141–150 of 158 posts
Twitter has degenerated into one of the least friendly things to build an app for. I've had a better dev experience with Gab, ffs. Not only that, but also their community building and tending is abysmal too, so your app will end up used mostly by the kind of user that brings infinitesimal value with them. Twitter isn't worth it.
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In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems compared to how much they are used.
You might not realize just how expensive SMSes can be. Based on AWS SMS pricing, they cost 6/10ths of a cent to US destinations each, so each deal sent to 90,000 people in the article would cost twitter $540. That's not even getting into Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS, but I doubt twitter supported that.
Not my knowledge.
SMS prices in Europe varies from country to country, but I would say that they are, on average, around 3-4 cents. You have cheap countries like Portugal (1-2 cent), intermediate countries like Spain (2-3 cents) and France (3 cents) and expensive countries like Germany (6 cents) or Belgium (6 cents).
From the top of me head, Azerbaijan is the most expensive country in the world, at 10 cents per SMS.
Source: Running a SMS hub in Europe for the last 15 years.
This is quite unfortunate. In countries where whether the people have access to internet or not is under the control of the government, this was a neat work around to get voices heard. In the recent history, an 'internet lockdown' has been the MO of many (oppressive) governments, including India. edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the intended point.
Unfortunately there's often no one in the decision making process with skin in the game WRT free expression when it comes to axing a feature. It frustrates me that often folks who express support for HK independence so fiercely can't even tell me who Modi is. Best wishes friend.
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If this happens to a client attempting to load a single page in isolation (which it does, a lot), you are a failed web site. They may be a very successful mobile app , but as a website, they've failed miserably.
I get this a lot and just assumed it was because I'm using a VPN.
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On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to what it was a decade ago. It’s materially the same, which is rare for unicorns of this time.
In some ways that's the problem with Twitter. A decade ago people used to post what they ate for lunch and any random thoughts that entered their head. It was true "microblogging". Now it's mostly politics and bots, and the service itself hasn't evolved at all to handle them.
You’ll have to do at least two things -
1. Train the algorithm to drop politics from your feed by actively liking content on other topics.
2. Use Lists to curate timelines on a particular topic.
After this learn to use search and mute filters well. There’s a lot to gain from twitter if you follow and interact with the right people.
This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…
I used to SMS friends from my email client and later my iPod touch using email.
Twitter has degenerated into one of the least friendly things to build an app for. I've had a better dev experience with Gab, ffs. Not only that, but also their community building and tending is abysmal too, so your app will end up used mostly by the kind of user that brings infinitesimal value with them. Twitter isn't worth it.
Just curious, isn't gab that extremist right wing site?
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That infuriated me last year when I finally tried to create a Twitter account. During registration I was given a choice between providing an email address or a phone number. I provided an email address, only to immediately have my account locked until I provided a phone number. Well, I wouldn't have given my email address if I knew a phone number was required anyway! It wouldn't even let me visit my account settings…
That's pretty interesting. I've had a twitter account that has no phone number and no email for a very long time. It's never been blocked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately there's often no one in the decision making process with skin in the game WRT free expression when it comes to axing a feature. It frustrates me that often folks who express support for HK independence so fiercely can't even tell me who Modi is. Best wishes friend.
I am confused. Why is modi relevant here?
>The protests began in December when the government passed a law that uses religion as a criterion for determining whether illegal migrants in India can be fast-tracked for citizenship. The measure favors members of all South Asia’s major religions except Islam, India’s second largest faith. Muslims worry that the law will be coupled with a citizenship test and used to strip them of their Indian nationality.
They're very different situations, but the common thread is people feeling their rights are not being respected, and protesting that.
It's pretty well discussed among those who actually care about free expression and/or censorship circumvention.