Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?
In the last few months Twitter has went from letting you browse the site without signing in, to now prompting you to sign in to do pretty much anything. Even something as simple as scrolling down with my mousewheel in Twitter prompts me to sign in. This also happens with official government communication pages. I thought courts already decided in the US that the public has a right to access official government communications on social media. When requiring users to sign in and agree to the companies terms, wouldn't this be considered a form of preventing access to those communications?
186 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadSo technically they're not preventing access, but they nag you incessantly after you've scrolled past the fold.
IANAL, but I do work in the public sector and my customers do have to make data public. This does not mean that anywhere they choose to post links to documents has to help out. It means they need their own site to post documents. It also can mean that documents are offline, but FOIA-able. Frankly, in the small town that I live in, some documents are still tacked to a bulletin board in the park.
So yes, documents have to be public, but no, it is not the responsibility of Twitter to ensure those regulations are met.
That being said, I do agree that Twitter is making "interesting" choices. Just not illegal ones.
Edit: I'm not seeing the issue in an incognito tab.
You are also supposed to read and accept 13k words of terms of use. And I'm not even counting the ~50 pages of "Twitter Rules and Policies [...], which are part of the User Agreement"; most of which contain a couple thousand words.
Twitters profitability has always been a contentious issue, they launched their first subscription service (Twitter Blue) last year. My assumption is that they are potentially trying to move towards a more subscription based revenue model. The push back against ads is only going to get stronger and maybe they are trying to get ahead of the curve.
On top of that with GDPR and all the inevitable legislation that's coming, having people "registered" ensures that they have accepted Ts&Cs and can be tracked legally for advertising purposes. Maybe they anticipate not being able to run (particularly) profitable ads for unregistered users.
Finally, with the new CEO he probably wants a quick win on metrics, this could push more registrations, good news to report to the board.
No wonder there are frequent emails from Twitter with the subject "... don't be shy" and "... we miss you".
The GDPR outlaws making tracking mandatory to access the service unless it's functionally necessary (as in the outcome can't be achieved without tracking). Targeted ads don't count as "functionally necessary".
But first, make sure all the filters are updated (click the "Update Now" button on the filters page if it's enabled).
At least this will take a bit of load off my pihole :)
Opening a thread and scrolling down results in a login prompt being shown; but simply removing the login prompt still doesn't let me load further tweets from that thread, at least not when I remove the login prompt manually (via web inspector).
[citation needed]
Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though. They've hit a growth plateau, the users are really fractious, management doesn't understand what they want out of it, and it's the venue for social strife.
Something about _very important people_ sharing their thoughts in 140/280 characters really is the addictive nicotine of the human attention span.
All using each other as a "source" to create a false picture of reality
AFAIK, they still announce the monkey JPEGs somebody overpaid for on their behalf on Twitter.
Or better reply
And twitter in the present just seems outright toxic, I can't imagine being a new user on today's twitter.
I have never seen a for-profit social networking site that is immune to this on a long enough timeline. They all degrade eventually. By following what the money wants from users , not what the users want.
> "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."
- William S. Burroughs
I wonder what would happen if Twitter said "OK, we are going to charge $5 dollars a year" to use it.
Maybe it would not only be an improvement, but also viable from a business perspective.
The Twitter "firehose" (all public tweets, delivered in real-time) is likely very valuable for news, research, and marketing interests; charging for access to the firehose is possibly a workable business model, and by limiting it to public tweets, side-steps many of the issues around privacy and user tracking (since the people writing the tweets are doing so with informed consent, even if individual tweets may be sent in error).
The poster you replied to may have been thinking of US court decisions related to the legality of politicians blocking members of the public, when those politicians are speaking in their official capacity [1][2]. That doesn't quite seem to be the same thing as "the public has a right to access official government communications on social media".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_First_Amendment_Institu...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/can-government-officia...
As a user, when I tweet something, I do want the whole world to be able to read it. Without logging in. Ideally via the interface of their choice.
Orbis is a proof of concept:
https://orbis.club/
A Twitter clone that stores the tweets on Arweave.
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
For example, you cannot see who liked a Tweet on Nitter.
That's exactly what you'd expect from a Twitter archive site. The author's point was that this is the same tech you'd need for a Twitter replacement, and this doesn't need blockchain or web3.
Reminds me of the comment on HN from a few months back "On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script." You don't need blockchain or web3 to fix that either - centralised solutions like bandcamp.com already give the artist 80-90%.
The problem is that whoever builds the replacement can just fuck up the user experience any time in the future. Just like Twitter did.
To look at it another way, how would web3 actually help here? As far as I can tell it would only make this example worse - a more user hostile UI (faffing around with wallets and keys and whatnot), less decentralised (everything going through one API to interact with the blockchain), more resistant to change (forking blockchains is a big deal and only tends to happen when rich people at the top of the pyramid don't like something), more expensive (gas fees), less privacy (your wallet address being essentially an undeletable cookie), more likely to incentivise divisiveness and conflict (flamewars driven by the expectation of personal profit rather than just likes), etc. etc.
That's a positive feature.
I expect most Mastodon instances will be shorter lived than Twitter. So changing from Twitter to Mastodon seems not like a good deal if I want my posts and the comments and likes I get to stay around.
I have decades in the IT industry, and I don't want to self host.
As long as the majority does not self host their fediverse content, the fediverse is not a solution of the problem discussed in this HN story.
It would be important to ensure the integrity of the software running on such servers, though, perhaps via regular check of the binaries also at runtime.
While Bitcoin miners calculate hashes to get transaction fees, Arweave miners store data to get those fees paid upfront for storage.
So the question "what happens in they shut down" is similar to asking "what happens if Bitcoin shuts down?". It is not a single party the suddenly can decide to "shut down".
Mastodon[0] is a successful decentralized social media without the use of blockchain. Because of federation, users can like and reply to posts from other instances, and other people will be able to see it.
I can even follow a PeerTube channel and have recent videos show up in my feed, because of the ActivityPub federation protocol (a W3C standard).
Best of all, it doesn't require the linking of a crypto wallet and the payment of cryptocurrency to interact with people.
[0] https://joinmastodon.org/
The Crypto wallet you use for Orbis can be a fresh, empty wallet. No need to put any cryptocurrency in it.
Twitter holds a complete information monopoly over all its content. This means they can make hostile changes, such as forcing a login in order to view public content, without much repercussion. If Twitter were to ban me, I would be completely cut off from all of my friends on Twitter. You can't easily move away from Twitter, because Twitter is a huge entity with swaths of content and users already on it.
On the other hand, Mastodon instances have only a fraction of that power. They have control over information only that is on their instance, in a world that contains thousands of such instances. They are tiny entities holding control over small fractions of the content available in the fediverse.
If a Mastodon instance started acting hostile, people can relatively easily move away to a different instance. If my Mastodon instance were to ban me, I can sign up on a different instance (or host my own) and still keep in touch with my friends; unless my friends used the same instance and the owners broke federation with the instance I moved to, at which point a lot of people would probably want to move away from that hostile instance immediately.
[0]: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html
It took a little jiggering to make it part of my workflow within Sublime and my personal site, but I'm really liking it. I avoid Twitter completely - haven't touched it for a few years. This system allows for a NOW page on my personal site, a stream for communication, and even a private channel for short projects.
Go twtxt!
Answer: They hired a "ruthless" product manager, who believes in things like "we should do things that are good for Twitter, but not necessarily good for the world", and probably wants to be remembered as the PM who took the route that no one was willing to take. (S)he has the data to backup these decisions, like some analytics dashboard that shows very many unauthenticated users browsing twitter. Also wears a tough face in meetings.
/s
Imagine donald trump being able to sell his funny red hats to his angry followers. Or the powerball lottery except they buy from twitter and its open to the planet!
I am just saying, they have the money, the tech to get around legalities and the lawyers to skirt it exist.
Either way, to answer the question: new boss. @Jack left.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
I use browser plugin that redirects me to nitter when clicking a twitter link.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
On rare occasions there's an issue with finding online instances where you reach deadlinks but that's so rare and otherwise it's all perfect.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
In growth mode, investors hand out free candy to companies, companies hand out free candy to you. In consolidation mode, investors want their candy (+ returns) back, so companies start taking away your candy until they determine the minimum users will accept. Many such cases.
It's a terrible website. Character limit leads to terribly shallow discussions that still need to be split into multiple posts. It's a dumb medium of exchange.
Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon the redundancy) can, in a couple of seconds, search everything a target has ever written and find reasons either to reject him (after he has passed an interview) or reduce his offer on evidence of lower leverage. Social media is a fool's game. In ten years or so, the ultimate flex will be not to partcipate.
Twitter somehow survives in spite of this, because (a) it is an unserious format, a fact that lends some plausible deniability, (b) a fraction of people--arguably perversely, but also arguably nobly--enjoy gambling with their reputations, and (c) there is a defeated, demoralized understanding among the young that, given the destruction of the middle-class labor market, not to play the social media game is just as dangerous (it suggests having something to hide) as to play it. So today's savvy young people might tweet a little bit but mostly lurk, or use alternate accounts to post anything that might get serious.
wait till you find out about hacker news
Should be noted though that I only interact with twitter trough Tweetbot and with a extremely curated follow list. And in this specific way I find it's a great way to keep up to date on industry specific news and learn about new things (by following people in other industries).
It's far from perfect but I have not found any other way to keep up to date with the thoughts of people I look up to or find interesting. I had high hopes for micro-blogging but it has not caught on yet.
There's a "normalization" that it's acceptable for companies such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc to enourage the world to post information on their website, and then block access to casual visitors once they got successful.
It's ABHORRENT FILTH and morally grotesque. They are causing human misery every day by deciding certain people are [outgroup] and do not have the same rights as logged-in users [ingroup].
Reddit, Twitter and Facebook are psychopath companies, and anyone working for them is part of the "ingroup vs outgroup" degradation of society.
Read it somewhere (maybe HN) and it worked quite well.
1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords
2) Not at all
I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) you won’t go back.
Granted, you need an account to use a third party client so the no-login thing is obviously not working there either, but at least you are protected from the constant front end churn in the official clients. This is just one such example.
I really don’t want to see every post by everyone I follow. I prefer to just see the good stuff and get the hell out. Social media is a horrendous time sink.
In my opinion everyone should be doing all they can to spend less time on there.
What worked for me was to move all the time wasting apps off my phone’s Home Screen.
What does happen to every platform including twitter (and those are the people I unfollow the most) is that the 'internet marketing' people take over and use every opportunity to push in some affiliate link or product. Sometimes these products are good and welcome, but mostly they are just uninspired rehashes of other get-rich-quick drivel.
But that's basically what the OP wants to avoid. It's not a question of creating an account, but giving them your phone number.
You don't: https://fritter.cc ("A privacy-friendly Twitter frontend for mobile devices")
I get two completely different timelines on these devices.
That said, the reordering of the feed by inferred relevance is kind of annoying when someone does a rant without using threads - often the first tweet I see is like the 4th tweet in the series
You would be better served accessing official government communications via .gov sites. This is their purpose.
If you want official bot communications from troll farms, then Twitter is the best!
Social media is a huge liability for us on the left, as well as for society at large. Its structure and dynamics serve the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else, but it is associated with its public-facing apparent liberalism, which means that blowback against its failures and heavy-handed actions will diminish our reputation rather than the right's.
Maybe there's an earlier example I can't think of, but I don't think this trend started with Trump. I think this trend really started with Alex Jones. Once it becomes acceptable to ban anybody for ideas, then nobody can be considered safe from the chopping block. That was the freedom of speech test that civilization failed.
> the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else
What property of social media makes it so that people on the right are more skilled at using it?
And how can you tell the difference between "people on the right are more skilled at social media" and "better ideas simply win out"? Which one is true if they both explain reality?
Official government sites are largely static and slow to update.
Local emergency services, police, snow clearing, power and utility providers, etc all use Twitter for their most up to date posts anything else is hours or days behind if it gets updated at all.
I don't like that reality. I'd love to change that reality. I can not however wave it away :-/
It’s a pain in the ass though.
On Android the only browser I have found to do this is brave
on Desktop I think all of them but I use Firefox, and just disable all cookies for Twitter.
Then the topics started coming in. First it was infosec and cybersecurity and they were fine for a bit so I tolerated it. But then it turned into just a bunch of hot women saying basically nothing. If before it was some random person talking about finding a bug in X with a fuzzer, next it was someone talking about completely non-technical things like graduating from a university and starting a career in cybersecurity. Later it of course turned into culture war nonsense. So I unsubscribed. I could reasonably see this being a foreign influence campaign it was such an obvious slide from sometimes useful to total nonsense.
Then Twitter started flooding my account with topics and "based on your interests" and of course the feed turned to garbage again and I had to manually unsubscribe from all of them.
Twitter. Please. I'm begging you. I follow arms control people, software people, and government accounts. I've got this figured out. Please leave me alone I was happy.
Edit:
I forgot about the inability to turn of "[Somebody you follow] follows" tweets. Can I disable these? Doesn't appear like I can.
You do lose access to a few extras (like polls), but the tradeoff might be worth it to you.
When I am on Twitter, I don't care about US culture war stuff, I don't want to join you deplatforming everyone you dislike, I am not going to send you and your cat good vibes because you need a day longer to finish your Jira ticket. If I see posts like that, I automatically mute to keep me focused on things that matter.
I prefer the mute over unfollowing. I don't want to make a statement about you by unfollowing you (it can be tracked), I just decided that reading some of your tweets cause me more stress than the positive effect your other tweets bring. I don't dislike you, I just don't want to see you moan on Twitter.
It works well enough, but of course, there are some stuff that slip through.
What is sad is now there is no creativity, no exploration, no true fun.
the example the original poster in this thread said about "hot girls" in netsec.'
On Twitter, status, identity and gender play a big role vs just knowing content, or actually knowing how a computer "works." Then if you have enough followers, it seems your voice is that big .
I don't know if it's always been "like" that, or not. But, the more accessible something is, the more it seems to be diluted.
I played and broke operating systems and electronic devices, posted about my experiences online, and then it was magical when someone would take my info, add on to it and said they could do x, y, etc - jtag exploration, eprom copying (lol that old), finding root accounts on embedded devices and just breaking stuff.
So that's why I deleted my twitter account a couple of years ago, I never understood it, and I still don't. I just see screenshots of crypto scams and people stating opinions and then having to apologize for their opinions.
In order to "be successful", it requires an almost constant engagement with your curated social/online identity. And for many fields, being an attractive candidate for employment means you should have: a blog promoting your side-projects; a Twitter account engaged in networking & self-promotion; a GitHub account linked to your identity; maybe even a YouTube channel; and, of course, a highly polished LinkedIn account.
Sure, if you have 20 years of experience and plenty of industry connections, this might not apply. But for anyone else? Hustle, hustle, hustle + Promote, promote, promote. Personally, I find it pretty gross...
This is just another step in the rat-race that is fighting the platform itself. It merely prolongs the period before inevitable monetization and signal decay.
There is no self-respecting, intelligent way to use Twitter.
This is horrifying. Believable, and understandable, but truly disturbing.
And from a content producer's side, I want random people who follow me to read my tweets. How else could they find me in the first place? Just from retweets from my followers alone? If anything, I think that people are not seeing enough tweets outside of their filter bubble.
It is a losing battle fighting for Twitter against... Twitter.
In other words, don’t use twitter’s own website or app.
https://netnewswire.com
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
I'm not sure this is a good thing. I agree that you shouldn't be constantly hammering yourself with upsetting things but I don't think the polar opposite of avoiding anything you disagree with or get upset about it mentally healthy either. I think this could lead to you just being overly sensitive to anything that makes you a little emotional. Although, maybe you get enough "disagreement" in you regular life to balance it out.
The best option is to learn how to better deal with you emotions. For younger generations that aren't going to be able to avoid social media as well this might be the only option for them since that IS their entire social interaction in many cases. It's definitely harder though and the way social media berates you constantly maybe our minds aren't able to handle such a barrage.
For me, that is actually one of the biggest annoyances with twitter. People who threaten to unfollow me or to block me if I follow or give a like to somebody who they don't like. Granted, it's not a practical problem yet because I only have very few followers, but it still annoys me. One of the reasons I have two accounts is that I want to follow "mutually exclusive" people. Maybe twitter shouldn't even show to other people what I liked or who I follow. Or the culture has to be changed to be more relaxed.
Another thing that is related is that everybody is in their own cozy bubble, and when something from outside seeps in they get worked up.
For those reasons I think the "feed" model of social media is broken, and the "cozy filter bubble feed" even more so. I want the old "social network" model from early Facebook and MySpace back, where you have a page, you can present youself there, and you can see who knows whom IRL.
If I want to think about politics I will read an old political science book.
There isn't even any discussion of politics on twitter anyway. It is a weird type of recreational negative infotainment.
I really want to make a profile that I don't delete in a few days but it is impossible. The platform is basically unusable unless one thinks starting the day off with a flood of negativity is a good idea.
suggest_recycled_tweet_inline suggest_activity_tweet suggest_who_to_follow suggest_recap suggest_recycled_tweet suggest_pyle_tweet suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet
source: https://twitter.com/stillnotsam/status/1490169409024892928?s...
Social Media Companies: It's OK to not have any new content to show me every few seconds. It's OK if I see the same things for a while until new, meaningful content comes my way. Shoving content I don't want down my throat just makes me want to leave altogether.
You are not the one who decides whether it is "OK". Every dopamine microhit they give out reinforces dependence, and is another chance to backhaul surveillance telemetry and show ads. It may fail on you personally, but it seemingly works on the majority of people. Your (our) problem is allowing third party software, bound to its own incentives, to mediate our attention in the first place.
Scrolling through and accidentially touching saying a sponsored Tweet will mark it as an interest of yours so I look into the Interests quite frequently to dispose rubbish I'm not interested in even if they think so.