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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

#931

Post by qingcharles »

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)

I'd love to see the source control change log for HN. I can't even remember a single visible change in all the years I've been a user. I think there have been a few under the surface though.

I wish all the other sites on the Internet would wake up every morning, look at their TODO list and say "Nah, not today."

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#932

Post by qingcharles »

weinzierl wrote: post #698
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 appreciate that attitude and value it myself, but I like to point out that it is not without risk. If the world around HN (including its community) changes, stasis can damage or kill it as well. Specifically regarding the issue of the original posting: - HN is already an important data source for large language model training. [1] - To the best of my knowledge there is no freely downloadable and current data dump o…

I don't expect HN give a fuck about the scraping. It's pure HTML, no images, probably cached all to hell for users who aren't logged in anyway.

The one thing I see as a future issue is that people are starting to post comments that clearly look like they were manufactured by ChatGPT and friends. Or that could just be the way some people talk and I've spent too long with ChatGPT now and start to smell it everywhere.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#933

Post by bastard_op »

I always curse whenever someone posts "news" from twitter, I pretty much just ignore them already. I've never had a twit account, and don't intend to get one, particularly just to see HN posts from poorly chosen sources.

Much like paywalled sites, can we please stop posting twit links now?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#934

Post by rsynnott »

blurrybird wrote: post #263
m3kw9 wrote: post #135

I’m using twitter as much as ever, the live content is just too good to pass up, I set up Lists and use it to read only the category I want and you don’t need to follow them. You don’t have to like Elon but the stuff people write(given the right profiles), the concentration of it, isn’t really offered anywhere else.

Do you have some examples of these lists? I’ve wanted to do something similar to Mastodon where you can follow hashtags. Sounds like you might have solved that?

It’s quite odd that Twitter never adopted this as a first party feature; virtually every third party app did it, until Naughty Ol’ Mr Car got in.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#935

Post by Jenk »

lucb1e wrote: post #354
Jenk wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This killed nitter. I suspect that was the intent.

Nah, how many people are using Twitter without being logged in compared to how many people legitimately change every link they receive to Nitter? I used the 'redirect to nitter' Firefox extension and Android app but it got quite unreliable and nobody else that I know uses nitter at all. I think Nitter users would be a tiny, perhaps even immeasurable minority compared to casual readers that now are incentivized to eit…

I didn't mean nitter _specifically_ but rather all forms of alternative/anonymous UIs for twitter (that strip all of the engagement/ad/tracking stuff from twitter.)

Of anything I suspect Elon saw what happened woth reddit and had a "wait, we should do that!" Moment.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#936

Post by qingcharles »

aws_ls wrote: post #882
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)

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.

I think of features like this on a regular basis that this site needs. Then I catch myself. It's feature-creep like that which has killed practically everything else.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#937

Post by [deleted] »

massysett wrote: post #306
hedora wrote: post #151

Uggh. I only use twitter to follow critical (life-and-death) emergency broadcasts from our local fire department. Is there a viable alternative for them to use now that twitter is going to block most of our county’s residents?

It baffles me that governments ever relied on an unprofitable ad-supported company to provide critical communications, especially where alternatives exist (email, putting notice on a website.) And if it’s life or death, there’s Emergency Alert System. Goes on TV, radio, and straight to your phone, complete with the Cold War-era alert tone. I hope Twitter merely supplemented that?

[deleted]

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#938

Post by dredmorbius »

yuuuuuuuu wrote: post #711
benjaminwootton wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This could easily be solved by making the unauthenticated access hard for machines to consume, like introducing delays or some kind of captcha or even just proof of work (reverse some hash). While the authenticated get all the snappiness they want. I'm strictly anti account, so he just lost me as audience. The next walled garden after Facebook and Instagram that won't ever see me again.

The other option would be to front caches through ISPs and the like.

This works far better when the items requested are small in number but large in volume (that is: a large number of requests against a small set of origin resources). When dealing with widespread and deep scraping, other strategies might be necessary, but these aren't impossible to envision.

Specifically permitted scraping interfaces or APIs for large-volume data access would be another option.

Of course, there's the associated issue that data aggregation itself conveys insights and power, and there might be concerns amongst those who think they're providing incidental and low-volume access to records discovering that there's a wholesale trade occurring in the background (whether that's remunerated or free of charge).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#939

Post by kergonath »

hashtag-til wrote: post #928
kergonath wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But then so is Twitter. They don’t produce any content whatsoever. The data they are having a fit about is not theirs, it’s been volunteered by the users. It’s the same line Reddit is pushing, and it’s bullshit. AI compan…

Well, one thing is people going there and putting their data on a platform. That’s their choice. Taking/scrapping/stealing that data out of said platform for the benefit of your over-hyped “disruptive” startup - and implying that others should give you all for free - is the issue.

That’s not the point. Twitter has a non-exclusive license to distribute the content; it’s not the owner of the data regardless of the high horse Musk feels like riding today.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#940

Post by dredmorbius »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #682
zerd wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they killed the API, what did they think would happen? It's easier to control access and rate limit with a proper API.

The actual problem seems to be that a large number entities now want a full copy of the entire site. But why not just... provide it? Charge however much for a box of hard drives containing every publicly-available tweet, mailed to the address of buyer's choosing. Then the startups get their stupid tweets and you don't have any load problems on your servers.

So, I'd just made that suggestion myself a few moments ago.

That said, there are concerns with data aggregation, as patterns and trends become visible which aren't clear in small-sample or live-stream (that is, available in near-time to its creation) data. And the creators of corpora such as Twitter, Facebook YouTube, TikTok, etc., might well have reason to be concerned.

This isn't idle or uninformed. I've done data analysis in the past on what were for the time considered to be large datasets. I've been analyzing HN front-page activity for the past month or so, which is interesting. I've found it somewhat concerning when looking at individual user data, though, here being the submitter of front-page items. It's possible to look at patterns over time (who does and does not make submissions on specific days of the week?) or across sites (what accounts heavily contribute to specific website submissions?). In the latter case, I'd been told by someone (in the context of discussing my project) of an alt identity they have on HN, and could see that the alternate was also strongly represented among submitters of a specific site.

Yes, the information is public. Yes, anyone with a couple of days to burn downloading the front-page archive could do similar analysis. And yes, there's far more intrusive data analytics being done as we speak at vastly greater scale, precision, and insights. That doesn't make me any more comfortable taking a deep dive into that space.

It's one thing to be in public amongst throngs or a crowd, with incidental encounters leaving little trace. It's another to be followed, tracked, and recorded in minute detail, and more, for that to occur for large populations. Not a hypothetical, mind, but present-day reality.

The fact that incidental conversations and sharings of experiences are now centralised, recorded, analyzed, identified, and shared amongst myriad groups with a wide range of interests is a growing concern. The notion of "publishing" used to involve a very deliberate process of crafting and memoising a message, then distributing it through specific channels. Today, we publish our lives through incidental data smog, utterly without our awareness or involvement for the most part. And often in jurisdictions and societies with few or no protections, or regard for human and civil rights, let alone a strong personal privacy tradition.

As I've said many times in many variants of this discussion, scale matters, and present scale is utterly unprecedented.

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