The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of the Nitter project. To save readers a click
Guest accounts have been removed, they weren't just led to believe that. With real accounts getting rate limited immediately and likely banned, I don't see any path forward for Nitter.
I would say that Nitter as a whole is not owned by anyone, that person is the owner of one of the Nitter instances, in addition to being the primary maintainer of the project as you correctly stated.
I agree with the second part of your comment about all instances being in danger. It is unfortunately a common problem faced by many privacy-respecting frontends (Nitter, Libreddit, Proxigram, Piped etc)
It's also factually incorrect to suppose that this person owns the Nitter project, too. There's no CLA so the copyright is held in common by all of the contributors. Free software projects don't have owners, they have maintainers, and the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.
But zdeus is the 'owner' of the nitter project on Github. That's their official word for it, even though it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the legal concept of (copyright) ownership.
And then there's 'owner' in the software dev sense, i.e. the one that ultimately decides which direction the project takes, what patches to merge etc. is sometimes referred to as "product owner".
This seems factually incorrect, but in a nuanced way.
The copyright owner of a code is the one listed as such. In cases of multiple contributors, each owns the copyright to their individual contributions. For projects with shared contributions, it's more accurate to say each necessary part has its own copyright owner, rather than a common ownership.
Free software projects do have copyright owners, which can be entities like non-profits or companies. This ownership is crucial for legal standing in copyright infringement cases, except for public domain code, which isn't copyrighted.
It's wise to have a Contributing.md or similar, stating that contributors affirm their creation is original, free from patent issues, and they agree to license their contribution under the project's terms.
Without such agreements, there's a risk contributors might withdraw their code, claiming it wasn't licensed under the project's terms, potentially leaving gaps in the project.
Simply hosting code on a site with a common license doesn't automatically apply that license to your code unless you explicitly agree to it.
> the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.
Property law itself is a social construction of exactly the same kind.
A single person or group owning a FLOSS project is also a typical, almost universal case. There's always the person or team, and the canonical repository, that represents what "Emacs" is, or what "sr.ht" is, etc. In practice, for everything except legal issues, this is the same as legal ownership.
This is one of the long time running instances shutting down, linking to the primary nitter author saying it's the end for all instances eventually. And providing insights from the status page.
If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine.
Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.
I shouldn't have to paste this here, but: "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
It's unfortunate that this mistaken comment is top voted.
"If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
I don't know for sure, I've been watching a couple accounts that have been dormant for a while, but several instances have broken search, so maybe the account pages are cached.
Edit: I just checked an instance and it seems to have tweets from the past minute or two, but if the backend accounts that drive them are getting banned, it's probably gonna tank in the upcoming weeks.
The submitted title was "Nitter Is Dead". We changed it to the article title overnight, but I've since changed it to a representative sentence from the text.
I'm with you that this is disappointing, but folks who use these sorts of tools tend to be a bit naive about the impact of them going away. It's a little silly, to be honest. Best numbers I could come by is X does something like 100B impressions/day and x.com saw 1.2B visits in the month of December. Will some people stop seeing X posts on Nitter? Sure, maybe. Will it matter to X? I doubt it.
It's created a reverse eternal September. The masses stay confined to one place. Other places can flourish with the old school smaller community kind of feel and quality. Let twitter live in its current state if it means other places won't be taken over by influencers and other bullshit.
We're all sharing the same links, articles, jokes, memes, ideas, cat pictures. What differentiates a place is its sense of community, not its content. It's easy to forget that because Twitter long ago stopped being a community.
Given only a fraction of account bans make the news, the problem was probably much bigger than the news indicates. Maybe 10-100x (what's the ratio of newsworthy to regular folks?). Also, when a prominent user is banned, others see that and clam up on the topic lest they face the same fate; they tread on egg shells, which doesn't constitute a healthy community for them.
> Cloth masks are ineffective against covid, that's a true statement, every doctor in 2019 knew it, and now I'm banned on twitter for saying it? Interesting.
Keep in mind for every famous ban, there might be a few orders of magnitude more bans of small accounts we don't hear about given Twitter "use(d) Artificial Intelligence to identify posts" "that are misleading enough to cause harm to people" [2].
Also keep in mind this is one topic of thousands that could get an account banned, there is no shortage.
Please keep in mind my broader point is simply Twitter might have felt like a community for some, but not for everyone. If someone's banned for stating hard truths, that's frustrating to say the least, and I think to some extent makes the individual feel like it's a not a welcoming/fair community to be part of.
The Elon era seems to emphasize hypocrisy and censorship at the command of authoritarian regimes, while Elon himself posts disinformation about election laws in the US.
>The Elon era seems to emphasise truth over sensitivities
I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition--Musk infamously gutted that department, and I've seen plenty of claims at least from journalists and the EU that the problem is now worse. Anecdotally, I left Twitter not for ideological reasons, but because my timeline become filled with algorithmic noise from what were clearly bots I wasn't following. Do you have evidence to back up that claim?
>some suspected (but couldn't prove) being shadow banned for having contrarian viewpoints.
I would think we would have seen actual indication of that by now if that were true; given all the "Twitter files" and whatnot that turned out to be a nothingburger, if there was a there there, employees were certainly motivated to air it after the acquisition, if not before. In any case, it's certainly indisputable that Musk has been more than willing to artificially inflate accounts he wants to promote (the latest I know of being the Mr. Beast debacle), which, outside of expressly labelled advertising, I don't remember being a thing before, though again, I'm open to the possibility of being wrong about that.
Community notes are great and an important tool to fact check disinformation from politicians and VIPs to which traditional fact checkers often turn a blind eye. I say this from Brazil so your YMMV. While I'm not familiar with the Mr. Beast debacle on Twitter he and his content are extremely popular so it's natural for his content to be recommended. What wasn't "natural" was Twitter recommendations prior. Though there are many other reasons for not using Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
I can’t stress this enough, for anyone who (like myself) for some reason didn’t think this was possible: Twitter’s community notes are no different from tweets in their ability to spread misinformation.
What makes them worse than tweets (at least the original immutable tweets) at combatting intentional disinformation is that Birdwatch notes 1) are visually formatted to communicate an impression of absolute ground truth, and 2) don’t reflect any controversy or edit history.
A trending tweet with a false “correction” (such as the one that claimed a video of Xinjang police brutality against an Uyghur was showing Taiwanese police) would be viewed by millions of people, 99% of whom would read that note completely uncritically, before it would get corrected. The people who are equipped to recognize the lie, and who care to fight to get it corrected, are few compared to the army of internet trolls spreading that lie.
Eventually the note may get rewritten—but at that point the tweet is no longer trending; the operation was a success and no one even knows that it took place. Since the note gets rewritten with no history maintained, the only evidence of the original malicious, false correction would have to be in that updated note, which is obviously an unpopular choice because it makes the new note harder to read and makes future readers do extra work to untangle what happened there.
(Incidentally, one of the things that could reliably be used to combat bias—labeling tweets from accounts that are known to be associated with governments or such—was nuked by Elon right away.)
As I said your mileage may vary. This looks like something that can be improved and an exception. I'd rather have imperfect decentralized information checking than centralized information checking that is know to be partisan, biased and easily bought. But please downvote me more as it shows that what you're truly in favor is censorship and monopoly over narrative.
I do not deny your experience and I saw many useful community notes before. It took me seeing this case to understand that it is actually a bad idea, for the reasons I mentioned (illusion of absolute truth while being open to manipulation & showing no history of controversy).
Also, it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform)… If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right? If you are up against a totalitarian government controlling the 2nd most populous country, there can always be more people who claim the false correction. There was a minority of people who got the correction fixed, and if it was actually decentralized then how would they be able to?
> it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform)
Community notes are generated by users and not the platform it's not perfect but better than having a mainstream media oligopoly deciding what is truth and what isn't.
> If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right?
The algorithm tries to prevent this kind of abuse. "the Community Notes rating algorithm explicitly attempts to prioritize notes that receive positive ratings from people across a diverse range of perspectives". See Vitalik analysis: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.h.... But from what you're telling it looks CCP found a way to game it.
Good point that the algorithm tries to compensate for the perspectives, but I’m sure it still comes down to a popularity contest.
Generally, the platform determines the algorithm of which note wins, so that’s centralized. The algorithm depends on what kind and how many users vote and how. Those users exist on the platform which requires registration and can deny any given user. Centralized.
Further, no guarantee that the actual algorithm in production matches the one made public, but I guess they have no reason to lie here.
> from what you’re telling
It’s not just me telling, the tweet has been up so far and community note does its best to awkwardly convey the controversy that would’ve been otherwise completely lost due to the ill designed way community notes work.
> Good point that the algorithm tries to compensate for the perspectives, but I’m sure it still comes down to a popularity contest.
It isn't clear if polarization score have only one dimension where it would be great to capture US culture wars but fail to capture nuances outside of that or if it's more complex than that.
> Generally, the platform determines the algorithm of which note wins, so that’s centralized. The algorithm depends on what kind and how many users vote and how. Those users exist on the platform which requires registration and can deny any given user. Centralized.
Yes, not perfect but still better than the traditional media oligopoly.
> Further, no guarantee that the actual algorithm in production matches the one made public, but I guess they have no reason to lie here.
The algorithm and the data are open. It is reproducible.
> It’s not just me telling, the tweet has been up so far and community note does its best to awkwardly convey the controversy that would’ve been otherwise completely lost due to the ill designed way community notes work.
> Original video, which provides a better look at the plate (鄂F1573警),indicates that the video was shot in Hubei, China
This means there was yet another update since I looked. The previous note at least made the user suspect that there was an attempt to point fingers at some other country. Now it merely corrects the location in China. It is good to link to a higher quality video, but I don’t rule out that the note will with time drift to suit the agenda of the government.
> Many here are biased against Elon and Twitter for political reasons so they are too quick to pass judgement
He killed the feature that labeled accounts associated with governments though.
I think community notes are not his invention so I don’t blame him for them, but they are very poorly implemented and are strictly worse than tweets themselves.
If they applied the same algo to weighing tweets and replies, they could’ve gotten the same results but without making people trust blindly. But of course this defeats the point of paying for Elon’s blue checkmarks.
> This means there was yet another update since I looked. The previous note at least made the user suspect that there was an attempt to point fingers at some other country. Now it merely corrects the location in China. It is good to link to a higher quality video, but I don’t rule out that the note will with time drift to suit the agenda of the government.
I didn't calculate any statistics but exploring the data I saw are way more "anti-China" notes than "pro-China" notes.
> He killed the feature that labeled accounts associated with governments though.
Yeah because Western government funded medias cried rivers when they were correctly labeled as such.
> If they applied the same algo to weighing tweets and replies, they could’ve gotten the same results but without making people trust blindly. But of course this defeats the point of paying for Elon’s blue checkmarks.
Doing so wouldn't make sense as the algorithm needs prior data from tweets to calculate ratings. What are your expectations? That Twitter hide (soft ban) tweets/accounts that an algorithm labels as misinformation because it was massively flagged? That happened before, it was easily abused, it was censorship.
> I think community notes are not his invention so I don’t blame him for them, but they are very poorly implemented and are strictly worse than tweets themselves.
You could give only one example where community notes were abused to spread misinformation and with time the correct note prevailed.
> exploring the data I saw are way more "anti-China" notes than "pro-China" notes.
Maybe that is the problem, it is seen as pro/anti X instead of facts/lies.
> You could give only one example where community notes were abused to spread misinformation and
If you ask this, you miss the point. How exactly do you expect me to tell a true note from a false one? The medium is the problem here.
> with time the correct note prevailed.
As long as it prevails before the heat death of the universe that’s OK, right?
> Doing so wouldn't make sense as the algorithm needs prior data from tweets to calculate ratings.
Twitter has prior data from tweets. I don’t get it.
The algorithm they use to present one community note can be used to capture feedback and sort tweets instead. Problem solved. People have better access to balanced views but are not being nannied by the platform or elonsplained what is truth.
> Maybe that is the problem, it is seen as pro/anti X instead of facts/lies.
What I meant is that there are more notes correcting pro-China lies than anti-China lies. So the removal of community notes would benefit pro-China propagandists.
> If you ask this, you miss the point. How exactly do you expect me to tell a true note from a false one? The medium is the problem here.
Use your head. Do your research. Trust your guts. I think you're expecting impossible things from technology.
> As long as it prevails before the heat death of the universe that’s OK, right?
No, it's not right. It should be quick but I have no way to tell how long it took for the better note to prevail. AFAIK it is quick enough.
> The algorithm they use to present one community note can be used to capture feedback and sort tweets instead. Problem solved. People have better access to balanced views but are not being nannied by the platform or elonsplained what is truth.
Nobody wants that. With community notes you can choose to ignore the context but you see the tweet. With your proposal people would just no see some tweets, they would lose agency.
Exactly. Just show me tweets well-sorted and let me decide. Don’t tell me “here is truth” (which is what “here is context” is intended to look like).
> right. It should be quick but I have no way to tell how long it took for the better note to prevail
You can’t. Because the implementation is botched.
> Nobody wants that.
Nobody wants community notes as is. Anyone who wants them only wants them because it’s a great way to disseminate disinformation.
> With community notes you can choose to ignore the context
Just like you could have chosen to ignore lies in the actual tweet without any community notes adding yet another layer of lies, only harder to ignore because it is now called “context” but really is just some guy’s opinion that won a popularity contest.
The context should just be a top reply, but then who would pay Elon 8 bucks to show up first?
> That Twitter hide (soft ban) tweets/accounts that an algorithm labels as misinformation because it was massively flagged? That happened before, it was easily abused, it was censorship.
>I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition
Twitter Japan's recommendations feed was inundated with political bullshit nobody cared about.
Musk came in, fired everyone at Twitter Japan, and the recommendations feed changed to anime, manga, visual novels, games, music, and other such pop cultural subjects that everyone cares about. Japanese Xers love Musk for cleaning house.
The change was obvious to all, and personally I finally could justify making an account to better manage the handful of accounts I always kept tabs on (news postings from games I play, new art from illustrators I like, etc.).
Speaking for the fediverse only, the experience is what you make of it. Stay on the largest, averagest instance and your experience will be bland; get on an instance with people who share your values, an instance that connects with other instances OK with you, follow accounts posting content you want to see and the experience will be much better.
There's too many other places. VC can't find every tiny community out there, or even any noteworthy portion of them. Places small enough to still have a coherent sense of community are beneath the notice of VC.
Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily.
The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.
I have seen a considerable degrading of quality on reddit since the blackouts. I use reddit for quality subject discussion in topics ranging from pressure cooking to circuit design but I also use it for general crappy banter and time wasting, and the people who would contribute useful content in the former have decreased in number while the latter have increased making the signal to noise much worse.
It doesn't help that they have started placing content from more obscure subreddits onto people's front pages seemingly randomly, so people wander into places and have no idea what the culture is they are contributing to and add content which is wildly out of place.
To get subject matter discussion which is reasonable I have been wandering back to bespoke forums, which isn't necessarily bad, but they still have a lot of issues. A lot of other content has moved to discord, but I won't get into how I feel about that.
Although, I'm surprised how often I'm seeing the key comments I was searching for deleted. I haven't been keeping stats, but maybe around half the time.
Some Reddit metrics might've hardly noticed the blips, but if they had metrics for early-Reddit qualities, such as for smart (or clever) comments, helpful information, humor, or goodwill... I suspect those would be bad. Where they're not bad might be non-frontpage subs that are still cruising along with their earlier communities. But those communities started in earlier Reddit, and I suspect that today would not have started there.
I think leftists who are losing their minds over Elon Musk's Twitter are a loud minority. If Nitter goes down, nothing at all will change. Twitter will continue to thrive and people will continue to use it and link to it.
I hate that Twitter is a walled garden but I understand why it is like that today as the well has been poisoned. To be honest I gave it try and it looks like today Mastodon/Bluesky are worse and Twitter better due to the migrations.
Comparing traffic, pre sale, of logged in twitter users vs traffic generated by those without accounts would give insight into what percentage of users have to take action to continue to use twitter normally.
I spent a 1-2 minutes googling and could not come up with numbers though.
I know I am part of the percentage of people that used to read twitter without an account, or at least not logged in, and now read twitter a trivial amount.
I'm struggling heavily to find the traffic statistic that I read a year or so ago, but it said that point seven to point nine percent of all Twitter traffic came from Nitter. Considering that at the time there were three different third party front ends that is no small amount, I think somewhere around thirty million visits daily.
I have misunderstood you/OP. In this case you are right. I was commenting from perspective of someone that do not have account but came across the twitter links on sites like HN.
This actually came up in a conversation yesterday, funnily enough: I'm mostly using Twitter because I'm curious as to how much worse it's going to get. So far, I've seen them allow NSFW paid-for advertisements, doxxing of well-known figures, daily crypto mention farming spam (with highly suspicious, easily-detectable patterns, spread across ~10 accounts per day), obvious engagement bait to benefit from ad-revenue sharing, fake interaction spam, and plenty more.
As an excerpt, the @support account on Twitter is completely dead, too -- if I remember correctly, the last reply to an issue was around August / June of last year. So clearly they don't have the staffing needed to support... well, the support, and they seem to have issues admitting that.
That becomes even more clear when you look at the spam on the platform: obvious spam patterns are completely ignored, with reports going to the wayside, and crypto / NFT spam being left up to victimize someone who doesn't know what it really is. It's quite grotesque.
Even though a lot of people may use the platform, quite a substantial amount of people also speak out about how much worse Twitter has got since the acquisition -- while I have nothing against Elon Musk, I find it quite amazing how badly the platform seems to be doing ever since he's been at the helm.
This is disappointing because often times people link to threads on Twitter but if you’re lucky enough to not get a login wall, the full thread wont be visible without logging in. (Which I’m not going to do)
I really wish people would just stop linking me to twitter (or better yet, stop using it altogether).
It's a terrible site though and calls to disallow submissions from there (in comments here) were common going back well before Musk took over, so the Twitter dislike originated independently of anyone's views about him.
In fairness, before Nitter (or even Musk) there was a highly inconsistent guest browsing policy on Twitter. One week you could read entire threads without logging in, the next week every inbound link would redirect to the registration page. Before Nitter I just stopped clicking Twitter links entirely, because I never knew if it would show any content.
At this point, submitting screenshots of a thread you like would unfortunately be more accessible. Shocking that we have to say that about static text content, but here we are in 2024...
I refuse to login to twitter for ethical reasons. If someone links me to a tweet I assume it’s because they thought I’d find it interesting. It’s a thoughtful act which deserves a little bit of effort on my part, so I’m willing to change the domain to see it. I’m not willing to login though. It’s a principle thing.
Ethics aren't binary nor are they black and white. I chose to draw my line where I did, you may draw yours wherever you like. I'm not here to judge, simply answering a question.
Not the OP but: because I've never wanted to post there and as far as I'm concerned there's no compelling reason I should need one and I'm so offended by Musk and his attempt to force me to get one that I would rather not read it than let him succeed.
12. Uncomfortable agreeing to their terms of service. (e.g. according to their own summary as well of the text, you are not permitted to learn from the experience of using their mobile app, e.g. about app design principles, because it is "solely for the purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the Services.")
Why make me create an account if I want to read e.g. announcements of government organizations? Many of these publish only to Twitter and don't have an RSS feed.
Twitter can't both be the de-facto successor of RSS and a walled garden enforcing signups for read-only users.
Many places require an account, many even paid like New York Times but you have all other social media offering limited views to facebook, instagram, tiktok with signing in.
Twitter isn't special in that regard. Not having Facebook or Instagram does the same thing or at least you get a very limited view. I think it's all bullshit as those networks exist because of the people are posting as a means to share.
I just want to run a headless browser that logs into my socials periodically and scrapes the stuff I want from the account I follow and puts it into a less addictive format that provides an upper limit on my possible exposure and engagement. I’m happy to run it locally from my device. Ideally it redirects links to socials I come across too. Where is such a thing?
This was the dream of RSS, but it went against the long-term business interests of the corporations hosting content, so it has since largely faded away
Outside of the tech community those see little use. Listings for my local music and arts scenes are on Instagram and Facebook. Underground community events are planned using proprietary group chats.
Free culture and open internet activists lost this battle
I started using RSS again recently for this reason. I use it for for facebook, twitter, hackernews, etc. Feedbro extension supports public facebook profiles. Nitter clones like https://farside.link/nitter/elonmusk/rss still work.
You're right. I wonder if it works for me because feedbro checks every x minutes and eventually finds a working one to refresh my feed. I wonder if the situation is getting worse and I just haven't noticed yet.
You may want social media to be pipes, not platforms.
Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers. Then, social platforms will not care if you use whatever client you desire.
Big Social shareholders don’t want it, though. Being a double-sided market is addictive, and no one can compete with them if they capture the market by not charging money.
> I like broadcast TV and radio (especially radio while driving)
If you suggest to apply the same model to social media (where they don’t get to know about a single thing about the user, strictly one way ads) then I’d be totally for it.
However, I don’t think they’ll find this model profitable enough (advertisers like to target), and because charging users is easier with social media compared to radio broadcasting the barrier to start doing that is lower.
That is, disallowing profiting from PII and only allowing one-way ads in social media, while difficult to enforce will also mean they start charging users anyway. So why not skip that model altogether.
Local broadcast models don’t work on global scale anyway.
This can be done with little AWS Lambda scripts that periodically scrape (or API) whatever sites you want and e-mail you results. All the credentials to login to whatever sites can be personal/dedicated to your instance (so no real API limits), and the usage will almost certainly fall into the AWS free tier since it's only for you.
The ideal install workflow would be to have a repo of AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the installation of the lambdas for different sites in your account. Anyone can open an AWS account, and using CloudFormation is a few fields, and a button click.
Also, if the scripts are developed properly, they are runnable locally. A sane developer will run them locally during development, and then test deployed before releasing.
With an AWS IP and a bot usage pattern they’ll surely ban your account pretty quickly or put you in front of a CAPTCHA. I wish it was as easy as a small script. Without anti-bot techniques, sites would be overflown by scraping bots. Try to scrape a Cloudflare protected site, for example. They’re really good in figuring out if you’re human or a bot. IIRC they even fingerprint your TLS handshake or cypher suite, which ultimately made me give up with headless Chrome and Puppeteer even after proxying through my residential IP, spoofing user-agent and screen size and rate limiting. Unfortunately, there’s no way to distinguish good bots for personal usage from bad bots.
In theory, anything is possible with months of developer work. The trouble is, there are billions of people addicted to social media. There aren't many widespread solutions to scrape it. Whenever a scraper becomes even remotely popular, Facebook takes action against it, as accessing posts outside the walled garden is a violation of their terms of service. Currently, I am using a combination of Feedbro and Nitter to scrape all the accounts I want to follow. They currently work with Facebook and have not been blocked.
But there is no aggregation - each user runs their own instances. For any site the offers an API, the API would need to have breaking changes to disable this, or block access from AWS.
It's easy to make work for a developer like crowd (very little time to write). It would work for most developers just fine, and could, with more considerable development time, be good for anyone.
This is what I made for myself at https://www.bulletyn.co - regular email digests of content from Reddit, HN, RSS feeds, etc. It's helped me significantly cut down the amount of time I spend on Reddit particularly.
I had been planning to add Twitter before the API changes...alas.
I want the vision that Rabbit is selling, a headless browser that periodically scrolls through my socials and have AI assemble all entries into a readable digest. I would settle for manually scrolling through my timetime to a screen recorder that OCRs all the text and removes the fluff.
That sounds like a case of be the change you wish to see. Such a project sounds rather substantial, not only initially but also in upkeep. Might want to be more specific, such as "does this exist for my favorite social network called <insert network here>?"
I wonder if Youtube will ever do the same with Invidious by requiring an account for people to view videos.
Sure, it might seen unthinkable for this to happen in 2024, but give it more 5 or 10 years and I could see this being something acceptable to the eyes of the average user. I don't like the direction the internet is going :\
Oh yeah, I see it as inevitable. I'm blown away that YouTube is still accessible without an account. It's only a matter of time, though, I'd wager. I never thought Twitter would require an account to view its content.
It's not the same site, but it's the same company: one thing that caught my attention lately is those little messages nagging you whenever you access Google without being logged in. And... those sorta passive aggressive behavior always start like this. Like, "Oh, why don't you log in? It's good for you, log in!", and as the time passes that behavior just gets more and more hostile towards the user until you end up reaching twitter/instagram levels.
You can try to guess the reason for such high temperature user boiling, it's not hard.
There is a single TOS and privacy agreement for all Google services. If you “just” log in to Chrome to synchronize history because “it's convenient”, you also allow everything else, including AdSense and other all-across-the-web tracking. By formally becoming a client, you lose most of legal protections against indiscriminate data collection.
Oh yeah, that's right! I've noticed those nag modals are filling over 1/3 of my screen! On all kinds of sites! So coercive and manipulative. I can see why some people just browse with JS disabled and just forget about sites that require it.
People have learned to auto-click OK long before cookie banners. Also, cookie banners are not the fault of the EU, but the malicious compliance of companies.
Why would they want to lose out on the additional ad revenue of not-logged-in users? As long as they manage to generate ad impressions, I don't think they care all that much.
Yes, assume every video you watch and like is going to get deleted in a week or month or year, or whatever. We don't know the timeline but it's really not a question of "if", just when.
> I don't like the direction the internet is going :\
Haven't read "The Internet Con" yet but apparently Cory Doctorow has some ideas what can be done about this direction.
> We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet. [1]
Maybe this is a good moment to reconsider the acceptance of X links on HN. If users without accounts have no way to read the content, why redirect people there en-masse?
Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.
I'm gonna guess that these guest accounts might be the reason 'usage is at an all time high' according to musk, but seems to be falling according to everyone else.
Websites like Quora, Instagram, TikTok, and now X, work against the idea of an open Web. Content is increasingly concentrated into separated silos. But I understand why it's happening: People who don't have an account can't receive personalized ads.
> FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.
Very true. Using the openness when it’s convenient and actively shutting the door behind you, it’s one of the most morally reprehensible things that one can do in a shared ecosystem.
I'm not even mad at them that they want to pay the bills. What I find sad was the method they have used: capture community as big as possible and then sell the community.
So many people and orgs fell for that. Now the 'squares' are closed. There is no public internet, just niches.
Yeah it's sad. I hope Musk reverses course for X. At least in showing threads, not necessarily for individual user feeds. Perhaps when the platform is in a better financial position.
Has there been any guides about self-hosting Nitter and using your own personal account, rather than trying to generate a bunch of guest accounts?
I ask because while I no longer use Twitter, I have been using the RSS feature from Nitter to follow a few accounts that aren't available elsewhere. So if there's any way to keep doing that, I'd appreciate it if anyone has a solution. And I really don't want to login to Twitter anymore.
Keep in mind that Twitter might ban you for doing that. They really don't like anything that could be considered scraping (unless you pay them a lot of money).
They asked about using their personal account. The README does not mention this.
And without a personal account, you won't have any luck with self-hosting this, as guest accounts don't work anymore.
Just accept that it's lost. Like tears in the rain, yada yada. Some people don't want permanent chains of information, they prefer sand mandalas that are broken after completion.
After all, it's just a big fake bullshit. There are “fabulous kids clubs” in school. There are “limited membership” snake oil selling and paper medal awarding companies. There are social network services relying on invites and other stuff to make public believe being there is something valuable. It is clear as day that Twitter is at the stage where it has to inflate usage stats by requiring sign-in, and hold user data hostage because it's one of the remaining ways to make some money. If people decide to have a nice chat in a building that is getting demolished without thinking about consequences, it's their choice, after all.
All historic MySpace data was thrown out at some point. Have people killed themselves over that? No, they simply forgot. And you will forget all that, too.
What do you mean by important? If it's something related to public safety (civil defence for instance) then it's a real issue that you as a citizen should fight. For everything else you could just stop engaging and hope that enough others do for the content creators to get the message.
Unfortunately, waiting for them to ‘get the message’ is a losing battle.
The main issue i find is that non-tech related folks just don’t care enough about this stuff to move to different platform.
Yeah, it's unfortunate as it took years for governments/municipalities/orgs etc. to start posting stuff to Twitter and embracing that modern "information pipeline" (as opposed to, at best, a rarely-updated website). Now it's taking years for them to adopt or figure out a self-hosted/self-owned alternative.
Often people who witness live event report what they witness on twitter. Like the boston massacre or Jan 6th attack had a lot of people reporting important eyewitness post right on social media
And with that twitter is once again dead to me.. Not even by choice. The layout/UI is utter crap and my computer hates it. I refuse to use it. For a short time i was able to read things.. guess it's back to nothing again. lol
What's frustrating about social media closing off public access is that, most of the time, they don't even do it correctly--instead of showing a dialog or a message to sign in to view content, they just straight up show an unclear, ambigous error message. Twitter and Instagram does this AFAIK.
Also a bit OOT but there is also something that I think needed to be said: search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.
A good example of the enshittification of Twitter:
Instead of improving their UI / loading times / privacy standards, they just cut all alternatives off.
Just like reddit.
The user needs are treated like a child would - If I can't see them they're not there.
My bet is if they won't find a new niche, administer themselves (much unwoke, such legal battles, wow) instead of adapting to the users' needs. Eventually, a better option comes along and Twitter falls into oblivion.
Maybe they get some political money along the way.
A real shame, I've been using Nitter to check lots of art accounts, but even with https://twiiit.com/ I find myself reloading it multiple times to find an instance that's not rate limited.
Would a self-hosted private instance of Nitter be an option to avoid rate limits, or are Twitter accounts being penalized for using any third-party API client?
yes but those extra steps make the difference. those extra steps are the entire point. The difference between using the blessed client and using a preferred client that previously accessed the platform via an API is those steps!
Are there any services that make daily twitter digests out of lists that doesn't cost arm and leg in terms of API access? I've been running a pretty hacky google sheet script to parse nitter list rss on supported instances, but guess that's going to be DOA in the coming days.
It's just like the fediverse, what you see depends on where you hang out around. I can easily find extremely bad corners of the fediverse but again, that's not representative
It's weird to say but the "worst" parts (as in, questionably legal content and not just controversial content) in my experience has been in non English speaking instances. But just think of basically any community and they have a mastodon spin off, especially they have been deplatformed somewhere else.
Dunno who you followed, but my little corner of twitter is not gross at all. A lot of smart people, doing cool things, and linking to interesting stuff.
AFAIK you can't curate stuff in 4chan by following/muting/blocking, so it's more like reddit or HN than twitter.
I don’t follow anyone on Twitter or even look at it. Content from there just feels slimy. Usually if someone posts a link, it’s something popular or viral, and that means the comments section will be filled with all kinds of crap. Right now I prefer Threads.
So a place on the Internet that's still fun? It's sad you're so serious that you're grossed out by that.
You might be from the Tumblr side of the tracks, a place of humorless, distributed Orwellian purity testing and virtue signalling where people sublimate their depression and anxiety disorders by trying to police and cancel each other online while pretending they're making the world a better place. That's way less gross than just having a good time. :D
Sad. Used to browse since it was so nice and easy. Strangely they didn't accept one off donations only monthly. Musk has dismantled left control over Twitter but this is a side effect.
Uninstalled Reddit app it was battery draining plus slow.
On one hand, this is unfortunate since X always directs me to a login page, and Nitter was the only way I could view whatever gets posted nowadays. On the other hand, the cynical side of me is thankful that I have no more desirable means to see the contents of posts on X.
Edit: a similar thing happened with Reddit and Teddit(?). API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore. I am aware of old.reddit.com, but in the case of Reddit I preferred the alternative frontends not only for no-JS compatibility, but also a (possibly false) sense of privacy
There's a weird world of outrage about twitter ... on twitter by people who keep providing content for twitter. I don't get that.
The further downside being that all the alternatives I've dipped my toes in, the content is pretty much similar to twitter and all the alternatives are offering are various back end type differences, but the same content. So personally I'm not particularly happy with those either.
People are working through their grief, knowing that a utility that is essentially the modern postal service was sold to someone who is essentially the modern Hearst.
But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square” (before someone tries to bring up that terrible analogy too) and really doesn’t deserve people’s grief. It’s yet another corporate-owned and controlled messaging app and we are seeing the inevitable result of that control.
I've found no substitute for getting breaking news on a specific topic (e.g. natural disasters, war, politics, sport). Google News is second best, but the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter.
Zite was my favourite app from many, many years ago. But it was good at collating daily reading, not for up to the minute/second curation.
For certain topics that are time sensitive, I haven't found anything that comes close to twitter.
> the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter
Genuine question: who cares?
There is almost no news where the difference between getting it now, twenty minutes from now, or tonight makes a meaningful differ to your life. Much of the information in the first twenty minutes of an event will be confusing, misleading, and/or wrong.
E.g., when I saw police helicopter that seemed to be doing a low altitude search pattern about 300 m away, and a TV news helicopter hovering higher up in the same area, I wanted to know if this was something I needed to be concerned about.
A quick search on Twitter and I found a recent tweet about gunfire in a store in that area and a shooter on the loose.
it’s not just big news though, twitter was very useful for hyper local news in cities… to the point that if there were helicopters overhead or some loud noise nearby… usually someone posted about it on twitter - this has been irreplaceable for me, I know less about what’s around me now
Trivial, but salient: sale drops for things like electronics or tickets. The only reason I got Pax East passes in 2014 is because I got a Twitter alert. They were gone 10 minutes later. An email alert showed up a half-hour later. I'm sure people have had similar experiences with more significant events.
True for the most part. But occasionally there's good reason to want to know some information sooner rather than later: outbreaks of war, dangerous/breaking events in your localised area, dangerous weather alerts etc.
Twitter was useful when you didn't know the source. Keyword searches brought you everyone talking about a topic, and trending showed you topics people were talking about (and, by extension, the people talking about them). Not everything that might be significant to you is necessarily going to be discussed within your close networks or covered adequately by media-of-record.
If CNN has decided not to cover the protest happening outside your downtown office and you don't want to go up to a rowdy crowd to figure out what's going on, Twitter would (have) be(en) the place to drum up intel (with which to decide if you need to go home early that day or not).
Twitter was great for reporting on court cases. For example, last year the Biden administration essentially made millions of Americans into felons via an obscure ATF rule change. The rule has since been enjoined by at least three federal courts, which anyone who follows @2aupdates would know about because he crawls the PACER feeds. My local newspaper has been following this story, but as recently as last week reported that the rule was still in effect. I submitted a correction and they fixed it.
Twitter was really good for some things. For example, there was a thread yesterday contrasting public data on fertility rates with the latest official data as collected by Twitter users. In short, the UN, Macrotrends and CIA World Factbook are publishing data that is extremely inaccurate. For example, Macrotrends reports that China's TFR was 1.7 in 2023, when the official data says it was 1.09. Accounts like @morebirths and @birthgauge even report estimated fertility based on monthly data so following those accounts is like having a time machine.
I don't really get into the news enough to want a real time feed. Even if I did, I think I'd look for something more reliable than a collection of posts from Twitter users. It probably even goes deeper than not getting into news for me though, because heck, I don't even watch much TV really.
But I am into sports. And I think the best real time sports feeds out there are the reddit game threads. Now maybe the threads on X are better for some people? I don't know? But reddit game threads are far superior for my purposes. ie - Finding out if everyone else is thinking "What The Actual F--- was that?" Whenever Drew Allar threw the ball in a bowl game for instance.
Similar to you not having found a substitute for news over Twitter, I haven't found a substitute for reddit game threads where these kinds of sanity checks are concerned.
This is a void that should be filled but is akin to tv or news paper of the past which were as close as you could get to breaking and also privately owned.
The tech is there now for the government and other entities to distribute with open protocols or things like rss, but Twitter never was that
> But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square”
Yes and no. The thing that makes a social media useful (not necessarily good) is the same thing that makes it hard to leave: userbase. Centralization.
I think it would be weird if people __weren't__ upset. You act as if it is easy to make a collective decision to move platforms. I can't get a collective decision in my friend group for where we should go get food and drinks, and that requires far lower consensus and the stakes/effort needed are much lower. People also frequently complain about places they visit in real life, including restaurants they frequent.
> It’s yet another corporate-owned
Btw, being privately owned doesn't mean it isn't a public space.[0] This should be a bit unsurprising when we look around places and how people organize. People go where other people are, full stop. Doesn't matter if it is public or private property (clear example being malls or cafes). Doesn't matter of online or offline. The major difference is we don't treat online spaces as abstracted versions of offline spaces despite them often being built to serve as that exact thing.
Not really a utility, but it meant that someone at the parks and rec department with virtually zero computer skills could let everyone know when things were closed due to rain and when they were open again.
Yeah, in 2008 when we signed up for it, we didn't realize the implications of that -- now we're learning, between Myspace, FB, and now Twitter. I made a LOT of connections on Twitter, a lot of meaningful interactions, and it absolutely had a large effect on my life. It's without a doubt one of the biggest disappointments to me in modern web/internet tech, that it has gradually been eroded into the trash it is now. Well, as I can say about so many things, "it was good while it lasted".
While I don't disagree, it requires that both the members of government and the public have a decent technical literacy. I'm not sure how true this is even on HN.
I'd personally love to see the government build a lot of frameworks that can be considered "public goods" and be less reliant on private entities who must generate a profit. I happily pay taxes to serve many networks which operate as natural monopolies, such as roads. I'd also be happy to have that extended to such things as telecommunications. I'd happily pay more taxes if it got rid of my phone bill or internet bill. Though I'd say that personally this is conditioned on them being E2EE and privacy focused, since I consider that information having a higher potential for abuse in a single governmental entity than distributed among corporate powers (even if they still want to abuse it, they can do less and there are competitors).
I disagree. I find Mastodon to be much more like the Twitter of '08 that we all loved.
It's like watching over the shoulder of a stranger as they go about their day. But you're welcome there! You can say hi and the stranger is happy to have you.
It's real people sharing their weird hobbies. The often-boring minutiae of their daily life. Their feelings and hopes and dreams.
I've made friends. I feel like I know people. I love it.
It's the same enshittification we're always talking about now. Something you once enjoyed strategically turns to shit once it believes people are too locked in and docile to leave.
Yep, it will be easier to cut the X habit off. I'll miss Nitter, but I'll be happier in the long run.
I was a Reddit Apollo user, and it was easier to wean off of Reddit when I had to use their horrible app or their website. Even using old.reddit has been painful.
I lurk Reddit for local news without ever logging in. They recently started restricting anonymous users to a limited amount of comments on long threads. That finally motivated me to switch to Firefox plugins that re-layout old.reddit.com to be usable on mobile. Thanks Reddit for the much improved free web experience.
> Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.
Intersting, I haven't had a single person leave. People make a big fuss about leaving, but the traffic you get from Twitter is too attractive to leave.
> What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.
As I said, that's because you're not using lists. It's literally impossible to see posts from accounts you don't like if you're using lists.
As a journalist who has been involved in newsroom analytics at three organizations since Twitter launched, I can assure you that most online news outlets have seen very little to no referral traffic from Twitter in nearly a decade. Journalists love to point to some viral retweet of their story, but most of the time: the number of likes/retweets > actual referrer traffic.
i follow about a thousand physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, try searching keywords like “quantum mechanics” and then “follow all” when recommended. Really no place like twitter for math/science content
Tweeting screenshots of text demonstrates how poor a platform Twitter is, IMO. A core feature -- sharing text -- must sometimes be done in the least efficient way possible, as an image or a series of tweets (that can only be viewed while signed in).
> must sometimes be done in the least efficient way possible, as an image or a series of tweets
Try tiktok and instagram, they’re to kids these days what twitter was to us 10 years ago. There’s a huge trend on those platforms of people sharing a single tweet as a 20s video with a face grimacing and pointing at the text as commentary.
Literally 280char of content turned into a 20s full screen selfie video.
There's also a much higher character limit for paying users, so you can post an entire essay in a tweet now. Look at basically everything Bill Ackman[1] posts, for example.
"Yeah, the best content is on twitter, you have everything from links to Medium to links to personal websites, sometimes there's even screenshots of them!"
You know how Stallman browses the web by emailing a scraper that replies only the text? And he avoids all the Medium flurry of popups and overlays and trackers and cookies and other rubbish?
Seeing a screenshot of the text in Twitter accidentally does that too, and provides a better experience than visiting the site for anyone who doesn't need to customise the text for readability.
Can you please not cross into arguing that way, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are? I know how frustrating it can be to defend a minority position (believe me I know this well), but even in that case the onus is on you to remain thoughtful and respectful. If you're feeling to strongly to do that, this is understandable, but in that case please wait to post until you can.
I mostly follow L7+ SWEs, creators of popular tech like dynamoDB, and professors in AI/systems/DB/PL. The ones who tried to move to sites like mastodon eventually came back, or are now using twitter much more than these alternatives. There's been more top SWEs and professors especially in AI and systems sharing content there.
Noticed as well that twitter is also more optimistic about tech than HN, especially with subcultures like e/acc, learning/building in public, etc.
> Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.
That has been my experience as well. Easily. I learned a ton about LLMs, open source projects, growth hacks, marketing tips, a lot of great from the trenches lessons. Best site on the web.
Yep exactly. I’m also a big formula 1 fan and it’s the only place where I can get insight from engineers who are involved in the day to day of building race cars for ex.
Reddit’s f1 subreddit has really degraded in quality unfortunately (just people posting clickbait articles).
It’s the same for investing, politics, cars, poker and everything else I enjoy.
I follow subject matter experts on Mastodon/ActivityPub. Scientists, engineers, librarians, mathematicians, doctors, programmers, designers, artists, musicians, retro computing enthusiasts, amateur radio operators, etc. etc.... They've been migrating away from Twitter for a long time, because it has shown us how horribly "millions of people in the same room" works out, especially when a sociopathic algorithm rewards conflict and sensationalism at the expense of thought/consideration and kindness.
1) There are people who dislike E. Musk but you can't know whether the downvoters are those people or not.
2) Twitter hasn't shutdown, but you can't know if that's connected to the downvotes.
3) Same as 2)
4) You can't know that the parent was downvoted for happily using Twitter.
For something which claims to be "the reason and reality", it's really "things I imagine are the reason without evidence, because that lets me feel superior to strawHN users". The reason I'm writing this is to intercept you going "downvoted for telling the truth" because what you are telling isn't the truth.
> For something which claims to be "the reason and reality", it's really "things I imagine are the reason without evidence, because that lets me feel superior to strawHN users".
By inspecting the greyed out comments and its content, you can find your evidence of this by simply seeing more of the flagged / dead comments supporting Twitter / X. No explicit admitting is needed.
Thus, this is indeed an over-reaction to the four facts and given the HN sentiment has already been cemented to detest the fact that Twitter / X did not shutdown as incorrectly predicted and any user reminding of this or praising Twitter / X and still likes using it gets downvoted. They will never admit to downvoting themselves.
> The reason I'm writing this is to intercept you going "downvoted for telling the truth" because what you are telling isn't the truth.
When faced with the harsh reality that Twitter / X is still running after 2 years of a prediction of its collapse perhaps that truth hurts many folks here the most.
You are missing the fact that, for many of us who used to enjoy Twitter in exactly the way you described, X no longer fills that need, because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform, and all that remains are people whose real-time thoughts we don't generally want to hear.
That may differ from your experience - your real-time expert community might be different than mine.
But for a lot of us who actually used to enjoy Twitter, what you're describing is no longer to be found there.
Nah, you're probably wrong about HN users not knowing how to use Twitter. You're assuming the worst - perhaps assume that people have good reasons for avoiding it and ask what those might be?
I have about 5k followers on Twitter and have posted roughly 10k tweets over the last 16 years of having an account there. I'm pretty familiar with how to use it. I've moved to mastodon - the part of Twitter I used to value is a dumpster fire, many of my colleagues have moved, and I don't want to contribute to monetizing hateful garbage. And that includes preferring not to log in, which means threads don't show up any more. So it was nitter or nothing.
I used to use Twitter and I simply disagree with it being more useful than HN. I suppose it depends on the focus of content you want to learn or read about
For me it's the abysmal SNR no matter where I look, except if it absolutely needs to be real-time. Even considering just the "content" and ignoring the unfathomable interface that we're left with now.
It’s HN. Everyone here has encountered many true believers who, when confronted with a criticism of their favorite tool, responds “well, you are using it wrong. Change your workflow to match mine, which is superior anyway, and then you’ll see.”
It’s tiresome, and I for one have little patience for someone patronizingly suggesting that I'm being stubborn for refusing to allow them to enlighten me.
Is that what you were doing? Maybe not. But you certainly matched my regex, so to speak.
I've recently learned that Twitter can actually be quite good for building genuine connections online, but it takes a very conscious effort and a lot of diligence
I was cynical about X like that too, but recently learned some good techniques that make a lot of difference to the overall experience. And then there's really nothing like it, in terms of reach.
Also, it's easy to see bad in everything, and then all we see is bad. But there're good things to find as well, it's just a matter of what we focus on..
Ironically enough, to me what it bothers me the most on twitter is how bad and slow its front-end is. Sure, I'm not a fan of having to use an account, but if twitter at least had a nitter instance, like literally the same front-end, I would have way less problems with that.
While it is unmaintained now due to the API changes, Libreddit (reddit frontend) is still working for me. Granted, I self-host it, and I'm the only user so I never hit the rate limit, but no issues at all, save for some of the changes reddit has made (namely the new share links)
The repository says at the top in a HUGE FONT that "Libreddit is currently not operational" and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page. The issue tracker talks of forking and stuff. Doesn't feel too welcoming or functional.
But in actuality it works just fine? Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?
If they don't want you to use their API just respect their wishes and scrape Reddit. https://github.com/JosephLai241/URS it's the only moral thing we can do.
I think that message was to let users know it's basically on it's last legs and could 100% stop at anytime. When the API changes started, most all of the instances ran into rate limits due to the number of requests. But it works just fine until that rate is hit.
Like I mentioned, I've been running my own private instance and I've never hit the rate limit so it's been working fine for me.
And I don't know about any API key. AFAIK, Libreddit uses the publicly available JSON, no need for a key (hence why it's read-only). Since it's still working for me, those JSON endpoints must still be available, just highly rate limited now
Oh, that's cool! Sounds like it should suffice for my usage also, which is extraordinarily light since they shut down reddit-is-fun. I've mostly replaced that with mastodon, not the same concept but serves a similar "let's scroll and see what's new" function.
After doing some analysis (a while ago) on reddit comment/submission rates before and after the boycott and new rate limits, it seems either only a tiny tiny fraction actually left reddit and/or reddit benefited from the negative publicity as much as or more than they lost. Since nothing has changed since then, I suppose there's no point in me staying off the platform anymore, especially if I'm not contributing with OC submissions or comments. Libreddit sounds like a good way to do that, thanks :)
One of the top search results was this page, <https://libreselfhosted.com/project/libreddit/>, which links to <https://libredd.it> as homepage. Domain sounds plausible so I just assumed that's the official one. The project github page has as "website" one of their tickets listed... can't say if that website field once contained something different
twitter and facebook have mostly been garbo for me, what i would like to know is where are the interesting mathematicians and software engineers posting now? or have they had enough too. i suspect that may be the case.
> API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.
They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.
Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.
Well the “experts” among us here, WaPo, and the NYT predicted Twitter would surely collapse after firing their SREs and admin that were crucial to keeping the servers running. Any day now Twitter will collapse and all of us will be saved. Surely
Here's a challenge: find an article from either wapo or nyt which actually predicted a sure collapse. And I mean a collapse as you said rather than issues with operations. (which they had many of since the takeover) I may have missed one if it exists, but I'd bet they didn't publish anything that certain.
The first link is reporting about users panicking and one of the few comments from NYT itself is "Though there are no official signs that Twitter is going anywhere,...".
The second documents actual issues and makes no predictions.
Even the third one which is just an opinion piece about how bad of a decision maker Elon is doesn't come close to suggesting a collapse.
For the “Newspaper of Record” to report such fantastical news stories, as if anecdotal reports and opinions are real news, shows the obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.
Why write such articles at all? It’s “The NYT never said it would collapse, they just reported numerous articles implying it MIGHT collapse and everyone says it will!” OK!
Knowing what many people believe is itself useful, especially if you annotate it with "there are no signs that this is actually going to happen".
> obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.
Yet, you can't show me an article that says this. Is this left wing media obsession, or is this what you believe about NYT? Twitter was a hot topic and they reported on what's happening there. It's not like there were many positive things to say since the takeover.
Sure sure, down the memory hole. No one said Twitter would collapse after firing 7500 people. Everyone assumed it would be fine. All of these articles were simply conjecture, just something to speculate.
When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.
> When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.
The sources you presented failed to substantiate your argument, and instead of looking for different ones or considering you might be mistaken, you've doubled down.
Are you quite sure you are willing to take a hard look at uncomfortable facts and hazard having your mind changed?
Sorry but the 'twitter will die any day now' narrative was utterly pervasive across reddit and endless media sources were cited on a daily basis in the 6-month period that followed the buyout. It was basically the _only_ topic on r/whitepeopletwitter which had 3+ posts hit the frontpage daily.
It isn't something you can gaslight away. Everyone who was there saw it. It happened.
Interestingly enough most of the reddit posts were deleted after 3 days once they'd fallen off the frontpage. It didn't matter, there were always more being made lol. Does make it awfully hard to cite, though. Odd.
None of these 3 articles "predict a sure collapse".
One of them reports on what twitter users were saying, one reports on technical problems occurring at that time, and one is an opinion piece titled "Elon Musk Has No Idea What He’s Doing at Twitter" (but which doesn't predict a collapse AFAICT).
They just had a very high-profile event involving deepfake porn of one of the world's most popular musical artists. They appear to have belatedly responded to this by shutting down all searches of that famous artist's name. This does not suggest an organization that has the capacity to quickly or effectively manage the systems they are running.
The reason why all adspace isn't priced equally is because of tracking either done by the seller of the adspace or the buyer of the adspace. This has been the case for hundreds of years. The buyer wants to make sure that their ad spend is reaching the maximum amount of people who are likely to end up in an conversion.
We are specifically talking about individual-level tracking in this conversation. You can also track the efficacy of an ad by, for example, placing a special link in the ad and watching how many people use that link, but that's a completely different subject and not what we're talking about here. That type of "tracking" is not dependent on whether website users are logged in or surveilled in any way.
Yes, of course, because it's two products bundled as one. You're charging for ad space in addition to a service where you track your visitors individually and build profiles about them. But obviously many people continue to make money by just selling ad space without providing this accompanying service.
But it also seems bad for customer acquisition to close off twitter. None of us outside the organization know if the cost is offset, but this is certainly not the typical SV playbook.
Dear customer, your system is too old to run 20 third party browser fingerprinting libraries in parallel with OS window manager and GUI toolkit re-implemented in Javascript. Please use our service on a recent enough device capable of browser fingerprinting.
After reading about the person running HN threatening local government officials maybe none of us should be using any server owned by HN either.
If we use servers owned by Twitter/X does that mean we identify with the political ideologies of whomever owns it servers.
As it happens, there is no need to touch any server owned by KF when using nitter.poast.org. So you should be safe.
Maybe we should revoke Section 230 and require that server owners take legal responsibility for the behaviours of the people who use them. That would spell the end of Twitter/X. Then we would not have to use Nitter instances. Problem solved!
Wow, I did not know that. It is just an instance that seems to work better than all the others I tried.
There was a submission about KF a while ago and it summoned an army of impromptu commenters that literally took over the thread, suppressing any negative commentary. Interesting PR strategy.
TBH, I do not use Twitter much at all. It's only when I'm checking something someone submitted to HN. Would be nice if people stopped submitting "tweets". There is rarely anything worth reading in them. Often it's just someone sharing a URL. Why not submit the URL instead.
