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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

#261

Post by pantalaimon »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #223
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For reddit, IMO the simplest things you can do to improve the experience is to force the old reddit design (old.reddit.com) when on desktop, and use any app except the official app when on mobile.

The old mobile interface (i.reddit.com) works well too

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#262

Post by pomian »

miohtama wrote: post #119
Spivak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are some attemps to make proof-of-human https://herrjemand.medium.com/why-cloudflares-captcha-replac... https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ But in the end it comes to the fact that your Google/Apple needs to have your app store account that is verified to be human enough (less fake accounts) and then a web browser confirms this via a login to this account.

We get into the Ex Machina situation. It was a pretty good movie about Android (robot?} proving itself human.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#263

Post by zigradett »

This entire comment section is proof positive that there is much room for innovation and improvement in the space for interactive, online discussion of news items.

Twitter is committing suicide by requiring phone numbers and logins to even read tweets, the way Digg committed suicide and sent all its users stampeding over to Reddit.

Reddit themselves are committing suicide with their aggressive user interface changes, and their dark gangs of out-of-control moderators.

Looks to me like USENET sent us over to LiveJournal sent us over to Digg, sent us over to Reddit, sent us over to Hacker News, and something good and new can grow and replace them all.

Because I am not handing over my phone number to read anyone's tweets.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#264

Post by pantalaimon »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #144
fighterpilot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a copious number of round button-icons that are not intuitive? It's fucking insulting.

It seems that, at least in reddit's case, the issue is preloading a lot of stuff that on the old website wasn't preloaded. Like videos. Ben Awad[0] made a quick technical comparison between the two websites and this was his conclusion. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jkSiIBDDZ8

That's also what makes it pretty much unusable when you are on a slow mobile connection

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#265

Post by ChrisArchitect »

This is user hostile a bit maybe but the content wasn't blocked, you read what you linked to. If you want to browse around and do something more than passively consume, aka actually be a user of the site, then log in. Don't really hate them for this. All you lurkers that just consume consume and then demand some input over how a site works (coincidentally this post is on reddit which is the other one that comes to mind often complained about on here) will just have to create an account to participate and be part of a site. This has been going on with other things like IG and FB forever, with even IG being app-only until recent years where they made it more web browsing friendly (but still have to log in to actually see more/do anything on the site.)

Fairplay at this point.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#267

Post by antifa »

Kye wrote: post #116
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).

You can remove the number after you've used the account for a while and not get locked, but they shouldn't require it in the first place.

The point is to never give it to them.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#268

Post by bityard »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #67
AlwaysRock wrote: post #4

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.

Android has a client called RedReader that makes Reddit highly tolerable: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/

Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#269

Post by smoldesu »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #225
eurasiantiger wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remind me again, why did we leave IRC?

Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30 years. There have been attempts to make it friendlier with things like IRCCloud, but then the beards just scoff at the idea of a $5/month bouncer-as-a-service and go right back to wondering why the protocol is dying.

I'd argue that Twitter hasn't been improved meaningfully in the past decade either, certainly no more than how IRCCloud has 'improved' upon IRC.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#270

Post by zigradett »

b3morales wrote: post #170
throw149102 wrote: post #128

Honestly, this seems like a plus for humanity. I don't think Twitter has really improved the world in any significant way, and maybe made it worse. Anything that prevents the twitter universe from seeping into mine is a good change.

Realistically, though, is this going to: - decrease Twitter usage, or - increase Twitter signups They apparently have calculated that they have enough mass that people will be dragged towards the latter.

Realistically, though, is this going to decrease Twitter usage.

I would never hand my phone number over to Twitter. Would you?

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