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Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

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Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#91

Post by KerrAvon »

paulddraper wrote: post #70
KSteffensen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place? At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am? Also: https://xkcd.com/743/

> Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place? Reach. IDK if anyone is using it as the sole method of communication. But Twitter in practice has a much higher reach than every other method.

It doesn't, though; this is a myth propagated by journalists, who are Twitter addicts and are the only reason it survived Musk's initial incompetence.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#92

Post by consumer451 »

jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #7

Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 "Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"

I wonder what percentage of legitimate traffic is blocked by this. I would imagine that the majority of users don't have an account, by a large margin, correct?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#94

Post by KerrAvon »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #67
KSteffensen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place? At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am? Also: https://xkcd.com/743/

Musk has been deferential to governments to date, even when that flies in the face of his idea of a free speech platform.

Musk has also been deferential to catturd2 and banned journalists for imagined crimes.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#95

Post by eddythompson80 »

staplers wrote: post #46
darkarmani wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed is what is stupid. The Internet is supposed to be distributed. We've gotten so used to consolidated services that we have forgotten this lesson.

Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed This is human nature/greed unfortunately. Look at any natural (distributed) resource. The current economic system rewards this as well.

There is a failure of technology too. The internet is distributed, sure, but the server-client architecture puts all the operational burden on the server. The expectation that everyone will run their own internet exposed instance of any thing is still simply not feasible, even today. The operational complexity of security, availability, monitoring etc are unmanageable even for technical users. Back when smaller forums were popular, hearing of a forum getting hacked was pretty much the norm. They get hacked, they go down for few days, they come back from a backup losing few days or hours of data, and on to the next vbulletin. Phpbb, nuke, or whatever vulnerability/hack. There doesn’t yet exist a distributed system that can replace something like facebook, twitter, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, instagram, or even WhatsApp without a significant operational burden or added complexity.

It’s also not a very interesting problem to solve because of the type of cliffs you will run into due to precisely how the “internet works”

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#96

Post by hkt »

darkarmani wrote: post #34
agluszak wrote: post #17

Putting the internet in the hands of corporations was the worst thing that ever happened to technology

No. Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed is what is stupid. The Internet is supposed to be distributed. We've gotten so used to consolidated services that we have forgotten this lesson.

Centralisation vs decentralisation in tech is pretty much irrelevant.

What is relevant is governance. We allow billionaires and venture capitalists to govern a commons that we all rely on. Surprise surprise, it isn't going well.

The solution is not to have (difficult to scale) federated alternatives. The solution is collective ownership.

Imagine for a moment that the multinationals that are increasingly in charge of our lives were owned by their customers. Imagine they had a fair electoral system, reflecting the variety of those users, limiting them to one person, one vote, and that their constitutions were designed to guarantee the rights of minorities.

The journey that most countries went on through the 20th and 21st centuries, in other words.

Tech giants and other multinationals are a different kind of beast, because they govern a little slice of our lives instead of having carte blanche. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility for democratically operated multinationals to exist. It will be hard to do, but IMO, that approach has a bright future because non-techies can grasp it and participate in it more easily, and that is one less barrier to a runaway network effect than the fediverse has.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#97

Post by gjsman-1000 »

activitypea wrote: post #73

I just ran into this problem -- not being able to view tweets without logging in. As much as I hate Musk, this is clearly the trajectory of all platforms. Without a unified push towards self-hosting or the fediverse, the internet as we know it is over :(

Been over for a long time. We've had a lot of consolidation into Reddit (which, you can browse mostly anonymously, it will just beg you to death to log in unless you use the old site); and we've also had a mountain of consolidation into Discord (the most unsearchable system ever designed).

People stopped hosting their own forums. Frankly, it's hard to not see why. The constant spam and people avoiding bans wasn't helpful - and modern forum software like Discourse is pure agony to set up and maintain if you don't know what you are doing. Not that forum software hasn't always been hard to set up, but the modern software stacks are particularly hard to manage. Also, what normal people see as good UX, in my experience, almost completely does not match what computer engineers and the average open-source contributor sees as good UX.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#98

Post by KerrAvon »

berkle4455 wrote: post #37

You can blame this all you want on evil social media corporations, but the reality is AI companies scraping public conversations to feed LLMs are the current reason for walls being erected around every single garden. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn.. all heading toward full walled garden mode to prevent scrapers from repurposing data and profiting off their systems. Federated systems are a nice idea, b…

Twitter has been slow since Musk took over and fired all of the competent devops people and then shut down most of the data centers. It's reasonable to assume that he's either been lied to or is lying about the cause of this.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#99

Post by hkt »

warmwaffles wrote: post #19
agluszak wrote: post #17

Putting the internet in the hands of corporations was the worst thing that ever happened to technology

[x] doubt Putting the internet in the hands of the Government wouldn't fair much better.

See my comment above: these companies could be the formal and effective property of their users.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#100

Post by diego_sandoval »

mydriasis wrote: post #4
duringmath wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're just reporting the news how you react to it is up to you

I choose to cry, then. Seems sensible.

I choose to delete my Twitter account, which I didn't use much anyway.
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