There’s a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content.
I suppose these angry Reddit commenters bashing Twitter aren’t seeing it because they’re logged in to Reddit.
Just as with Reddit, there are workarounds to bypass this login requirement if you really want to. The users in that thread have some tips for using uBlock to disable it.
I don't have a reddit account, but it has (for now) the old, usable interface available, so the issue does not persist. Twitter doesn't, and one needs third party services such as nitter or other front ends to avoid the bloated, buggy, purposefully worthless UI.
This tendency to build walled garden communities can't end well, but at the same time the platforms introducing these dark patterns themselves aren't particularly honest, so not much of value is going to be lost as hopefully better alternatives get more adoption.
Anyway, up until a few days ago there were uBO filters to delete twitter cookies every page load and it seemed to do the trick, this may not work anymore.
> There’s a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content.
My first thought when I saw the headline was, how long until the front page features this:
Reddit starts to require login to view posts (twitter.com)
Then I realized this has probably already happened a while ago.
But signing up for Reddit is much easier than signing up for Twitter. You just need to specify a username and a password. You don't need an email or a phone number.
I’m not sure it’s as much ‘the same’ as it appears at first glance.
Increasingly, Twitter is a place where people post original _content_ - things they expect others to be able to see and read and share, potentially on other platforms. These range from the original pithy remarks to long, article-like streams. It seems problematic to me to require a login to view these, and I think it could have an effect on usage for these kinds of things.
There’s not so much of that in Reddit. It’s more a discussion forum, where reading seems like the secondary thing to do to me. Peoples identity also isn’t as ‘obvious’ on Reddit.
Of course, it’s not concrete - you do see long shareable ‘articles’ in Reddit comments sometimes, but I do find myself more taken aback by a Twitter login requirement than a Reddit one.
When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's great if you want to get off them.
What I've noticed is a few of the newer things breaking on it (unsurprisingly). I think over time it'll get to a point where there's enough of these new things where they'll just pull the plug, which is really too bad. Also love it much more than the "new" experience.
The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me. I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand why they chose this new disastrous design.
That's their objective, to get rid of users who they can't monetize. Including veteran users with ad blockers who refuse to use the new site or any of its features.
It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.
The post-view in compact mode is actually denser than before (thought it has some ugly spacing issues at the top). It’s amazing. Sadly, there seems to be no compact mode for comments, so those look horrible.
And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.
Reddit has had 5 second page loads for over a decade. Extremely embarrassing of them to be honest. I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement, but you always want your site to be fast. I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors.
>I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors
There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.
The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.
What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a copious number of round button-icons that are not intuitive? It's fucking insulting.
Several years ago, I went to a tech roundtable hosted by a well-known company, and this topic came up.
Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.
"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"
I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view its contents. On the new design most of the post contents are right there on the list page.
I exclusively use new Reddit. The increased friction around every single interaction is great for limiting the amount of time I spend there: it raises the bar for deciding to actually view a discussion, and the incomprehensible nesting-collapse algorithm keeps me from going down rabbit holes in threads unless it's something that genuinely interests me.
It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch, and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully invested in what I'm watching.
Sounds like how I like my afternoon coffee, bitter without any additives. It reminds me I need to leave work if I've finished the important stuff for the day. A much needed kick in the guts that makes you purse your lips as you drink it down that puts the rest of the day in perspective.
If you click the button to get rid of the cookie prompt on the bottom of the site while on old.reddit.com, it redirects you to new.reddit.com. Amazing.
You can just uncheck "Use new Reddit as my default experience" in settings and get the old experience without an extension, if you have an account anyway.
Exactly. This is good since this corporations are basically killing themselves since people, slowly but steady, are realizing they can get info elsewhere on the internet (and people start sharing outside them). So yeah, they are basically forcing users to migrate to more open services.
Eh maybe. The problem is that IMO there aren’t any obvious alternatives to Reddit. I remember when Digg committed suicide with a pretty bad redesign and most disgruntled users moved to Reddit. I’ve been pretty annoyed with the changes Reddit has implemented in the past couple of years, but I haven’t found another place to go (that’s not necessarily a bad thing). HN is the closest alternative but the scope of topics we discuss is limited. That’s probably part of HN’s success but then where do you go for other topics?
My Reddit habit has been all but replaced with private Slacks and Discords these days. Either hobby / interest groups, or an "alumni Slack" full of old work friends from a company I worked at a long time.
I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway. Small private forums, where you can actually have real discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.
For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram once per decade, or something like that. But whatever people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses want.
I rather like my reaction GIFs and discussion threads. What I want to see is a modern IRC with these features, and an optional per-channel/per-server message persistence to deal with not knowing what happened while you were away, or while the mobile IRC app of your choice was killed by the Google/Apple background task manager that only allows you to dodge it with proprietary push support.
Slack also smacks of terrible usability, and is proprietary up the wazoo. There is no way to automate anything on it unless your organisation gives some approval.
I find these terrible for any kind of information discovery. I hate that so many communities are using them as an alternative to a subreddit or focused forum. Hell most "modern" forum software is horrific as well.
I think that the advantage in using some kind of instant-message system like Discord/Slack is that you might end up getting a faster response, which is quite helpful when I'm feeling impatient and want my problem to be solved faster. On the other hand, the questions aren't as easily searchable and archived for future people to find.
I used to feel the same way, but even the smaller ones are increasingly being co-opted by partisan screechers. Especially in the State/City/Town subreddits.
IMO they are just creating an opening in the market by continuously shooting themselves in the foot like that. I don't really understand it. Requiring a login to view content is the reason why I never got into Tumblr or Pinterest... I'm not going to bother signing up for your site if you don't first show me it has content that is worth my time, these people have it the wrong way around.
As a Reddit alternative, Ruqqus has the UI and responsiveness down pretty good. However, it branded itself as anti-reddit, and attracted a lot of right-wing people as a result. However, their platform is open source, so IMO, it's only a matter of time before someone steps up to the task.
For reddit, IMO the simplest things you can do to improve the experience is to force the old reddit design (old.reddit.com) when on desktop, and use any app except the official app when on mobile.
That's the one I use. The downside is you can't see pictures or gifs in comments nor the rules of a sub-reddit if you want to submit something. Also submit doesn't work correctly sometimes, especially when you need to tag a submission with flair.
I've been using red reader for the better part of a decade. Its far from the flashiest but its clean, easy to read and performant. Its also FOSS. Since my reddit experience revolves mostly around special interest subs with text heavy discussion, it suits my needs well. If you wanted something to scroll through the media heavy meme subs or the front page there are better options.
The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.
With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.
Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.
> The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.
I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs results in almost never being redirected to the "new" site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see the gallery photos in oldreddit style.
This solution works for me on both mobile browser and desktop browser.
uh... I go to www.reddit.com not old.reddit.com - I don't actively do anything at all, other than change a flag in my user settings. Looking at old.reddit.com in an incognito window looks the exact same as what i see at www.reddit.com. Firefox, ublock origin, no other addons. On mobile and desktop.
> I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, other than having to re-set the flag in settings now and again. Like I said, the only time i've seen an issue is the odd time someone posts an image gallery - I can't see it in oldreddit style unless I click on comments.
I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.
And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.
With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.
Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/<username> or /r/<subname>). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.
Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.
Disabling JS makes you keep going back to the new layout? Interesting that it's essentially being done client-side then.
I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.
Unfortunately, I think they are going to decommission that version eventually.
Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they decided to remove the account activity panel, making revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the fact that they also remove a link from the front page too quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for the dark patterns, heh.
Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)
I second red reader. To you SNR point, I think that is entirely due to the communities you join and how you manage it. Unsub from all of the default subs. They are all garbage. And any that gets beyond a certain size will inevitably fall to low effort reposts and click bait.
Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making focused special interest forums. In the past these would have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But they would have some of the best content the internet had to offer.
Thanks. I broke my reddit habit when I realized that most of the communities on reddit are just ideological echo chambers where you get banned for saying anything the community doesn't agree with. It lost most of it's value when honest conversations couldn't take place anymore. Now the only time I use reddit is when the only search results with the answer to a question I have point to reddit, and I've grown very weary of their tracking and harassing me to use their spyware app. Teddit is a nice way to get the information I'm looking for without being jerked around by those stalkers at reddit. We'll see how long it lasts before being blocked.
A lot of it has to do with being able to see the points. People think “it has a lot of points so it must be right”, which is rarely true, especially on Reddit. HN hides the points on comments and has a bit of unpredictability to the sorting to allow things to float up provided they haven’t been flagged/downvote bombed. I think it is the largest reason HN is still healthy, other than the great moderation.
It always cracks me up seeing the echo chamber criticism of reddit here. Like are you serious? Reddit is a cesspool but it is a utopia of free speech compared to HN.
While HN definitely becomes a bit of an echochamber at times too, at least you can still voice opinions that go against it without people going through your history to attack you rather than your arguments. Occasionally you get downvoted/flagged enough that people can't reply anymore, but again: That stays with just that comment/thread.
Will mention though that I’ve had wholly uncontroversial HN accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a thread.
I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it without one, but am still confused.
Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if it posts a comment with only a link?
New accounts that post links often get auto-flagged, because they're mostly spammers. You can probably recover your account by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
I always saw some comments of people saying "RIP Inbox" after one of their posts became popular in Reddit. I kid you not, it was not until earlier today that I found out that the reason for those comments is that apparenlty Reddit sends replies to your post to your email inbox. My reddit account is so old that it doesn't have a linked email, so I never realized that.
I don’t have Chrome installed on any of my devices but I’ve noticed when I’m on reddit.com on my iPhone it prompts me to either use the Reddit app or “continue browsing” using the Chrome app. Does Google pay for this as some sort of an advertisement? Or is Reddit incentivized in some way to plug Chrome over Safari or DDG “browser”? When I click “continue” it lets me just keep using my current browser but I always wonder if it would open in Chrome if the app were available on my device.
I’m on ios using firefox (though I think I’ve heard that under the hood it is using Safari’s renderer or something like that because of application store requirements? Not sure.), and it shows the chrome logo for me, uh, when I click a link that goes to new reddit, or something.
Or, I guess when viewing through the browser window that twitter embeds?
Just now I tried viewing new.reddit in safari and it told me my browser was old (though perhaps this is because I’ve refrained from updating ios)
I think the Instagram experience is better on mobile web than it is on the app with regards to consuming less. The "timeline" on mobile web is only people I follow with no inserted ads. Same with stories, there are no ads.
The best thing is that the "Explore" tab is just a bit too slow in terms of responsiveness on mobile web. I spend a less time on there because it's not as pleasant to use as the app.
Reddit is unusable without which app, the official one? Because I've been on reddit for a decade and never once used their app. It's either reddit is fun on android or the browser. Never had a problem. Even if you don't have an account, old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com (for mobile) bypass all the atrocious new UI changes
Probably referring to the regular reddit mobile website. It constantly bombards you with requests to open the app, you can't open anything from NSFW subs. It's pretty unusable. At least Twitter and Instagram I can use in the browser without 3rd party sites or apps.
Slide is also a pretty good FOSS(?) Reddit client for Android. I don't use it anymore since I'm trying to get myself to use Reddit less and less but Slide was a pretty good experience for me.
It's going to be tough because of how much of the Internet treats Twitter as a primary source. So this in effect becomes yet another stream behind a pay-wall (in information, not in money) that balkanizes people's view of "what is happening" in the world.
The first place I knew about the January 6th riots was from Twitter. I guess I'll learn about subsequent such events from other sources after people on Twitter do.
I used to love reddit, it was my favourite social media but I can't use it since they redesigned it, they really need to look at hacker news for inspiration.
Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user. I know they present a more spammy version to users landing from google, but nothing is blocked behind more than a click or two. I think that's just good business sense because you want to monetize your firehose of less engaged users and coddle the ones that are more engaged and producing content.
I find that you can get used to a change of habit very quickly. Youtube introduced unblockable commercials for iOS/safari. After 15 years of adblockers and not watching TV, I have developed an intolerance to ads and I just lost the reflex of clicking on any youtube link or going on youtube to find something. Don't really miss it.
This is what has prevented me from joining tik tok. Now it also requires a login after you view like three videos. I just close the tab afterwards. It works great!
methink the coming decade will be a few websites, a bit of IRC and a whole lot of non digital things. the information highway of freedom is becoming a parkour competition
Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible.
This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.
No idea. I used it a while and enjoyed the content, then they changed something in the algorithm and I'd suddenly get basically the same content every single day, often >30% of the feed would be the exact same as the week before. They also removed the list of topics, so there was no obvious way to escape the near static feed.
Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I never visited the site again.
It's a real shame. I used to really enjoy my daily Quora digest email. One of the only automated emails I truly dug into and read in detail. Over time I read it less and less. Then switched it to be weekly, then turned it off. I miss the old Quora.
I could imagine they're trying to prioritize things like user retention and ad revenue, both of which can be done better by tracking user behavior. Losing a percentage of their logged out user base could very well be worth it to them in order to increase what helps their business.
It's because they need to start collecting more first-party data from users who land on their site. This is a result of Apple (and others in the future) blocking third-party cookie tracking.
They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.
They sure do; however, digital media and social in particular, absolutely rely on significant investment in their audiences, attribution, etc in order to drive more revenue and thus higher CPMs. More traditional media (such as OOH, Print, etc) all rely on very high-level metrics such as daily traffic volumes and lack of direct impact evidence in their attribution of value.
This is why Facebook is SO very against what Apple is doing with iOS14+, particularly with cross-device and cross-app tracking opt-in, because they know it will decimate their ability to do what they do today.
Bingo. They need this for user-level measurement and targeting. Wouldn't be surprised if this also supports part of their audience extension work with twitter audience platform as well.
Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You no longer just ”get” them. You need to apply. I was rejected for getting key to export my own tweets.
Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.
Interesting. As someone who hasn't done any mobile dev at all, is there a way to prevent something like this from happening? Can't you somehow encrypt such secrets in the app?
You can try, but you won't succeed against a dedicated reverse engineer, simply dropping a hook in on the API calls would be enough to grab the decrypted key in a case like that, if not simply statically reading the encryption keys and decrypting it. That's not to say it's useless - some reversers will simply move on to the next app when there's a list of dozens.
You can also send requests via your own server, which would allow you more control over the requests that get sent out to your 3rd party APIs and just restrict tokens as much as possible to the minimal set of features necessary for your application.
That achieves nothing against someone who uses something like apktool/baksmali to do static RE, let alone inject something like Frida to perform dynamic RE. There are even Xposed modules designed to just bypass certificate pinning.
Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a counter-RE one.
Posting on HN, I'm sure that you are aware that the mobile touchscreen computers in most people pockets are "owned" not by the consumer but by the manufacturer long after the device was _purchased_ by the consumer. Do you have, or can you easily get, root access? Swap the bootloader? Install an alternate ROM?
And even if _you_ can, the far majority of consumers cannot.
Unless an API you're looking at requires/supports attestation via SafetyNet or you're willing to proxy via your own server this is likely not an option.
Additionally, while it's true (to my knowledge) that re-implementing a full safteynet spoof is not currently publicly available, a combination of Frida and MagiskHide is able to bypass SafetyNet for dynamic RE purposes, just launch the app as normal with MagiskHide enabled then attach to it with Frida as root. If they enforce full hardware attestation this may change in the future, but right now we're good.
Please don't legitimize SafetyNet. It is an existential threat to real ownership of your phone as any flavor of Android but that blessed by Google trips SafetyNet. It's the equivalent of barring people from running software on their laptop because they've installed a flavor of Windows that wasn't shipped from the factory. People everywhere have a right to do with their phone what they want to.
I agree with all your points, but what's the reasonable alternative? There is a reason that apps have decided to go with SafetyNet as a requirement. It dramatically reduces abuse.
Quora ended for me when spun/copy+pasted Google results started to replace answers. For example: I asked for the science behind the EPA's recommendations on UV exposure, and the answers were all word-for-word copies of the first result in Google, which had no detail on the science behind it. Just "avoid going out before x," "wear x SPF sunscreen," but nothing about the basis for the recommendations.
That was years ago. Recently, I went looking for how to un-retweet something from an account that has since blocked me, and every single answer on every instance of someone asking that on Quora is more or less a copy of Twitter's documentation for an ordinary un-retweet. Useless search result pollution.
For people who post tweets, but don't often read tweets, I recommend creating an app to post on your behalf. It is pretty straightforward through their developer tools. That way, you can also save your tweets locally, instead of having to view your own writing through their platform.
If you like to read other people's tweets then you don't have any other option except to login, unfortunately.
My use case is archiving historical or noteworthy tweets. My infrastructure up to this point used Wayback Machine to retrieve and store the content, will have to build something now.
I’ve been able to hide the modal wall via the chrome DOM inspector (right click on parent element in markup view, click “hide element”). Not a great experience but if you really want to see a tweet it works.
Blocking cookies for twitter.com in settings is a much more reliable way to disable the login popup, for now anyway. Your first filter there uses a randomly generated ID that will change when Twitter pushes an update to prod.
Im just curious, what are the motivations for a company to make this move? It seems like a death sentence to me but I cant think of any examples off-hand.
KPIs can work well or not. In this case, some VP's KPI about increasing signups and % of tweets viewed by signed in users is making Twitter worse (actually better because I hate Twitter).
It's being spreadsheeted to death. When, as a manager, all you look at is some Excel spreadsheet that tracks the numbers you think are important, you get reactionary management.
1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet.
2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account" and think nothing of it.
They would if I meant "not logged in by default" on the same browser, but I mean on completely separate devices which have never even touched my Twitter account—not out of paranoid sandboxing on my part, mind you, just no motivation to log in. I barely tweet anything at all, so why bother login in.
Could they still know it's my "user" who is seeing this or that tweet, by using intelligence-agency level analysis on usage, personal connections, and networking patterns to determine that it's me? I'm sure they could. But why bother to such a massive level of complexity when they could simply require login to view tweets instead?
One way of cutting down usage is to reduce the amount of data you volunteer. Logging out is an easy way to reduce usage. This change compels light users to stay logged in and participating.
I am thinking that Twitter has reached saturation for the most part. Pretty much everyone has heard of it and has an opinion about it. The areas of the world that do have an untapped audience also have authoritarian regimes that do not like Twitter very much.
At the same time, there is some manager with a spreadsheet that has new account creation metrics. S/he wants that number to be as high as possible. How do you do that if people do not actually want to make an account? Try capturing the people who usually click in from other sites and bounce back.
I think the end result will be that social media somehow becomes even more pictures of text than previously.
I deleted my Twitter account years ago. This won't motivate me to make a new one; it will just ensure that I spend even less time on their site than I already do ("ugh, paywall" close tab) and give them fewer ad impressions.
> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.
I had a thread moderated away due to this yesterday :/ sucks.
Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app.
Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter:
Sometimes they use user agents for this, but those are easily faked, so it's only done by websites that don't have comprehensive auth walls.
A more comprehensive method is based on ip ranges, say whitelisting traffic from Google and Bing. This gives you > 95% of search traffic as Google alone has >90%, and many various smaller search engines like Yahoo or DDG are Bing resellers.
On the other hand, a pure ip based check can be circumvented too. Sometimes you can view how search engines see a website through google translate. But places like LinkedIn have countermeasures for all of these circumventions.
Which by Google's own T&Cs is illegal and could get your site dropped from their index... They state that you should not present a different site experience to their crawler compared to what normal users get.
As usual it's OK for the big guys to break the rules whereas us little site owners have no choice but to obey them.
I deactivated my account the other day in frustration over this. They would send me emails and I would sometimes click a tweet, only to be prompted to log in, which I didn't want to do because I wanted to avoid being sucked in. Okay, fine, I get that I wanted to use the site in a way that the site doesn't want me using it and that's their business decision. It still seems hard to believe that it's better for them to have someone completely off Twitter rather than receiving and occasionally clicking through emails to use the site.
this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most.
I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100% user-hostile, Twitter.
Beyond the Login wall, Public Sector Agencies should not be using Twitter as a Primary communication method, it would be Ok to have the messages Copied their from Official Sources, but there should be Official Sources to obtain the same info, at the same time, update in the same frequency.
I like Debian's approach to this; publish short news on their own site and also automatically republish those items on social networks. Full blog posts get similar treatment.
I've literally just spent a couple of hours integrating Nitter.net's RSS feed into my custom feed reader. Why a couple of hours? Because Nitter for some reason returns a 404 header instead of 200 when it gives you the RSS feed data.
Consequently stuff like PHPs file_get_contents() and curl_exec() return absolutely nothing... took me ages (via trying to shell out to curl, and then back to using the lib again) before I realised it wasn't actually the 404 error cause the issue, but that curl (and libcurl) on my system doesn't like Nitters SSL cert, which then led me to CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to override it. Frustrating, but educational none-the-less.
I'm using the search filter "(from:$username) -filter:replies" to get just the tweets I want.
Ah I was using --head (actually -I) as part of my debugging. It's still not correct though is it? (I was thinking about opening an issue on the github repo)
It bothered from the other angle when POTUS started pushing Twitter as an important channel to keep up on what was going on because it's hardly ideal for that. My local government has similarly been making Nextdoor a de facto requirement if you want to know what's happening or want to give feedback (especially in an era of frequent town office closures).
I tend to favor minimal government but I think the USPS was an important outcome of the Constitution to fill the need for a universal and "official" communication channel. But their budget has been butchered, I get misdelivered mail all the time and the DMV tells me I'm not the only one in my town who never seems to get their mail, but there's no shortage of wasteful junk mail. If only I was confident we could nail the execution, I would love to see the Internet embraced as basic, universal infrastructure and an official government communication channel that's more reliable and less abused.
For what it’s worth, you can sign-up through DMAChoice to stop receiving junk mail [1]. It takes a few months after you sign up to really take effect, but it has easily eliminated 90% of the mail I used to receive. Well worth it IMO for the $2 fee every 10 years.
I'll take your word for it that it works, but I would have been skeptical. Am I correct in understanding that they essentially function is a communication medium with the companies maintaining these unsolicited mailing lists, and those companies voluntarily remove people that pay DMAchoice?
Title 39, United States Code, Section 3008 authorizes the Postal Service™ to issue a prohibitory order against a mailer who sends you an advertisement offering to sell any matter that you, in your own discretion, believe to be “erotically arousing or sexually provocative.” You can request the order by completing the relevant portion of PS Form 1500, Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order, and submitting it to any Post Office™. The form is available at your local Post Office. Thirty days after receiving the order, the mailer is prohibited from sending you any further mail. Violating this prohibition makes the mailer subject to court enforcement action by the United States Government.
I think of the issue a different way. The problem isn't having an official communications channel, but rather, being able to communicate somewhere where the average person will actually be exposed to it. POTUS puts out memos and briefings all the time on the official whitehouse.gov site, but who actually reads those? I see the fundamental problem as attention based, rather than infrastructure based.
Especially when accounts could be hacked to say anything, like the incidents a couple years ago. Imagine the POTUS account pissing off an unstable dictator in some country, or posting of some sensitive information.
When has it been any different? Before twitter, it was TV and radio. Before RV and radio, it was newspapers. All of these are commercial entities (with a few non-profit exceptions).
television and radio were at least publicly available and based on published/known standards. you didn't need to ask anyone permission to receive signals.
On top of that the FCC governs the airwaves and (at least in theory) works to ensure they meet public need. There are also other rules such as the Equal Time Rule. Twitter is subject to nothing like these things.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadI suppose these angry Reddit commenters bashing Twitter aren’t seeing it because they’re logged in to Reddit.
Just as with Reddit, there are workarounds to bypass this login requirement if you really want to. The users in that thread have some tips for using uBlock to disable it.
Anyway, up until a few days ago there were uBO filters to delete twitter cookies every page load and it seemed to do the trick, this may not work anymore.
My first thought when I saw the headline was, how long until the front page features this:
Then I realized this has probably already happened a while ago.Such is the treadmill of social media platforms.
"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
Increasingly, Twitter is a place where people post original _content_ - things they expect others to be able to see and read and share, potentially on other platforms. These range from the original pithy remarks to long, article-like streams. It seems problematic to me to require a login to view these, and I think it could have an effect on usage for these kinds of things.
There’s not so much of that in Reddit. It’s more a discussion forum, where reading seems like the secondary thing to do to me. Peoples identity also isn’t as ‘obvious’ on Reddit.
Of course, it’s not concrete - you do see long shareable ‘articles’ in Reddit comments sometimes, but I do find myself more taken aback by a Twitter login requirement than a Reddit one.
Give me "ugly" plain-ish text that is information dense.
And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.
“Fewer” versus “less” for countable things is more of an actual rule (but of course that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it).
Which is very subjective.
New reddit is certainly more modern than old reddit, but I find it kinda ugly.
There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.
The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.
Do you have any citations for this?
Ben Awad[0] made a quick technical comparison between the two websites and this was his conclusion.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jkSiIBDDZ8
Typically these designers are just fashionistas following the trendy crowd.
Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.
"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"
old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit.
1. Appeals more to the mainstream, and to new users who are used to Facebook-style feeds. 2. Easier for them to disguise ads in user's feeds.
Nitter.net for Twitter.
I don’t know how long these sites will last with the demand there is for avenues that don’t prompt login.
It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch, and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully invested in what I'm watching.
I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway. Small private forums, where you can actually have real discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.
For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram once per decade, or something like that. But whatever people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses want.
I find these terrible for any kind of information discovery. I hate that so many communities are using them as an alternative to a subreddit or focused forum. Hell most "modern" forum software is horrific as well.
Chats are a horrible place for evergreen knowledge. Forums are pretty good though.
It’s only a slight difference but a big one.
As a Reddit alternative, Ruqqus has the UI and responsiveness down pretty good. However, it branded itself as anti-reddit, and attracted a lot of right-wing people as a result. However, their platform is open source, so IMO, it's only a matter of time before someone steps up to the task.
I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit with all dark patterns removed.
There is also an alternative front end for twitter called nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app / login.
Thank you.
With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.
Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.
(Mobile most especially.)
I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs results in almost never being redirected to the "new" site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see the gallery photos in oldreddit style.
This solution works for me on both mobile browser and desktop browser.
I'm doing the latter (in large part so that I post old.reddit.com links), and I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
I never type "old.reddit.com". I'm always on www.reddit.com, and I'm always on the old site experience.
Of course, I don't know how much of that has to do with the fact that I use RES.
> I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.
in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, other than having to re-set the flag in settings now and again. Like I said, the only time i've seen an issue is the odd time someone posts an image gallery - I can't see it in oldreddit style unless I click on comments.
I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.
And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.
With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.
Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/<username> or /r/<subname>). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.
Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.
I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.
Logging out is the only thing I can think of that would cause you to keep seeing the new layout.
Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they decided to remove the account activity panel, making revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the fact that they also remove a link from the front page too quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for the dark patterns, heh.
Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)
Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making focused special interest forums. In the past these would have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But they would have some of the best content the internet had to offer.
Will mention though that I’ve had wholly uncontroversial HN accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a thread.
I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it without one, but am still confused.
Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if it posts a comment with only a link?
Now if only I could shake HN.
Or, I guess when viewing through the browser window that twitter embeds?
Just now I tried viewing new.reddit in safari and it told me my browser was old (though perhaps this is because I’ve refrained from updating ios)
The best thing is that the "Explore" tab is just a bit too slow in terms of responsiveness on mobile web. I spend a less time on there because it's not as pleasant to use as the app.
The first place I knew about the January 6th riots was from Twitter. I guess I'll learn about subsequent such events from other sources after people on Twitter do.
On desktop. The main mobile version blocks essential features, like browsing subreddits or viewing all comments on a post.
(Alternatives like old.reddit, i.reddit and teddit aren't completely broken but aren't great on mobile either)
This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.
Their algo will just continually blast email you every category you ever clicked on
Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I never visited the site again.
They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.
This is why Facebook is SO very against what Apple is doing with iOS14+, particularly with cross-device and cross-app tracking opt-in, because they know it will decimate their ability to do what they do today.
Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.
You can also send requests via your own server, which would allow you more control over the requests that get sent out to your 3rd party APIs and just restrict tokens as much as possible to the minimal set of features necessary for your application.
Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a counter-RE one.
If it's executing on my device, you can be sure I can poke it and see what it's doing.
Posting on HN, I'm sure that you are aware that the mobile touchscreen computers in most people pockets are "owned" not by the consumer but by the manufacturer long after the device was _purchased_ by the consumer. Do you have, or can you easily get, root access? Swap the bootloader? Install an alternate ROM?
And even if _you_ can, the far majority of consumers cannot.
-a keypair is generated in secure hardware
- you send the public key to a server which encrypts the secret key with it
- the server sends the encrypted key back
- then it goes inside the secure hardware where it gets decrypted
The decrypted secret key is never in the userspace.
Additionally, while it's true (to my knowledge) that re-implementing a full safteynet spoof is not currently publicly available, a combination of Frida and MagiskHide is able to bypass SafetyNet for dynamic RE purposes, just launch the app as normal with MagiskHide enabled then attach to it with Frida as root. If they enforce full hardware attestation this may change in the future, but right now we're good.
Just out of curiosity, is there a marketplace for private APIs? I'd love if you could elaborate on the "charge someone else for it" part.
This from the site that used to indicate on every tweet the client used
That was years ago. Recently, I went looking for how to un-retweet something from an account that has since blocked me, and every single answer on every instance of someone asking that on Quora is more or less a copy of Twitter's documentation for an ordinary un-retweet. Useless search result pollution.
This is probably the only good content that existed on there before it became a cesspool: http://qsf.cf.quoracdn.net/best_of_quora_2010-2012.pdf
If you like to read other people's tweets then you don't have any other option except to login, unfortunately.
twitter.com##.r-zchlnj.r-1xcajam.r-12vffkv.r-1d2f490.r-1p0dtai.r-aqfbo4.css-1dbjc4n
twitter.com##html:style(overflow:auto !important)
twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
I do this as a reminder-on-steroids to only access Twitter via third-party interfaces --- Nitter, Threadreader, or various Mastodon-Twitter gateways.
1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet.
2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account" and think nothing of it.
Could they still know it's my "user" who is seeing this or that tweet, by using intelligence-agency level analysis on usage, personal connections, and networking patterns to determine that it's me? I'm sure they could. But why bother to such a massive level of complexity when they could simply require login to view tweets instead?
At the same time, there is some manager with a spreadsheet that has new account creation metrics. S/he wants that number to be as high as possible. How do you do that if people do not actually want to make an account? Try capturing the people who usually click in from other sites and bounce back.
I think the end result will be that social media somehow becomes even more pictures of text than previously.
> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.
I had a thread moderated away due to this yesterday :/ sucks.
https://fritter.cc
Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app.
Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter:
https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
[1] Instructions for enabling custom extensions on Firefox Nightly or forks of Firefox on Android: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
A more comprehensive method is based on ip ranges, say whitelisting traffic from Google and Bing. This gives you > 95% of search traffic as Google alone has >90%, and many various smaller search engines like Yahoo or DDG are Bing resellers.
On the other hand, a pure ip based check can be circumvented too. Sometimes you can view how search engines see a website through google translate. But places like LinkedIn have countermeasures for all of these circumventions.
As usual it's OK for the big guys to break the rules whereas us little site owners have no choice but to obey them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most.
I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100% user-hostile, Twitter.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The problem comes if they don't provide any other way to access their information.
https://micronews.debian.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/micronews https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/otherSN
Consequently stuff like PHPs file_get_contents() and curl_exec() return absolutely nothing... took me ages (via trying to shell out to curl, and then back to using the lib again) before I realised it wasn't actually the 404 error cause the issue, but that curl (and libcurl) on my system doesn't like Nitters SSL cert, which then led me to CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to override it. Frustrating, but educational none-the-less.
I'm using the search filter "(from:$username) -filter:replies" to get just the tweets I want.
--
https://nitter.net
curl https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
vscurl --head https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
I tend to favor minimal government but I think the USPS was an important outcome of the Constitution to fill the need for a universal and "official" communication channel. But their budget has been butchered, I get misdelivered mail all the time and the DMV tells me I'm not the only one in my town who never seems to get their mail, but there's no shortage of wasteful junk mail. If only I was confident we could nail the execution, I would love to see the Internet embraced as basic, universal infrastructure and an official government communication channel that's more reliable and less abused.
But I dream.
https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php
You can mark mail "rejected" and return it to the delivery box or any post box.
https://refuseyourmail.cooperjr.name/how-to
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...
First-class mail can be returned to sender:
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Return-to-Sender-Mail
Title 39, United States Code, Section 3008 authorizes the Postal Service™ to issue a prohibitory order against a mailer who sends you an advertisement offering to sell any matter that you, in your own discretion, believe to be “erotically arousing or sexually provocative.” You can request the order by completing the relevant portion of PS Form 1500, Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order, and submitting it to any Post Office™. The form is available at your local Post Office. Thirty days after receiving the order, the mailer is prohibited from sending you any further mail. Violating this prohibition makes the mailer subject to court enforcement action by the United States Government.
https://about.usps.com/publications/pub307/welcome.htm
Heads of state have spoken through commercial publications since printing existed. Roughly 1550.
Online Internet services merely happen to be the present iteration of this.
(I'm not saying that the practice isn't without its problems. I'm saying it's nothing new.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641366
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304