| ▲ | robot-wrangler 2 days ago |
| Since we're doing PSAs, isn't it also now just a completely broken platform on mobile for everyone who isn't logged in? > Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot. This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel |
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| ▲ | ewoodrich 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I set up a URL redirect rule in Edge/Brave/Chrome with the extension URL Auto Redirector (previously used Redirector but it was removed, there are other alternatives available for Firefox I'm sure). I also found a similar front end for Instagram but just added a rule yesterday so haven't tested it extensively yet. I avoid most Twitter/X content after I deleted my account but it's helpful when it gets linked in HN. Source | Destination
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^https?://x.com/(.*) | https://xcancel.com/$1
^https?://twitter.com/(.*) | https://xcancel.com/$1
^https?://instagram.com/(.*) | https://imginn.com/$1
^https?://www.instagram.com/(.*) | https://imginn.com/$1
URL Auto Redirector:https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector... |
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| ▲ | PyWoody 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Serious question: Why doesn't Google de-rank content that requires a login? I remember they used to claim they did but they clearly do not anymore. |
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| ▲ | extraduder_ire 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | For twitter at least, that would have to be done manually. It still shows a timeline for grey checkmark (government) accounts, and a "best of" type page for all other accounts. Most sites serve a special version of the page to visitors with "googlebot" in their UA string and/or coming from an IP range google controls with more SEO'd contents too. | |
| ▲ | jelder 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting something for free, you're the product being sold." Only sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine. | | |
| ▲ | PyWoody 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think I should at least be able to see even a subset of the content that caused the item to be returned in the search result, though. If I try to navigate away or see more content, sure, make me log in. But, if I search something, click on a Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin result, I should at least be able to see something. The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login results should be de-ranked. | |
| ▲ | mrbombastic 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality” this doesn’t follow unless we assume the most extreme implementation, the openness of the content is just one factor of many that should count in the contents favor. Further it assumes the only non-shady way to monetize content is put it behind a login which is not true. | | |
| ▲ | observationist 2 days ago | parent [-] | | A site can be a billboard for a product or service, or provide a social hub, without participating in the surveillance adtech industry. There are plenty of hobby forums, like those for craft brewing, which get supported by brewery suppliers, for example. There are luthier communities which get supported by toolmakers and professionals, and so on. The implicit community networking, reviews by community members, and other interactions reward quality and honesty, and penalize the shady shit. It's just not scalable into the exploitative cash cows that VCs drool over. |
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| ▲ | soraminazuki 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. Quality has never been synonymous with monetization for as long as I can remember. The primary driver of low quality or harmful content is greed. Guess what fuels the most greed in modern society? > A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine. Are you suggesting that including Twitter in search results would mitigate propaganda? | |
| ▲ | observationist 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >>> nothing but a propaganda engine And that's different from Google, how? A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human level content curation, with a reasonably performant scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and use natural language rules like "does this content contain text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate policy XYZ?" Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a curated list from the already censored and politically filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their own index and crawler. I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting as much money as possible from their adtech customers. Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that service. If that service is honest curation of and effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and extracting fractions of profit from commercial interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to do with. Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to me. |
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| ▲ | emsign 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because Google wants the web to be broken like that, they're also part of the design team of tech behemoths that made the internet shitty und no fun. | |
| ▲ | graemep 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They have had ways of letting people who give Googlebot access to content that requires login for a long time. A decade? | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because people can get a login. If the best quality result is behind a login and a paywall, I still want it to be the first result. Only quality should decide ranking. | | |
| ▲ | debazel 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Please do tell how to get an X account? It instantly locked my account after registration and I have several friends have the same issue. I would much prefer if Google just stopped showing inaccessible information completely. | | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I have no idea, I've never used X or Twitter. But apparently millions do, so it is not inaccessible. |
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| ▲ | ajkjk 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well I sure don't | |
| ▲ | mrbombastic 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Openness and accessibility should absolutely be factors in ranking, otherwise where does it end? I dk what twitter requires these days, maybe an email, password and a couple more fields, what if a site starts doing id verification? What if accounts require a subscription? What if all the best content on the first page of your search results is behind a paywall with 3 easy payments of $299 | | |
| ▲ | hombre_fatal 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance. If the search engine orders by relevance, than I can make the decision for myself of where to trade-off with paywalls. I don’t want a search engine to make the decision for me because it cannot: what if the only answer to my question is behind a paywall? | | |
| ▲ | mrbombastic 2 days ago | parent [-] | | “ You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance.” I didn’t make that claim, i am contesting the claim “Only relevance should decide ranking”. I am arguing ease of accessibility should be a factor. | | |
| ▲ | hombre_fatal a day ago | parent [-] | | Unless you mean as a tie-breaker in the niche case of equally-relevant results, then you're making the claim that it's better to see less relevant (or nonrelevant) results just because they have some other quality beyond relevance. |
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| ▲ | carlosjobim 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It ends with you paying for information. If I need some information and it is only available behind a paywall, then I'll pay for it or I didn't need it anyway. Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some of the most important content are on social media, and most of them only serve logged in users. If you want to decide yourself how search results are presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search engine. |
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| ▲ | nottorp 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No, it's also completely broken on desktop. Still have one or two friends who insist on sending twitter links. I don't click. |
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| ▲ | agos 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| remember when part of the commentary was "ha! twitter fired one bajllion people and it's still operating fine". I keep seeing errors, much more than in the flying whale era, just now they appear to be in the frontend. |
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| ▲ | Levitz 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, wasn't that sentiment a response to those arguing that the site would cease to function or be outlawed in several countries? | |
| ▲ | 1234letshaveatw 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't? | |
| ▲ | code_for_monkey 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a load of woke lib employees or something | |
| ▲ | verdverm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > flying whale era Is that the same as the fail whale era? |
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| ▲ | teiferer 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Always been like that. Twitter, Instagram, ... None of those platforms have usable UX if you're not logged in. |
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| ▲ | Zolomon 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the value of data. Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in. | | |
| ▲ | mattmanser 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Instagram's been a pita to use without a login for years, they've recently got even worse though. | |
| ▲ | dylan604 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is my recollection as well when they all realized they were feeding the bots that the free use became broken | |
| ▲ | jelder 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My recollection is that this happened pretty much immediately after Twitter became X. | |
| ▲ | saagarjha a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, it was a test by some misguided PM who was looking at her signups metric and not much else. It rolled out, everyone hated it, it got rolled back after some senior people complained. When Elon took over they turned the feature back on and then evidently rewrote it to be even more annoying and we have what is in place today. Source: my comments against it are probably in Slack somewhere if Elon is still paying for that | |
| ▲ | KronisLV 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That’s roughly when I stopped opening Twitter links, I still sometimes see posts from that platform, but mostly just as screenshots and with the discussions elsewhere. I don’t care for their dark patterns. | |
| ▲ | jeroenhd 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Instagram has always redirected me to a login page. Twitter only did after Elon and his friends went batshit ruining the website. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Following an Insta link gives me a dismissible login modal, but still shows the linked page when dismissed. Following any link becomes login only unless you right click to open link in new. Now it does the same previous behavior. I don’t use Insta, only when every now and then someone sends me a link with what looks like might be some other interesting post, but the game becomes boring and and I just close the tab |
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| ▲ | nxor 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Best comment. | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | People already knew the value of data long before LLMs were popularised and web scraping has been a thing since the very beginnings of the web. Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely. Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Getting down voted for stating a fact. Just goes to show how short some people’s memories are. | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 a day ago | parent [-] | | You're getting downvoted for stating falsehoods. > Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely. The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon. > Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You're getting downvoted for stating falsehoods. I'm getting downvoted because people are either to young to remember the web in the 00s, or just misremembering what the web was like. > The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon. I gave examples of big platforms that weren't accessible without a login. And modern platforms were also heading this way long before LLMs existed. Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem. LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before. And before then, it was just people leeching off other people's work. This is a tale as old as the web. And I remember it well, having been both a web developer and user of the web since 1994. Lets also not forget all the attempts that Microsoft took to try and control the internet and how AOL had their own walled gardens too. Yahoo had a plethora of cool features, most of which weren't available without a Yahoo account. And so on and so forth. Walled gardens are not a recent phenomenon. > In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in. You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched) For example this archived page from Facebook. Notice how there's no way to advance without signing up?
https://web.archive.org/web/20070630190243/https://register.... --- I know people want to blame AI for everything that goes wrong these days be that simply isn't the reason that platforms lock down. They do it because thats how you make money. You either: 1. lock down and charge people for access or 2. lock down and sell your user data (or, depressingly too often, both) Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that. What AI has changed is the increase in invasive bot detection on sites that don't monetise anonymous access. | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem. Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose. > LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before. LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data. When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly. > You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched) It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature. Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account. > Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that. Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data. This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose. Exactly. LLMs aren't the cause of that change. > LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data. Clearly I know that. My point wasn't that LLMs are literally scraping the sites but instead making the differentiation between scraping that happened before LLMs and scraping that happened after. > When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly. Actually, that's not always true. Search engines have included snippets from sites for years and that's also been a well-discussed point of contention. Then there's also Google's attempt to switch people to AMP to further lock people into Google's walled garden. I accept this isn't quite the same thing but it's still an example of how search engines fight to prevent people from leaving their ecosystem. Some sites, like MSN, literally host news articles from others sites on their own site too. I'm sure Microsoft has an agreement to do this, but it's yet another example of how companies try to lock visitors into their own site. I accept the AMP and MSN examples are tangential, but they do still illustrate the same point I'm making about how it's not a new thing for platforms to use dark patterns to keep people from navigating away from their platform. This isn't something new that's happened in the last couple of years. > It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature Would you rather I just said you were citing falsehoods like you accused me of? Also I'm not talking about a different feature. I'm talking about the exact same stuff I was talking about from my original comment in this thread. > Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account. So you agree that platforms have locked content down and this isn't a recent phenomenon then ;) Making the distinction between profile data and public comments is a little strained when it's clear that Facebook has invested heavily into their walled garden and the vast majority of content on Facebook has always been hidden behind that walled garden. > Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data. Smaller sites make money from ads. But we were talking about big platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sites that make money from ads are just making small change compared to platforms. > This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months. This I do agree with. But that wasn't the statement that was originally made. Those sites will remain open or shutdown entirely. They're not going to go private ala Twitter and Instagram. Their business model is entirely different -- often intentionally not run as a business in the first place. Sometimes just passion projects with no ads and/or run at a loss. The part I was disagreeing with was that the dark patterns seen in Instagram et al are a result of the rise of LLMs. That simply isn't true. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also Facebook feeds weren’t even a feature back before Twitter was around. Zuckerberg added it to compete with Twitter. So you couldn’t even access “public feeds” in the mid-00s because no such thing existed. |
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| ▲ | davedx 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being logged in | | |
| ▲ | T3RMINATED 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | teiferer 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible. | | |
| ▲ | estimator7292 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Sorry, are you actually five years old? Until just a few years ago Twitter was entirely open. You could view any and all public tweets, replies, threads. All exactly like you were logged in. Their APIs were open and you could literally plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users on the actual planet in real time into your own application. | | |
| ▲ | callamdelaney 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Actually, you definitely could not plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users in real time into your own application (without huge cost). You only would ever see a subset of tweets via twitters API's and search results, if you wanted the full thing you had to pay for 'the firehose' which was very expensive. | |
| ▲ | Root_Denied 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This openness is part of the reason governments (local, state, federal, sovereign) started using it for official comms. Seems rather shortsighted in retrospect, but it was a useful tool for a short period of time. | |
| ▲ | Izkata 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, I'm with GP: Most of the time I'd just get errors and retries that don't work, even years before Elon. I also never had an account there and assumed it had something to do with that. | |
| ▲ | nwsm 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you needed was an account + token. I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another). At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only. You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate through the API. It wasn’t the complete firehose, though. | | |
| ▲ | L3viathan a day ago | parent [-] | | That sample was complete though as long as there wasn't too many tweets. I.e, as long as your query was specific enough, you _did_ get all tweets. |
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| ▲ | SanjayMehta 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Some years ago you could even subscribe to an RSS feed for each user. |
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| ▲ | input_sh 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below. And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off. | | |
| ▲ | as1mov 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Here's me complaining[1] about the login walls way back in 2021, this was before the Elon takeover. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365 Edit:
Some more posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472 | | |
| ▲ | the_mitsuhiko 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's a completely unrelated issue. Once someone sent you a link to a tweet, you could read it. | | |
| ▲ | as1mov 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Is it unrelated? From the parent comment: > Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below. I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover. (And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether) |
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| ▲ | derbOac 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you used to be able to read tweets without an account, but that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over. There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time. | |
| ▲ | Carp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Interesting; if you'd have asked me when Elon took over I'd have said something around 2020-2022. Probably why everyone assumes it's a result of him |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | agos 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Instagram explicitly tells you need to be logged in. Twitter/X just appears to be broken | |
| ▲ | robot-wrangler 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Obviously wrong. The typical user-hostile thing isn't this dumb, you'd see a teaser that's probably vaguely sexual and get some "sign up for the full experience" prodding. Literally any 2-person startup that's a week old would do better than this at being thirsty and awful |
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| ▲ | gethly 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Twitter never worked on my on desktop without account since Elon took over. It came down to security settings not allowing 3rd party cookies. If you allow it, it loads up. |
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| ▲ | zahrevsky 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) What if those errors are trying to tell you to install one? |
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| ▲ | bhouston 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This past week I rarely see quoted tweets now in the main timeline, it just says not available. So something about viewing RT is broken. |
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| ▲ | moneywoes 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| same with Instagram |
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| ▲ | chairmansteve 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Another PSA. RSS is still very good. |
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| ▲ | myko 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's been broken for anyone not logged in since Elon turned a bunch of servers off. It costs too much to make Twitter freely available. If users who weren't logged in could see the site it would crash constantly. |
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| ▲ | dbbk 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Not really sure how that's possibly true considering CDN caching exists |
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