Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

annoying.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 215 posts

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#201

Post by spullara »

notreallyserio wrote: post #193
spullara wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you are seeing in that thread is the OP replying to themselves to create a thread of related tweets. They believe that seeing the whole thread of the OP is more important than what could be 1000s of replies to the original tweet.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#202

Post by grishka »

pcmoney wrote: post #198
grishka wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

> fiduciary duty

Ah yes, the one reason why everything eventually turns to shit unless it's a nonprofit.

> but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”.

But they are contemplating doing exactly that with the Bluesky project. Not just that, but federation, as in, you'd be able to interact with tweets without a Twitter account, but from an account you host on your own infrastructure.

This is why I'm asking the question in my original comment. These two efforts feel so misaligned to me. If you're going to federate, you could as well provide completely unauthenticated API to access public content — you'll have to anyway.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#203

Post by pcmoney »

grishka wrote: post #202
pcmoney wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

> fiduciary duty Ah yes, the one reason why everything eventually turns to shit unless it's a nonprofit. > but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. But they are contemplating doing exactly that with the Bluesky project. Not just that, but federation, as in, you'd be able to interact with tweets without a Twitter account, but from an account you host on your own i…

Non-profits are typically just a mechanism for turning wealth into status. Mostly useless for all other concerns.

You would need to self host on Bluesky. Also it is just an open social standard that Twitter would be part of it. It would not be Twitter giving up control of Twitter data. They would never provide "completely unauthenticated API to access public content". The abuse vectors alone would destroy the network.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#204

Post by kingcharles »

notreallyserio wrote: post #120
pram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many things that make it an unpleasant ordeal. Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. Having to click on individual tweets to see their replies. Pressing back and having your window reset to the top of the replies page, and now you have to click 'see more replies' all over again. Having your history completely broken somehow so pressing back doesn't even take you to the right place. etc etc

> Having to click on individual tweets to see their replies I'm not sure that even works -- when I go to a tweet in a "thread" I see there are replies but I can't figure out how to view them. All I see are the rest of the tweets in the "thread". I've completely given up on seeing replies to tweets mid-thread. I'm too dumb to grok Twitter's UI.

Clicking the text of the specific tweet in the thread should show the replies. I always click the little speech bubble in the bottom-left, which is the icon to show replies in all other interfaces, but that just pops up the Reply feature and I get aggravated every time.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#205

Post by twofornone »

wwweston wrote: post #197
account42 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

What are you on about? Certain ideas are made more difficult to express by a defacto authority (twitter). That's censorship, by definition.

>If you value discourse so little as to equate both

Censorship is a spectrum. Hence my original choice of the word "soft". Honestly it sounds like you're upset that someone noticed the suppression of right leaning opinions and are effectively deflecting by pretending that this isn't censorship, rather than acknowledging that it's happening. I don't think you even realize how disingenuous you're being if that's the case.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#206

Post by wwweston »

twofornone wrote: post #205
wwweston wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

What are you on about? Certain ideas are made more difficult to express by a defacto authority (twitter). That's censorship, by definition. >If you value discourse so little as to equate both Censorship is a spectrum. Hence my original choice of the word "soft". Honestly it sounds like you're upset that someone noticed the suppression of right leaning opinions and are effectively deflecting by pretending that this is…

> Certain ideas are made more difficult to express

Which ones? Describe a few. Try not to embarrass yourself by either picking something for which someone could actually find a tweet embodying the idea, or by demonstrating that what you're talking about is actually not, in fact, so much an idea.

> by a defacto authority

Twitter is not an authority. It's one of many fora.

> That's censorship, by definition.

Nope. By definition, censorship describes activity by the state. You might productively stretch the definition to any other entity that can use physical force in the same manor a censorous state does to selectively deprive people of liberty or health on the basis of speech opposed by said entity, but that's it.

> Hence my original choice of the word "soft".

ie, indicating that in actual fact, no speech has actually been suppressed at all.

> Honestly it sounds like you're upset that someone noticed the suppression of right leaning opinions

"Noticed," heh. Like, with some kind of evidence? Not anecdotal, analytical? Systemic suppression of right wing opinions?

Can you describe which right wing opinions are being suppressed -- apparently to the point where I haven't even heard these opinions?

> I don't think you even realize how disingenuous you're being if that's the case.

Speaking of disingenuous, like I said above, please send me your address. Or tell me why I shouldn't be able to compel you to carry posters/signs I'd like to see displayed on your property.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#207

Post by RMPR »

grumbel wrote: post #184
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Only support services that aren't blatantly trying to buy their way into becoming a monopoly and abusing their locked in customers. There are no such services. Everything that gets popular goes for abuse and lock-in and often they only start with that after they already have become wildly popular. There is nothing you can do against it.

I think OP is referring to Federated social networks like Mastodon and others.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#208

Post by nicce »

redmen wrote: post #159
nicce wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t push feature like that for tens of millions to prevent some scrapers who bypass it in few minutes by creating account which is not providing anything to Twitter. They account requirement is simple there for more efficient data collection.

And Twitter's business model is largely based on data collection?

Actually, yes. They sell data products and ads.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#209

Post by twofornone »

wwweston wrote: post #206
twofornone wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you on about? Certain ideas are made more difficult to express by a defacto authority (twitter). That's censorship, by definition. >If you value discourse so little as to equate both Censorship is a spectrum. Hence my original choice of the word "soft". Honestly it sounds like you're upset that someone noticed the suppression of right leaning opinions and are effectively deflecting by pretending that this is…

> Certain ideas are made more difficult to express Which ones? Describe a few. Try not to embarrass yourself by either picking something for which someone could actually find a tweet embodying the idea, or by demonstrating that what you're talking about is actually not, in fact, so much an idea. > by a defacto authority Twitter is not an authority. It's one of many fora. > That's censorship, by definition. Nope. By d…

Are you also one of those people who pretend that twitter, facebook, and google don't lean left in their moderation?

>Can you describe which right wing opinions are being suppressed -- apparently to the point where I haven't even heard these opinions?

Another in a series of strawmen. Again, I called it soft censorship. The fact that these opinions exist on these platforms does not imply that they are not made more difficult to communicate. But it sure does make it easy for people to weasily claim that no suppression is occurring.

This "show more replies" trick typically loads 3 comments at a time with a half second delay. Compare that to scrolling through hundreds of posts in an uncensored thread. Far fewer people are going to see those tweets. It's an obvious form of information manipulation - why else would it be done?

>Or tell me why I shouldn't be able to compel you to carry posters/signs I'd like to see displayed on your property.

My property is not a public square frequented by millions of people, including world leaders like Trump, whom I'll remind you was banned from twitter. I don't care about your weak rationalization for the ban, the point is that twitter does not need to be a nation state satisfy the definition of a censor. And if millions fewer eyes are landing on certain topics because of what is effectively a dark pattern, that's suppression, that's censorship, at the very least in spirit because certain information is being made more difficult to communicate. It's dishonest to pretend it isn't happening just because you agree with it, but I guess it helps with your cognitive dissonance over authoritarianism?

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#210

Post by ColinWright »

eminence32 wrote: post #21

One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline. I've always struggled to understand the full context of the tweet I'm reading (that is, where is this tweet in the full conversation?). Do others also struggle with this? Am I just Doing It Wrong?

I have a tool to "Chart" Twitter conversations. For example:

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1511425005443174402.svg

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1510898215448678400.svg

I find it invaluable, others find it unusable.

Post reply on HN