I guess the price of old accounts is going up a bit.
Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
51–60 of 393 posts
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume by "propaganda" what you mean is "deplatforming". Much easier to keep people who emit thoughtcrime off of your platform if they have to keep getting new mobile numbers each time they are banned.
Does Twitter have a right to police their platform or not?
Companies shouldn't be regulated at all ever except when it comes to letting racists spout hate. Then they should be regulated into requiring that. Plus harassment and other bad behaviours.
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#53It's understandable they might require a phone number to keep down spam. It's less understandable they'd lie to new users on the reasons their account was blocked. We can't expect even the smallest scraps of honesty from corporations anymore.
It is understandable why they'd lie. If the error message was something like, "your request was blocked because you've included HTTP headers in the order [x-foo, x-bar], which is the header ordering in 99.9% of spam tweets", they would just change their agent's header order instead of no longer spending spam. I am not sure people realize what a high percentage of users of "free" services are spam bots of some sort. S…
You misunderstand - not divulging what triggered the suspicion isn't lying. Claiming a phone number is required due to suspicious activity, when in fact it is required of almost all new accounts, is.
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#54[deleted]
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sad but true. At the hosting company I work for, we had to start requiring phone numbers for cloud servers due to a massive wave of abuse. It's one of the few roadblocks that helps at least somewhat. Previously, we didn't even require a full name. A few idiots always ruin it for everyone.
You seem to ignore that this constrains abusers as much as it does legitimate users. Collective punishment in order to mitigate abuse by a few is the wrong way to go.
Easy to say until you're running a service that's a target of said abuse. Do you have a better solution?
If you do, it'd be quickly adopted because no one likes adding unnecessary friction.
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#56Something like this happened to me. It certainly prompted me to look for alternatives (e.g., Mastodon). You can start small: sign into Twitter every other month. IIRC, this will decrease the number of active users they report to investors.
I can't get the article to load (hugged to death?), but I'd imagine the reason that they are finally moving on this is due to combat harassment. I can't blame Twitter for adding friction to its sign up process because of others abusing the platform.
I could blame them, but considering everything else wrong with Twitter there is no point. Avoiding Twitter is easy and you lose very little.
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is understandable why they'd lie. If the error message was something like, "your request was blocked because you've included HTTP headers in the order [x-foo, x-bar], which is the header ordering in 99.9% of spam tweets", they would just change their agent's header order instead of no longer spending spam. I am not sure people realize what a high percentage of users of "free" services are spam bots of some sort. S…
You misunderstand - not divulging what triggered the suspicion isn't lying. Claiming a phone number is required due to suspicious activity, when in fact it is required of almost all new accounts, is .
I'd find anyone creating a Twitter account in 2019 to be somewhat suspect.
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#58Something like this happened to me. It certainly prompted me to look for alternatives (e.g., Mastodon). You can start small: sign into Twitter every other month. IIRC, this will decrease the number of active users they report to investors.
I can't get the article to load (hugged to death?), but I'd imagine the reason that they are finally moving on this is due to combat harassment. I can't blame Twitter for adding friction to its sign up process because of others abusing the platform.
About a year ago, there were a lot of topical submissions to HN (that I liked reading) but received community backlash, because they consisted almost entirely of posting tweets (of Trump et al) about the current political situation. The community here made an argument that I could agree with: if I wanted to read it, I should just follow them on Twitter.
So I made a Twitter account, that I checked about once every two months, that followed the relevant players. I didn't make any tweets of my own and I didn't favorite or retweet anything. Just catching up on what people have been saying worked for my interests. Twitter banned me for Harassment. I had nothing that could have possibly offended anyone - I didn't even have a bio for my profile. I'd say the system assumed I was a robot? It was frustrating to me, because in order to appeal my ban, I had to provide my phone number. I don't want to give Twitter my phone number. I get the fewest spam calls of anyone I know, and I do that by protecting my phone number. Twitter has earned no trust from me, and is not getting my phone number. I tried to delete my account, but it needed my phone number to do that. I tried to sign out of the account so I could just see tweets as a guest, but it wanted my phone number for that too. Well, I signed out by deleting browser data, but there is still a tombstone on my email address in their database.
This experience has sown distrust with me about Twitter's harassment numbers. It's not that I don't think harassment is a real problem, it's that I think they are often self-serving in their actions and analysis, and for them to say they're doing something because of harassment isn't enough for me anymore. We can speculate all we want about what their reasons might be, but to be so trusting as to take their harassment claim at face value isn't something I'll do.
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#59I don't use Twitter much, but every time I click on a Twitter link from my Android phone...it pops an error page.
The page says either something about an error, or that I'm rate limited. A page refresh usually then works fine and displays the page.
Is this related to similar attempts to block bots/spammers? Or maybe just something wrong on my end?
Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a really split opinion about this. On the one hand I've seen a lot of really hateful stuff lobbed around on sites like Twitter, and I suspect that linking accounts to phone numbers would dramatically reduce that. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want Twitter (et. al.) knowing my phone number.
I agree. I would rather pay them some fee. But they don't seem to want to monetize their service via user fees.
Oh my god, paid Twitter would be amazing.
Well, then again, something awful was a paid forum iirc, and it was still a den of villainy.