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> 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 T

> 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 ago
Twitter doesn't even let you click links to other Twitter pages, it redirects you back to the original link you followed.
jrochkind1 5y ago
In 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 ago
  It will make their metrics look better
  - Retric 5y ago
    That might help some middle managers at Twitter but it’s irrelevant to the company. If anything adding such pop up’s just costs them views and thus revenue.
    - beardedetim 5y ago
      The company _is_ middle management. Those are the people being served by the company the most.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
>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. You can't just make throwaway accounts on Twitter though, they ban them after a few hours if you don't verify by phone number. So really it's forcing you to hand over a lot of personal information just to read what is essentially a few forum posts.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  We surely don’t expect that a business should have its value proposition make sense for everyone.
  - jerf 5y ago
    These SV companies would have a lot less power over us if we all judged and acted as if the personal information whywhywhywhy is complaining about having to give away as being more important than reading some forum post, or watching some video stream, or some other transient dopamine hit gone in literally seconds vs. the near-permanent and very difficult to remove little tentacle the company gets to stick into your life now. Each one individually is no big deal, but the whole is. Adopt an abundance mentality. Our world is awash in transient dopamine hits. Why do you need this one, when there's so many you can have for truly free, or for small amounts of money, or via any other mechanism that isn't trading such a transient personal value for some quasi-permanent cost?
  - rektide 5y ago
    Different but feels somewhat the same shape as a previous point, > Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. i'm fine with both of your alls-fair-in-love-and-war attitudes, but it makes me sick that twitter became a near defacto monopoly as the all-connected public-social-media before locking down & exploiting their position, before transforming into a propeietary closed experience. and it makes me even more disturbed thinking what an epic project it would be to dislodge or replace this vast once public network. the switching costs are asteonomical, require millions of people of recognize how rudely governed their once open & reasonable platform has become, has fallen to. the value propositions can keep changing. quickly. under society's feat. civil society has no control, the enemy has all the control. society has such a slow response time, our side of the free hand moves only over the course of decades, not days. it's a trashfire thing twitter is doing to us, and i fully support their right to self (re)define themselves as snakey lowlife punks who've renegged on their bargain of being the public social system, but damn i wish society could respond & shift course & adapt in some sort of fashion, and it just cant; this assemblage is trapped, and so things will only forever now get worse. it's terrible. platforms are social treachery, they all fall down.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account Sure, but then it should be banned from use by politicians for public announcements made in official fashion. Would there be anyone left on Twitter?
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  It's an abomination that is - if it's a government announcement put it on gov.tld/announcements. For sure, mirror that content anywhere you want to. If it's a party announcement put it first on your party's page. Mind you, this whole thing of presidents/premieres/PMs making announcements as if they are making up the policies ... if they are then everyone is screwed (and their advisors and party should stop that immediately), if they're doing it right and the policy has gone through party committees, government departments, experts, then the head of that group should be announcing it. Why the heck do we need everything filtered through some ignorant dickhead; whither democracy. The cult of celebrity is ruin for humanity. Urgh.
guerrilla 5y ago
> Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. Reddit's unusable with an account too. So annoying when I just want to read a thread and it want's to draw my attention every which way. Notifications and the reply text never work on Firefox and using old is getting more and more inconvenient.
- teraflop 5y ago
  Reddit is much more usable with the "old" version of the site, which you can set as the default in your preferences. Frankly, I'm continually amazed that they haven't killed it off yet, but for now it's a big improvement.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Even if they do kill it off, you could use an alternate front end that goes through the Reddit APIs. I know I've seen https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/ posted here on HN before as one option.
digitalsushi 5y ago
On a cell phone, I can type "best driveway shovel" on my phone, and it will take me to google. Google will have an overlay that tells me searching for the best driveway shovels is better in an app. I close that overlay. The first hit is twitter. The second is reddit. I skip twitter. I get an overlay telling me to install a reddit app, or continue in the website. I click continue in website. There is an overlay telling me to get the reddit app. I close it. I have to click 'read more' to load the rest of the main content. When I scroll to the comments, the first one or two are visible, and then I get a popup telling me reddit is better in an app. If the information about shovels was rated as adult content, I have already seen the content, but then at the comments, I get a popup that tells me to go to the main reddit page, or an option to install the reddit app. I click back. The third hit on google was also reddit. I repeat the above.
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  Old.reddit.com is the only remotely usable form of the website and seems to have none of the obnoxious popups.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    The day old.reddit.com goes offline is the day I delete my account. There must be vocal internal holdouts keeping it up.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    If you don't need to comment, libreddit is significantly better, especially on mobile, than old.reddit.com.
    - ajvs 5y ago
      Also teddit.net, which I find even faster and lightweight without JS.
      - emptysongglass 5y ago
        If you selfhost Whoogle you can have it rewrite all Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitter results to your own self-hosted, js-free alternative front-ends. I love it!
jevoten 5y ago
> 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. Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start. Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown enough so they could rely on network effects for dominance, did they turn hostile. A bait and switch, tricking people into relying on them, and then turning evil once switching to a different platform becomes too difficult.
- xg15 5y ago
  Yes. Also called "growth engineering" and pretty much the basic mode of operation of silicon valley companies.
  - GreggHyram 5y ago
    ackshually we call it "growth hacking". sounds better to investors ;)
    - drivingmenuts 5y ago
      > ackshually we call it "growth hacking". sounds better to investors ;) Which is strange, because the term “hacking” used to set jimmies a’rustlin’ and underwear a’bunchin’ whenever it came up.
      - tata71 5y ago
        Hacking only rustles jimmies when it's happening to them. The first thing a malicious nontechnical investor wants to know about your competition: "Well, can't you just hack them?!" Russ on Silicon Valley came from somewhere, ha..
  - Handytinge 5y ago
    Also called "being cunty", from a user perspective.
eCa 5y ago
> 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. This change happened during last summer. Funilly enough it was just ad I considered getting an account to share a bike trip live, but: 1. I didn’t want my new account to help their A/B-testing. 2. I didn’t want family and friends to have to sign up to follow my trip. End result: No account, and I read twitter less since they don’t value my passive engagement.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  >2. I didn’t want family and friends to have to sign up to follow my trip. That's exactly what they want though. Their real user growth has slowed down and they're trying to juke the numbers by coercing the hold outs to sign up.
goodpoint 5y ago
> I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account No no no, companies should not be allowed to this kind of bait and switch: 1) provide a free service 2) gain market dominance, push out competitors, and turn into a necessity for millions of users 3) create lock-in and exploit the userbase Essential public utilities are regulated (properly, in many countries) to avoid this. In 2022 services like ISP, mobile carriers, email and instant messaging are almost essential. Millions of people need them to work, buy food, have access to health and government services. And yet tech companies are never held responsible.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  I'd call Twitter many things, but never a necessity. And the contrived person for who it is, has an account and won't be bothered by a login prompt.
- djakaitis 5y ago
  What’s exploitative about offering a free account?
  - ahelwer 5y ago
    A bit taken aback this still needs to be explained, but the point of having an account is so they can use your email address and phone number to correlate you & your actions across the entire internet to better surveil you & serve you behavior-modifying content.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      The "free" service is also there to hurt competition, establish market dominance and later or do all sort of bait-and-switch. Reminder: by dominating a market a company removes options and better alternatives from the end users.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    I just explained how cornering a market works. What part of the 3 steps is unclear?
codegeek 5y ago
And let's not forget the idiotic "This site works better in App" crap that we get on our phones when browsing sites like Linkedin or reddit. No, I don't want to install yet another shitty app. Just let me browse the "net' on my phone directly.
- PenguinCoder 5y ago
  This pisses me off. I don't need or want a specific APP for your website. I ALREADY HAVE an app that views websites. It's called damn web browser, and it's my choice of which one I use or install (currently). I don't want your shit designed, spyware filled app.
nickysielicki 5y ago
No company even comes close to the transition that Reddit did that took them from a {clean,simple,dense,power-user friendly} interface to a horrible user-hostile shit show that it is now. The average Reddit user has to reach for a custom third party app on their phone or a browser plug-in that hacks a redirect to the old or third party interface. Quora doesn’t hold a candle.
- ostenning 5y ago
  What I dont understand is why these companies are debasing their products integrity to scrape in more users. What Reddit doesn’t seem to realise is that right now there is a primed opportunity for a competitor to take its market share.
  - duffyjp 5y ago
    If reddit ever dropped the old.reddit option, that would be the last time I ever use the site. They must know the new (several years old now, I suppose) layout is awful. I can't understand the rational. Maybe it cost a fortune to build and it's sunk-cost fallacy thing.
    - Loughla 5y ago
      My theory is that it's easy to hand-wave away those complaints as just coming from Luddites. You don't get the new layout, and are only complaining because you like the old layout and don't want to learn anything new. Administratively, it feels good to know that I'm doing the right thing, and to know that you will eventually come around to the new layout design. You have to, because I'm right. That's my theory. Smugness, maybe? Is that it? Overconfidence?
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Advertising. It's the root cause of it all. Reddit is actually an advertising company. Their business model consists of attracting people to the site with open forums and then spamming ads. They want people to switch to the app because that way they can collect more data and users can't block ads.
the_other 5y ago
> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. I agree with this to a degree. However, it's so much easier to find and interact with/around content tailored to your interests on FB/Twitter/Reddit than to use the indie web. Network effects mean the silos are growing and the experience of using the more open internet is increasingly niche. This seems a shame to those of us who really enjoyed the more open internet. (I'm not saying it's dead, just that the people who missed it are so well catered for by the silos that they don't go looking for it, so it stays niche).
numpad0 5y ago
Sending a text costs me 3 cents. 3G data used to cost 0.022-0.11 cents per 128 bytes. Nowadays it's like $75/mo. for 60GB, but at no point it had been free. Ultimately the source of problem is its lack of proper AAA which in turn enabled this ad economy.
- gattopalla 5y ago
  paying 7€ for 50gb of internet in italy :D
elvis70 5y ago
> Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. Try old.reddit.com (or i.reddit.com on mobile).
j4yav 5y ago
I actually love the new Reddit non-logged in experience. It self-limits how much value you can get out of it, and I get through the first page or whatever it lets me do and just put it away.
AltruisticGapHN 5y ago
To be fair creating a random account takes a second on Reddit , after which you can turn off a bunch of things, and also browse from https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com to remove all the junk.
torginus 5y ago
I disagree. When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia. This was the 'social' contract they presented to users. They built their monopolies on top of the goodwill of users. I'm pretty sure that subject matter experts who wrote extremely long-winded and well-researched articles on Roman battle tactics, did not do so with the intent, that some nebulous internet money-man could charge $5/month in the future to view the articles they wrote for free. All these internet companies are essentially engaging in rent-seeking behavior, but are trying to boil the frog only slowly, so they don't get swept away by the tides of user discontent.
- golemotron 5y ago
  It's like Google search results, isn't it? Brands ruin themselves over time as they chase more market. We can be upset by this, but the bright side is that customer discontent eventually leads people to go to different products.
  - oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
    Yeah, isn't the market so fucking magical? We just have to rebuild Google of 2008 from scratch and with no funding! I'm sure somebody will have that done by 2100 or so.
- kbsspl 5y ago
  internet was supposed to be the savior. these sites were the vanguard of the brave new world. instead it was the worst sellout ever, using the greatest power in time, to build megaliths that have humongous power of distortion. yes, it hurts. and it should. much more. but they manage to make people to 'move on'. in the end. we forgot. It's always about power.
  - scotuswroteus 5y ago
    why did this turn into an elliot smith poem at the end, lmao.
- 5y ago
ulrashida 5y ago
Reddit is trying its best to beat Twitter here. A recent option has turned on posts from subreddits you are not subscribed to with a tag "because you visited here previously". I'm not sure if this is desperation or simply callous disregard for users intelligence.
shp0ngle 5y ago
On reddit, I just switch the url to “old.reddit” and that’s it Twitter doesn’t have “old twitter”… well… one time, I somehow magically summoned mobile interface that looked like from 2013, but I haven’t been able to repeat it. Something with Javascript I suppose
- HWR_14 5y ago
  They killed that interface in December of 2020.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
It's not just popups, whole subreddits are blocked without an account on the mobile site. To be fair, it does work, because whenever I crack and register a new account, I end up commenting to avoid someone being wrong on the Internet.
cxcl 5y ago
If you were suspended at 18 years old from twitter you are technically banned for the remainder of your life unless you can successfully appeal. Creating a new temporary account will eventually get you suspended again as it's against the rules and they functionally require a phone number as you quickly get flagged after a few follows. Considering twitter often makes the news it isn't reasonable to ban people from looking into what they market as the "public conversation" by blocking logged out read access.
winternett 5y ago
It also makes permanent bans a very harsh thing they can inflict... I was "permanently" banned after over 12 years of contributing content to reddit by a random subreddit mod (banned from all of reddit) just for doing a music video cross posting to a music subreddit and suddenly my own subreddit was orphaned and I could not access content posted by others including on Google search because I then had no account. To this day, all of my posts are orphaned and now owned by reddit with no way for me to delete them, and all I got was vague boiler plate responses as to why with no means of requesting reinstatement. The content wall also limits outreach for people that use Twitter to promote their business behind the scenes too, pretty much voiding a major benefit of posting to Twitter for everyone (unbeknownst to users). It's completely hostile behavior that does not get addressed because it is inflicted on such an individual basis. Most people with user accounts don't know about the content blocking because they're always logged in and being tracked. These sites do not own the content, the people that make the content are the actual content owners, if there was more awareness about underhanded things these sites do, this would not be seen as good business.
oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
old.reddit.com still exists and doesn't have any pop-ups.
jjav 5y ago
> 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. Not reasonable at all. If I'm not posting, an account doesn't serve any purpose (for me). I can read HN all day long without an account, same for blogs, normal websites, etc. Accounts on websites should not be the norm, and never was before.

dyeje 5y ago

Twitter doesn't even let you click links to other Twitter pages, it redirects you back to the original link you followed.

jrochkind1 5y ago

In 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 ago
It will make their metrics look better
- Retric 5y ago
  That might help some middle managers at Twitter but it’s irrelevant to the company. If anything adding such pop up’s just costs them views and thus revenue.
  - beardedetim 5y ago
    The company _is_ middle management. Those are the people being served by the company the most.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

>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. You can't just make throwaway accounts on Twitter though, they ban them after a few hours if you don't verify by phone number. So really it's forcing you to hand over a lot of personal information just to read what is essentially a few forum posts.

threatofrain 5y ago
We surely don’t expect that a business should have its value proposition make sense for everyone.
- jerf 5y ago
  These SV companies would have a lot less power over us if we all judged and acted as if the personal information whywhywhywhy is complaining about having to give away as being more important than reading some forum post, or watching some video stream, or some other transient dopamine hit gone in literally seconds vs. the near-permanent and very difficult to remove little tentacle the company gets to stick into your life now. Each one individually is no big deal, but the whole is. Adopt an abundance mentality. Our world is awash in transient dopamine hits. Why do you need this one, when there's so many you can have for truly free, or for small amounts of money, or via any other mechanism that isn't trading such a transient personal value for some quasi-permanent cost?
- rektide 5y ago
  Different but feels somewhat the same shape as a previous point, > Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. i'm fine with both of your alls-fair-in-love-and-war attitudes, but it makes me sick that twitter became a near defacto monopoly as the all-connected public-social-media before locking down & exploiting their position, before transforming into a propeietary closed experience. and it makes me even more disturbed thinking what an epic project it would be to dislodge or replace this vast once public network. the switching costs are asteonomical, require millions of people of recognize how rudely governed their once open & reasonable platform has become, has fallen to. the value propositions can keep changing. quickly. under society's feat. civil society has no control, the enemy has all the control. society has such a slow response time, our side of the free hand moves only over the course of decades, not days. it's a trashfire thing twitter is doing to us, and i fully support their right to self (re)define themselves as snakey lowlife punks who've renegged on their bargain of being the public social system, but damn i wish society could respond & shift course & adapt in some sort of fashion, and it just cant; this assemblage is trapped, and so things will only forever now get worse. it's terrible. platforms are social treachery, they all fall down.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account Sure, but then it should be banned from use by politicians for public announcements made in official fashion. Would there be anyone left on Twitter?

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
It's an abomination that is - if it's a government announcement put it on gov.tld/announcements. For sure, mirror that content anywhere you want to. If it's a party announcement put it first on your party's page. Mind you, this whole thing of presidents/premieres/PMs making announcements as if they are making up the policies ... if they are then everyone is screwed (and their advisors and party should stop that immediately), if they're doing it right and the policy has gone through party committees, government departments, experts, then the head of that group should be announcing it. Why the heck do we need everything filtered through some ignorant dickhead; whither democracy. The cult of celebrity is ruin for humanity. Urgh.

guerrilla 5y ago

> Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. Reddit's unusable with an account too. So annoying when I just want to read a thread and it want's to draw my attention every which way. Notifications and the reply text never work on Firefox and using old is getting more and more inconvenient.

teraflop 5y ago
Reddit is much more usable with the "old" version of the site, which you can set as the default in your preferences. Frankly, I'm continually amazed that they haven't killed it off yet, but for now it's a big improvement.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Even if they do kill it off, you could use an alternate front end that goes through the Reddit APIs. I know I've seen https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/ posted here on HN before as one option.

digitalsushi 5y ago

On a cell phone, I can type "best driveway shovel" on my phone, and it will take me to google. Google will have an overlay that tells me searching for the best driveway shovels is better in an app. I close that overlay. The first hit is twitter. The second is reddit. I skip twitter. I get an overlay telling me to install a reddit app, or continue in the website. I click continue in website. There is an overlay telling me to get the reddit app. I close it. I have to click 'read more' to load the rest of the main content. When I scroll to the comments, the first one or two are visible, and then I get a popup telling me reddit is better in an app. If the information about shovels was rated as adult content, I have already seen the content, but then at the comments, I get a popup that tells me to go to the main reddit page, or an option to install the reddit app. I click back. The third hit on google was also reddit. I repeat the above.

AutumnCurtain 5y ago
Old.reddit.com is the only remotely usable form of the website and seems to have none of the obnoxious popups.
- jagger27 5y ago
  The day old.reddit.com goes offline is the day I delete my account. There must be vocal internal holdouts keeping it up.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  If you don't need to comment, libreddit is significantly better, especially on mobile, than old.reddit.com.
  - ajvs 5y ago
    Also teddit.net, which I find even faster and lightweight without JS.
    - emptysongglass 5y ago
      If you selfhost Whoogle you can have it rewrite all Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitter results to your own self-hosted, js-free alternative front-ends. I love it!

jevoten 5y ago

> 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. Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start. Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown enough so they could rely on network effects for dominance, did they turn hostile. A bait and switch, tricking people into relying on them, and then turning evil once switching to a different platform becomes too difficult.

xg15 5y ago
Yes. Also called "growth engineering" and pretty much the basic mode of operation of silicon valley companies.
- GreggHyram 5y ago
  ackshually we call it "growth hacking". sounds better to investors ;)
  - drivingmenuts 5y ago
    > ackshually we call it "growth hacking". sounds better to investors ;) Which is strange, because the term “hacking” used to set jimmies a’rustlin’ and underwear a’bunchin’ whenever it came up.
    - tata71 5y ago
      Hacking only rustles jimmies when it's happening to them. The first thing a malicious nontechnical investor wants to know about your competition: "Well, can't you just hack them?!" Russ on Silicon Valley came from somewhere, ha..
- Handytinge 5y ago
  Also called "being cunty", from a user perspective.

eCa 5y ago

> 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. This change happened during last summer. Funilly enough it was just ad I considered getting an account to share a bike trip live, but: 1. I didn’t want my new account to help their A/B-testing. 2. I didn’t want family and friends to have to sign up to follow my trip. End result: No account, and I read twitter less since they don’t value my passive engagement.

monkeybutton 5y ago
>2. I didn’t want family and friends to have to sign up to follow my trip. That's exactly what they want though. Their real user growth has slowed down and they're trying to juke the numbers by coercing the hold outs to sign up.

goodpoint 5y ago

> I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account No no no, companies should not be allowed to this kind of bait and switch: 1) provide a free service 2) gain market dominance, push out competitors, and turn into a necessity for millions of users 3) create lock-in and exploit the userbase Essential public utilities are regulated (properly, in many countries) to avoid this. In 2022 services like ISP, mobile carriers, email and instant messaging are almost essential. Millions of people need them to work, buy food, have access to health and government services. And yet tech companies are never held responsible.

Karunamon 5y ago
I'd call Twitter many things, but never a necessity. And the contrived person for who it is, has an account and won't be bothered by a login prompt.
djakaitis 5y ago
What’s exploitative about offering a free account?
- ahelwer 5y ago
  A bit taken aback this still needs to be explained, but the point of having an account is so they can use your email address and phone number to correlate you & your actions across the entire internet to better surveil you & serve you behavior-modifying content.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    The "free" service is also there to hurt competition, establish market dominance and later or do all sort of bait-and-switch. Reminder: by dominating a market a company removes options and better alternatives from the end users.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  I just explained how cornering a market works. What part of the 3 steps is unclear?

codegeek 5y ago

And let's not forget the idiotic "This site works better in App" crap that we get on our phones when browsing sites like Linkedin or reddit. No, I don't want to install yet another shitty app. Just let me browse the "net' on my phone directly.

PenguinCoder 5y ago
This pisses me off. I don't need or want a specific APP for your website. I ALREADY HAVE an app that views websites. It's called damn web browser, and it's my choice of which one I use or install (currently). I don't want your shit designed, spyware filled app.

nickysielicki 5y ago

No company even comes close to the transition that Reddit did that took them from a {clean,simple,dense,power-user friendly} interface to a horrible user-hostile shit show that it is now. The average Reddit user has to reach for a custom third party app on their phone or a browser plug-in that hacks a redirect to the old or third party interface. Quora doesn’t hold a candle.

ostenning 5y ago
What I dont understand is why these companies are debasing their products integrity to scrape in more users. What Reddit doesn’t seem to realise is that right now there is a primed opportunity for a competitor to take its market share.
- duffyjp 5y ago
  If reddit ever dropped the old.reddit option, that would be the last time I ever use the site. They must know the new (several years old now, I suppose) layout is awful. I can't understand the rational. Maybe it cost a fortune to build and it's sunk-cost fallacy thing.
  - Loughla 5y ago
    My theory is that it's easy to hand-wave away those complaints as just coming from Luddites. You don't get the new layout, and are only complaining because you like the old layout and don't want to learn anything new. Administratively, it feels good to know that I'm doing the right thing, and to know that you will eventually come around to the new layout design. You have to, because I'm right. That's my theory. Smugness, maybe? Is that it? Overconfidence?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Advertising. It's the root cause of it all. Reddit is actually an advertising company. Their business model consists of attracting people to the site with open forums and then spamming ads. They want people to switch to the app because that way they can collect more data and users can't block ads.

the_other 5y ago

> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. I agree with this to a degree. However, it's so much easier to find and interact with/around content tailored to your interests on FB/Twitter/Reddit than to use the indie web. Network effects mean the silos are growing and the experience of using the more open internet is increasingly niche. This seems a shame to those of us who really enjoyed the more open internet. (I'm not saying it's dead, just that the people who missed it are so well catered for by the silos that they don't go looking for it, so it stays niche).

numpad0 5y ago

Sending a text costs me 3 cents. 3G data used to cost 0.022-0.11 cents per 128 bytes. Nowadays it's like $75/mo. for 60GB, but at no point it had been free. Ultimately the source of problem is its lack of proper AAA which in turn enabled this ad economy.

gattopalla 5y ago
paying 7€ for 50gb of internet in italy :D

elvis70 5y ago

> Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. Try old.reddit.com (or i.reddit.com on mobile).

j4yav 5y ago

I actually love the new Reddit non-logged in experience. It self-limits how much value you can get out of it, and I get through the first page or whatever it lets me do and just put it away.

AltruisticGapHN 5y ago

To be fair creating a random account takes a second on Reddit , after which you can turn off a bunch of things, and also browse from https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com to remove all the junk.

torginus 5y ago

I disagree. When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia. This was the 'social' contract they presented to users. They built their monopolies on top of the goodwill of users. I'm pretty sure that subject matter experts who wrote extremely long-winded and well-researched articles on Roman battle tactics, did not do so with the intent, that some nebulous internet money-man could charge $5/month in the future to view the articles they wrote for free. All these internet companies are essentially engaging in rent-seeking behavior, but are trying to boil the frog only slowly, so they don't get swept away by the tides of user discontent.

golemotron 5y ago
It's like Google search results, isn't it? Brands ruin themselves over time as they chase more market. We can be upset by this, but the bright side is that customer discontent eventually leads people to go to different products.
- oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
  Yeah, isn't the market so fucking magical? We just have to rebuild Google of 2008 from scratch and with no funding! I'm sure somebody will have that done by 2100 or so.
kbsspl 5y ago
internet was supposed to be the savior. these sites were the vanguard of the brave new world. instead it was the worst sellout ever, using the greatest power in time, to build megaliths that have humongous power of distortion. yes, it hurts. and it should. much more. but they manage to make people to 'move on'. in the end. we forgot. It's always about power.
- scotuswroteus 5y ago
  why did this turn into an elliot smith poem at the end, lmao.
5y ago

ulrashida 5y ago

Reddit is trying its best to beat Twitter here. A recent option has turned on posts from subreddits you are not subscribed to with a tag "because you visited here previously". I'm not sure if this is desperation or simply callous disregard for users intelligence.

shp0ngle 5y ago

On reddit, I just switch the url to “old.reddit” and that’s it Twitter doesn’t have “old twitter”… well… one time, I somehow magically summoned mobile interface that looked like from 2013, but I haven’t been able to repeat it. Something with Javascript I suppose

HWR_14 5y ago
They killed that interface in December of 2020.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

It's not just popups, whole subreddits are blocked without an account on the mobile site. To be fair, it does work, because whenever I crack and register a new account, I end up commenting to avoid someone being wrong on the Internet.

cxcl 5y ago

If you were suspended at 18 years old from twitter you are technically banned for the remainder of your life unless you can successfully appeal. Creating a new temporary account will eventually get you suspended again as it's against the rules and they functionally require a phone number as you quickly get flagged after a few follows. Considering twitter often makes the news it isn't reasonable to ban people from looking into what they market as the "public conversation" by blocking logged out read access.

winternett 5y ago

It also makes permanent bans a very harsh thing they can inflict... I was "permanently" banned after over 12 years of contributing content to reddit by a random subreddit mod (banned from all of reddit) just for doing a music video cross posting to a music subreddit and suddenly my own subreddit was orphaned and I could not access content posted by others including on Google search because I then had no account. To this day, all of my posts are orphaned and now owned by reddit with no way for me to delete them, and all I got was vague boiler plate responses as to why with no means of requesting reinstatement. The content wall also limits outreach for people that use Twitter to promote their business behind the scenes too, pretty much voiding a major benefit of posting to Twitter for everyone (unbeknownst to users). It's completely hostile behavior that does not get addressed because it is inflicted on such an individual basis. Most people with user accounts don't know about the content blocking because they're always logged in and being tracked. These sites do not own the content, the people that make the content are the actual content owners, if there was more awareness about underhanded things these sites do, this would not be seen as good business.

oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago

old.reddit.com still exists and doesn't have any pop-ups.

jjav 5y ago

> 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. Not reasonable at all. If I'm not posting, an account doesn't serve any purpose (for me). I can read HN all day long without an account, same for blogs, normal websites, etc. Accounts on websites should not be the norm, and never was before.