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The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

annoying.technology

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Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#191

Post by redmen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #187
redmen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I said LOL. What's the need for your anger?

> That's exactly what I said LOL Well, no, it's exactly the opposite of what you said. It's kind of concerning that you can't tell the difference. A login requirement can't have any effect on spammers, because -- in order to be spammers -- they must already have satisfied that requirement. The only people a login requirement can exclude are, by definition, not spammers.

Ummmm a spammer is a person who must create many accounts to game the system. If there was no login requirement they could spam in other ways, for example voting, on YouTube: views. Scraping is a huge part of spamming. First you need to identify what you are going to do, which audience you are going to go after.

I'm not sure if you are trolling or just being overly pedantic to argue for the sake of arguing or what but it's tiring.

Spammers scrape data and sell it to other spammers who do other actions.

When you come in with an intent to disprove you're going to be looking for holes in what someone says rather than focusing on the value. That's one of the main problems with the web and the world these days.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#192

Post by thaumasiotes »

redmen wrote: post #191
thaumasiotes wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's exactly what I said LOL Well, no, it's exactly the opposite of what you said. It's kind of concerning that you can't tell the difference. A login requirement can't have any effect on spammers, because -- in order to be spammers -- they must already have satisfied that requirement. The only people a login requirement can exclude are, by definition, not spammers.

Ummmm a spammer is a person who must create many accounts to game the system. If there was no login requirement they could spam in other ways, for example voting, on YouTube: views. Scraping is a huge part of spamming. First you need to identify what you are going to do, which audience you are going to go after. I'm not sure if you are trolling or just being overly pedantic to argue for the sake of arguing or what bu…

> Ummmm a spammer is a person who must create many accounts to game the system.

No, that's not what a spammer is.

> Scraping is a huge part of spamming.

No, it isn't.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#193

Post by notreallyserio »

spullara wrote: post #162
notreallyserio wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost never the case for me. The replies to this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1512109658432888... are way, way off screen (except for the self replies). And when you scroll down to them it's not clear if they're replies to the first tweet, the last, or the middle.

Every tweet under the tweet are a reply if they don't have a line connecting them to a previous tweet. The ones that have lines up are replies to the tweet the line connects to.

Thanks, looks like you're right. That's some counterintuitive UX right there, requiring the user to scroll several pages just to see a mid-thread comment. Wonder why they don't just put the replies immediately below the tweet they're replying to.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#194

Post by grishka »

pcmoney wrote: post #135
grishka wrote: post #91

It's really funny how Twitter manages to somehow do both these things at the same time: 1. Promise everyone to decentralize itself, aka the "bluesky" project. Except it's been a thing for ~2 years and exactly zero meaningful progress has been made. Related: didn't Jack say they wanted to open up the API again? 2. Become ever more manipulative and get in my way more and more with its engagement growth bullshit.

The did open up the API again, or rather are in the process of doing so. Look at the new essential access tier and v2 endpoints. Its early but they are launching more and more.

Okay so there still are nonsensical per-app limits, and they still act as if building a third-party client is not a use case that exists. Yeah, right, because of course people primarily use APIs of social media services for research and business.

How hard would it be to simply comment out all the checks in the code to give everyone the same access official apps have? Why is it taking them months? It's as if they don't actually want to open up their API.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#195

Post by redmen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #192
redmen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummmm a spammer is a person who must create many accounts to game the system. If there was no login requirement they could spam in other ways, for example voting, on YouTube: views. Scraping is a huge part of spamming. First you need to identify what you are going to do, which audience you are going to go after. I'm not sure if you are trolling or just being overly pedantic to argue for the sake of arguing or what bu…

> Ummmm a spammer is a person who must create many accounts to game the system. No, that's not what a spammer is. > Scraping is a huge part of spamming. No, it isn't.

Lol you really don't know much about this topic. Sorry if I am sounding rude but you just revealed that with yet another response looking simply to be right and prove me wrong without any actual thought.

In the context in which we are talking, yes indeed a spammer needs to create accounts to dm people, upvote, retweet,.etc etc etc.

You might be thinking of email or something, which is a different type of spam in a different context.

Again, please try to stay positive and look for value rather than just simply trying to win.

A Twitter spammer creates many accounts, scrapes to identify an audience, follows and unfollows to build their audience, DMs, tweets, etc for the purpose of making money.

There, are there any more blanks that you want me to fill? Or can I go back to living in peace and speaking with people who aren't trying to poke holes in everything.

P.S. sorry to anyone having to read this drivel. But I feel the need to defend when people come in here with an intent to argue for the sake of arguing and showing zero intent to listen or understand.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#196

Post by ziml77 »

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…

I use it because that's where everyone went after the Tumblr exodus. Many of them will post to other places as well, but Twitter is the only place where I can follow all of them without jumping between sites.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#197

Post by wwweston »

account42 wrote: post #172
wwweston wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

LOL there's a fun one. What's next, writing a new arbitrary definition so that pinching people for not wearing green on St Patricks day is also censorship?

There are reasons the formal definition of censorship focuses on the actions of the state. One of them is that decisions about which speech to carry or amplify (and which to not) in the context of private means are themselves rights of speech.

If you disagree, I look forward to you sending me your address and letting me put signs of my choice up on your lawn. After all as a principled defender of speech, you wouldn't want to "suppress" what I have to say by not giving me the privilege of putting whatever words I choose there.

The funny thing, though, is that even by your altered definition, what the ancestor comments are talking about here still isn't censorship -- even assuming that there's some basis on which to assume systematic click-to-read-more-ificitaion of "right of center" ideas other than "some dude on the internet feels like it might be true", it's not even that Twitter is taking the words down and making the ideas unavailable, it's that they're somewhat less convenient to actually read and you have to put extra clicks in. This has all the "suppression" of a downvote, a mechanism I'd wager you've recently used.

But hey. If you value discourse so little as to equate both "have to make extra clicks to read someone's hot take on some sites/apps (freedom to choose other sites/apps still quite intact)" and "face imprisonment for expression of certain ideas" under the umbrella of censorship, the good news is that free speech rights let you do that.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#198

Post by pcmoney »

grishka wrote: post #194
pcmoney wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The did open up the API again, or rather are in the process of doing so. Look at the new essential access tier and v2 endpoints. Its early but they are launching more and more.

Okay so there still are nonsensical per-app limits, and they still act as if building a third-party client is not a use case that exists. Yeah, right, because of course people primarily use APIs of social media services for research and business . How hard would it be to simply comment out all the checks in the code to give everyone the same access official apps have? Why is it taking them months? It's as if they don…

I think there is a balance here. Open the API and make shareholders happy. If they cannibalize their own traffic they violate fiduciary duty and get sued into the ground. Otherwise they inject ads into the API endpoints themselves and make it part of TOS to not strip them out. You can pay for higher and higher access levels but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. They have spent and spend millions and millions building that physical infrastructure.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#200

Post by svnpenn »

_moof wrote: post #165
svnpenn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are deliberately misusing the site. The whole point of the character limit, is to force you to make a concise thought. Some people ignore that, and just ramble over a dozen tweets, like a monkey with a typewriter. The anarchist in me says fine, but objectively it's just a dumb way to use the site. Just make a blog post and link to it.

Twitter very intentionally added support for this use case. There's literally a button just for it. There's even a help page about how to do it: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/create-a-thread So maybe this would've been a misuse in 2007, but nowadays it isn't. An objection based on rules just doesn't hold water.

Even if CEO says, "yes do this", it's still an idiotic way to use the site. If you trying to kill a bear, you don't shoot it 18 times with a BB gun. You shoot it once with a shotgun.
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