7 ms·

It's over. It isn't just Twitter, it's every single website that's turned themselves into a login-walled "application". Twitter's relative openness lasted a l

by rchaud 3y ago

It's over. It isn't just Twitter, it's every single website that's turned themselves into a login-walled "application". Twitter's relative openness lasted a long time. It was open by default because it is a product built in 2006, when the idea of coralling people into walled gardens to show them ads didn't exist. Apps built later take the concept of "walled garden" as a default feature. Slack , Discord, Snapchat, Tiktok, Telegram .... all largely closed off platforms. You can't see anything unless you're logged in.

neglesaks 3y ago
[dead]
renegade-otter 3y ago
But Twitter is an ad-driven platform. Most of those other ones are not. It's ALL about the exposure to eyeballs. But now that Elon chewed on some wires and killed whole colocations, they are not able to serve all that traffic that is supposed to view the ads - for all the talk about how "Twitter is still running like it used to" after being gutted like a fish. It is definitely not.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It's not really that ad driven anymore since most of the advertisers have gone to fuck themselves as musk told them to :) But seriously, if they want to increase revenue it probably is more effective to not insult their advertisers than it is to make a login mandatory.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  Once upon a time, you could go to Twitter as a non-registered user by clicking on an embed in another application, view the post, and then click on the user's post and see all their interactions without ever registering or logging in. Today, you get to see the one post, and if you're lucky, it will give you a few of their most highly interacted posts. If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms, especially when the platform in question is losing relevance and isn't unique. What genius! Not only did he make the ads less valuable, but his behavior has created less competition for the ad slots that people actually see. I've watched while shaking my head as a former employer has taken a similar approach and absolutely cratered their online business. I warned them that it was going to end in disaster. I provided the evidence that we'd used to make decisions against exactly what they were attempting to do. I can't unstupid them.
  - jdminhbg 3y ago
    > If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. To serve you ads that have any hope of making money, they need to know which eyeballs they're going in front of.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      No they don't. People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters wouldn't exist. You can even make money on the internet this way: www.ethicalads.io. Twitter also has an enormous advantage: even if they don't know anything about you, they know a whole bunch about whoever posted the tweets you're reading. They could do a lot of targeting by just looking at the content you're viewing.
      - jdminhbg 3y ago
        > People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters Billboards and bus stop posters are cheaper to run than Twitter.com is, so making much less money is ok. The whole reason Twitter has always been unprofitable but Facebook/Meta is a trillion-dollar public company is that FB figured out how profitably identify users and serve them ads and Twitter didn't.
        burkaman 3y ago
        I agree with you, it is unquestionably more profitable to spy on people and then sell them ads. My point is that you can still make money without the spying part, and there is no reason for us to accept that the two always have to be bundled. If you can't make a profit without spying on people then your business model sucks. The fact that you might be able to make more money by being less ethical is not very interesting, that's true of almost anyone.
- godelski 3y ago
  Well it probably doesn't help that they're now riddled with bots. About 6 months after the Musk takeover I've started to receive 2-3 likes a day from bots and a follow every week. I only have an academic account so my bot interaction vastly outweighs my non-bot interaction. I stopped reporting them because they still exist. The big change I saw was that they no longer suggest to me 30 other bots with the same profile picture when I click on the bot's page but instead suggest I follow other researchers. I guess a slight improvement, but only visually. It's weird to see him talk about how bots are so harmful to the platform, see that the platform is identifying bots, but then not see any action. These are accounts that can be identified via a naive bayes filter too, so pretty low hanging fruit. But then again, same thing is happening to my gmail.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    There is a financial incentive to ignore bots. The investment banks and advertiser's want to know how many eyeballs the site has, and counting bots too increases that number and hence the company valuation.
    - godelski 3y ago
      I'm more taking about the hypocrisy since Elon made a huge deal about bots
mjevans 3y ago
Forget them all. If it isn't on the open web it's a private club.
rplnt 3y ago
Slack, Discord, Snapchat, Telegram are not open forums as their main selling point. They are 1 to 1 or group/community chat applications first. So relatively scoped or even private. It's like a blog vs icq/irc.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  And yet Discord has become a de-facto forum replacement for niche topics/communities. ...Which is awful. As is often said here, Discord is where information goes to die.
  - baxuz 3y ago
    It's horrible that a lot of web development tools and libraries keep the discussions only on discord.
thriftwy 3y ago
You can see plain text Telegram (and Twitter?) posts by a direct link without login. You cannot do that anymore to FB or Instagram posts.
ineedaj0b 3y ago
It’s because of AI scraping. Wait until you realize ‘verified’ paid accounts will be a necessity in the future to prove personhood unless we toss it all in the wind and create a national id system which guess what, you’ll be tracked by. Which way brave one? You will lose an arm or a leg. You get to choose
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  > Which way brave one? Probably the same way my grandparents did.
- Retr0id 3y ago
  Why should Twitter care about AI scraping, beyond the load it causes to their servers? Scraping isn't new, and I don't think the overall rate of scraping has changed much since the advent of AI - it only needs to be scraped once, then it's in a dataset (I don't have any stats to back this up, though)
  - a_bonobo 3y ago
    If you have a company building AI on top of Twitter's data, it could've been a company Twitter itself could've built. It's the feeling of lost money for them.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      The API has been wide open until 2023, so if there was anything of value, I think we would have seen something by now. Musk would also have been focused on that instead of trying to become WeChat US.
  - lenkite 3y ago
    According to Musk, below: Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said. “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. Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience." To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day
Dalewyn 3y ago
You must be new and young, most internet communities have always been login-walled or otherwise inaccessible to the wider public. Why? Nowadays it's to combat freeloading "AI" data scraping, but more predominantly it's been to fight spam and scraping of data in general. So no, nothing is over. If anything, we're getting back to the status quo of 20 years ago when most forums required you to make an account to enter.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Here's a list of open-access communities I grew up on: Hacker News, Myspace, LiveJournal, XDA-Developers, RateyourMusic/AbsolutePunk forums, and about a thousand phpBB/vBuletin boards from 20 years ago. Every single one of these is close to 20 years old. It is in fact the "new and young" that think they need to "download the app" and "join the community" for every single thing that could just be a Discourse message board.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Hell, there were BBSs that let you browse around under a guest account with zero requirement to register an account
- g-b-r 3y ago
  It's as if you were describing an alternate reality Extremely few forums required an account to read them 20 years ago, that practice largely began with Facebook
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Most of the forums I patronized left their index open to the wider public, maybe also let the wider public read posts, and almost always blocked user profiles (read: treasure troves of personal information) without logging in.
    - g-b-r 3y ago
      User profiles were indeed blocked to the public on most forums, but I very rarely found that a problem Change that maybe to definitely, I guarantee you that very few were auth-walled
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Add Reddit to the list. Lately, I get "Whoa pardner" treatment whenever I try to read it without logging in. But at least you can still create an account without a phone and without even an email. AI is evil and already makes us all suffer.
HunOL 3y ago
Actually in case of Telegram you could open in browser public channels. Example: https://t.me/s/durov/ https://t.me/s/durov/ https://t.me/s/telegram/ https://t.me/s/telegram/
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
firemelt 3y ago
twitter is the best shit that startups culture ever produced for developer healthyness built with rails full restful API and good docs

by rchaud 3y ago

neglesaks 3y ago

[dead]

renegade-otter 3y ago

But Twitter is an ad-driven platform. Most of those other ones are not. It's ALL about the exposure to eyeballs. But now that Elon chewed on some wires and killed whole colocations, they are not able to serve all that traffic that is supposed to view the ads - for all the talk about how "Twitter is still running like it used to" after being gutted like a fish. It is definitely not.

wkat4242 3y ago
It's not really that ad driven anymore since most of the advertisers have gone to fuck themselves as musk told them to :) But seriously, if they want to increase revenue it probably is more effective to not insult their advertisers than it is to make a login mandatory.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Once upon a time, you could go to Twitter as a non-registered user by clicking on an embed in another application, view the post, and then click on the user's post and see all their interactions without ever registering or logging in. Today, you get to see the one post, and if you're lucky, it will give you a few of their most highly interacted posts. If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms, especially when the platform in question is losing relevance and isn't unique. What genius! Not only did he make the ads less valuable, but his behavior has created less competition for the ad slots that people actually see. I've watched while shaking my head as a former employer has taken a similar approach and absolutely cratered their online business. I warned them that it was going to end in disaster. I provided the evidence that we'd used to make decisions against exactly what they were attempting to do. I can't unstupid them.
- jdminhbg 3y ago
  > If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. To serve you ads that have any hope of making money, they need to know which eyeballs they're going in front of.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    No they don't. People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters wouldn't exist. You can even make money on the internet this way: www.ethicalads.io. Twitter also has an enormous advantage: even if they don't know anything about you, they know a whole bunch about whoever posted the tweets you're reading. They could do a lot of targeting by just looking at the content you're viewing.
    - jdminhbg 3y ago
      > People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters Billboards and bus stop posters are cheaper to run than Twitter.com is, so making much less money is ok. The whole reason Twitter has always been unprofitable but Facebook/Meta is a trillion-dollar public company is that FB figured out how profitably identify users and serve them ads and Twitter didn't.
      - burkaman 3y ago
        I agree with you, it is unquestionably more profitable to spy on people and then sell them ads. My point is that you can still make money without the spying part, and there is no reason for us to accept that the two always have to be bundled. If you can't make a profit without spying on people then your business model sucks. The fact that you might be able to make more money by being less ethical is not very interesting, that's true of almost anyone.
godelski 3y ago
Well it probably doesn't help that they're now riddled with bots. About 6 months after the Musk takeover I've started to receive 2-3 likes a day from bots and a follow every week. I only have an academic account so my bot interaction vastly outweighs my non-bot interaction. I stopped reporting them because they still exist. The big change I saw was that they no longer suggest to me 30 other bots with the same profile picture when I click on the bot's page but instead suggest I follow other researchers. I guess a slight improvement, but only visually. It's weird to see him talk about how bots are so harmful to the platform, see that the platform is identifying bots, but then not see any action. These are accounts that can be identified via a naive bayes filter too, so pretty low hanging fruit. But then again, same thing is happening to my gmail.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  There is a financial incentive to ignore bots. The investment banks and advertiser's want to know how many eyeballs the site has, and counting bots too increases that number and hence the company valuation.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I'm more taking about the hypocrisy since Elon made a huge deal about bots

mjevans 3y ago

Forget them all. If it isn't on the open web it's a private club.

rplnt 3y ago

Slack, Discord, Snapchat, Telegram are not open forums as their main selling point. They are 1 to 1 or group/community chat applications first. So relatively scoped or even private. It's like a blog vs icq/irc.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
And yet Discord has become a de-facto forum replacement for niche topics/communities. ...Which is awful. As is often said here, Discord is where information goes to die.
- baxuz 3y ago
  It's horrible that a lot of web development tools and libraries keep the discussions only on discord.

thriftwy 3y ago

You can see plain text Telegram (and Twitter?) posts by a direct link without login. You cannot do that anymore to FB or Instagram posts.

ineedaj0b 3y ago

It’s because of AI scraping. Wait until you realize ‘verified’ paid accounts will be a necessity in the future to prove personhood unless we toss it all in the wind and create a national id system which guess what, you’ll be tracked by. Which way brave one? You will lose an arm or a leg. You get to choose

singleshot_ 3y ago
> Which way brave one? Probably the same way my grandparents did.
Retr0id 3y ago
Why should Twitter care about AI scraping, beyond the load it causes to their servers? Scraping isn't new, and I don't think the overall rate of scraping has changed much since the advent of AI - it only needs to be scraped once, then it's in a dataset (I don't have any stats to back this up, though)
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  If you have a company building AI on top of Twitter's data, it could've been a company Twitter itself could've built. It's the feeling of lost money for them.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    The API has been wide open until 2023, so if there was anything of value, I think we would have seen something by now. Musk would also have been focused on that instead of trying to become WeChat US.
- lenkite 3y ago
  According to Musk, below: Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said. “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. Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience." To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day

Dalewyn 3y ago

You must be new and young, most internet communities have always been login-walled or otherwise inaccessible to the wider public. Why? Nowadays it's to combat freeloading "AI" data scraping, but more predominantly it's been to fight spam and scraping of data in general. So no, nothing is over. If anything, we're getting back to the status quo of 20 years ago when most forums required you to make an account to enter.

rchaud 3y ago
Here's a list of open-access communities I grew up on: Hacker News, Myspace, LiveJournal, XDA-Developers, RateyourMusic/AbsolutePunk forums, and about a thousand phpBB/vBuletin boards from 20 years ago. Every single one of these is close to 20 years old. It is in fact the "new and young" that think they need to "download the app" and "join the community" for every single thing that could just be a Discourse message board.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Hell, there were BBSs that let you browse around under a guest account with zero requirement to register an account
g-b-r 3y ago
It's as if you were describing an alternate reality Extremely few forums required an account to read them 20 years ago, that practice largely began with Facebook
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Most of the forums I patronized left their index open to the wider public, maybe also let the wider public read posts, and almost always blocked user profiles (read: treasure troves of personal information) without logging in.
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    User profiles were indeed blocked to the public on most forums, but I very rarely found that a problem Change that maybe to definitely, I guarantee you that very few were auth-walled

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Add Reddit to the list. Lately, I get "Whoa pardner" treatment whenever I try to read it without logging in. But at least you can still create an account without a phone and without even an email. AI is evil and already makes us all suffer.

HunOL 3y ago

Actually in case of Telegram you could open in browser public channels. Example: https://t.me/s/durov/ https://t.me/s/durov/ https://t.me/s/telegram/ https://t.me/s/telegram/

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

firemelt 3y ago

twitter is the best shit that startups culture ever produced for developer healthyness built with rails full restful API and good docs