Comment by trey-jones
7 hours ago
Regardless of the legality of the service:
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912
I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are, but AFAIK the general trend of login-walling services over the past few years has happened due to a court decision saying that it's legal to scrape publicly available data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn ). If they gate content behind a login wall and put a clause in the EULA forbidding scraping, this lets them use the CFAA to go after anybody who still scrapes the site.
Effectively it forces scrapers to become a party to the terms of service, which usually contains the "no programmatic access (other than via paid API)" or specifically prohibits automated scraping.
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It's ineptitude. Of course it is. Otherwise it would be indefensible.
EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability
The decision to force you to sign in to view replies is clearly not by accident or ineptitude. It's probably not malice either - just a business decision.
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These browser extensions still work:
For Chrome: https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire...
For Safari: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
Twitter itself doesn't even suck too much for me it's the broader context that makes it a no go
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I hate when companies do this. Instagram is a black box for me. Whenever someone sends me a link the web app is completely nonfunctional; clicking links just reload the page, it constantly tries opening the app, etc
The last time I signed up for an Instagram account (2016) it got immediately flagged as a bot account. I think I was supposed to appeal it to have it reinstanted, but why bother if this is how badly they treat users?
Can you imagine going to work as Instagram's web developer, spending your day finding new ways that the app accidentally works and disabling them?
The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.
A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
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> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.
But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
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> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.
They went login only in the wake of Hi-Q vs LinkedIn, which established that scraping a login-free site is legal.
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> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.
It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.
That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.
Your comment seems to implicitly assume that X has some ethical claim to the content they're monetizing, when in fact they're trying to monetize _others'_ content.
You want to read what service XYZ offers, but you dont want to do it within the constraints of service XYZ.
If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
The market would dictate that if X content consumers found it too inconvenient to consume from X and that would result in a significant drop in demand, the X content producers would stop producing their content on X.
I dont like many things about X -- random ads, bookmark folders being a paid feature, enshittification of the algorithm if you god forbid linger over some controversial video or content.
But i keep coming back to it because its the best way to follow the minds of brilliant techies. The basic sign up flow that i did years ago was basically a no-op.
I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.
Twitter promised an open publishing platform with extensive API access. They're the ones who broke the (social) contract, not us.
Well if you're willing to accept that the extensive API access comes at a price, they at least somewhat fulfilled that promise.
It's just a different kind of gate, though.
> If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
I am 100% okay with this. I don't want what Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer, so I no longer have an account these platforms. But I do have an account with my local electric utility. It's my only option. And if I want to find information about an outage, it's posted on their Facebook page. I'm 0% okay with this.
Last time I tried creating a Twitter account, I couldn't even complete the sign-up flow before getting automatically banned pending giving them my phone number. After that, I went to like and follow things. My account was then banned again for suspicious activity.
> I suspect that for most people
Most people do not use X.
X usage is down year over year.
The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.
This is where freedom of choice is great. You can follow the people you want on platforms of your preference.
The smartest people i know, i mostly know because of their X presence.
They want to consume XYZ, written by A,B,C and posted on twitter.
Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?
Clearly they approve or they'd at least stop advertising their twitter handles on their websites and handouts. Most brands cannot ignore such a vast network effects and have made the decision to continue despite the changes.
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