Companies are all about open data until they have enough to hold it hostage. Then they shut down APIs and require an account to do access any of the data.
Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
111–120 of 250 posts
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#112A single uBlock Origin filter fixes this for me:
twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
Still haven't found an easy fix that works for safari on iphone though.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website. Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start . Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown eno…
> But then it should have been that way from the start. Twitter is 15 years old. You can't except them to remain unchanged forever. Priorities change, people change, goals change. Didn't they change CEO some time ago? Then the latest change might be even something from the new managment.
So true. I'm old enough to remember when Google was really good at web search, and they had some cuddly motto to go along with their preskool logo. Can't quite recall what it was.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#114Requiring an account is not a problem - the so called "phone verification" is.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website. You can't just make throwaway accounts on Twitter though, they ban them after a few hours if you don't verify by phone number. So really it's forcing you to hand over a lot of personal information just to read what is essentially a few forum posts.
We surely don’t expect that a business should have its value proposition make sense for everyone.
Different but feels somewhat the same shape as a previous point,
> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.
i'm fine with both of your alls-fair-in-love-and-war attitudes, but it makes me sick that twitter became a near defacto monopoly as the all-connected public-social-media before locking down & exploiting their position, before transforming into a propeietary closed experience.
and it makes me even more disturbed thinking what an epic project it would be to dislodge or replace this vast once public network. the switching costs are asteonomical, require millions of people of recognize how rudely governed their once open & reasonable platform has become, has fallen to.
the value propositions can keep changing. quickly. under society's feat. civil society has no control, the enemy has all the control. society has such a slow response time, our side of the free hand moves only over the course of decades, not days. it's a trashfire thing twitter is doing to us, and i fully support their right to self (re)define themselves as snakey lowlife punks who've renegged on their bargain of being the public social system, but damn i wish society could respond & shift course & adapt in some sort of fashion, and it just cant; this assemblage is trapped, and so things will only forever now get worse. it's terrible. platforms are social treachery, they all fall down.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account No no no, companies should not be allowed to this kind of bait and switch: 1) provide a free service 2) gain market dominance, push out competitors, and turn into a necessity for millions of users 3) create lock-in and exploit the userbase Essential public utilities are regulated (properly, in many countries) to avoid thi…
What’s exploitative about offering a free account?
I just explained how cornering a market works. What part of the 3 steps is unclear?
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#117> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. > Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.…
I disagree. When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia. This was the 'social' contract they presented to users. They built their monopolies on top of the goodwill of users. I'm pretty sure that subject matter experts who wrote extremely long-winded and well-researched articles on Roman battle tactics, did not do so with the intent, tha…
> When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia.
You're misremembering, but please feel to prove me wrong by pointing to any of these services positioning themselves as the "Wikipedia of [thing they do]".
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website. Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start . Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown eno…
Yes. Also called "growth engineering" and pretty much the basic mode of operation of silicon valley companies.
Yeah. And when they design the site to be addictive like a drug, it's "engagement engineering". When they spam us with noise, it's "advertising".
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#119Use nitter.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
No company even comes close to the transition that Reddit did that took them from a {clean,simple,dense,power-user friendly} interface to a horrible user-hostile shit show that it is now. The average Reddit user has to reach for a custom third party app on their phone or a browser plug-in that hacks a redirect to the old or third party interface. Quora doesn’t hold a candle.
What I dont understand is why these companies are debasing their products integrity to scrape in more users. What Reddit doesn’t seem to realise is that right now there is a primed opportunity for a competitor to take its market share.
Advertising. It's the root cause of it all. Reddit is actually an advertising company. Their business model consists of attracting people to the site with open forums and then spamming ads. They want people to switch to the app because that way they can collect more data and users can't block ads.