Twitter starts to require login to view tweets
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
Another workaround for Android users is the FOSS app Fritter:
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...
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
Do they whitelist accounts of public officials? For instance, having the POTUS account behind an auth wall seems like a horrible practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My life is perfectly fine without tweets, likes and stickers. One less thing to waste time on.
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...
Why I feel that RSS and personal blogs will resurrect and become the norm? The benefits of centralization are diminishing day by day.
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?
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.
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.
I'm fine with this, I'll just never look at Twitter again.
I love this. It makes it impossible to view Twitter as nothing could compel me to actually sign up for an account.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
See you never, walled gardens; I don't belong to a prison!
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.
When I first noticed this I found a workaround to block all cookies from Twitter.
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?
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.
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This is a positive change for world mental health, bravo.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
Alternative frontends like Nitter[1] should hopefully continue to work. They could always scrape as an authenticated user if that becomes necessary.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tip: you can replace www in Reddit URLs (like in the submission) with old to get past it encouraging you to log in.
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.
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.
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.
Too many bluechecks publicly roasted.
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
More time to work on important projects instead of me mindlessly scrolling and clicking in circles.
When a login is required to view content, how do Google, Bing, and the others crawl the site?
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.
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.
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Well, if Gab is clever, they can position themselves here as a privacy alternative.
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.
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.
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...
Less range for twitter users means less twitter users.
Seems to be a pretty dumb move.
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
I only bother viewing tweets through Nitter instances nowadays.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope this helps kill the 20 tweet roll blog replacement.
Just turn JavaScript off for Twitter to “solve” the issue.
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...
Great feature! This will help me stop using twitter!
Hopefully this will reduce the amount of embedded tweets in articles and my accidental exposure to Twitter and the problems it produces.
Finally an article where people can state publicly their hate to this decision without polluting all the other posts linking to tweets.
Guess I'm not viewing Twitter links any more. Hopefully they realize that not everyone cares. We just opt-out, 100%. Oh well.
I wish this had the effect of politicians no longer being allowed to use Twitter in order to express any type of public opinions.
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”
It's probably just a few scraper bots that cause all this inconvenience for millions of innocent people.
Great, now I will see even more Twitter screenshots on all the other websites (reddit, imgur)... /s
Good, hopefully this is the beginning of the end of Twitter… at the very least the end of its influence.
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.
The beginning of the end.
Somewhat perverse that it seems like the fall of Kabul was the motivation for this change.
Hopefully this will be the end of news articles including links to tweets or embedded tweets.
Happened to me too. An easy workaround: just refresh the browser when shown the login page.
So will I now need a 2nd account to view all the users who have blocked me? Lame.
I don't get it. You're still fed ads either way? Why do they care?
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.
All it does is that i wont be consuming this, behind a login bye bye.
If this drives people away from the Great Banality Laser, good.
Monetising demands proof of eyeballs. Its all about money.
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.
What happens when a tweet is embedded in a news article?
Damn, this really sucks for internet archiving. :/
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Boy that's nice. I read a whole lot less Twitter.
Net gain for me.
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How will this work with embedded tweets?
As a shareholder--good.
As a lazy Twitter reader--bad.
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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.
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.
Disappointed by this move.
good. the sooner it fades to irrelevance the better
twitter is cancer
this belongs in reddit.com/r/thanksihateit
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.
Wow this is so greedy wtf
what is the point of twitter ? why do people even use it.
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Funny, I got downvoted for mentioning the same thing in a post about a Tweet.