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Tell HN: Twitter blocks public read access to profiles & tweets

42 points by merek ↗ HN
I'm trying to access a Twitter profile as a logged-out user.

Previously I would have been able to see tweets and other information. Now I'm being redirected to a login page.

For example, try this in incognito / private browsing mode:

https://twitter.com/nasaearth?lang=en

22 comments

[ 690 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] thread
merek
If it's verified that this is not a temporary issue nor anomaly, this is a big reason for me to use Mastodon regularly.

I run a business and post important updates to Twitter. My users should not have to have Twitter accounts to receive updates.

mikequinlan
Does Twitter allow simultaneous logins? Maybe someone could set up a single account and post the credentials then everyone could just use that one account.
lapcat
> Does Twitter allow simultaneous logins?

Yes.

> Maybe someone could set up a single account and post the credentials then everyone could just use that one account.

It would likely get rate limited, even suspended for "bot-like" behavior.

jojobas
Welcome to bugmenot.com. Unfortunately everyone monitors these now and bans these accounts in no time.
ohpls
The same thing happens for me when logged out, that's rather annoying if this is planned.
dflock
Difficult to know, with the new Twitter, if this is intentional or they just screwed something up - although they've been driving their API to zero for ages, so probably intentional.
lapcat
It's 302 redirecting to /home

This may be a bug.

Or it may not be a bug. Who knows at this point?

[EDIT:] The same thing is happening for links to individual tweets, not just profiles. I doubt that Twitter intends to block tweets, so this feels like a bug.

myfonj
Fun fact about this 302 to /home is that it (tries to) set cookie and when you land on /home without one you get another 302 to /home again. I.e. any client without cookies support ends up in infinite redirect loop.

And another disputable HTTP behaviour: HEAD requests are all 403 Forbidden.

I really hope those are all just unintentional bugs.

brucethemoose2
Daily reminder that Nitter (a Twitter frontend) exists for precisely this kind of issue:

http://nitter.net/

Just replace twitter.com with nitter.net in links.

Its still working for me without a login.

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MostlyStable
It works without a login, but you can only see the "tweets" page not the "tweets and replies" page (I tried about 6 different instances this morning, same behavior on all). There are exactly 3 twitter accounts I check, and 2 of them are for the conversations they have there. I can no longer see those conversations. Deeply annoying
blueridge
I'm seeing the same behavior, wasn't like this yesterday. Also, yesterday I noticed they removed the search feature in the top-right corner for logged-out users. Previously I could search for a specific person, click their profile, and view their feed. Instead of search, there were "New to Twitter?" prompts to sign up or sign in, no search was visible.

I've never had a Twitter account and I really don't want one. But I do check the NWS (National Weather Service) local accounts for updates on severe weather, and now those accounts are behind an auth wall and I can't see anything at all. I wish they'd make an exception for public service accounts (NWS, fire, police, government) and make them visible to everyone.

oinkly
Twitter seems to have made an exception for archiving via the Internet Archive, so you can view tweets and profiles via https://web.archive.org/save if needed.

They've not done the same for other archive sites like https://archive.ph and https://ghostarchive.org though. Perhaps because those sites don't make their archiving HTTP requests with any header that identifies them differently from a common browser. Whereas the Internet Archive adds

    Via: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; archive.org_bot; Wayback Machine Live Record; http://archive.org/details/archive.org_bot), Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; archive.org_bot; Wayback Machine Live Record; http://archive.org/details/archive.org_bot), 1.1 warcprox
to each request, which allows for an easy detection server-side.
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toomuchtodo
Twitter is redirecting Wayback capture ops to a picture of a poodle.

https://ibb.co/CMPHRX8

"Nothing to see here

Looks like this page doesn’t exist. Here’s a picture of a poodle sitting in a chair for your trouble."

more_corn
Yeah I noticed too. Let’s see how this works out for them.

Interesting move for an ad supported platform.

I’d be interested to see their traffic graph for the day. What do y’all think? 50% drop?

rchaud
Non-logged in users are useless to advertisers. There is no information to target an ad to them besides extremely rudimentary IP-based location.
TechBro8615
I assume this doesn't apply to Tweets embedded on other websites?