for this change.

jjulius 5y ago
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
- batman-farts 5y ago
  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.

nixroot 5y ago

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/ https://nitter.net/

0-_-0 5y ago
All Instagram frontends are broken now, so if Twitter goes through with the change Nitter's days are numbered.
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  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.

SamuelAdams 5y ago

What happens when a tweet is embedded in a news article?

quesomaster9000 5y ago
I don't know, they get blocked by my browser plugins along with all the other parasitic embedded widgets, adverts and internet cancer.

dustymcp 5y ago

All it does is that i wont be consuming this, behind a login bye bye.

zigradett 5y ago

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.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

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.

riffic 5y ago
Twitter's track record is nothing but user-hostility at this point. Look at the bigger picture please, people.

paulpauper 5y ago

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.

justinzollars 5y ago

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.

f00zz 5y ago

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.

nullc 5y 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.

reggieband 5y ago

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.

qwertox 5y ago

I wish this had the effect of politicians no longer being allowed to use Twitter in order to express any type of public opinions.

TekMol 5y ago

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?

nostromo 5y ago

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.

emptybits 5y ago

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-twitter-user-may-have-its-roots-in-us/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/saudi-case-against-twi...

batch12 5y ago

I hope this helps kill the 20 tweet roll blog replacement.

nrvn 5y ago

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”

koolba 5y ago

I love this. It makes it impossible to view Twitter as nothing could compel me to actually sign up for an account.

nbzso 5y ago

Why I feel that RSS and personal blogs will resurrect and become the norm? The benefits of centralization are diminishing day by day.

slig 5y ago
We thought the same when Posterous finally died, but then Medium happened.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I don't get it. You're still fed ads either way? Why do they care?

breakpointalpha 5y ago

Great, now I will see even more Twitter screenshots on all the other websites (reddit, imgur)... /s

rubyist5eva 5y ago

twitter is cancer

timbit42 5y ago
Twitter is to society as cancer is to life.

fridif 5y ago

More time to work on important projects instead of me mindlessly scrolling and clicking in circles.

stevebmark 5y ago

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.

tomlin 5y ago

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.

njarboe 5y ago

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.

amatecha 5y ago

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/ https://joinmastodon.org/

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago

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.

wavefunction 5y ago

Hopefully this will reduce the amount of embedded tweets in articles and my accidental exposure to Twitter and the problems it produces.

deleted 5y ago

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jdeaton 5y ago

Great feature! This will help me stop using twitter!

MiddleEndian 5y ago

Hopefully this will be the end of news articles including links to tweets or embedded tweets.

deleted 5y ago

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ryanSrich 5y ago

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.

cwkoss 5y ago
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?
- yosame 5y ago
  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.

lodonnell9213 5y ago

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

abstractbarista 5y ago

Guess I'm not viewing Twitter links any more. Hopefully they realize that not everyone cares. We just opt-out, 100%. Oh well.

sysadm1n 5y ago

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/ https://nitter.net/

dredmorbius 5y ago
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.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

It's probably just a few scraper bots that cause all this inconvenience for millions of innocent people.

dredmorbius 5y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter_starts_to_require_login_to_view_tweets/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter...

bitwize 5y ago

If this drives people away from the Great Banality Laser, good.

nikisweeting 5y ago

Damn, this really sucks for internet archiving. :/

lykahb 5y ago

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.

vzaliva 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

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MichaelZuo 5y ago

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.

jopsen 5y ago
> 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.