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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

#511

Post by tjpnz »

zmmmmm wrote: 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…

NZ government was using Facebook almost exclusively to do that during Covid. If you didn't have a Facebook account you were basically stuck with TV news or radio. Online news sources would only link to the Facebook post.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#512

Post by cycomanic »

sneak wrote: post #416
vhcr wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why they can't do both, have an official website (with RSS), and automatically share the links on Twitter.

Setting up an official website with RSS that allows nontechnical users to securely post in real-time costs time, money, and expertise. Signing up for a Twitter account is free and can be done by literally anyone in the organization.

It's worth noting that many government institutions nowadays have (often several) social media communications "officers" officers, whose only job it is to disaminate information via social media (twitter, Facebook...). Now you'd think that if they hire a person for these sort of things (btw keeping track of multiple social media account and monitoring relevant keywords is definitely not typical nontechnical user territory) they could train the person to update a cms as well.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#513

Post by user764743 »

cmckn wrote: post #208
consumer451 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what percentage of legitimate traffic is blocked by this. I would imagine that the majority of users don't have an account, by a large margin, correct?

I would not assume that, no. Following accounts is fundamental to using Twitter; I absolutely think the majority of people using Twitter are logged-in.

Tons of people I share news with don't have Twitter - now I just wont bother, and I'm assuming it's the same for many others who used Twitter as some sort of middle man for that.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#514

Post by ChainOfFools »

mauvehaus wrote: post #368
MattGaiser wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, public institutions have long been criticized for not communicating where the people are. Notices posted on their own website are unlikely to read by anywhere as broad an audience. Plenty uses newspapers, but even my grandparents get stuff from Twitter before the paper now, if just from younger people sharing it with them. I agree Twitter shouldn't be the only channel, but it is where the people ar…

The answer would seem to be POSSE - Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere https://indieweb.org/POSSE

How does this help to fix the essentially non-technical problem that on long enough time horizons, and by long enough maybe 5 years at most these days, content that is optimized to provoke reaction ("engagement") outcompetes content that is optimized to promote contemplation, on any network, whether syndicated or not.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#515

Post by winwang »

swat535 wrote: post #267

Taking into consideration how much Spez thinks of himself as a Musk, we should be expecting Reddit to implement the same feature soon. We are just sitting by the sideline watching as the internet we all loved slowly dies in the hands of greedy corporations. This is truly a sad state of affairs.

I'm not sure it's as simple as a "greedy corporation" thing, because they've been "greedy" for a while. In a sense, they're even legally obligated to be "greedy". And the more we skirt the details of what (who) exactly causes these issues, the more we'll fail to understand such issues.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#516

Post by doctor_eval »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #506
sneak wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public institutions now often require agreeing to the Google Account ToS to get public schooling. IMO this should be illegal.

And if it's not Google it's Microsoft. Which is, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the lesser of two evils at this point. There's a 2003 me staring through a time travel portal absolutely aghast that 2023 me is saying something like this.

Microsoft has always been an apex predator, like a lion or maybe a hippo. It can end you in a single bite, but at least you know what you’re dealing with.

Google is more like a malaria carrying species of mosquito. Little bites that you barely notice, but in aggregate are actually much more dangerous.

I know the metaphor is a bit stretched but even in the late 90’d it was clear what Microsoft did. Google has gone from “don’t be evil” to “this is the definition of open source” to …

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#517

Post by sofal »

cvoss wrote: post #430
hedora wrote: post #151

Uggh. I only use twitter to follow critical (life-and-death) emergency broadcasts from our local fire department. Is there a viable alternative for them to use now that twitter is going to block most of our county’s residents?

If the local authorities have an actual life-and-death emergency broadcast to make to the entire area they serve, I suspect they have a more effective means to do this than Twitter. As a matter of public safety, they need to be able to inform everyone, whether they've subscribed or not, and in a way that does not require users to think to check for a notification, or even to have a special device (like a cellphone to…

How about: I'd like to know what's happening during an active shooter event at my son's school. Is there a loudspeaker for that?

This actually happened to me, and guess where all of the official police updates were posted.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#518

Post by hedora »

londons_explore wrote: post #465
NelsonMinar wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Data pillaging", WTF does that mean? Remember when Twitter used to give archives of tweets to the Library of Congress? And had a firehose for folks to consume as many tweets as they could?

I think it means "someone is crawling our data, perhaps because we made our API cost money, and we don't like it".

Ironically, my initial reaction was “Oh crap. Public saftey orgs use this to broadcast alerts.”

My second reaction was “I wonder how hard it would be to take a list of twitter handles and scrape their feeds into an S3 bucket that’s fronted with a CDN.”

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#519

Post by mark_l_watson »

calebcannon wrote: post #463
akira2501 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :( The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are meeting their inevitable end.

The internet is most definitely not fine. There is an incoming tsunami of chat gpt generated bullshit that is going to make most open discussion sites more or less useless. Twitter requiring accounts and Reddit shutting down apis are both related: chat gpt et al are a threat to the social media business and ironically made possible because of the social media business. TBF I think we should all be exercising extreme…

+1 your concern is valid.

A potential saving grace: I bet within a year or so it will be easy to self-host LLMs that are easy to fine tune and run. Then there will be a few open source tools that you can use yourself, privately, to capture your level of interest while reading, and periodically make a reader/summarize/filter agent.

This is not scary if people can fairly easily run it all themselves, keeping their data private. It would help wade through crap, and there is some irony in using LLMs to have personal filtering and summarization.

Compared to future versions of ChatGPT, Bard, etc. the models that individuals can self host will be much weaker, but I think that they will be strong enough for personal agents and eventually be cheap to run, and affordable to fine tune.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#520

Post by berniedurfee »

nunez wrote: 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. :(

The internet has sucked for a long time, it’s just leveling up again.
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