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Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

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Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#101

Post by queuebert »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #37
pkdpic_y9k wrote: post #22

Im just curious, what are the motivations for a company to make this move? It seems like a death sentence to me but I cant think of any examples off-hand.

I imagine that they have two motivations in mind: 1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet. 2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account"…

They still have cookies and your browser fingerprint. You might be surprised how complete their picture already is.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#102

Post by finiteseries »

jchw wrote: post #91
finiteseries wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created an account in May 2021 without a phone number to follow some people without blogs etc, and it’s still working with just a disposable email. They’ve added sign in/up with Google & Apple recently though.

You can get away with that on a residential IP sometimes, but don’t count on it. Log in from the wrong location or a VPN or do certain patterns of behavior and it drops you.

I exclusively use it via VPN, with a ProtonMail address from the web (so many login notifications) while like, commenting, and subscribing on politically controversial content and soccer.

Three, almost four months in and zilch. It’ll be a good test case anyways.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#104

Post by Svetlitski »

macksd wrote: post #66
NowhereMan wrote: post #38

Do they whitelist accounts of public officials? For instance, having the POTUS account behind an auth wall seems like a horrible practice.

It bothered from the other angle when POTUS started pushing Twitter as an important channel to keep up on what was going on because it's hardly ideal for that. My local government has similarly been making Nextdoor a de facto requirement if you want to know what's happening or want to give feedback (especially in an era of frequent town office closures). I tend to favor minimal government but I think the USPS was an…

For what it’s worth, you can sign-up through DMAChoice to stop receiving junk mail [1]. It takes a few months after you sign up to really take effect, but it has easily eliminated 90% of the mail I used to receive. Well worth it IMO for the $2 fee every 10 years.

https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#105

Post by mywittyname »

NoGravitas wrote: post #69
TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content. My first thought when I saw the headline was, how long until the front page features this: Reddit starts to require login to view posts (twitter.com) Then I realized this has probably already happened a while ago. Such is the treadmill of s…

The modern internet: four websites each filled with nothing but screenshots from the other three.

There's a sad amount of "news" content on the web that amount to listicals of a Reddit post.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#106

Post by est31 »

Spivak wrote: post #95
_dujt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Like seriously I’ve implemented at a company I worked for and it’s the least invasive thing to actually rate limit people. Alternatives included: - pay a small fee but that requires a credit card - send us government documents which is worse - mine crypto for a while but it doesn’t stop people who are actually motivated - send a selfie and then do some face matchin…

Personally I'm a fan of the fee idea. You can quickly outstrip the yearly revenue per user with even a small fee, and the fee payment could e.g. happen via PayPal which doesn't require credit cards, to give one example. The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes which renders this entire exercise pointless.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#107

Post by lgats »

commoner wrote: post #31

Another workaround for Android users is the FOSS app Fritter: https://fritter.cc Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app. Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect [1] Instructions for enabling custom extensions…

Or the web based “nitter” project https://nitter.domain.glass or https://nitter.cc

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#109

Post by 9034725985 »

wildpeaks wrote: post #64

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).

Personally, I don’t mind giving them my phone number because my number is already public information. It sucks though that I can’t get tweets by text.

This was the original use case of twitter. I understand SMS is not secure enough to publish tweets but why can we no longer get texts when someone tweets?

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#110

Post by bastard_op »

So can people please quit posting twitter feeds finally?

Some of us still have never used or signed up with twitter, or feel the need to, and really don't want to. Bad enough they removed non-javascript access, since they are permablocked through noscript here, I simply close postings on HN that link there and curse them for bothering. Asking for a login atop that is just a 4x non-starter for "news" links.

Yes, some of us still respect our privacy.

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