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Twitter has started blocking unregistered users

Checkmite said:
It's almost hard to believe that a year ago Twitter was humming right along, fully solvent despite a some ten times larger payroll to cover, and with comparatively few technical issues besides; but it's the truth.
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No. A year ago, Musk had already put his bid in and it had been accepted. He was already sabotaging the company by refusing reasonable business requests E.g with staff hire.
 
Instagram’s Twitter clone launches in two days. The timing of this is interesting to say the least.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...agram-twitter-competitor-meta-to-launch-rival.

Though fun to watch, I can’t remember the last time a major tech company made a new social network happen through force of will, rather than just buying up what the cool kids switched to. Also, Twitter competitors seem not to see the irony of hosting their catfights on Twitter:

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder who is currently working on BlueSky, tweeted a screenshot of Threads’ app privacy information, along with the caption “All your Threads are belong to us”.
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Meanwhile Musk shows his contempt for 3rd party developers, even the ones paying him $42,000 per month…

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-api-elon-musk-developer-issues-apps

"Everything used to work fine before we started paying half a million per year," shared one developer in a private Twitter developer group chat shared with Mashable.
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I was about to ask, if he treats his customers this bad, what must it be like working for him. But we know what it’s like working for him, and also, I reckon he thinks of his customers AS employees, and not particularly favoured ones.
 
Agatha said:
I deactivated my Twitter account back in February and nothing I've seen since - this latest nonsense in particular - has caused me to regret that decision.
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I have one which I mainly use to publicise a couple of events I'm involved with (and we mostly do that on Facebook and Instagram). I do look at it most days, but usually stop after looking at a couple of accounts on my feed as I can feel my blood pressure rising.
 
Darat said:
Oh dear, no more Twitter reading for me, oh woe is me.
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I get what you mean, but Twitter has long been a de-facto public messaging platform for a lot of people and organizations. Even if you aren't a perpetually online Twitter user, there has been utility as a public announcement type platform where even non-members could view posts.

It's routine for local governments or other such orgs to use Twitter as one of their primary ways to make announcements. Micro-blogging social media is an ideal format for making short announcements.

It's a real pain in the ass that these social media sites are increasingly login-walling their services. If your local community is hosting some type of event, often information about it is hidden behind facebook, instagram, or now Twitter login walls.

A related problem that is irritating is how often Pinterest shows up in search engine image results, only to find that clicking the link leads to a login-wall dead end.

I would bet that walling off the garden makes twitter a less useful place in the long run and drives down traffic and ad-revenue.

Should go without saying that Musk's excuse is almost certainly a pretext to cover for the service experiencing a serious technical problem that has no obvious and immediate solution. Even registered and paying (lol) users are being rate limited, and there's open speculation that it has something to do with a Twitter contract with Google hosting services expiring at the end of June.

Twitter has reportedly been ‘scrambling’ to cut costs by moving services off Google Cloud before the contract ends on June 30, but this process was taking longer than expected. Systems under threat of being cut off included those dedicated to fighting spam and removing content featuring child sexual abuse, extremism, and gore.

The Information previously reported that the company has been seeking to renegotiate its contract with Google in recent months, following similar renegotiation attempts with Amazon and Oracle last year.

Since he took over Twitter for $44 billion last year, Elon Musk has been looking to reduce the company’s IT footprint and costs, by reducing both cloud and on-premises IT resources.
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https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/twitter-pays-google-cloud-bill-fixes-relationship-report/
 
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TurkeysGhost said:
A related problem that is irritating is how often Pinterest shows up in search engine image results, only to find that clicking the link leads to a login-wall dead end.
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I know exactly this problem. Perhaps you already know, but for anyone that doesn't, adding -pinterest to the end of a Google or Bing search query will exclude all Pinterest results. Or for more precision you can use -site:annoyingwebsite.com
 
Going forward I suspect that the excuse of "fighting bots" is going to be deployed to explain why Twitter is plainly not functioning well.

Twitter has been even more of a mess than usual over the last few days, in part because it limited the number of tweets users could read each day. The decision came as a surprise to many, but the company said it was unable to give folks a heads up.

"We temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform," a Twitter Business blog post reads. "Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection."
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https://www.engadget.com/twitter-says-it-couldnt-tell-people-about-rate-limiting-in-advance-183928265.html

Rate limiting broke Twitter's website and apps for the most part, including TweetDeck, an app that many power users rely on. To help remedy that, the company released "a new, improved version of TweetDeck." The company is moving all users over to the latest version, but there was another twist in store: Twitter is making the app exclusive to verified accounts, effectively putting a paywall on TweetDeck for the vast majority of users.
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Breaking the parts of Twitter that people like and use and putting them behind the paywall smacks of desperation. Smells like a death spiral to me.
 
In unregistered news, was surprised to find I was once again able to follow a link to a tweet today.

Perhaps Musk noticed users want to share stuff, so if general readers are blocked, those users will just share their stuff somewhere else.
 
Andy_Ross said:
I haven't had any problems for a couple of days now.
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Yeah, it may indeed have been fixed for some time but I only ever look at twitter by following other people's links to items, and folk have been posting links to anything other than twitter so...

But today I got to watch the result of some genius-level Russian MLRS ammunition storage out in plain view in Donetsk. Normal service resumed.

https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1676499206989545474
 
Jack by the hedge said:
In unregistered news, was surprised to find I was once again able to follow a link to a tweet today.

Perhaps Musk noticed users want to share stuff, so if general readers are blocked, those users will just share their stuff somewhere else.
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Andy_Ross said:
I haven't had any problems for a couple of days now.
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Jack by the hedge said:
Yeah, it may indeed have been fixed for some time but I only ever look at twitter by following other people's links to items, and folk have been posting links to anything other than twitter so...

But today I got to watch the result of some genius-level Russian MLRS ammunition storage out in plain view in Donetsk. Normal service resumed.

https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1676499206989545474
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Oh, me too! Don't recall if I checked yesterday.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Yeah, it may indeed have been fixed for some time but I only ever look at twitter by following other people's links to items, and folk have been posting links to anything other than twitter so...

But today I got to watch the result of some genius-level Russian MLRS ammunition storage out in plain view in Donetsk. Normal service resumed.

https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1676499206989545474
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I'm finding links to individual tweets work fine from a regular, not logged in browser, but the ability to browse individual profiles is giving me a load-error message.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
I'm finding links to individual tweets work fine from a regular, not logged in browser, but the ability to browse individual profiles is giving me a load-error message.
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Yeah, looks that way. Also, if it's a thread, you only get to see its opening post. None of the following posts show up.

Which is somehow different from that tweet I linked to above, since there I see the initial tweet with the video and one reply from the same poster with a picture of a map. Nothing else shows up though I assume it got plenty of reactions.
 
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Jack by the hedge said:
Which is somehow different from that tweet I linked to above, since there I see the initial tweet with the video and one reply from the same poster with a picture of a map. Nothing else shows up though I assume it got plenty of reactions.
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Looks like they were quote tweeting themself, so it's showing the one tweet plus the original tweet being quoted without loading any comments.
 
My sense is that Twitter and Reddit both are trying to limit how much of their human-generated content can be scraped by bots for AI training, with rapidly-increasing infrastructure costs to the service and no commensurate benefit to its owners or users.
 
Trausti said:
My sense is he's trying to find ways to increase revenue. Other social media platforms limit what unregistered users can see. He set off this trial balloon, and it flopped.
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The best thing to increase revenue would be to make the website more attractive to advertisers, but that would mean reversing most of his big decisions and admitting that previous policies were about good business, not wokeness or whatever.
 
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