961–970 of 1001 posts
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I would not assume that, no. Following accounts is fundamental to using Twitter; I absolutely think the majority of people using Twitter are logged-in.
I have friends who have used Twitter for years to get status updates and read the occasional thread without following, so no, it is not "fundamental".
Uggh. I only use twitter to follow critical (life-and-death) emergency broadcasts from our local fire department. Is there a viable alternative for them to use now that twitter is going to block most of our county’s residents?
How did you really use it for emergency info if you weren't logged in? You'd find out there was an emergency and manually go check for details? I'd think most of the power of posting emergencies on Twitter would be notifications?
My house was in the evacuation zone for most of the recent fires. I just kept this link open on my phone and refreshed it as needed.
Quite often they will tell you when to expect the next update, ie) within an hour
Even if I had a Twitter, I’d say the random notifications would be more frustrating than valueable in an emergency situation. If I’m in a safe enough spot to look for updates online I can pull up the local OEM Twitter.
Both results are positive IMO
I've viewed twitter wayyyyy less (only when someone links something) since Tweetbot stopped working and I think it's been good for my mental health. A login wall will take that usage down to zero, so good news overall.
I find Twitter really annoying to use now, since they made it so all of the replies from blue checkmark accounts get boosted to the top of the feed. I have to scroll past all of them just to find "normal" comments. The BlueBlocker browser extension is helping, but it can only block 1 account approximately every 15 seconds, or it triggers a rate limit and I have to sign-in to Twitter again.
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They weren't "private" TV networks. They are licensed by the government to use our airwaves, which are accessible by all (except CNN, which is cable). There's a big difference. Governmental and public institutions should not be relying on Twitter for their communications. It's unprofessional at the very least.
They absolutely were/are private, even if they used a publicly owned medium to distribute their content. Other than an hour of public-service airtime on Sunday mornings, and lax FCC enforcement of a decency standard, those private TV networks can do/say anything they want. You wouldn't put quotes around that word for cell-phone companies using licensed bandwidth, or airlines using public airspace, would you?
And they are not private. The public is legally entitled to receive anything broadcast over the radio spectrum. And as I and another poster have already pointed out, there are government licensing and carriage requirements involved with TV and radio broadcasters.
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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)
I'd love to see the source control change log for HN. I can't even remember a single visible change in all the years I've been a user. I think there have been a few under the surface though. I wish all the other sites on the Internet would wake up every morning, look at their TODO list and say "Nah, not today."
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…
I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But: A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk'…
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…
I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But: A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk'…
There absolutely is, if you try instead of whining on internet. People at Vercel have already developed new anti-bot + fingerprinting + rate limiting techniques which look quite promising. I dare say within a year, new tools will be powerful enough to do this easily.
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Elon has a good point there. Much of the current AI hotness is predicated on stealing peoples content and exploiting the infrastructure that other people have built. I don’t think it’s acceptable. The licenses, compensation models, law, technical solutions, attribution, security and privacy all need time to catch up. Regulation has a role to play as its a bit of a free for all right now. The irony of Elon mentioning…
Why would an AI company start scraping twitter html, instead of using an already existing archive? Something similar to archive.org could earn money from that. If all you want is the content, there's no reason to suck it through a straw. I'd expect those that require real time data, such as stock market bots or sentiment data providers, to scrape twitter (if they don't provide the data by other means, for example the…
This is just kicking the can down the road.
We have a major structural problem now. We want data to be free and machine readable, but no startup (and even a giant like Twitter) can afford the server cost to withstand all those machines.
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I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But: A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk'…
> there is no engineering solution for this and you're not going to be able to successfully sue companies for scraping Twitter There absolutely is, if you try instead of whining on internet. People at Vercel have already developed new anti-bot + fingerprinting + rate limiting techniques which look quite promising. I dare say within a year, new tools will be powerful enough to do this easily.
I see where you're coming from, but if Twitter is in a position where it can't roll out those protections right now, given its current head counts, etc... it's not going to be in a position where it can roll out those protections next week. Probably not next month.
So it's less that no one could block companies from scraping Twitter (although anti-scraping mechanisms are probably always going to be a cat-and-mouse game, so I'm not sure that there is ever going to be a perfect easy solution). It's more that if Twitter can't do it right now, nothing is going to magically change any time soon about the situation it has found itself in. And waiting a year (even waiting 6 months) for tools to become available before rolling back this rate limiting would be incredibly self-destructive for Twitter.
The way I see it, they're basically guaranteeing that they will need to roll back these changes before they have a solution to whatever specific problem or irritation Musk is fixated on. They're not going to gain additional engineering capabilities in the next week. And how long does Musk plan to leave rate-limiting in place? A social media site where people can't look at content is just broken.