Twitter content now behind login wall?

hardypart@feddit.de to Technology@kbin.social – 129 points –

What's going on?

76

AI generated Reddit
Ad-blocks-you-back Youtube
Login locked pay-to-win Twitter

We are cattle to the elite's ad revenue system.

They really don't like their users, lol

Why would alpha daddy thought leaders care about low quality organic persons?!

The second golden age of the internet is officially over.

Unfortunately the golden age was just a mirage, it was actually VC funds killing the ecosystem and offering impossible free services for over a decade.

We'll see if the internet can rebuild, but under the weight of spam and regulation and habit and clout chasing I'm not sure.

I'm fine with that.

if it's time to have conversations with actual people face to face, then so be it.

The utopian dream of the internet as the great equalizer and "Information wants to be free!" is dead.

Why did the whole internet seemingly decide to kick their enshittification into overdrive in the past month?

There's no more venture capital/free money to spend.

Yeah, basically it has to do with interest rates & tech speculation on LLM's.

"Market trends". One greedy dipshit does it and the rest follow suit. Like spez looking up to Elon.

If like me, you only engage with Twitter to the extent of clicking on a link that takes you to a Tweet, reading it and then getting the hell out before the brain dead replies consume what little remains of your soul, then can I recommend Googling up an addon for your preferred browser that redirects Twitter to Nitter as a way around this new barrier to entry.

I am using this one

Don't know why I haven't thought about looking for this add on. Thanks for the link!

Nitter unfortunately does not work right now due to this change. Hopefully they will fix this somehow (probably by changing user agent to googlebot, because they still allow web crawlers)

3 more...

Reddit: Demonstrates that locking away content is bad for the site and the wider internet.

Elon Musk: "I want that for my website!"

They seem to be inspiring each other these days.

"Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow. "

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700

Inspired by someone whose idea of cost cutting is just not paying others. Any rational person should be avoiding doing business with them.

I was going to post a tweet here but found out that you can't view it without logging in -- so not worth sharing.

I think it's good, I think only Twitter blue people should be able to read tweets.

Don't give Elon ideas

seems like a great idea to me! everyone will rush to mastodon because this one actually costs them money and not just ideals and their soul which they have no use for right this second!

So they can kiss user growth goodbye. It’s interesting to watch, because it’s like someone who has no understanding of the business model is running it. Embedded tweets and viewing tweets on the web is free advertising!

Being not-public is part of the reason why a lot of Twitter alternatives don't have a lot of general mind share I think. They might work well as actual social networks (i.e. people talking to each other), but have no chance of becoming even close to what Twitter was.

Noticed that as well, guess twitter will become much less linked to in the future?

For sure! And what about all those embedded Tweets in news articles?

I was on a news site yesterday that had an embed that asked if I wanted to see Twitter content or not. And I was like, "Why would I need to see and give views to a Tweet that you're describing in this article? NOPE." And opted out. It was great. I hope more sites do this in the future

kid named reading the tweet yourself instead of reading a re-telling of a tweet:

I often look up the tweets/original news stories just because media often twists the context or grasps at straws to make for a flashier headline.

Kid named, I don't need to give Elon the views when the article quotes the entire tweet. It's not like they're novels.

Seriously, Elon is speedrunning the destruction of twitter

It’s a race to the bottom between Twitter and Reddit.

It's the cool big tech move to kill your business right now. Soon we'll be seeing articles on why making site's unusable hellscapes is good for future growth.

They've been soft locking content behind a login for a while, I guess they're going for the full thing now. Very annoying

The 30th of June 2023 will forever be known as enshittification day.

In Dream SMP canon terms (no offense to that series, though), that'll be L'Manburg's Doomsday.

It's not surprising. Other sites have been this way for ages, and they all seem to be in a struggle with one another to out-shit their beds.

It's been drifting that way for a while (couldn't go more than a few clicks without logging in) but it looks like they've made it official. I'm not interested in writing anything behind a login wall.

I would say you could still use nitter.net but that seems kind of broken at the moment, maybe related.

Hopefully this gets public services off twitter.

There's no reason my local fire department or mayor should only be accessible by giving a foreign (to me) company my info and money.

yeah this will def cause many public and private services to think about alternatives

That's a good point!

Also, I used to browse Twitter for years before making an account and probably would never have made one otherwise. Saying things out in public, to the public was kind of the whole point of Twitter.

Twitter was the only way to get updates about wildfires near me 😬

Not just clicks, even scrolling is broken. It shows content at first so you lower your guard and then block you with login page once you scroll down.

I don't even get that. Just an immediate login prompt without being able to see anything underneath.

This is just going to speed the growth of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon, which is great, but it's sad to see such a once-innovative, widely-used platform degrade to this level of shittiness. All because of a deranged wealthy idiot with an unchecked ego. This was a communication platform, FFS!

So maybe this is how I'll give up the habit of scrolling through social media on phone. They all just lock themselves in with all the ads goodness, I guess it's good for some of us.

There are kbin apps coming, so flee while you still can.

I do wonder how long it will be before the official Twitter app blocks screenshots.

Yeah just tried to check if a Cramer tweet was real (it wasn’t) and had to log in. Good think iCloud remembered my password because I certainly didn’t. Fuck twitter hopefully I’ll never have to go there again.

I'm pessimistic that this will actually change much, or drive users to Mastodon. Just like, as much as I've been loving my time with Kbin/Lemmy, I don't think people are ever going to leave Reddit. Most people appear to have a way, WAY higher bullshit tolerance than I do. It's sad. The old guard are unusable, and the new options are withering on the vine.

Why dont ppl just post a screenshot of a tweet instead of linking it, same with reddit posts ?

I really like being able to confirm that something isn't made up or blown out of proportion, being able to quickly check stuff like 'how many people even agree with this take (a lot of times people leave out the engagement of a post)' and 'is this a genuine person in the first place (check out their profile or other posts)' to not poison discourse with made-up issues
That said, as others in this thread have pointed to, libdirect should be encouraged so they can discourage traffic to the actual site
e: though nitter sadly seems to be out of commission for new tweets, rip

There are accessibility concerns with doing that, if the poster doesn't provide alt-text. Images are basically unreadable to the vision impaired.

Mastodon has already become viable. I switched when there was court decision that Musk had to buy twitter and deleted my account there. At that time Mastodon was ghosttown - posts related to US were very very few and refreshing the page after a minute gave handful of posts. It changed as it achieved critical mass. By that time I had gotten used to mastodon which is not very user friendly and is different from twitter. Kbin/lemmy are much similar to reddit in that regard.

Now it does the main thing twitter did for me - telling me the news - what is happening around and what others think about that. And it is much better than twitter which was mostly clickbait. It lacks in terms of depth on specific topics, but general topics are there - though you have to know how to curate those.

It seems to be more than individual tweets. The whole site seems down for me if I'm not logged in.

Absolutely wonderful. I love looking at art on Discord, opening the tweet to get the high res pic to save (Yes, I'm aware of adding ?format=jpg&name=large at the end of the URL, already had to do it for some pics), then being blocked. Or trying to see some sports news, then being blocked again.

Can confirm.

I guess I'll never read another tweet again 🤷

I just tried to access it and I get redirection errors. I guess they didn’t account for integration testing during their most recent sprint.

I like how George Hotz briefly worked at Twitter and got rid of the login after scrolling a bit blocker, and now you can't see anything.

I wonder what that's going to do to ad revenue as millions of non account lurkers can't see content anymore and won't make an account