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Ask HN: Nitter officially declared "over" today – alternatives?
300 points by bookaway 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 328 comments
There were often "rate-limited" errors that hadn't completely prevented the site from being usable since the nitter people said the site would go down eventually.

Now however there is an official declaration on the site itself: https://nitter.cz/

Due to the reasons stated by Nitter itself on their repo, it seems unlikely there will alternatives.

Are there any currently?




It's over.

It isn't just Twitter, it's every single website that's turned themselves into a login-walled "application".

Twitter's relative openness lasted a long time. It was open by default because it is a product built in 2006, when the idea of coralling people into walled gardens to show them ads didn't exist.

Apps built later take the concept of "walled garden" as a default feature. Slack , Discord, Snapchat, Tiktok, Telegram .... all largely closed off platforms. You can't see anything unless you're logged in.


But Twitter is an ad-driven platform. Most of those other ones are not. It's ALL about the exposure to eyeballs. But now that Elon chewed on some wires and killed whole colocations, they are not able to serve all that traffic that is supposed to view the ads - for all the talk about how "Twitter is still running like it used to" after being gutted like a fish. It is definitely not.


Well it probably doesn't help that they're now riddled with bots. About 6 months after the Musk takeover I've started to receive 2-3 likes a day from bots and a follow every week. I only have an academic account so my bot interaction vastly outweighs my non-bot interaction. I stopped reporting them because they still exist.

The big change I saw was that they no longer suggest to me 30 other bots with the same profile picture when I click on the bot's page but instead suggest I follow other researchers. I guess a slight improvement, but only visually. It's weird to see him talk about how bots are so harmful to the platform, see that the platform is identifying bots, but then not see any action. These are accounts that can be identified via a naive bayes filter too, so pretty low hanging fruit. But then again, same thing is happening to my gmail.


There is a financial incentive to ignore bots.

The investment banks and advertiser's want to know how many eyeballs the site has, and counting bots too increases that number and hence the company valuation.


I'm more taking about the hypocrisy since Elon made a huge deal about bots


Once upon a time, you could go to Twitter as a non-registered user by clicking on an embed in another application, view the post, and then click on the user's post and see all their interactions without ever registering or logging in.

Today, you get to see the one post, and if you're lucky, it will give you a few of their most highly interacted posts. If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms, especially when the platform in question is losing relevance and isn't unique. What genius! Not only did he make the ads less valuable, but his behavior has created less competition for the ad slots that people actually see.

I've watched while shaking my head as a former employer has taken a similar approach and absolutely cratered their online business. I warned them that it was going to end in disaster. I provided the evidence that we'd used to make decisions against exactly what they were attempting to do. I can't unstupid them.


> If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important.

To serve you ads that have any hope of making money, they need to know which eyeballs they're going in front of.


No they don't. People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters wouldn't exist. You can even make money on the internet this way: www.ethicalads.io.

Twitter also has an enormous advantage: even if they don't know anything about you, they know a whole bunch about whoever posted the tweets you're reading. They could do a lot of targeting by just looking at the content you're viewing.


Network television is enormously expensive and entirely paid by ads without knowledge of the viewers. Instead they make assumptions based on surveys of demographics and manage to be very profitable.

I wonder if you could make a comparison of ratings of a TV show to active users of a website. For example: is Twitter the equivalent of daytime TV, or multiple series-finale-of-Friends per day.

*edit: it looks like they are the equivalent of 0.8 Friends finale / day. 41m daily active users vs 51m viewers of the Friends finale.


> People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters

Billboards and bus stop posters are cheaper to run than Twitter.com is, so making much less money is ok.

The whole reason Twitter has always been unprofitable but Facebook/Meta is a trillion-dollar public company is that FB figured out how profitably identify users and serve them ads and Twitter didn't.


I agree with you, it is unquestionably more profitable to spy on people and then sell them ads. My point is that you can still make money without the spying part, and there is no reason for us to accept that the two always have to be bundled. If you can't make a profit without spying on people then your business model sucks. The fact that you might be able to make more money by being less ethical is not very interesting, that's true of almost anyone.


It absolutely matters if someone is logged in. 3rd party cookie blocking on Safari, Chrome and Firefox has crushed the ability for advertisers to do remarketing with any level of precision. That was where you didn't need the user to be logged in, you just needed to match their cookie ID on Twitter.com with the cookie ID passed on by Site X, which the user had visited previously.

Nowadays, Advertisers upload customer lists with email, phone numbers and other identifiers into Twitter Ads for ad targeting. Twitter shows those advertisers' ads to logged-in users that have the same email/phone # or other identifier.

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/campaign...

Anything else is effectively untargeted and useless.


They already have the only information they really need, which is what you've requested to look at. If I'm following someone who tweets about X you can safely guess that I'm interested in X and target me with ads related to that without ever knowing my identity.


There may be a reason there's no social media network that does this.


It may be that it wasn't feasible on large scale to match content to ads. I feel like recent advanced in machine learning and ai could change the game there.

What were describing is essentially how television ads worked for decades, isn't it? You know the content, so you can identify the demographics and advertise properly. Podcast and YouTube sponsor deals often work that way too (not always, but that's on the advertiser).


To some extent they very often do use the type of content you consume for various things, but they don't use that data exclusively because they can make far more money by collecting, leveraging, and/or selling every scrap of personal data they can get their hands on and money is really all they care about.


Interesting that something initially seen as a privacy victory has ended up harming the experience of anonymous internet browsing.


Still a privacy victory, and if they want to annoy me I'll just go somewhere else, that's fine.


Cookies do this for them.


> Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms

The continuing decline of reddit makes me suspect people are much more tolerant of being bullied than you think. when old.reddit.com is finally killed off (it already seems to be getting less functional) I'll stop going there entirely too.


People ceaselessly cry about reddit and its moderation while anyone is perfectly free to start a community of their own and moderate it to their own heart's content. I've seen no real decline in reddit. It's generally the same mindless shithole it was 10 years ago, while the communities which have had steady moderation haven't changed at all.


The quality of individual subreddits has a very wide range, but it's the admin side of things that just get worse and worse. Anyone can create a community but you can't escape the way they run the site.

Over time more and more subreddits get shutdown for questionable reasons, censorship creeps in more often, long standing problems with moderation go entirely unaddressed (both in terms of problematic moderators/moderation and in terms of the lack of tools/resources available to moderators), transparency, communication, and integrity get worse all the time, nice features get removed, obnoxious new ones get added, etc. Even old.reddit.com is starting to become broken.

If you're lucky you can still find some great little subreddits, and maybe they'll even be allowed to stick around, too many good users won't get chased off, and they don't degrade in quality much as the site itself gets worse around them. There's still no good reddit alternatives but I'm still hoping we'll get one soon.


It’s somewhat intriguing how long they’ve kept old reddit alive. I had figured it’d get the axe fairly soon after they made the redesign the default, even if they claimed otherwise. I suspect there must be a contingent of users who are big contributors or otherwise important, who they believe will leave if they shut it down.


I suspect they have loads of data showing that contributors use old Reddit and cat video watchers use new Reddit.

And they haven't chosen to cater only to the watchers, yet.


It's not really that ad driven anymore since most of the advertisers have gone to fuck themselves as musk told them to :)

But seriously, if they want to increase revenue it probably is more effective to not insult their advertisers than it is to make a login mandatory.


Slack, Discord, Snapchat, Telegram are not open forums as their main selling point. They are 1 to 1 or group/community chat applications first. So relatively scoped or even private. It's like a blog vs icq/irc.


And yet Discord has become a de-facto forum replacement for niche topics/communities.

...Which is awful.

As is often said here, Discord is where information goes to die.


It's horrible that a lot of web development tools and libraries keep the discussions only on discord.


Add Reddit to the list. Lately, I get "Whoa pardner" treatment whenever I try to read it without logging in. But at least you can still create an account without a phone and without even an email. AI is evil and already makes us all suffer.


Forget them all. If it isn't on the open web it's a private club.


Actually in case of Telegram you could open in browser public channels.

Example: https://t.me/s/durov/ https://t.me/s/telegram/


It’s because of AI scraping.

Wait until you realize ‘verified’ paid accounts will be a necessity in the future to prove personhood unless we toss it all in the wind and create a national id system which guess what, you’ll be tracked by.

Which way brave one? You will lose an arm or a leg. You get to choose


Why should Twitter care about AI scraping, beyond the load it causes to their servers? Scraping isn't new, and I don't think the overall rate of scraping has changed much since the advent of AI - it only needs to be scraped once, then it's in a dataset (I don't have any stats to back this up, though)


According to Musk, below:

Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said. “It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation. Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience."

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day

- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day

- New unverified accounts to 300/day


If you have a company building AI on top of Twitter's data, it could've been a company Twitter itself could've built. It's the feeling of lost money for them.


The API has been wide open until 2023, so if there was anything of value, I think we would have seen something by now. Musk would also have been focused on that instead of trying to become WeChat US.


I think you're overestimating the value of raw text.

A large unsorted dataset is not "free" for AI companies. Without API access there's very little useful information that can be scraped from a tweet.

In my opinion, Twitter just wanted to convert lurkers to make it look like the platform isn't dying.


I'm not convinced AI scraping has anything to do with it. A company resourceful enough to develop & train AI is fully capable of setting up infrastructure to massively create bot accounts to bypass the loginwall.


As if paying 5 bucks is going to be tough for an agent.


> Which way brave one?

Probably the same way my grandparents did.


You can see plain text Telegram (and Twitter?) posts by a direct link without login.

You cannot do that anymore to FB or Instagram posts.


twitter is the best shit that startups culture ever produced for developer healthyness

built with rails

full restful API and good docs


You must be new and young, most internet communities have always been login-walled or otherwise inaccessible to the wider public.

Why? Nowadays it's to combat freeloading "AI" data scraping, but more predominantly it's been to fight spam and scraping of data in general.

So no, nothing is over. If anything, we're getting back to the status quo of 20 years ago when most forums required you to make an account to enter.


Here's a list of open-access communities I grew up on:

Hacker News, Myspace, LiveJournal, XDA-Developers, RateyourMusic/AbsolutePunk forums, and about a thousand phpBB/vBuletin boards from 20 years ago. Every single one of these is close to 20 years old.

It is in fact the "new and young" that think they need to "download the app" and "join the community" for every single thing that could just be a Discourse message board.


Hell, there were BBSs that let you browse around under a guest account with zero requirement to register an account


It's as if you were describing an alternate reality

Extremely few forums required an account to read them 20 years ago, that practice largely began with Facebook


Most of the forums I patronized left their index open to the wider public, maybe also let the wider public read posts, and almost always blocked user profiles (read: treasure troves of personal information) without logging in.


User profiles were indeed blocked to the public on most forums, but I very rarely found that a problem

Change that maybe to definitely, I guarantee you that very few were auth-walled


> Extremely few forums required an account to read them 20 years ago

The few forums I currently frequent don't require an account to read most of the threads.


I mostly have the same attitude to this as I do to sites with ridiculously aggressive cookie popups… I don’t need to see the content, I can just go for a walk in the sun instead.


Basically, I don't want to bother if it's lurker-hostile. Twixxer joins Facebook in the "closed silos" category.


+1. I wasn't happy to have to use Nitter to access Twitter, but I accepted it. I'm not jumping through any more hoops for Twitter. Random Twitter links become random FB/Medium/LinkedIn: a closed world I'm not interested in.

I only ~followed two people's content:

* Dan Luu, available on https://mastodon.social/@danluu

* Paul Graham, available on https://mas.to/@paulg but he doesn't post anymore. I'll live without this.


If lurking Twitter / X works only with JS enabled, and if the same applies to Mastodon as well, then (strictly speaking in reading / lurking ability) what would be the difference between those two other than perhaps the size of total JS served?


1. If I understand correctly they talk about whether you need an account to lurk or not (I'd agree) and 2. the same does not apply to Mastodon. There even are CLI clients and I'd be interested to hear where you got the impression that js is required for Mastodon.


When I clicked on https://mastodon.social/@danluu I got: "To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform."

That's probably going to leave people with the impression that JS is required. Sure, there are desktop clients (all third party) and I could probably try those, but generally the kinds of people who'd run random code on their systems and give it network access will probably just have JS enabled by default in the first place. At least some are open source I guess.

Looking at some of the the open source projects I was amused to find a client for MS-DOS (https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon) and then amused again to see all the .js files it needs to work. It looks like it might take a little work to find a desktop client that doesn't just run a bunch of javascript anyway


Not only is JS required, but for some reason those Mastodon pages can't be (easily?) archived in https://web.archive.org/, whereas Twitter pages can.


Archiving is an interesting issue to bring up.

Due to the federated nature of Mastodon every other instance is ostensibly an archive as there is currently no way to guarantee that a tweet/comment/account is removed from remote instances when you delete it from your local instance.


What I've been doing when people here post Mastodon links to is add .rss after the @whatever bit which lets me grab their RSS feed and then I can scroll through that to try to find the post being mentioned. I'm not sure the entire post always shows up, and I think you don't get replies or comments or whatever Mastodon is supposed to have with posts, but you can at least get some kind of information out of Mastodon that way.


Try adding /embed after - sadly you don't get the replies etc (same as RSS) but it's a lot less hassle than scrolling though RSS


> sadly you don't get the replies etc

So, parity to unauthenticated Twitter browsing.


It used to work, then they broke it in v4 with whatever 'upgrades' they made and haven't brought back the lost functionality yet :/.

You can add /embed on the end to see the singular post without replies, but it's not really a good substitute.

GH issues:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23153


https://mastodon.social/@danluu.rss


Yes, that's it. I don't want an account.


I can see the posts just fine (albeit with JS enabled), but not the replies and subsequent conversations. Assuming you were referring to the latter, then yes I'd agree with you.


Sometimes when I load Twitter, even to view a single, it requires sign in.

I don't know why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.


I've noticed the same and it's really frustrating, it just straight up redirects to the login page sometimes. I guess I'll have to accept the fact that it's closing down, visitors are not welcome. Can't view a single post or picture in the future but so be it.


weird i can’t lurk twitter without login


Make an account. Only follow those guys. You don’t even need to include your real name man.

This is like saying you wanna use windows without a user account.

You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore


This is like saying you wanna use windows without a user account.

It's like saying I want to use Windows without a Microsoft account, which I do.


If you choose to roll over and give $PRISMpartner unfettered access to your data in exchange for a modicrum of convenience, go for it. But there are millions of people who stopped using Windows, Chrome, Android, Facebook, etc because they care. Many people will stop interacting with Twitter after this change. Don't bash them for being principled where you have surrendered.


>You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

how does having an account to view twitter meaningfully change anything during this mystick time of AI?

If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.

>It don’t work like that anymore

well if a company doesn't follow customer demand they fail; I don't intend to continue using a service that requires me to have an account to lurk -- i'm not the only one. The rules for customer service don't somehow just get cast away because of magic software.


> how does having an account to view twitter meaningfully change anything during this mystick time of AI?

> If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.

If you require an account, it’s harder to scrape you and train an AI for free using platform you've build with your own investment and effort. Until court rule in favor of copyright holders, welcome to the future where nothing is shared in the open anymore.


I'm curious who you consider that rights holder to be.


The creator.


I asked because it sounded as if you considered it to be the platform. And let's not kid ourselves by pretending that this has to do with protecting the creators.


No, it’s simply that if it’s a violation against the creator, then the platform by extension doesn’t get hammered.

By the way, you know for legal purposes those creators (copyright holders) also include guys like Disney, Warner Bros, Penguin et al. right?


> Make an account. Only follow those guys. You don’t even need to include your real name man.

I understand this is easy, and others won't mind doing this. That's fine.

I object to the idea of needing an account solely to read heavily linked, otherwise free, content.

Besides, my browser doesn't store logins/cookies, so it'd be another login I have to do on each session.

> You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

So be it, I guess? The content isn't that valuable to me anyway.


> my browser doesn't store logins/cookies, so it'd be another login I have to do on each session.

To be fair, that's a burden you imposed on yourself.

But I agree that requiring an account just to browse and read content, is BS.


no, adtech and walled gardens collecting your browsing data and monetizing/weaponizing it against you is the imposition. refusing to provide this data by wiping cookies is not a "burden" this guy chose to impose on himself for fun, it is the logical answer to the adtech companies' hostile action.


adtech monetizes your browsing data by collecting it across lots of sites we visit, and aggregating them all to build a profile.

It's true that wiping cookies was the most effective to prevent building up this trail of cookies from every visited site adhered to those ad companies.

But this seems to me like a solved issue since Mozilla deployed their Total Cookie Protection [1] with Firefox i.e. each domain has its own isolated set of cookies.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-rolls-out-total-...


> This is like saying you want to use Windows without a user account

If only I was able to do what you describe, I would use Windows. But sadly, Microsoft wants to invade users' lives like a malignant cancer, so Linux it is.


Linux requires a user account too. There is no anonymous mode. You will always be running something as a user who has a user id. getuid and geteuid are always successful and correspond to a valid user. In theory there could be a way to run things without a user, but Linux was designed to not allow that.


Linux user accounts are local to the system, not centralized in a cloud service. There is no corporation tracking or monetizing your uid or gid.


That's beside the point. Linux has a login wall before you are able to do anything. You must have an account in order to use it.


I thought you could skip creating a MS account if you ran the setup entirely offline. Does that trick not work anymore? To be honest, even if it did work you can't trust MS to stay out of your business. Windows is constantly collecting data on the what you do on your system including the name of the file you open and what software you have installed. Jumping through hoops to try and work around a user hostile OS is a losing battle. You'll always be one forced update away from defeat. Linux is the way to go. I'm forced to use windows at work, but at home the last windows OS I had was 7 professional and it looks like it'll be the last I ever use.


> I thought you could skip creating a MS account if you ran the setup entirely offline. Does that trick not work anymore?

It still works. There are several alternative workarounds as well. I have a laptop that normally runs Debian that I can dual-boot to Windows for BIOS updates or to use Acer’s app to limit battery charge to 80%. I use a local Windows account without a password, as I don’t keep any data on the Windows partition.


Is this level of tracking (files you open) something you can't opt out of? If so I hadn't realized that. Do you have a link so I can read more?


I don't know if you can opt out that specifically or not. There are third party tools that claim to disable a lot more than MS will normally allow, but I don't put much faith in them (if for no other reason than the fact that MS can undo anything with an update)

MS took these pages down, but there were two posts that I think gave users the most in depth look at at the kinds of data they've been collecting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175209/https://docs.micr...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170407072948/https://technet.m...

This only gives examples of some of the types of things they collect though. For example, it says that the Photo App (default image viewer) will tell MS if the file was on your hard drive or a network share or a cloud server or an SD card, and it will send them the metadata (resolution, file size, encoding, etc) and tell them if you looked at the photo or video in fullscreen mode, as well as how long you spent looking at each file, but you shouldn't assume that's all the information they take. That's why the start of each section has the words "such as"

Now that they're fully committed to using their OS as an ad delivery platform they likely collect everything that they think will help them target those ads to you better.


I had an account to follow two or three guys, and maybe 4-5 accounts that only post every few months. The timeline gets filled with all kinds of things. Besides the horrible clickbait ads, it puts in random posts from unsubscribed parties. You really have to look between the crap for the stuff you're subscribed to.

If this is Twitter in the age of AI, Twitter isn't worth the effort to me in the age of AI.

Especially since I can use Mastodon, and that is actually very nice. I get that not all interests are as well represented, but I like it.


I’d actually be willing to use a Twitter account, except that I find the Twitter front-end unusably bad. Nitter doesn’t really support the use-case of serving as an alternative front-end with an account (and is discontinued), so I’m done with Twitter.


Exactly, I literally can’t remember accessing any content on Facebook in the past year; nor did I really think about it.


I do wish some people mirrored their content to their own blogs because there's some interesting stuff there once in a while.


I'm the same way, with few exceptions.

The best part about it is that I've noticed a strong correlation between content quality and ease of access.


>I've noticed a strong correlation between content quality and ease of access.

it being inversely proportional?


content quality is proportional to ease of access, inversely proportional to obstacles such as cookie consent dialogs, newsletter promotes, forced logins


There's two distinct Nitter use cases I need to replace.

1. Someone drops a link to Twitter. Twitter hides threads and throws items in some weird non-chronological order—assuming I don't get a login wall. I need an unfucked UI.

2. There are some content I can't get anywhere else that I follow through RSS. I wish these people would move elsewhere, but if they haven't by now, they probably won't ever.

I may just run a local instance with an account created for the purpose if that remains viable, but associating all that with a single login/IP address is something I'd like to avoid.


1) Ask people to send screenshots of the tweets instead of links. I think this has naturally been happening a lot more over the years anyway and people will just get used to do that.

2) I guess those people will slowly realize they have lost most of their audience anyway.


Right? (#2), I can't be so far in the minority to just not be willing to bother with Twitter. There is really very little content that will compel me to have a bad time consuming it. Is it 1 out of 10? 2 out of 10? More? Even if it's just 10% that's still significant. Just my $0.02 of course.


You should ask people to send a textual copy before a screenshot, OCRs are not nearly as conveniently accessible and effective to justify requiring them


Kinda sad that we have to send screenshots since it hurts accessibility, but I guess that's less of an issue with local OCR on most devices these days.


Imagine the conversation just a few short decades ago...

"We perfected OCR! Blind people can read!"

Yay! Awesome.

"Yeah, and soon we can route around damage when the capitalism growth mandate breaks hyperlinks!"

Yaa— wait what??


In addition to a chronological feed, Nitter provided pagination and link de-obfuscation. Would be nice to get that back somehow.


Right, all the "just don't use it" comments miss the point. I used Nitter specifically because I don't use twitter, so I could see the contents of a link that was being posted or discussed. I suppose a solution could be "ignore a large swath of posts and links and discussions" which is basically what I do, but sometimes it's nice to have the option to look at them. Same as if you don't use MS Word, someone might still occasionally send you a word document and it's nice to have a way to open it without having to install Word.


+1. Need something like archive.today/.is for Twitter so you can rip and archive the content that might not live elsewhere. Grab it, stick it in Wayback Machine, return a Wayback url.


+1 on Reddit as well.

Reddit doesn't have login walls yet but it has way too much information stored within their walls to not have a backup / non-social-media way of extracting it. It's infeasible to have Reddit blocked because it's UI is intended to be addictive like all social media but also be able to extract information from it.


For the moment, old.reddit.com is sill useful.

For the moment.


It’s dying a slow death through neglect. Image posts don’t work correctly, image comments don’t show up, and the dirent comment links generated from www don’t work on old


Still better than logging in, using the new web app or downloading the app.

It's not like 95% of the content is any good anyway. You have to dig deep into a niche to really get any value, and the last few years, less and less. Of course, I haven't logged in for 3-4 years so maybe I'm missing something. Doubt it.


There's also a thing lately where link targets posted on New Reddit (I assume, since mine aren't doing this) are all lower cased, while the link text is correct as you typed. This breaks the links for some sites. In addition to the issues with underscores getting extra slash-escapes.


There are 18+ age walls that just force you to login, often in unnecessary places.

Plus mobile sometimes refuses to show some things.

old.reddit still works though.


Some subreddits will impose the 18+ wall because reddit hasn't specifically vetted/approved of the subreddit. So it will be something totally not adult, just a small sub with important information you're looking for and you can't view it anonymously from a browser.


These can be avoided by using old.reddit.com instead of www. I think.


I think this is only true if you're using mobile. If you're on a desktop you can get through just fine. Usually.


Reddit also now blocks all Mullvad connections that I'm aware of. It's kinda ironic seeing all the scamy YouTube ads promoting using VPNs to watch Netflix in another country when that's never worked and other companies tend to be hostile towards VPN users.


https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd87...


> Reddit doesn't have login walls yet

There isn't one on the root directory, but Reddit has plenty of login walls.


On New Reddit. I haven't seen any on Old Reddit yet.


There's not a difference. If a subreddit requires you to be logged in, then it requires you to be logged in.


The EFF just recently wrote an article with instructions on how to persevere & archive your own tweets on the Wayback Machine, but it involves exporting your own backup and uploading it to them. Since the API is completely cut off from Twitter, there is no official way to backup other people's accounts.

But archive.today uses scraping and all sorts of tricky methods to bypass paywalls. I honestly don't understand why Nitter can't just stay logged out and rotate IPs. Although I'm sure that gets pricey when other people are accessing it constantly.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/save-your-twitter-acco...


If the scraping model is impaired due to aggressive countermeasures, end game are browser extensions that scrape as users view the site and ship scraped data back to a processor, similar to recap the law (uses an extension to scrape the PACER legal database and ship digital artifacts to the Internet Archive). Care will need to be taken around potentially sensitive data that could be shipped if users are logged in.

https://free.law/recap


This model also works well for deep web content archiving.

There was a gaming message board where someone wrote a browser extension that would back up all topics someone visited in the background while they were reading them. It became important for archiving as much content from those forums as possible as the forum was in the process of shutting down.


Oh, that's a very cool project! How successful has it been? If it wasn't for Sci-hub that would be a great idea for the scientific publishing world as well.


Very successful. Millions of court filings extracted and indexed, and a crucial component in driving down PACER costs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570

> I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158

> Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/white-collar-and-criminal-law/...


[flagged]


If the content we wanted was on Mastodon, we would not be having this conversation. Your comment is deeply unhelpful.


[flagged]


You're looking at a vase and seeing two faces side-on.

"Twitter won't let me read content people post on it"

"Try posting it on Mastodon"

"If it was on Mastodon we wouldn't be having this conversation"

"Whatever, you don't share anything from Twitter anyway"

Can you see the vase yet?


It's like asking a Christian if he can see the devil.


The issue isn't me posting Twitter links here or elsewhere. It's what to do when others do.


[flagged]


Much as I dislike login walls, Mastodon still doesn't respect `:prefers-color-scheme`, so they're not my friends either.


What problem is that suggestion supposed to help with?


Why don't you make a twitter account and install a duplicate web browser that you only use to open twitter links (and other crap that you don't want polluting your normal browser)?


I don’t want the company to have any information about me.


I also don't want to give them any traffic.


That's why I suggested you use a burner browser.


These systems are completely losing propositions. My data is worth $$$$, my time is worth $$$, and I have to spend $$-$$$ in order to safely interop with them?

Twitter/FB don't understand just what a terrible value proposition and complete waste of time they represent. I'm happy Ediot Mashbrains has been bleeding money for the damage he's caused.


You also need a burner phone number. Otherwise it will be difficult to get an account.


I didn't know you needed a phone number for twitter. Yeah, then it's difficult.


Spite, personally.


Spite, personally.


For 2, you might want to send them an email asking them to post said content elsewhere.

Given that it's Twitter, there's not a ton of text or anything in what you're missing. If it's a blog post, you could see about them enabling RSS on it? If it's video content or something, they could put it on patreon with you paying them for it?


> I need an unfucked UI.

Preach. I need a UI where I don't have to click "Read more" to only find out there is one word missing. Then required to swipe back and repeat the process because someone used all 240 characters in several tweets.

This is literally what happens when your devs don't dog food. What an insane thing to do and with such an easy fix. It is just baffling. There's so many little things like this but I can't understand how this isn't just a few lines of code somewhere.


Might archive.something eventually work on twitter? (To allow quotes and fixed views for use within HN discussions?)


I’d also vote for 3) the user interface is fast, responsive, and not total garbage inflicted with man boy ego whim randomly mutating a decade of questionable product management decisions


For 1: replace twitter.com with vxtwitter.com.


Yea I just don't read twitter content anymore. Same thing I did to facebook. There's some really good stuff on there that I miss, but it simply isn't worth it to me. Easy enough.


> There's some really good stuff on there that I miss

Tbh, same. I do miss getting some information about Windows betas pretty much, but other than that, I won't miss Twitter at all.

People need to publish more on more open and community driven solutions. Heck, even publishing information for a site that still works on older PCs is better than publishing information on Twitter.


It's the Great Tune Out. More people are joining this movement every day.


I don't understand.

There are some handy mechanisms you can use on Twitter to filter and curate what you get to see.

You can mute any word or hashtag you want.

You can create lists containing specific people or orgs you'd like to keep up with.

Occasionally something slips through the cracks but nothing is perfect.

With those mechanisms in mind though, Twitter is pretty hackable. You can get it into a state where you can still consume things you're interested in. And if you don't want to give ad impressions you can access it with a browser that can block ads.


They're saying: I don't read Twitter anymore [because I don't want to get a log in and now it requires a login]


You're right. I'd just figure at that point it's not that complicated to get a random spam email box just to create an account with.


They don't ask for a phone #? I would consider making an account or two in that case. If only because many services that start out requiring only an email end up requiring a phone # (like google did) and those old anonymous accounts become useful.


In my experience, they do indeed ask for a phone number.


They will also demand your phone number, by pretending to politely request it, then insta-banning your account if you decline.


What I find weird, is of all the things I totally ignore because of its corporate shitfuckery, Twitter is the one that should be the easiest to read. How in 2024 is it possible that I, using a text only browser without JavaScript, cannot read what are short text-only messages on what's really a jumped up version of NNTP?

With each passing day we regress technically .


They want to at least try to reduce data scraping. At least attempt. Do you have a better idea because we’d love to hear it


Ignore it. What's the reason to restrict it? Scraping is important to interoperability.


> data scraping.

What we old people call "reading"? But if that's what you crazy kids call it these days.

> Do you have a better idea because we’d love to hear it

Oh well, now you mention it, it'd be rather nice if Elon Musk went and stuck his head up the back of a cow.

Anyway gotta go scrape some more HN posts...


Have cows not suffered enough?


I mean, yes? There are many techniques for blocking or throttling high volume scraping. You don't even need to understand the techniques, plenty of companies sell this as a service.

That's beside the point though. There's no actual need to force logins, it's just something Elon wants. Given what a dumpster fire Twitter has turned into the rational move for most people is probably to just forget about the site at this point.


While this is tangential, you've stoked my curiosity. What could prevent scraping? In this case, they're combating against scraping from other major businesses, so another company doing something like setting up thousands of distinct IPs to scrape from at rates which are specifically intended to mimic organic usage would not be difficult.

Only thing I can think of is starting to get into gaming-site type territory where you end up trying to do things like analyze mouse position, click patterns (every 30 seconds at exactly the 0,0 pixel or whatever), and so on. But this sort of stuff is a cat and mouse game, where I think the cat is generally going to be at a pretty big disadvantage.


IMO literally nothing, as long as the analog hole exists. The best they can do is make it more expensive. Requiring an account is one way to do that. Another option is to take the RIAA route and sue everyone involved. Of course they will likely fail, but they can weaponize the legal system against less well resourced companies.

A better idea would be to sell access to the firehose and API at a reasonable cost such that it makes more sense to pay them for this rather than set up a whole scraping farm, aka the Netflix model. Unlike Netflix, they won't be crippled by 3rd parties unlicensing content.


For the same reason given for Nitter stopping, it is unlikely that you'll find a public service like that. There are nitter-like options, including forks of nitter itself, that you can self-host to give a better UX, but with those you have to have a twitter⁰ account for it to login with.

Another option (that also requires an account) is to use twitter⁰ itself with a browser extension that tweaks the UI.

My solution is the one I've been using for a _long_ time: simply don't go there. It has never been more than a novelty-gone-wrong, unless you count “a cesspool of humanity” as more, and as far as I know I've not missed out on anything significant. If you want me not to know what you have to say, say it on twitter⁰! Though I acknowledge that this is not an acceptable solution for all.

--

[0] The site desperately trying to be known as Χ


In terms of a browser extension for Twitter, I highly recommend Control Panel for Twitter. It works as a browser extension as well as on some mobile browsers. It is highly customizable to filter out who/what you don't want to see and is fully open source if you feel the need to tweak.

It's updated regularly and the creator is highly active on Twitter to provide updates and answer questions - @ControlPanelFT

If you decide to use it, drop the guy a donation, they work hard on it!

https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-twitter


Control Panel ftw.

I'm also eyeing https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/trab-tweet-reporter... for rapid block+report of the crud that accumulates on various posts, and pondering how much hassle it would be to port to firefox.


That looks interesting in theory, but unfortunately it was last updated in Feb 2022 so I would doubt highly it still works. There were a great deal of 3rd party tools to reduce abuse, bots and known bad actors on Twitter, but Elon took that all away when he restricted access to the API to only those paying $42k/month.

I haven't actively been on Twitter since July, but after he essentially removed the majority of moderation staff after he bought the place, reporting people is basically a non-working feature anyway. I remember getting a notice on someone I reported 3 months after the fact.


In practice, what I'm doing is:

Click drop down, click report

Tab x 3, Down x 5, Tab, Enter, Tab x 2, Enter

That reports a user or tweet as spam and blocks them. Currently.

Reporting was never that effective anyway but if something gets -enough- reports it seems to help, so I don't mind the extra keypresses.


Twitter became the defacto public square, so it's understandable that there's inertia for society to keep visiting.

This particular public square has been bought and fenced off. Ostensibly this is to drive more traffic to it.

Passively standing outside the fence trying to peek in is a lost cause. Find a new public square and convince as many people as you can to move. To do that, engage with those who moved, and create compelling reasons to go to the new public square.


> Find a new public square and convince as many people as you can to move.

In particular, complain loudly to your local governments etc that (still) use Twitter for “quickly reaching the public” or whatever their remaining excuse may be, especially if that information isn’t accessible elsewhere.

The public square rhetoric was always a red herring. A distraction to fool people, including yours truly, although it’s been years since the illusion came falling down.

There is still a need for public spaces. I just don’t have any hopes about ad-tech corporations any more.


> Twitter became the defacto public square

I think people often miss this about social media. Private spaces can become public spaces. The same way you can lose a trademark if your product becomes associated with the general thing (which is why OpenAI failed to get a trademark). In a way too much success is limiting to the company's power, but that's probably a feature and not a bug in terms of protecting the public.

It's not like it is easy to navigate away from Twitter or any other major platform. Unlike traditional products you can't simply choose Pepsi if you are upset with Coke, or vise versa, because the product's utility (and product) is it's network. It also makes it very difficult to compete against as you can make an infinitely better UI/UX but if no one is on it you are missing the key product. So you only move to a ghost town in hopes that others will follow but if that doesn't happen quickly then it'll remain a ghost town.


Public-facing tweets are a huge part of Twitter's value proposition. Between this, removal of verification, and publish.twitter.com being broken, I wonder how many of the biggest outlets and organizations will continue to abide Twitter's decline.


> Now however there is an official declaration on the site itself: https://nitter.cz/

FYI: That's not official, nitter.net was, and there are other instances of Nitter that still work.

https://status.d420.de/


They work only for a few more days, till their account expires (30 days after creation). After that no more guest account creation is possible: each instance will go red one by one.


Not all instances use guest accounts, some use a lot of real accounts


They are rate limited faster than guess accounts and banned. It's over


Not if you setup your own instance and use your own account sparingly


I'm talking about public instances. Using nitter with your own account is not for what nitter was intended to.


I find it insulting that it is still allowed to submit "links" to Twitter posts on HN. It is a pervasion of the concept of "Links". You are teasing something that might be of interest that then can not be read by a majority of users.

While Nitter still worked at least people here could then post alternative links. Now that Nitter is dead, that's no longer an option.

And therefore people really should stop submitting Twitter links here. Instead contact the author and ask him to at least cross-post to some accessible platform. How hard can it be to cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky or ... OMG, a website?


The honourable Court of the Fish has given its ruling, tipping the scales of justice towards linking to the open net on HN.

* the court could not determine the plaintiff's legal standing, as the plaintiff had no legs, however 'slopping' was considered an acceptable substitute to standing.


Ahahahaha :)


I have Tampermonkey scripts that delete Twitter entries from HN and anywhere else on the web. Seems to work well for me.


Would you mind sharing?


uBlock Origin rules:

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="https://twitter.com"]) + tr + tr.spacer
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="https://twitter.com"]) + tr
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="https://twitter.com"])
    *##a[href^="https://twitter.com"]:style(text-decoration: line-through !important)


I tried responding here but my comment isn't showing up -- was it autoremoved? I'm commenting with this meta-comment to check.


I see 3 very similar comments from you sharing block rules. Is one of your browser extensions hiding your own comments from you? Try viewing this thread in a no-extension browser.


...yes. The rule deletes this comment as well.


0.0.0.0 twitter.com

0.0.0.0 platform.twitter.com


The developer from bird.makeup is asking for donations of account tokens: https://www.patreon.com/posts/call-for-special-98167212

I'm also thinking about adding twscrape support to my https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser and extend its mirrors to Mastodon servers, but to be honest I can not afford (money- and time-wise) to get into yet-another project without some minimal financial support.


Nitter was officially declared "over" yesterday. Why can I still use it today?

https://nitter.poast.org/Kantrowitz/status/17581675175146582...

Twitter sucks. The "alternative" IMHO is to refrain from submitting links to "tweets" to HN. No one wants to visit Twitter.

The idea of "exclusive" content on the web is extremely difficult to accomplish. The internet is a giant copy machine.

The history of the web shows that popular websites lose popularity.

These mega-websites amassed considerable wealth during ZIRP-->COVID period. Now let them burn through it all desperately trying to stay popular.

Time to move on.


I usually check this list: https://status.d420.de/


libreddit is suffering the same problem. Some instances are still working but they're probably switching outgoing IPs often to evade the ban hammer.

As others have noted, I think this is part of a larger trend. All websites have realized that data is power, data is money, and they don't want to share anymore.

I used to host both nitter and libreddit, now I host neither of them. I've simply given up on reading that data.


There's a fork of LibReddit called RedLib which should work better: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib?tab=readme-ov-file#libr...


Why would it work better when reddit are blocking IPs? It's an arms race you can't win in the long run.


It is working better because previously Reddit was blocking IPs from accessing the JSON endpoints, but Redlib doesn’t use those anymore, we emulate an official client, which currently doesn’t have any kind of IP blocking (they don’t want to ban any mobile VPN users probably).


What are you looking for? If you want to be anonymous, your are SOL unfortunately. If you are looking for a less crappy browsing experience than Twitter, and Nitter filled that void, you can find forks which fetch content with your Twitter account. Setting up for local self hosting doesn't take a lot of minutes.


I used to use Nitter to view content without logging in, as I do not have a twitter account nor do I want one.


The question is whether or not they'll continue to develop Nitter just for people who want to run it locally. Twitter's page layout & functions get updated and changed CONSTANTLY. If someone isn't updating Nitter regularly it will become depreciated very quickly.


> you can find forks which fetch content with your Twitter account

What is the recommended/preferred fork for self hosted using your own account?


Nitter has been abandoned by the developer and I don't have time to deal with Elon Musk's whims


Ah, can't wait for more login walls, oversized UIs, and more "Please Subscribe" crap. Thanks Twitter.


There is enough decent resources on Twitter to warrant signing up IMO. I just avoid installing the app so I don't end up browsing it.


The alternative is the fediverse. Just drop twitter. Anything of value in there will eventually make its way outside anyway.


I simply have a Twitter account (linked to a purpose-specific @goatse.email account, if you must know) and I log into the app on my phone and the website on my computers. This allows me to see all the content I like. I appreciate the position of the folks who want to use a third-party client (Christ's sake, I'm the author of Twittirix, the unpopular, entirely unknown, and now-dead Twitter client for SGI IRIX) but engaging with reality-as-it-is rather than lamenting the inaccessibility of reality-as-I-wish-it-were is a supremely useful way of interfacing with the world.


I think you have 3 alternatives:

1. Create a Twitter account.

2. Stop using Twitter.

3. Use Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon for microblogging.

Twitter started requiring a login screen to view posts, but it's not the first website to do so. Pinterest and Instagram have done this for ages. We all hate it, but it's business.

I wonder why Tumblr isn't more successful than it is. It used to be a pretty well-known platform, and it's almost identical to Twitter, but while every celebrity seems to have a Twitter account, nobody seems to have a Tumblr account. Perhaps they do, they just don't tell anybody about it?

I wish Mastodon wasn't a thing. I believe federation is a terrible idea for normal computer users due to its non-obvious dangers, specially as more people will begin using Mastodon as if it were Facebook. I saw on Reddit that someone is building an open source, non-federated Reddit clone. That's what I think would have been better: an open-source, non-federated Twitter clone. Does anybody know of something like that, by the way?


> I wonder why Tumblr isn't more successful than it is. It used to be a pretty well-known platform, and it's almost identical to Twitter,

Twitter won over that and a number of other options on novelty, inertia, and notoriety, essentially. A mix of right-place-right-time, further luck, and network effects.

Tumblr did better than many alternatives, but eventually shot itself in the foot (well, was shot in the foot by its parent) when it alienated a chunk of the audience it did have by deleting a lot of content in order to appease potential advertisers.


> in order to appease potential advertisers.

It wasn't advertisers, it was apple, they'd been delisted from the app store, and getting rid of the NSFW material was part of the deal that apple would allow them back with.


Tumblr used to be a lot more popular, but its collapse is usually attributed to them banning NSFW content. Not everyone was posting or viewing NSFW of course, but there was enough overlap in audiences to cause a cascade which ended with nearly everyone, NSFW or not, moving to Twitter.

It's a classic Yahoo acquisition fumble, they bought it for $1.1 billion and ended up selling it on to Automattic for just $3 million post-exodus.


None of those other platforms allowed NSFW, and even when it did allow it, Tumblr had a fraction of the popularity.


Twitter might not allow NSFW content, but it has a lot of NSFW content nonetheless.


You could just run a Mastodon instance that doesn't federate.


I see. Does anybody do that, though?


I've recently read TFA from this discussion, and felt tempted to do the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825520


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)


Isn't it what Donald Trump did with its mastodon instance? Or is it federated?


Alternative: Stop consuming any content from that shitty platform?


Twitter is doing its best to paywall and authwall content. Fighting this is a losing battle. I think that the best alternative to Nitter is probably learning to live without Twitter. For the folks you used to follow, try reaching out to them to see if they are willing to also send updates on other platforms. If they are, great. If not, well, it may be time to let them go.

For public accounts that are still using Twitter, definitely write appropriate representatives to request that they use more open means of disseminating important information. Twitter used to be the "public square", but its actively hostile behavior toward lurkers and non-paying members means that it no longer serves this purpose. In turn, public accounts that use Twitter aren't reaching as many people as they used to, and in time, will reach fewer and fewer people.


I recommend you to look for alternatives to X rather than alternatives to access it. It's several months now since I closed my account and I find news and discussion in other social media and news sites now. X is a less big deal than one might think.


you could run your own instance of rsshub

https://docs.rsshub.app/


> alternatives?

Stop consuming Twitter posts


It's funny how an answer can be totally unhelpful while still being correct.


Twitter under the X revamp has exactly two available legit API plans.

$100/month and then $4000/month.

Nothing in between. And you can't just layer $100 packages for more API calls when you run out.

So the idea of being a 3rd party friendly API 2.0+ is just a joke because access is either too limited to be useful or to expensive to find out. Meanwhile their rate of internal innovation seems to have reached zero or slightly negative. What a joke the content is becoming more valuable than ever but what you can do with it is practically in decline.


around the same time, twitter social cards started working. maybe there's a way in there.

The promises of Web 2.0 are dead and megacorps are killing them.

Adversarial interop is a digital human right and Elon is taking that away from us. Shame on him. If he can't run a business without stepping all over our API rights then he shouldn't be in business.


Host it your self. I'm doing that with libreddit. Gives me much better performance than the highly used public instances.


I was self hosting Reddit, which now seems entirely dead, and need to switch over to libreddit. Hopefully that lasts longer...


Mastodon


For the past few weeks I've been using

https://twiiit.com/

to find independent nitter servers that can show tweets of the few academics I still want to follow.

Now Twitter might soon break also these small third party servers but for the moment, they still work.


say what you may but i never used twitter because you needed to login to lurk properly all this time anyways.

moreover requiring mobile number, at first for specific regions but then for everyone, was a deal-breaker which kept me off, and for good reasons in the long run (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510865).

i would like to think that i am not the only one not using the platform all this time to get my news. to be fair i do get shared some links to tweets but at least until this debacle you could read them without too much trouble.


I thought that the official instance (nitter.net) works and that it works but visited it now, and it seems it doesn't have a valid certificate since Jan24th.


If you're in Chrome it likes to give you a full screen "oh no you can't go to this website!" with no visible override, but if you type in "thisisunsafe" it'll fly by it.

I wish Chrome would just let me have the damn button. I'm not a five year old.


this is why it forces you to type those things, the button would have been bypassed by a five year old


I just made a Twitter account. I don't care to post anything in it, I just use it to read tweets that websites post or embed, such as on HN.


Maybe someone wants to earn some karma by pasting the content of the tweets here? Similar how it happens with the archive.ph/today links.


RIP. It would be nice if twitter actually have useful monetization system, a few dollars to get lists into daily digest.


Maybe this one? https://nitter.unixfox.eu/


When nitter.poast.org announces it is going offline, I will believe "Nitter is over". (Unless I find another instance that works.) Meanwhile I'm still using Nitter.


The issue as I understand it is guest accounts no longer being supported by Twitter, so it now requires real accounts which are said to not be feasible for most public instances. Not sure if Poast.org has a smaller number of users or how they're handling it.

Side note but it was the original maintainer (zedeus) a few weeks back who declared 'Nitter is dead' in a Github issue.


Why is there no mass boycott movements against these corporates


If your concern is quasi-anonymity, get a burner phone to create your social media accounts.


My personal concern is, if I have to sign up for an account to see what you have to say, I don't care what you have to say. If you want reach pick a platform that let's people easily read your thoughts. This is no different than "download the app to continue reading." People on twitter are irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, and they just don't know it yet. They will.


individual users can ifttt to another site https://ifttt.com/connect/sendie/twitter


What about threadreader? I used that a lot when I still used Twitter.


I wonder if archive.ph could work for at least the original tweet(s)


If you don't like twitter, why not just not use it? I guess it sucks that you can't click twitter links, but honestly, you're not missing anything. Whenever I jump through some hoop to view a tweet linked here, it's not worth it.


There are sometimes newsworthy things on Twitter. I have the domain blocked at the Pihole to break the "check Twitter" loop I get into; having to do the Nitter thing helped enormously in breaking the bad habit.


> There are sometimes newsworthy things on Twitter.

If something is particularly newsworthy, it'll appear elsewhere in pretty short order IME, often it originated elsewhere in fact.


Sometimes the tweets themselves are newsworthy, or the news articles cite a tweet. Some local governments use Twitter for announcements you can't easily get elsewhere, especially during a disaster like a big snowstorm.


> Some local governments use Twitter for announcements you can't easily get elsewhere, especially during a disaster like a big snowstorm.

A bit like my national government seems to be run via WhatsApp…

In an emergency situation, if twitter was the only rapid source, I'd have to go look there. This is partly why I said elsewhere in this thread that avoiding twitter isn't practical for everyone. The chances of such an emergency where I am is pretty remote. If any of my local politicians are listening: if there is something that important and you can't reliably provide information somewhere instead of (or as well as) twitter, rest assured that even if I voted for you last time I won't the next!


Most local gov have their own websites too. The thing is people used to check on them on twitter by default.


During the last natural disaster I found myself in, the authorities were updating Twitter and Facebook but not their official websites.

At least the important/urgent stuff was going out through the emergency alert system.


From what I understand, the official measures in a situation of emergency and disaster in my country and local gov is:

- messages on the fm radios

- sms broadcasting


That, and some government run sites are under-resourced to survive the deluge of traffic that an emergency might generate. As much as I dislike twitter, I understand that it is a useful fallback.


There are people doing things of interest to me where I can either read it on Twitter (currently using Nitter's RSS feeds) or see the misleading blogspam or fluff-filled YouTube video about it a few days later. I'd rather get the information from the source.


Why do you need one? It takes a few minutes to make a Twitter account and keep browsing. You probably spent more time writing this post.

I'm glad I won't have to deal with people posting these off-brand Twitter links anymore.


Their UX is a trashfire even when logged in.


Why would I want an account? Blocking me from viewing Twitter has done wonders for my mental health.


Started using Twitter in 2006. [Long story] Quit around 2017. Privacy Badger extension blocks embeds. Used to allow occasionally until I noticed it was never worth it and finally stopped reading "news" sites that were sentence|tweet|s|t etc.

Used Nitter for a while for the reason many do: to see that 1 tweet or thread that sounds interesting. Realized it either wasn't or was a little FOMO.

When I was a kid if you missed a good movie in theaters you had to wait years to see it on TV. I've started returning to that mentality. If it's genuinely good enough and interesting enough it will turn up somewhere eventually or I'll just miss out.

I can't number the people who have told me I must subscribe to AppleTV to watch some Ted show no one talks about any more. I always said: "No. It will turn up on some platform I use or come out on Blu-ray or I'll just never see it." For all I know it's on Blu-ray already. I forgot about it until just now it's been so long since I must watch.


> If it's genuinely good enough and interesting enough it will turn up somewhere eventually or I'll just miss out.

Waiting a few years for the marketing to die down, the hype to move on, and the dust to settle has served me well. Time is an amazing filter of quality.

Twitter is a FOMO based product. What if you miss the latest announcement about some important breaking research development? What then?! You'll be behind! You'll have missed the bus! It's not like you can just wait five hours for the announcement to be reported on- oh wait.

And how often does that actually happen? Virtually nothing on Twitter has a shelf-life of more than one news cycle, which is reason enough not to waste time on it. The signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is abysmal, and has gotten much, much worse in the last five years.


Farcaster


Use a completely different platform. Find users providing content you like. Follow them and interact.

Either Twitter opens back up or segments trickle off the platform.

I used nitter only because it loaded faster and displyed raw cronological order.

Life existed before Twitter was created. You can do it.


I think this misses the point that a lot of nitter users aren’t looking for a social media platform to interact with people on, but to access information only available on twitter. “Use a completely different platform” is useful to people consuming the social media product, but not useful for people who are uninterested in “content you like” but in very specific content they’re interested in.

I’m not saying there’s a solution that’s good either or there needs to be a good solution. It’s a private business and there are all sorts of shitburger private businesses building golden walls around important content only available on their crappy platform and there’s no alternatives other than submit to their exploitation or remain ignorant in the world of subjects that are important to you.

But it would be nice if there were alternatives between brutal exploitation and unrequited ignorance. But heading over to mastodon or whatever doesn’t help you read “important thread about X discovery” or whatever since the content is singular and only exists on twitter.

Personally HN is the only social media like platform I use, and I have no interest in maintaining the energy levels to participate in the others. I’m just a passive observer of specific pieces of content in those platforms.


> but to access information only available on twitter

I see this being said a lot, even by some of my own contacts who insist on occasionally sending me links to things on twitter¹, but I'm not convinced there is really much of worth on there that isn't available elsewhere. What is uniquely on there that I might possibly care about isn't, IMO, worth being associated with or exposed to the rest.

--

[1] I used to use nitter to view such things, but stopped that many moons ago and ask if they have any other source, or if it is a joke maybe download/screenshot and forward that way.


You may feel the subject is inane, but an example that sticks out in my mind was the Varda replication thread of LK99. It was really only on twitter, I found it entertaining to read occasionally, but I wasn’t really going to invest energy in asking for screenshots etc. But I agree with you regarding being associated with it exposed to the rest. That’s the value nitter brought ! It’s a sad day that it’s gone. End of the world? No. But the world has become slightly less good.


Twitter at least used to be the best place to find official statements from local government, local cops, etc. They would put stuff out on their official accounts, other people would post video of news conferences, and so on. I am not sure there is a replacement.


yes, they can all have their private blog/microblog or use something else on the fediverse.

You might have a tiny bit of friction in discoverability but it isn't hard to spread the word when it is about local agencies/administrations.


I would love this. Absolutely love this. Unfortunately, this is not happening now. The vast majority of 'official'/'governmental' institutions/people seem post on Twitter and, sadly, only on Twitter. Maybe Facebook if you're lucky. I've had to resort to using the premium tier of IFTTT to get things like road closure notices for my area.. it's maddening.

I'd love if they would set up some ActivityPub something under their own domain that I could subscribe to :/


Don't know about 'murica but in europe more and more gov and local institutions have a fediverse presence.

some examples are the european commission and frenchgov mastodon instances:

https://social.network.europa.eu

https://social.numerique.gouv.fr

I am pretty sure other countries are doing the same or are considering it. Also many NGOs have a fediverse presence.


Can is arbitrarily complex. Reality is they don’t.

I actually wish the UN had acquired twitter as a global public good than baby man boy.


Twitter is gone for people who don't want to log in. The only options are to accept it and move on with life or support a competing system. Former nitter users may not have been looking to interact on a social media platform, but the content they enjoyed was coming from a social media platform whose users post because they get interaction on the platform. If former nitter users don't want to interact anywhere, then they will not have anything like nitter, because new platforms need to provide interaction to people posting content in order to grow, even if it is only "views", "likes", "reposts", etc.


The alternative is to finally abandon twitter for good.


How? There are currently 2 HN submissions which are twitter links.


And you are threatened at gun point to click on those links?


I'm not sure I understand the question.


You don't need to click every link you see on hacker news.


And you don't have to comment


Too few people who care, too many that are happy to be fed what the twitter algo decides they should see. Dopamine takes care of the rest.


Too few people care for what to happen?

Maybe I am misreading your post, but why does it matter if people behave in a certain way en masse, when the majority of the personal impact is based on personal behavior.


This is the actual answer... but social networks are super sticky, and trap people in with the threat of cutting other people off who also cant/wont leave.


Despite the outrage, I think only a minority of users think this.

Most twitter users like it, and didn't even attempt to move to another platform.

I personally tried substack notes, mastodon and bluesky, and none of them bring 0.1% of the activity and interesting things that used to happen on twitter.

Now twitter is less interesting than before, but it still the only candidate that is worth my time. Even reddit is slowly becoming meh.

I'm certain that the new generation, however, is creating their own wonderland in a place I'm not active in. That's how we got twitter started, it's usually the young that stir those things.


nitter.cz is one of many mirrors. The official site was nitter.net (which is down as well).


[flagged]


The only winning move is NOT to play. Social media is a massive time sink.


[flagged]


There is no such thing as "one twitter", it's way too big.

I assume your activity mean you must be filtered in a bucket that shows you those things, because I never encounter such tweets in my timeline.


So does Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost.

Should we stop linking to all information on all of these platforms because some of the information is undesirable to some people?

Do you allow others to poison your well like that? If so, that strikes me as easily exploitable.

Also, the idea that this sort of content is inherently dangerous doesn’t hold water. I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet. Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.


> So does Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost.

That is intentionally and maliciously obfuscating the issue by equating social media (Google, Facebook, Tumblr) with infrastructure hosting (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost).

Those two types of companies are very different and should be regulated very differently.

> Should we stop linking to all information on all of these platforms because some of the information is undesirable to some people?

Um, yes?

Links to social media vaporize regularly. If it isn't worth the effort to pull and host onto a less ephemeral medium, was it really worth sharing at all?


> Also, the idea that this sort of content is inherently dangerous doesn’t hold water. I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet. Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.

There's been enough work that suggests a close link between exposure to propaganda and getting funneled in to increasingly more radical material, e.g. [1].

Particularly regarding Twitter, it's noticeable that it's not just one racist tweet that gets shown to you when you deliberately click on one - the space below will be filled with similar kind of content, and you can see a marked increase of far-right crap on your algorithmic timeline as well, with every little interaction you have with far-right content.

It was bad before Musk, but since his takeover it's gotten really really bad.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...


Your link mentions YouTube. Under your logic, should we also stop using YouTube because its recommendations will radicalize us?

This line of thinking doesn’t make sense to me. Furthermore, bad ideology and its ideologues won’t go away simply because we individually stop looking at them.

I quit Twitter after 12 years when they started censoring the site search. I was trying to research QAnon wackos and it turns out that the search box had been neutered.

It’s one thing to tell people what they can post, it’s another to tell me what I’m not allowed to read (that is allowed to be posted).

Fuck censorship.


> you can see a marked increase of far-right crap on your algorithmic timeline as well, with every little interaction you have with far-right content.

And?

I trust people to be intelligent enough to make their own decisions. If seeing an incredibly (or even mildly) racist tweet suddenly makes them proverbially goose-step around their home, they already were going to. One, ten, or hundred posts won't make them racist unless they were already predisposed to those ideas. In a healthy mind, viewing alternative views may broaden their view which might include disagreeing with their previous opinions.

If viewing a gay marriage doesn't make you gay, neither does seeing someone complain about other races or LGBT people. I am on 'your' side politically but the opinion that all conservative opinion should be extinguished or somehow that it is inherently harmful because you disagree with is just as bad as conservatives saying the same about your opinion.

There is no harm in reading and understanding other's opinions. All sides need to understand that. It only crosses into the need for 'deplatforming' when they are making implicit or explicit threats against a person or a group of people.

"I think <x> race is less likely to be successful due to <x, y, z>" is not a bad opinion. It may be wrong, but it isn't hurtful beyond maybe to someone who is too sensitive. "I think <x> race should be exterminated" is beyond the line and shouldn't be allowed to be posted publicly.


> If viewing a gay marriage doesn't make you gay, neither does seeing someone complain about other races or LGBT people.

This is a great line that probably pisses off almost everybody. Love it.


> So does Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost.

Those are all very different things. Only Facebook is somewhat similar in that it has an algorithm that surfaces emotionally engaging content.

> I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet.

How about if it showed you 50 racist tweets? If repetition and exposure didn't have any effect on our behaviour then there would be no advertising market and no one would bother to spend vast sums on political campaigning.

> Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.

How about misinformation? As an example, I'd say the rise in anti-vaccination activity is an example of inherently dangerous information that has been spread primarily through social media.


Neither is misinformation inherently dangerous. There are 400,000 churches in the US and every year fewer people identify as religious.


What one individual might view as transphobia another would view as radical feminism. The world's not as black and white as you make it out to be.


yikes oops i accidentally terfed myself


The initialism "TERF" means "trans-exclusionary radical feminism"; I'm sure those who hold these views see themselves as being "just" radical feminists — the way the discussions go, it seems to me people with these views are unable to comprehend that the model they have of what gender is, is one of several, or that there is any value in the models they do not themselves have.


There's only room for one model when it comes to deciding who gets to use which space though.

For example, should a male convict who identifies as a woman be incarcerated in the female prison estate or the male one? There's not really room for several models of sex and gender in answering that question, as there's a single choice to be made with two mutually exclusive options.


> There's only room for one model when it comes to deciding who gets to use which space though.

One model per space. For example, the answer to "given how much testosterone is now in their body, which gender sports team should this F2M person be on?" is different to "which do we need to screen them for, testicular cancer or cervical cancer?"

> For example, should a male convict who identifies as a woman be incarcerated in the female prison estate or the male one? There's not really room for several models of sex and gender in answering that question, as there's a single choice to be made with two mutually exclusive options.

Four[0] options, if you think outside the box.

Ideally, I would have my prisons set up with enough guards that this doesn't matter. As I don't live in the ideal world, I would also have a[0] trans estate for those who have begun but not yet completed transitioning, and those who have completed a transition would be in whatever the new gender is.

[0] or +1, if M2F != F2M while transitioning


[flagged]


>Don't like the platform? Then don't use it! It's not mandatory.

Sorry, my public officials seem to be using it as an official communications platform. For many people, it is in fact mandatory.

>You can find content elsewhere online.

Not if someone sends you a link to a twitter thread and you can only see the first tweet without logging in. You can only see that content right there.

> I have an account that I use solely for reading. The overwhelming number of similar comments actually makes me want to use it more.

This attitude will make you fit right in there.


As an example, local police here sent out urgent missing person reports and the "more information" link was a twitter link (behind a bit.ly shortener if you can believe it)


I can't help but contrast this response with the dismissive reactions towards censorship and the Twitter Files. Turns out, it actually is an important source of information. Are we about to see op-eds about how it needs to be public or regulated like utility companies? :)

Aside from that, critical information is not exclusively posted on Twitter, although it used to be "locked" behind a radio or a TV receiver. An online account is not the insurmountable hurdle that you paint it as.


TV receivers didn't come with built-in user tracking.

You could get user tracking added by a company called Nielsen but they actually paid you a small sum for your data.

I think this is quite different.


Sure, I do not have a Facebook account for similar reasons despite hearing that a lot of valuable information and networks are on that platform. Ten years ago I might have complained about it loudly, but nowadays I tend to think about things more pragmatically. Or at least that's what I tell myself after I caved and bought a smartphone after resisting for over a decade since they became ubiquitous :)

I didn't use Twitter for the better part of the last decade and don't feel like I missed anything important. Idem with Facebook that I haven't touched in over ten years. If I cared enough about defeating trackers I could spin up a personal Nitter instance with a pseudonymous account, otherwise I see it as the price to pay to have access to such a large volume of information instantaneously, and I would rather be tracked by private interests than by the government.

I also find it frustrating when any organization, government or otherwise, only publishes information on restricted channels, but that is nothing new.


>I also find it frustrating when any organization, government or otherwise, only publishes information on restricted channels

Then we agree :)


> my public officials seem to be using it as an official communications platform

Oof


>Sorry, my public officials seem to be using it as an official communications platform. For many people, it is in fact mandatory.

I don't believe that anyone but Elon Musk use twitter as its only communicatuon platform.


Does the name ‘Donald Trump’ ring a bell?


Is he still using twitter?

Also: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/ (which includes a news section)


No but for a time it was his primary news distribution platform, which means it’s reasonable for some other important person to also use it as their platform.


Except for sharing his mug shot, even he hasn't posted on Twitter since Biden's inauguration.


I’m responding to the parents ‘ I don't believe that anyone but Elon Musk use twitter as its only communicatuon platform.’ - at some point trump did use Twitter as his primary communication platform, whether he still does or not is largely irrelevant to the point.


That's present tense though. It was more popular in the past, but today, it's been relegated.


what is important is that you changed the goal post.

I said "only" and you moved it to "primary".


Primary meaning first and possibly only - I really don’t know if trump had secondary platforms, but people would talk about his Twitter, not his blog.

Proving it to be his only source is likely impossible to do, but also has little value (do you want to learn the latest news now or in a weeks time when secondary sources catch up?)


And to follow up, my understanding is that trump would post personally, not one of his PR staff, I’m not aware of him personally posting elsewhere until after he was banned from Twitter.


I'll do both.

People that create twitter accounts do so because they want reach. They want to be able to publish freely, to the internet, to share ideas, information they have, memes, whatever. But now, their reach is limited to other twitter accounts. Their voice is no longer public on the internet.

Twitter has some inertia that will carry this new model for now, there's a lot of twitter accounts, so many that most people won't know the difference at first. But as time goes on and people want to make things public and people slowly stop posting twitter links everywhere because they're useless (only useful to people with twitter accounts, so why share them outside of twitter in the first place) and every reference to something on twitter becomes a screenshot, people will look for alternatives to broadcast their thoughts.

Twitter is supposed to be a website where people can share ideas. You need an account to share ofc, but it's still supposed to be a website, you go there and read things. That's not possible anymore. Reading what someone has to say is only "using it" in the most tenuous sense. Using twitter is posting to it. People being able to read what you say is the whole point. They think they're forcing the whole world to get twitter accounts, but what they're really doing is forcing twitter users to share their ideas in more than one place, it's not going to turn out good for the company in the long run.


> They want to be able to publish freely, to the internet, to share ideas, information they have, memes, whatever.

Is this necessarily true? At this point, I would figure that people who continue to publish on Twitter are aware of its restrictions and continue to communicate there with that knowledge. If anything, one could argue that trying to access Twitter content without an account is what's actually inappropriate here, as posters can no longer trust the guarantees of the platform.

> Twitter is supposed to be a website where people can share ideas.

Twitter used to be a website where people can share ideas. Twitter currently is a website where people can share ideas with other Twitter users. If you post on Twitter now with the intention of being truly public on the internet, I'd say you're using the wrong tool for the job. Whether that's a good business decision or not is irrelevant; the fact is that Twitter has changed its purpose, and users should update their expectations accordingly, however they see fit.


Yeah, and I'm saying this was a mistake. People continue to use it thinking it gives them the most reach, because most people don't understand networks. I'm sure some like it locked down, but most people still think it's a place to publish because they don't really understand the magnitude of the change. It's not a small change; it is a fundamental change in the game dynamics of the platform. For now people can't tell that their audience is restricted. They're used to not knowing who saw it except for their feedback from other accounts. It still looks the same from their perspective. The apparent impact will be delayed, but it will happen. First, twitter links in the news will become screenshots, then they'll become quotes, then engagement outside will evaporate and people will begin feeling the need to publish blogs and the like. It's already beginning to happen. Twitter is much less useful if it's walled off.


I completely agree that the change was an overall negative one that has resulted in Twitter being much less useful, and my point is that it's up to users to decide how to engage with the platform given these changes. For me, Twitter went from being an app that I checked and refreshed several times a day to one where I maybe open it once a month. I'm disappointed in the new direction but I updated my usage patterns accordingly.

Your point about other users potentially not understanding the change is well-taken, and some of the other comments in this thread prove it (like a city's police department communicating exclusively via Twitter), but trying to make an open platform out of one that's fundamentally not (anymore, at least) seems like the wrong way to solve the problem.


Then something else will emerge (even something that already exists) and people using it will have more reach. Once the people of Twitter realize that, they will transfer to the new platform.


It's a change in behavior for Twitter, which was built with content and threads in the open.

It's ok for people to say, "I like how it was before."


I agree. It's not hard to make an account to "lurk". I'm sure most of those complaining have accounts at various other social media websites. It may cost some privacy, but I find the content more than worthwhile.

There is content on Twitter that is not available anywhere else. It frequently breaks news faster than any other source, and there are many high profile posters who use it as their only broadcast source. Some memorable examples include the FTX and OpenAI fiascos.

The website isn't stellar, but it is functional. Lists are a great feature to separate content into custom feeds.

Maybe there will be something in the future that can serve as an alternative, but there is none currently.


> "I don't like twitter, I don't want to have an account on twitter, yet I demand to be able to read content posted on twitter" Honestly, I cannot understand the point of view of some commenters here.

Why is it surprizing? What's there to understand? It's web. Twitter used to be a decent web citizen, and allowed you to read its posts like you would read web pages. I don't want an account on Mastodon; yet I can read content posted to Mastodon. I don't want an account on Bluesky; yet I can read content posted to Bluesky. Twitter used to be like that, and we got used to it, and now it's not, and it's infuriating.


No. Now stay mad.


It's political, doesn't have to make sense.


Twitter, oh sorry X, died on the day everything went completely batshit insane, politicized and radicalized anyway. To the point people got (and still are!) permanently suspended for no good reason at all.

Such a shame, ~10 years ago it used to be tons of fun with some really good discussions in the mix.

But times are really changing I guess. And not for the better.


Farcaster has been a nice refreshment for me. Currently a lot of developer types are present on the platform and I've seen lots of insightful conversations there.


Isn't that some crypto garbage?


I looked it up and apparently there is a "$5 sign-up fee", and posts/reactions are not free too:

>To sign up, users must pay a $5 sign-up fee, meant to prevent the creation of spam accounts. Further, users can only post a limited number of “casts” on Farcaster apps, which are tied to packages called storage units. Storage units, which go for $5 a piece, grant a user 5,000 casts, 2,500 reactions, and 2,500 links or photo posts within a one-year period.

(some shady website)

Yeah, that will surely make millions of users to sign up /s


Yeah, I don't get it. Social media sites thrive on interaction. Giving users a reason to hesitate before interacting is going to snuff out a lot of the casual interactions that make a site feel "alive".


I don't see that the suppression of thoughts in these comments is any better than the claims against twitter.


Look. I don’t know how else to say this but just make a gosh darn account.

Twitter is good. IF you control your follows. Don’t follow more than 100 people. If someone pisses you off multiple times, unfollow.

If you don’t want ads, you have to pay. But this keeps the lean twitter org afloat. The ads are not intrusive

If you pay you get no ads.

All that said Twitter has gone off recently for me, the content not as good but I bet it’s because I broke my ‘never follow more than 100’ people rule and I get low quality tweets more often. I’ve also been clicking on dumber posts so it shows me more dumb stuff… I appreciate the Algo being rough in a way - it forces personal curation by myself

JUST MAKE AN ACCOUNT


Nice try, Elon.

But no, Twitter is not good, even if you control your follows, although it becomes much more bearable if you NEVER look at the "For You" tab (which Twitter defaults to everytime). Even then, doesn't matter who you follow, because no matter how cool you think the people you follow are, they don't have the same judge of character and will retweet trash that ends up in your timeline. So then it's a game of whack-a-mole of constantly muting the shit that the people you follow retweet. Or they inevitably get involved in a toxic argument and make all their followers witness to it. It has been this way since before Elon, in my experience.

So I propose a different solution: JUST DON'T USE TWITTER.


Can corroborate; made an account some time to ago to make following the small handful of illustrators, Youtubers, and games' devs I'm interested in easier. I get exactly what I want now, nothing more.

Couple that with Musk nuking most if not all the behind-the-curtains political manipulations, and Mysterious Twitter X has been wonderful.




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