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[VERGE] Twitter has started blocking unregistered users
(www.theverge.com)
This is hilarious. The biggest inconvenience this will cause, is people asking "can you post a screenshot? I dont use Twitter."
It is kind of a disaster for emergencies. Twitter is the defacto social network whenever any disaster strikes round here, the sheer volume of people, emergency services and the versatility of hashtags make it great for that.
Which it never should have been in the first place. There should be some kind of publicly funded twitter like clone used for this purpose.
Because what Twitter really needs right now is less engagement.
They're trying to juice up their stats for advertisers. More registered users = more surveillance capitalism.
Twitter users can't post to the general public anymore. Their posts are visible to users logged into Twitter only. That should render Twitter useless to whoever wants to post something to people on the Internet. I wonder what journalists, companies, or politicians think about it.
Lol. "Town Square". Hah.
Honestly, thank you, Elon. Now I'm not even tempted to visit that toxic hellscape echo chamber of awful shit.
Bastard somehow did something that'll probably have a more positive effect on my mental health.
This is a net positive (for me), but it's still fucking dumb, and his fault. "Too many sites were scraping us :(" Yeah, dude, that's what happens when you pull the "API is only for the wealthy now" nonsense.
I swear, this could be prescient, actually. Could easily see Huffman pulling this shit within the next few weeks. (Lol, I wouldn't put it past him to do it tomorrow.)
The advertisers must love this.
He kind of already has implemented something like this. If you ever try and load a mobile reddit thread in your browser, you're greeted with a download the app-wall like 50% or more of the time.
it's better in the app
Watching him destroy that site is quite astonishing. I've never had an account with twitter. It never appealed to me. Making it a requirement to have an account to even see content isn't going to convince me to sign up.
Since many companies use twitter as their mouthpiece on the internet. I wonder how they're going to react when they're now only able to engage with registered users. I'd be surprised if this works out well for the company to be honest.
Huffman?
Lol, probably should have specified. My bad.
Steve Huffman. You may know him as /u/spez on reddit.
These social media giants seem to be self destructing themselves on purpose.
Seriously though, what is causing all of these various media platforms to ramp up the attacks on their users so obviously? Reddit blocking apps, Twitter login-hiding posts, Google shutting down adblockers. Is it coordinated? Does it just make sense to make a rush for money when every company is doing the same?
A lot of the tech companies were slammed by investors over the last two years for missing their earnings and many of them are still struggling to go back to 2021 optimistic growth rates. The layoffs last year have also cost them a lot of their best talent, so the quality of innovation, decision making, and execution has suffered. You are now left with a bunch of older executives who never really understood that it was their younger talent that was the core of their company's success, so they fall back on older methods like increasing prices and cutting costs to try and lead the board / shareholders into thinking that their ridiculous executive salary packages are somehow justified.
Can already tell you this is negatively affecting furries. A lot of people use Twitter as a platform for furry art and discussion. Now that Twitter can't be accessed by the public, furry art can't be spread as easily theough embed, and this hurts furry artists in the long run.
Actually, more generally this could hurt artists period.
Welp, this kills Twitter for me permanently. I closed my account after Mush took it over but sometimes I’d check out tweets and replies my Discord friends would share. Big tech just keeps shooting itself in the foot lately.
Good, I don't want to use Twitter anyway. :)
Well, that makes it even easier to never visit Twitter again. Right now I was sometimes tempted to follow a link and see what it was about, but I'll be happy to quit that habbit too.
That's certainly one way to begin a social media detox along with Reddit's idiocy over third party apps. This will make it much easier to ignore Twitter since I deleted my account there and have no intention of signing up again just to view tweets.
Man seeing all these big websites kill themselves slowly with poor decisions, kind of gives me hope for the future of the internet. Now we just need facebook to really mess up, and things will be even better.
Right, monopolies crumbling will give space to innovation. No one company will buy up smaller company and then put their innovations behind closed doors, never to be seen again.
Though I doubt google wiill go under for what YouTube is doing. Google is stilll huge and profitable. Most likely it will outlast all of it's peers from the 2000 dotcom boom.
Twitter, on the other hand, well. It's on its 9th live and is hanging by the ledge.
Thank god. Hopefully Elon Musk will require a blue checkmark to be able to make new tweets.
Mastodon is better anyway. I deleted Twitter ages ago when Musk took over. It's amazing how many people have stayed there despite how much he's shit all over the userbase. He makes Spez look like a saint.
Mastodon might be "better" but it's in a completely different league if it's missing 99% people I actually care about following on twitter. On mastodon the feed is just random people talking about their personal stuff and misusing hashtags, and usually when you bring this up the answer is "well duh, mastodon is not supposed to be twitter, it is its own thing".
Mastodon feels a bit like Twitter back when it was still new, and no celebs or influencers existed. If you had 5k followers or more, you were a big shot.
it's missing 99% people I actually care about following on twitter
This is what's stopping me from really giving Mastodon a shot. Nobody that I care about uses it, except for a few bot accounts that are just mirroring that user's existing Twitter feed, and they're not even monitoring those accounts on Mastodon so trying to interact with them is fruitless.
Agreed. There's a lot mixed messaging from the userbase where we're recommended to switch to Mastodon from Twitter but also respect that Mastodon is not supposed to be a Twitter replacement.
It may not be a Twitter replacement, but perhaps it can still fulfill whatever specific needs they're currently fulfilling using Twitter.
I'm not the best person to judge since I never really "got" Twitter in the first place, but the basic function of "announcing a small piece of text to the world" is shared by a whole lot of different platforms.
It's a weird day when I read a read a Tim Sweeney quote and agree with him.
I mean it kind of already was, right? You could view specific tweets and a couple replies before a banner showed up asking you to sign in and preventing you from scrolling further. It did the same thing if you tried to click on certain things. I had a firefox extension to bypass it which worked wonders. I assume there'll probably be a new one for this.
Will this affect Google search? That’s got to be a good driver for Twitter right?
Maybe trying to get people that end up there after a search to sign up would be a better tactic.
I'm sure they give the content to the google bots, just not end users. So you see a teaser, click on it, then have to log in.
Screw that, I'm out!
I've never used Twitter, but on occasion been linked to something there. So if that's intentional they're killing off that kind of traffic on purpose. It seems all these corpo social media sites are monetizing themselves to death.
This is actually the interesting part of this move for me. Organic traffic into the platform from google searches, websites (like news orgs and such) that link directly to the tweets as sources, etc. if that’s not going to work, that will likely tank their engagement.
Stop. Don't. Come back.
Also breaks nitter. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/916#issuecomment-1614389399
Huh, in that issue thread someone posted a tweet from the devs stating that it's temporary, for what that's worth.
This could be companies scraping Twitter to feed large language models. If so, I'm glad we're keeping Twitter out of the corpus for whatever the next GPT is
This feels like a big milestone in their enshittification journey, and also in the maturity of the fediverse. Part of what made Twitter so widely popular I think is that tweets were available to everyone, not just the few people who were online enough to actually have an account. To lock things behind a wall after so many people have left seems like a bad idea.
I'm sure this will work out well for them. The legacy social sites are really on a roll this summer.
Seems like nitter still works. Interesting how everyone, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit seem to try to to squeeze more money out of their platforms by making themselves shittier.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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