Oh No. You don't like twitter. Oh No. Let's start a petition.
I also don't like Twitter. But unlike you, I would consider posting that I don't lke Twitter on HN terrible BANAL.
Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
231–240 of 250 posts
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should I understand Tumblr or any other product? I and others as well were happy with just reading the ramblings of other Internet users. I mean, no one's forcing you to. That's my point though! Casual web visitors to the public-facing (no account needed) portion of the product simply aren't exposed to the majority of the product, and have a sub-par experience as a result. This reduces the likelihood of the pro…
> Casual web visitors to the public-facing portion aren't exposed to the majority of the product, and have a sub-par experience as a result. No, their experiences are perfectly fine. Maybe the company believes that monetization is worse when account-free users read the site, but being account-free is an ideal experience for the majority of users. Companies love to lie about this, both externally and internally.
I'm talking strictly from the standpoint of a user of web-based social products. For any product with a substantial communication and/or community aspect, you inherently can't use most of the product's functionality if you don't have an account. And if the product doesn't do a good job of explaining its purpose, you won't even fully understand what functionality you're missing out on.
Going back to my Tumblr example, I've had a lot of conversations with people on HN who fundamentally didn't grok that there's substantially more to the product than the public-facing blog network, in part because there isn't a login wall. A few examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607197 (interesting quote further downthread "I never felt the need to make an account since I was just reading. They didn't make it clear that the service was incomplete without an account.")
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#233Consider my problem. I had an old account with my phone number associated with it. I closed the account two years ago. I went to open an account and they asked for my phone number, Twitter says my phone number is in use and will not let me get past that point. So I am now shut out on both ends.
Have you contacted support about this?
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#234> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. > Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.…
> If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.
Not reasonable at all. If I'm not posting, an account doesn't serve any purpose (for me). I can read HN all day long without an account, same for blogs, normal websites, etc. Accounts on websites should not be the norm, and never was before.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website. Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start . Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown eno…
Why would you not want an account on a website you rely on? It's one thing to complain that your occasional visits to twitter are more inconvenient now. But if you would go so far as to say that people rely on them, then it seems like a silly hill to die on for those people to resist creating an account.
> Why would you not want an account on a website you rely on?
Since creating an account is both more work and causes privacy violations, the obvious question is the other way around. Why would I even want to create an account if not fundamentally necessary?
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#236> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. > Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.…
I disagree. When Reddit, Quora, Medium, Twitter started, they have posed themselves as privately owned public spaces, much like Wikipedia. This was the 'social' contract they presented to users. They built their monopolies on top of the goodwill of users. I'm pretty sure that subject matter experts who wrote extremely long-winded and well-researched articles on Roman battle tactics, did not do so with the intent, tha…
Show me where any of them ever offered this
Social contracts don't exist merely because you expect something
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#237> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. > Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.…
Sending a text costs me 3 cents. 3G data used to cost 0.022-0.11 cents per 128 bytes. Nowadays it's like $75/mo. for 60GB, but at no point it had been free. Ultimately the source of problem is its lack of proper AAA which in turn enabled this ad economy.
paying 7€ for 50gb of internet in italy :D
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#238Are you aware that it's free to register for an account? What's the use case of reading Twitter but not having an account?
Why must I get dragged kicking and screaming into a walled garden just to look at a funny cat video from a friend?
Twitter doesn't owe you anything. Play ball or don't.
Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#239Re: Tell HN: Twitter is growing increasingly unusable without an account
#240> Unfortunately twitter is going the direction of quora, pinterest, facebook, and medium Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me. > Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.…
On reddit, I just switch the url to “old.reddit” and that’s it Twitter doesn’t have “old twitter”… well… one time, I somehow magically summoned mobile interface that looked like from 2013, but I haven’t been able to repeat it. Something with Javascript I suppose
They killed that interface in December of 2020.