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Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

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Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#521

Post by RulerOf »

gizzlon wrote: post #473
Thoreandan wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking in - it's not possible to disable from the app anymore, is it? The preference setting is still there, but ignored, afaict.

You still have the fb app? You know the spied everything you browsed, right? And if they didn't, it was not for lack of trying... What does it take for people to delete this shit?

> You know the spied everything you browsed, right?

I remember that this "became news" some time ago, but it's always pretty obvious the moment it loads.

App presenting an SFSafariViewController? "Convenience" that's intended to keep users in the app.

App presenting a WKWebView? Assume it's loaded with spyware scripts.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#522

Post by vincnetas »

danudey wrote: post #434
vincnetas wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle…

Person A: Says something exceptionally inflammatory and provably false Person B-Z: That's a horrible thing to say, why are you like this? Algorithm: Wow, this post must be awesome, I should show it to more people!

and the sad part is that this is by design. no one who runs the algorithm cares why yo engage with content. engagement = good = money

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#524

Post by agluszak »

Thoreandan wrote: post #413
nitwit005 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content appeared on how to disable it. That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of their websites not working correctly in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-con...

Checking in - it's not possible to disable from the app anymore, is it? The preference setting is still there, but ignored, afaict.

Correct, it's ignored. I find it strange that the EU isn't looking into it.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#525

Post by digianarchist »

ndr wrote: post #170
bpavuk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.

Who is using Bluesky in the US? Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?

Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed.

There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#526

Post by modeless »

> Update 2: even correcting for the fake views, traffic to Substack links from X is up substantially. (full post reads, signups, etc. also track.)

Real traffic is estimated at 3-4x higher than before, after correcting for the preloading.

https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985852384531394916

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#527

Post by materialpoint »

stillatit wrote: post #344
aldousd666 wrote: post #161

Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I may want to click to another app and back in and still be where it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser, but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views, in all forms.

>Nobody wants a damn web view. OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance). FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be ren…

That's just asinine. Just because any user would like fast navigation doesn't mean privacy only matters if you know what a violation it is to ping every server in sight on user's device, with absolutely no way to prevent it.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#528

Post by saagarjha »

mcint wrote: post #430
drdec wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)

Well, Twitter/X gets this wrong too. Pretty often jumps away from what you're viewing, especially on the nav-in to a thread or nav-out from a thread actions.

Seems like something they broke themselves, then.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#529

Post by saagarjha »

Zolomon wrote: post #32
teiferer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always been like that. Twitter, Instagram, ... None of those platforms have usable UX if you're not logged in.

This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the value of data. Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in.

No, it was a test by some misguided PM who was looking at her signups metric and not much else. It rolled out, everyone hated it, it got rolled back after some senior people complained. When Elon took over they turned the feature back on and then evidently rewrote it to be even more annoying and we have what is in place today. Source: my comments against it are probably in Slack somewhere if Elon is still paying for that

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#530

Post by gizzlon »

RulerOf wrote: post #521
gizzlon wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have the fb app? You know the spied everything you browsed, right? And if they didn't, it was not for lack of trying... What does it take for people to delete this shit?

> You know the spied everything you browsed, right? I remember that this "became news" some time ago, but it's always pretty obvious the moment it loads. App presenting an SFSafariViewController? "Convenience" that's intended to keep users in the app. App presenting a WKWebView? Assume it's loaded with spyware scripts.

no no, not in the fb app, in the mobile browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115

TBF it's "only" sites with a meta pixel, and on Android. But in my book this does not matter, it shows their intentions

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