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Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

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11–20 of 187 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#11
Just in case some of you don't know about it yet, you can browser Twitter without logging in using a nitter instance (e.g., https://nitter.net/). The url are the same just replace "twitter.com" with the nitter instance URL. The interface is clean and smooth, and makes twitter links actually sharable with anyone.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#12

Making a Twitter account takes less than a minute to do and is free. It's not a big deal. Edit: I'm not seeing the issue in an incognito tab.

> takes less than a minute to do and is free

You are also supposed to read and accept 13k words of terms of use. And I'm not even counting the ~50 pages of "Twitter Rules and Policies [...], which are part of the User Agreement"; most of which contain a couple thousand words.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#14
> I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media

[citation needed]

Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though. They've hit a growth plateau, the users are really fractious, management doesn't understand what they want out of it, and it's the venue for social strife.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#15
I think this is one reason why "web3", social media with a decentralized storage layer, could become a thing.

As a user, when I tweet something, I do want the whole world to be able to read it. Without logging in. Ideally via the interface of their choice.

Orbis is a proof of concept:

https://orbis.club/

A Twitter clone that stores the tweets on Arweave.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#17
What Has Happened to Twitter?

Answer: They hired a "ruthless" product manager, who believes in things like "we should do things that are good for Twitter, but not necessarily good for the world", and probably wants to be remembered as the PM who took the route that no one was willing to take. (S)he has the data to backup these decisions, like some analytics dashboard that shows very many unauthenticated users browsing twitter. Also wears a tough face in meetings.

/s

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#18
post #15

I think this is one reason why "web3", social media with a decentralized storage layer, could become a thing. As a user, when I tweet something, I do want the whole world to be able to read it. Without logging in. Ideally via the interface of their choice. Orbis is a proof of concept: https://orbis.club/ A Twitter clone that stores the tweets on Arweave.

Nothing about this requires blockchain. There are plenty of Twitter archive sites like nitter.net that are not only open source, but also have plenty[0] of distributed instances on good old "web 2"

[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#19

The "uBlock Origin" browser extension blocks Twitter's login prompt and enables you to read posts without logging in.

Upvoted because this answered my confusion about the initial question. I did not see any login prompts pop up where they need not be. :)

Yeah, a lot of annoyances just go away when you use uBlock Origin, and you tend to forget what the web is really like without it.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#20
post #14

> I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media [citation needed] Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though. They've hit a growth plateau, the users are really fractious, management doesn't understand what they want out of it, and it's the venue for social strife.

It's truly amazing how despite all this twitter is as successful as it is.

Something about _very important people_ sharing their thoughts in 140/280 characters really is the addictive nicotine of the human attention span.

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