Twitter now requires an account to view tweets • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#641

Post by jjav » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:31 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #534

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…

It never seemed right that a private company was being put in between public functions and the the public which depends on them. But why? It’s always been that way. Before Twitter, it was private radio stations, private TV stations or private newspapers.

> It’s always been that way. Before Twitter, it was private radio stations, private TV stations or private newspapers.

You can listen to TV and radio stations for free without an account or subscription and they can't cancel you (unlike FB/Twitter/etc).

Newspapers tecnically you had to buy, but reading the headlines at the newstand was free and you could always go to the library of coffee shop to read the whole thing for free.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#642

Post by Red_Tarsius » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:33 AM UTC

It's a very myopic decision on their part if true, even worse than the API pricing update. This will stop any form of viral content on twitter from reaching non-internet people. Forget about sharing that one twitter link to friends or relatives. Instead it will make the twitter echo chamber increasingly detached and irrelevant to the larger discussion. On the long run, this decision changes the narrative of twitter from being a catalyst of political change (e.g. Arab Spring) to a tumblr clone with ecelebs. I don't have an account and never will. I followed a handful of accounts via nitter rss. Now I'll just wait until they build their presence outside the platform.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#643

Post by takeda » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:33 AM UTC

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…

That sounds like if the public institutions line Twitter, they should sub their own federated Mastodon server so they are in full control of it.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#644

Post by HWR_14 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:36 AM UTC

kakakiki wrote: post #599

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "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…

Isn't Musk a major investor in OpenAI? If he said "my data feeds chatgpt, not its competitors", that would make sense, right?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#645

Post by agnosticmantis » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:36 AM UTC

anon373839 wrote: post #622

agnosticmantis wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He needs revenue right now, and the other monetization efforts haven't panned out (blue checks, advertising, etc.). So he's trying to make a quick buck from user-generated data now that the LLM rush is at an all time high. For that he needs to limit access to the data in the first place, otherwise nobody would be paying for publicly available data.

Twitter is full of low-quality garbage, partly due to the culture and partly due to the format. I am very doubtful that it has much value for LLM pretraining OR fine-tuning.

That’s a good point. I think (in jest) the data is invaluable for training automated trolls, for which various state actors should be willing to pay good money.

But more seriously, maybe the value is in it being a real-time source of new data, albeit the signal is drowned in noise like a needle in a hay stack.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#646

Post by spaceman_2020 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:37 AM UTC

UberFly wrote: post #629

zerd wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they killed the API, what did they think would happen? It's easier to control access and rate limit with a proper API.

"control access and rate limit" Isn't that basically what they did with the API changes?

But they were too stingy with the tiers and too greedy with their prices. Even for minor use cases where you need to make, say, 100 API calls a day, you’ll need to pay $100/month.

Which just leads people to scrape.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#647

Post by sneak » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:39 AM UTC

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.

All big tech companies that store non-e2ee data are equally evil, because they all by law must make that data available to government spies without a warrant. (They know this, and they still collect the data.)

These same government spies run an international network of torture centers.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#648

Post by bongobingo1 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:40 AM UTC

Panzer04 wrote: post #623

ImaCake wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity markets are a prime example of ideology winning over logic. In Australia, the eastern states have a privatised electricity market while Western Australia has a very limited market with agreements to hold a certain amount of gas fuel at a certain price. Currently the price of electricity is significantly higher in the eastern market than the "less free" western one.

The western Australian example just demonstrates why petrostates are wealthy - if you have big energy resources you can make stuff cheaper, surprise! And realistically all that's really happening there is west Australia is effectively imposing a tax on gas profits to subsidize the grid. There's no magic success here - just a redistribution of gas profits to electricity consumers. I don't actually think the Australian…

> There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything

Did we gain anything? I ask in earnest, I don't know.

I can guess that the cost of running, maintenance, etc are now "not a cost of the state", but the cost doesn't just disappear, it was always on the consumer via tax or bills (or tax and bills, hopefully in a way that sums to the same cost!).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#649

Post by spaceman_2020 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:41 AM UTC

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 so jaded with the internet at this point. Most phone apps and games are a microtransaction hell. Most social media apps are a race to the bottom with clickbait. Every website is littered with ads and popups and cookie banners.

Time to go outside and forget that the online world exists.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#650

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:43 AM UTC

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. :(

HN isn't next. We hate change.

(More precisely: we're acutely aware that users hate change, and since we do too, it's kind of an easy call.)

Also, the value of HN to YC consists of the community and keeping the community happy is therefore a must.

(Did I say happy? More precisely: as happy as possible under the circumstances)