Twitter now requires an account to view tweets • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#881

Post by agentgumshoe » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 12:47 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #861

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…

I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But: A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk'…

Not to mention Elon is great mates with the VC douchebags that are busy hyping and profiting off the AI hype train.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#882

Post by aws_ls » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:03 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #650

nunez wrote: post #110

This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(

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)

One welcome addition would be support for embedded images - sometimes you need to share some screenshots. For example right now, I am seeing rate limiting messsages from Twitter, from the normal account.

But may be it will increase your costs a lot.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#883

Post by paulnpace » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:04 PM UTC

justnotworthit wrote: post #106

for the desperate: https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-... add username at end from https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ and https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a91...

I remember the olden days when something like this would be voted to the top. A useful solution to a posted problem is what I hope to find for topics such as this.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#884

Post by versteegen » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #861

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…

I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But: A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk'…

> Nothing about Musk's Twitter has indicated that he cares about Open data access or anonymous access to the site

Not so, he tasked George Hotz with getting rid of that horrible popup which prevented you from scrolling down much if you weren't logged in, which was added soon before he bought Twitter. When that was removed I rejoiced. But now Twitter's gone 100x in the opposite direction.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#885

Post by Unkechaug » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

photonthug wrote: post #581

brushfoot wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm cautiously optimistic about Lemmy. Anyone can spin up an instance, so it's decentralized, but instances are connected, so there's community. It may still be rough around the edges, but to me it feels like the spirit of the old phpBB forums combined with almost 20 years of lessons learned from Reddit.

Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment. The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances , is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you clic…

As someone who signed up for Lemmy and is planning to replace my Reddit use with it, I hear these points loud and clear. You also make a good point about Google search and how bad it’s become - I see so many stories of people adding “Reddit” to their search in order to get any decent results. This is the natural result when you have every business paying people for SEO and trying to game the system.

Between account walls and search’s indexing problem, it’s become very hard to find small to mid sized active communities on your own. In fact this problem seems to be something people are trying to solve in Reddit communities via related subreddits on the sidebar.

So having gone from using search engine’s to crawl for relevant content that was out there, people are now creating content specifically to end up in Google’s search results - destroying the value search once had. Indicated by what people have done on Reddit, and these discussions about finding alternatives, it seems we are well on our way back to webrings. I welcome this.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#886

Post by Zak » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

kungito wrote: post #804

xorcist wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would an AI company start scraping twitter html, instead of using an already existing archive? Something similar to archive.org could earn money from that. If all you want is the content, there's no reason to suck it through a straw. I'd expect those that require real time data, such as stock market bots or sentiment data providers, to scrape twitter (if they don't provide the data by other means, for example the…

If there was more value in requiring login than there is in having this public and easily accessible, it would be behind a login form. The current internet has 99% of the time nothing to do with values someone imagined in the 80s

Value to whom? Twitter is more valuable to its users, to journalists who embed tweets in stories, and to web users at large who follow links and search results if it does not require a login to view posts.

Of course, none of those people own Twitter, and it may well be more valuable to its owners if it does require a login.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#887

Post by medler » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:15 PM UTC

whatyesaid wrote: post #286

swat535 wrote: post #267

Taking into consideration how much Spez thinks of himself as a Musk, we should be expecting Reddit to implement the same feature soon. We are just sitting by the sideline watching as the internet we all loved slowly dies in the hands of greedy corporations. This is truly a sad state of affairs.

Reddit is useful in Google search results though whereas Twitter and Instagram are not. For instance if you search "movies like X", on Google by default most results are automated aggregators or one critics perspective. If you search "movies like X reddit" you get more recommendations.

Twitter is in search results, though I guess that might go away if it stays closed

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#888

Post by sebzim4500 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

smcl wrote: post #880

sebzim4500 wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't generally need to accept licenses in order to scrape something, only if you want to distribute it.

The legal ambiguity comes from the question of whether LLM outputs are a derivative work of the training data. I expect that they aren't, but anything can happen.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#889

Post by Unkechaug » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #649

nunez wrote: post #110

This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(

I’m so jaded with the internet at this point. Most phone apps and games are a microtransaction hell. Most social media apps are a race to the bottom with clickbait. Every website is littered with ads and popups and cookie banners. Time to go outside and forget that the online world exists.

There is any believable amount of content being made where the value is so absurdly low, I welcome this change. For everyone that wants to setup a copy/paste version of a CRUD app or YouTube channel, that is a ton of time and effort being wasted. I’m not saying we should be focused on solely optimizing everyone’s time and efforts, but it’s clear we have tipped the scale too far with how much time and effort is being dedicated to bullshit.

If we as a society decided to channel these efforts into building infrastructure improvements and homes, I think this would help a lot more. I understand the biggest problems in that respect are legal and cultural, but I can’t help but feel people have tried nothing and are all out of ideas.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#890

Post by medler » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 1:19 PM UTC

netbioserror wrote: post #872

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.

It’s naive to say that this is the inevitable result of wider forces. If Elon had never offered to buy Twitter, or had managed to weasel out of it, you can bet the API would still be a thing and the login wall would be much as it was a year ago.