The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#171

Post by autoexec » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 8:21 AM UTC

city41 wrote: post #116

dionidium wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's evidence that network effect are powerful, more than anything. I'm on twitter because that's where everybody else is.

People also just suffer silently. Buggy, confusing, incorrect, whatever it may be, in my experience a lot of people just put up with all of it and never think to complain or look for alternatives. I find this especially true of less technical people who often think bugs are due to something they did wrong.

I think people have been trained to feel helpless about what companies do to them, especially when it comes to tech companies. It's very much not just a problem with tech, but tech gives companies new and easy ways to force things on their users long after the sale is completed. Everyone's been conditioned to accept things like sudden and unexpected changes. The websites they visit do it, so does the software on their computers, their consoles, and their cell phones.

There was some grumbling from uppity Windows users when forced updates/upgrades and reboots were pushed onto them, and I thought things might start to change but those things are still around (although the reboot thing was walked back a little) and now people are slowly being made to get used to hosting all their data on 3rd party servers and never being sure if/when it will be suddenly and unexpectedly be removed and inaccessible. Today there are stories of people who had their YT video or their repository removed, or lost access to books/music/games/movies they paid to be able to download/stream/play etc. Car companies are now disabling or pay-walling off features people already had when they purchased the vehicle.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#172

Post by account42 » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 8:33 AM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #150

twofornone wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. I don't know if I'm just suffering from confirmation bias but it seems like this feature is used as a form of soft censorship, to discourage users from reading certain threads, as it appears to disproportionately pop up on "controversial" topics where right of center opinions are likely to be expressed.

> soft censorship If it's soft, it's not censorship. (On top of "if it's private, it's not censorship.")

> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies.

It IS censorship.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#173

Post by grumbel » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:14 AM UTC

goldtownjac wrote: post #169

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service t…

> The internet exists beyond these walled gardens.

Barely. The amount of content that is locked in Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Co. is enormous and I have never managed to find anything that can remotely compete with them. Worse yet, most alternatives are just clones of those services, they don't really change anything fundamentally. If they would ever get successful, they would go down the very same path. See imgur, which started as an image-sharing-but-good site and is now just another site trying to force you into their mobile app.

At this point I think the only way to solve this is legislation that forces those companies to open up the data and not wall it away. GDPR already did that for users personal data. The upcoming Digital Markets Act will force messaging services to interact with each other and maybe the walled gardens will be the next target.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#174

Post by ZeroGravitas » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:14 AM UTC

goldtownjac wrote: post #169

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service t…

More importantly, don't let this happen again.

How many times does someone have to fall for the same scam before they deserve some of the blame?

Only support services that aren't blatantly trying to buy their way into becoming a monopoly and abusing their locked in customers.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#175

Post by Thlom » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

goldtownjac wrote: post #169

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service t…

Twitter has barely changed for me the last 10 years. I only access Twitter from Tweetbot on my phone. Should Twitter decide to deny Tweetbot API access I’m pretty sure I’ll quit Twitter all together. Cause I don’t understand the web version or the native app.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#176

Post by dewey » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

goldtownjac wrote: post #169

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service t…

There's a lot of content that only exists in these walled gardens. It's easy to say "don't watch that movie if you don't like it" but Twitter has a lot of information that you can't find anywhere else. Just like YouTube which can be a bad place but still has a lot of documentaries and valuable content that's only there and makes it worth jumping through hoops for.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#177

Post by dewey » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:27 AM UTC

Thlom wrote: post #175

goldtownjac wrote: post #169

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service t…

Twitter has barely changed for me the last 10 years. I only access Twitter from Tweetbot on my phone. Should Twitter decide to deny Tweetbot API access I’m pretty sure I’ll quit Twitter all together. Cause I don’t understand the web version or the native app.

> Should Twitter decide to deny Tweetbot API access I’m pretty sure I’ll quit Twitter all together.

Based on their new API efforts it's going in the different direction of actually making more third party apps possible. They just added a bookmarks endpoint that only used to exist in the official apps and not in the API, now everyone can implement that.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#178

Post by grumbel » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:29 AM UTC

thewebcount wrote: post #29

I found this statement really bizarre: > Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don’t use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design. I've always found Twitter to be horribly confusing. It's mishmash of replies, re-tweets, and completely unrelated other tweets has been there for years and never made any sense to someone who doesn't have an account. I don't have a Reddit account but kno…

Reddit doesn't make it very obvious that there are subreddits on the site or how to find and navigate them. The front page is just memes, which makes the site not look all that useful. A normal web forum or Usenet in contrast has the hierarchy of groups/forums always directly visible. Even 4chan has a big box with all the boards on their first page.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#179

Post by Retric » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

dewey wrote: post #176

goldtownjac wrote: post #169

Lots of people in this thread complaining about user hostility and bad UX. I wholeheartedly agree. Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, and this ever-worsening dark pattern shows that very clearly. Why, then, do you subject yourself to it? I simply can't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using nitter, constantly clearing cookies, or using browser extensions _just to use a service t…

There's a lot of content that only exists in these walled gardens. It's easy to say "don't watch that movie if you don't like it" but Twitter has a lot of information that you can't find anywhere else. Just like YouTube which can be a bad place but still has a lot of documentaries and valuable content that's only there and makes it worth jumping through hoops for.

There is vastly more great content out there than you could ever consume. Avoiding Twitter and or YouTube is hardly a major sacrifice.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#180

Post by teekert » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 9:32 AM UTC

I don't click on twitter links anymore, when I start scrolling some black screen covers my entire screen and you can't scroll back! I mean, we moan when some site breaks our back button here, twitter breaks back scrolling! People invariably suggest to replace the twitter part of the url with nitter, I'm not doing that every time, so maybe HN could do it by default? F twitter man, it's worse than that mess reddit (when not logged in, using the website, as I do).