Occasionally a link to a tweet will be submitted here as a story by itself. Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium by making the site nearly unusable without an account. Until a few days ago you could read all the tweets you wanted but clicking any of them would pop up a “join twitter” screen. Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs.
Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
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Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#2I guess there isn't much we can do besides creating an account in 30 seconds and not using it, it's not that bad
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#3Have you tried clearing your cookies and your local storage?
There also are alternative interfaces such as nitter
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#4I've noticed this too, but that's also the reason why I use Nitter [0].
I'm also a bit lazy so I've also setup a redirector plugin to automatically redirect every twitter link to Nitter, been happy since then.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#5> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium
Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me.
> Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.
The only login-wall that doesn’t make sense to me is Medium’s, as the site is primarily designed as a publishing platform rather than a community platform. Forcing users to create an account to read a blog post isn’t a great way to generate wide viewership of your blog posts.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#6I see this as a feature and not a bug now that I no longer have an account on Twitter.
If I absolutely want to read a tweet, I can. But the barrier to entry is a _good_ thing to me.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#7I guess there isn't much we can do besides creating an account in 30 seconds and not using it, it's not that bad
On medium, when I logged out and saw what sort of experience the site was giving the readers of the things I worked so hard to post there, I stopped posting there.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#8I've noticed this too, but that's also the reason why I use Nitter [0]. I'm also a bit lazy so I've also setup a redirector plugin to automatically redirect every twitter link to Nitter, been happy since then. [0] https://nitter.nl
Nitter is great. The Privacy Redirect extension can automatically redirect your Twitter page loads to Nitter:
https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
If you are on Android, you can also use the free and open source Fritter client to view tweets and browse Twitter without an account:
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#9No post body was provided.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#10> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. > Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.…
In the end no company is obligated to do much of anything. We see that twitter probably wouldn't have achieved the kind of market dominance they have if they had started out this way though. So it feels like a sort of bait-and-switch, which annoys. That now that they have we have to deal with it or be cut out of something so popular, that they can only get away with because they are so popular. But sure, they have no obligation to not do that.