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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some years ago you could even subscribe to an RSS feed for each user.
From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs.
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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.
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=28281472
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