[HN Gopher] Twitter starts to require login to view tweets
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter starts to require login to view tweets
Author : oenetan
Score : 717 points
Date : 2021-08-24 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reddit.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter...
| johnrob wrote:
| I've been able to hide the modal wall via the chrome DOM
| inspector (right click on parent element in markup view, click
| "hide element"). Not a great experience but if you really want to
| see a tweet it works.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Somewhere a Twitter employee is patching this now!
| mypastself wrote:
| "Thanks for testing our feature without getting paid for it,
| suckers! Uh, I mean hackers."
| Kye wrote:
| Tip: you can replace www in Reddit URLs (like in the submission)
| with old to get past it encouraging you to log in.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I thought they did this years ago. I added it to my uBlock Origin
| list way back when because of it. In addition to that, that kind
| of pattern across so many sites had inspired me to make an FF
| add-on for my self to completely remove links to sites I know I
| never want to visit from whatever page I'm on, that way I didn't
| have to manually vet every link, or waste time opening a new tab
| just to have uBO tell me it's blocked.
|
| Funny that they're doing this now, just this month I setup a new
| PC after 7 years of using the old one and hadn't yet added
| twitter back to my list but noticed they weren't nagging me
| anymore, so I left it off. Now it's back on.
| nullc wrote:
| This is a great opportunity to stop reading twitter.
|
| Many people find it detrimental to their mental health, many
| people believe that the communications norms and technically
| mandated interaction styles of the platform are toxic to the
| public discourse. But if those reasons didn't quite get you over
| the line, it's now actively even more annoying.
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| Is there a third party app/viewer that can get around this?
| Twitter is getting increasingly problematic, what with the new
| font and so forth.
| 3maj wrote:
| I'm fine with this, I'll just never look at Twitter again.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| Good, hopefully this is the beginning of the end of Twitter... at
| the very least the end of its influence.
| tomlin wrote:
| If they made The Day The World Stood Still today, the aliens
| wouldn't even mention nukes - they would ask us to get rid of
| Twitter.
|
| Twitter has always been garbage. It makes right wingers think
| they have freedom of speech, while it destroys democracy,
| coherent thought, and lets left wingers think they are changing
| the world, while they make it a worse place to be.
| reggieband wrote:
| In the early days of the Internet I recall warnings that once
| these companies successfully grabbed all of the users then they
| would turn from benevolent to even worse than the existing media
| companies.
|
| I was watching YouTube last night and realized I was getting a
| ton of ads. They do this new thing on their TV apps where they
| show the first 10-20 seconds of the video and then put in an ad.
| Plus a midroll that awkwardly injects itself on a scene change
| somewhere at 5-10 minutes. I was watching a live music
| performance and mid song the camera angle changed and YouTube
| algo decides it is a good place for an ad. I used to get one
| 10-15 sec ad but lately it is more like 3 ads with the third one
| being un-skippable.
|
| I opened Facebook this morning and the first 10 or so cards on my
| feed were all ads and complete garbage "comedy" videos. I then
| saw 1 or 2 posts from friends followed by terrible recipe gifs,
| more "comedy" videos, TED talks, ads for marketplace and
| pointless "news". I would guess around 10% of the posts were from
| my actual social network.
|
| Twitter embeds on news articles are nearly the worst. If they
| have an image, after you have clicked through to Twitters site,
| you can't even see attached image without logging in. Actually,
| every single button the Tweet landing page seems to go to a login
| screen.
|
| I even have a reddit account and now the front-page isn't even
| customized. Probably 30% of the cards are from subreddits I have
| never interacted with with "suggested because you are subscribed
| to XXX".
|
| What's amazing is we are justifying this with "well capitalism,
| duh". Like these companies didn't vacuum up the free Internet
| until any non-ad supported content was snuffed out. Now that we
| have no where else to go for this stuff they can start to turn
| the screws.
| koolba wrote:
| I love this. It makes it impossible to view Twitter as nothing
| could compel me to actually sign up for an account.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Doesn't Twitter report that they have north of 500 million
| dormant users (people who use Twitter without an account)?
|
| Given how much shit they get from Wall Street due to their super
| weak user growth, I'm suprised they didn't do this long ago.
| bejelentkezni wrote:
| For now, adding the following to your uBlock Origin filters
| works:
|
| twitter.com##.r-zchlnj.r-1xcajam.r-12vffkv.r-1d2f490.r-1p0dtai.r-
| aqfbo4.css-1dbjc4n
|
| twitter.com##html:style(overflow:auto !important)
|
| twitter.com##+js(cookie-remover, guest_id)
| oenetan wrote:
| thanks
| makeworld wrote:
| Blocking cookies for twitter.com in settings is a much more
| reliable way to disable the login popup, for now anyway. Your
| first filter there uses a randomly generated ID that will
| change when Twitter pushes an update to prod.
| timdaub wrote:
| I prefer using nitter.net. Also on mobile I don't have uBlock.
| wavefunction wrote:
| Hopefully this will reduce the amount of embedded tweets in
| articles and my accidental exposure to Twitter and the problems
| it produces.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Can somebody chime in why in the world I get so often "Something
| went wrong" errors when viewing hotlinked tweets? I need to
| refresh like 5-10 times.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| Refreshing never worked for me, although I admit I probably
| never tried refreshing ten times.
|
| What _does_ work for me is manually prepending www. to
| twitter.com in the url.
| anonymousab wrote:
| I recall an HN comment a year ago that went into some detail
| about how Twitter botched their webworker implementation,
| leading to these errors.
|
| But at this point it's safe to say that it's another
| intentional way of getting to drive users to create an account.
| It has been too horrendously broken for too long for it to be
| explained by incompetence.
| dathinab wrote:
| By by Twitter.
|
| The only think you wher still a really good choice for was to use
| you as a microphone with some feed back.
| shaan7 wrote:
| I wonder how much of this was a result of India pressuring folks
| like Twitter to implement "traceability":
| https://scroll.in/article/999171/why-is-the-government-of-in...
| pbreit wrote:
| So will I now need a 2nd account to view all the users who have
| blocked me? Lame.
| dustymcp wrote:
| All it does is that i wont be consuming this, behind a login bye
| bye.
| nbzso wrote:
| Why I feel that RSS and personal blogs will resurrect and become
| the norm? The benefits of centralization are diminishing day by
| day.
| slig wrote:
| We thought the same when Posterous finally died, but then
| Medium happened.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't get it. You're still fed ads either way? Why do they
| care?
| justinzollars wrote:
| Twitter is getting worse and worse. It was so cool in 2010-12
| with a amazing API, a real vision, and future. Now it's just a
| machine learning assisted, comment hiding, news blocking, left
| leaning facebook.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| Great, now I will see even more Twitter screenshots on all the
| other websites (reddit, imgur)... /s
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| There's a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this when
| Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login requirements
| (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content.
|
| I suppose these angry Reddit commenters bashing Twitter aren't
| seeing it because they're logged in to Reddit.
|
| Just as with Reddit, there are workarounds to bypass this login
| requirement if you really want to. The users in that thread have
| some tips for using uBlock to disable it.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| The people complaining on Reddit are already logged in
| ragazzina wrote:
| But signing up for Reddit is much easier than signing up for
| Twitter. You just need to specify a username and a password.
| You don't need an email or a phone number.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _There's a strange irony in Redditors complaining about this
| when Reddit has been rolling out the same sporadic login
| requirements (on mobile web) to view certain Reddit content._
|
| My first thought when I saw the headline was, how long until
| the front page features this: Reddit starts to
| require login to view posts (twitter.com)
|
| Then I realized this has probably already happened a while ago.
|
| Such is the treadmill of social media platforms.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The modern internet: four websites each filled with nothing
| but screenshots from the other three.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Ah yes, the classic. This was the earliest mention I could
| find: https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071
| 040?lan....
|
| "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a
| group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of
| text from the other four."
| dredmorbius wrote:
| FTFY: https://nitter.eu/tveastman/status/1069674780826071
| 040?lang=...
| mywittyname wrote:
| There's a sad amount of "news" content on the web that
| amount to listicals of a Reddit post.
| jrmg wrote:
| I'm not sure it's as much 'the same' as it appears at first
| glance.
|
| Increasingly, Twitter is a place where people post original
| _content_ - things they expect others to be able to see and
| read and share, potentially on other platforms. These range
| from the original pithy remarks to long, article-like streams.
| It seems problematic to me to require a login to view these,
| and I think it could have an effect on usage for these kinds of
| things.
|
| There's not so much of that in Reddit. It's more a discussion
| forum, where reading seems like the secondary thing to do to
| me. Peoples identity also isn't as 'obvious' on Reddit.
|
| Of course, it's not concrete - you do see long shareable
| 'articles' in Reddit comments sometimes, but I do find myself
| more taken aback by a Twitter login requirement than a Reddit
| one.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| I don't have a reddit account, but it has (for now) the old,
| usable interface available, so the issue does not persist.
| Twitter doesn't, and one needs third party services such as
| nitter or other front ends to avoid the bloated, buggy,
| purposefully worthless UI. This tendency to build walled garden
| communities can't end well, but at the same time the platforms
| introducing these dark patterns themselves aren't particularly
| honest, so not much of value is going to be lost as hopefully
| better alternatives get more adoption.
|
| Anyway, up until a few days ago there were uBO filters to
| delete twitter cookies every page load and it seemed to do the
| trick, this may not work anymore.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| A lot of folks seem to forget that Twitter also has electricity
| bills they have to pay directly or indirectly. Serving every
| tweet, along with everything else you see on the internet, does
| cost money. Usually it's so small we don't worry about it but
| it's certainly not zero.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| If this drives people away from the Great Banality Laser, good.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Twitter has to be one of the most dystopian apps ever created.
| Not just from a UX perspective, but from a cultural perspective
| as well. Some of the most evil people I've ever come across are
| avid users of Twitter and wield it like a sword to destroy
| people's lives. I'm confident it's been a net negative for
| society.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| twitter is cancer
| [deleted]
| elcapitan wrote:
| How will this work with embedded tweets?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| As with any pusher: the first one's free.
|
| For now, at least, you can view the initial tweet. Expanding a
| thread fails with the registration wall.
|
| My view is that embeds / hotlinks were a Bad Idea for many
| other reasons (see the porn that's started appearing on old
| news and government sites due to hotlinked content). It trades
| a modicum of short-term convenience for major long-term risk.
| qwertox wrote:
| I wish this had the effect of politicians no longer being allowed
| to use Twitter in order to express any type of public opinions.
| batman-farts wrote:
| The beginning of the end.
|
| Somewhat perverse that it seems like the fall of Kabul was the
| motivation for this change.
| jjulius wrote:
| First I've heard of that being mentioned as the catalyst, and -
| forgive my ignorance - I can't imagine why the fall of Kabul
| would prompt this decision. Care to elaborate as to why, and/or
| provide a source?
|
| Aside: lol @ your SN
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Just turn JavaScript off for Twitter to "solve" the issue.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For those unaware: this prevents tweets from showing at all.
|
| I do this as a reminder-on-steroids to only access Twitter via
| third-party interfaces --- Nitter, Threadreader, or various
| Mastodon-Twitter gateways.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Im just curious, what are the motivations for a company to make
| this move? It seems like a death sentence to me but I cant think
| of any examples off-hand.
| trypietry wrote:
| To draw back in those seeking to cut down their social media
| usage, in part
| usefulcat wrote:
| I don't see how that makes sense. If you're looking to reduce
| your social media usage, this change will make that easier..
| dawnerd wrote:
| Chasing metrics.
| gsibble wrote:
| KPIs can work well or not. In this case, some VP's KPI about
| increasing signups and % of tweets viewed by signed in users
| is making Twitter worse (actually better because I hate
| Twitter).
| comeonseriously wrote:
| It's being spreadsheeted to death. When, as a manager, all you
| look at is some Excel spreadsheet that tracks the numbers you
| think are important, you get reactionary management.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I imagine that they have two motivations in mind:
|
| 1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a
| Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I
| click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw
| linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data
| regarding _my_ user having seen _this_ tweet.
|
| 2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go _" Oh well,
| I'll make an account"_ and think nothing of it.
| queuebert wrote:
| They still have cookies and your browser fingerprint. You
| might be surprised how complete their picture already is.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Have you been introduced you to Firefox containers? Best
| feature the masses will never use.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I am thinking that Twitter has reached saturation for the most
| part. Pretty much everyone has heard of it and has an opinion
| about it. The areas of the world that do have an untapped
| audience also have authoritarian regimes that do not like
| Twitter very much.
|
| At the same time, there is some manager with a spreadsheet that
| has new account creation metrics. S/he wants that number to be
| as high as possible. How do you do that if people do not
| actually want to make an account? Try capturing the people who
| usually click in from other sites and bounce back.
|
| I think the end result will be that social media somehow
| becomes even more pictures of text than previously.
| throw149102 wrote:
| Honestly, this seems like a plus for humanity. I don't think
| Twitter has really improved the world in any significant way, and
| maybe made it worse. Anything that prevents the twitter universe
| from seeping into mine is a good change.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > and maybe made it worse
|
| I'm on this boat.
|
| Certainly the proliferation of social media has given every
| moron a voice, but Twitter made it worse with its short message
| limit. There's no room for nuance in your messages, so people
| just post short "zingers" to "own" the other side, which are
| often not based on any sort of reality and just giant straw
| men.
|
| It's absolutely destroyed people's ability to have intelligent
| political conversations.
| Jcowell wrote:
| On the other hand I think Twitter and these platforms are a net
| gain for Human connectivity and sharing of knowledge and
| expansion of interest. There are many things, including humor,
| events , people, technology, that I would have never discovered
| without the existence of many of these platforms. I'm someone
| who pushes for greater globalization and I believe the transfer
| of culture that Twitter provides is a good effort towards that.
|
| I think a lot of the complaints towards Twitter is due to
| people not using the on-site tools to cater the site towards
| what they want. I find Twitter the most approachable platform
| in allowing the user to curate the content they want to see via
| blocking and muting alone. Out of all the Social Media
| platforms, if there's something I really don't want to see
| while still wanting to use the platform , Twitter is the best.
| All without having to make a single tweet in 2-3 years.
| b3morales wrote:
| Realistically, though, is this going to:
|
| - decrease Twitter usage, or
|
| - increase Twitter signups
|
| They apparently have calculated that they have enough mass that
| people will be dragged towards the latter.
| conradfr wrote:
| I guess it worked for Instagram so they're copying them?
| zigradett wrote:
| Realistically, though, is this going to decrease Twitter
| usage.
|
| I would never hand my phone number over to Twitter. Would
| you?
| b3morales wrote:
| I wouldn't, but almost everyone I know would.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Good that means less time on there, which should make my anger
| level go down. This is a plus plus for society as a whole. Now if
| only twitter would completely disappear off the planet...
| koreanguy wrote:
| what is the point of twitter ? why do people even use it.
| jordemort wrote:
| I deleted my Twitter account years ago. This won't motivate me to
| make a new one; it will just ensure that I spend even less time
| on their site than I already do ("ugh, paywall" _close tab_ ) and
| give them fewer ad impressions.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I share funny tweets to people all the times in chats, to people
| that don't have Twitter accounts. Those people will never sign up
| for Twitter, now they will simply stop being visitors/consumers.
| I don't see how this is good?
| petee wrote:
| The trick is to click the next tweet, then manually press 'Go' or
| hit enter in the url bar to reload the page, only the will
| clicking outside the login will make it disappear.
|
| If it opens from a referrer, clicking outside the login box will
| take you back to the previous tweet
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Funny, I got downvoted for mentioning the same thing in a post
| about a Tweet.
| blueflow wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button
| breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be
| interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then
| friendly feedback might be helpful.
|
| I had a thread moderated away due to this yesterday :/ sucks.
| f00zz wrote:
| Great news. I deactivated my account a few months ago, but once
| in a while I still find myself opening the site to read tweets
| from people I used to follow. Now I won't waste time any more.
| solmag wrote:
| Too many bluechecks publicly roasted.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| Damn, this really sucks for internet archiving. :/
| wildpeaks wrote:
| On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account
| because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give
| them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's
| not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick
| people into giving up yet more information than asking for it
| upfront).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| FWIW: HN are receptive to member feedback about improvements to
| Hacker News itself.
|
| This includes both encouraging sites, content, and/or users,
| and suggestions as to unwelcomed behaviour.
|
| email hn@ycombinator.com
| Kye wrote:
| You can remove the number after you've used the account for a
| while and not get locked, but they shouldn't require it in the
| first place.
| myhf wrote:
| And yet that account will still get suggestions to follow
| people who have that phone number in their address book.
| Thinking face emoji
| echelon wrote:
| It's probably permanently held in their databases. Some
| services use immutable data models that "append deletes".
| (GDPR made those types of systems fun to deal with.)
|
| Might be bad for activists, whistleblowers, et al.
| antifa wrote:
| The point is to never give it to them.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You can remove your phone number easily under account settings.
|
| This trickery is still a very effective way to get phone
| information for masses of people, but on the individual level,
| it's possible to avoid.
| [deleted]
| finiteseries wrote:
| I created an account in May 2021 without a phone number to
| follow some people without blogs etc, and it's still working
| with just a disposable email.
|
| They've added sign in/up with Google & Apple recently though.
| jchw wrote:
| You can get away with that on a residential IP sometimes, but
| don't count on it. Log in from the wrong location or a VPN or
| do certain patterns of behavior and it drops you.
| genewitch wrote:
| Fixed wireless ISP in the US and I hit a captcha on every
| site from time to time when logging in (and sometimes just
| trying to read-only) - and I'm effectively blocked from
| anonymous sites.
|
| I can "lock in" an apparent IP address, i.e. ssh to some
| box with no-ops; but that's either per-connection or still
| NAT enough that I get flagged. att aggregates all such
| connections at F5 routers in large cities, mine is in
| Dallas, for both of my fixed wireless connections.
| finiteseries wrote:
| I exclusively use it via VPN, with a ProtonMail address
| from the web (so many login notifications) while like,
| commenting, and subscribing on politically controversial
| content and soccer.
|
| Three, almost four months in and zilch. It'll be a good
| test case anyways.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| They flagged my phone number-less account after four
| months, probably because I replied to a high traffic
| thread.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| I think the key to using a phone number less account is
| to use it as much as you can in read only mode.
| Razengan wrote:
| And this is why things like Sign In With Apple are a godsend*
| for users, which predatory devs rail against on HN.
|
| * Even though the bait-and-switch can be done there too, but at
| least you didn't have to give up your email to the scummy
| service.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Which is not reassuring considering their past abuse of phone
| numbers provided for allegedly only security reasons. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-
| uninentionally...
| sneak wrote:
| It's worse: Twitter staff sold private user PII to the Saudi
| government (the one that assassinates journalists):
|
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-
| saud...
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Remind me again, why did we leave IRC?
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Completely different communication paradigm.
|
| IRC is an instant-messaging platform, while Twitter is a
| microblogging platform that was available to anyone in
| the pre-smartphone era as it was initially tailored for
| SMS message length.
|
| IRC requires a client (okay, you could use a web
| gateway), and you somewhat need to know what you're doing
| (not saying it's hard, but the average user might not
| even care about accessing IRC if it requires a minimum of
| effort), while Twitter could be used through a flip-phone
| or accessed simply through a web browser, which you can
| assume everyone have.
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| You don't have to be on twitter. If we can get more
| people off that platform, then the world has become a
| better place. I deleted mine years ago. Never felt
| better.
| rchaud wrote:
| How do you show programmatic ads to people on IRC?
| autoexec wrote:
| bots? seems possible if you don't mind those ads being
| text
| pvarangot wrote:
| A combination of we couldn't agree on what character
| encoding to use, and no one made a good mobile client.
| cpach wrote:
| Have you tried Irccloud? It's good! And it's available
| for both Android and iOS.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Because corporate interests have brainwashed us into
| thinking that IRC isn't good enough any more
| autoexec wrote:
| I often hear people suggest that the internet couldn't
| exist without corporate interests and surveillance
| capitalism. usually along the lines of "If there were no
| ads, we wouldn't have any internet at all!"
|
| That's an example of what corporate interests have
| brainwashed people into thinking. They didn't have to
| turn us against IRC. Most internet users don't even know
| it exists.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| So, in this fictitious world where IRC is a stable
| protocol and easy enough for the average layperson to
| use, who pays for the IRC server bills and how?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > easy enough for the average layperson to use
|
| At one point it was easy enough for the average person to
| use, because the average person had to deal with a
| command-line. But tech, in its infinite quest to Make
| More Money, keeps chasing the dumbest of the dumb so that
| it can expand its market into an imagined infinity. It
| kinds of reminds me of the windshield repair shop that
| takes a baseball bat to nearby windshields at night to
| drive business
|
| How about we work towards unwinding this whole mess and
| meet users in the middle??
|
| FOSS and open protocols are criminally undervalued
| because of greed, and all the fake newbie empathy it
| generates
| cpach wrote:
| I didn't :-p
|
| TBH: These days I prefer other venues though. E.g. HN,
| Slack and Facebook groups.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30
| years. There have been attempts to make it friendlier
| with things like IRCCloud, but then the beards just scoff
| at the idea of a $5/month bouncer-as-a-service and go
| right back to wondering why the protocol is dying.
| bityard wrote:
| Can't tell if you're being ageist on purpose but "the
| beards" don't _have_ to use IRCCloud and can just keep
| using their TUI clients and bouncer daemons if they want
| instead of having their UX change weekly at the whim of
| some resume-driven front-end team.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Well, here's one issue: I can tell you what a reply and
| hashtag is but I'm going to fail the quiz that asks me to
| define a TUI client. (And don't get the Chrsmistian
| Fundamentalists hellbent on taking downn Tumblr et al.
| starter anything involving a "daemon".)
| flyinglizard wrote:
| This sounds like the release candidate of GPT-3 which
| hasn't made it.
| officeplant wrote:
| Begone print daemon, thou shall not infect mine systems.
| Arrath wrote:
| This is a crusade I could get behind.
| dvtrn wrote:
| .....what is this comment?
| Arnavion wrote:
| The point was that the stereotypical "beards" in question
| can continue using their TUI clients, not that someone
| who doesn't know what a TUI client is should be forced to
| use one.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| What does IRC lack that is an improvement you missed in
| the last 30 years?
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I think the lack of channel history is a big showstopper
| for many people but personally I think that's a feature.
| The idea that I should have to dig through slack history
| and its rambling conversation format to find information
| pertinent to my work is downright dumb.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30
| years.
|
| I'd way rather have something that doesn't improve for 30
| years than something that actively gets worse at a rapid
| clip.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'd argue that Twitter hasn't been improved meaningfully
| in the past decade either, certainly no more than how
| IRCCloud has 'improved' upon IRC.
| hk__2 wrote:
| IRC is just a protocol; it's not immune to these issues
| (see the last Freenode debacle).
| ekianjo wrote:
| IRC does not require your phone number to work.
| beebeepka wrote:
| That would be up to the server
| turminal wrote:
| It is immune, precisely because it's a protocol. Freenode
| is dead but switching to another network is literally as
| simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.
| danellis wrote:
| So the same as the HTTP protocol (i.e. switching from a
| website like Twitter to another, similar, website).
| turminal wrote:
| Comparing protocols like that is comparing apples to
| oranges, but I think I see your point.
|
| When people say 'I miss IRC', they don't necessarily mean
| the technicalities of the protocol though.
| root_axis wrote:
| It's not apples to oranges, it's directly analogous: both
| represent federated networks on the internet where users
| have the freedom to decide which client they want to use
| and which servers they want to connect to.
| turminal wrote:
| They are not analogous. IRC is a chat protocol with
| semantics suitable for a chat protocol. HTTP is at this
| point just a transport level thing for whatever you want
| to send. It doesn't have any significant semantic
| implications for sites like Twitter.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _HTTP is at this point just a transport level thing for
| whatever you want to send._
|
| So what? They're analogous not identical. The distinction
| you point out isn't relevant to the point of the analogy.
|
| You wrote:
|
| > _switching to another network is literally as simple as
| pointing the client to a different domain name._
|
| irc and http are the same in this respect, thus they are
| analogous.
| bityard wrote:
| I don't understand the question. IRC is a real-time chat
| protocol and twitter is a proprietary micro-blogging
| website. I don't see how the two are related, other than
| they are both something to do with the Internet.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| You do understand the question, you've just decided to
| respond in a silly way.
| epistasis wrote:
| If my only current understanding of a question is "that's
| a silly question," then I'm also going to assume first
| that it's my failure to understand rather than assuming
| something worse about someone else.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| The above commenter is correct, the original question is
| silly, however much flak they may get as people here love
| IRC.
|
| Do you genuinely believe (1) IRC is anywhere near as
| usable as Twitter for the general population, or that (2)
| a real-time chat is an equivalent offering to Twitter?
| xtracto wrote:
| IRC is just a protocol... one could potentially implement
| a client (or website if you wish) which presented IRC
| comments as a "tweet stream".
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Malicious bots are definitely more effective and reliable
| on Twitter.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'll add (3) the only reason IRC isn't equally abused is
| because it's so bad that it can't attract enough people
| to justify any kind of ad-based (or otherwise)
| monetization model. IRC is the opposite of being a victim
| of one's own success.
|
| EDIT: I should note that beyond being more usable than
| IRC, I have precious little good to say about Twitter.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I'm beginning to seriously believe the general population
| doesn't deserve services like Twitter and giving it to
| them was a mistake. When something can be had so easily
| there is no respect for it. A lack of respect for the
| technology and a lack of thoughtfulness into its
| implications have caused a lot of harm. The hope of the
| internet was that it would increase communication and
| understanding. But nobody is communicating. They are
| talking at each other. They should be listening but have
| just become more self absorbed.
|
| So in a way IRC is better. If for no other reason because
| it required some personal discipline and will to learn to
| use and it segmented the internet to prevent these
| monstrous echo chambers. Humans aren't ready for a global
| forum. We are still only good at small communities.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| If this is your takeaway you're following toxic people. I
| have learned a lot and changed my mind on several issues
| just from Twitter discourse.
| ballenf wrote:
| Or they clicked on a trending topic on the wrong day.
|
| Or they read an article about one twitter group bashing
| another twitter group and clicked on one of the tweets.
|
| There's no path from toxic Twitter to constructive
| Twitter, but there are thousands of paths the other way.
|
| Which can only mean that toxic twitter is where Twitter
| wants its users, so it seems like you're using twitter
| wrong in their view.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| My point isn't that meaningful conversation is impossible
| on twitter. Its that the majority isn't and most abuse
| the gift of an instant global platform. Its tragedy of
| the commons on an unprecedented scale.
|
| Of course there are worthwhile interactions to be made.
| But the people making them would have been doing so on
| the less accessible older internet anyways.
| void_mint wrote:
| In general social media is a big negative for people.
| Just because some of them find it useful doesn't change
| that.
| dorkwood wrote:
| You just need to make an IRC channel that contains
| everyone in the world.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Well to compare that to Twitter you'd also have to have
| everyone in the world on Twitter which is overwhelmingly
| not the case.
| ok123456 wrote:
| That's basically what twitter is.
| Arnavion wrote:
| No, it would be one channel per person. Only you would be
| able to talk (post) in your channel. People who want to
| read your posts would join your channel.
|
| Private DMs easily map to one-on-one privmsgs. Public
| replies and threads won't have an equivalent unless there
| was some meta-protocol to temporarily allow another
| person to talk in your channel + duplicate your posts in
| your channel to theirs + expire that access eventually.
|
| Also subscribing to tags won't work without a similar
| "copy all messages from one channel to another" relay.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Channels are basically tags, without history for those
| who join. Anyone can PRIVMSG a channel by default, it is
| prevented by setting the common +n mode.
| Arnavion wrote:
| My point is that IRC messages need to be duplicated
| across multiple channels to be the equivalent to how
| Twitter works.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Make all channels -n and you now have Twitter hashtags,
| kind of.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Did you? Some of "us" never did.
| habibur wrote:
| We need to revive the ad free, commercial interest free
| Internet of the 90s. It will be small in size, but so was
| the internet back then.
|
| Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro
| blogging service like how emails work.
| smhenderson wrote:
| _pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how
| emails work_
|
| It's called NNTP
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Usenet died of its own inability to handle scaling
| issues, ranging from culture and posting conventions to
| various forms of abuse and criminality.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_
| use...
|
| Attempting to resurrect Usenet at any scale simply won't
| work. Even with a lessons-learned set of improvements
| (Usenet II), it went nowhere.
| Semiapies wrote:
| The culture issue alone is a killer.
|
| People say they want the old early-90s internet, but that
| internet only worked that way because almost nobody
| outside of universities was on it and nothing on it
| actually mattered to anybody.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Yep.
|
| It took me way too long to find the usage numbers (which
| ironically were within an arm's reach on my bookshelf
| most of the time), but ~1988 Usenet was under 1 million
| _potential_ users, and fewer than 150,000 active readers.
| Even by the mid-1990s, it was under 1 million active
| participants.
|
| Google+ was considered a _failed_ social network with at
| least 10--100 million active users (by my own
| conservative estimates based on sampled profile data,
| independently verified by a much larger analysis).
| Facebook has 3 billion MAUs (monthly active users).
|
| Until ~1992 (the Eternal September), Usenet users were
| largely represented as cohorts of a few hundred to low
| thousands, each subject to the disciplinary authority of
| university network administrators. Privileges _could be_
| and _were_ revoked. Netadmins had a hardcopy directory in
| which everyone 's number was listed _twice_ (forward and
| reverse search). They talked to each other.
|
| I'm active on Diaspora (for over a decade) and Mastodon
| (for about five years now). Both are far smaller than
| their comparable commercial equivalents (FB and Twitter,
| respectively). Each already strains under abuse, spam,
| and propaganda efforts, though Mastodon seems to have a
| more robust containment toolkit. Much resembles the old
| Usenet model: individual instance administrators can
| determine what users (locally or remotely) or instances
| (remote federation) can interact, and to what extent.
| It's high-touch, and has issues, but _at present scale_
| it _mostly_ works. (Not perfectly, but it 's not
| completely blown up yet either.)
|
| Diaspora ... seems on far shakier grounds. User controls,
| admin engagement, reporting tools, and the culture of
| active management are all far weaker. The saving grace is
| the lack of algorithmic amplification, but bad actors are
| a distinct presence, if largely walled off into their own
| small, sad world.
| dragontamer wrote:
| More commonly known as Usenet. (Or maybe google groups,
| lol)
| rchaud wrote:
| The only way to do this is with blogrolls/linkrolls and
| other decentralized mechanisms. Making a centralized repo
| of links like a Yahoo! style web directory is only going
| to lead to that directory monetizing its gatekeeper
| status.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro
| blogging service like how emails work.
|
| As well as NNTP (mentioned in a sibling comment),
| listserves work for that (and don't just work like email,
| they use email.) And both have been around longer than
| the web.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > We need to revive the ad free, commercial interest free
| Internet of the 90s. It will be small in size, but so was
| the internet back then.
|
| It still exists, it's just harder and harder to find. For
| example, most of the tech blogs you see on HN are hosted
| on personal websites with no ads.
| fsiefken wrote:
| gemini https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
|
| fediverse: mastodon, pleroma, pixelfed
|
| indieweb: https://indieweb.org/
|
| twtxt: https://indieweb.org/twtxt
|
| scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/
|
| hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/ (see iris.to
| for an implementation)
|
| https://quitsocialmedia.club/solutions
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I would add RetroShare to the list.
| opan wrote:
| There's gemini. Not the web, but maybe has the vibe
| you're looking for.
|
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
| mikro2nd wrote:
| mstdn.social
| lancesells wrote:
| I would love that but think adding in any kind of
| automated service will keep it from being the back-then
| internet.
| omoikane wrote:
| Mastodon and diaspora* might fit this description,
| especially the "small in size" part.
| leephillips wrote:
| How about email?
| the-dude wrote:
| > Saudi government (the one that assassinates journalists):
|
| Just like the US does : https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2020/jun/15/all-lies-how...
| [deleted]
| qecez wrote:
| Just use a verification service like https://sms4sats.com
| 0xdeadb00f wrote:
| Twitter is not listed there for my region. So no, I can't
| just throw some sats at this problem.
| Saris wrote:
| What is a 'sats'?
|
| What is the list of services used for?
|
| This needs a lot more explanation built into the site!
| joecool1029 wrote:
| >What is a 'sats'?
|
| Techbro lingo for bitcoin's smallest unit, the satoshi.
| sbagel wrote:
| unless they've changed their policy on this you can email
| support and say you don't have a phone number and they'll re-
| active your account, has worked for me in the past.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| While this works, I still hate the lie that they have
| suspended your account for "suspicious activity".
|
| If you're going to require a phone number to read tweets,
| don't lie about it, just be up front about it.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| couldn't you just call them instead?
| nichch wrote:
| I can confirm this as recently as June 2021
| peakaboo wrote:
| At some point there will only be people who don't care at all
| about their privacy that use twitter, Facebook, Instagram...
| All these American services in "social" media.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I'm not sure I'll blame Twitter for (effectively) requiring
| phone numbers - they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
|
| On one side, people rightfully complain about trolls,
| harassers, spam, CSAM, misinformation campaigns and propaganda
| on online services. And on the other side, people will _also
| rightfully_ complain about data harvesting, and an ever growing
| lack of anonymity on the Internet.
|
| At the moment, phone numbers are the closest thing we have to
| at least have _some_ cost associated with spamming and a legal
| pointer to get hold of criminal-level abusers. Using government
| IDs such as the German Personalausweis (which can communicate
| with a website using NFC and a special app) would outright kill
| anonymity, using middle men to do the same (or video /postal
| identification) like for banks, porn and gambling sites costs
| money and is not _much_ better in terms of anonymity.
| yholio wrote:
| You can request phone numbers when creating a certain number
| of tweets, or trying to reply to a well known account, or if
| upvoting a comment that is controversial or reported as spam.
|
| It's a lazy solution that pushes spam control costs onto the
| users.
| sgustard wrote:
| But all I want to do is read the tweets? I'm not contributing
| to spam if I don't even have an account.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I want to be able to read the New York Times without a
| subscription too, yet here we are. Corporations don't have
| to give all their services to us for free. They can charge,
| require free registration, whatever.
| drdeca wrote:
| That doesn't make the rock-and-hard-place point apply to
| that situation though, which is what the comment you
| replied to was a reply to.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| People is giving content for free to Twitter. Should they
| start charging for it? Twitter is not on the same league
| as the NYT.
| avhon1 wrote:
| NYT pays people to write its content, but Twitter users
| post their content for free.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It's not you. It's scraper bots they are trying to protect
| against.
| maram wrote:
| >> it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more
| information than asking for it upfront
|
| What I found interesting is that "translate tweet" button
| doesn't appear unless you are signed in. Why cannot I read news
| from all over the world unless I'm signed in? Why do users have
| to sign in to read translated tweets in real time?
| shadilay wrote:
| Does Twitter have to pay to use Google or MS's translate API?
| maram wrote:
| I have no idea but twitter uses google translate API
| shadilay wrote:
| Apparently it costs money.
| https://cloud.google.com/translate/pricing
| [deleted]
| maram wrote:
| Now it makes sense!
|
| Thanks a lot
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| Unrelated, but does anyone know if Facebook does this? They
| seem to allow signing up with just an email address, but I
| haven't tried going through with it and seeing if they'll
| eventually require a phone number.
| miohtama wrote:
| Here is a research how much phone number verification decreases
| account fraud a.k.a. spam bots
|
| http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
| ecf wrote:
| Of course, in order to help out the unfortunate website
| operators, people should willingly give up pii that the same
| companies have shown they don't give a damn about protecting.
| /s
| queuebert wrote:
| "For your protection."
|
| The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
| povik wrote:
| Also at top of the list: "We care about your privacy"
| (and not that we are required by law to give you these
| options that follow)
| andruby wrote:
| "We value your privacy" is even better.
|
| That's actually an honest one, since they know exactly
| what the value is of the PII that they sell to third
| parties.
| chalst wrote:
| "They know the price of everything and the value of
| nothing."
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| uh, 'to protect the children' would like to have a word.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Along with "For your own safety".
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| "safety" is a term that's been abused since at least
| 1793: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public
| _Safety
| ElFitz wrote:
| The translation is inaccurate. It means safety in the
| same way as the salvation of the soul for Christians, but
| in a non-religious way, and applied to all of society.
| Yes, they were both quite grandiose in their wordings and
| full of themselves.
|
| Safety, as it is commonly used, would better be
| translated, in French, as "surete". "Salut" would be a
| much, much stronger word.
|
| Although I do see your point.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| Well damn, that ruins one of my favourite points.
|
| But I'm still not quite sure what the French word "salut"
| means. Is there not a simple one-word English
| translation? What exactly is the remit implied by the
| name _Comite de salut public_?
| kubanczyk wrote:
| "Salut" in this context translates as "salvation" in the
| sense of "preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or
| loss".
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Next to: 'no need to worry about privacy if you've got
| nothing to hide'.
| npteljes wrote:
| Right there with "for us to deliver better user
| experience"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Twitter's users are its advertisers.
|
| Tiwtter's product is you.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| They always add that incorrect "y".
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Wait -- you mean "Sanitized for your protection" on
| glasses at cheap motels isn't true?
| meowster wrote:
| I think it stopped being true at the word, "Sanitized".
| JadeNB wrote:
| > The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st
| century.
|
| The T&C equivalent of "your call is very important to
| us"?
| meowster wrote:
| Right before "We are experiencing higher than usual call
| volumes."
| kabdib wrote:
| "For purposes of National Security . . .", a close
| second.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Like
| seriously I've implemented at a company I worked for and
| it's the least invasive thing to actually rate limit
| people.
|
| Alternatives included:
|
| - pay a small fee but that requires a credit card
| - send us government documents which is worse -
| mine crypto for a while but it doesn't stop people who are
| actually motivated - send a selfie and then do
| some face matching, also worse.
|
| Like what other things can we ask for that actually work
| and aren't more invasive?
| throw6746 wrote:
| >I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?
|
| Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks
| dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these
| pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious
| Fiverr-like spam accounts
|
| > Like what other things can we ask for that actually
| work and aren't more invasive?
|
| Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even
| asking for email, including this one. It seems what you
| really want to say is "What can we ask from you for it
| not to cost us anything?".
| Spivak wrote:
| Obvious to a human manually looking at the account isn't
| obvious to a computer system that has to pick them out a
| huge dataset. You will never be able to ban Fiverr type
| accounts because for the same reason residential VPNs
| work well. You're paying someone who has a clean record
| and will send all the right signals.
|
| HN works because it's niche. It can be moderated by a
| handful of people. Once you cross the "can't be moderated
| by humans" threshold of size you're solving a completely
| different problem.
|
| I won't knock you for saying "well then you shouldn't
| exist at that scale" but that's a non-answer for the real
| world where giving up PII in exchange for participating
| in a huge social network is a trade enough people are
| willing to make that you feel pressure to do it in order
| to get in.
| throw6746 wrote:
| > someone who has a clean record
|
| It doesn't follow to me, those people open thousands of
| account for those scams, how are they clean? They are not
| sophisticated, they don't even use them like real humans
| and it's literally for $5!
|
| > "can't be moderated by humans" threshold
|
| Is it a threshold or simply a cost center that starts to
| be big and needs to be slashed in order to please
| shareholders?
|
| To me it's perfectly possible to be big and have
| moderators, you just can't have it cheaply.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| They've already rejected doing nothing, as it doesn't
| work.
|
| I want Tesla to give me a free car too, but it ain't
| happening. At some point a company makes decisions you
| aren't gonna agree with and your only recourse is to not
| use them. If that means you can't read Twitter, then
| that's the price you pay. You aren't "owed" a free
| Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
| ballenf wrote:
| No one's asking for a free car.
|
| They're asking for a stop to major companies lying to the
| public. To stop harvesting people's data under false
| pretenses.
|
| I think citizens can and should demand those things from
| companies that choose to incorporate in their country.
| That avail themselves of the legal systems and
| protections. That take advantage of the workforce
| present.
|
| Companies are free to choose where they operate and
| incorporate.
| dustymcp wrote:
| Yet customers love free stuff, aslong as they can send
| cat pictures they dont care.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| First they came...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your
| own personal terms.
|
| If we go that route of argumentation: Can Twitter please
| close shop and go away then? Their value is vastly
| overestimated: Most people don't want to use Twitter
| specifically, they are peer pressured into it because it
| is where everyone is. There are better free and open
| source alternatives without them trying to steal from me.
| Twitter burns all that money (do they generate a profit
| yet?) to stay on top, just so that nobody else can.
|
| To stay with your analogy: Tesla rolled up and pushed
| every other car manufacturer out, now they are giving a
| somewhat free car and in return they want you to do
| everything they say, and the keys to your house "just in
| case".
|
| We don't owe Twitter anything.
| throw6746 wrote:
| > You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your
| own personal terms.
|
| It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so
| big and so central to our lives, to the point many news
| (including from police precincts or first responders) are
| only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they
| shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's
| "they owe you nothing".
| swader999 wrote:
| If they have a monopoly on the public square, arguments
| could be made...
| JadeNB wrote:
| There should not be a channel for government
| communications that is only available upon giving money
| or information to a private party.
|
| (But that's a ship that sailed long before the internet
| age. "Want to know the laws? Pay up!")
| riffic wrote:
| talk to your electeds about regulation then.
|
| Public sector and publicly funded groups should be
| communicating through standards-based channels. Their
| content belongs to the digital commons. This exists
| today, via the ActivityPub and RSS sphere of ecosystems.
| leephillips wrote:
| But you can't blame that on Twitter, no matter how much
| they welcome it and how evil they are. Blame it on
| unspeakably bad judgement on the part of government
| employees. Making Twitter the conduit for official
| communications? I can't even fathom the mindset.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Sure, instead of a phone number you can:
|
| * Give us your Credit Card information
|
| * Give us a picture of your real life self
|
| Neither of these are solutions to the privacy and
| compromise potential problem that is the 'phone number or
| else' requirement. Its objectively worse, so that you go
| "oh, guess you can have my phone number instead".
| Spivak wrote:
| I want to go further here.
|
| - Combat spam.
|
| - Be large.
|
| - Allow (pseudo-)anonymous accounts.
|
| A social network can only pick two.
| throw6746 wrote:
| > A social network can only pick two.
|
| Reddit has all three (no need for email even), they might
| not be perfect but I can't remember any time I saw
| "viagra links" or other obvious spam. They have problems
| with accounts obviously, but you can't frame it as a spam
| problem.
| dijit wrote:
| I see a lot of spam on Reddit.
|
| That does nothing to speak of "auto moderator",
| fragmented rules/guidelines and ilk and the sheer effort
| involved by volunteers.
|
| Even then: the spam gets through. But I agree that PII is
| not solving this.
| throw6746 wrote:
| >I see a lot of spam on Reddit.
|
| Where? I've seens a couple of ghost subreddits with spam,
| but then you see the same with ghost fb groups, weird
| twitter profiles, youtube, etc On even moderately sized
| subs I've seen any that wasn't removed quickly by the
| mods.
|
| People can say mods are too expensive for fb and twitter,
| but there is the dishonesty, instead of paying mods they
| pass on that cost to us with our pii while pretending
| it's free.
| dijit wrote:
| uptimeporn, for a very specific example from today. I
| wont link it because the spam is NSFW and probably
| removed by now, but- I saw it, so moderation effort is
| obviously not effective.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Okay, I'll bite.
|
| How does allowing people to read (but not post) without
| logging in produce "spam"?
| miohtama wrote:
| There are some attemps to make proof-of-human
|
| https://herrjemand.medium.com/why-cloudflares-captcha-
| replac...
|
| https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
|
| But in the end it comes to the fact that your
| Google/Apple needs to have your app store account that is
| verified to be human enough (less fake accounts) and then
| a web browser confirms this via a login to this account.
| pomian wrote:
| We get into the Ex Machina situation. It was a pretty
| good movie about Android (robot?} proving itself human.
| rkeene2 wrote:
| One option might be to allow people to view tweets if
| they have accounts from reputable federated identity
| providers, then you have an identity of an individual
| person without having to do the validation yourself. You
| can then rate-limit based on that individual ID.
|
| Another option might be to rate-limit by things which
| don't require accounts, which won't strictly rate-limit
| individuals, but it's unlikely that's the terminal goal
| here. It's not actually clear what they are trying to
| accomplish. Reducing the amount of resources wasted on
| scraping bots ?
| IX-103 wrote:
| Currently federated identity providers do not provide a
| separate identity to each site you are authenticated on.
| At that point any collaborating sites can pull together
| all the information you give to any one of them. Hell, in
| most cases your "identity" is your email address, so
| every site you authenticate with can spam you directly.
|
| "Trust tokens" was built to deal with these issues just
| for this use case:
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/trust-
| toke...
| nick__m wrote:
| The Shibboleth Idp also support per SP opaque nameID but
| nobody like SAML based protocol and as far as I know
| outside the academical identity federations, no one
| deploys Shibboleth ...
| rkeene2 wrote:
| Shibboleth is terrible -- so terrible it was easier for
| me to write my own SAML IdP from the specification than
| try to make it useful. Lots of people use Active
| Directory Federated Services (ADFS), which has a SAML
| IdP.
| dhosek wrote:
| One option would be to just allow people to view public
| tweets without requiring sign in.
| rkeene2 wrote:
| It doesn't achieve the stated goal of rate-limiting
| individual people, which sounds like an instrumental goal
| for an actual (unstated) business objective.
| BTCOG wrote:
| I just want to be able to occasionally read a few tweets
| with no required login or account. Just the same with
| Instagram and similar, I just won't use it and I'll
| forget about it. I guess Twitter is next. No, I've never
| had a Twitter account. I don't have a Facebook account.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I don't think Twitter cares that you won't use it.
| They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny
| portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.
| satellite2 wrote:
| The rule of thumb is that 99% of users are lurkers. Since
| more and more people are privacy focused and it's clear
| that forcing lurker to register is not in their best
| interest they obviously miscalculated.
|
| Reddit, Qora and Pinterest all tried it, shot themselves
| in the foot, lost a huge readership and reversed it or
| will reverse it.
|
| It's hard to realise how bad it is as only lurker don't
| have a sunk cost fallacy and easily quit and their
| quitting is invisible.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?
|
| I want them to do nothing.
| novok wrote:
| Twitter is stopping viewing, which isn't a fraud / abuse
| issue at low rates.
|
| In the case of posting, rate limiting / scoring w/o a
| phone number without explicitly banning until you build
| more reputation works pretty well from what I can see,
| and most legit twitter users, especially new ones, don't
| post a lot and mostly read anyway.
|
| And in twitter's case, I think paying a small amount of
| crypto would actually be something the CEO is interested
| in this case for the private types who won't / can't get
| a phone number. Some of twitter best accounts are
| anonymous and the CEO is into crypto. Add a monero
| payment option for those small amounts who aren't
| fraudulent and are private people and you will probably
| get rid of a lot of complaints.
| est31 wrote:
| Personally I'm a fan of the fee idea. You can quickly
| outstrip the yearly revenue per user with even a small
| fee, and the fee payment could e.g. happen via PayPal
| which doesn't require credit cards, to give one example.
| The issue with fees though is that you might need a
| billable address for tax purposes which renders this
| entire exercise pointless.
| mcny wrote:
| > The issue with fees though is that you might need a
| billable address for tax purposes.
|
| Maybe there is room for some simple innovation here. Is
| it possible to do "coarse" address for tax purposes?
| After all I imagine they only care about which tax
| jurisdiction such as county / parish or something like
| that?
| Someone wrote:
| I don't understand that in this context.
|
| Let's say you pay a fee for being able to view tweets
| without logging in. How will they know it's you who's
| trying to view a tweet if you don't effectively log in?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| MetaFilter's been doing this for decades and it seems to
| be working well for them
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Proton mail requires a small fee which can be paid
| pseudo-anonymously via cryptocurrency.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Their fraud problems don't justify anything though. Nobody
| outside Twitter cares about Twitter's problems. Just because
| they have a problem doesn't mean they should get to solve it,
| especially if it involves personal information disclosure
| which can get people killed.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If reading content generates spam, You Have A Bigger Problem.
| vxNsr wrote:
| So maybe don't require an account to view tweets, or don't
| let me tweet until I provide phone number but still let me
| view... lots of options
| est31 wrote:
| But then they don't get data on which tweets you viewed.
| arsome wrote:
| They can't set a cookie? Associate my phone with my
| desktop by IP address correlation on home ISPs? C'mon,
| they oughta be more capable than that.
| est31 wrote:
| Cookies don't track you nearly as well. What happens if
| you delete a cookie? Fingerprinting isn't a universal
| solution either as iDevices all look extremely similar to
| each other. As to IP addresses, they only work if you
| connect from your home WiFi. Not every phone has that set
| up. Often they use carrier grade NAT so you only have a
| few IPs to work with.
|
| Last, customers of their data love being able to
| search/correlate by phone number, not by some
| pseudonymous identifier that might not be present in some
| other dataset.
|
| I think this crackdown might in fact be a reaction to
| attempts by institutions like Apple to ensure better
| privacy. If fingerprinting isn't giving them the data,
| they ask for it directly at the threat of restricting
| access.
| [deleted]
| Jnr wrote:
| ~10 years ago I made about 10k Twitter accounts just for fun.
| I never used them. They still exist, no one deleted them. A
| while ago I lost the script and password for them.
|
| Back then you could bypass captchas and other checks by
| changing Tor endpoint (some endpoints required captchas, some
| didn't). Made a script that did just that.
|
| It also worked for Facebook and I still receive facebook spam
| for those accounts daily.
|
| I have no problem with asking for a phone number during
| registration, it complicates automated account registration
| and makes it quite expensive. But I dislike the idea of
| hiding content behind login page, internet should not be a
| walled garden.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| How is that relevant to read-only access, which is what is
| reportedly being newly blocked?
| ZWoz wrote:
| I have noticed that most those services (twitter, Skype and so
| on) block login without giving phone number...until few months
| later they automatically unblock. I simply check out in every
| week, are they removed block or not. Once I was stupid and gave
| phone number one of those kind services, that was bad idea.
| Account went into some weird state after giving code received
| from SMS. So my personal experience: wait, never give phone
| number.
| axpy906 wrote:
| Ideally, there should be an option to not give it. It's a
| security risk for those with MFA elsewhere.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| That's odd. I've _never_ given Twitter a phone no. (Granted
| my account predates their phone no. fetish.) Still use
| Twitter daily without any issue. Perhaps it 's because I'm
| still logged in and not trying to re-login?
| [deleted]
| sli wrote:
| Twitter doesn't seem to care much about established
| accounts, but every attempt I've made to make a new account
| under a new name gets suspended.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Same experience, and why I do not use a twitter account. Plus
| the last thing in the world I would do is to let some woke SV
| company associate the political opinions I follow with a real
| identity, not in the current environment.
| 9034725985 wrote:
| Personally, I don't mind giving them my phone number because my
| number is already public information. It sucks though that I
| can't get tweets by text.
|
| This was the original use case of twitter. I understand SMS is
| not secure enough to publish tweets but why can we no longer
| get texts when someone tweets?
| amatecha wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you can still get SMS notifications by
| turning it on in your Settings[0] and then also clicking on
| the "Notifications" button on the specific profile for which
| you want to receive notifications. I haven't used it in ages
| but all the settings appear to be there still :)
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/settings/sms_notifications
| TekMol wrote:
| Everyone is afraid of what the social media giants will do next.
| Everyone prays every day "Please let them keep me on their
| platform". How can we get rid of this fear and achieve peace of
| mind?
|
| Unfortunately, even a federated systen like Mastodon is not a
| solution to this. The url of a Tweet/Toot is still
| domain/user/postid. If the domain owner f*cks you over, you are
| simply helpless.
|
| Maybe a content addressable social media software is needed?
|
| Maybe something can be build with blockchain tech so that it
| simply is not possible to remove a post as it would break the
| whole chain?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It's probably just a few scraper bots that cause all this
| inconvenience for millions of innocent people.
| phtrivier wrote:
| I used to install browser extensions to make twitter and fb usage
| as un-user friendly as possible, to limit the time wasted reading
| useless nonsense on social media.
|
| Great that twitter is doing it themselves !
|
| I hope that interesting people, with relevant things to say, will
| leave those platforms and re-open blogs.
| nostromo wrote:
| Wouldn't this prevent US politicians and government agencies from
| using Twitter? I believe there is some standard about official
| communications being freely available.
|
| Politicians being banned from Twitter would be great for our
| political process.
| rc_mob wrote:
| this belongs in reddit.com/r/thanksihateit
| Cream-Corn-11 wrote:
| I only bother viewing tweets through Nitter instances nowadays.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Won't this break nitter, since nitter would need to sign in to
| view tweets?
| saos wrote:
| Disappointed by this move.
| nrvn wrote:
| Isn't it a regular path for this kind of services nowadays?
|
| The next step will be a popup saying "this tweet is available in
| the official app"
| zigradett wrote:
| This entire comment section is proof positive that there is much
| room for innovation and improvement in the space for interactive,
| online discussion of news items.
|
| Twitter is committing suicide by requiring phone numbers and
| logins to even read tweets, the way Digg committed suicide and
| sent all its users stampeding over to Reddit.
|
| Reddit themselves are committing suicide with their aggressive
| user interface changes, and their dark gangs of out-of-control
| moderators.
|
| Looks to me like USENET sent us over to LiveJournal sent us over
| to Digg, sent us over to Reddit, sent us over to Hacker News, and
| something good and new can grow and replace them all.
|
| Because I am not handing over my phone number to read anyone's
| tweets.
| lykahb wrote:
| Great, this means less time wasted on crap. The next thing they
| should do is to ban Google crawler lest someone sees the tweets
| without giving them the personal data.
| vzaliva wrote:
| This would break the social contract of Twitter, as it was
| preceived my many people. Unlike Facebook "walled garden" model
| Twitter was ultimately an open web publishing platform. Changing
| this will move them into a different category and many users will
| look elswhere.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| petee wrote:
| How does this affect Twitter users that are publishing official
| tweets, like police departments announcing emergency situations?
| Am I going to miss a school shooting because I don't have a
| Twitter account? Some of these accounts have mandated public
| visibility
| riffic wrote:
| mandatory public visibility should be regulated and enforced
| through legislation.
|
| I would prefer open and standards-driven information
| dissemination (ActivityPub, RSS, et cetera) rather than
| publication into walled-gardens.
|
| call your congress critters and tell them that their publicly
| funded agencies need to spin up a self-hosted
| Mastodon/Pleroma/PixelFed/PeerTube (or use WordPress with the
| AP plugin).
| commoner wrote:
| Another workaround for Android users is the FOSS app Fritter:
|
| https://fritter.cc
|
| Fritter is much more lightweight than Twitter's web app.
|
| Also, if you are using a browser that supports extensions (such
| as a desktop browser or Fennec F-Droid[1]), the Privacy Redirect
| extension will redirect all Twitter requests to Nitter:
|
| https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
|
| [1] Instructions for enabling custom extensions on Firefox
| Nightly or forks of Firefox on Android:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
| lgats wrote:
| Or the web based "nitter" project https://nitter.domain.glass
| or https://nitter.cc
| criddell wrote:
| When a login is required to view content, how do Google, Bing,
| and the others crawl the site?
| tjpnz wrote:
| Login is typically disabled for crawlers.
| johnc1231 wrote:
| How do they identify a crawler? Can a user not masquerade as
| a crawler somehow?
| tjpnz wrote:
| Normally by user agent. You can adopt the same UA to get
| past some paywalls, but it doesn't always work.
| est31 wrote:
| Sometimes they use user agents for this, but those are
| easily faked, so it's only done by websites that don't have
| comprehensive auth walls.
|
| A more comprehensive method is based on ip ranges, say
| whitelisting traffic from Google and Bing. This gives you >
| 95% of search traffic as Google alone has >90%, and many
| various smaller search engines like Yahoo or DDG are Bing
| resellers.
|
| On the other hand, a pure ip based check can be
| circumvented too. Sometimes you can view how search engines
| see a website through google translate. But places like
| LinkedIn have countermeasures for all of these
| circumventions.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Which by Google's own T&Cs is illegal and could get your site
| dropped from their index... They state that you should not
| present a different site experience to their crawler compared
| to what normal users get.
|
| As usual it's OK for the big guys to break the rules whereas
| us little site owners have no choice but to obey them.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Don't they have an explicit exception for login screens on
| their T&C?
| emptybits wrote:
| US and Saudi citizens who work for Twitter are allegedly involved
| in serious human rights violations because they have shared
| users' email addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses with the
| Saudi government. The recent imprisonment of Abdulrahman al-
| Sadhan is an example.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/saudi-case-against-
| twi...
| noisy_boy wrote:
| My life is perfectly fine without tweets, likes and stickers. One
| less thing to waste time on.
| riffic wrote:
| give this guy a round of applause, everyone.
| megous wrote:
| Yes, I like to posture on HN instead, too! :)
| batch12 wrote:
| I hope this helps kill the 20 tweet roll blog replacement.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Hopefully this will be the end of news articles including links
| to tweets or embedded tweets.
| lodonnell9213 wrote:
| Isn't this an old thing now? I'm sure it's been like this for a
| while? Nitter is a good alternative if you want to view tweets
| but not actually have an account, also supports RSS
| badkitty99 wrote:
| Wow this is so greedy wtf
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| This is user hostile a bit maybe but the content wasn't blocked,
| you read what you linked to. If you want to browse around and do
| something more than passively consume, aka actually be a _user_
| of the site, then log in. Don 't really hate them for this. All
| you lurkers that just consume consume and then demand some input
| over how a site works (coincidentally this post is on reddit
| which is the other one that comes to mind often complained about
| on here) will just have to create an account to participate and
| be part of a site. This has been going on with other things like
| IG and FB forever, with even IG being app-only until recent years
| where they made it more web browsing friendly (but still have to
| log in to actually see more/do anything on the site.)
|
| Fairplay at this point.
| riffic wrote:
| Twitter's track record is nothing but user-hostility at this
| point. Look at the bigger picture please, people.
| Dopameaner wrote:
| Within HN, there are alot of people who might not be targeted
| audience for twitter.
|
| I consider this addition to be a step back. As a rabid twitter
| fan, They blocked my account because i refused to add my number.
| Then, they blocked the content to view tweets, this reduced my
| interaction even further.
|
| I question how some of these features get decided. Atleast, WSJ,
| gives couple of articles before throwing in a paywall.
| fridif wrote:
| More time to work on important projects instead of me mindlessly
| scrolling and clicking in circles.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| I deactivated my account the other day in frustration over this.
| They would send me emails and I would sometimes click a tweet,
| only to be prompted to log in, which I didn't want to do because
| I wanted to avoid being sucked in. Okay, fine, I get that I
| wanted to use the site in a way that the site doesn't want me
| using it and that's their business decision. It still seems hard
| to believe that it's better for them to have someone completely
| off Twitter rather than receiving and occasionally clicking
| through emails to use the site.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| When Reddit started doing this it effectively broke my redditing
| habit. I know these things are annoying but for anyone who is
| trying to use social media less... Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram
| are almost unusable without their apps. They are basically
| useless if you dont sign in on the browser on your phone. It's
| great if you want to get off them.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| I agree but unfortunately their mobile website got better (when
| logged in) and now works really well on my phone.
| delusional wrote:
| The flipside is that anyone now signing in now are going to
| have harder time getting off later.
| [deleted]
| oplav wrote:
| I think the Instagram experience is better on mobile web than
| it is on the app with regards to consuming less. The "timeline"
| on mobile web is only people I follow with no inserted ads.
| Same with stories, there are no ads.
|
| The best thing is that the "Explore" tab is just a bit too slow
| in terms of responsiveness on mobile web. I spend a less time
| on there because it's not as pleasant to use as the app.
| useful wrote:
| I don't know my facebook password or save it on any of my
| devices save for the home pc for this reason.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I find that you can get used to a change of habit very quickly.
| Youtube introduced unblockable commercials for iOS/safari.
| After 15 years of adblockers and not watching TV, I have
| developed an intolerance to ads and I just lost the reflex of
| clicking on any youtube link or going on youtube to find
| something. Don't really miss it.
| tootie wrote:
| Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user. I
| know they present a more spammy version to users landing from
| google, but nothing is blocked behind more than a click or two.
| I think that's just good business sense because you want to
| monetize your firehose of less engaged users and coddle the
| ones that are more engaged and producing content.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| > Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user.
|
| On desktop. The main mobile version blocks essential
| features, like browsing subreddits or viewing all comments on
| a post.
|
| (Alternatives like old.reddit, i.reddit and teddit aren't
| completely broken but aren't great on mobile either)
| d883kd8 wrote:
| Remarkably, Reddit has managed to organize two teams of
| programmers competing to make a worse experience between their
| app and website
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| I almost hesitate to share these because I too found that
| Reddit's dark patterns were a large part of what helped me
| break that habit.
|
| I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit
| with all dark patterns removed.
|
| There is also an alternative front end for twitter called
| nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app /
| login.
| swiley wrote:
| This is the same reason I don't tell people how I get around
| HN's "noprocrast."
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Just log out, I guess? I don't comment very frequently, the
| links are what keeps me coming back.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| For reddit, IMO the simplest things you can do to improve the
| experience is to force the old reddit design (old.reddit.com)
| when on desktop, and use any app _except_ the official app
| when on mobile.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Yeah, heartily recommend the Apollo app and you don't have
| to sign in.
| alexitosrv wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think they are going to decommission that
| version eventually.
|
| Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they
| decided to remove the account activity panel, making
| revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the
| fact that they also remove a link from the front page too
| quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for
| the dark patterns, heh.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I've been using red reader for the better part of a decade.
| Its far from the flashiest but its clean, easy to read and
| performant. Its also FOSS. Since my reddit experience
| revolves mostly around special interest subs with text
| heavy discussion, it suits my needs well. If you wanted
| something to scroll through the media heavy meme subs or
| the front page there are better options.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The old mobile interface (i.reddit.com) works well too
| blendergeek wrote:
| You have changed my life.
|
| Thank you.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| That's the one I use. The downside is you can't see
| pictures or gifs in comments nor the rules of a sub-
| reddit if you want to submit something. Also submit
| doesn't work correctly sometimes, especially when you
| need to tag a submission with flair.
| [deleted]
| papreclip wrote:
| I use old.reddit on mobile as well. Personally I prefer
| panning & zooming on the desktop version of a site to the
| mobile design in general
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm speculating but recently they added a gdpr/cookie popup
| that forces you to got on non-old reddit to opt-in/out..
| they're trying hard.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is
| that numerous links _on Reddit_ will redirect you to the
| New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you 'll find yourself
| consistently frustrated by this.
|
| With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit
| rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.
|
| Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also
| broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but
| quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new
| substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.
| Saris wrote:
| With RES I've never seen new reddit, everything always
| goes to old.reddit.com
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Not all browsers support extensions. Even those that do
| may support only a subset.
|
| (Mobile most especially.)
| SECProto wrote:
| > The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit)
| is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the
| New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself
| consistently frustrated by this.
|
| I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my
| default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs
| results in almost never being redirected to the "new"
| site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a
| gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see
| the gallery photos in oldreddit style.
|
| This solution works for me on both mobile browser and
| desktop browser.
| askafriend wrote:
| Using a 3rd party mobile client also does the trick - no ads
| either. Apollo on iOS is awesome.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| There's also libredd.it
| yosito wrote:
| Thanks. I broke my reddit habit when I realized that most of
| the communities on reddit are just ideological echo chambers
| where you get banned for saying anything the community
| doesn't agree with. It lost most of it's value when honest
| conversations couldn't take place anymore. Now the only time
| I use reddit is when the only search results with the answer
| to a question I have point to reddit, and I've grown very
| weary of their tracking and harassing me to use their spyware
| app. Teddit is a nice way to get the information I'm looking
| for without being jerked around by those stalkers at reddit.
| We'll see how long it lasts before being blocked.
| whoaisme wrote:
| It always cracks me up seeing the echo chamber criticism of
| reddit here. Like are you serious? Reddit is a cesspool but
| it is a utopia of free speech compared to HN.
| ohhhhhh wrote:
| the hive-mind propaganda circle jerk took over, and many
| dont even realize they are still jerkin'
| treesknees wrote:
| I'd argue that any site with like/dislike functions which
| influence the visibility of posts end up this way.
| Akronymus wrote:
| While HN definitely becomes a bit of an echochamber at
| times too, at least you can still voice opinions that go
| against it without people going through your history to
| attack you rather than your arguments. Occasionally you get
| downvoted/flagged enough that people can't reply anymore,
| but again: That stays with just that comment/thread.
| bityard wrote:
| Android has a client called RedReader that makes Reddit
| highly tolerable:
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
|
| Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the
| desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much
| time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely
| not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I
| follow via RSS.)
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I second red reader. To you SNR point, I think that is
| entirely due to the communities you join and how you manage
| it. Unsub from all of the default subs. They are all
| garbage. And any that gets beyond a certain size will
| inevitably fall to low effort reposts and click bait.
|
| Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making
| focused special interest forums. In the past these would
| have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have
| nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But
| they would have some of the best content the internet had
| to offer.
| xtracto wrote:
| I always saw some comments of people saying "RIP Inbox" after
| one of their posts became popular in Reddit. I kid you not,
| it was not until earlier today that I found out that the
| reason for those comments is that apparenlty Reddit sends
| replies to your post to _your email inbox_. My reddit account
| is so old that it doesn 't have a linked email, so I never
| realized that.
| fograte wrote:
| Second teddit
|
| Will mention though that I've had wholly uncontroversial HN
| accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting
| teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a
| thread.
|
| I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for
| creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it
| without one, but am still confused.
|
| Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if
| it posts a comment with only a link?
| mkl wrote:
| New accounts that post links often get auto-flagged,
| because they're mostly spammers. You can probably recover
| your account by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| +1 for teddit.net, I discovered it because it's a default
| Insight Browser extension, as is old.reddit.net.
| agumonkey wrote:
| methink the coming decade will be a few websites, a bit of IRC
| and a whole lot of non digital things. the information highway
| of freedom is becoming a parkour competition
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Reddit is unusable without which app, the official one? Because
| I've been on reddit for a decade and never once used their app.
| It's either reddit is fun on android or the browser. Never had
| a problem. Even if you don't have an account, old.reddit.com
| and i.reddit.com (for mobile) bypass all the atrocious new UI
| changes
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Slide is also a pretty good FOSS(?) Reddit client for
| Android. I don't use it anymore since I'm trying to get
| myself to use Reddit less and less but Slide was a pretty
| good experience for me.
| treesknees wrote:
| Probably referring to the regular reddit mobile website. It
| constantly bombards you with requests to open the app, you
| can't open anything from NSFW subs. It's pretty unusable. At
| least Twitter and Instagram I can use in the browser without
| 3rd party sites or apps.
| dangerface wrote:
| I used to love reddit, it was my favourite social media but I
| can't use it since they redesigned it, they really need to look
| at hacker news for inspiration.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| This is what has prevented me from joining tik tok. Now it also
| requires a login after you view like three videos. I just close
| the tab afterwards. It works great!
| hughrr wrote:
| Yes this. Life is getting progressively better now Twitter,
| Reddit and Apple pissed me off. I've got more time, money and a
| healthier outlook on life.
|
| Now if only I could shake HN.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I use RSS to stay updated on news. Complete control over what
| I receive.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The noprocrast option in the user settings can help. You can
| set minaway to a much longer time to avoid checking in
| constantly.
| m_myers wrote:
| I did that once, 10 years ago or so. My reddit account is
| coincidentally 10 years old now. Beware of unintended
| consequences.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I tried it, but it didn't make it any easier. I just
| shifted devices and back on the front page. If that works
| for you, then that's cool!
| animanoir wrote:
| Exactly. This is good since this corporations are basically
| killing themselves since people, slowly but steady, are
| realizing they can get info elsewhere on the internet (and
| people start sharing outside them). So yeah, they are basically
| forcing users to migrate to more open services.
| enumjorge wrote:
| Eh maybe. The problem is that IMO there aren't any obvious
| alternatives to Reddit. I remember when Digg committed
| suicide with a pretty bad redesign and most disgruntled users
| moved to Reddit. I've been pretty annoyed with the changes
| Reddit has implemented in the past couple of years, but I
| haven't found another place to go (that's not necessarily a
| bad thing). HN is the closest alternative but the scope of
| topics we discuss is limited. That's probably part of HN's
| success but then where do you go for other topics?
| snek_case wrote:
| IMO they are just creating an opening in the market by
| continuously shooting themselves in the foot like that. I
| don't really understand it. Requiring a login to view
| content is the reason why I never got into Tumblr or
| Pinterest... I'm not going to bother signing up for your
| site if you don't first show me it has content that is
| worth my time, these people have it the wrong way around.
|
| As a Reddit alternative, Ruqqus has the UI and
| responsiveness down pretty good. However, it branded itself
| as anti-reddit, and attracted a lot of right-wing people as
| a result. However, their platform is open source, so IMO,
| it's only a matter of time before someone steps up to the
| task.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| The sooner reddit dies the better. What a toxic and
| manipulated hellhole it has become.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| For larger subs, yeah. For smaller, specialised topical
| subs, I will defend them until Reddit forces a similar
| requirement as Twitter here.
| Okx wrote:
| It already does on mobile. It is impossible to view
| subreddits unless you sign in, you only get a "preview"
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I used to feel the same way, but even the smaller ones
| are increasingly being co-opted by partisan screechers.
| Especially in the State/City/Town subreddits.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| My Reddit habit has been all but replaced with private
| Slacks and Discords these days. Either hobby / interest
| groups, or an "alumni Slack" full of old work friends from
| a company I worked at a long time.
|
| I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway.
| Small private forums, where you can actually have real
| discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.
|
| For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at
| this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram
| once per decade, or something like that. But whatever
| people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the
| thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses
| want.
| queuebert wrote:
| Ok, shows over. Everyone back to IRC.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I rather like my reaction GIFs and discussion threads.
| What I want to see is a modern IRC with these features,
| and an optional per-channel/per-server message
| persistence to deal with not knowing what happened while
| you were away, or while the mobile IRC app of your choice
| was killed by the Google/Apple background task manager
| that only allows you to dodge it with proprietary push
| support.
| deadbunny wrote:
| > Slacks and Discords
|
| I find these terrible for any kind of information
| discovery. I hate that so many communities are using them
| as an alternative to a subreddit or focused forum. Hell
| most "modern" forum software is horrific as well.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It is a problem for ephemeral vs evergreen.
|
| Chats are a horrible place for evergreen knowledge.
| Forums are pretty good though.
|
| It's only a slight difference but a big one.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| And we are back to a "decentralised" web, although it's
| only decentralised between a few servers in Discord's and
| Slack's basements.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| I think that the advantage in using some kind of instant-
| message system like Discord/Slack is that you might end
| up getting a faster response, which is quite helpful when
| I'm feeling impatient and want my problem to be solved
| faster. On the other hand, the questions aren't as easily
| searchable and archived for future people to find.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I don't have Chrome installed on any of my devices but I've
| noticed when I'm on reddit.com on my iPhone it prompts me to
| either use the Reddit app or "continue browsing" using the
| Chrome app. Does Google pay for this as some sort of an
| advertisement? Or is Reddit incentivized in some way to plug
| Chrome over Safari or DDG "browser"? When I click "continue" it
| lets me just keep using my current browser but I always wonder
| if it would open in Chrome if the app were available on my
| device.
| dlvktrsh wrote:
| pretty sure that's reddits doing
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| I get a button for Safari on my iPhone and iPad.
| drdeca wrote:
| I'm on ios using firefox (though I think I've heard that
| under the hood it is using Safari's renderer or something
| like that because of application store requirements? Not
| sure.), and it shows the chrome logo for me, uh, when I
| click a link that goes to new reddit, or something.
|
| Or, I guess when viewing through the browser window that
| twitter embeds?
|
| Just now I tried viewing new.reddit in safari and it told
| me my browser was old (though perhaps this is because I've
| refrained from updating ios)
| fencepost wrote:
| Probably just classifies webkit based browsers as Chrome.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's going to be tough because of how much of the Internet
| treats Twitter as a primary source. So this in effect becomes
| yet another stream behind a pay-wall (in information, not in
| money) that balkanizes people's view of "what is happening" in
| the world.
|
| The first place I knew about the January 6th riots was from
| Twitter. I guess I'll learn about subsequent such events from
| other sources after people on Twitter do.
| Theizestooke wrote:
| I'm using old.reddit.com, and it's ok. Shame if they would turn
| that off though.
| est31 wrote:
| There is also i.reddit.com, which is more mobile friendly
| than old.reddit.com.
| [deleted]
| rootsudo wrote:
| They are killing the feed, I don't know for you, but for me
| it has seemed static.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| What I've noticed is a few of the newer things breaking on it
| (unsurprisingly). I think over time it'll get to a point
| where there's enough of these new things where they'll just
| pull the plug, which is really too bad. Also love it much
| more than the "new" experience.
| trypietry wrote:
| Give teddit.net a look.
|
| Nitter.net for Twitter.
|
| I don't know how long these sites will last with the demand
| there is for avenues that don't prompt login.
| valvar wrote:
| There are a lot of mirrors, too, as anyone can host an
| instance, so if those don't work you can always try others.
| system2 wrote:
| The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me.
| I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand
| why they chose this new disastrous design.
| pier25 wrote:
| Same.
|
| old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit.
| system2 wrote:
| RES is godsent.
| 0xdeadb00f wrote:
| It isn't hard for me to understand their reasoning at all;
|
| 1. Appeals more to the mainstream, and to new users who are
| used to Facebook-style feeds. 2. Easier for them to
| disguise ads in user's feeds.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old
| reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view
| its contents. On the new design most of the post contents
| are right there on the list page.
| system2 wrote:
| You use RES for that. It shows everything and plays every
| video.
| donio wrote:
| I think Reddit knows it too, that's why old is still
| around. The Digg fiasco was a long time ago but must be
| still in their corporate subconscious.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to
| have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a
| copious number of round button-icons that are not
| intuitive? It's fucking insulting.
| ugjka wrote:
| It is slow because very few people can write effective
| and fast React code. And then they use WebGL to do fancy
| overlay animations
| asciimov wrote:
| It's that companies let the designers design without any
| constraint on usability.
|
| Typically these designers are just fashionistas following
| the trendy crowd.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Several years ago, I went to a tech roundtable hosted by
| a well-known company, and this topic came up.
|
| Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe
| the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media
| and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics
| (presumably which measure some sort of server compute
| time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of
| religious fervor.
|
| "Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own
| lying eyes!?"
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| It seems that, at least in reddit's case, the issue is
| preloading a lot of stuff that on the old website wasn't
| preloaded. Like videos.
|
| Ben Awad[0] made a quick technical comparison between the
| two websites and this was his conclusion.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jkSiIBDDZ8
| pantalaimon wrote:
| That's also what makes it pretty much unusable when you
| are on a slow mobile connection
| crummybowley wrote:
| They wanted to give Digg some company.
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| That's their objective, to get rid of users who they can't
| monetize. Including veteran users with ad blockers who
| refuse to use the new site or any of its features.
| [deleted]
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and
| frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be
| able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages
| I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| It's more buggy, less responsive, has less features and
| consumes more resources. Literally its only pro is that
| it looks pretty.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It looks "pretty" in the crappy modern way though where
| there's loads of whitespace and everything is hidden in a
| menu or tab somewhere.
|
| Give me "ugly" plain-ish text that is information dense.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The post-view in compact mode is actually denser than
| before (thought it has some ugly spacing issues at the
| top). It's amazing. Sadly, there seems to be no compact
| mode for comments, so those look horrible.
|
| And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn't
| even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for
| people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _Literally its only pro is that it looks pretty._
|
| Which is very subjective.
|
| New reddit is certainly more modern than old reddit, but
| I find it kinda ugly.
| danielmg wrote:
| fewer features
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I thought it is one of these "don't end sentences with
| prepositions" weird rules no one really follows.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The prepositions one was invented after the fact, it has
| never been a real grammatical rule.
|
| "Fewer" versus "less" for countable things is more of an
| actual rule (but of course that doesn't mean you're
| obliged to follow it).
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Reddit has had 5 second page loads for over a decade.
| Extremely embarrassing of them to be honest. I can
| understand them not fixing their search because that
| increases engagement, but you always want your site to be
| fast. I guess they don't because they know they have no
| competitors.
| blue_rog wrote:
| > "I can understand them not fixing their search because
| that increases engagement..."
|
| Do you have any citations for this?
| saltminer wrote:
| >I guess they don't because they know they have no
| competitors
|
| There are lots of clones, but they typically become
| havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit
| (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the
| users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure
| reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or
| are super niche and could easily be served by a
| traditional forum.
|
| The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that
| there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly
| niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities
| have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit
| users aside from trying to migrate, and that will
| inevitably result in many just leaving the community
| entirely.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I exclusively use new Reddit. The increased friction around
| every single interaction is _great_ for limiting the amount
| of time I spend there: it raises the bar for deciding to
| actually view a discussion, and the incomprehensible nesting-
| collapse algorithm keeps me from going down rabbit holes in
| threads unless it 's something that genuinely interests me.
|
| It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure
| I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch,
| and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully
| invested in what I'm watching.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| Actually that's a great idea - actively feeling pain every
| time you interact - whats more effective limiting
| consumption than that.
| lambdaba wrote:
| There's a Chrome extension for redirecting to old.reddit.com:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-
| redirec...
| donatj wrote:
| You can just uncheck "Use new Reddit as my default
| experience" in settings and get the old experience without
| an extension, if you have an account anyway.
| SynasterBeiter wrote:
| If you click the button to get rid of the cookie prompt on
| the bottom of the site while on old.reddit.com, it redirects
| you to new.reddit.com. Amazing.
| ink wrote:
| Wow... I forgot how much better reddit on desktop used to be.
| croes wrote:
| Less range for twitter users means less twitter users.
|
| Seems to be a pretty dumb move.
| riffic wrote:
| I posted this yesterday:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
|
| this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in
| that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency
| information. With a login wall, this information is not getting
| out to the people who need it the most.
|
| I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads
| complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100% user-
| hostile, Twitter.
| young_unixer wrote:
| The real culprits here are these public sector agencies. They
| shouldn't use inaccessible mediums like Twitter as their
| primary channel of information.
| riffic wrote:
| reply because I can't edit. even HN knows how User Hostile
| Twitter is:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| macintux wrote:
| I've complained to government agencies about using Facebook and
| not making their posts public. Maddening.
| syshum wrote:
| Beyond the Login wall, Public Sector Agencies should not be
| using Twitter as a Primary communication method, it would be Ok
| to have the messages Copied their from Official Sources, but
| there should be Official Sources to obtain the same info, at
| the same time, update in the same frequency.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| When I first noticed this I found a workaround to block all
| cookies from Twitter.
| [deleted]
| njarboe wrote:
| Twitter started asking me for my phone number about a week ago to
| sign in. I did not provide it and complained that I should be
| able to verify my account with just the email on file. Then a few
| days ago I could login again, but my account was suspended. All
| the images on my tweets are blank and the list of people I follow
| is gone. I have appealed for reinstatement. We'll see how that
| goes. I was surprised not to see this new phone number
| requirement for twitter on HN or other sites sooner.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| I've literally just spent a couple of hours integrating
| Nitter.net's RSS feed into my custom feed reader. Why a couple of
| hours? Because Nitter for some reason returns a 404 header
| instead of 200 when it gives you the RSS feed data.
|
| Consequently stuff like PHPs file_get_contents() and curl_exec()
| return absolutely nothing... took me ages (via trying to shell
| out to curl, and then back to using the lib again) before I
| realised it wasn't actually the 404 error cause the issue, but
| that curl (and libcurl) on my system doesn't like Nitters SSL
| cert, which then led me to CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to override it.
| Frustrating, but educational none-the-less.
|
| I'm using the search filter "(from:$username) -filter:replies" to
| get just the tweets I want.
|
| --
|
| https://nitter.net
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| By the way, the Feedbro RSS reader lets you subscribe to
| twitter accounts like an RSS feed:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
| icehawk wrote:
| I've found that only happens when you're not doing GET:
|
| curl https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
| 2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:32:56 -0400] "GET
| /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 200 12985 "-" "curl/7.64.1"
|
| vs
|
| curl --head https://nitter.1d4.us/newsycombinator/rss
| 2620::2218 - - [24/Aug/2021:11:33:57 -0400] "HEAD
| /newsycombinator/rss HTTP/2.0" 404 0 "-" "curl/7.64.1"
| phy6 wrote:
| This is a positive change for world mental health, bravo.
| abstractbarista wrote:
| Guess I'm not viewing Twitter links any more. Hopefully they
| realize that not everyone cares. We just opt-out, 100%. Oh well.
| NowhereMan wrote:
| Do they whitelist accounts of public officials? For instance,
| having the POTUS account behind an auth wall seems like a
| horrible practice.
| city41 wrote:
| The POTUS relying on a commercial entity to communicate with
| the public seems like a more fundamental horrible practice.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It is older than the Republic.
|
| Heads of state have spoken through commercial publications
| since printing existed. Roughly 1550.
|
| Online Internet services merely happen to be the present
| iteration of this.
|
| (I'm not saying that the practice isn't without its problems.
| I'm saying it's nothing new.)
| phy6 wrote:
| Especially when accounts could be hacked to say anything,
| like the incidents a couple years ago. Imagine the POTUS
| account pissing off an unstable dictator in some country, or
| posting of some sensitive information.
| drewg123 wrote:
| When has it been any different? Before twitter, it was TV and
| radio. Before RV and radio, it was newspapers. All of these
| are commercial entities (with a few non-profit exceptions).
| riffic wrote:
| television and radio were at least publicly available and
| based on published/known standards. you didn't need to ask
| anyone permission to receive signals.
| city41 wrote:
| On top of that the FCC governs the airwaves and (at least
| in theory) works to ensure they meet public need. There
| are also other rules such as the Equal Time Rule. Twitter
| is subject to nothing like these things.
| macksd wrote:
| It bothered from the other angle when POTUS started pushing
| Twitter as an important channel to keep up on what was going on
| because it's hardly ideal for that. My local government has
| similarly been making Nextdoor a de facto requirement if you
| want to know what's happening or want to give feedback
| (especially in an era of frequent town office closures).
|
| I tend to favor minimal government but I think the USPS was an
| important outcome of the Constitution to fill the need for a
| universal and "official" communication channel. But their
| budget has been butchered, I get misdelivered mail all the time
| and the DMV tells me I'm not the only one in my town who never
| seems to get their mail, but there's no shortage of wasteful
| junk mail. If only I was confident we could nail the execution,
| I would love to see the Internet embraced as basic, universal
| infrastructure and an official government communication channel
| that's more reliable and less abused.
|
| But I dream.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I think of the issue a different way. The problem isn't
| having an official communications channel, but rather, being
| able to communicate somewhere where the average person will
| actually be exposed to it. POTUS puts out memos and briefings
| all the time on the official whitehouse.gov site, but who
| actually reads those? I see the fundamental problem as
| attention based, rather than infrastructure based.
| Svetlitski wrote:
| For what it's worth, you can sign-up through DMAChoice to
| stop receiving junk mail [1]. It takes a few months after you
| sign up to really take effect, but it has easily eliminated
| 90% of the mail I used to receive. Well worth it IMO for the
| $2 fee every _10 years_.
|
| https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There are a number of other options.
|
| You can mark mail "rejected" and return it to the delivery
| box or any post box.
|
| https://refuseyourmail.cooperjr.name/how-to
|
| https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-
| remo...
|
| First-class mail can be returned to sender:
|
| https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Return-to-Sender-Mail
|
| _Title 39, United States Code, Section 3008 authorizes the
| Postal Service(tm) to issue a prohibitory order against a
| mailer who sends you an advertisement offering to sell any
| matter that you, in your own discretion, believe to be
| "erotically arousing or sexually provocative." You can
| request the order by completing the relevant portion of PS
| Form 1500, Application for Listing and /or Prohibitory
| Order, and submitting it to any Post Office(tm). The form
| is available at your local Post Office. Thirty days after
| receiving the order, the mailer is prohibited from sending
| you any further mail. Violating this prohibition makes the
| mailer subject to court enforcement action by the United
| States Government._
|
| https://about.usps.com/publications/pub307/welcome.htm
| macksd wrote:
| I'll take your word for it that it works, but I would have
| been skeptical. Am I correct in understanding that they
| essentially function is a communication medium with the
| companies maintaining these unsolicited mailing lists, and
| those companies voluntarily remove people that pay
| DMAchoice?
| amatecha wrote:
| I knew Twitter has been going downhill for a long time, but I
| actually didn't think they'd stoop to this level. Super
| disappointing.
|
| In the earliest years Twitter was such an awesome platform to
| connect with people and discuss stuff. I actually met a bunch of
| local fellow geeks (some of whom I am still in contact with), and
| also met tons of industry people in different areas over the
| years -- again people I still keep in touch with.
|
| These days though, it's much harder to engage in new genuine
| discussions on the platform because it's so overloaded with
| sensationalistic noise and ragebait retweets. Even as I
| unfollow/mute accounts who propagate this stuff, it's just not
| feasible as it's become the primary context of basically the
| entire platform.
|
| Further, the site itself shows you content from users you don't
| even follow (and that no one you follow retweeted), trying to
| "drive engagement" or whatever. It just compromises trust that
| I'll see stuff from the people I follow and not see crap that
| "some algorithm" wants me to see. I try to only access the
| service from 3rd party clients so I'm not basically abused by
| some engagement algorithm that forces ads and unrelated content
| at me. Twitter is the new Facebook.
|
| BTW, if you're still reading this and want something like Twitter
| that isn't centralized and being ruined by the publicly-traded
| corporation that owns it, check out Mastodon[0]. Find an instance
| that aligns with your idea of a cool community and sign up there.
| Or start an instance with your circle of friends or whatever.
|
| [0] https://joinmastodon.org/
| gregors wrote:
| Requiring phone numbers for what is for the majority of their
| user base a consumption activity seems like completely over
| stepping the relationship. Gmail doesn't even require that.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| I don't have a twitter account because I have nothing I want to
| say or post in the twitter-verse. I do occasionally read threads
| on twitter when they're the primary source of something
| significant. E.g. when they are linked to from a news article or
| HN. I ran into their block a few days ago and my gut reaction
| wasn't to sign up and keep reading, it was to leave. I doubt I'll
| be back.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I will probably never read another tweet again, and I'm a
| little bit glad about it too. Maybe next reddit can close the
| old interface too.
| paulpauper wrote:
| yup another popular website walling itself in
|
| remember the good old days of the pre-2010 internet when you
| could just go to a domain and read content without having to sign
| up, login, pay, check a bunch of boxes, etc. yeah it was a great
| time for those too young to remember.
| sysadm1n wrote:
| How does Nitter[0] work then? Does it use a Twitter account to
| grab tweets that reside in Twitter's walled garden. If the tweets
| are no longer public, how does such a thing work?
|
| [0] https://nitter.net/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You can host your own instance if you want.
|
| Public Nitter instances have a distressing tendency to become
| rate limited or go offline entirely. I'm on my 3rd or 4th
| instance now. That works most of the time though it's starting
| to throw limit notices periodically.
|
| The interface itself is excellent IMO.
| jdeaton wrote:
| Great feature! This will help me stop using twitter!
| [deleted]
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Managements always work toward managing towards what they can
| measure. I'm sure that daily signups are a metric that they
| track, hence they'll prioritize signups even at the cost of user
| frustration and love, something that's less tangible.
|
| This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It's a
| great resource but I don't feel like logging in 100% of the time.
| So now I just ignore all of their links.
| hammock wrote:
| This is not about measurement. This is about tracking people
| across third-party websites.
| ezconnect wrote:
| This is about growing users, they are stagnant now and had
| been for a while just like facebook.
| foogazi wrote:
| Quora is such a shit show though - what happened there ?
|
| Their algo will just continually blast email you every category
| you ever clicked on
| alpaca128 wrote:
| No idea. I used it a while and enjoyed the content, then they
| changed something in the algorithm and I'd suddenly get
| basically the same content every single day, often >30% of
| the feed would be the exact same as the week before. They
| also removed the list of topics, so there was no obvious way
| to escape the near static feed.
|
| Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I
| never visited the site again.
| city41 wrote:
| It's a real shame. I used to really enjoy my daily Quora
| digest email. One of the only automated emails I truly dug
| into and read in detail. Over time I read it less and less.
| Then switched it to be weekly, then turned it off. I miss
| the old Quora.
| Kye wrote:
| Quora ended for me when spun/copy+pasted Google results started
| to replace answers. For example: I asked for the science behind
| the EPA's recommendations on UV exposure, and the answers were
| all word-for-word copies of the first result in Google, which
| had no detail on the science behind it. Just "avoid going out
| before x," "wear x SPF sunscreen," but nothing about the basis
| for the recommendations.
|
| That was years ago. Recently, I went looking for how to un-
| retweet something from an account that has since blocked me,
| and every single answer on every instance of someone asking
| that on Quora is more or less a copy of Twitter's documentation
| for an ordinary un-retweet. Useless search result pollution.
| leros wrote:
| I could imagine they're trying to prioritize things like user
| retention and ad revenue, both of which can be done better by
| tracking user behavior. Losing a percentage of their logged out
| user base could very well be worth it to them in order to
| increase what helps their business.
| garciasn wrote:
| It's because they need to start collecting more first-party
| data from users who land on their site. This is a result of
| Apple (and others in the future) blocking third-party cookie
| tracking.
|
| They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience
| creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Broadcast radio, television, and print newspapers still exist
| without these things.
| garciasn wrote:
| They sure do; however, digital media and social in
| particular, absolutely rely on significant investment in
| their audiences, attribution, etc in order to drive more
| revenue and thus higher CPMs. More traditional media (such
| as OOH, Print, etc) all rely on very high-level metrics
| such as daily traffic volumes and lack of direct impact
| evidence in their attribution of value.
|
| This is why Facebook is SO very against what Apple is doing
| with iOS14+, particularly with cross-device and cross-app
| tracking opt-in, because they know it will decimate their
| ability to do what they do today.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Opening Quora links in a new private tab each time solves the
| issue for me. But agreed, it sucks.
| miohtama wrote:
| Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You
| no longer just "get" them. You need to apply. I was rejected
| for getting key to export my own tweets.
|
| Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what
| was used API keys before, because of you can use public
| internal API.
| arsome wrote:
| I prefer to just steal keys by reverse engineering mobile
| apps. So easy to get keys for just about anything and charge
| someone else for it that way.
| hn_99 wrote:
| Interesting. As someone who hasn't done any mobile dev at
| all, is there a way to prevent something like this from
| happening? Can't you somehow encrypt such secrets in the
| app?
| xvector wrote:
| I believe solutions like SafetyNet on Android might help
| here. AFAIK no one has successfully reversed SafetyNet
| enough to spoof it.
| arsome wrote:
| Unless an API you're looking at requires/supports
| attestation via SafetyNet or you're willing to proxy via
| your own server this is likely not an option.
|
| Additionally, while it's true (to my knowledge) that re-
| implementing a full safteynet spoof is not currently
| publicly available, a combination of Frida and MagiskHide
| is able to bypass SafetyNet for dynamic RE purposes, just
| launch the app as normal with MagiskHide enabled then
| attach to it with Frida as root. If they enforce full
| hardware attestation this may change in the future, but
| right now we're good.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Please don't legitimize SafetyNet. It is an existential
| threat to real ownership of your phone as any flavor of
| Android but that blessed by Google trips SafetyNet. It's
| the equivalent of barring people from running software on
| their laptop because they've installed a flavor of
| Windows that wasn't shipped from the factory. People
| everywhere have a right to do with their phone what they
| want to.
| arsome wrote:
| You can try, but you won't succeed against a dedicated
| reverse engineer, simply dropping a hook in on the API
| calls would be enough to grab the decrypted key in a case
| like that, if not simply statically reading the
| encryption keys and decrypting it. That's not to say it's
| useless - some reversers will simply move on to the next
| app when there's a list of dozens.
|
| You can also send requests via your own server, which
| would allow you more control over the requests that get
| sent out to your 3rd party APIs and just restrict tokens
| as much as possible to the minimal set of features
| necessary for your application.
| powvans wrote:
| Mobile developers can implement certificate pinning to
| prevent man in the middle snooping. Twitter's app does
| this.
| arsome wrote:
| That achieves nothing against someone who uses something
| like apktool/baksmali to do static RE, let alone inject
| something like Frida to perform dynamic RE. There are
| even Xposed modules designed to just bypass certificate
| pinning.
|
| Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a
| counter-RE one.
| feanaro wrote:
| I hope you did not just assume that general purpose
| computing and device ownership can be subverted by mere
| certificate pinning.
|
| If it's executing on my device, you can be sure I can
| poke it and see what it's doing.
| Macha wrote:
| And this is likely because there were a few years of "insert
| your own API key" third party clients after Twitter limited
| their max user count.
|
| This from the site that used to indicate on every tweet the
| client used
| darkwater wrote:
| Finally an article where people can state publicly their hate to
| this decision without polluting all the other posts linking to
| tweets.
| stevebmark wrote:
| Sounds like a great move, Twitter is a premium real-time news
| source and it makes sense to require more engagement to access
| the content. Comparison behavior: Instagram.
| reidjs wrote:
| For people who post tweets, but don't often read tweets, I
| recommend creating an app to post on your behalf. It is pretty
| straightforward through their developer tools. That way, you can
| also save your tweets locally, instead of having to view your own
| writing through their platform.
|
| If you like to read other people's tweets then you don't have any
| other option except to login, unfortunately.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| My use case is archiving historical or noteworthy tweets. My
| infrastructure up to this point used Wayback Machine to
| retrieve and store the content, will have to build something
| now.
| reidjs wrote:
| You will probably have to write a scraper :(
| [deleted]
| nixroot wrote:
| Alternative frontends like Nitter[1] should hopefully continue to
| work. They could always scrape as an authenticated user if that
| becomes necessary.
|
| [1] https://nitter.net/
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| All Instagram frontends are broken now, so if Twitter goes
| through with the change Nitter's days are numbered.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| yeah I'm also just waiting for nitter to break. but frankly
| by now I'm just there to follow @mntmn and the comments in
| their threads.
|
| Deleting the account was actually what helped me break my
| twitter habit; without an account the UI is so annoying it
| works as an effective dopamine inhibitor.
|
| anyhow, @mntmn is also on mastodon and MNT Research also run
| a cosy Discourse instance, so I'm welcoming this as twitter
| taking their place next to the facebooks, tumblrs amd
| myspaces in the ranks of self-obsoleted social media.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| What happens when a tweet is embedded in a news article?
| quesomaster9000 wrote:
| I don't know, they get blocked by my browser plugins along with
| all the other parasitic embedded widgets, adverts and internet
| cancer.
| est31 wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27641366
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| As a shareholder--good.
|
| As a lazy Twitter reader--bad.
| jjulius wrote:
| I don't have a Twitter account, and this now makes it far, far
| less likely that I will even click on a Twitter link or engage
| with the platform whatsoever.
|
| I could obviously be in the minority (though I'm certainly not
| alone), but I'm curious if you think that my scenario will be
| the less common one and this will actually increase signups, or
| if it will have a positive impact on the stock price in another
| way.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Yes I do think this will boost sign ups. It's free and
| Tweets, for better or for worse, have come to be a sort of
| "source material." I think many, particularly younger, news-
| savvy users will seek to access Twitter.
|
| I also think it greatly boosts Twitter's ability to monetize
| advertising. That's what make Facebook and Google so valuable
| (just about everyone is logged into an account).
|
| I am, however, curious how this will impact embedded tweets
| (in articles, for example).
| mnd999 wrote:
| Why do you think this is good for the stock price?
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Everyone is logged into an account + Tweets (and share
| buttons) embedded all around the web -> way more data for
| advertising.
|
| That's the underlying fact that make Facebook and Google (and
| to a lesser degree, Pinterest) so valuable for advertising.
| Facebook and Google have organic signups (FB for FB, Google
| for Gmail, Youtube, etc.), but Pinterest does what Twitter's
| thinking of doing here--it locks you out of content until you
| have an account. Pinterest also has "share" buttons (and the
| accompanying JS, cookies, etc.)
| Andrex wrote:
| You're a shareholder seeking short-term gains. That doesn't
| really absolve you of this opinion.
| dangerface wrote:
| Good twitter is probably the worst social media out of the lot
| and the only reason people use it is because famous influencers
| use it to get publicity. If they go walled garden that kills
| twitter usp vs facebook.
| jojo2000 wrote:
| See you never, walled gardens; I don't belong to a prison!
| bastard_op wrote:
| So can people please quit posting twitter feeds finally?
|
| Some of us still have never used or signed up with twitter, or
| feel the need to, and really don't want to. Bad enough they
| removed non-javascript access, since they are permablocked
| through noscript here, I simply close postings on HN that link
| there and curse them for bothering. Asking for a login atop that
| is just a 4x non-starter for "news" links.
|
| Yes, some of us still respect our privacy.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unfortunately, given the nature of network effects, I suspect
| those who use Twitter will continue to use it, news media will
| continue to treat it as a primary source for comments from
| people, and those of us who wish to refrain from using it
| just... Won't have access to that channel of data. I don't see
| a scenario where a mass-walkout happens... Certainly not from
| this.
|
| It'll be like the good old days of only finding out what's
| happening in the next town over because you read the paper's
| account of it, only now the next town over is just a site we
| could create an account on but refuse to.
| asdff wrote:
| Is that so bad though? Nothing I idly read about online much
| less twitter has any bearing on my daily life. It's mindless
| content masking as some important cultural zeitgeist. It's no
| different than netflix or any other time sink.
| b3morales wrote:
| I fully share your sentiment. Tip, though: threadreaderapp.com
| will proxy them for you if you do really want to see them for
| some reason. I've also heard nitter.net mentioned, but haven't
| tried it yet.
| bastard_op wrote:
| I mostly use theoldreader.com, which doesn't, and honestly
| don't mind they don't capitulate and work-around privacy
| walls. Watching twits tweet with twats is mostly a non-
| starter anyways, nor would I believe anything I see there any
| more than facebook or other scandal rag links anyways.
| tristan957 wrote:
| I will not take the time to take a Twitter link and send it
| through that website. Anything on Twitter is time wasted as
| far as I am concerned.
| rozab wrote:
| I think some people have misunderstood this change. It's been
| active for me for about a week, I suspect most others without
| accounts just haven't noticed.
|
| Clicking on a linked tweet still works, it's only when you then
| click on another from within the site that it asks you for a
| login. It's the same approach Quora takes iirc.
| ugjka wrote:
| Pretty sure their sign up rates are going down the shitter,
| so they need some creative ways to satisfy the execs or
| whatever
| tyingq wrote:
| Except that you often have to click something in Twitter to
| see the "thread", or a decent resolution of a tweeted
| picture, etc.
| doctorsher wrote:
| I don't have an account, and the change has been noticeable
| and annoying. It's more than just clicking on another tweet,
| though from what I can tell they've been A/B testing this
| behavior (sometimes I get it and sometimes I do not). On
| mobile, you can't click through to someone's profile from the
| tweet without creating an account. If the tweet chain is more
| than 4 or 5 tweets, you cannot read the rest without creating
| an account. It's prevented me from normal browsing habits
| multiple times, like reading the ASML twitter thread that was
| posted on HN a couple of days ago.
| smithza wrote:
| I cannot view threads or expand images or see people's
| responses to threads any longer. This does not compel me to
| sign up at all. Quite the opposite effect. Twitter is not the
| ideal place for long form threads anyways. *yes lets just
| keep adding more 140 character mini blogs to make a long form
| news posting*
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| If, for any reason, you stop using Twitter, your life will be
| going to be far more pleasant.
| smolyeet wrote:
| Keyword here being some
| ryan93 wrote:
| I don't understand the HB obsession with not creating accounts
| or reading Twitter. I haven't logged into Twitter in years I
| stay logged in. Also reading Twitter is trivial people have
| consumed countless billions of tweets. Yet for some reason
| programmers on HN struggle with it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It lets them track you across sites that use their iframes.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Scary. Patagonia might show me an ad when i read the WSJ
| since i follow their twitter account.
| nabakin wrote:
| I there's a better compromise for both parties. A website that
| you give a twitter link, it scrapes the content and rehosts
| without the login banner or bloat. You share this link instead
| of the original twitter link. Twitterers get to share the
| content they want and anyone can read without issue.
| timdaub wrote:
| Yeey, finally someone says it! I've been trying to flag all
| possible Twitter links on here simply because their content
| isn't accessible to me.
| splatcollision wrote:
| It would be great if the community here just started downvoting
| stories that are twitter links. If it's not worth a blog post
| somewhere, why should we care?
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Microblogging is no less legitimate than blogging.
| Octopodes wrote:
| Considering how difficult is to follow lengthy posts that
| are split up in reverse chronological order, and how
| unintuitive it is to find replies, I surely disagree. The
| medium is very poor for centralized discussion of a single
| topic, in contrast to something like a single Reddit or HN
| article.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I mean, sure, but that's _one_ tweet. 40 tweets in a row
| that you 're supposed to read in order, comprise one large
| whole, nothing "micro" about it. I actually respect when
| someone follows the rules as it were, and spends the effort
| to post one tweet that conveys a lot concisely with a
| little. That to me is deserving of the label microblogging.
| Although unfortunately right alongside that is all the
| idiotic shallowness, sloganeering and fascistic tendencies
| posted by people who are like "thank god, a place where the
| format is as tiny as my thoughts." That's fitting a little
| into a little, so if there's a counter-argument to be made
| legitimacy-wise, that's it right there. But spreading
| something longer over a bunch of tweets, that's just
| regular blogging, on the wrong platform. I'm not fooled.
| It's a nuisance. Like when someone decides to pay you $5 as
| 500 pennies.
| ihuman wrote:
| Can you even downvote posts here? I thought you can only
| downvote comments
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Posts can be flagged, though there's a karma threshold
| required to do so.
|
| A sufficient number of flags will kill a post (it's noted
| as "flagged").
|
| This is addressed in multiple FAQ items, linked at the
| bottom of every HN page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| caymanjim wrote:
| There is no downvoting for submissions, although I wish
| there were.
| splatcollision wrote:
| Oh, I assumed for higher karma users they could downvote
| actual story posts... ohwell
| zachrip wrote:
| Some of the highest upvoted content on HN is tweet storms
| with really awful takes (that driver one yesterday was full
| of them). I think it's fine to link to quality tweet threads
| but a lot of them are quite bad.
| Can_Not wrote:
| Twitter threads are a confusing mess to look at and usually I
| can't figure out OP was trying to convey by posting a link to
| 30 tweets that probably should have been a text post
| somewhere.
| Qub3d wrote:
| I just gave up railing against it and run it through
| threader.app or threadreaderapp.com.
| megous wrote:
| That doesn't make it into something the original poster
| re-read after themselves as a whole before posting.
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