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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

#581

Post by photonthug »

brushfoot wrote: post #198
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. :(

I'm cautiously optimistic about Lemmy. Anyone can spin up an instance, so it's decentralized, but instances are connected, so there's community. It may still be rough around the edges, but to me it feels like the spirit of the old phpBB forums combined with almost 20 years of lessons learned from Reddit.

Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment.

The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view)

Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added.

So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#582

Post by rchaud »

robot_no_421 wrote: post #412
rchaud wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If P2P micropayments could somehow have succeeded, then a different Internet could have been possible. Tipping content creators directly is impossible without megacorporations taking a cut, be it Apple, Paypal, Patreon etc, and their unit economics work better with recurring payments, which lands us in subscription hell. One would almost be tempted to ask for a cheque in the mail like in the old days.

Cryptocurrency almost solves this, but the scaling issues and high knowledge barrier to entry is still holding this idea back.

It doesn't solve it at all, I am talking about real money you can spend in a store, not tokens that need to be converted through an exchange into cash each time.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#583

Post by nickthegreek »

Choco31415 wrote: post #566
dehrmann wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I’m learning more about the Twitter situation slowly. Why did it take on massive debt?

Musk did that to finance his purchase.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#584

Post by gt565k »

The overthinking, speculation, and wasted thoughts in the comments due to misinformed people attempting to spread unsubstantiated claims is quite shocking.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674887204580073474?s=20 ---- @elonmusk

"Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.

What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas. 5:06 PM · Jun 30, 2023"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ---- @nearcyan

"so @elonmusk now that twitter blocks all requests that are not logged in, tweets can no longer be embedded in most chat apps

I'd strongly suggest reconsidering the UX+growth tradeoffs made here (take note how tiktok, youtube, etc, do not need this despite much higher b/w req!)"

----

@elonmusk

"This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.

Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.

It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation."

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#585

Post by wraptile »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #143
jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #7

Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 "Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"

"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?

It's corporate speak of "we want to have our data public for all of the benefits and carry no costs"

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#586

Post by nomilk »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #570
nomilk wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (twitter) needs revenue right now, and the other monetization efforts haven't panned out Twitter monetizes via 1. advertising, 2. subscriptions, 3. API sales, admittedly I have no idea of the actual numbers. The first claim (that Twitter needs revenue urgently) seems false since the owner has deep pockets.

Twitter is still $20B away from being in the green from even the most generous estimates. (Elon himself) Currently Twitter is in the red, and he needs it to not be that and to generate a multi-billion surplus to pay back the investors he took up to finance this.

> Twitter is still $20B away from being (profitable)

Can you explain how Twitter manages to spend $20B per year?

Say they have 1000 employees @ $200k/year, that's $200m/year (1/5th of 1B). Where are the remaining $19.8B being spent? That figure doesn't pass the sniff test.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#587

Post by hrisng »

Choco31415 wrote: post #566
dehrmann wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I’m learning more about the Twitter situation slowly. Why did it take on massive debt?

Leveraged buyout. Twitter is now forced to carry the debt that incurred from its own acquisition

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#588

Post by nomilk »

mogwire wrote: post #567
nomilk wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (twitter) needs revenue right now, and the other monetization efforts haven't panned out Twitter monetizes via 1. advertising, 2. subscriptions, 3. API sales, admittedly I have no idea of the actual numbers. The first claim (that Twitter needs revenue urgently) seems false since the owner has deep pockets.

How many companies owned by the world’s richest men have had lay offs in the last 18 months? They became that rich by not losing money. It’s a sinking ship and he is trying to plug the hole.

Correlation does not equal causation. Although unprofitable companies might be inclined layoff employees, it's not implied that layoffs are a sign of unprofitability (in fact, the opposite could be true: laying off employees whose marginal value is low could cause a company to be more profitable).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#590

Post by jeromegv »

refurb wrote: post #550
renewedrebecca wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radio stations & TV stations use public airwaves and actually (used to, not sure now) had to prove they were acting in the public interest to keep their licenses. Doing public announcements were one way they handled that function.

The internet is a public resource, anyone can “broadcast” on it. In the end it’s still private companies (with the exception of public broadcasters or websites).

You’re being obtuse.

You were able to access those news for free. Without any account. Once you had a radio or a tv, it was free and accessible for everyone.

Not the same for Facebook or Twitter. Even if technically free, you can be banned, or have your account deactivated because you didn’t give away your phone number as “security measure”.

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