It's insane that their sign-up process now requires a phone number to complete on the web, and even basic features like playing a video in a tweet recently stopped working on x.com without an account. (In the past, searching for tweets, looking at an account's entire timeline, etc., never required logging in at all.)

▲

cbeach 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.

▲

jdiff an hour ago | parent [-]

But Twitter has and embraces that. The bots are all verified. Go on any tweet that mentions crypto or "my friends account got hacked" and dive into the deep well of hidden tweets.

Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.

▲

cbeach an hour ago | parent [-]

X.com makes it nearly impossible to run bot accounts, with its phone number per account requirement, and the astronomical fees for using its API.

Twitter, by comparison, was trivially easy to run bots on. I ran many automated Twitter accounts (for legit purposes). I had to shut them all down when Musk bought Twitter.

	▲	dgellow an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Just Google « buy x.com retweets » or similar and you will see a dozen company offering their services. Doesn’t look like a lack of activity on that area
	▲	numpad0 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's just a lie. Twitter has been overrun by "verified" African-Middle Eastern spambots posting completely nonsensical spams since AFTER it was bought. It's clearly connected to someone higher up than its head of products, considering said head of products was forced to rollback an anti-spam measure at least once.