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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

#521

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

CydeWeys wrote: post #152
throw6746 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious Fiverr-like spam accounts > Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive? Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even asking for email, including this o…

They've already rejected doing nothing, as it doesn't work. I want Tesla to give me a free car too, but it ain't happening. At some point a company makes decisions you aren't gonna agree with and your only recourse is to not use them. If that means you can't read Twitter, then that's the price you pay. You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.

> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.

If we go that route of argumentation: Can Twitter please close shop and go away then? Their value is vastly overestimated: Most people don't want to use Twitter specifically, they are peer pressured into it because it is where everyone is. There are better free and open source alternatives without them trying to steal from me. Twitter burns all that money (do they generate a profit yet?) to stay on top, just so that nobody else can.

To stay with your analogy: Tesla rolled up and pushed every other car manufacturer out, now they are giving a somewhat free car and in return they want you to do everything they say, and the keys to your house "just in case".

We don't owe Twitter anything.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#522

Post by xtracto »

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.

I always saw some comments of people saying "RIP Inbox" after one of their posts became popular in Reddit. I kid you not, it was not until earlier today that I found out that the reason for those comments is that apparenlty Reddit sends replies to your post to your email inbox. My reddit account is so old that it doesn't have a linked email, so I never realized that.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#523

Post by tomc1985 »

debaserab2 wrote: post #511
autoexec wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often hear people suggest that the internet couldn't exist without corporate interests and surveillance capitalism. usually along the lines of "If there were no ads, we wouldn't have any internet at all!" That's an example of what corporate interests have brainwashed people into thinking. They didn't have to turn us against IRC. Most internet users don't even know it exists.

So, in this fictitious world where IRC is a stable protocol and easy enough for the average layperson to use, who pays for the IRC server bills and how?

> easy enough for the average layperson to use

At one point it was easy enough for the average person to use, because the average person had to deal with a command-line. But tech, in its infinite quest to Make More Money, keeps chasing the dumbest of the dumb so that it can expand its market into an imagined infinity. It kinds of reminds me of the windshield repair shop that takes a baseball bat to nearby windshields at night to drive business

How about we work towards unwinding this whole mess and meet users in the middle??

FOSS and open protocols are criminally undervalued because of greed, and all the fake newbie empathy it generates

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#524

Post by Akronymus »

yosito wrote: post #365
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.

Thanks. I broke my reddit habit when I realized that most of the communities on reddit are just ideological echo chambers where you get banned for saying anything the community doesn't agree with. It lost most of it's value when honest conversations couldn't take place anymore. Now the only time I use reddit is when the only search results with the answer to a question I have point to reddit, and I've grown very wear…

While HN definitely becomes a bit of an echochamber at times too, at least you can still voice opinions that go against it without people going through your history to attack you rather than your arguments. Occasionally you get downvoted/flagged enough that people can't reply anymore, but again: That stays with just that comment/thread.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#525

Post by matheusmoreira »

miohtama wrote: post #72
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).

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...

Their fraud problems don't justify anything though. Nobody outside Twitter cares about Twitter's problems. Just because they have a problem doesn't mean they should get to solve it, especially if it involves personal information disclosure which can get people killed.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#526

Post by young_unixer »

riffic wrote: post #35

I posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472 this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most. I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100…

The real culprits here are these public sector agencies. They shouldn't use inaccessible mediums like Twitter as their primary channel of information.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#527

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?

I want them to do nothing.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#528

Post by est31 »

arsome wrote: post #162
est31 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then they don't get data on which tweets you viewed.

They can't set a cookie? Associate my phone with my desktop by IP address correlation on home ISPs? C'mon, they oughta be more capable than that.

Cookies don't track you nearly as well. What happens if you delete a cookie? Fingerprinting isn't a universal solution either as iDevices all look extremely similar to each other. As to IP addresses, they only work if you connect from your home WiFi. Not every phone has that set up. Often they use carrier grade NAT so you only have a few IPs to work with.

Last, customers of their data love being able to search/correlate by phone number, not by some pseudonymous identifier that might not be present in some other dataset.

I think this crackdown might in fact be a reaction to attempts by institutions like Apple to ensure better privacy. If fingerprinting isn't giving them the data, they ask for it directly at the threat of restricting access.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#529

Post by iainmerrick »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #90
danielmg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fewer features

I thought it is one of these “don’t end sentences with prepositions” weird rules no one really follows.

The prepositions one was invented after the fact, it has never been a real grammatical rule.

“Fewer” versus “less” for countable things is more of an actual rule (but of course that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it).

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#530

Post by MichaelZuo »

A lot of folks seem to forget that Twitter also has electricity bills they have to pay directly or indirectly. Serving every tweet, along with everything else you see on the internet, does cost money. Usually it’s so small we don’t worry about it but it’s certainly not zero.
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