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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

#701
post #678

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…

This makes no logical sense. Why would the scraping not restart after its unlocked? More realistically, he got a lot of backlash from users and website owners where embedded tweets suddenly stopped showing up.

Presumably they will put some protections in place.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#702
post #650
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)

Just innovate one thing: show a counter how many new replies you have since last visit.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve done fine with these employees for the last while. Trimming the fat is healthy, especially when Twitter has historically over-hired hard for no reason other than “growth for growth’s sake”. There’s lots of legitimate reasons to criticize, but making a more efficient company and firing valueless employees is not one of them.

... and you can do just fine without regular maintenance on your house ... for a while.

What makes you think all of those employees were useful? An employee does not have inherent value. It’s not as though Twitter never had problems before the acquisition.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual problem seems to be that a large number entities now want a full copy of the entire site. But why not just... provide it? Charge however much for a box of hard drives containing every publicly-available tweet, mailed to the address of buyer's choosing. Then the startups get their stupid tweets and you don't have any load problems on your servers.

What do you even charge for that? We might never make a repository of human made content with no Ai postings in it ever again. Seems like selling the golden goose to me

It's already public information. The point isn't to extract rents, it's to remove the incentive for server-melting mass scraping.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#705
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Just innovate one thing: show a counter how many new replies you have since last visit.

No thanks, I'm happy that HN doesn't contribute to notification hell...

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#706
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 worry that at some point, Google will start monetising GMail and "Sign in with Google". This might be a calamity of a much larger scale.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#707

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…

Sounds to me like the Internet is, in fact, fine. It's only those "open" discussion sites which are having trouble.

Those sites never fit my definition of open anyway (free, permissively licensed technology and content). The ones that do are smaller, aren't a monoculture and seem to be pretty untroubled so far. No one wants to scrape the little Mastodon or Lemmy instances or other small community sites I pay attention to.

Big deal if something is a threat to the social media business. The social media business is a cancer which should be destroyed anyway. Go outside and engage in real socializing instead of the depression-spawning, teen-girl-murdering version peddled by Zuckerberg and Musk. It's much better and once you change your habits you'll never look back. Maybe it has something to do with all the vitamin D you get from being outside.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#708
post #674
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, he sold all (I think) of his shares long time ago apparently because of conflict of interest with Tesla.

Wasn’t in a non profit back then? Do they actually have shares? I thought part of the point is they don’t turn a profit to pay out to investors.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#709
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are centralized businesses doomed to fail? It’s been the primary organizational mode for the last 10,000 years.

It's not centralized businesses that inevitably fail, it's businesses that become top dog that inevitably fail. If you own a company and want it to last through the ages and you aren't literally the only guy in town, never become number one. Aim high, but don't hit the top. The same can be said for countries and practically any organization or group. You stay an underdog if you do not want to ever fail.

This doesn't make intuitive sense. Are you sure you're not seeing the results of survivorship bias? Or is there a mechanism in place that kills top players?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#710
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This attitude that: if it ain't broke, don't destroy it, is something I'm finding myself valuing increasingly. I use Stylish to make HN look a bit more readable and prettier, and beyond that, it functions exactly how I want it to and I'm glad to see that the institutional momentum here is a core value.

> If it ain't broke, don't destroy it.

That's actually a nice way of putting it! Better than the "fix" version, because this is clear on the consequences.

I feel like it might be applied to everything from OS UI design (Windows 11), web platform redesigns (Google's icons) to whatever is going on with social media (the silly enshittification term describes this) and many other things.

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