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Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

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Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#251

Post by JadeNB »

swader999 wrote: post #235
throw6746 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms. It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so big and so central to our lives, to the point many news (including from police precincts or first responders) are only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's "they owe you nothing".

If they have a monopoly on the public square, arguments could be made...

There should not be a channel for government communications that is only available upon giving money or information to a private party.

(But that's a ship that sailed long before the internet age. "Want to know the laws? Pay up!")

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#252

Post by alpaca128 »

foogazi wrote: post #17
logicalmonster wrote: post #8

Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible. This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.

Quora is such a shit show though - what happened there ? Their algo will just continually blast email you every category you ever clicked on

No idea. I used it a while and enjoyed the content, then they changed something in the algorithm and I'd suddenly get basically the same content every single day, often >30% of the feed would be the exact same as the week before. They also removed the list of topics, so there was no obvious way to escape the near static feed.

Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I never visited the site again.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#253

Post by maram »

shadilay wrote: post #174
maram wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront What I found interesting is that “translate tweet” button doesn’t appear unless you are signed in. Why cannot I read news from all over the world unless I’m signed in? Why do users have to sign in to read translated tweets in real time?

Does Twitter have to pay to use Google or MS's translate API?

I have no idea but twitter uses google translate API

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#254

Post by kgwxd »

I thought they did this years ago. I added it to my uBlock Origin list way back when because of it. In addition to that, that kind of pattern across so many sites had inspired me to make an FF add-on for my self to completely remove links to sites I know I never want to visit from whatever page I'm on, that way I didn't have to manually vet every link, or waste time opening a new tab just to have uBO tell me it's blocked.

Funny that they're doing this now, just this month I setup a new PC after 7 years of using the old one and hadn't yet added twitter back to my list but noticed they weren't nagging me anymore, so I left it off. Now it's back on.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#255

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

throw149102 wrote: post #128

Honestly, this seems like a plus for humanity. I don't think Twitter has really improved the world in any significant way, and maybe made it worse. Anything that prevents the twitter universe from seeping into mine is a good change.

> and maybe made it worse

I'm on this boat.

Certainly the proliferation of social media has given every moron a voice, but Twitter made it worse with its short message limit. There's no room for nuance in your messages, so people just post short "zingers" to "own" the other side, which are often not based on any sort of reality and just giant straw men.

It's absolutely destroyed people's ability to have intelligent political conversations.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#256

Post by hammock »

logicalmonster wrote: post #8

Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible. This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.

This is not about measurement. This is about tracking people across third-party websites.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#257

Post by ugjka »

rozab wrote: post #219
bastard_op wrote: post #110

So can people please quit posting twitter feeds finally? Some of us still have never used or signed up with twitter, or feel the need to, and really don't want to. Bad enough they removed non-javascript access, since they are permablocked through noscript here, I simply close postings on HN that link there and curse them for bothering. Asking for a login atop that is just a 4x non-starter for "news" links. Yes, some…

I think some people have misunderstood this change. It's been active for me for about a week, I suspect most others without accounts just haven't noticed. Clicking on a linked tweet still works, it's only when you then click on another from within the site that it asks you for a login. It's the same approach Quora takes iirc.

Pretty sure their sign up rates are going down the shitter, so they need some creative ways to satisfy the execs or whatever

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#258

Post by bityard »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #225
eurasiantiger wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remind me again, why did we leave IRC?

Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30 years. There have been attempts to make it friendlier with things like IRCCloud, but then the beards just scoff at the idea of a $5/month bouncer-as-a-service and go right back to wondering why the protocol is dying.

Can't tell if you're being ageist on purpose but "the beards" don't _have_ to use IRCCloud and can just keep using their TUI clients and bouncer daemons if they want instead of having their UX change weekly at the whim of some resume-driven front-end team.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#259

Post by doctorsher »

rozab wrote: post #219
bastard_op wrote: post #110

So can people please quit posting twitter feeds finally? Some of us still have never used or signed up with twitter, or feel the need to, and really don't want to. Bad enough they removed non-javascript access, since they are permablocked through noscript here, I simply close postings on HN that link there and curse them for bothering. Asking for a login atop that is just a 4x non-starter for "news" links. Yes, some…

I think some people have misunderstood this change. It's been active for me for about a week, I suspect most others without accounts just haven't noticed. Clicking on a linked tweet still works, it's only when you then click on another from within the site that it asks you for a login. It's the same approach Quora takes iirc.

I don't have an account, and the change has been noticeable and annoying. It's more than just clicking on another tweet, though from what I can tell they've been A/B testing this behavior (sometimes I get it and sometimes I do not). On mobile, you can't click through to someone's profile from the tweet without creating an account. If the tweet chain is more than 4 or 5 tweets, you cannot read the rest without creating an account. It's prevented me from normal browsing habits multiple times, like reading the ASML twitter thread that was posted on HN a couple of days ago.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#260

Post by pvarangot »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #218
sneak wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse: Twitter staff sold private user PII to the Saudi government (the one that assassinates journalists): https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud...

Remind me again, why did we leave IRC?

A combination of we couldn't agree on what character encoding to use, and no one made a good mobile client.
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