Comment by hoshi73
1 day ago
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.)
So where are the alternative instances popping up left and right? I thought the internet would detect a problem and route around it.
It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.
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.
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.
8 replies →
Twitter's removal of messages based on foreign government requests went up massively after the Musk takeover.