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Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

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Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook cut off access to Australian fire brigade pages, among others.

Facebook news is shutting off in Canada where there are currently wildfires. I'm leaving no comment on why.

Only the Canadian govt. is to blame for this.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#492
post #337

It always irked me that public institutions embraced Twitter as a primary means of communication in many cases. It never seemed right that a private company was being put in between public functions and the the public which depends on them. Not to mention, since I live outside the US, a private company in another country. I even wrote complaints to one local public body to ask them to set up a communication channel t…

Privatization is a thing beyond seemingly fundamental online services.

Local water systems in Guam are privatized, much to the chagrin of local activists.

Elsewhere, there's an article on the guardian just like yesterday about the impact of privatization on either the UK's or some locale inside the UK, for their water usage. Basically the water department is now the highest debt entity in all water departments and it's the one that's privatized.

Privatizing public data is a shortsighted thoughtless approach to public communication.

So Play stupid games went stupid prizes.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#493

Anybody feel like this is ironically going to accelerate the decline of twitter? I'm never, EVER making a twitter account. However publishers still communicate with me via tweets I could see. Now that I need an account to view tweets, publishers just have a smaller audience. I'll just see the screenshots on reddit anyway :)

He needs revenue right now, and the other monetization efforts haven't panned out (blue checks, advertising, etc.). So he's trying to make a quick buck from user-generated data now that the LLM rush is at an all time high. For that he needs to limit access to the data in the first place, otherwise nobody would be paying for publicly available data.

This is how death spirals work. Twitter was treading water a year ago. Taking on lots of debt caused mass layoffs, worrying people about site stability and making them investigate other platforms. A lot of bad tweets scared away advertisers, causing more layoffs and desperation. Signed-in users engage more, so make all users signed-in users (no logical fallacies here).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#494
post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook news is shutting off in Canada where there are currently wildfires. I'm leaving no comment on why.

How's USA based Facebook related to wildfires in Canada? Check cbc.ca for the updates related to wildfires.

Due to some revenue sharing rules that just went into effect in Canada, designed to prevent news from being absorbed by Facebook and never leading to the ads being seen on the original website, FB is closing link. Sharing to cbc.ca. People can go there directly, but eventually safety information being everywhere is a good thing.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#495
post #110

This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(

What's so funny is everyone saying social media sucks and needs to go away. Then when it starts to it's all "no not like that!"

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how we keep pretending that any of this complicated shit is better than good old phpBB. There are no modern inventions for social interactions which made actual interactions better. They're all incomprehensible UX nightmares used mostly by the loud minority of users on the web (i.e. Twitter actively engages with only 7% of the entire internet user base) who censor each other and then fight over how to make it…

The problems with phpBB are at least two-fold: 1) discovery If I can’t find a forum, it’s not much use to me! 2) single sign-on I don’t want to make a million accounts for a million separate forums. I want one account that I can take with me to every forum. Both of these issues were solved by Reddit. This was its major value-add. The user base brought all of the remaining value with them. This is also the value of th…

I'm not really convinced that discovery was a problem with the old forums. There was no insatiable need to know where everything under the sun lives. You'd typically just follow a few forums around your interests. I think it became a glaring disadvantage when Reddit introduced an overabundance of options and allowed everyone to subscribe to 20 things because they could, not because they needed or wanted to. I think Reddit's value-add was community moderation without self-hosting.

This is akin to online dating. Nobody needed 5 dates a week 20 years ago and because it's an option now doesn't mean it was a problem than. Optionality is just a byproduct of social platforms.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#498
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that's the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account. Agreed. I think the barrier would be lower if I knew I could migrate my identity to another instance if the first one became sketchy or shut down or de-federated. Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identit…

Maybe we need some sort of self-identifying system. Like SSH keys, where you manage your own identity and then share a public key to each instance that identifies you to that instance. Like an identity client you could self manage if you wanted to. Make it optional, portable, and transferable. So you can choose to let a server host manage your identity, or migrate to a self managed identity. If I had more time on my…

I've seen discussions that Mastodon has a way of migrating accounts. I don't know if that's a Mastodon specific thing or at the ActivityPub level. I don't think it migrates the content but I'm not sure. What I think it does is notify followers of the migration. I'm not sure anything like PKI is necessary.

Conceptually a planned migrations should have a period of concurrent access to both the old and new accounts and it should be easy to publish a handshake to confirm the migration to followers to update contact info. That's my thought anyway. Something like keybase (does that still exist?) could also be used for similar sorts of proofs.

The way people used to handle this on Reddit is people would send a message from their old account saying "hey XYZ is my new account" and that seems sufficient.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#499

I've viewed twitter wayyyyy less (only when someone links something) since Tweetbot stopped working and I think it's been good for my mental health. A login wall will take that usage down to zero, so good news overall.

As soon as I saw tweetdeck, which was like the gluttonous way of consuming all of Twitter all at once, I started thinking about the architect, from the movie The matrix. The guy with the enormous wall of televisions all watching neo in all of his different dimensions, checking to make sure he wasn't about to upset the balance of the matrix.

We are are not that sophisticated of animals. I mean we're not as dumb as dinosaurs were where they forgot about prey if the prey turned the corner out of their sight, but we're not as smart as we want to believe we are. So I think Twitter is Entertainment and Should not be relied upon.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#500
post #337

It always irked me that public institutions embraced Twitter as a primary means of communication in many cases. It never seemed right that a private company was being put in between public functions and the the public which depends on them. Not to mention, since I live outside the US, a private company in another country. I even wrote complaints to one local public body to ask them to set up a communication channel t…

Public institutions now often require agreeing to the Google Account ToS to get public schooling.

IMO this should be illegal.

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