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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

#871

Post by dang »

ricardobayes wrote: post #777
dang wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't next. We hate change. (More precisely: we're acutely aware that users hate change, and since we do too, it's kind of an easy call.) Also, the value of HN to YC consists of the community and keeping the community happy is therefore a must. (Did I say happy? More precisely: as happy as possible under the circumstances)

It's ambiguous what GP refers to as "next", but if it's the Eternal September part, I believe HN unfortunately already suffers a lot from it. In my subjective opinion, comment quality took a nosedive in the past 2-3 months or so. That said, I have no idea how to fix it, if it needs fixing at all.

I'm not saying you're wrong and anyway it is hard, if not impossible, to evaluate objectively—but I can tell you two things for sure. One is that people have been saying more or less exactly this about HN for at least 15 years; the other is that HN is subject to a lot of random fluctuations, and random swings tend to get interpreted by humans as long-term trends—not because they are, but because that is what humans do.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#872

Post by netbioserror »

The money printing and tech investing bonanza has allowed many programmers to flex their programming expertise without considering real-world resource costs. Now those bills come knocking and everyone acts like the previous utopian paradigm was somehow sustainable. I'm calling bullshit.

If the fediverse ever had this kind of scraping pressure, it would collapse in minutes.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#873

Post by dang »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #720
dang wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't next. We hate change. (More precisely: we're acutely aware that users hate change, and since we do too, it's kind of an easy call.) Also, the value of HN to YC consists of the community and keeping the community happy is therefore a must. (Did I say happy? More precisely: as happy as possible under the circumstances)

The choice is not between no change and drastic change, but selecting a rate of change that is appropriate. Things which do not change, die, as the only thing that is constant is change. Change or be changed.

We've actually made many changes to HN over the years, but almost all have been subtle enough that most users don't notice.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#874

Post by wallmountedtv »

throw0101a wrote: post #317
teddyh wrote: post #76

Paul Graham famously started to use Mastodon (but has not written anything there since last year). But the HN Status emergency “is HN down” channel is still only on Twitter. It used to be publicly readable at https://twitter.com/HNStatus >. But now, if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why.

> But now, if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why. There may be a post about it in /r/sysadmin

Well Reddit is hardly better. They have already started applying a login wall and app wall on mobile.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#875

Post by cyberneticist »

calebcannon wrote: post #463
akira2501 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :( The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are meeting their inevitable end.

The internet is most definitely not fine. There is an incoming tsunami of chat gpt generated bullshit that is going to make most open discussion sites more or less useless. Twitter requiring accounts and Reddit shutting down apis are both related: chat gpt et al are a threat to the social media business and ironically made possible because of the social media business. TBF I think we should all be exercising extreme…

[dead]

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#876

Post by dang »

tinus_hn wrote: post #793
dang wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't next. We hate change. (More precisely: we're acutely aware that users hate change, and since we do too, it's kind of an easy call.) Also, the value of HN to YC consists of the community and keeping the community happy is therefore a must. (Did I say happy? More precisely: as happy as possible under the circumstances)

I don’t know how much running the site costs, but I hope the people paying for it keep agreeing with that sentiment.

They have so far and have reason to continue to, not just because of how they feel about HN but because the economics of curiosity are a good fit for YC's business. That's the miracle (I would even say) about HN - it occupies a sweet spot where it can be funded to just be good*, and the economics work because it's in the interests of the business.

I've written about this a fair bit over the years if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

* ("good" here meaning "as good as possible under the circumstances")

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#877

Post by dang »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #692
dang wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't next. We hate change. (More precisely: we're acutely aware that users hate change, and since we do too, it's kind of an easy call.) Also, the value of HN to YC consists of the community and keeping the community happy is therefore a must. (Did I say happy? More precisely: as happy as possible under the circumstances)

Elon says he used it as a way to stop AI data scraping because the servers were suddenly hit by a large load.... (As a weird form of DDOS shielding in other words) HN could be hit with such a large load too, since we have pretty good and lengthy discussion here, good for AI data training. Would you believe it a valid tool to keep the community happy? Since I doubt we would be happy if we can't access the site because…

I agree that it could become a problem but I'd rather wait until the problem shows itself clearly, rather than (potentially) over-reacting in advance. Sometimes the medicine turns out to be worse than the disease; plus it's a better fit for being lazy.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#878

Post by dbbk »

smcl wrote: post #788
kakakiki wrote: post #599

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

Sorry I don’t buy it. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter, and we are to understand that there are an enough people scraping to the extent that they had to suddenly take drastic action by shuttering unauthenticated access? Any dev would have told him that those supposedly scraping could simply setup Selenium or some other headless browser to login before scraping. This smells of another failed Musk experiment…

Not only that but unauthenticated access is the easiest thing to cache. There is no need to "bring large numbers of servers online". He's lying.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#879

Post by wslh »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #683
kakakiki wrote: post #599

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

Elon has a good point there. Much of the current AI hotness is predicated on stealing peoples content and exploiting the infrastructure that other people have built. I don’t think it’s acceptable. The licenses, compensation models, law, technical solutions, attribution, security and privacy all need time to catch up. Regulation has a role to play as its a bit of a free for all right now. The irony of Elon mentioning…

> exploiting the infrastructure that other people have built

Including you and me. WE built part of the infrastructure.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#880

Post by smcl »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #791
smcl wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I don’t buy it. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter, and we are to understand that there are an enough people scraping to the extent that they had to suddenly take drastic action by shuttering unauthenticated access? Any dev would have told him that those supposedly scraping could simply setup Selenium or some other headless browser to login before scraping. This smells of another failed Musk experiment…

They could but signing in, even in selenium, means agreeing to twitter's TOS. See the LinkedIn scraping case.

The same way these AI code completion tools respected GPL-licensed code?
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