46 ms·

Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

• andyjohnson0 3y ago
  If this is Linda Yaccarino's first major policy decision as CEO then it's not looking good. I really don't know what they (corporate) can do at this point.
  • threeseed 3y ago
    Musk is in charge of Product and Technology so this is his decision. She is much more akin to a CEO at Large running around closing ad deals.
    • meepmorp 3y ago
      Imagine trying to do your job closing ad deals and the owner decides to block public access without prior notice. Nothing says "we're a trustworthy partner who won't damage your brand," like major changes made seemingly at random.
      • kogepathic 3y ago
        > Nothing says "we're a trustworthy partner who won't damage your brand," like major changes made seemingly at random. This has been Twitter's Modus operandi from well before Musk acquired them. They announced new features through Tweets (remember Fleets?) with glaring issues at launch (no authentication required to view a Fleet) and without any corresponding API documentation. The GraphQL that backs their website has more features and bug fixes than their paid API! They also famously do not have a staging environment, which frequently caused issues when new features were deployed or tested with a subset of users. Twitter has never been a trustworthy or reliable partner. They are just more of an obvious dumpster fire since the Musk acquisition.
        • fragmede 3y ago
          Staging environments are really hard at scale and I don't think anyone's really cracked that nut yet. The coordination between umpteen teams means that if there even is a staging, the test data is not totally representative, the systems are wildly out of sync, and it's either too stable, or too unstable. So you deploy to staging, which doesn't really give any signal other than it doesn't (or maybe it does) crash the kernel, so you release to prod with a gradual rollout and just pray. Twitter's got its share of issues, but not having staging isn't one of them because there's not much value for massive distributed systems like that to have a staging environment, not relative to the effort required, anyway.
• coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Ok, I’m not entirely unhappy to stop consuming Twitter for good. Musk sure showed me
• ineedausername 3y ago
  Should we cry now or something?
  • duringmath 3y ago
    They're just reporting the news how you react to it is up to you
    • mydriasis 3y ago
      I choose to cry, then. Seems sensible.
      • diego_sandoval 3y ago
        I choose to delete my Twitter account, which I didn't use much anyway.
• chrisandchris 3y ago
  Somehow they required an account to view more than a few replies. Then it got „better“ and they removed that requirement. And a few days ago I realized I can’t view anything at all without logging in. I‘m not really sad about that change. Just going to miss out some things because I don‘t see why I should register to read a few tweets a week.
• omoikane 3y ago
  Twitter has started blocking unregistered users (theverge) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535822
• jamesgreenleaf 3y ago
  Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 "Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
  • INTPenis 3y ago
    So first of all HE scaled the infrastructure down to save money. Secondly, that "data pillaging" was exposure, he just removed exposure from people's tweets to save money, again. Good work Elon.
  • odd_perfect_num 3y ago
    What a shame the his post requires an account to view...
  • PopularUsername 3y ago
    I am unable to read the tweet, I'll have to take your word for it
  • celsoazevedo 3y ago
    Screenshot: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2023/twitter.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2023/twitter.png
    • denysvitali 3y ago
      I was confused at first on why a random dude posted a link to a screenshot hosted on Celso Azevedo's website (the Google Camera port index creator). Then I realized... hello there! (:
      • celsoazevedo 3y ago
        Hey! Yep, that's me. I was going to host the screenshot on imgur, but I'm not sure if we can trust them anymore...
• villgax 3y ago
  This was the case for interactivity for any click if opened without logging in since years, similar to Instagram as well
• odd_perfect_num 3y ago
  This phased out obsolescence (where people who care can create an account to archive old content before the site's deletion) should be the new norm!
• _zzaw 3y ago
  This feels a little like the shittiest restaurant in town raising its prices. I have an account, and I wouldn't even bother logging in at this point. Why bother? The Twitter experience is so devotedly wretched that whatever I'd get from the tweet I want to see is outweighed by everything I have to wade through to see it. There was a point when Twitter was good enough that maybe they could have pulled something like this and gotten away with it. At this point, I think all this will do is hasten their irrelevancy.
  • gottorf 3y ago
    > The Twitter experience is so devotedly wretched Even the content aside (that you have to wade through), just from a technical perspective the Twitter experience leaves a lot to be desired.
• hayd 3y ago
  Noticed this morning that nitter was down and twitter made tweets completely unavailable until you're logged in. Very annoying. I wonder what happened to embedded tweets?
  • saurik 3y ago
    (Embedded tweets also stopped working.)
    • neltnerb 3y ago
      And people said I was being a Luddite for saying "just copy the text or take a screenshot", that's a lot of "news" articles at this point. Definitely disturbing that journalists (especially) figured it was good archival practice to rely on the Twitter API in providing context. For years, if I didn't enable twitter's javascript, news articles are missing images and quotes, obviously so. It's embarrassing, I honestly don't know how they recover from this, I don't know why they kept relying on Twitter embedding when screenshots and copy/paste work better and don't break.
      • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        I grew up with the practice of never putting more of my life in the digital world than necessary. Given the recent Amazon smarthome snafu I don't see a reason to change. Very innovation, many progress.
  • nickloewen 3y ago
    This comment on a related HN post seems to indicate they're still working: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542606 Here's the example link from that comment: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1674865731136020505 https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16748657311... Edit: and here's a random news article (post?) that has a working embedded tweet: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23780357/new-footage-of-that-space-invaders-ar-game-and-an-android-registration-link https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23780357/new-footage-of-t...
  • 3y ago
• agluszak 3y ago
  Putting the internet in the hands of corporations was the worst thing that ever happened to technology
  • jjulius 3y ago
    "The internet" isn't in their hands, the "Pop Web" (eg, pop music) is. Plenty of other internet out there, it's just time for people to start paying attention to it again.
  • warmwaffles 3y ago
    [x] doubt Putting the internet in the hands of the Government wouldn't fair much better.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      The internet started in the hands of the government.
    • phone8675309 3y ago
      False dichotomy - there are more options for Internet control than purely private and purely government.
    • agluszak 3y ago
      That's a false dichotomy. Government-regulated doesn't mean government-run. I wish we had laws in place that would prevent Facebook/Apple/Google/Twitter monopolies/walled gardens from happening
    • hkt 3y ago
      See my comment above: these companies could be the formal and effective property of their users.
  • darkarmani 3y ago
    No. Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed is what is stupid. The Internet is supposed to be distributed. We've gotten so used to consolidated services that we have forgotten this lesson.
• rektide 3y ago
  "Temporary emergency measure" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36540957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36540957
  • agluszak 3y ago
    Same kind of speech as "special military operation"
    • orblivion 3y ago
      The thing is if it weren't meant to be temporary I'd still expect him to undo it. Twitter is iconic, it's a big part of "the news" in a way. It just doesn't seem like it would be the same thing if it had exclusivity. So I'd expect them to reverse the decision after seeing the drop in engagement. Just like they did regarding the ban on promoting one's Mastodon account.
    • latency-guy2 3y ago
      Or "inflation is transitory"
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • fuzzbazz 3y ago
    Perfectly timed with tomorrow reddit API changes and possible user exodus.
• AlexandrB 3y ago
  I've viewed twitter wayyyyy less (only when someone links something) since Tweetbot stopped working and I think it's been good for my mental health. A login wall will take that usage down to zero, so good news overall.
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    Same here. I haven’t really missed it at all (by contrast, I stopped using Reddit when the blackout started earlier this month, and that feels like more of a loss). Weirdly, Twitter had started becoming so unreliable for me for several months prior (frequently not loading, video rarely working) that my click-through rate on Twitter links was already diminishing. But looks like it’s 0% from here on out.
  • jader201 3y ago
    I’ve completely stopped using Twitter for the same reason. I only occasionally (once every few weeks) click a Tweet that’s shared with me. I haven’t missed it.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • jug 3y ago
    Yes and it’s weird how weaning yourself off these things can go more easily than expected if you’re ”forced” to (because how you need to use the service changes too much for your tastes). I think it speaks a lot about the _illusion of value_ these networks provide vs actual value.
  • Nas808 3y ago
    I find Twitter really annoying to use now, since they made it so all of the replies from blue checkmark accounts get boosted to the top of the feed. I have to scroll past all of them just to find "normal" comments. The BlueBlocker browser extension is helping, but it can only block 1 account approximately every 15 seconds, or it triggers a rate limit and I have to sign-in to Twitter again.
    • 3y ago
• tedunangst 3y ago
  Was a little surprised to discover that nitter just throws up stack traces to users for errors.
• agluszak 3y ago
  And now imagine a citizen wants to quickly check news/updates/whatever from a government agency or a city council which doesn't have a fediverse account
  • KSteffensen 3y ago
    Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place? At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am? Also: https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/
    • wepple 3y ago
      NY Transit officially stopped using Twitter. I hope others follows. Google results that require a login to view are cancerous
      • fireflash38 3y ago
        How long did it take for expertsexchange to finally stop showing in Google results despite being super obnoxious? Yeah you could scroll way to the bottom, but that only worked if you came there direct from Google.
        • chris_wot 3y ago
          It took them just as long as it took for them to put in a dash between experts and exchange.
    • ben_w 3y ago
      > Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am? Not only, but also. Does the Chinese government run an account? Have American politicians been as upset about this as they seem to have been about TikTok? I'd check the former, but, well, the subject under discussion.
• lapcat 3y ago
  Here's a trick to view a tweet: use the embed. https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1674865731136020505 https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16748657311...
  • thomasahle 3y ago
    That's good at least. I assumed that would be gone too.
  • toyg 3y ago
    I was just going to say - lots of media companies routinely embed tweets, breaking that would be disastrous PR. Twitter is currently kept alive by media people; if they switch, the platform will die very quickly. I wonder if this is all a result of the API price hike. Folks probably tried to keep integrations alive by scraping, so now there is a lot of extra traffic on the main site. If integrations start acting like embedded calls, they will have the same problem there soon.
  • ricardo81 3y ago
    Was wondering about this, as the likes of the BBC embed a lot of tweets
• morbegn0 3y ago
  https://nitter.cz/ https://nitter.cz/, from the Czech collective NoLogz, has a statement in place of the error message: | | "Nitter.cz is not working, just like all other Nitter instances. The reason is Twitter blocking all access to it's content without login. We are sorry, but there is nothing we can do about it right now and we are not sure if the situation will change in the future. Don't trust corporations, especially those where one egomaniac has all the power. Use open-source and community driven solutions if you can (like Mastodon). Sincerely, NoLog.cz collective PS: You can also donate to us to keep our other services running"
  • Spivak 3y ago
    If they're able to make the switch to one of the big Mastadon instances it might be a fun way to bite your thumb.
• berkle4455 3y ago
  You can blame this all you want on evil social media corporations, but the reality is AI companies scraping public conversations to feed LLMs are the current reason for walls being erected around every single garden. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn.. all heading toward full walled garden mode to prevent scrapers from repurposing data and profiting off their systems. Federated systems are a nice idea, but they're not funded and will crumble under the same pressure until they too go into private mode. It's simply not a financially sound decision to run an open node that is continually harvested by corporations seeking to profit off the conversations occurring on your platforms.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Nextgrid 3y ago
    AI companies is a stupid argument. If the AI company operates legitimately, then TOS prohibiting using the content for LLM training purposes would be enough. If the AI company doesn’t want to play ball then restricting public access won’t stop them, they’ll just register accounts en-masse and scrape that way.
    • berkle4455 3y ago
      TOS does not apply if the data is not behind a login
  • KerrAvon 3y ago
    Twitter has been slow since Musk took over and fired all of the competent devops people and then shut down most of the data centers. It's reasonable to assume that he's either been lied to or is lying about the cause of this.
  • zuminator 3y ago
    Assuming social media companies are profitable via their normal services, then how they are hurt by downstream AI companies squeezing out a bit of leftover value? Because it feels like me being mad because I find out Jiffy Lube is making money reselling the used oil from my oil changes without giving me a cut. I think it's a mistake to block third party providers from profiting from their service. First of all the hypocrisy in that all of these large companies exist because of massively profiting off of mostly uncompensated user-created content. Second, this drive toward relentlessly monetizing every aspect of your company's business is how we get degraded services like Microsoft putting ads in their search bar. It's one thing if a downstream OEM does it, I can just use an alternative OEM that doesn't shovelware the crap out of their product. But when the primary provider does it, then their service is permanently borked and eventually becomes unusable. So if the idea of blocking scrapers is because the goal is to eventually provide their own shitty AI services, I think Twitter et al are just going to end up killing their own geese -- making their own services unusable out of greed.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• HungSu 3y ago
  A lot of comments suggesting federation as the solution to centralisation. I believe this is a false dichotomy. I think Write Once, Publish Everywhere (including both centralised and federated) is much better. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
  • kibwen 3y ago
    Different contexts call for different approaches. "Write once, publish everywhere" is ideal for read-only content. For a social network that is user-centric/identity-focused (like Twitter), federation makes sense; for a social network that is "topic-centric" (like Reddit) you can just have individual forums like the old days.
  • RobotToaster 3y ago
    How? twitter and facebook make automating that difficult with their API restrictions.
  • thih9 3y ago
    How to do that in practice? I find it tedious to update various social media platforms by hand, especially when each platform has its own rules and conventions. There are paid services that help but they often don't cover all of the platforms that I use, or are prohibitively expensive. Also if you just post a link to your site some social media platforms will treat you as a spammer.
• marcodiego 3y ago
  Since today I've been https://nitter.it/ https://nitter.it/ . Don't know how long it will work though.
  • emergie 3y ago
    Looks like nitter doesn't work anymore. I am unable to find a working instance https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
• babypuncher 3y ago
  Does this mean companies will finally stop putting their official announcements only on Twitter? I already deleted my Twitter account months ago and I'm not about to create a new one.
• Macha 3y ago
  I will miss some of the Ukraine news as twitter was good for that, but that's about it for me at this point.
  • kibwen 3y ago
    Here's a Mastodon server that mirrors many Ukraine-related Twitter accounts: https://fed.celp.de/@uanews https://fed.celp.de/@uanews (Who knows how long it will keep working, of course.)
    • veave 3y ago
      Doesn't seem very neutral.
      • bloopernova 3y ago
        I don't understand. Are you saying you want an aggregator that does 50/50 Ukrainian and russian tweets?
        • fckthisguy 3y ago
          Imagine asking for 50% Allied / 50% Axis news.
          • sorenjan 3y ago
            No no, you don't understand, the war was started by Poland! They attacked Germany in the Gleiwitz incident, you have to get unbiased news from both sides to properly assess the situation and stay truly neutral and enlightened.
            • pessimizer 3y ago
              Imagine thinking the Allies didn't also use dishonest propaganda during WWII.
      • 3y ago
• f0e4c2f7 3y ago
  Sort of related, I was wondering will teddit.net also be shutting down when the API is shuttered? Seems like it would be but didn't know if it works using scraping or something.
• xwdv 3y ago
  Sucks that it’s gone, but as a final aside, I never liked the name Nitter anyway. You better have perfect diction when talking about Nitter.
• rconti 3y ago
  Looks like Twitter was officially evicted out of their Boulder office today. Had a fire sale on furniture out on the street, at least until the Sheriff seemed to stop employees from going into the building anymore.
  • jacobsenscott 3y ago
    Lol, I would have made the drive up just to see if I knew.
• activitypea 3y ago
  I just ran into this problem -- not being able to view tweets without logging in. As much as I hate Musk, this is clearly the trajectory of all platforms. Without a unified push towards self-hosting or the fediverse, the internet as we know it is over :(
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    Funnily enough I always respected him for keeping it login free. I thought this was about his town / square free speech vision. Now I can never see myself going near the site again. Oh well.
    • tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      Yeah, wasn’t that a major hoopla before? Removing the forced login prompt? Making it optional, then removing it, but now re-adding it even worse.
    • __loam 3y ago
      I don't know how anyone can respect a man who calls a professional rescue working trying to save kids from a cave flood a pedophile. Musk has always been a piece of shit.
      • ChatGTP 3y ago
        I don’t mean I respect him, just a particular decision.
      • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        He also got off the hook for slander/libel by claiming "pedo guy" is a nickname. So clearly calling musk a "pedo guy" is just an affectionate nickname, too.
    • LadyCailin 3y ago
      Your first mistake was assuming he isn't a piece of shit, despite him proving that over and over. Hopefully now you learn the lesson.
• teddyh 3y ago
  Paul Graham famously started to use Mastodon (but has not written anything there since last year). But the HN Status emergency “is HN down” channel is still only on Twitter. It used to be publicly readable at <https://twitter.com/HNStatus https://twitter.com/HNStatus>. But now, if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why.
  • clouddrover 3y ago
    > Paul Graham famously started to use Mastodon And he just as famously went crawling back to Twitter. He's too addicted to quit it.
    • hackernewds 3y ago
      so is Musk. even if he weren't addicted to the platform, per se, he is to the exalted admiration and social proof. once one has acquired all the money in the world, what do they want? power he is hopelessly addicted to Twitter
  • geepytee 3y ago
    >if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why That's probably close to 99% of HN users
    • benburleson 3y ago
      I highly doubt that.
    • hackernewds 3y ago
      doubtful
    • gbear605 3y ago
      You can count me in the one percent then. :) Seriously though, lots of people don’t use Twitter. Of my friends, only one has a Twitter account, and he’s switched away since Musk took over.
• hiddendoom45 3y ago
  A fork of nitter by PrivacyDevel [0] should still work as it adds the option of using user account tokens to bypass content restricted tweets. [0] https://github.com/PrivacyDevel/nitter https://github.com/PrivacyDevel/nitter
  • the_third_wave 3y ago
    What this needs is some way to randomly select tokens from a (self-hosted) token dispenser. The dispenser can be fed fresh tokens through token donation from all those who claimed to have left and/or are planning to leave Twitter, that should provide enough tokens for the forthcoming decade.
• GloomyBoots 3y ago
  I’m not active on social media for the most part, and have to remind people not to send me links to sites that require a login (Pinterest for example). I don’t have a Twitter account, but there were accounts I liked to browse occasionally. In the months before the Musk takeover, Twitter kept coming up with new things that you couldn’t do without logging in. Finally, it was completely unusable. One of the earlier easy wins Musk made was undoing all of that. Now, on top of everything else he’s managed to spectacularly torpedo, we’re back to this.
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36535822
• millzlane 3y ago
  I noticed this earlier today when trying to follow a quote from linked from a new York times article. I thought "well thats fucked up how will anyone know what they said" lol. Twitter is such a crap show now lol. Really only useful to people who use it.
• wheelerof4te 3y ago
  This is why I've disconnected from all social media, these forum-like sites being an obvious exception. They have become an anti-thesis of freedom that was promised when World-wide-web emerged.
• jug 3y ago
  Ugh, what an eventful time of social media this has been. First Twitter API, then Reddit API, so today Apollo and many more Reddit clients shut down, and now Nitter. :-( I'm happy Lemmy is kind of taking off. I think it's helped more than Mastodon because it's less realtime/feed focused and slower paced. It also doesn't require you to form a friend circle to benefit. Instead, the community is waiting for you already. You just sign up on an instance and add your communities. Done. This helped me a lot, together with sites like https://sub.rehab https://sub.rehab
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    What is Lemmy?
    • SeanAnderson 3y ago
      https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
      • Angostura 3y ago
        see also https://kbin.pub https://kbin.pub - kbin instances interoperates with Lemmy, but I somewhat prefer the interface.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      One implementation of a Reddit style interface on top of ActivityPub. It's one of the nice things about AP is that whatever interface you like best Twitter/Reddit/RSS can get you access to the same content.
      • fluidcruft 3y ago
        I'm not sure about that entirely. It seems like kbin can federate with both mastodon and lemmy. Lemmy and kbin can federate with each other. But I don't think Lemmy and mastodon can right now. I don't know if that's deliberate or just unimplemented. I will say the kbin/mastodon interactions just seem... strange. Like you see mastodon users but I don't know why I wouldn't just use a mastodon client. But I haven't spent a lot of time directly inside kbin. I prefer the lemmy interface so far. People have described it as lemmy being like old.reddit and kbin being like new.reddit in feel.
• jansan 3y ago
  I tend to spend way more time on Twitter than I should, so I blacklisted it on my router and only accessed it through Nitter. Since I will not remove it from the blacklist, that's it with Twitter. Overall this is probably a good thing for me.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• aeyes 3y ago
  Embed links still work and I don't see how Twitter could disable them without causing a bit more outrage. But maybe they don't even care anymore.
  • zuminator 3y ago
    Is there a way to use embed links to stay abreast of a user though, as opposed to only individual tweets with predetermined urls? When you click on the embed it's just going to take you to the site to log in.
• mkl95 3y ago
  Twitter has now endured Instagram levels of enshittification. It has been a crappy product since the mid 2010s, but at least it was minimally usable back then.
• justnotworthit 3y ago
  for the desperate: https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-name/{username} https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-... add username at end from https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ and https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a919cf9720f9ae09b3093/raw/7ca5e003798d2d0e641a3e2fd20039fae03a4ffe/redirector-twitter-embed-rules.json https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a91...
  • dsab 3y ago
    Nice, how does it work, when you can use twitter not logged?
    • justnotworthit 3y ago
      correct. the first link you can use manually. The second link is a browser addon. The 3rd link you save to your computer then "import" in that addon to always rewrite twitter.com/username to the first link.
  • paulnpace 3y ago
    I remember the olden days when something like this would be voted to the top. A useful solution to a posted problem is what I hope to find for topics such as this.
    • medler 3y ago
      Doesn’t work for me
      • paulnpace 3y ago
        You are doing something wrong.
      • justnotworthit 3y ago
        for example: https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-name/ggreenwald https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-... change the word at the end with the username you want to see
• nunez 3y ago
  This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(
  • drk-thr 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • j-bos 3y ago
    I feel the same. Had 4 twitter accounts I followed on nitter after losing my account, and now, not sure. Feels like a time of (light) mourning.
    • tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      I had JUST started using Nitter’s RSS feeds. And it was so comfy avoiding all of the “algorithm” too.
  • montenegrohugo 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • darknavi 3y ago
    It's extremely rough around the edges but getting into fediverse content (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) has been extremely rewarding to me. It's like twitter and reddit but 15 years ago (and by that I mostly mean it's janky and full of bugs. Just like the web was 15 years ago!)
    • seanthemon 3y ago
      I tried it but I just can't get into the flow of things, it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? I just want to expel my bowels and doom scroll bad funny memes
      • 3y ago
• renewiltord 3y ago
  As an amusing aside, you can search for "username twitter" for many of the people posting here on hn.algolia.com and get a sequence of "I don't use Twitter" then "This Twitter account is decent" in a short span of time which makes me suspect many of these claims are not true. For my part, this is an annoyance since I use nitter's API to feed Tweets to a Slack I share with friends.
• philipov 3y ago
  I can't even access the page to reach a login screen. I get a redirect error.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    It's down for me too, loading aborts due to more than 20 redirects. Apparently, any kind of access is now deemed adversarial. ;-)
  • makeworld 3y ago
    Same, but I've had this issue on desktop (Chromium and Firefox) for weeks now. I think it's some misapplied filtering rule or something, since before this recent account change I could still see Twitter on my mobile browser, without redirects.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    Don't know if this applies to you, but it's been doing that for about the past month if you refuse cookies.
• drumhead 3y ago
  If you need to create an account you just won't bother. I find myself caring less about twitter now, when you could view tweets it would get you motivated to get involved, not that you won't be able to I can see a lot of traffic just drift away.
  • meepmorp 3y ago
    Yeah, I occasionally follow twitter links to things, but I'm not going to make an account just to see tweets. All this does is make sure I never use it again.
• b1n 3y ago
  Bluesky - https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/6-02-2023-beta-update https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/6-02-2023-beta-update " Roadmap and Growth A few weeks ago, we intentionally slowed our invite roll-out while we built more moderation tooling and capacity for users on the app. We staffed a content moderation team with shifts that cover a 24/7 schedule, and consulted with trust and safety experts to establish new processes and policies to support a growing userbase. We’ve resumed sending out daily invites to the waitlist, which is where the majority of users already on Bluesky received their invites. For those who don’t know someone personally with an invite code, the waitlist is the fastest way to receive a code, though please be patient as we work through the list. "
  • slimsag 3y ago
    Why did bluesky pick such sketchy looking domain names? blueskyweb.xyz bsky.app @username.bsky.social
    • megablast 3y ago
      [flagged]
• masswerk 3y ago
  So is it down just for me? Since for about an hour now site loading is aborted for more than 20 redirects. That is, not logged-in. – But, how do you log in, then?
  • masswerk 3y ago
    Update: 2 hours later, still not loading with Safari/Desktop. (Is there any QA, at all?) FF works though and immediately goes to an otherwise blank page with a log-in dialog.
• dkokelley 3y ago
  Honest question, should services that host user generated content be obligated to provide that content "for free" through APIs or scrapers? On one hand, users created the content "for free" for the platform to use and monetize. On the other hand, providing the content through an API without any ad/monetization potential doesn't make good business sense. Is there an acceptable threshold of free viewing before it becomes abusive? (Think, getting a single free See's candy from the store vs. employing an army of people to source thousands of pounds of chocolate treats.) With the Reddit API issue I'm honestly unsure where I stand. I love(d) Apollo and want it to succeed, but Reddit is doing the work and not getting the rewards. Where do you draw the line at "fair"?
  • Waterluvian 3y ago
    No because the user generating the content isn’t a virtue of any sort. They’re just doing free work for a company. If they choose to do that, that’s their choice. In fact I think this is good. It makes it very clear that no, it’s not your content and no, you don’t deserve any rights just because you feel like you own it. Twitter will do as it pleases with “your” content. I would very much welcome a far more informed environment where people were forced to face the details of IP rights and what it means to post content on these services.
    • medler 3y ago
      You own the copyright to your own tweets. When you tweet you give Twitter a license to display the tweet, but you still own it. This is all spelled out in the Twitter terms of service.
  • chris_wot 3y ago
    Well I guess we’ll work out two things very quickly: 1. Is it worthwhile giving free labour to these services by generating their content, and, 2. Do we want to login and/or pay to check user generated content? Personally, I think the answer will be no. If these services generated their own content, which we actually value, then it would be a different matter. But they don’t, so if they put up road blocks I suspect they will get a bit of a shock to learn they aren’t actually as vital to society as they thought they were.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  I’m using twitter as much as ever, the live content is just too good to pass up, I set up Lists and use it to read only the category I want and you don’t need to follow them. You don’t have to like Elon but the stuff people write(given the right profiles), the concentration of it, isn’t really offered anywhere else.
  • blurrybird 3y ago
    Do you have some examples of these lists? I’ve wanted to do something similar to Mastodon where you can follow hashtags. Sounds like you might have solved that?
    • m3kw9 3y ago
      Hash tag following isnt supported. but list like crypto for example, you create a list called Crypto and add user profiles to it.
    • rsynnott 3y ago
      It’s quite odd that Twitter never adopted this as a first party feature; virtually every third party app did it, until Naughty Ol’ Mr Car got in.
• cout 3y ago
  I thought this had been done years ago? Or was that only on mobile?
• CalChris 3y ago
  Yeah, that’s gonna help with ad revenue.
• hedora 3y ago
  Uggh. I only use twitter to follow critical (life-and-death) emergency broadcasts from our local fire department. Is there a viable alternative for them to use now that twitter is going to block most of our county’s residents?
  • hinata08 3y ago
    cell broadcast for real emergencies texts through registration on the site of the city hall, if cell braodcast isnt implemented by the phone company public emergency sirens radio TV actual website of the city hall local newspaper social fabric, with residents actually calling each others, for non emergency topics ? (Hacker news ?) Twitter has never been a great solution on its own. It could have contributed along with other channels of communication, so you should already have these.
    • coldpie 3y ago
      Emails, too. That's how I get snow emergency alerts and bus notifications. One disadvantage with all these is they're one-way. Twitter had reasonable ways to manage one-to-many conversations that other solutions lack.
  • coldpie 3y ago
    Not really. Blue Sky is the most promising replacement I've seen, but it's just another for profit company, so it will follow the same pattern eventually. I think an official government Mastodon or similar would work, but it really needs to be something hosted by a competent IT dept (meaning federal, in the US), with strict and well considered policies (who gets an account on it?) and with massive buy-in at all levels of government. So... no. Not really.
    • twicetwice 3y ago
      fwiw, Bluesky is fully federated (well, will be, it's in development, but it's well on the way, they just launched the federation sandbox the other day), and identities are portable, so it shouldn't be susceptible to the same dynamics as twitter. Plus, the dev team has stated a number of times that "the company is a potential future adversary" is one of the principles they keep in mind when designing the protocol. Plus, it's a Public Benefit LLC, for however much that's worth. And I really do trust the good intentions of the current devs and leadership (mostly the same people), based on my somewhat extensive interactions with them—I think their hearts are in the right place. So of course it definitely could go badly fo a variety of reasons—but I think there's good reason to be optimistic that it will go well.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• userbinator 3y ago
  I wonder if we'll just start seeing people sharing accounts, and growing the (currently mostly underground) ecosystem around that. There will probably also be tons more abandoned accounts halfway through the registration process, as the last time I remember trying to register one, I was asked to provide a phone number and noped out immediately.
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    Inactive accounts is great for inflating mDAU. Ironically, Musk had railed against Twitter for that before.
• readyplayernull 3y ago
  Currently the only email with human support is: press@twitter.com
• JoeMayoBot 3y ago
  There might be a couple sides to the story if one was to view from a less emotional perspective. People who genuinely enjoy reading the site, but value their privacy have a good argument because now they've been denied their rights. On the other hand, there's always been a serious problem with bots scraping the site, which drives up costs. Another consideration is that they're trying to make the company profitable and sign-ins is a measurable metric for advertising and possibly being able to weed out some bad actors. Whether that will work out the way they intend remains to be seen.
• tdeck 3y ago
  A lot of local governments (public transit, police, fire department) use Twitter to provide service updates and even critical information when there's some kind of local emergency. I hope they're migrating off already but I kinda doubt it.
  • jjgreen 3y ago
    Aren't those a statutory requirement? If so, I can see lawsuits for posting them only on a subscription-required service ... [reaches for popcorn]
• fullshark 3y ago
  I hope this helps me shake my addiction
• Firewater29 3y ago
  [dead]
• robotblake 3y ago
  Reposting from another thread earlier. --- I still have a few accounts I glance at from time to time. Hockey, Game Devs, Artists, etc. who haven't migrated away despite everything, so this is kinda obnoxious. I created some Redirector (https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/) rules to redirect Tweet and Twitter Profile URLs to their HTML embed equivalents. Should be able to just import the rules and it seems to work alright with some caveats. * I have no idea if this will continue to function. * I've only tested some random links from my Discord and Slack groups. * Profile links only show the most recent 20 tweets. * Tweets will show quote-tweets, but no replies (though maybe that's a good thing). * Obviously won't work for mobile. Rules are at https://gist.github.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a919cf9720f9ae09b3093 https://gist.github.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a919cf9720f9ae... Edit: And just realized /u/justnotworthit posted the link earlier too.
• Firewater29 3y ago
  [dead]
• anigbrowl 3y ago
  Guess I'll just be checking it less often then. I have a Twitter account but don't like to be logged in on my phone and potentially leaking location data.
• ipsum2 3y ago
  Looks like they even blocked the Google crawler for individual accounts. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com https://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com sort by last hour.
• velavar 3y ago
  > Musk — who is no longer CEO of Twitter, but still deeply involved in operations — may also be motivated by a desire to prevent AI tools from searching Twitter. This seems very unlikely. If they really just wanted to stop just AI tools from searching twitter, it would be very easy to prevent them from doing it at scale by imposing basic rate limiting and device intelligence (or even something like the puzzle LinkedIn makes you solve before viewing someone's profile while not logged in). I'm very confused as to why they may not want unlogged-in human lurkers who are still seeing and clicking on ads when on the Twitter website.
  • Terr_ 3y ago
    > This seems very unlikely. If they really just wanted to stop just AI tools Same issue with Reddit, it's a false excuse for embarking on some other kind of cash-grab policy. They claimed the almost-no-warning API changes were necessary to stop the "AI", except that all the big (and therefore significant) actors could have been stopped by a change to the terms of service or some modest rate-limits.
• azangru 3y ago
  Google still manages to show recent tweets. I wonder if twitter lets it through by checking the user agent.
  • Nemo_bis 3y ago
    For the longest time, Google had an agreement with Twitter to get new posts in real time with a firehose feed. It was active at least in 2009–2011 and 2015, not sure about the current status. https://variety.com/2015/digital/news/google-makes-peace-with-twitter-adds-tweets-to-mobile-search-1201500757/ https://variety.com/2015/digital/news/google-makes-peace-wit...
• charliea0 3y ago
  So when does blue.sky leave beta?
• throw03172019 3y ago
  Whenever Twitter asked me to login, I’d close the tab. Good luck, Elon!
• ineedasername 3y ago
  I’m guessing they’ll still let google crawl it, maybe cache: will be a passable workaround. Does Internet Archive capture twitter content? If so how will all of these changes impact them?
• klyrs 3y ago
  Do reddit next! Everybody's productivity will be through the roof
• paddw 3y ago
  remember like 1/2 a year ago when they removed the sign in prompt entirely... lol we've come full circle
• jason_zig 3y ago
  It's funny that creating a twitter clone has been a "hello world" kind of project for most web frameworks over the last 10 years but here we are without any feature-complete alternatives.
  • paxys 3y ago
    It doesn't have to do with feature completeness but rather the network effect. Even if you build a pixel-by-pixel copy of Twitter how are you going to convince everyone to move there?
• nashashmi 3y ago
  This is got to be reversed eventually because Twitter was a public square and now it is a closed square where every tweet is logged on who sees what. Nearly everybody is going to be getting off of Twitter now. It no longer is what it used to be. A place where celebrities could brag about themselves publicly. Remember, this is what influenced Facebook to open up and make all of the profiles public. Mastodon and blue sky here we come.
• sizzle 3y ago
  RIP Nitter
• swat535 3y ago
  Taking into consideration how much Spez thinks of himself as a Musk, we should be expecting Reddit to implement the same feature soon. We are just sitting by the sideline watching as the internet we all loved slowly dies in the hands of greedy corporations. This is truly a sad state of affairs.
  • whatyesaid 3y ago
    Reddit is useful in Google search results though whereas Twitter and Instagram are not. For instance if you search "movies like X", on Google by default most results are automated aggregators or one critics perspective. If you search "movies like X reddit" you get more recommendations.
    • medler 3y ago
      Twitter is in search results, though I guess that might go away if it stays closed
  • optymizer 3y ago
    The Internet I loved was full of random forums and text websites. If anything, I'm rejoicing and hoping this will mean less centralized forums. Y'all realize you can just not use reddit and Twitter right? You can host your own forum on the Internet
    • tester457 3y ago
      The discovery hurdle is too big for me to rejoice.
      • BirAdam 3y ago
        Especially since the best search engines are nearly useless for finding new old-style content… search is broken, the big platforms are broken, and random links from users of HN are now the only way I have to find new stuff. The cool thing is that most of what is posted to HN is relevant to my interests…
• elgenie 3y ago
  Since Twitter the company also did this in 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263), this is more an example of the Elon regime rerunning product experiments in production for themselves, and thus retreading ground unproductively as the debt service counter ticks away.
• I_am_tiberius 3y ago
  I guess that will free up some Internet broadband.
• omgmajk 3y ago
  Welp, Twitter goes down the drain faster than expected...
• lexandstuff 3y ago
  On a related note: any ideas on why Bluesky seems to be taking so long to open to the public? They had a beta program a few months ago, and everyone seemed to love it, and now nothing? Surely now is the time to capitalise on the discontent on Twitter, even if it means dealing with a few scaling pains.
• lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • nashashmi 3y ago
    Ever since twitter was bought, I deleted my account. I don’t want to be on the seasaw roller coaster. I was just about to open one now. Not anymore. There used to be a lot of good stuff on twitter. Now it doesn’t matter. I have a quora account, but I don’t use quora because it is difficult to use without account. I have a stack exchange account. But I never login. I browser anonymously including HN. It’s nice this way.
  • kortilla 3y ago
    You’re asking why people like privacy. There are plenty of long essays about this topic.
  • mcbutterbunz 3y ago
    I got banned from Twitter for putting Elons image as my profile pic and tweeting a friend asking if he wanted a job. It was a dumb joke but I got banned In the email, they said “Note that if you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts.” So now I’m 100% banned from twitter if I follow the rules.
    • nashashmi 3y ago
      > that if you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts.” They do this at eBay too.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• extrememacaroni 3y ago
  good maybe now people will stop linking tweets.
• irrational 3y ago
  Yet another nail in Twitters coffin. I’ve never had an account, but usually have been able to follow links to twitter.
• junon 3y ago
  That's explains trying to see some links earlier. Twitter is officially dead for me then. RIP.
• pengaru 3y ago
  So can HN ban twitter.com submissions now that they require a twitter account to view? Please?
  • jjgreen 3y ago
    Flag `em
• vimota 3y ago
  There's a good chance this is in response to scrapping caused by them suddenly deprepcating the /follows + /followers API : https://twitter.com/thomasschulzz/status/1674881114773815296?s=20 https://twitter.com/thomasschulzz/status/1674881114773815296...
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  It always irked me that public institutions embraced Twitter as a primary means of communication in many cases. It never seemed right that a private company was being put in between public functions and the the public which depends on them. Not to mention, since I live outside the US, a private company in another country. I even wrote complaints to one local public body to ask them to set up a communication channel that wasn't controlled by a foreign private entity. Of course, they laughed at me and I went away like a good citizen. It's hard to map this onto my framework of "reasonable paranoia". Even while I felt uncomfortable about it, it never occurred to me that Twitter would actually cut off access. Now here we are.
  • celdon25 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • jdelman 3y ago
      It's not "fake news" that you now need to be logged in to see tweets. Whether or not this is truly temporary remains to be seen. But we now know this is something Twitter is willing to do, even if they undo it.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • Marcan 3y ago
      Do you still take this man at his word, after all he's done?
      • stainablesteel 3y ago
        yes
      • coliveira 3y ago
        Correct, he's the biggest con man in the world.
• SergeAx 3y ago
  Unpopular take: large platforms can do anything, any kind of evil moves towards their users and still mostly get away with it. We can see that it generally works with Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and lots of others. I don't know for sure if it is possible to fight it. Centralized platforms will always win because they are very convenient and UX is very smooth while user plays ball by platform's rules. Migrating to decentralized is mostly for geeks. I am geek myself, but I still can't find energy to migrate at leas email to my own domain. Instead I keep using GMail, despite all the risks (I am citizen of Russia, so in my case risk of deplatforming from Google is even higher).
• inetknght 3y ago
  Ahhh I thought maybe I was being A/B tested. Good to know I'll never visit the dumpster fire of Twitter again.
• de_nied 3y ago
  Elon Musk has stated this is temporary [due to all the scraping that was happening in an attempt to circumvent the API access costs]. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505
  • celdon25 3y ago
    How is this not the top comment?
• robot_no_421 3y ago
  Anybody feel like this is ironically going to accelerate the decline of twitter? I'm never, EVER making a twitter account. However publishers still communicate with me via tweets I could see. Now that I need an account to view tweets, publishers just have a smaller audience. I'll just see the screenshots on reddit anyway :)
  • jccooper 3y ago
    All sorts of services seem to think that mandatory accounts drive "engagement". No doubt it works on certain metrics. Long term... we'll see. I know I still don't have a Pinterest account.
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    > Anybody feel like this is ironically going to accelerate the decline of twitter? If Musks claim today is true ("This platform hit another all-time high in user-seconds last week"), then it is very much not in decline...
    • deciplex 3y ago
      anything that elon musk says is true by coincidence only
    • sangnoir 3y ago
      That's a fancy way to say it's infested by scraping bots, which makes sense since its been weeks since the API was dropped
    • FiberBundle 3y ago
      Well it likely isn't true [1]. Musk seems to come across more and more as a perpetual liar. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-engagement-the-data-tells-a-different-story/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-eng...
  • agnosticmantis 3y ago
    He needs revenue right now, and the other monetization efforts haven't panned out (blue checks, advertising, etc.). So he's trying to make a quick buck from user-generated data now that the LLM rush is at an all time high. For that he needs to limit access to the data in the first place, otherwise nobody would be paying for publicly available data.
• BirAdam 3y ago
  I miss twitter being SMS enabled and 140 characters only. That’s was an awesome time.
• marcooliv 3y ago
  Why is so terrible to just open an account? what a drama you're using a service that costs money to run. Everyone here likes to be highly paid but keep complaining for those things. maybe I'm missing something here. Use temp email, create an account and that's it.
  • goku12 3y ago
    If that's the way they (twitter in this case) wanted it, they should have started it that way. May be then, governments and individuals wouldn't have started sharing important information on a platform that requires their audience to forgo their anonymity.
  • u_name 3y ago
    Because if twitter decides that your email (address) is too temp, they might ask you for a phone number. And burner phones without (or with low hurdle) registration / verification aren't a thing everywhere.
  • medler 3y ago
    I tried to do this several months ago and Twitter immediately shut down my account, demanding a phone number if I wanted to proceed.
• pbarnes_1 3y ago
  The most annoying thing about this is that they broke unfurls in Slack, Discord, etc, etc.
• kgbcia 3y ago
  Well Usenet, RSS, and mailing list are there to use
  • goku12 3y ago
    These services have the following (non-exhaustive) list of problems: - They are hard to use for regular people due to lack of modern and intuitive clients. - They are somewhat hard to discover and learn. For example, browsers don't indicate the presence of RSS feeds without plugins anymore. - Security and encryption are an after-thought, if any Almost all of the above are due to the stagnation of their development (protocols and clients) due to emergence of easy-to-use, but centralized alternatives. They are not good modern options as they are now. But they are good models to build more modern alternatives on.
• semilattice 3y ago
  I am 100% sure that this will be reversed within 1 or 2 months, or sooner. Musk and his team are zigzagging to evaluate possible business models that make money.
• defulmere 3y ago
  It looks like status updates on https://status.stripe.com https://status.stripe.com are tweets. The most recent updates are available on that page, but for anything older than that you'll need a Twitter account to read stripestatus on Twitter. Even their Atom feed is a useless river of "A status update was posted" titles with truncated tweet content and t.co links. It's such a shame, Twitter used to be so useful for stuff like this.
• dathinab 3y ago
  So basically twitter is just about to die???? My argument is: Because they remaining main usage of twitter seem to be people "tweeting" small important (from their POV) bits of news. This could be political news but also e.g. announcements of content creators. The changes in the algorithm already where not so grate for some people for this use case. But most important for this use case is that this tweets need to be world readable even if not world discoverable. With this gone a lot of people now have to look for a place where they can do world visible announcements, and at that point why not only use that place? Especially if it doesn't require you to e.g. buy something like twitter blue to increase the chance that people subscribed to you see your announcement.
• carbocation 3y ago
  Signal's link preview feature broke today for Twitter. I wonder if that is related?
• cjwit 3y ago
  Few things demonstrate a (techno)feudal online world quite like throwing up the walls
• ianai 3y ago
  I wonder whether an alternative could be like a Reddit or mastodon with paid-for subreddits/servers (not familiar with mastodon) being able to be started like a colocation service ala linode. Ie customers just sign up and the backend provisions them infra as needed. That seems like a way to answer the “nobody wants to run their own server” problem.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• MallocVoidstar 3y ago
  They appear to have also drastically decreased the rate-limit for viewing tweets. I've hit 429 errors twice browsing my timeline normally, and looking at the headers shows the current rate-limit is 50 tweets per 15 minutes, at which point you get locked out. edit: Scrolling a thread counts as a hit against this every time it needs to load more tweets, so this is very easy to hit.
• WalterBright 3y ago
  Elon Musk wrote: Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience. What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674887204580073474 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674887204580073474
  • AHOHA 3y ago
    They can still scrap it but now with an account cookie? Also, what’s the problem of scraping it, it’s just like browsing systematically.
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      If there is a sufficient quantity of scrapers, it's equivalent to a DOS attack. The scraping traffic may even exceed the user traffic.
• aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
• ddingus 3y ago
  Like Quora, I view a whole lot less Quora. This kind of crap is how they lost many of their published top writers. Now Twitter. I am better off for these changes. You can be too. Just log out. It will pass.
  • fatfox 3y ago
    I'd like to know what happened to Quora. It's now full of Chat GPT answers and self-proclaimed experts who try to sell you their online course on gemstone energy driven entrepreneurship.
    • ddingus 3y ago
      That is what happened. Place is a war zone, far cry from the beautiful thing it once was. A hardy few are still slugging away amidst a rising tide of crap. Unless one knows who is who, they are hard to find.
    • ddingus 3y ago
      Lol gemstone... right!
• robot 3y ago
  good riddance it is a hell hole of people promoting stuff + conspiracy theorists and manipulators. it differentiates itself as "the shitshow social network".
• goolz 3y ago
  What makes these hacks think I wouldn’t just take my ball and go home? Not sure they care, but I am in a juicy demographic, so the joke’s on them. Social media has a short shelf-life, as long as I can remember. To pull a stunt like this, well, it is ballsy to say the least. Farewell, Tweeter, you will not be missed!
• ulkesh 3y ago
  Hopefully this will drive businesses off the platform and Twitter will become a thing of the past causing billions being lost by Musk and anyone else who think his idiocy was good for the platform.
• chaxor 3y ago
  I effectively thought this was always the case, since I don't use Twitter, and disabling JavaScript made the webpage unusable anyway. You don't miss out on much though. Twitter just seems to be random hot takes and celebrity nonsense.
• jmspring 3y ago
  Twitter also continues to unblock Elon for accounts that have blocked him. It's happened 3x to me in the last month or so. Currently still blocked.
  • ikt 3y ago
    [flagged]
• linuxhansl 3y ago
  Good. I got rid of my Twitter account years ago. Not missed anything whatsoever. Hopefully public institutions will now stop using it.
• linuxhansl 3y ago
  Can we now finally go back to the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter Internet, before we centralized everything within a few corporations?
  • AHOHA 3y ago
    Exactly this, I’m happy of what’s happening with twitter and Reddit and the likes, maybe it’s the reality slap the users needed to get back to smaller communities.
    • valeg 3y ago
      I'm actually glad too that these corporate platforms decided to self-immolate. Alternatives are there and they are much more healthy.
• brenainn 3y ago
  Like a lot of organisations, we use it at work for public notifications. Big gap in this space now for something simple and publicly accessible.
• XorNot 3y ago
  Well this right here is the penultimate act in the death of Twitter. They've taken the principle place Twitter can monetize it's usage - users who don't have Twitter accounts but are linked to Twitter content - and removed the ability to show ads to them in favor of trying to get account sign ups. The final act will be when they kill Twitter embeds on the basis of too many people are now viewing Tweets but not signing up for Twitter. Literally doing the latter thing - killing embeds - would've been a more sensible decision.
• keyle 3y ago
  Remember Musk bought it because the world needed an unbiased platform, freedom of speech, blah blah etc. Now I'm pretty sure your reach is severely limited if you don't pay; and now tweets are blocked behind a login. How's it going, really?
  • hn_throwaway_69 3y ago
    [flagged]
• kumarvvr 3y ago
  How does this work for embedded tweets?
• wraptile 3y ago
  This also seems like another attempt to combat web scraping. They put search behind login and now tweets themselves to try to push people to use their API. Twitter is still the bigest source used in public sentiment analysis and it's still relatively easy to scrape with login so this just shifts everything to grey/dark markets. The essentially means public researchers, students w/e lost access while dark market value increases significantly. So, as per character, this just empowers corporations and punishes public. Hopefully this means the upcoming end of Twitter.
• gt565k 3y ago
  The overthinking, speculation, and wasted thoughts in the comments due to misinformed people attempting to spread unsubstantiated claims is quite shocking. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674887204580073474?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674887204580073474?s=20 ---- @elonmusk "Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience. What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas. 5:06 PM · Jun 30, 2023" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ---- @nearcyan "so @elonmusk now that twitter blocks all requests that are not logged in, tweets can no longer be embedded in most chat apps I'd strongly suggest reconsidering the UX+growth tradeoffs made here (take note how tiktok, youtube, etc, do not need this despite much higher b/w req!)" ---- @elonmusk "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation."
  • timmytokyo 3y ago
    It's amusing that anyone takes anything Elon says seriously. At this point the "free speech absolutist" has about as much credibility as an orange reality TV star.
• raydiatian 3y ago
  I’m all for bluesky. Elon has crashed a lot of my faith in him as anything more than another insane industrialist. Fuck Elon, fuck Twitter
• javajosh 3y ago
  What if we just had sites and RSS-like aggregators? You could subscribe directly to the sources you like. You could then publish the aggregation. In turn you could subscribe to an aggregator, and perhaps even reaggregate their content, too. In this way we can have a distributed method of "following" content that we like. Basically this vision is one where everyone run's Google Reader in their browser and, if you're really gung-ho, you republish via some VPS hosted thing. The structure is a little like DNS - a hierarchical database.
  • larperdoodle 3y ago
    Did you just reinvent the fediverse?
    • javajosh 3y ago
      I don't really know. I'm on Mastodon but that doesn't really do anything I mentioned as far as I can tell.
  • acidburnNSA 3y ago
    I'm thinking it'd be nice to make a DB mapping people's twitter ids to their preferred RSS feed in anticipation of this future. Just not sure how to deal with commenting/ feedback/interaction. Guess that's what the fediverse is for.
• acidburnNSA 3y ago
  I have an archive of my tweets from a year ago. Not sure if the format changed, but this makes an html file with the full text and images and vids. Format to taste. import datetime import json import os import sys out = sys.stdout media = {} for med in os.listdir("data/tweet_media"): tid = med.split("-")[0] exist = media.get(tid, []) exist.append(med) media[tid] = exist out.write("<html><body>\n") with open("data/tweet.js") as d: vals = json.load(d) for val in sorted( vals, key=lambda val: datetime.datetime.strptime( val["tweet"]["created_at"], "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y" ), ): tweet = val["tweet"] out.write("<div>\n") out.write(f"<i>{tweet['created_at']}</i>\n") for fname in media.get(tweet["id"], []): if fname.endswith("mp4"): out.write( f'<video controls><source src="data/tweet_media/{fname}" type="video/mp4"></video>\n' ) else: out.write(f'<img src="data/tweet_media/{fname}"/>\n') if "full_text" in tweet: out.write(f'<p>{tweet["full_text"]}</p>\n') out.write("</div>\n") out.write("</body></html>\n")
• nonstopdev 3y ago
  Yelp you can’t see more than 3 reviews or photos without downloading their crap app. This anti pattern exists all over.
• kakakiki 3y ago
  From Elon's twitter (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation."
  • 7e 3y ago
    This is a direct consequence of Elon gutting Twitter's infrastructure.
  • throwaway290 3y ago
    I wonder if it's people seeking to move away from Twitter and working around crippled APIs, or if it's ClosedAI in which Musk himself invested before...
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    > Something went wrong. Try reloading.
    • meinheld111 3y ago
      I am trying…
  • LeafItAlone 3y ago
    I get only get > Something went wrong. Try reloading. on that link. Which, frankly, is hilarious.
  • jcims 3y ago
    I used to work for a very large financial institution. Scraping from finance apps was a material source of load even with substantial countermeasures in place. I can’t imagine what it does to sites like Twitter and Reddit (and HN).
• tempodox 3y ago
  Good. Maybe this will finally put an end to Twitter links being posted on HN.
• ericzawo 3y ago
  It is insane watching the tech elite continue to conjoin themselves into a shape that allows them the ability to actually say Twitter is going well with a straight face.
• elif 3y ago
  seems like a great way to prevent view botting now that they are a media platform, also better value for their advertisers to use realistic statistics.
• Red_Tarsius 3y ago
  It's a very myopic decision on their part if true, even worse than the API pricing update. This will stop any form of viral content on twitter from reaching non-internet people. Forget about sharing that one twitter link to friends or relatives. Instead it will make the twitter echo chamber increasingly detached and irrelevant to the larger discussion. On the long run, this decision changes the narrative of twitter from being a catalyst of political change (e.g. Arab Spring) to a tumblr clone with ecelebs. I don't have an account and never will. I followed a handful of accounts via nitter rss. Now I'll just wait until they build their presence outside the platform.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dragon111 3y ago
  [dead]
• victor9000 3y ago
  Bye bye Birdie!
• hashtag-til 3y ago
  I’m no E. Musk fan, but he’s got a point in this one. These hyped LLM startups are just freeloaders.
  • dyno12345 3y ago
    how do you feel about search engines?
  • notfed 3y ago
    What value exactly is there in training models on Twitter? To me it represents one of the worst signal-to-noise ratio forums on the net.
• dgan 3y ago
  Well their mobile version is so bad, I was avoiding clicking on links people send me, so that change only implements what i have been doing...
• bowsamic 3y ago
  Twitter is falling apart. Recently almost everyone I know got accused of being a spam account and told their accounts were locked. It’s not clear what this actually meant as they could still use it normally. Though I do know one who had to fight to get his back. I also am disallowed from liking tweets quite often and am told it looks “automated”. I also noticed a period on Thursday where they turned off the spam filter and I was inundated with likes from spam accounts
• vinay_ys 3y ago
  Wow what a hit piece. The tone of the article is so overtly biased against Elon/Twitter, TC editorial team lose whatever little journalistic credibility they might have had.
• pavlov 3y ago
  Hopefully this marks the end of posting direct tweet links to HN. I’ve been avoiding clicking Twitter links, and it’s frustrating to see them on the HN front page but then having to infer the content from comments. Maybe HN could even have a “Submit a microblog link” feature for that kind of content? When submitting a microblog link, there would be a small text box where you could copy the content of the tweet/whatever. This should be fair use as a quotation (but IANAL). It could be an important archival feature for situations like the current one, where all past HN submissions that point to Twitter are suddenly behind a login wall.
  • croes 3y ago
    Could be problem if the original source get deleted because of legal reasons. And I prefer the original source even if I don't like it.
  • cwillu 3y ago
    The worst is twitter links which are a broken summary
    • cwillu 3y ago
      of an interesting concept, briefly explained
      • cwillu 3y ago
        with a link to the actual paper or blogpost buried in the chain of tweets.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    You realize you don't have to click on every link, right? If someone publishes something on Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook and you don't like the form on that particular website, you can just ignore it and move on.
    • pavlov 3y ago
• mihaaly 3y ago
  No problem for me. (just for the statistics, I know it does not matter what is problem for me specifically and what not, just one point of view added. a person like me nervous about tracking my internet activity and blocks embedded twitter, does not like the twitter lifestyle of brief, single viewpoint, and oppinionated texts so never goes there by will, there will be no change. well written articles are much better anyway than brief and sudden reactions the twitter is made for, basicly smalltalk before the real conversation.)
• miramba 3y ago
  Many public or semipublic institutions like local and federal government, police, public transport made regular announcements there and sometimes only there. Hopefully this practice will change now that they see that it can become non-public in an instant. Citizens shouldn‘t be required to subscribe to large, private, foreign media companies to see announcements of their own government.
• xorcist 3y ago
  There are two basic strategies for publishing on the web. Either you lock up as much valuable data, forums, posts, and pictures you can, and provide a web based frontend to your service. This is the Minitel model, as exemplified by Facebook. Or you try to ride the coattails of network effects and remove any obstacles to your information, index public data, and generally tries to weave in the service in the public web as tight as possible. This is the www model, as exemplified by Google. Then there are the ones in between, such as newspapers, who generally wants to hide their information behind their service to increase the perceived value, but also wants to be reachable from the public web because without findability they have no value. This is of course paradoxical reasoning with no end of problems and no successful businesses. Twitter from the start was part of the web 2.0 movement with a clear www strategy. Now they are doing a strategic shift. But how valuable is twitter when they're no longer indexed by services such as Google? I can not see how they can grow their business in the long term from this. They lose the sentiment of a mirror of public discourse and instead will become like any web forum. So there will be zero journalistic value, and why would celebrities want to hang around then? It's not even a slippery slope. It's just a slope.
• phonk 3y ago
  [flagged]
• rnbaxter 3y ago
  Musk should sue for DDoS if the TOS don't allow massive scraping. He should also sue to explore the general legality of the AI racket, because copyright was made for humans and everyone on Twitter has posted under that assumption.
• netbioserror 3y ago
  The money printing and tech investing bonanza has allowed many programmers to flex their programming expertise without considering real-world resource costs. Now those bills come knocking and everyone acts like the previous utopian paradigm was somehow sustainable. I'm calling bullshit. If the fediverse ever had this kind of scraping pressure, it would collapse in minutes.
  • medler 3y ago
    It’s naive to say that this is the inevitable result of wider forces. If Elon had never offered to buy Twitter, or had managed to weasel out of it, you can bet the API would still be a thing and the login wall would be much as it was a year ago.
    • netbioserror 3y ago
      Twitter before the buyout was propped up by the forces I already mentioned. It was a resource black hole, and your claim that it was sustainable is, with high probability, categorically wrong.
• fnordfnordfnord 3y ago
  I've been rate limited all morning and all I do is casually browse and occasionally retweet, with infrequent replies. Something is wrong over there.
  • jmkni 3y ago
    Same here, was wondering if it was just me!
• r618 3y ago
  "Something went wrong. Try reloading." having normal user account throttled in desktop browser the whole day today so far great job twitter !
• bastard_op 3y ago
  I always curse whenever someone posts "news" from twitter, I pretty much just ignore them already. I've never had a twit account, and don't intend to get one, particularly just to see HN posts from poorly chosen sources. Much like paywalled sites, can we please stop posting twit links now?
• ouraf 3y ago
  Well, the man did say twitter would win the fight against the bots or die trying. Both results are positive IMO
• jrochkind1 3y ago
  One outcome of no longer allowing unlimited public access to tweets is that it will become very difficult to cache or archive them. (And Twitter won't want to allow caches or archives since if course they could be used to get around read rate limits) To the extent that tweets (does Twitter not call them that anymore?) are an important part of the public record, including being able to verify whether someone really did tweet a certain thing at a certain time, this is a little bit scary. And just generally for our ability to preserve historical record, already threatened by the digital world, and apparently getting worse instead of better.