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Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
Occasionally a link to a tweet will be submitted here as a story by itself. Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium by making the site nearly unusable without an account. Until a few days ago you could read all the tweets you wanted but clicking any of them would pop up a “join twitter” screen. Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs.
- arepublicadoceu 5y agoMy dream scenario would be Twitter and reddit effectively killing their api so we don’t have Apollo or Tweetbot anymore. These apps doesn’t help with addictive behavior because they absolutely remove everything wrong from these networks and gives me a stellar user experience.
- cinntaile 5y agoI said it before but got downvoted at the time [0], now that Jack is gone it's likely going downhill from here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503384
- rvz 5y agoExactly. It is the same with YouTube. Neither Twitter or YouTube will change and it will only get worse as I have said for years.
- FollowingTheDao 5y agoConsider my problem. I had an old account with my phone number associated with it. I closed the account two years ago. I went to open an account and they asked for my phone number, Twitter says my phone number is in use and will not let me get past that point. So I am now shut out on both ends.
- hidden-spyder 5y agoHave you contacted support about this?
- rvz 5y agoLooking at the comments, users are even suggesting to use alternative hacks and frontends like Nitter, uBlock which may work temporarily but will ultimately be broken and everyone will lose again. This is just the start and it will get much worse over time for all social networks.
- throwawaynay 5y agoI guess there isn't much we can do besides creating an account in 30 seconds and not using it, it's not that bad
- ahelwer 5y agoOn medium, when I logged out and saw what sort of experience the site was giving the readers of the things I worked so hard to post there, I stopped posting there.
- TremendousJudge 5y agoAfter creating an account, you will be prompted to give them your phone number, and afaik, you cannot skip this step
- KayL 5y agoLast time I tried to create an annoymous account ,they asked for tel verification. (not exactly when you sign it up but after a few day)
- f00zz 5y agoSame. It allowed me to create an account with just an e-mail address, but soon after the account was suspended for "unusual activity" and the only way to unlock it was with a phone number. At this point I gave up.
- bmarquez 5y agoHad that exact same problem, I emailed customer service via their webform asking what went wrong and a few days later Twitter replied, removing the "suspension" I think they're just fishing for mobile numbers for targeted advertising identifiers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jdkjs 5y agoHave you tried clearing your cookies and your local storage? There also are alternative interfaces such as nitter
- mattrighetti 5y agoI've noticed this too, but that's also the reason why I use Nitter [0]. I'm also a bit lazy so I've also setup a redirector plugin to automatically redirect every twitter link to Nitter, been happy since then. [0] https://nitter.nl https://nitter.nl
- commoner 5y agoNitter is great. The Privacy Redirect extension can automatically redirect your Twitter page loads to Nitter: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect If you are on Android, you can also use the free and open source Fritter client to view tweets and browse Twitter without an account: https://fritter.cc https://fritter.cc
- PenguinCoder 5y agoThanks for linking to that extension.
- alefvanoon 5y ago
- karlzt 5y agoOn Android there's also: https://framagit.org/tom79/nitterizeme https://framagit.org/tom79/nitterizeme. Get it on F-Droid.
- 2-718-281-828 5y agoI want to see localized trends. not on nitter.
- beardedetim 5y agoI see this as a feature and not a bug now that I no longer have an account on Twitter. If I absolutely want to read a tweet, I can. But the barrier to entry is a _good_ thing to me.
- dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 5y agoTwitter also requires you to a have a cell phone to sign up for an account. I have a work cell and a land line, neither of which can be used for creating a personal twitter account. This barrier to entry is good for me too.
- powvans 5y agoI came here to say exactly this. I have a Twitter account, but I stay logged out and let their door slamming act dissuade me from scrolling. I can read the one linked Tweet from some article or post and then return to my life. It’s blissful.
- civilized 5y agoIt's delightful. All these trash sites are under pressure to deliver more profits (presumably) and they're going to find out how little we all need them. Shame that that heroin needle is behind a sign-up/paywall barrier...
- lgvld 5y agoYeah, same here. Especially with Instagram. ;-) Make me save so much time.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. > Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website. The only login-wall that doesn’t make sense to me is Medium’s, as the site is primarily designed as a publishing platform rather than a community platform. Forcing users to create an account to read a blog post isn’t a great way to generate wide viewership of your blog posts.
- dyeje 5y agoTwitter doesn't even let you click links to other Twitter pages, it redirects you back to the original link you followed.
- jrochkind1 5y agoIn the end no company is obligated to do much of anything. We see that twitter probably wouldn't have achieved the kind of market dominance they have if they had started out this way though. So it feels like a sort of bait-and-switch, which annoys. That now that they have we have to deal with it or be cut out of something so popular, that they can only get away with because they are so popular. But sure, they have no obligation to not do that.
- Retric 5y ago> need to become a user of the website Why? You can show people the same advertising either way so signifying up with a junk e-mail address and forcing a login is really kind of a pointless hoop.
- gezfrg321 5y agoIt will make their metrics look better
- puregram 5y ago
- h2odragon 5y agoThey finally got me to sign up a few months ago with that crap. Suddenly other sites started working better, after I did: apparently that twitter cookie smooths the ad auctions and all the other underlayer horseshit on the modern web. Kinda makes me wonder how hard it would be to anti-optimize a site so that if you have a twitter / FB / youtube / etc account and are not using private browsing the pages load slow or incomplete etc. Presumably most of use crotchety enough to use such a thing in anger have already bowed out and fallen off the web already.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoAre we moving back in the direction of walled Gardens ?
- egberts1 5y agoWalled garden convent worked real well for the following portals: * CompuServe * AOL * GeoCities * MySpace My two cents worth here.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 5y agoDid we ever stop?
- fsflover 5y agoNot everyone. Some people use Mastodon.
- kevincox 5y agoI have a simple solution: Don't use it. I do occasionally follow a twitter link but these days I just skip by them on HN (or just read the comments) and most other places. I even have an account but don't bother to log in. I find the website atrociously slow anyways and I don't think 280 characters or whatever they are at now is an enjoyable form of content.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoNote that a huge issue I see is that Twitter is used by a lot of governments for official announcements. Back when Twitter was open, using it for goverment communication was OK, like it is OK for governments to make public announcements on public TV. But imagine an important announcement is only made on a private TV channel! Even if that private TV channel were free, but you have to accept FAANG ToS, it’s still wrong and probably must be unconstitutional in some way.
- riffic 5y agocall your government representatives and let them know about alternatives then. I feel the public sector should be required to adopt open and interoperable standards for its communications. Public money, public access, public infrastructure.
- zthrowaway 5y agoMore of this please. I want Twitter’s influence on our society to be less.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoGood. Perhaps it will encourage some people to not post on Twitter, and use something more appropriate? One can hope...
- travelhead 5y agoI don’t like being logged into Twitter on my Desktop, but I often need to search Twitter. Now it appears I need an account to search?
- NoGravitas 5y agoYou seriously should be using Nitter (find an instance that's not widely used so it doesn't get rate-limited as often), and install the Privacy Redirect plugin to redirect all Twitter links to your chosen Nitter instance. The speed and the quality of the UI are improved across the board. The only thing I miss with Nitter is seeing quote tweets.
- whalesalad 5y agoTwitter is unusable even with an account. It's 50% ads, 50% vitriol.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoThis really bugs me! This "join twitter" thing on the scroll is not even the worst experiment in user hostility that they have done. Much worse was the time that if you clicked a tweet, it displayed that tweet with the "join twitter" dialog box, and if you dismissed it, it just took you back to the original tweet using history hijacking. That was just bizarre -- how do they expect to sell the idea of twitter to a non-logged-in user if they make one of the most basic actions (navigating to a shared tweet) impossible with deliberate user hostility?
- MereInterest 5y agoIt gets worse. If you make a twitter account, then sign out, it will refuse to show you anything until you either sign back in or clear your cookies. I made a quick account to test out the API, then found that I'd need to give them a phone number actually generate an API key. Suddenly, every publicly-visible URL started stating that I must be logged in to view the content.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoThank you, I was wondering why they never even show me a tweet but people report that Twitter does allow that. I have a couple of accounts used to duplicate content to other streams, must be cookies lying around.
- that_guy_iain 5y agoHonestly, this seems like the most entitled thing ever. You want to use someone else's stuff for free but you get annoyed that they want you to have an account.
- specialist 5y agoTwitter sells eyeballs. Do they pay me to visit their site? To tweet? Is Twitter entitled to my attention? In only narrowly proscribed ways that maximize their own benefit? Quid pro quo.
- mattdeboard 5y ago> Is Twitter entitled to my attention? If you're using Twitter, yes, because you are explicitly entitling them to it > In only narrowly proscribed [sic] ways that maximize their own benefit? Yes
- that_guy_iain 5y ago> Twitter sells eyeballs. Do they pay me to visit their site? To tweet? No, they provide you with a service free of charge with the open knowledge that they pay for it by selling your attention. This is Quid pro quo.
- infinitezest 5y agoTo be honest, once a company reaches the level of notoriety and dominance that Twitter has, "just don't use it" starts to sound like a pretty disingenuous argument. You can practically see the troll face appended to it.
- Macha 5y agoI killed my accounts when they gave me the GDPR consent to tracking or close account ultimatum so nowadays I have the privacy redirect browser extension send me to nitter instead when I need to read tweets.
- bambax 5y agoI recently quit Twitter (almost[0]) and have been much happier ever since. It seems (to me) that the way Twitter increases "engagement" is to show you the tweets that will upset you the most, so that you can either reply with an angry thing of your own, or furiously "like" other angry responses. I tried to unfollow a lot of people who tend to post about controversial topics but Twitter keeps showing me their tweets or similar ones from other people. It also insists on showing me things that are popular but that don't concern me (such as sports). There doesn't seem to be a way to see only the tweets of the people you follow. And even if there was... random thoughts and bits from people I don't know are seldom interesting, and very unnecessary. At some point I thought I was addicted to Twitter; but it turned out it's the easiest addiction to get rid of. [0] "Almost": I didn't delete the account: I just logged out and stopped using Twitter completely.
- yosito 5y ago> It seems (to me) that the way Twitter increases "engagement" is to show you the tweets that will upset you the most I don't think upsetting you is an intentional design on the part of Twitter, it's just that optimising for engagement in the context of human psychology often leads to upsetting things being promoted because that's what humans naturally find engaging (though also unpleasant). I have a carefully curated Twitter, I've unfollowed anyone who posted anything that seemed to me ideological, and I rarely see upsetting content on Twitter anymore. Granted I'm following less than 100 people and unfollow people for ideological tweets about once a month.
- bambax 5y agoWell, maybe you succeeded, and if so good for you. In my experience, unfollowing does almost nothing. My problem was not especially "ideological" people as much as "concerned" people. For example I followed a brilliant young French doctor who was usually entertaining, but who's incensed by all the antivax noise and who would regularly retweet antivax rhetoric, not to defend it of course but to expose it. That would get me all worked up... and for what? There is no benefit to this for anyone (and not even for Twitter, as I only used it on desktop with an adblocker). If I want to read interesting articles about any topic by many other means (including HN!); Twitter isn't bringing anything useful to me (but again, that's just me, YMMV, etc.)
- icare_1er 5y agoMove to Gettr.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- z16a 5y agoAnd there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You want to use the product to some deeper degree, you should create an account, period. Don't like it, get off your pedestal and stop using the service. Geez.
- slightwinder 5y agoIt's not like it's useable much better even with an account...
- good8675309 5y agoI discovered nitter.net, a Twitter proxy, same vein as Whoogle. When you get a twitter link, just replace twitter.com with nitter.net and you're good to go. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
- democra 5y agoYou can also use a privacy redirect extension to do it automatically.
- yread 5y agoYou can (for now) open a reply tweet a in a new tab (by clicking its date or time) and that allows you to read some more
- onnnon 5y agoI agree. I avoid Twitter as much possible due to this "feature".
- jeffbee 5y agoI cannot confirm. In Chrome, I visited Twitter in an incognito tab. I clicked each of the trending topics in turn, and held down the 'j' key to scroll through 1000s of tweets. There is a standing login/signup button at the bottom of the page but at no time was there some kind of pop-up.
- baking 5y agoI'm getting more like 4 or 5 before the pop-up. Problem is when I sign-in I only get one additional tweet. Plus I have to deal with all the extra screen clutter. I'm trying to read about the upcoming blizzard and I'm cursing Dave Epstein for posting a picture of a tree when all I want are his potential snowfall maps. Just switched to nitter.net. End of rant.
- bigdict 5y agoIs it just me or in the past couple weeks it felt like Twitter actually went the opposite way, allowing normal access again (no popups) like before?
- nobleach 5y agoIt looks like they're A/B testing some stuff. Clear your cookies and refresh the page. You may get a different experience.
- caseysoftware 5y agoWhich is a problem if you've ever had an account suspended. Creating a new account can get you perma-banned for "trying to bypass suspension" Government agencies and officials should be banned from using any broadcast platform which requires you to log in to see/hear what they've posted.
- nicbou 5y agoCompanies are all about open data until they have enough to hold it hostage. Then they shut down APIs and require an account to do access any of the data.
- RobertLoblaw 5y agoA single uBlock Origin filter fixes this for me: twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id) Still haven't found an easy fix that works for safari on iphone though.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoRequiring an account is not a problem - the so called "phone verification" is.
- trenchgun 5y agoUse nitter. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
- meijer 5y agoWhy do these companies enforce accounts? I thought they could track you and advertise to you just as easily without an account, using cookies.
- tpoacher 5y agoI, for one, welcome it when companies that should not exist in their current form take further actions that make their product obsolete.
- superkuh 5y agoGrowing? Twitter stopped being usable years ago when they changed from being a HTML website to a javascript application you ran in your browsers VM. Now when you attempt to view it as a website there is no HTML to render. It's just a white page telling you to go away if you're not willing to be their product.
- newbamboo 5y agoGreat! Twitter is a cesspool and terrible for our society. The sooner it dies off, like quora and medium, the better.
- cpach 5y agoHasn’t it been like that for 2-3 years at least?
- cronix 5y agoThey do it every so often, but usually you could dismiss the popup/overlay by just clicking on the page.
- lucaw 5y agoTwitter seeks profit. Twitter is not offering free information to other company. Or it still does but you need to give a bit of yourself to them in exchange. It's basic capitalism, man. All company needs to make money.
- batman-farts 5y agoThe popup wall went up hard the weekend that Kabul fell to the Taliban. Perhaps they were doing it selectively before then, but that was when I first noticed it. Felt like particularly scummy opportunism at the time. Between this and leaning so heavily into the NFT grift, which is likely to burn casual participants and retail-level investors, it seems like Twitter is charting a course to Tumblr-like levels of niche relevance or worse.
- james_pm 5y agoWonder if a case could be made that since public officials like the US President or other "official" government accounts post to Twitter, that everyone should be able to view all the (public) tweets of those accounts without requiring an account for the viewer. Perhaps that is already the case?
- riffic 5y agopublic officials should be required to use public infrastructure. ActivityPub and ActivityStreams exist.
- saxonww 5y agoI set up a private Nitter instance to browse. It works well, and I would recommend other people give it a try. I'm using the Privacy Redirect extension in Firefox to auto-redirect to Nitter. I'm doing the same thing with Invidious for Youtube; Privacy Redirect also lets you redirect Reddit and Instagram if you use those sites. The only real issue I've run into is that I don't have HTTPS set up for this private/local instance, so embeds don't always work. This is easily solved by getting a cert I just haven't done it yet.
- speby 5y agoGot rid of my Twitter account a couple years ago. Have not missed it once.
- adenozine 5y agoAre you aware that it's free to register for an account? What's the use case of reading Twitter but not having an account?
- emptyparadise 5y agoWhy must I get dragged kicking and screaming into a walled garden just to look at a funny cat video from a friend?
- oalae5niMiel7qu 5y agoTell that friend you refuse to click his Twitter links.
- adenozine 5y agoTwitter doesn't owe you anything. Play ball or don't.
- VancouverMan 5y agoIs it possible to do that without having to give a phone number? I tried to join once, several years back. I could create the account, and then use it for a few minutes. But even before posting anything, the account was suddenly locked and I was prompted to give a phone number to unlock it. I didn't want to do that, obviously, so I ended up with an account that was pretty much unusable.
- aimor 5y agoThe first time I noticed it was when I couldn't find the Twitter search bar. I wanted to see someone's Twitter account so I went to http://www.twitter.com http://www.twitter.com and I didn't know what to do from there. It's still like this today. Your obvious options are "Sign Up or Log In", and along the bottom there's "About Help Center Terms of Service Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Accessibility Ads info Blog Status Careers Brand Resources Advertising Marketing Twitter for Business Developers Directory Settings © 2022 Twitter, Inc." which could plausibly be the entire site map EXCEPT for http://www.twitter.com/explore http://www.twitter.com/explore . Poking around, looks like a path to the search bar is Directory: https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles
- ivraatiems 5y agoFor those who are sick of it and would like to prevent it on desktop at least, here are some uBlock Origin blocker settings that currently work: https://pastebin.com/U9rpcCuq https://pastebin.com/U9rpcCuq I came up with these last night as I was irritated I couldn't just view the website. Twitter employees who look here: Stop it, c'mon. Take your massive stacks of mony and do something more useful than locking users out of your platform to drive low-engagement signups.
- cronix 5y agoI don't have an issue with it as far as Twitter the company goes, but I also don't think things that don't have a public way of reading them without an account should be used as sources on HN. Yes some paywalled content gets posted occasionally, but most of it has a public archive somewhere so others can still participate in the discussion. Otherwise HN will just end up a bunch of different cliques, each commenting on different things that they have access to, which seems to defeat the point of HN. At least to me. I mean, at that point you might as well just have the discussion on Twitter about info posted on Twitter as 100% of people with a Twitter account can participate.
- paulcole 5y agoMake an account, find a workaround, or don't read tweets. Not sure why you think you're entitled to Twitter on your terms and not their's? Are they making a bad business decision that is going to cost them dearly in the future? Maybe. But that's not a crime. If it is, lock me up and throw away the key.
- slenk 5y agoTry using instagram without an account :S.
- outloudvi 5y agoAs a viewer (not user) of Weibo ("Chinese Twitter", if you say it), Zhihu ("Chinese Quora") and Tieba ("Chinese Reddit"), I've seen the UX of these America services going increasingly similar as the Chinese ones. And it's certainly annoying.
- aprdm 5y agoThat's by design
- octoberfranklin 5y agosuggest retitle: "Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable"
- lykahb 5y agoI am grateful to Twitter and Reddit for reminding me to stop wasting time.
- stereoradonc 5y agoFor content that's essentially free (and using the labour of unpaid workers - aka users), what's the reason to complain? Their business model dictates that option and accept it and make peace with it.
- grey_earthling 5y agoOn twitter.com, you can read a Tweet without an account by opening it in a new tab. I find [Nitter](https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/) more usable.
- mrinfinite 5y agoOh No. You don't like twitter. Oh No. Let's start a petition. I also don't like Twitter. But unlike you, I would consider posting that I don't lke Twitter on HN terrible BANAL.