Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

There are two basic strategies for publishing on the web. Either you lock up as much valuable data, forums, posts, and pictures you can, and provide a web based frontend to your service. This is the Minitel model, as exemplified by Facebook.

Or you try to ride the coattails of network effects and remove any obstacles to your information, index public data, and generally tries to weave in the service in the public web as tight as possible. This is the www model, as exemplified by Google.

Then there are the ones in between, such as newspapers, who generally wants to hide their information behind their service to increase the perceived value, but also wants to be reachable from the public web because without findability they have no value. This is of course paradoxical reasoning with no end of problems and no successful businesses.

Twitter from the start was part of the web 2.0 movement with a clear www strategy. Now they are doing a strategic shift. But how valuable is twitter when they're no longer indexed by services such as Google?

I can not see how they can grow their business in the long term from this. They lose the sentiment of a mirror of public discourse and instead will become like any web forum. So there will be zero journalistic value, and why would celebrities want to hang around then?

It's not even a slippery slope. It's just a slope.

It’s not a little “use selenium” switch you can click, but it absolutely is an option (and there are others) if the barrier is simply to have an authenticated account and be logged in.

If these data scraping operations are as sophisticated and determined as he claims this measure is insufficient and actually it really hurts Twitter far more than it helps. Case in point: we stopped sharing Twitter links because when you click them in most iOS apps it opens up an unauthenticated web view and presents you with a login screen. So we just collectively decided “ah ok no sharing Twitter” and moved on.

I’m sure there are companies scraping Twitter. I just don’t buy that it’s as big of an issue as he claims it is, and that preventing people from viewing tweets without logging in is a way to mitigate against that (I’d first look at banning problematic IP addresses first, personally).

To me it’s either:

1) a very poor and very temporary mitigation against scraping, that could be bypassed with a bit of effort

2) an experiment in optimising metrics - Musk sees lots of unauthenticated users consuming Twitter, tries to steer them into signing up

3) it’s all just a big mistake

Option #2 makes the most sense to me, but frankly none of them are good

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We're talking about Elon Musk. I'd be surprised if he gave a shit.

Moderation is dominated by randomness - we don't come close to seeing all the comments on HN or even all the comments in any large thread. That's 90% of the answer to "why did my comment get moderated and not those other ones". (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)

The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.

You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.

It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets the ticket. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...