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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

#31
Another workaround for Android users is the FOSS app Fritter:

https://fritter.cc

Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app.

Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter:

https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

[1] Instructions for enabling custom extensions on Firefox Nightly or forks of Firefox on Android: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#33
I deactivated my account the other day in frustration over this. They would send me emails and I would sometimes click a tweet, only to be prompted to log in, which I didn't want to do because I wanted to avoid being sucked in. Okay, fine, I get that I wanted to use the site in a way that the site doesn't want me using it and that's their business decision. It still seems hard to believe that it's better for them to have someone completely off Twitter rather than receiving and occasionally clicking through emails to use the site.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#34
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using old.reddit.com, and it's ok. Shame if they would turn that off though.

The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me. I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand why they chose this new disastrous design.

It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#35
I posted this yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472

this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most.

I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100% user-hostile, Twitter.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#36
I've literally just spent a couple of hours integrating Nitter.net's RSS feed into my custom feed reader. Why a couple of hours? Because Nitter for some reason returns a 404 header instead of 200 when it gives you the RSS feed data.

Consequently stuff like PHPs file_get_contents() and curl_exec() return absolutely nothing... took me ages (via trying to shell out to curl, and then back to using the lib again) before I realised it wasn't actually the 404 error cause the issue, but that curl (and libcurl) on my system doesn't like Nitters SSL cert, which then led me to CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to override it. Frustrating, but educational none-the-less.

I'm using the search filter "(from:$username) -filter:replies" to get just the tweets I want.

--

https://nitter.net

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#37

Im just curious, what are the motivations for a company to make this move? It seems like a death sentence to me but I cant think of any examples off-hand.

I imagine that they have two motivations in mind:

1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet.

2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account" and think nothing of it.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#40

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.

I could imagine they're trying to prioritize things like user retention and ad revenue, both of which can be done better by tracking user behavior. Losing a percentage of their logged out user base could very well be worth it to them in order to increase what helps their business.
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