Somehow they required an account to view more than a few replies. Then it got „better“ and they removed that requirement. And a few days ago I realized I can’t view anything at all without logging in.
I‘m not really sad about that change. Just going to miss out some things because I don‘t see why I should register to read a few tweets a week.
Yes, it was definitely the "data pillaging" that was degrading service, and not the fact that Twitter is now hosted on a Mac Mini under somebody's desk...
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I'm not saying you owe CEO billionaires or billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. If you'd please review and follow the site guidelines, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm a little surprised at this response, dang. I could understand if I was being hostile to the poster, but my sarcasm was directed at Musk (who they're quoting), whose comment about data pillaging I find highly dubious.
As far as snark, I see several other examples of that—also intended for Musk—in this thread. They don't strike me as either offensive or particularly constructive, so it's not clear to me why my comment was called out here. (Especially considering that there are a few other comments that definitely go beyond the acceptable levels of user-to-user snark as I understand them.)
I can avoid sarcastic comments about billionaires in the future, if that's a problem. If the issue was snark directed at another user, that wasn't my intention.
I'll also say that the "snark" rule you cited, while well-intentioned, seems very broad and selectively applied here.
It does not say “don’t be snarky unless scarasm is directed at a billionaire because then it’s ok because they have a lot of money and power, so we will allow it”.
You would then need to define some amount of money that would put someone in then “can be flamed” category.
The rule is not applied selectively here; it is applied to everyone, Musk included.
I mean—your response just now was snarky also. I don't think you were responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what I said, either.
I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)
Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?
Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.
Moderation is dominated by randomness - we don't come close to seeing all the comments on HN or even all the comments in any large thread. That's 90% of the answer to "why did my comment get moderated and not those other ones". (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.
You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.
It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets the ticket. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...
I wonder what percentage of legitimate traffic is blocked by this. I would imagine that the majority of users don't have an account, by a large margin, correct?
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.
Maybe to using Twitter on a sustained basis, sure. However I imagine there’s a decent-if-not-majority chunk that accesses tweets via Google/friends/news articles/etc
I ha[d] a bookmark folder with about a dozen twitstreams — no login/acct. I'm not signing up. Too bad nitter is broken, as well.
With all the public officials on Twitter (and FaceBook) publishing "public-facing" information, I'm surprised both are allowed to be/remain walled gardens.
To do my business taxes this year I had to DEMAND paper form acceptance, which was begrudgingly accepted once I went, in person, to the tax authorities [they want you to provide all sorts of tracking JUST TO FILE STATE TAXES, under the auspices of "two factor authentication"].
As a technosophisticate that intentionally avoids email and doesn't carry a cellphone... I weep for what my public-interfacing world will yet become.
There are tons of usages of Twitter which don't need an account. All those Twitter links on this site for isntance. Some of them provide interesting input, however the urge to participate in those threads is low, as the need to follow those authors. The browser I use for HN is not signed in to twitter. Neither is my phone, where I sometimes get Twitter links in messages from friends.
Tons of people I share news with don't have Twitter - now I just wont bother, and I'm assuming it's the same for many others who used Twitter as some sort of middle man for that.
Like anyone believes for a second anything that comes out of this guy's mouth. Even if true, who cares Elon? You're so good at shooting yourself in the foot, you might consider being a professional Russian Roulette player.
Remember when Twitter used to give archives of tweets to the Library of Congress? And had a firehose for folks to consume as many tweets as they could?
Ironically, my initial reaction was “Oh crap. Public saftey orgs use this to broadcast alerts.”
My second reaction was “I wonder how hard it would be to take a list of twitter handles and scrape their feeds into an S3 bucket that’s fronted with a CDN.”
It went from $0/mo (as it had been for a long time) to $5000/mo overnight with no middle ground (for access to streaming data, no matter how small the volume).
It's a shame that he's not able to escape his pathological belief that his product approach is the right approach, regardless of the grotesque impact he's making on what was a good thing for all of us.
Haven’t we been predicting twitter’s degradation for some time? When Musk removed half of his employees many of us realised systems would remain running for some time, but at a certain point they would start degrading without intervention.
The more Musk makes changes, the faster it degrades.
How much time is it that the systems will remain running? Because it's been 9 months now and Twitter is still running fine. Time to admit that theory has been disproven.
They’ve done fine with these employees for the last while. Trimming the fat is healthy, especially when Twitter has historically over-hired hard for no reason other than “growth for growth’s sake”.
There’s lots of legitimate reasons to criticize, but making a more efficient company and firing valueless employees is not one of them.
What makes you think all of those employees were useful? An employee does not have inherent value. It’s not as though Twitter never had problems before the acquisition.
I'd like to know how relevant search engine traffic is for Twitter. I was always under the impression that embed tweets and link shares would be way more important than search.
"Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas."
2. The scraping orgs dgaf & mask their IPs through proxy servers or through orgs that appear legit. For example, a recent massive scraping operation originating from Oracle IP addresses was just using their servers as a laundromat.
3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now."
> 3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data…
What does “our” refer to here? Does Twitter (i.e. musk) own the data in any sense? Or does he mean it as “we the people’s data”?
Very off-putting to read that sentence. Obviously he’s trying to monetize the user generated data in this LLM rush as other avenues to monetizations have flopped.
Unless I misunderstood, he might actually have a case.
> In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6] In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties. [7]
This also really sounds like he's trying to pretend his data is some kind of rare commodity, when the reality is that it's bottom of the barrel trash as far as text data for LLMs goes.
Unless someone was pulling in everything to build a new AI dataset or something like that then I'm filing this in the "bots bots bots" stuff from the takeover - a real problem that is completely blown out of proportion.
Easy solution: Regularly upload dumps of public tweets to the internet archive, like how stackoverflow used to do. Twitter's value is in live engagement, not in stale tweets.
This feels a little like the shittiest restaurant in town raising its prices. I have an account, and I wouldn't even bother logging in at this point. Why bother? The Twitter experience is so devotedly wretched that whatever I'd get from the tweet I want to see is outweighed by everything I have to wade through to see it.
There was a point when Twitter was good enough that maybe they could have pulled something like this and gotten away with it. At this point, I think all this will do is hasten their irrelevancy.
And people said I was being a Luddite for saying "just copy the text or take a screenshot", that's a lot of "news" articles at this point.
Definitely disturbing that journalists (especially) figured it was good archival practice to rely on the Twitter API in providing context.
For years, if I didn't enable twitter's javascript, news articles are missing images and quotes, obviously so. It's embarrassing, I honestly don't know how they recover from this, I don't know why they kept relying on Twitter embedding when screenshots and copy/paste work better and don't break.
I grew up with the practice of never putting more of my life in the digital world than necessary. Given the recent Amazon smarthome snafu I don't see a reason to change.
That's a false dichotomy. Government-regulated doesn't mean government-run. I wish we had laws in place that would prevent Facebook/Apple/Google/Twitter monopolies/walled gardens from happening
Distributed power takes more effort. Of course people naturally trend towards lazy over the generations because it's easier and more efficient at the cost of everything it was initially supposed to be. And now we are where we are: executive branch agencies legislating.
That's why we shouldn't optimize everything, the longer I live the more I understand that overoptimization is the root of all evil. We should analyse what we are doing and how we are changing things in the long term, monitor the situation and adjust accordingly. Otherwise our systems will find a local optimum that benefit the most powerful groups. Happens in all aspects of life, modern capitalism being the prime example.
There is a failure of technology too. The internet is distributed, sure, but the server-client architecture puts all the operational burden on the server. The expectation that everyone will run their own internet exposed instance of any thing is still simply not feasible, even today. The operational complexity of security, availability, monitoring etc are unmanageable even for technical users. Back when smaller forums were popular, hearing of a forum getting hacked was pretty much the norm. They get hacked, they go down for few days, they come back from a backup losing few days or hours of data, and on to the next vbulletin. Phpbb, nuke, or whatever vulnerability/hack. There doesn’t yet exist a distributed system that can replace something like facebook, twitter, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, instagram, or even WhatsApp without a significant operational burden or added complexity.
It’s also not a very interesting problem to solve because of the type of cliffs you will run into due to precisely how the “internet works”
Centralisation vs decentralisation in tech is pretty much irrelevant.
What is relevant is governance. We allow billionaires and venture capitalists to govern a commons that we all rely on. Surprise surprise, it isn't going well.
The solution is not to have (difficult to scale) federated alternatives. The solution is collective ownership.
Imagine for a moment that the multinationals that are increasingly in charge of our lives were owned by their customers. Imagine they had a fair electoral system, reflecting the variety of those users, limiting them to one person, one vote, and that their constitutions were designed to guarantee the rights of minorities.
The journey that most countries went on through the 20th and 21st centuries, in other words.
Tech giants and other multinationals are a different kind of beast, because they govern a little slice of our lives instead of having carte blanche. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility for democratically operated multinationals to exist. It will be hard to do, but IMO, that approach has a bright future because non-techies can grasp it and participate in it more easily, and that is one less barrier to a runaway network effect than the fediverse has.
Can you not have both? Each federated instance costs money to upkeep. Some instances could elect for collective ownership or even elect to donate for develop (probably this needs to be carefully considered to deter corporate ownership). I like your idea but I think there needs to be an interim step and for now, maybe that's federation. Maybe we'll get to the place you speak of... one day.
We won't get there while people would rather rely on doing a bit of systems administration and hoping a developer can pay the bills. Not without strictly ideologically motivated admins and devs.
It's that old tradeoff - convenience vs. single point of failure. Unfortunately, we're getting to see now what that single point of failure does to us. A big chunk of the open web is winking out of existence at this very moment.
The internet was conceived as a democratic haven, a realm where every individual had the potential to influence and shape their digital experience. However, a pervasive dip in technological literacy and a rising dependency on heavily-guided online pathways has begun to shift this balance. If this trend persists, corporations will continue to maintain their overarching dominion.
A dynamic, user-driven community still thrives in the vast expanse of the digital world, yet it lies hidden beyond the towering edifices of corporate-controlled structures. Discovering these spaces has become an increasingly formidable task, as the infusion of corporate social content into journalistic and blogging platforms perpetuates the mirage that such networks are all that exist.
Each colossal tech corporation we see today began its journey as a modest, affable endeavor. As these projects expanded with their burgeoning popularity, users neglected to challenge the escalating influence and control these companies wielded.
Nitter was merely an alternative facade to Twitter. Despite offering an ad-free environment, it lacked substantial advantages as the underlying platform remained the same - Twitter.
However, the digital realm is not void of choices. Federated social media is emerging as a profound alternative. Yet, a majority of those voicing concerns about corporate social media seem to dismiss options like Mastodon. This is primarily due to their increased technological demands and people's comfort in having a corporation guide their online journey.
The power to reshape your digital footprint rests in your hands. You can sever ties with your corporate social media accounts. You can choose to eschew media that incessantly embeds corporate social media content. You can advocate for an internet not ruled by corporate influence. All it requires is the willingness to venture beyond the realm of comfort.
> The internet was conceived as a democratic haven, a realm where every individual had the potential to influence and shape their digital experience.
I have a hard time reconciling this perspective with history. Were any of these ideals present among the people/organizations responsible for the internet and the Web at the time that they were being developed? Or is sentiment like yours something that people adopted later on?
I was speaking more to the ethos that arose as the internet was opened up to the public and began to evolve in the late 20th century. You are correct that this is a far cry from its initial conception as a military communications network (ARPANET).
The internet was conceived as a DARPA concept of reliable government communications in the face of unreliable transport, among many other research interests. For most of its early existence (through at least the NSFnet incarnation in the US), it was the private preserve of academic, government and military users, along with some of the corporations that supported them and commercial use beyond supporting projects was prohibited (e.g. you couldn't use it for advertising). It was far from a 'Democratic haven'. There were epic flamewars over 'do we let any more commercial content in our private backyard?' and 'why would we let regular people in?'.
However, a pervasive dip in technological literacy...
Right...it's bad we let the proles into utopia. So much for 'democratic havens'.
If you can't get the basic background right, it really damages the credibility of the rest of the screed (which I mostly agree with).
Doesn't come as a surprise when you look at how openly hostile the open source community still is to prioritizing user experiences and supporting tech-illiterate users in general.
FOSS, fediverse, IPFS all had their chance, and they blew it. Corporations were the ones who opened up the internet to the 99% of people who would otherwise never have been there at all, and now they want to collect their cut.
To be completely fair, FOSS' marketing budget is orders of magnitude smaller than these corporation's budgets. Not to say that you're wrong but I suspect that's more like a drop in the bucket compared to marketing.
Even now, these federated sites on the rise have technicial growing pains. And those will probably take years to get through until it's to a point where everyone can use it with little friction.
Twitter made a convenient, easy to use, centralized (which is an absolute positive for user experience), social media product that attracted people, by their own free will. The number of people using a social media service amplifies its "usefulness", so the more people, the stronger it attracts new users.
We didn't put the internet in the hands of these corporations. We walked over and sat in their, easy to use, hands.
At university I was using JANET, and in some ways it was better than what we have now.
I don't think they'd have ever bothered inventing privacy violating trackers A/B testing (though if I'm wrong this is the best place to assert wildly and be quickly corrected).
You said it would be nothing without tech companies.
Without tech companies, it was still immensely useful.
Apps on iPhones? Great, but the internet doesn't need them to be hugely culturally and socially important — and I'm saying that as an iPhone app developer since before the first iPad came out.
"The internet" isn't in their hands, the "Pop Web" (eg, pop music) is. Plenty of other internet out there, it's just time for people to start paying attention to it again.
We the people were inactive & didn't figure out how to weave together our individual & community sites to create a compelling multi-party space.
Or we could try to create alternative centralized but non-corporate systems. Not sure what other options there are.
I don't like where we are either. But new power has to be created. Hard work of figuring out protocols to converse across & usefully home our content/words on is sort of just beginning.
The thing is if it weren't meant to be temporary I'd still expect him to undo it. Twitter is iconic, it's a big part of "the news" in a way. It just doesn't seem like it would be the same thing if it had exclusivity. So I'd expect them to reverse the decision after seeing the drop in engagement. Just like they did regarding the ban on promoting one's Mastodon account.
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.
Same here. I haven’t really missed it at all (by contrast, I stopped using Reddit when the blackout started earlier this month, and that feels like more of a loss).
Weirdly, Twitter had started becoming so unreliable for me for several months prior (frequently not loading, video rarely working) that my click-through rate on Twitter links was already diminishing. But looks like it’s 0% from here on out.
Yes and it’s weird how weaning yourself off these things can go more easily than expected if you’re ”forced” to (because how you need to use the service changes too much for your tastes).
I think it speaks a lot about the _illusion of value_ these networks provide vs actual value.
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.
You forgot to notice that Twitter has a pure chronological timeline now without any algorithmic recommendations. Surely that will outweigh people with blue checkmarks in the replies.
As soon as I saw tweetdeck, which was like the gluttonous way of consuming all of Twitter all at once, I started thinking about the architect, from the movie The matrix. The guy with the enormous wall of televisions all watching neo in all of his different dimensions, checking to make sure he wasn't about to upset the balance of the matrix.
We are are not that sophisticated of animals. I mean we're not as dumb as dinosaurs were where they forgot about prey if the prey turned the corner out of their sight, but we're not as smart as we want to believe we are. So I think Twitter is Entertainment and
Should not be relied upon.
And now imagine a citizen wants to quickly check news/updates/whatever from a government agency or a city council which doesn't have a fediverse account
Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place?
At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?
How long did it take for expertsexchange to finally stop showing in Google results despite being super obnoxious? Yeah you could scroll way to the bottom, but that only worked if you came there direct from Google.
> Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?
Not only, but also.
Does the Chinese government run an account? Have American politicians been as upset about this as they seem to have been about TikTok? I'd check the former, but, well, the subject under discussion.
> Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place?
Exactly this. It's fine if they use twitter to syndicate news that is also announced on official government systems, but not as a primary and certainly not as a solitary distribution method.
> Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?
That would be hilarious and maybe it would result in some people learning that twitter is in fact a private corporation that can do whatever it wants, but i doubt it - similar incidents proved that large swathes of users believe twitter is or should be treated as public infrastructure rather than prompting significant moves to user controlled platforms
I like to be able to point to times when Musk errs from his stated free speech mission so I'm curious for the journalists in question. I know he upheld the Alex Jones ban explicitly because he found Jones' speech distasteful. It'd be nice to have a more sympathetic person to refer to.
I've definitely seen critical info communicated either only on Twitter, or first on Twitter and only much later elsewhere. Not sure if it was alerts ("chemical plant on fire, close windows") or crisis communication ("emergency water supplies being distributed at Foo street"), but it was a case of "use Twitter or suffer serious consequences".
Stuff like "public transit line 17 out of service" being announced only on Twitter is completely par for the course.
This is one of the biggest scandals nobody is talking about.
Any talk about privacy awareness is invalidated when public sector entities endorse these platforms and encourage citizens to participate.
Any talk about the public sector not picking winners is a joke when they explicitly advertise and provide links on their websites to particular platforms.
We have normalized alot of abnormal stuff in the past decade...
> Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place?
It's the responsibility of the government to make information available where the citizens are. As the citizens moved from radio and TV to social media, the government followed.
Definitely this. The big thing now will be: where is everyone? Twitters active user numbers are fine, but for how long? Likewise with Facebook as younger people aren’t showing up there. Will the governments of the USA need to be on every single platform? Should USDS just make a new news site just for the governments to broadcast on?
It is right to be present on Twitter. But the question is: Should it be the single/primary channel or only secondary channel filled from a primary source, like their website?
Of course, running a website, which allows those quick edits requires with dealing with secure infrastructure, maybe apps dir field agents to write something etc. which they could all outsource to Twitter (and vendors of tools built around Twitter API for scheduled tweets etc.)
Its somewhat similar with public broadcasters (BBC, German ARD etc ) putting their content on YouTube (where consumers are) vs their sites (where they control it, including privacy concerns)
Simple, if you are not there you do not exist. Go and check how many of your contacts follow the oficial accounts of your local government.
Also, the common layman isn't anyone that suddenly gets the urge to check your official webpage, if you are lucky you are in their social media results.
Looks like this is the best moment to move to the fediverse. Each country to have its own instances and accounts for all public institutions and governors.
Relying on Twitter for that was a lazy mistake to begin with. Why would a government agency rely on a private, unpaid third party, without any contract, for anything of consequence?
I was just going to say - lots of media companies routinely embed tweets, breaking that would be disastrous PR. Twitter is currently kept alive by media people; if they switch, the platform will die very quickly.
I wonder if this is all a result of the API price hike. Folks probably tried to keep integrations alive by scraping, so now there is a lot of extra traffic on the main site. If integrations start acting like embedded calls, they will have the same problem there soon.
https://nitter.cz/, from the Czech collective NoLogz, has a statement in place of the error message:
|
|
"Nitter.cz is not working, just like all other Nitter instances. The reason is Twitter blocking all access to it's content without login.
We are sorry, but there is nothing we can do about it right now and we are not sure if the situation will change in the future.
Don't trust corporations, especially those where one egomaniac has all the power. Use open-source and community driven solutions if you can (like Mastodon).
Sincerely, NoLog.cz collective
PS: You can also donate to us to keep our other services running"
You can blame this all you want on evil social media corporations, but the reality is AI companies scraping public conversations to feed LLMs are the current reason for walls being erected around every single garden. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn.. all heading toward full walled garden mode to prevent scrapers from repurposing data and profiting off their systems.
Federated systems are a nice idea, but they're not funded and will crumble under the same pressure until they too go into private mode. It's simply not a financially sound decision to run an open node that is continually harvested by corporations seeking to profit off the conversations occurring on your platforms.
AI companies is a stupid argument. If the AI company operates legitimately, then TOS prohibiting using the content for LLM training purposes would be enough. If the AI company doesn’t want to play ball then restricting public access won’t stop them, they’ll just register accounts en-masse and scrape that way.
Twitter has been slow since Musk took over and fired all of the competent devops people and then shut down most of the data centers. It's reasonable to assume that he's either been lied to or is lying about the cause of this.
Assuming social media companies are profitable via their normal services, then how they are hurt by downstream AI companies squeezing out a bit of leftover value? Because it feels like me being mad because I find out Jiffy Lube is making money reselling the used oil from my oil changes without giving me a cut.
I think it's a mistake to block third party providers from profiting from their service. First of all the hypocrisy in that all of these large companies exist because of massively profiting off of mostly uncompensated user-created content. Second, this drive toward relentlessly monetizing every aspect of your company's business is how we get degraded services like Microsoft putting ads in their search bar. It's one thing if a downstream OEM does it, I can just use an alternative OEM that doesn't shovelware the crap out of their product. But when the primary provider does it, then their service is permanently borked and eventually becomes unusable. So if the idea of blocking scrapers is because the goal is to eventually provide their own shitty AI services, I think Twitter et al are just going to end up killing their own geese -- making their own services unusable out of greed.
Different contexts call for different approaches. "Write once, publish everywhere" is ideal for read-only content. For a social network that is user-centric/identity-focused (like Twitter), federation makes sense; for a social network that is "topic-centric" (like Reddit) you can just have individual forums like the old days.
I find it tedious to update various social media platforms by hand, especially when each platform has its own rules and conventions. There are paid services that help but they often don't cover all of the platforms that I use, or are prohibitively expensive. Also if you just post a link to your site some social media platforms will treat you as a spammer.
Does this mean companies will finally stop putting their official announcements only on Twitter? I already deleted my Twitter account months ago and I'm not about to create a new one.
No no, you don't understand, the war was started by Poland! They attacked Germany in the Gleiwitz incident, you have to get unbiased news from both sides to properly assess the situation and stay truly neutral and enlightened.
Most English-language content about the Ukranian war is slanted in favor of Ukraine. This is partially because of the relevant military alliances (Europe and the USA support Ukraine) but much more because Russians are the aggressor here. War isn't clean or simple, but there are clearly good and bad guys in this one. The Russian justifications for the war are 100% pretextual and invalid, just like they were in 2014.
I'm not sure why anyone wants "neutrality" to mean 50/50 airtime, instead of attempting to present the best available picture of the world, even if it's not favorable to one side.
Public Twitter lists seem like the sort of thing that's quite scrape-able though, even behind a login wall. With sufficient caching & semi-randomised access it should be fairly hard to detect which account is doing the scraping.
Most of the news, images, and video originates from Telegram. Even if you don't want an account you can view channels without logging in... For example: https://t.me/s/pilotblog, but there are usually t.me watermarks on videos so you can find plenty of others.
As someone who’s been consuming a lot on Twitter and Reddit, can you recommend a decent set of telegram channels that I could follow to stay up to date?
Not really, since I try to not follow it too closely for my own sanity's sake. The channel I mentioned is Denys Davydov, a Ukrainian who also has his own Youtube channel where he posts updates.
If you want the most up to date stuff you would probably have to follow some Russian and Ukranian channels, Telegram has built in Google translate to make that slightly easier. Reddit is probably a good place to start to find some.
I follow Davydov on YouTube, but I tend to avoid most of the telegram channels that a lot of YouTube people suggest because they tend to use it as a place where they can share combat and violent footage that YouTube doesn't allow.
While I'm interested in following the war, I don't have a desire to watch combat footage so I've been a little hesitant to jump into his telegram channel.
I kinda get the sense that it's probably not super easy to find a telegram channel that doesn't post war footage.
Yes, I was going back to Twitter for some days to follow updates on the Prigozhin road trip last week. But the quality of the news had noticeably deteriorated compared to the past, as Twitter's algorithm now promotes blue checks above everything else, so you now get updates from such notable experts on the Ukraine (as well as, I bet, many other topics) as David Sacks, Mario Nawfal, and Kim Dotcom.
Looks like Twitter was officially evicted out of their Boulder office today. Had a fire sale on furniture out on the street, at least until the Sheriff seemed to stop employees from going into the building anymore.
I just ran into this problem -- not being able to view tweets without logging in. As much as I hate Musk, this is clearly the trajectory of all platforms. Without a unified push towards self-hosting or the fediverse, the internet as we know it is over :(
Been over for a long time. We've had a lot of consolidation into Reddit (which, you can browse mostly anonymously, it will just beg you to death to log in unless you use the old site); and we've also had a mountain of consolidation into Discord (the most unsearchable system ever designed).
People stopped hosting their own forums. Frankly, it's hard to not see why. The constant spam and people avoiding bans wasn't helpful - and modern forum software like Discourse is pure agony to set up and maintain if you don't know what you are doing. Not that forum software hasn't always been hard to set up, but the modern software stacks are particularly hard to manage. Also, what normal people see as good UX, in my experience, almost completely does not match what computer engineers and the average open-source contributor sees as good UX.
> modern forum software like Discourse is pure agony to set up and maintain if you don't know what you are doing
I'd like to know more about why Discourse is this way. Why the fark can't I just docker compose it up and running? I'm almost but not quite thinking about paying for a hosted Discourse solution since time is money. But why do they make it so hard?
Is anyone saying they're obligated to support the old site? I don't think that's a supportable inference to draw from people's observations that the new design is hot garbage.
I don't know how anyone can respect a man who calls a professional rescue working trying to save kids from a cave flood a pedophile. Musk has always been a piece of shit.
I like how we keep pretending that any of this complicated shit is better than good old phpBB. There are no modern inventions for social interactions which made actual interactions better. They're all incomprehensible UX nightmares used mostly by the loud minority of users on the web (i.e. Twitter actively engages with only 7% of the entire internet user base) who censor each other and then fight over how to make it all "better" by over-engineering everything.
Yep. Until there’s a big fat “Create Account” button, users are going to remain confused about instances. We’ve tried explaining it to them for years and they still don’t get it. The abstraction is clearly just a bad one, and needs to be swept under a rug somehow.
I don’t want to make a million accounts for a million separate forums. I want one account that I can take with me to every forum.
Both of these issues were solved by Reddit. This was its major value-add. The user base brought all of the remaining value with them.
This is also the value of the fediverse, of which lemmy is a fine example. Yes, the technology is way more complicated than phpBB, but it solves these very challenging problems which present huge barriers to growing an individual forum (which must be overcome once again, every time for every forum).
I'm not really convinced that discovery was a problem with the old forums. There was no insatiable need to know where everything under the sun lives. You'd typically just follow a few forums around your interests. I think it became a glaring disadvantage when Reddit introduced an overabundance of options and allowed everyone to subscribe to 20 things because they could, not because they needed or wanted to. I think Reddit's value-add was community moderation without self-hosting.
This is akin to online dating. Nobody needed 5 dates a week 20 years ago and because it's an option now doesn't mean it was a problem than. Optionality is just a byproduct of social platforms.
I'm not really convinced that discovery was a problem with the old forums
If you're referring to the time when the "old forums" were new, that is a world which no longer exists: a world where Google search results were useful and not overloaded with paywalled sites and SEO spam. Today, you're going to have a very difficult time finding those "old forums" unless you know the exact name of what you're looking for. And forget about browsing.
As for "people today have too many options, back in the day we had fewer options and we were fine!" that's a very old argument you'll have a hard time convincing many people of.
> I want one account that I can take with me to every forum.
Why do you want that? Why would you want your identity on a functional programming forum to be the same as on a Star Trek fans site and a furries meetup group?
That's an easy problem to solve - you can have 3 accounts
The other alternative where you don't care if functional programming and Rust programming forums are on the same id is the issue without the option of a single account
Disagree. I'd frame it as the "popular web" as we know it is over. There's plenty of other space on the internet for other web experiences that are different from what corporations have given us over the past two decades.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 543 ms ] threadI‘m not really sad about that change. Just going to miss out some things because I don‘t see why I should register to read a few tweets a week.
"Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
Then I realized... hello there! (:
I was going to host the screenshot on imgur, but I'm not sure if we can trust them anymore...
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I'm not saying you owe CEO billionaires or billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. If you'd please review and follow the site guidelines, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
As far as snark, I see several other examples of that—also intended for Musk—in this thread. They don't strike me as either offensive or particularly constructive, so it's not clear to me why my comment was called out here. (Especially considering that there are a few other comments that definitely go beyond the acceptable levels of user-to-user snark as I understand them.)
I can avoid sarcastic comments about billionaires in the future, if that's a problem. If the issue was snark directed at another user, that wasn't my intention.
I'll also say that the "snark" rule you cited, while well-intentioned, seems very broad and selectively applied here.
It does not say “don’t be snarky unless scarasm is directed at a billionaire because then it’s ok because they have a lot of money and power, so we will allow it”.
You would then need to define some amount of money that would put someone in then “can be flamed” category.
The rule is not applied selectively here; it is applied to everyone, Musk included.
I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)
Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?
Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.
The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.
You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.
It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets the ticket. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...
It's the same with reddit, the user is the product, which is why they don't want you using third party apps/frontends.
Secondly, that "data pillaging" was exposure, he just removed exposure from people's tweets to save money, again.
Good work Elon.
With all the public officials on Twitter (and FaceBook) publishing "public-facing" information, I'm surprised both are allowed to be/remain walled gardens.
To do my business taxes this year I had to DEMAND paper form acceptance, which was begrudgingly accepted once I went, in person, to the tax authorities [they want you to provide all sorts of tracking JUST TO FILE STATE TAXES, under the auspices of "two factor authentication"].
As a technosophisticate that intentionally avoids email and doesn't carry a cellphone... I weep for what my public-interfacing world will yet become.
[0] https://archive.ph/Y91cJ
Remember when Twitter used to give archives of tweets to the Library of Congress? And had a firehose for folks to consume as many tweets as they could?
My second reaction was “I wonder how hard it would be to take a list of twitter handles and scrape their feeds into an S3 bucket that’s fronted with a CDN.”
It's a shame that he's not able to escape his pathological belief that his product approach is the right approach, regardless of the grotesque impact he's making on what was a good thing for all of us.
I can't tell if it's different people talking now or if people really are that fickle. Probably a bit of both.
I hold both views.
The subtlety is in whether the User is beholden to Twitter Inc in a Just Along For The Ride sense, or is Creating a Burden for Innocent Others.
Former is most of us, latter is institutions incapable of acting insightfully considering the possible future (this one we now live in).
The more Musk makes changes, the faster it degrades.
Stuff like this will happen more often in the future. It's downhill all the time.
The last few months showed he’ll silence people whenever he wants (his right— it’s his platform— but clearly he lied)
And now you can’t even consume that limited speech on Twitter without letting Twitter track every single thing you read and link you click on.
There’s lots of legitimate reasons to criticize, but making a more efficient company and firing valueless employees is not one of them.
Seems just another day at Twitter dot com.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674898695534309378
"1. Scraping is already disallowed by T&C.
2. The scraping orgs dgaf & mask their IPs through proxy servers or through orgs that appear legit. For example, a recent massive scraping operation originating from Oracle IP addresses was just using their servers as a laundromat.
3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674898695534309378
What does “our” refer to here? Does Twitter (i.e. musk) own the data in any sense? Or does he mean it as “we the people’s data”?
Very off-putting to read that sentence. Obviously he’s trying to monetize the user generated data in this LLM rush as other avenues to monetizations have flopped.
But I'm happy to speculate: Organizations violated the twitter TOS by scraping, and he's going to sue the organizations for it.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn,
> In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6] In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties. [7]
There was a point when Twitter was good enough that maybe they could have pulled something like this and gotten away with it. At this point, I think all this will do is hasten their irrelevancy.
Even the content aside (that you have to wade through), just from a technical perspective the Twitter experience leaves a lot to be desired.
I wonder what happened to embedded tweets?
Definitely disturbing that journalists (especially) figured it was good archival practice to rely on the Twitter API in providing context.
For years, if I didn't enable twitter's javascript, news articles are missing images and quotes, obviously so. It's embarrassing, I honestly don't know how they recover from this, I don't know why they kept relying on Twitter embedding when screenshots and copy/paste work better and don't break.
Very innovation, many progress.
Here's the example link from that comment: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16748657311...
Edit: and here's a random news article (post?) that has a working embedded tweet: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23780357/new-footage-of-t...
I just made an updated tool that should work Replace http://twitter.com by http://traittor.net
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672
to
https://traittor.net/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672
Is normally bypassing no registered account and limit by day.
Have fun :)
Putting the internet in the hands of the Government wouldn't fair much better.
The Internet is supposed to be distributed. We've gotten so used to consolidated services that we have forgotten this lesson.
Sounds like the issues we currently have with democracy.
It’s also not a very interesting problem to solve because of the type of cliffs you will run into due to precisely how the “internet works”
What is relevant is governance. We allow billionaires and venture capitalists to govern a commons that we all rely on. Surprise surprise, it isn't going well.
The solution is not to have (difficult to scale) federated alternatives. The solution is collective ownership.
Imagine for a moment that the multinationals that are increasingly in charge of our lives were owned by their customers. Imagine they had a fair electoral system, reflecting the variety of those users, limiting them to one person, one vote, and that their constitutions were designed to guarantee the rights of minorities.
The journey that most countries went on through the 20th and 21st centuries, in other words.
Tech giants and other multinationals are a different kind of beast, because they govern a little slice of our lives instead of having carte blanche. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility for democratically operated multinationals to exist. It will be hard to do, but IMO, that approach has a bright future because non-techies can grasp it and participate in it more easily, and that is one less barrier to a runaway network effect than the fediverse has.
A dynamic, user-driven community still thrives in the vast expanse of the digital world, yet it lies hidden beyond the towering edifices of corporate-controlled structures. Discovering these spaces has become an increasingly formidable task, as the infusion of corporate social content into journalistic and blogging platforms perpetuates the mirage that such networks are all that exist.
Each colossal tech corporation we see today began its journey as a modest, affable endeavor. As these projects expanded with their burgeoning popularity, users neglected to challenge the escalating influence and control these companies wielded.
Nitter was merely an alternative facade to Twitter. Despite offering an ad-free environment, it lacked substantial advantages as the underlying platform remained the same - Twitter.
However, the digital realm is not void of choices. Federated social media is emerging as a profound alternative. Yet, a majority of those voicing concerns about corporate social media seem to dismiss options like Mastodon. This is primarily due to their increased technological demands and people's comfort in having a corporation guide their online journey.
The power to reshape your digital footprint rests in your hands. You can sever ties with your corporate social media accounts. You can choose to eschew media that incessantly embeds corporate social media content. You can advocate for an internet not ruled by corporate influence. All it requires is the willingness to venture beyond the realm of comfort.
I have a hard time reconciling this perspective with history. Were any of these ideals present among the people/organizations responsible for the internet and the Web at the time that they were being developed? Or is sentiment like yours something that people adopted later on?
The internet was conceived as a DARPA concept of reliable government communications in the face of unreliable transport, among many other research interests. For most of its early existence (through at least the NSFnet incarnation in the US), it was the private preserve of academic, government and military users, along with some of the corporations that supported them and commercial use beyond supporting projects was prohibited (e.g. you couldn't use it for advertising). It was far from a 'Democratic haven'. There were epic flamewars over 'do we let any more commercial content in our private backyard?' and 'why would we let regular people in?'.
However, a pervasive dip in technological literacy...
Right...it's bad we let the proles into utopia. So much for 'democratic havens'.
If you can't get the basic background right, it really damages the credibility of the rest of the screed (which I mostly agree with).
FOSS, fediverse, IPFS all had their chance, and they blew it. Corporations were the ones who opened up the internet to the 99% of people who would otherwise never have been there at all, and now they want to collect their cut.
Even now, these federated sites on the rise have technicial growing pains. And those will probably take years to get through until it's to a point where everyone can use it with little friction.
Twitter made a convenient, easy to use, centralized (which is an absolute positive for user experience), social media product that attracted people, by their own free will. The number of people using a social media service amplifies its "usefulness", so the more people, the stronger it attracts new users.
We didn't put the internet in the hands of these corporations. We walked over and sat in their, easy to use, hands.
I don't think they'd have ever bothered inventing privacy violating trackers A/B testing (though if I'm wrong this is the best place to assert wildly and be quickly corrected).
Without tech companies, it was still immensely useful.
Apps on iPhones? Great, but the internet doesn't need them to be hugely culturally and socially important — and I'm saying that as an iPhone app developer since before the first iPad came out.
We the people were inactive & didn't figure out how to weave together our individual & community sites to create a compelling multi-party space.
Or we could try to create alternative centralized but non-corporate systems. Not sure what other options there are.
I don't like where we are either. But new power has to be created. Hard work of figuring out protocols to converse across & usefully home our content/words on is sort of just beginning.
Weirdly, Twitter had started becoming so unreliable for me for several months prior (frequently not loading, video rarely working) that my click-through rate on Twitter links was already diminishing. But looks like it’s 0% from here on out.
I haven’t missed it.
I think it speaks a lot about the _illusion of value_ these networks provide vs actual value.
Yes it's enormous and popular now, but that's in spite of musks product vision.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-blue-checks/a...
We are are not that sophisticated of animals. I mean we're not as dumb as dinosaurs were where they forgot about prey if the prey turned the corner out of their sight, but we're not as smart as we want to believe we are. So I think Twitter is Entertainment and Should not be relied upon.
At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?
Also: https://xkcd.com/743/
Google results that require a login to view are cancerous
Not only, but also.
Does the Chinese government run an account? Have American politicians been as upset about this as they seem to have been about TikTok? I'd check the former, but, well, the subject under discussion.
Exactly this. It's fine if they use twitter to syndicate news that is also announced on official government systems, but not as a primary and certainly not as a solitary distribution method.
> Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?
That would be hilarious and maybe it would result in some people learning that twitter is in fact a private corporation that can do whatever it wants, but i doubt it - similar incidents proved that large swathes of users believe twitter is or should be treated as public infrastructure rather than prompting significant moves to user controlled platforms
It’s a business. Free speech is the brand.
Reach.
IDK if anyone is using it as the sole method of communication.
But Twitter in practice has a much higher reach than every other method.
Stuff like "public transit line 17 out of service" being announced only on Twitter is completely par for the course.
REACH
Any talk about privacy awareness is invalidated when public sector entities endorse these platforms and encourage citizens to participate.
Any talk about the public sector not picking winners is a joke when they explicitly advertise and provide links on their websites to particular platforms.
We have normalized alot of abnormal stuff in the past decade...
It's the responsibility of the government to make information available where the citizens are. As the citizens moved from radio and TV to social media, the government followed.
Of course, running a website, which allows those quick edits requires with dealing with secure infrastructure, maybe apps dir field agents to write something etc. which they could all outsource to Twitter (and vendors of tools built around Twitter API for scheduled tweets etc.)
Its somewhat similar with public broadcasters (BBC, German ARD etc ) putting their content on YouTube (where consumers are) vs their sites (where they control it, including privacy concerns)
Simple, if you are not there you do not exist. Go and check how many of your contacts follow the oficial accounts of your local government.
Also, the common layman isn't anyone that suddenly gets the urge to check your official webpage, if you are lucky you are in their social media results.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16748657311...
I wonder if this is all a result of the API price hike. Folks probably tried to keep integrations alive by scraping, so now there is a lot of extra traffic on the main site. If integrations start acting like embedded calls, they will have the same problem there soon.
| |
"Nitter.cz is not working, just like all other Nitter instances. The reason is Twitter blocking all access to it's content without login.
We are sorry, but there is nothing we can do about it right now and we are not sure if the situation will change in the future.
Don't trust corporations, especially those where one egomaniac has all the power. Use open-source and community driven solutions if you can (like Mastodon).
Sincerely, NoLog.cz collective
PS: You can also donate to us to keep our other services running"
Federated systems are a nice idea, but they're not funded and will crumble under the same pressure until they too go into private mode. It's simply not a financially sound decision to run an open node that is continually harvested by corporations seeking to profit off the conversations occurring on your platforms.
I think it's a mistake to block third party providers from profiting from their service. First of all the hypocrisy in that all of these large companies exist because of massively profiting off of mostly uncompensated user-created content. Second, this drive toward relentlessly monetizing every aspect of your company's business is how we get degraded services like Microsoft putting ads in their search bar. It's one thing if a downstream OEM does it, I can just use an alternative OEM that doesn't shovelware the crap out of their product. But when the primary provider does it, then their service is permanently borked and eventually becomes unusable. So if the idea of blocking scrapers is because the goal is to eventually provide their own shitty AI services, I think Twitter et al are just going to end up killing their own geese -- making their own services unusable out of greed.
I think Write Once, Publish Everywhere (including both centralised and federated) is much better.
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
twitter and facebook make automating that difficult with their API restrictions.
I find it tedious to update various social media platforms by hand, especially when each platform has its own rules and conventions. There are paid services that help but they often don't cover all of the platforms that I use, or are prohibitively expensive. Also if you just post a link to your site some social media platforms will treat you as a spammer.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
(Who knows how long it will keep working, of course.)
I'm not sure why anyone wants "neutrality" to mean 50/50 airtime, instead of attempting to present the best available picture of the world, even if it's not favorable to one side.
It's also not a great list. Igor Sushko, for example, is very susceptible to posting unverified things that later turn out to be false.
A much better list is Noah Smith's at: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1492242776825552896. Yes, you now need to log in to see it, unfortunately.
Public Twitter lists seem like the sort of thing that's quite scrape-able though, even behind a login wall. With sufficient caching & semi-randomised access it should be fairly hard to detect which account is doing the scraping.
If you want the most up to date stuff you would probably have to follow some Russian and Ukranian channels, Telegram has built in Google translate to make that slightly easier. Reddit is probably a good place to start to find some.
While I'm interested in following the war, I don't have a desire to watch combat footage so I've been a little hesitant to jump into his telegram channel.
I kinda get the sense that it's probably not super easy to find a telegram channel that doesn't post war footage.
Seems like it would be but didn't know if it works using scraping or something.
People stopped hosting their own forums. Frankly, it's hard to not see why. The constant spam and people avoiding bans wasn't helpful - and modern forum software like Discourse is pure agony to set up and maintain if you don't know what you are doing. Not that forum software hasn't always been hard to set up, but the modern software stacks are particularly hard to manage. Also, what normal people see as good UX, in my experience, almost completely does not match what computer engineers and the average open-source contributor sees as good UX.
I'd like to know more about why Discourse is this way. Why the fark can't I just docker compose it up and running? I'm almost but not quite thinking about paying for a hosted Discourse solution since time is money. But why do they make it so hard?
Now I can never see myself going near the site again. Oh well.
So clearly calling musk a "pedo guy" is just an affectionate nickname, too.
1) discovery
If I can’t find a forum, it’s not much use to me!
2) single sign-on
I don’t want to make a million accounts for a million separate forums. I want one account that I can take with me to every forum.
Both of these issues were solved by Reddit. This was its major value-add. The user base brought all of the remaining value with them.
This is also the value of the fediverse, of which lemmy is a fine example. Yes, the technology is way more complicated than phpBB, but it solves these very challenging problems which present huge barriers to growing an individual forum (which must be overcome once again, every time for every forum).
This is akin to online dating. Nobody needed 5 dates a week 20 years ago and because it's an option now doesn't mean it was a problem than. Optionality is just a byproduct of social platforms.
If you're referring to the time when the "old forums" were new, that is a world which no longer exists: a world where Google search results were useful and not overloaded with paywalled sites and SEO spam. Today, you're going to have a very difficult time finding those "old forums" unless you know the exact name of what you're looking for. And forget about browsing.
As for "people today have too many options, back in the day we had fewer options and we were fine!" that's a very old argument you'll have a hard time convincing many people of.
Why do you want that? Why would you want your identity on a functional programming forum to be the same as on a Star Trek fans site and a furries meetup group?
The other alternative where you don't care if functional programming and Rust programming forums are on the same id is the issue without the option of a single account
Disagree. I'd frame it as the "popular web" as we know it is over. There's plenty of other space on the internet for other web experiences that are different from what corporations have given us over the past two decades.