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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

#161

Post by jagger27 »

AutumnCurtain wrote: post #34
digitalsushi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a cell phone, I can type "best driveway shovel" on my phone, and it will take me to google. Google will have an overlay that tells me searching for the best driveway shovels is better in an app. I close that overlay. The first hit is twitter. The second is reddit. I skip twitter. I get an overlay telling me to install a reddit app, or continue in the website. I click continue in website. There is an overlay tellin…

Old.reddit.com is the only remotely usable form of the website and seems to have none of the obnoxious popups.

The day old.reddit.com goes offline is the day I delete my account. There must be vocal internal holdouts keeping it up.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

#162

Post by james_pm »

Wonder if a case could be made that since public officials like the US President or other "official" government accounts post to Twitter, that everyone should be able to view all the (public) tweets of those accounts without requiring an account for the viewer. Perhaps that is already the case?

Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

#163

Post by saxonww »

I set up a private Nitter instance to browse. It works well, and I would recommend other people give it a try. I'm using the Privacy Redirect extension in Firefox to auto-redirect to Nitter. I'm doing the same thing with Invidious for Youtube; Privacy Redirect also lets you redirect Reddit and Instagram if you use those sites.

The only real issue I've run into is that I don't have HTTPS set up for this private/local instance, so embeds don't always work. This is easily solved by getting a cert I just haven't done it yet.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

#164

Post by shp0ngle »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #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.…

On reddit, I just switch the url to “old.reddit” and that’s it

Twitter doesn’t have “old twitter”… well… one time, I somehow magically summoned mobile interface that looked like from 2013, but I haven’t been able to repeat it. Something with Javascript I suppose

Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

#165

Post by rvz »

cinntaile wrote: post #78

I said it before but got downvoted at the time [0], now that Jack is gone it's likely going downhill from here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503384

Exactly.

It is the same with YouTube. Neither Twitter or YouTube will change and it will only get worse as I have said for years.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

#167

Post by nickysielicki »

npongratz wrote: post #105
nickysielicki wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company even comes close to the transition that Reddit did that took them from a {clean,simple,dense,power-user friendly} interface to a horrible user-hostile shit show that it is now. The average Reddit user has to reach for a custom third party app on their phone or a browser plug-in that hacks a redirect to the old or third party interface. Quora doesn’t hold a candle.

To be fair, one company did: Digg. And that's why no one uses or remembers Digg anymore.

I remember the Digg exodus. In my mind, it was a mass protest after the AACS key leaked. The redesign of Digg wasn’t the death knell. I could be misremembering with Rose colored glasses, though. Pun intended.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

#168

Post by yosito »

bambax wrote: post #66

I recently quit Twitter (almost[0]) and have been much happier ever since. It seems (to me) that the way Twitter increases "engagement" is to show you the tweets that will upset you the most, so that you can either reply with an angry thing of your own, or furiously "like" other angry responses. I tried to unfollow a lot of people who tend to post about controversial topics but Twitter keeps showing me their tweets o…

> It seems (to me) that the way Twitter increases "engagement" is to show you the tweets that will upset you the most

I don't think upsetting you is an intentional design on the part of Twitter, it's just that optimising for engagement in the context of human psychology often leads to upsetting things being promoted because that's what humans naturally find engaging (though also unpleasant). I have a carefully curated Twitter, I've unfollowed anyone who posted anything that seemed to me ideological, and I rarely see upsetting content on Twitter anymore. Granted I'm following less than 100 people and unfollow people for ideological tweets about once a month.

Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account

#170

Post by emptyparadise »

adenozine wrote: post #169

Are you aware that it's free to register for an account? What's the use case of reading Twitter but not having an account?

Why must I get dragged kicking and screaming into a walled garden just to look at a funny cat video from a friend?
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