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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

#61

Post by Felz »

paxys wrote: post #38
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.

In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems compared to how much they are used.

You might not realize just how expensive SMSes can be. Based on AWS SMS pricing, they cost 6/10ths of a cent to US destinations each, so each deal sent to 90,000 people in the article would cost twitter $540. That's not even getting into Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS, but I doubt twitter supported that.

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

#62

Post by paxys »

aaronlifshin wrote: post #12

He writes: "Of course if that’s a major problem, then offering 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn’t make much sense either." But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.

He also skips over the fact that 2FA means second factor. Even if insecure it's still better than nothing.

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

#63

Post by mschuster91 »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #55
flatTheCurve wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is, everything is political. Take LGBT people, especially trans people. Their entire right to existence is a hotly debated topic. Same for abortions. Religions. Sport events. Porn preferences. Sex work. Even such utterly mundane things as lipstick.

Take that out and you'd be left with essentially a feed of cute animals and still get fights between people arguing if dogs or cats are cuter.

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

#64

Post by saagarjha »

mtnGoat wrote: post #39
saagarjha wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd have to remember to shut down the SMS network.

dont have to shut it down entirely, just block twitters shortcodes and numbers.

Which is work, especially if you're the kind of government that just shuts down the internet rather than blocking undesirable content.

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

#65

Post by gurkendoktor »

jedberg wrote: post #36
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.

The reddit experience is pretty similar to a decade ago.

Only if you use the "old" layout, who knows how long that'll last.

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

#66

Post by buckminster »

heleninboodler wrote: post #40
raverbashing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't. The mobile website works. Worse of the worse cases use Dabr.

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 had the same behaviour from Android Firefox, so I disabled Javascript and now Twitter gives me the old (i.e. fast) site.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #62
aaronlifshin wrote: post #12

He writes: "Of course if that’s a major problem, then offering 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn’t make much sense either." But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.

He also skips over the fact that 2FA means second factor. Even if insecure it's still better than nothing.

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by rakoo »

djsumdog wrote: post #51
rakoo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is absolutely nothing the original UI offers that I want, it's all bloated all I want is the content. Unfortunately when I'm looking at a tweet I want to see the whole conversation with replies and such, but nitter doesn't show it, only some of the threads that start at the given tweet, so if I want to read it all I have to click everywhere and open 10 tabs. I wish there was a frontend that loaded the whole conversation in one go, the way HN or old reddit do

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

#69

Post by hombre_fatal »

paxys wrote: post #62
aaronlifshin wrote: post #12

He writes: "Of course if that’s a major problem, then offering 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn’t make much sense either." But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.

He also skips over the fact that 2FA means second factor. Even if insecure it's still better than nothing.

Only if 2FA doesn't open up customer support channels that defeat the point of 2FA, like the common "oops I lost my phone lol" channel attack that gives you access to an account if you can provide the other factor.

(Still) works against Amazon btw: https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backd...

I'd say 2FA is often worse than 1FA because customer support systems are rarely prepared to say "sorry, can't give you access to your account :/". Because 99.9% of the time, it really is a user accidentally locked out of their account.

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

#70

Post by wolco »

schnevets wrote: post #58
djsumdog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They seem like our older geocities pages or myspace profiles or tublr blogs but used by more and offering less but expecting less effort to create.
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