Live data from Hacker News

Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

reddit.com

71–80 of 643 posts

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#71

When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's great if you want to get off them.

Yes this. Life is getting progressively better now Twitter, Reddit and Apple pissed me off. I’ve got more time, money and a healthier outlook on life.

Now if only I could shake HN.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#72

On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront).

Here is a research how much phone number verification decreases account fraud a.k.a. spam bots

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#73

When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's great if you want to get off them.

I almost hesitate to share these because I too found that Reddit's dark patterns were a large part of what helped me break that habit. I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit with all dark patterns removed. There is also an alternative front end for twitter called nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app / login.

+1 for teddit.net, I discovered it because it’s a default Insight Browser extension, as is old.reddit.net.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#74

When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's great if you want to get off them.

I don’t have Chrome installed on any of my devices but I’ve noticed when I’m on reddit.com on my iPhone it prompts me to either use the Reddit app or “continue browsing” using the Chrome app. Does Google pay for this as some sort of an advertisement? Or is Reddit incentivized in some way to plug Chrome over Safari or DDG “browser”? When I click “continue” it lets me just keep using my current browser but I always wonder if it would open in Chrome if the app were available on my device.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#75

Funny, I got downvoted for mentioning the same thing in a post about a Tweet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.

I had a thread moderated away due to this yesterday :/ sucks.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#76

Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible. This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.

It's because they need to start collecting more first-party data from users who land on their site. This is a result of Apple (and others in the future) blocking third-party cookie tracking.

They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This is good since this corporations are basically killing themselves since people, slowly but steady, are realizing they can get info elsewhere on the internet (and people start sharing outside them). So yeah, they are basically forcing users to migrate to more open services.

Eh maybe. The problem is that IMO there aren’t any obvious alternatives to Reddit. I remember when Digg committed suicide with a pretty bad redesign and most disgruntled users moved to Reddit. I’ve been pretty annoyed with the changes Reddit has implemented in the past couple of years, but I haven’t found another place to go (that’s not necessarily a bad thing). HN is the closest alternative but the scope of topics w…

My Reddit habit has been all but replaced with private Slacks and Discords these days. Either hobby / interest groups, or an "alumni Slack" full of old work friends from a company I worked at a long time.

I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway. Small private forums, where you can actually have real discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.

For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram once per decade, or something like that. But whatever people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses want.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#78

For now, adding the following to your uBlock Origin filters works: twitter.com##.r-zchlnj.r-1xcajam.r-12vffkv.r-1d2f490.r-1p0dtai.r-aqfbo4.css-1dbjc4n twitter.com##html:style(overflow:auto !important) twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)

Blocking cookies for twitter.com in settings is a much more reliable way to disable the login popup, for now anyway. Your first filter there uses a randomly generated ID that will change when Twitter pushes an update to prod.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#79

Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible. This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.

Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You no longer just ”get” them. You need to apply. I was rejected for getting key to export my own tweets.

Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#80

On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront).

Here is a research how much phone number verification decreases account fraud a.k.a. spam bots http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

Of course, in order to help out the unfortunate website operators, people should willingly give up pii that the same companies have shown they don’t give a damn about protecting. /s
Post reply on HN