Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter_starts_to_require_login_to_view_tweets/

by oenetan • 5 years ago

912 619 5 years ago

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.

0x_rs2• 5 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

The modern internet: four websites each filled with nothing but screenshots from the other three.

kevinmchugh• 5 years ago

The people complaining on Reddit are already logged in

ragazzina• 5 years ago

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.

jrmg• 5 years ago

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.

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

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.

Theizestooke• 5 years ago

I'm using old.reddit.com, and it's ok. Shame if they would turn that off though.

est316• 5 years ago

There is also i.reddit.com, which is more mobile friendly than old.reddit.com.

ChicagoBoy11• 5 years ago

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.

system23• 5 years ago

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.

rootsudo• 5 years ago

They are killing the feed, I don't know for you, but for me it has seemed static.

trypietry3• 5 years ago

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.

mortenjorck• 5 years ago

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.

SynasterBeiter• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Wow... I forgot how much better reddit on desktop used to be.

lambdaba• 5 years ago

There's a Chrome extension for redirecting to old.reddit.com: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

animanoir• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

stackbutterflow• 5 years ago

I agree but unfortunately their mobile website got better (when logged in) and now works really well on my phone.

delusional• 5 years ago

The flipside is that anyone now signing in now are going to have harder time getting off later.

useful• 5 years ago

I don't know my facebook password or save it on any of my devices save for the home pc for this reason.

f0e4c2f7• 5 years ago

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.

nemosaltat• 5 years ago

+1 for teddit.net, I discovered it because it’s a default Insight Browser extension, as is old.reddit.net.

swiley• 5 years ago

This is the same reason I don’t tell people how I get around HN’s “noprocrast.”

Sohcahtoa825• 5 years ago

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.

bityard3• 5 years ago

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.)

askafriend• 5 years ago

Using a 3rd party mobile client also does the trick - no ads either. Apollo on iOS is awesome.

yosito• 5 years ago

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.

fograte• 5 years ago

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?

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

There’s also libredd.it

xtracto2• 5 years ago

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.

__vim__• 5 years ago

Is there no similar frontend for facebook? It seems like its impossible to view facebook posts and timelines without an account.

hughrr• 5 years ago

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.

zamadatix• 5 years ago

The noprocrast option in the user settings can help. You can set minaway to a much longer time to avoid checking in constantly.

CodeGlitch• 5 years ago

I use RSS to stay updated on news. Complete control over what I receive.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

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.

Kye4• 5 years ago

I get a button for Safari on my iPhone and iPad.

fencepost• 5 years ago

Probably just classifies webkit based browsers as Chrome.

dlvktrsh• 5 years ago

pretty sure that's reddits doing

oplav• 5 years ago

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.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

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

treesknees2• 5 years ago

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.

kaladin-jasnah2• 5 years ago

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.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

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.

dangerface2• 5 years ago

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.

tootie• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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)

cm21872• 5 years ago

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.

iscrewyou• 5 years ago

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!

d883kd8• 5 years ago

Remarkably, Reddit has managed to organize two teams of programmers competing to make a worse experience between their app and website

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

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

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

When I first noticed this I found a workaround to block all cookies from Twitter.

logicalmonster• 5 years ago

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.

foogazi• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

leros• 5 years ago

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.

garciasn2• 5 years ago

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_thibedeau2• 5 years ago

Broadcast radio, television, and print newspapers still exist without these things.

shostack• 5 years ago

Bingo. They need this for user-level measurement and targeting. Wouldn't be surprised if this also supports part of their audience extension work with twitter audience platform as well.

miohtama3• 5 years ago

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.

arsome5• 5 years ago

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.

Macha• 5 years ago

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

Kye4• 5 years ago

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.

hammock• 5 years ago

This is not about measurement. This is about tracking people across third-party websites.

ezconnect• 5 years ago

This is about growing users, they are stagnant now and had been for a while just like facebook.

imhoguy• 5 years ago

Opening Quora links in a new private tab each time solves the issue for me. But agreed, it sucks.

_-david-_2• 5 years ago

With Quora you can just add ?share=1 at the end of the url and you can view the content without logging in.

nerdwords• 5 years ago

Quora's not a great resource anymore. It's just peoples' opinions boosted by an echo chamber.

This is probably the only good content that existed on there before it became a cesspool: http://qsf.cf.quoracdn.net/best_of_quora_2010-2012.pdf

reidjs2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

reidjs2• 5 years ago

You will probably have to write a scraper :(

johnrob• 5 years ago

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.

kordlessagain2• 5 years ago

Somewhere a Twitter employee is patching this now!

mypastself• 5 years ago

“Thanks for testing our feature without getting paid for it, suckers! Uh, I mean hackers.”

bejelentkezni• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

thanks

makeworld• 5 years ago

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.

timdaub2• 5 years ago

I prefer using nitter.net. Also on mobile I don't have uBlock.

kordlessagain2• 5 years ago

Just turn JavaScript off for Twitter to “solve” the issue.

dredmorbius20• 5 years ago

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_y9k2• 5 years ago

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.

dawnerd• 5 years ago

Chasing metrics.

gsibble• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

Mordisquitos2• 5 years ago

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.

queuebert5• 5 years ago

They still have cookies and your browser fingerprint. You might be surprised how complete their picture already is.

trypietry3• 5 years ago

To draw back in those seeking to cut down their social media usage, in part

usefulcat• 5 years ago

I don't see how that makes sense. If you're looking to reduce your social media usage, this change will make that easier..

jabroni_salad• 5 years ago

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.

pkdpic_y9k2• 5 years ago

Thanks for the considered responses, this was all super illuminating! And thanks for the hot tip on Firefox containers too :~I

jordemort• 5 years ago

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.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

Funny, I got downvoted for mentioning the same thing in a post about a Tweet.

blueflow• 5 years ago

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.

Cream-Corn-11• 5 years ago

I only bother viewing tweets through Nitter instances nowadays.

Ajedi32• 5 years ago

Won't this break nitter, since nitter would need to sign in to view tweets?

commoner• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Or the web based “nitter” project https://nitter.domain.glass or https://nitter.cc

criddell• 5 years ago

When a login is required to view content, how do Google, Bing, and the others crawl the site?

tjpnz2• 5 years ago

johnc1231• 5 years ago

How do they identify a crawler? Can a user not masquerade as a crawler somehow?

mattowen_uk3• 5 years ago

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.

jgwil2• 5 years ago

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.

riffic8• 5 years ago

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.

syshum• 5 years ago

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.

OrangeMusic2• 5 years ago

Seriously, how is Twitter better than an RSS feed for this use?

macintux• 5 years ago

I’ve complained to government agencies about using Facebook and not making their posts public. Maddening.

riffic8• 5 years ago

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...

young_unixer• 5 years ago

The real culprits here are these public sector agencies. They shouldn't use inaccessible mediums like Twitter as their primary channel of information.

IlPeach• 5 years ago

Yes, and no. They use what's available and what gets them in front of the users. IMO I don't see anything wrong with that.

The problem comes if they don't provide any other way to access their information.

mattowen_uk3• 5 years ago

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

icehawk• 5 years ago

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"

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"

mattowen_uk3• 5 years ago

Ah I was using --head (actually -I) as part of my debugging. It's still not correct though is it? (I was thinking about opening an issue on the github repo)

0-_-02• 5 years ago

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...

NowhereMan• 5 years ago

Do they whitelist accounts of public officials? For instance, having the POTUS account behind an auth wall seems like a horrible practice.

macksd2• 5 years ago

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.

Svetlitski• 5 years ago

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

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

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.

city414• 5 years ago

The POTUS relying on a commercial entity to communicate with the public seems like a more fundamental horrible practice.

phy62• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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).

dredmorbius20• 5 years ago

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.)

est316• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487304

jojo2000• 5 years ago

See you never, walled gardens; I don't belong to a prison!

solmag• 5 years ago

Too many bluechecks publicly roasted.

wildpeaks• 5 years ago

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).

miohtama3• 5 years ago

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...

_dujt• 5 years ago

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

vxNsr• 5 years ago

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

Jnr• 5 years ago

~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• 5 years ago

How is that relevant to read-only access, which is what is reportedly being newly blocked?

dredmorbius20• 5 years ago

If reading content generates spam, You Have A Bigger Problem.

matheusmoreira2• 5 years ago

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.

ben-gy• 5 years ago

That is genuinely a very interesting paper - thanks for sharing

finiteseries2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

0x_rs2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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...

qecez• 5 years ago

Just use a verification service like https://sms4sats.com

9034725985• 5 years ago

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?

amatecha2• 5 years ago

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

Kye4• 5 years ago

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.

echelon• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

The point is to never give it to them.

myhf• 5 years ago

And yet that account will still get suggestions to follow people who have that phone number in their address book. Thinking face emoji

mschuster91• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

But all I want to do is read the tweets? I'm not contributing to spam if I don't even have an account.

maram3• 5 years ago

> 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?

shadilay2• 5 years ago

Does Twitter have to pay to use Google or MS's translate API?

sbagel• 5 years ago

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.

nichch• 5 years ago

I can confirm this as recently as June 2021

gunapologist99• 5 years ago

couldn't you just call them instead?

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

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.

peakaboo• 5 years ago

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.

ZWoz• 5 years ago

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.

mikro2nd3• 5 years ago

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?

axpy906• 5 years ago

Ideally, there should be an option to not give it. It’s a security risk for those with MFA elsewhere.

cm21872• 5 years ago

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.

the_pwner224• 5 years ago

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.

auscompgeek• 5 years ago

Facebook do require a phone number to access their API (or otherwise manage a Facebook App).

jvanderbot2• 5 years ago

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.

RedComet• 5 years ago

Yes, but once you've added it, they have it, even if you can't see it in your settings.

Razengan• 5 years ago

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.

dredmorbius20• 5 years ago

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

sova• 5 years ago

You can petition them (via email) to not require your phone number and if your emails are persuasive enough they will activate the account without a phone number. But yeah, that is an extra step, and usually takes 2-3 emails that say something like "this account is vital to our business"

phtrivier• 5 years ago

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.

elcapitan• 5 years ago

How will this work with embedded tweets?

dredmorbius20• 5 years ago

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.

noisy_boy• 5 years ago

My life is perfectly fine without tweets, likes and stickers. One less thing to waste time on.

riffic8• 5 years ago

give this guy a round of applause, everyone.

megous2• 5 years ago

Yes, I like to posture on HN instead, too! :)

croes• 5 years ago

Less range for twitter users means less twitter users.

Seems to be a pretty dumb move.

darkwater• 5 years ago

Finally an article where people can state publicly their hate to this decision without polluting all the other posts linking to tweets.

DrBenCarson3• 5 years ago

As a shareholder--good.

As a lazy Twitter reader--bad.

mnd999• 5 years ago

Why do you think this is good for the stock price?

DrBenCarson3• 5 years ago

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.)

jjulius2• 5 years ago

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.

DrBenCarson3• 5 years ago

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).

Andrex• 5 years ago

You're a shareholder seeking short-term gains. That doesn't really absolve you of this opinion.

bastard_op2• 5 years ago

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.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

b3morales3• 5 years ago

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_op2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

ugjka2• 5 years ago

Pretty sure their sign up rates are going down the shitter, so they need some creative ways to satisfy the execs or whatever

doctorsher• 5 years ago

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.

tyingq• 5 years ago

Except that you often have to click something in Twitter to see the "thread", or a decent resolution of a tweeted picture, etc.

smithza• 5 years ago

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*

splatcollision2• 5 years ago

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?

Can_Not• 5 years ago

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.

zachrip• 5 years ago

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.

Brendinooo• 5 years ago

Microblogging is no less legitimate than blogging.

ihuman• 5 years ago

Can you even downvote posts here? I thought you can only downvote comments

ryan933• 5 years ago

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_thibedeau2• 5 years ago

It lets them track you across sites that use their iframes.

aendruk• 5 years ago

Twitter destroyed in myopic greed what was once a sensible service that shared in our vision of an open web. The “struggle” you refer to is protest.

recursive• 5 years ago

I am just as confused as to how literally multiple people have figured out how to use and navigate Twitter. I have probably failed at many other things in my life too though. Maybe it's me.

mayankkaizen• 5 years ago

If, for any reason, you stop using Twitter, your life will be going to be far more pleasant.

timdaub2• 5 years ago

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.

nabakin• 5 years ago

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.

smolyeet• 5 years ago

Keyword here being some

Kye4• 5 years ago

Tip: you can replace www in Reddit URLs (like in the submission) with old to get past it encouraging you to log in.

throw149102• 5 years ago

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.

b3morales3• 5 years ago

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.

zigradett2• 5 years ago

Realistically, though, is this going to decrease Twitter usage.

I would never hand my phone number over to Twitter. Would you?

conradfr• 5 years ago

I guess it worked for Instagram so they're copying them?

Jcowell• 5 years ago

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.

Sohcahtoa825• 5 years ago

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.

partiallypro• 5 years ago

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?

saos• 5 years ago

Disappointed by this move.

monkeybutton• 5 years ago

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.

marcosdumay2• 5 years ago

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.

dangerface2• 5 years ago

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.

3maj• 5 years ago

I'm fine with this, I'll just never look at Twitter again.

whoisjuan• 5 years ago

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.

RicoElectrico• 5 years ago

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.

anonymousab• 5 years ago

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.

WaltPurvis• 5 years ago

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.

_-david-_2• 5 years ago

It seems to happen to me when I have an ad blocker. On occasion I try without an adblocker and don't seem to have the issue. It could just be a coincidence though.

ecommerceguy• 5 years ago

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...

phy62• 5 years ago

This is a positive change for world mental health, bravo.

gregors• 5 years ago

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.

zthrowaway• 5 years ago

Good, hopefully this is the beginning of the end of Twitter… at the very least the end of its influence.

dathinab• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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...

petee2• 5 years ago

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

petee2• 5 years ago

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

riffic8• 5 years ago

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).

Dopameaner• 5 years ago

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.

pbreit• 5 years ago

So will I now need a 2nd account to view all the users who have blocked me? Lame.

batman-farts2• 5 years ago

The beginning of the end.

Somewhat perverse that it seems like the fall of Kabul was the motivation for this change.

jjulius2• 5 years ago

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

batman-farts2• 5 years ago

Perhaps just a coincidence (though I doubt it), but the full-screen login pop-ups on mobile became constant that weekend. Seemed like most of the videos coming out of Kabul airport that weekend were sourced off Twitter.

nixroot• 5 years ago

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-_-02• 5 years ago

All Instagram frontends are broken now, so if Twitter goes through with the change Nitter's days are numbered.

black_puppydog• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

What happens when a tweet is embedded in a news article?

quesomaster9000• 5 years ago

I don't know, they get blocked by my browser plugins along with all the other parasitic embedded widgets, adverts and internet cancer.

dustymcp2• 5 years ago

All it does is that i wont be consuming this, behind a login bye bye.

kgwxd• 5 years ago

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.

zigradett2• 5 years ago

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.

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

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.

riffic8• 5 years ago

Twitter's track record is nothing but user-hostility at this point. Look at the bigger picture please, people.

paulpauper• 5 years ago

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.

justinzollars• 5 years ago

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.

f00zz• 5 years ago

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.

nullc• 5 years ago

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.

reggieband• 5 years ago

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.

qwertox• 5 years ago

I wish this had the effect of politicians no longer being allowed to use Twitter in order to express any type of public opinions.

TekMol• 5 years ago

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?

nostromo• 5 years ago

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.

emptybits• 5 years ago

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...

batch12• 5 years ago

I hope this helps kill the 20 tweet roll blog replacement.

nrvn• 5 years ago

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”

koolba• 5 years ago

I love this. It makes it impossible to view Twitter as nothing could compel me to actually sign up for an account.

nbzso• 5 years ago

Why I feel that RSS and personal blogs will resurrect and become the norm? The benefits of centralization are diminishing day by day.

slig• 5 years ago

We thought the same when Posterous finally died, but then Medium happened.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

I don't get it. You're still fed ads either way? Why do they care?

breakpointalpha• 5 years ago

Great, now I will see even more Twitter screenshots on all the other websites (reddit, imgur)... /s

rubyist5eva• 5 years ago

twitter is cancer

timbit42• 5 years ago

Twitter is to society as cancer is to life.

rc_mob• 5 years ago

this belongs in reddit.com/r/thanksihateit

fridif• 5 years ago

More time to work on important projects instead of me mindlessly scrolling and clicking in circles.

stevebmark• 5 years ago

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.

tomlin• 5 years ago

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.

njarboe• 5 years ago

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.

amatecha2• 5 years ago

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/

cupcake-unicorn• 5 years ago

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.

wavefunction• 5 years ago

Hopefully this will reduce the amount of embedded tweets in articles and my accidental exposure to Twitter and the problems it produces.

jdeaton• 5 years ago

Great feature! This will help me stop using twitter!

MiddleEndian2• 5 years ago

Hopefully this will be the end of news articles including links to tweets or embedded tweets.

ryanSrich• 5 years ago

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.

cwkoss• 5 years ago

Are Twitter, Facebook and Reddit meaningfully different in this regard?

I think they have different affinities to different demographics, but the toxic behavior is quite similar among all of them.

Is there something about Twitter in particular that makes it particularly toxic, or is it inherent to platforms where people compete for attention in the public square?

yosame2• 5 years ago

I'd argue that the lack of characters per tweet is what makes Twitter so toxic, since it essentially destroys the ability to convey nuance.

lodonnell9213• 5 years ago

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

abstractbarista• 5 years ago

Guess I'm not viewing Twitter links any more. Hopefully they realize that not everyone cares. We just opt-out, 100%. Oh well.

sysadm1n• 5 years ago

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/

dredmorbius20• 5 years ago

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.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 5 years ago

It's probably just a few scraper bots that cause all this inconvenience for millions of innocent people.

dredmorbius20• 5 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/pa6dra/twitter...

bitwize• 5 years ago

If this drives people away from the Great Banality Laser, good.

nikisweeting• 5 years ago

Damn, this really sucks for internet archiving. :/

lykahb• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

MichaelZuo• 5 years ago

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.

jopsen• 5 years ago

A lot of folks seem to forget that Twitter also has electricity bills they have to pay directly or indirectly.

The cost of running Twitter could be very small, if they optimized for that.. cost of the engineers is harder to keep down.

But the real problem is probably that they got investors, went IPO and somehow need to produce significant returns.

Maybe Twitter can produce higher returns with a more captured user-base and a less open platform.

It just seems sad, that we're putting walls all over internet.

In any case, I doubt it's cost of operations that causes it. More likely too much investment.

ggm• 5 years ago

Monetising demands proof of eyeballs. Its all about money.

dleslie• 5 years ago

I recently deleted my Twitter and Reddit accounts. Both services seem to rely on an outrage->comment->outrage cycle to produce engagement, and I decided I didn't need to encourage more outrage in my life.

It's been good. I recommend it.

brailsafe• 5 years ago

Additionally, at least Twitter has a pretty nice offline webapp that gets downloaded when you archive your account.

tdeck• 5 years ago

If this goes further it's going to be frustrating to get information about public services. My local fire department has a Twitter feed where they tell the public about areas to avoid. Both local public transit systems use Twitter and it's often the best way to know about real time delays and issues (often in replies rather than main-feed tweets). It's already bad enough when these things are on Facebook, but I always appreciated when they're on Twitter and visible to everyone. It seems like now that might be changing.

ddingus• 5 years ago

Boy that's nice. I read a whole lot less Twitter.

Net gain for me.

treeman79• 5 years ago

Company asked everyone retweet something. Awkward silence. Finally many people mentioned they had deleted Twitter for mental health reasons.

Few weeks after watching a group plotting to come burn my neighborhood down in real-time I deleted the app. Just too much.

echlipse• 5 years ago

Happened to me too. An easy workaround: just refresh the browser when shown the login page.

lenkite• 5 years ago

Well, if Gab is clever, they can position themselves here as a privacy alternative.

noobermin• 5 years ago

Gab hitched itself to a political section of the right, and so they've walled off a lot of potential users.

modzu• 5 years ago

good. the sooner it fades to irrelevance the better

okonomiyaki3000• 5 years ago

I'm sure it's been like this for some time already. I often click links (many from HN) and end up on their login screen. It might as well be a 404.

egfx• 5 years ago

I created a free data exchange product between Twitter and Facebook in the form of a chrome extension https://2fb.me

It’s interesting to see that this protocol product may be the only way to see tweets freely between two walled gardens today.

But I guess it should have been predicted when function and good UX took a back seat to profitability years ago.

_wp3r• 5 years ago

This could probably have one of the single greatest global impacts on mental health ever take by anyone/anything/any-organization ever. If users respond in the negative.

Even a 5% reduction in social media exposure could have the potential to move the global suicide rate significantly.

r_singh• 5 years ago

It's likely done as an anti-scraping mechanism in my opinion. Scraping Twitter is rampant as most companies find their API to be too expensive...

loughnane• 5 years ago

It’s not the full Twitter experience but I’ve been using huginn to turn tweets (not replies, likes, or retweets) into an RSS feed.

For me it’s hit the sweet spot of being informed without being swamped

kadomony• 5 years ago

But why? Why does it matter if a user is authenticated or not? This is just some moron PM’s arbitrary metric they’re chasing, and it serves no value to anyone.

Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

Related Stories