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Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

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191–200 of 347 posts

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#191
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"? Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number? Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.

It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test). I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.

Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#192
post #147
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isn’t fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.

Thats entirely how atproto works now!

Except for the part where bluesky maintains a central registry and also the part where the protocol is really complicated with its authenticity stuff.

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#193
post #27

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too. But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app inst…

That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)

So HTTP and IP

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#194
post #27

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too. But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app inst…

I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous. Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.

Or you sue them and (if they did something wrong) they're SOL.

But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#195
post #27

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too. But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app inst…

I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."

Twitter requires your phone number to sign up

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#196
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.

They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.

Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#197
post #27

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too. But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app inst…

>are completely hostile to allowing you to see it. You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.

It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#198
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He thinks Twitter data is valuable for AI training. He also blocks archive.org. Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon. Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.

I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was. It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US cultu…

He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked

Re: Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

#199
post #116
post #27

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too. But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app inst…

Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.

You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?
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