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The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

annoying.technology

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Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#41

Post by pram »

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?

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

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#44

Post by bitwize »

hnaccount141 wrote: post #27
egypturnash wrote: post #11

They don't want you to leave either of course. I'm an artist and there's a constant discussion with other artists over how to get people to ever see tweets where you mention things like "my Patreon" or "commissions" or other little things like this that involve going elsewhere or exchanging money, all that shit gets hidden by the algorithm. Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel li…

> Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or something. It's been bizarre watching the increasing prevalence of these types of behaviors the last few years. There was a period of time when I remember seeing a number of consumer tech youtubers discussing supply chain issues but having to avoid using the words "COVID" or "pandemic" for fear o…

"Un-alive" comes from a Marvel animated cartoon series called Ultimate Spider-Man, in which Spider-Man teams up with Deadpool, who expresses his intent to "un-alive" a certain villain. To which Spidey replies, shocked, "You mean KILL him?!"

Deadpool's circumlocution around killing and death is a parody of similar linguistic gymnastics from 1980s cartoons, which were considered "for children" and so addressing death directly was forbidden. And given that Deadpool's mental illness makes him genre-savvy, it was probably deliberate in-universe and out. The writers then paired that with Spidey using "kill" directly in an animated kids' block show, to show how ridiculous such censorship was.

The sheer irony is that we're now self-censoring to 1980s cartoon levels to avoid robotic censors we can't even argue with.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#45

Post by throwaway81523 »

Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so they can increase the bloat to 10MB instead of 1MB to read a tweet. Finally, it is stupendously influential in the real world, yet Musk was able to buy 10% of it for around $3B, so it has a fraction of a percent of Facebook's market cap. I don't know anyone who uses Facebook any more or cares what happens on it, but Twitter steers everything. It's weird.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#46

Post by makeworld »

xg15 wrote: post #12

Meanwhile Twitter just straight-up put up a loginwall. Whenever I scroll down more than a few tweets, I get an undismissable popup prompting me to login.

There are a few options:

- Switch to an alternate Twitter frontend like nitter.net. There are extensions that can redirect to this automatically as well.

- Block Twitter from setting any cookies. This will prevent loginwalls.

- Add this custom uBlock Origin filter:

  twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
Personally I use the last two options, and sometimes use Nitter, especially on mobile.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#47

Post by makeworld »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #31
xg15 wrote: post #12

Meanwhile Twitter just straight-up put up a loginwall. Whenever I scroll down more than a few tweets, I get an undismissable popup prompting me to login.

Delete all Twitter cookies. If you’re not logged in you don’t need them. The wall disappears for awhile. Up until the Ukraine war started, this worked for a few days and then I’d get the login wall. Delete cookies again, buy a few more days. Since the war started though they seem to be acknowledging a lot of non-logged-in people need to see tweets and I haven’t seen the login wall since.

Just block Twitter from setting cookies and you won't need to keep manually deleting them.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#48

Post by manmal »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #45

Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so they can increase the bloat to 10MB inste…

It simply is the place where people post relevant, up-to-date stuff. People put up with bad UX all the time to get what they want.

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#49

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #45

Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so they can increase the bloat to 10MB inste…

[deleted]

Re: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter

#50

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #11

They don't want you to leave either of course. I'm an artist and there's a constant discussion with other artists over how to get people to ever see tweets where you mention things like "my Patreon" or "commissions" or other little things like this that involve going elsewhere or exchanging money, all that shit gets hidden by the algorithm. Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel li…

[deleted]
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