Comment by kemotep
14 hours ago
I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.
It's for the best.
There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.
Not even remotely close.
Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.
I think my main communication is probably the last tool that I want to be government backed tbh.
Even if it's communication/announcements from the government?
I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.
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Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?
Signal is an improvement, but not federated.
Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?
It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.
My phone can’t even open most of the apps since it’s so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).
Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.
Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?
Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?
Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.
Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762
But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.
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It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
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I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.
I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky
I didn't
> Reddit is now this way too.
Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.
The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.
Notably this was called a “temporary emergency measure” by Elon Musk — yet another promise he couldn’t keep
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...
“Temporary emergency” should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.
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I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.
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The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.
In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.
ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isn’t fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.
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The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.
totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.
Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.
Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.
I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.
At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.
It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies
> Even Bluesky has this problem!
Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?
Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.
It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)
This is Mastodon, and there are instances such as https://ec.social-network.europa.eu.
So HTTP and IP
I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.
Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.
Or you sue them and (if they did something wrong) they're SOL.
But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.
Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?
There is a browser addon https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect to view Old Reddit without an account.
In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.
They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.
Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links
I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."
Twitter requires your phone number to sign up
The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.
Create an account then? Not sure why that's an issue.
You can't make new accounts on twitter. You can only use existing apple or google accounts.
I think you can, if you install their app.
>are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.
It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?
From Musk in Dec 2022 (right after purchasing Twitter):
> we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s
I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.
[0] https://elonmusk.today
Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
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Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.
You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?
And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.
Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.
Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.
>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
Disruption was never an unblemished positive for society.
Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech
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