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Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

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Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#51

Post by djsumdog »

rakoo wrote: post #48
Dunedan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, an occasional reader without a Twitter account, the experience became much worse in the past decade. That's because Twitter switched of RSS feeds and when opening links to individual tweets nowadays there is this ubiquitous "Something Went Wrong, Try Again" on first page load.

I use nitter.net as an alternative frontend, it's better in every way

I love nitter and threadreaderapp. They make reading Tweets tolerable. The stock UI is just a confusing cluster fuck of Web 5.0 bloated webpacked Javascript bullshit.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#52

Post by flatTheCurve »

xxpor wrote: post #33
zymhan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can follow people. But if the people you follow "like" a political post, then you might see that. You can also tell Twitter to "Show you less" of any kind of post.

Or just turn off the feature entirely in settings.

Where in settings? I've just checked everything.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#53

Post by fastball »

koverda wrote: post #2

> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.

I originally read your comment as "I'd have to second guess this" and I was very confused.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#54

Post by heleninboodler »

AndrewGaspar wrote: post #44
heleninboodler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For extremely generous definitions of "works." I am constantly amazed at how long (and how many attempts) it often takes to load a single tweet page. The SPA-initializing state is usually measured in minutes on my iphone regardless of what kind of connection I'm on, and the result is often that message that the page failed to load because my browser made too many attempts. I don't know how you can possibly do this ba…

I just loaded a link to a tweet in a private browsing window on my iPhone in some sub-second amount of time. So whatever issue you're running into is a bug, not intentional.

Interesting how different our experiences are. This is a two-month old iphone, fully patched and with very few apps installed. Same experience as my previous iphone and android phones. Just verified: I sat and watched the "loading" spinner for over three minutes before starting to write this response. No idea how long it actually took, but it finished with just a blank white page with a twitter logo and a search bar. Maybe it's my mobile network (AT&T), who knows. But the experience is basically unusable, and I see at least one other person in this thread mentioning the error that indicates requests are being throttled, so I know I'm not alone.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#55

Post by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 »

flatTheCurve wrote: post #28
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to what it was a decade ago. It’s materially the same, which is rare for unicorns of this time.

Disagree. Before you could follow people. Now you have an algorithm of forced political tweets.

A twitter-like service whose only ban-able TOS violation (besides obviously illegal stuff) is to post any political content... that sounds amazing! I’d be there in a heartbeat.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#57

Post by quixoticaxolotl »

crazygringo wrote: post #45

I mean, Twitter over SMS made perfect and necessary sense back in the first decade of its life. But honestly the time has long since passed where it still makes sense to support. Smartphone notifications with the app are far superior in every way. (And if you don't want to install the app? I mean, just don't use Twitter then.) And the only people who don't have smartphones these days are the kind of people who have m…

> the only people who don't have smartphones these days are the kind of people who have made an intentional choice to reduce their always-on digital connection

This needs to be qualified: with respect to Twitter's target audience.

It's empirically not true that smartphone penetration is universal. Only ~350 million smartphones exist in India for 1 billion people, for example (source: McKinsey Global Institute's "Digital India" report publication from April 2019).

It's a fair statement to say that the majority of prospective and current Twitter users have smartphones, which justifies this decision.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#58

Post by schnevets »

djsumdog wrote: post #46
ilikehurdles wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter used to be a wonderful platform to hack on. I feel like the early days of developer and poweruser friendliness helped keep the platform from dying in some niche microblogging category.

It was originally a base for which people made all kinds of neat things like TwitPic. But then Twitter started integrating everything and competing with all the people who made them great; sometimes even suing them. I started using Twitter via SMS and before the age of modern smart phones (I was on my Palm Treo. The girl in the cube behind me just got an EDGE eyePhone) and for all my university friends, we used it as…

I have similar memories from college. It's weird to think that API Craze was an apex for hacking culture, but things haven't felt as exciting since.

Or maybe I'm just reflecting on a younger period with nostalgia and have lost touch. Maybe those Instagram stickers and TikToks are equally as hackworthy as the things we spun up in the ol' days.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#59

Post by ChrisArchitect »

bnt wrote: post #34
zamfi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! I did something quite similar back in the day for text message notifications of server downtime. The problem was that sometimes Twitter's messages were delayed by hours...

Does anyone remember the drama of failwhale and their Rails issues? Those were the times!

was thinking about the failwhale a few weeks back when github went down and was throwing angry pink unicorns. Different, pre-coronavirus times.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#60

Post by oprypin »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #15
seancoleman wrote: post #5

This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…

Twitter used to be a wonderful platform to hack on. I feel like the early days of developer and poweruser friendliness helped keep the platform from dying in some niche microblogging category.

A video by Tom Scott exploring that sentiment https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0
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