They really don't like their users, lol
The second golden age of the internet is officially over.
Unfortunately the golden age was just a mirage, it was actually VC funds killing the ecosystem and offering impossible free services for over a decade.
We'll see if the internet can rebuild, but under the weight of spam and regulation and habit and clout chasing I'm not sure.
I'm fine with that.
if it's time to have conversations with actual people face to face, then so be it.
The utopian dream of the internet as the great equalizer and "Information wants to be free!" is dead.
Why did the whole internet seemingly decide to kick their enshittification into overdrive in the past month?
"Market trends". One greedy dipshit does it and the rest follow suit. Like spez looking up to Elon.
If like me, you only engage with Twitter to the extent of clicking on a link that takes you to a Tweet, reading it and then getting the hell out before the brain dead replies consume what little remains of your soul, then can I recommend Googling up an addon for your preferred browser that redirects Twitter to Nitter as a way around this new barrier to entry.
There is also https://addons.mozilla.org/... in case you are not aware which supports A LOT of different services besides twitter.
Don't know why I haven't thought about looking for this add on. Thanks for the link!
At least until they break nitter, as they already did with the +18 content.
considering how its been working for years
so were third party reddit clients.
Reddit: Demonstrates that locking away content is bad for the site and the wider internet.
Elon Musk: "I want that for my website!"
They seem to be inspiring each other these days.
"Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow. "
Inspired by someone whose idea of cost cutting is just not paying others. Any rational person should be avoiding doing business with them.
I was going to post a tweet here but found out that you can't view it without logging in -- so not worth sharing.
Don't give Elon ideas
So they can kiss user growth goodbye. It’s interesting to watch, because it’s like someone who has no understanding of the business model is running it. Embedded tweets and viewing tweets on the web is free advertising!
Being not-public is part of the reason why a lot of Twitter alternatives don't have a lot of general mind share I think. They might work well as actual social networks (i.e. people talking to each other), but have no chance of becoming even close to what Twitter was.
Seriously, Elon is speedrunning the destruction of twitter
It's the cool big tech move to kill your business right now. Soon we'll be seeing articles on why making site's unusable hellscapes is good for future growth.
I was on a news site yesterday that had an embed that asked if I wanted to see Twitter content or not. And I was like, "Why would I need to see and give views to a Tweet that you're describing in this article? NOPE." And opted out. It was great. I hope more sites do this in the future
kid named reading the tweet yourself instead of reading a re-telling of a tweet:
I often look up the tweets/original news stories just because media often twists the context or grasps at straws to make for a flashier headline.
Kid named, I don't need to give Elon the views when the article quotes the entire tweet. It's not like they're novels.
In Dream SMP canon terms (no offense to that series, though), that'll be L'Manburg's Doomsday.
Looks to be part of Twitter 2.0 plan. They also remomved certain endpoints from their API.
This is just going to speed the growth of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon, which is great, but it's sad to see such a once-innovative, widely-used platform degrade to this level of shittiness. All because of a deranged wealthy idiot with an unchecked ego. This was a communication platform, FFS!
Twitter was on a downward spiral long before Daddy Elon took over, though.
It's been drifting that way for a while (couldn't go more than a few clicks without logging in) but it looks like they've made it official. I'm not interested in writing anything behind a login wall.
I would say you could still use nitter.net but that seems kind of broken at the moment, maybe related.
That's a good point!
Also, I used to browse Twitter for years before making an account and probably would never have made one otherwise. Saying things out in public, to the public was kind of the whole point of Twitter.
Twitter was the only way to get updates about wildfires near me 😬
I don't even get that. Just an immediate login prompt without being able to see anything underneath.
So maybe this is how I'll give up the habit of scrolling through social media on phone. They all just lock themselves in with all the ads goodness, I guess it's good for some of us.
I do wonder how long it will be before the official Twitter app blocks screenshots.
Yeah just tried to check if a Cramer tweet was real (it wasn’t) and had to log in. Good think iCloud remembered my password because I certainly didn’t. Fuck twitter hopefully I’ll never have to go there again.
Only serves to grow the Fediverse, so i'm all for it.
Mastodon has already become viable. I switched when there was court decision that Musk had to buy twitter and deleted my account there. At that time Mastodon was ghosttown - posts related to US were very very few and refreshing the page after a minute gave handful of posts. It changed as it achieved critical mass. By that time I had gotten used to mastodon which is not very user friendly and is different from twitter. Kbin/lemmy are much similar to reddit in that regard.
Now it does the main thing twitter did for me - telling me the news - what is happening around and what others think about that. And it is much better than twitter which was mostly clickbait. It lacks in terms of depth on specific topics, but general topics are there - though you have to know how to curate those.
I really like being able to confirm that something isn't made up or blown out of proportion, being able to quickly check stuff like 'how many people even agree with this take (a lot of times people leave out the engagement of a post)' and 'is this a genuine person in the first place (check out their profile or other posts)' to not poison discourse with made-up issues
That said, as others in this thread have pointed to, libdirect should be encouraged so they can discourage traffic to the actual site
e: though nitter sadly seems to be out of commission for new tweets, rip
I highly recommend using nitter instances to look at content from Twitter. And with the excellent LibRedirect extension, the process becomes seamless and you can bounce between instances as you please.
And now nitter no longer works.
I just tried to access it and I get redirection errors. I guess they didn’t account for integration testing during their most recent sprint.
I'm pessimistic that this will actually change much, or drive users to Mastodon. Just like, as much as I've been loving my time with Kbin/Lemmy, I don't think people are ever going to leave Reddit. Most people appear to have a way, WAY higher bullshit tolerance than I do. It's sad. The old guard are unusable, and the new options are withering on the vine.
Absolutely wonderful. I love looking at art on Discord, opening the tweet to get the high res pic to save (Yes, I'm aware of adding ?format=jpg&name=large at the end of the URL, already had to do it for some pics), then being blocked. Or trying to see some sports news, then being blocked again.
I like how George Hotz briefly worked at Twitter and got rid of the login after scrolling a bit blocker, and now you can't see anything.
I wonder what that's going to do to ad revenue as millions of non account lurkers can't see content anymore and won't make an account
Great reason to embrace #Fediverse
Thanks, Elon
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
AI generated Reddit
Ad-blocks-you-back Youtube
Login locked pay-to-win Twitter
We are cattle to the elite's ad revenue system.
save