> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms. It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so big and so central to our lives, to the point many news (including from police precincts or first responders) are only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's "they owe you nothing".
If they have a monopoly on the public square, arguments could be made...
Are you using "old.reddit.com" to visit, or "www.reddit.com" and relying on JS for the old-site experience? I'm doing the latter (in large part so that I post old.reddit.com links), and I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
Personally, I do the latter. I never type "old.reddit.com". I'm always on www.reddit.com, and I'm always on the old site experience. Of course, I don't know how much of that has to do with the fact that I use RES.
I don't use RES but otherwise have the same experience as you. I never end up in new reddit.
I don't understand the question. IRC is a real-time chat protocol and twitter is a proprietary micro-blogging website. I don't see how the two are related, other than they are both something to do with the Internet.
You do understand the question, you've just decided to respond in a silly way.
It's not a silly response. The thing about IRC is that there's channels, and you chat with people in those channels. The deal with Twitter is you both publish and subscribe to short messages, but there's no enforcement of reciprocity -- I don't have to follow someone just because they follow me. There are replies, but that's not the same thing, and Twitter is starting to give people more tools to restrict replies to their Tweets, making the platform even less reciprocal. Everyone in an IRC channel gets the same experience, everyone on Twitter gets a unique experience.
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.
I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view its contents. On the new design most of the post contents are right there on the list page.
On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront).
You can petition them (via email) to not require your phone number and if your emails are persuasive enough they will activate the account without a phone number. But yeah, that is an extra step, and usually takes 2-3 emails that say something like "this account is vital to our business"
I almost hesitate to share these because I too found that Reddit's dark patterns were a large part of what helped me break that habit. I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit with all dark patterns removed. There is also an alternative front end for twitter called nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app / login.
This is the same reason I don’t tell people how I get around HN’s “noprocrast.”
My trick for getting around noprocrast is being too dumb to set it up correctly.
I have noticed that most those services (twitter, Skype and so on) block login without giving phone number...until few months later they automatically unblock. I simply check out in every week, are they removed block or not. Once I was stupid and gave phone number one of those kind services, that was bad idea. Account went into some weird state after giving code received from SMS. So my personal experience: wait, nev…
That's odd. I've never given Twitter a phone no. (Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish.) Still use Twitter daily without any issue. Perhaps it's because I'm still logged in and not trying to re-login?
> Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish
On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront).
You can remove your phone number easily under account settings. This trickery is still a very effective way to get phone information for masses of people, but on the individual level, it's possible to avoid.
Yes, but once you've added it, they have it, even if you can't see it in your settings.