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HN policy is that submissions always link to the primary source. Alternative proxy links (Thread Reader, archive.today, archive.org) are welcome in the comments, but as they are not the primary source, they should not be submitted as the HN topic.
And, for whatever reason, Twitter/X links get upvoted on HN.

Otherwise, eventually word would get out to content creators that, if they want exposure on HN, they'd have to put their content somewhere other than Twitter/X.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

If there's things on Twitter that are interesting, they may be submitted. Blocking Twitter would effectively block quite a few interesting submissions. Furthermore, most people don't go to Twitter to get HN upvotes; they're going there for likes and retweets.

  Blocking Twitter would effectively block quite a few interesting submissions. 
Society has a problem with information overload these days, not information shortage. If X is a pain in the ass to browse then 'screw em' - most of what anyone posts there is, or gets, regurgitated via the other social media sites, anyways.
Don’t you think they get upvoted bc other HN users don’t share your opinion on X links or outright disagree with you?
> Don’t you think they get upvoted bc other HN users don’t share your opinion on X links or outright disagree with you?

I would guess that they get upvoted because people aren't aware of the concern, people are aware but disagree, people are aware and at least sorta disagree but didn't notice this time, or there's shill upvoting.

Regardless of the reason, in theory, HN might have the power to change the behavior of Twitter/X posters.

Most HN users comment on the title, not the content. The title and the xeet will have similar length anyway.
Said another way, they either don’t mind or don’t care about X links.
That will take a bit of time but I do flag and downvote whenever I can. I'm not going to signup to that to read 2 lines of text.
At what point is the front page all original source intranet links?
Right. What else do you propose? a large book burning? destroying libraries?

X (formerly Twitter) has a large trove of valuable content that dates from the "Twitter 1.0" era as well.

Banning the media of an oligarch who supported book bans in public libraries would just sounds like karma to me.
Well, movies, music and video games have content rating, to the extent that a book that features tobacco use may be rated for certain audiences...

For the sake of consistency, I would expect that a sexually explicit book would not be put in the hands of kids, same as we already do with other types of content such as music, movies and games.

Now, there are books that should be banned. Like the Golden book of Chemistry Experiments and other books that can lead to potentially dangerous outcomes.

Lots of harmless books were banned and curiously the Bible is exempted, but OK there's no problem and it's not censorship.
I don't want an X account, so X links are useless to me.

I don't subscribe to subscriptions, so NYT links etc... useless to me.

I block privacy-abusing domains... AlphaGoogle links etc are inaccessible.

I won't disable my adblocker... many commercial sites linked here no good to me.

No Chrome browser... many other sites here don't work.

Maybe it's crazy to expect the net to contain interesting websites that don't have wall-to-wall ads, tracking, require a subscription, or are limited to one specific browser. On the other hand, the web is an order of magnitude larger today than when I used to find such sites.

If it were up to me, each link on HN would have a 'bad ux flag' button, and account settings would have a 'hide bad ux' filter. Then I would have the choice to browse HN without sifting through bad links myself.

> I don't want an X account, so X links are practically useless to me.

And yet individual tweets can be read without an account. Of course, that doesn't work in this case as you will only see the first tweet in the thread, but you still can read a lot of HN submissions from Twitter.

True, but mostly if I find a tweet worth a click, it's a long enough tweet that its author split it into several parts... of which I can read only the first.
Nearly every tweet linked from HN is part of a thread because it's actually a blog post by someone who couldn't be bothered to have a proper blog.
>each link on HN would have a 'bad ux flag' button

Do they check the github for PRs? That might be worth learning Arc for.

Apple doesn't necessarily making the best hardware or software, but they are definitely the best at branding and public relations.
The former would benefit the user, while the latter mostly just benefits Apple.
This doesn't stand up to reality. You can't market your way into billions of sales over such a long period while a superior product exists at a lower price sold literally right next to it. You just can't hide the lack of signal for that long. The "iPhones are a status symbol" hasn't been true for a long time because everyone has them.

They are the better software and hardware product full stop. Whether that makes them worth the premium they charge or whether the restrictions they impose make it less useful for the tasks you want to do is an individual decision. But the narrative that Apple has been pulling the wool over everyone's eyes for 20 years doesn't work because people are using the product constantly every day.

Source: Long time Android user from the Droid days who was fully convinced iPhones were a marketing scam until I actually used one in like 2022.

> You can't market your way into billions of sales over such a long period while a superior product exists at a lower price sold literally right next to it.

Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" would like a word with you...

Consumers and companies will give up a lot for “free”. Look at social media and advertising. When one has to pay there is more scrutiny on a purchase.
That's actually a great example of my point. For a long time IE was the best game in town, that's where all those pixeley "Works Best in Internet Explorer" banners came from. They got a boost from being the default but the bigger boost was because it was free. You had to pay for Netscape and later on Firefox/Opera were about the same. It wasn't until a truly better browser showed up, Chrome, that IE was unseated and that information spread like wildfire. It had a long tail of death from the perspective of web devs but they stopped being the market leader right quick.
> You had to pay for Netscape

>> The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it.

>> This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Origin

You _could_ pay for Netscape for a brief period of less than a year after initial release. You never _had_ to, and I was a user from some time in 1995, all the way through the Mozilla Application Suite, then later Phoenix / Firefox. I never paid a penny for the privilege.

Internet Explorer was my preferred browser as an end user for more than a decade, for its native UI and text rendering. It was mostly only a pain for web developers.
Which lines up exactly to the current state of iOS so it's no wonder HN's opinion is what it is.

If you don't use iOS but have to develop for it it's completely understandable that you end up resenting it.

> You can't market your way into billions of sales over such a long period while a superior product exists at a lower price sold literally right next to it.

Of course you can! This is the point of marketing! You don't need to make the best product, you just need to make people think you make the best product (you can't skimp completely on quality). Apple has always been extremely good at that.

It's especially true for expensive gadgets that require familiarity, because 99% of people won't spend a lot of time and money testing each option. They will buy whatever seems to be best and stick with it.

They are good at branding and public relations, but that isn’t why people continue to buy their products. Look at how many AI hardware companies have recently tried branding and PR while launching their product to only flub when the quality wasn’t delivered in the product.
Comparing the established markets that Apple operates in to AI/ML gold-rush (what even is the product??) is quite a stretch.
I think their public relations recently has been abysmal.
I didn’t really see good examples of their claims in the unrollnow link - was there more on x proper? Admittedly I’m not an iOS/macOS dev so I’m probably not the target audience of this CtA.

Or maybe I’m just too keen to the irony of using language to deconstruct another’s use of language, how the “us vs them” language shapes the argument about Apple’s own so-called “us vs them” language…

> 4/10 The External Link Account Entitlement? It's like they're actively trying to make it sound complicated.

WTF this even is? I have no idea what could "The External Link Account Entitlement" mean.

Entitlements are flags (like AndroidManifest permissions) for apps allowing them to do things. It’s not something a user will ever encounter.

In this case it is a flag indicating to the reviewer etc that the app links to a website for account creation and management rather than doing it all within the app.

Yup. OP is deliberately comparing the language for the end users and the language for the developers for the purpose of a dubious conclusion.
To me it seems the very distinction is toxic. All users of a platform should be considered equal, not separated into developers and consumers. Creating your own apps for whatever an audience to use it (for yourself, for specific people you want or for everyone) should be considered a normal feature any user may use.
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"Us vs Them" was an actual line in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley", which was about Apple and Microsoft in the 80s. The phrase in the movie was referring to Macintosh vs Apple II camps within the company.