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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

#241

Post by dnissley »

lostdog wrote: post #229
dnissley wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason not to create a work twitter account?

Because you need another email and phone number? The obvious solution is still for Twitter to not suck.

You can add up to 10 accounts per phone number, fwiw. It just kind of seems like people are investing more effort into coming up with reasons they don't want to or can't create a twitter account than it would take to just create an account :/

https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-numb...

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

#242

Post by ciupicri »

evanelias wrote: post #232
lostdog wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Casual web visitors to the public-facing portion aren't exposed to the majority of the product, and have a sub-par experience as a result. No, their experiences are perfectly fine. Maybe the company believes that monetization is worse when account-free users read the site, but being account-free is an ideal experience for the majority of users. Companies love to lie about this, both externally and internally.

I'm talking strictly from the standpoint of a user of web-based social products. For any product with a substantial communication and/or community aspect, you inherently can't use most of the product's functionality if you don't have an account. And if the product doesn't do a good job of explaining its purpose, you won't even fully understand what functionality you're missing out on. Going back to my Tumblr example,…

So instead of Tumblr providing a better user interface that includes timestamps or lets you filter "reactions" or commments, casual reards should sign up to Tumblr.

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

#243

Post by evanelias »

ciupicri wrote: post #242
evanelias wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking strictly from the standpoint of a user of web-based social products. For any product with a substantial communication and/or community aspect, you inherently can't use most of the product's functionality if you don't have an account. And if the product doesn't do a good job of explaining its purpose, you won't even fully understand what functionality you're missing out on. Going back to my Tumblr example,…

So instead of Tumblr providing a better user interface that includes timestamps or lets you filter "reactions" or commments, casual reards should sign up to Tumblr.

Your comments prove my point exactly. The public-facing blog network (which has no login wall and does not require an account) uses a templated theme system. The blog author can make it look however they want! Some blogs choose themes which omit these things, or use a custom theme and choose to omit these things. That makes the user interface worse!

Meanwhile the Tumblr dashboard (logged in user experience / social network side) has a uniform user interface which does provide these things.

But there is no way for Tumblr to prevent this problem on the blog side while still allowing users to have full control over their blog's public appearance. If they forced themes to contain specific template tags or design elements, it would no longer be usable as a freeform CMS.

Same reason Tumblr doesn't/can't have a login wall. But as a result of this, casual readers get a mistaken impression of the product and its capabilities.

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

#244

Post by exikyut »

tikhonj wrote: post #152
CharlesW wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia. You're misremembering, but please feel to prove me wrong by pointing to any of these services positioning themselves as the "Wikipedia of [thing they do]".

I used to use Quora a lot and that was pretty much Quora's mission statement. I can't find an explicit comparison to Wikipedia, although I've definitely seen that somewhere. But here are a few highlights from a post the founder wrote about the company's mission[1]: "Quora's mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge." "Quora aims to allow anyone to easily share their knowledge and in the process to dramatical…

> "We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, a place where hundreds of millions of people go to learn about anything and share everything they know."

> be me

> be in Library of Alexandria

> row upon row of books as far as the eye can see

> any topic, any subject, all the collected information in the world available just because it's humanly possible to enable that

> you can practically see the titles on the book spines

> one of them looks familiar... could it be...?

> take a single step forward

> hologram stutters and flickers out

> "Phis service requires authorisation to perpetually access your Realtime User Feed in order to continue. Process authorisation?"

> (you later learn the book title that looked familiar was algorithmically constructed by a model that keyed off of the Realtime User Feeds of your public friends list.)

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

#245

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

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.…

old.reddit.com still exists and doesn't have any pop-ups.

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

#246

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

golemotron wrote: post #139
torginus wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia. This was the 'social' contract they presented to users. They built their monopolies on top of the goodwill of users. I'm pretty sure that subject matter experts who wrote extremely long-winded and well-researched articles on Roman battle tactics, did not do so with the intent, tha…

It's like Google search results, isn't it? Brands ruin themselves over time as they chase more market. We can be upset by this, but the bright side is that customer discontent eventually leads people to go to different products.

Yeah, isn't the market so fucking magical? We just have to rebuild Google of 2008 from scratch and with no funding! I'm sure somebody will have that done by 2100 or so.

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

#247

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

gaius_baltar wrote: post #183
90d wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel anxious every time I see old.reddit mentioned. If it gains traction, they may want to "improve" it.

They are already doing it. There are a lot of seemly intentional bugs, I suspect this is a strategy to force users to migrate to the new one. Galleries and some profile features are not supported, and it is (again intentionally) slowed down on mobile. Reddit jumped the shark already and the current state of affairs is an offense to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Problem is that a new mass migration (as happened in the D…

The amount of content available isn't a real problem, since Reddit deletes terabytes of that content on a whim. Consider it already deleted and migrate already.

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

#248

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

xg15 wrote: post #31
jevoten wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start . Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown eno…

Yes. Also called "growth engineering" and pretty much the basic mode of operation of silicon valley companies.

It's analogous to those sea predators that disguise themselves as a rock so as not to scare away potential prey.

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

#249

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

epicide wrote: post #124
ostenning wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I dont understand is why these companies are debasing their products integrity to scrape in more users. What Reddit doesn’t seem to realise is that right now there is a primed opportunity for a competitor to take its market share.

They already have the data and the name recognition. While each is powerful on its own, they are far more powerful (and sticky) together.

That data comes without e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or any real-world identity. They want to become more like Twitter, where people post with their IRL identity. That way your Reddit upvotes can translate into a salesman physically knocking at your door if that's what marketers decide would make the sale.

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

#250

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

emptyparadise wrote: post #170
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?

Tell that friend you refuse to click his Twitter links.
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