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The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

annoying.technology

11–20 of 215 posts

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#11
They don't want you to leave either of course. I'm an artist and there's a constant discussion with other artists over how to get people to ever see tweets where you mention things like "my Patreon" or "commissions" or other little things like this that involve going elsewhere or exchanging money, all that shit gets hidden by the algorithm.

Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or something.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#13
post #5

The sub-rant about every app having its own browser really rang true for me. I never gave it much thought until now, but wow, what a horrible experience. Frequently I click a link to a private GitHub repo (404!) or a news article (paywall!) inside an app and then have to clunkily "Open in Safari" to actually apply my session cookie. To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I only logged in some of…

The confusing part for non-developers is how to get back from Safari to Twitter. Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.

And so they end up going Home, getting distracted by some other app and not going back to Twitter at all.

That's why in-browser UIs exist. Because it makes a big different to keeping users in the app.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#16
Leaving the philosophical issues out for a moment, this is a problem for me even as someone who had a Twitter account and wants to be signed in. Every time I click on a link to Twitter in the Reddit app on iOS it opens in the embedded browser where I'm not logged in and don't know how to open it in the Twitter app instead. It's a pain!

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#17
post #5

The sub-rant about every app having its own browser really rang true for me. I never gave it much thought until now, but wow, what a horrible experience. Frequently I click a link to a private GitHub repo (404!) or a news article (paywall!) inside an app and then have to clunkily "Open in Safari" to actually apply my session cookie. To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I only logged in some of…

I agree so much! I was puzzled when Google introduced that feature to android and even advised it as the recommended way for apps to open links.

Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind that feature?

I mean, I can sort-of understand that individual apps want me to stay inside the app as long as possible. But why would the platform vendor actively support or even push that pattern?

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#18
post #12

Meanwhile Twitter just straight-up put up a loginwall. Whenever I scroll down more than a few tweets, I get an undismissable popup prompting me to login.

I also see this loginwall sometimes when trying to click through to related images or tweets. The workaround I've found is to open the click in a new tab. It seems if there is no browser history, twitter is less aggressive about throwing up the login wall

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#20
post #12

Meanwhile Twitter just straight-up put up a loginwall. Whenever I scroll down more than a few tweets, I get an undismissable popup prompting me to login.

Amusingly opening a private window avoids that. I speculate they left that loophole so that people who get into slapfights and block each other can still view each others' tweets.
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