This effectively breaks 15 years of links to tweets posted all over the Internet. Just another reason to keep the web open.
This takes Twitter to the same level as Facebook, a website that only lives of its internal posts, where no young people open accounts, and where eventually the only ones who post are the ones who opened an account in its time.
I wonder if recent Reddit/Twitter events might have finally given blockchain a real problem to solve.
The problem is centralized entities can take away access to data you generated at anytime. They can also ban you for whatever reason they want. So if your livelihood depends on these services, it can cause a huge disruption.
If Reddit/Twitter's data is stored on a blockchain, then anyone can build a client to access that data and Twitter would essentially have much less power.
The problem I see is that blockchains are too slow, and too expensive for mass products like Reddit and Twitter. Heck, I'm sure it's already a huge challenge for centralized databases to have as much data as Twitter/Reddit - let alone a decentralized one. Maybe at some point, we'll have a quantum computer breakthrough and blockchains performance is solved for use cases like this.
When people say "blockchains are a solution in search of a problem" they aren't kidding huh? We already have decentralized Twitter, it's called Mastodon (we have more of those as well).
I still have a few accounts I glance at from time to time. Hockey, Game Devs, Artists, etc. who haven't migrated away despite everything, so this is kinda obnoxious.
Should be able to just import the rules and it seems to work alright with some caveats.
* I have no idea if this will continue to function.
* I've only tested some random links from my Discord and Slack groups.
* Profile links only show the most recent 20 tweets.
* Tweets will show quote-tweets, but no replies (though maybe that's a good thing).
* Obviously won't work for mobile.
Login wall for me. I'll give it a day and then delete the dozen or so remaining twitter accounts I had bookmarked and checked in occasionally. I did delete my account a few months before Elon took over, guess we are watching its final days.
Well, depends how you're defining 'final', really. Like, one way of looking at it is that Livejournal hasn't had its final day yet; there are still people on Livejournal. Another is that it had its final day in 2006 or so; from that point on (at least in the English-speaking world; I think it stayed relevant in Russia for longer) it was kind of a legacy semi-zombie social network.
Twitter's whole thing is its outsized cultural relevance for a rather small user base. If that goes, well, arguably, it's had its final day. This particular change seems like it might go a long way towards ending its relevance; an awful lot of people used twitter only via clicking links from news articles etc, and never actually had an account.
Users will remain, they will just represent a much more narrow slice of society than before. They will be smaller in number and Twitter itself will be less of an 'approved' service — I feel like we already see less promotion of it on TV and on news sites.
Very few sites die entirely. Usenet, BBS, AOL, nethack.alt.org, AskJeeves, MySpace, and Facebook all still exist. That doesn’t mean they remain culturally relevant.
I stopped using Twitter months ago. Stopped Tweeting and only visit the site if I need to follow a link. I never announced it. There was a trend of high profile Tweeters announcing their departure, and some may well have relapsed (I don't keep track) but it would be interesting to see how many people just stopped bothering with the site and all its drama.
With the notable exception of Digg, big-bang deaths are rather rare for social networks (and even Digg's wasn't _quite_ as big-bang as people tend to remember); they drift slowly into obscurity. While there might be a triggering factor that could be remembered as the cause of the decline, it's generally hard to pinpoint a time of death.
Un/fortunately, they didn’t storm Moscow. It was rather interesting to see them advance, however. Though whether this was a distraction to hide something else (say, “banishing” a PMC closer to the border) or a genuine coup has yet to be seen.
What in the world gives you the impression Twitter is in its final days? Naysayers have been saying Twitter fill fail any day now for about 8 or 9 months now.
When people talk about Twitter dying, they are talking about its relevance. No one means "Twitter.com will redirect to a domain squatter".
E.g, despite it being dead since the redesign in 2010,
you can still go to digg.com right now, create an account and all. Fark.com still exists. Slashdot still exists. None of these sites are relevant anymore though.
Baffling decision. The fact that tweets were, by default, essentially public and easily linkable was a big differentiator between Twitter and other social networks (particularly Facebook) and made them very attractive for things like news sites to link, vs, say, Facebook posts.
Without API and without web access, where are you going to read the tweets from?
The only option left is unofficial API stubs, which essentially scrape the web requests, but those also will require a login, so the high activity will be easy to spot and block by Twitter.
Unless they have a whole network of accounts. That'd work but it's work to do.
There's a nitter fork (in the sense of 'PRs not merged yet') that uses the admin's burner accounts to retrieve tweets, and it still works. But I think it hits rate limits fairly often.
edit: Well, worked. Seems down right now, possibly because it was the only instance that still worked.
I suspect that this is going to deter news sites from using tweets in articles. Imo this is probably a good thing, but what twitter thinks it well get out of this isn't clear to me.
Bad move on Elon's part. Many people deleted their accounts when he took over, but some portion of them are still "addicted" to twitter and browse it anonymously. Thus still generating views and revenue for the company. Once the login wall comes up, most of them are leaving for good, as their egos will not allow them to create another account.
It never worked like this, though. You could always view a single linked tweet/thread; it was if you tried to view a timeline that you ran into difficulties.
I am not a prolific twitter user. I am one of the "anonymous lurkers" I mentioned in my original comment. But your observation makes sense, as I only started visiting Twitter after Elon's takeover. The removal of the login wall must have been the reason.
Yep it used to be you could view individual tweets but nothing else. Elon came in removed it and made everything free to view. A couple months ago I noticed they went back to the old system. And now you can't even view individual tweets. Embedded tweets still work I guess
I think there must have been some kind of nuance beyond that, at some point. The number of people claiming that they couldn't view twitter links — and I'm sure this started pre-Elon — suggests to me that, like someone else has mentioned, there might have been different behaviour for 'anonymous' vs. 'not-logged-in' viewers.
The main difference to me was that I could see the "trending" tweets and additional "recommended" tweets after the comments on the one that I was reading. That started post Elon. There was also the login popup that was trivial to X out that seemed to appear more frequently after Elon took over.
The pre-Musk behaviour was fairly straightforward to my recollection: All logged out accounts could view a single tweet and some percentage of the replies. They could also view a profile but, similarly, scrolling down a certain number of tweets triggered the modal.
> Not everything has to be illegal just because you’re annoyed by it.
No, some things should be illegal because they're public officials using semi-private communications channels for public communications in the course of their work, that the public won't have access to without agreeing to a TOS with that private company.
Hasn’t Trump completely abandoned Twitter, and very much prefers his de-federated Mastodon instance? I’d say you can’t put an indefinite delay on for any longer than, well, indefinite.
That aside, you’re absolutely right. It’ll be interesting to see why Elon would hide away his money sink, especially when they made such a big hoopla about removing this very thing from the beginning.
Hmm, I wonder if this is just an experiment, a bug, or something permanent.
Posting twitter links to places like HN will be a no-no, since a good portion of the people can't view the content. Will that stop people from using Twitter to inform?
Unfortunately, many things posted to HN are not on the Internet. Paywalled links, links to articles where the publisher does the idiotic IP-based regionalization and denies access to those not in his "region", etc.
I believe HN should make a rule that only links to things on the Internet are allowed. If it's not readable by anyone with an IP address, it shouldn't be on HN.
Agreed; clicking on a paywall link is such an unedifying experience. Direct links to paywalled content should almost always be avoided, not just on HN!
Reddit is essentially the same. Default ordering of comments is “best”. That means that many comments are not displayed at all. You need to log in to be able to change that. I only noticed that after deleting my account.
Nitter is still working, although searching for users seems to have stopped working you can still use the tweet search tab or manually type a twitter username on the end of the URL.
Looks like it occurs in private windows as well. In the past, twitter set cookies to distinguish between visitors who never had an account, and visitors who have an account but are logged out. Publicly visible posts were displayed to no-account visitors, but blocked from logged-out visitors.
At the end of each snippet is a t.co link with a /{tweet id} at the end. You'll have to click on it and copy the status/tweet id from the url after the "%2Fstatus%" part. Paste that number into an embed link:
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16763153424...
Oddly enough tweets that are age/content restricted do not get the login wall, so while you cannot see the age-restricted tweet, you can still see the replies.
Login walls, paywalls, etc., are fine, I just wish google would not index these sites. There has to be a cost for every move. This whole have_and_eat(cake) needs to stop.
I don't remember the ability to view any individual tweet being locked behind a login screen before - timeline scrolling yes, but not this. This is a new approach.
This is a hard stretch. That login wall is easily dismissible. Haven't come across any tweet, even content that could be considered "premium" like Tucker's long form video commentaries, that is not available behind the login wall.
EDIT: I was wrong. This was the behavior not so long ago, seems like any link now redirects to homepage.
How do you dismiss it? I just get redirected to /home from everything. Even if I click the "X", I just end up on the frontpage instead of the page I wanted to see.
(It's different from the "please login" in-page popup that came up before occasionally. That one indeed was easily dismissable)
This takes Twitter to the same level as Facebook, a website that only lives of its internal posts, where no young people open accounts, and where eventually the only ones who post are the ones who opened an account in its time.