Comment by robot-wrangler
3 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
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.
URL Auto Redirector:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...
For Kagi users - it's also possible to redirect it in Kagi with redirect rules in search settings:
Thanks for sharing! I continue using Redirector [0] on Firefox for other stuff but it didn't occur to me to set one for Twitter.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
I created this plug-in for firefox...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-cont...
Not being updated any more, but might be useful to someone.
Thanks. You only need this single regex for instagram:
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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> 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?
>>> 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.
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.
They have had ways of letting people who give Googlebot access to content that requires login for a long time. A decade?
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.
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.
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Well I sure don't
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
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No, it's also completely broken on desktop. Still have one or two friends who insist on sending twitter links. I don't click.
I have no idea why people still think it's a viable platform.
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.
Well, wasn't that sentiment a response to those arguing that the site would cease to function or be outlawed in several countries?
I don't?
I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a load of woke lib employees or something
> flying whale era
Is that the same as the fail whale era?
Always been like that. Twitter, Instagram, ... None of those platforms have usable UX if you're not logged in.
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.
Instagram's been a pita to use without a login for years, they've recently got even worse though.
This is my recollection as well when they all realized they were feeding the bots that the free use became broken
My recollection is that this happened pretty much immediately after Twitter became X.
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
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.
Instagram has always redirected me to a login page. Twitter only did after Elon and his friends went batshit ruining the website.
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Best comment.
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.
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False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being logged in
[dead]
When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible.
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Instagram explicitly tells you need to be logged in. Twitter/X just appears to be broken
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
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.
change the url to xcancel.com
or nitter.net
> 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?
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.
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.
Not really sure how that's possibly true considering CDN caching exists
same with Instagram
Another PSA. RSS is still very good.