In an unforeseen turn of events, Twitter has decided to test user patience by cloistering tweets behind a sign-in wall

  • ForcedCreator@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Twitter was one of the few socials where government agencies could publish to the masses. Everyday Twitter erodes its worth for short-term wealth.

    • ficwats@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      In hindsight, it seems absurd that we collectively trust a for-profit company to disseminate official information. Governments should probably take this opportunity to spin up their own Mastodon instances and migrate away from Twitter.

        • atocci@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Judging by the number of German posts I see on here as well, it seems Germany is very receptive to the idea of the fediverse.

          • thehatfox@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            I’ve noticed a lot of German language fediverse content too. Does anyone know why German speakers are so keen on the fediverse?

            • Teal@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              According to Kbin’s Privacy Policy page many of the servers are in Germany.

              I actually like the way it’s written, “the Germany”, and hope it doesn’t get changed. :)

            • lauric@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              I guess it’s because we don’t like US platforms.

              We don’t like, that they have a monopoly on these platforms, we don’t like the idea of influencers, we don’t like cult of personality, we don’t like to loose control over our data, we don’t like English speakers as a whole, we don’t like US politics, we don’t like radical politics (even though I am a radical right, I hate everyone else who is radical right and more so the left. Actually I hate every political position), we also hate to loose our productivity for screentime and the list could go on.

              We Germans are control freaks. We have always been. In the past we tried to enforce it with weapons. Now we are desperately trying to enforce our values with generosity. Running around the world and throwing money around.

              We are longing for absolute control, centralised in Germany and not in some foreign third world country without healthcare (USA).

      • donuts@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I’m with you 100%. The same thing could be said about reputable news organizations. And really, there’s no better “verification” than people and agencies having their accounts on servers tied to domains that they own.

    • nameless_prole@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Everyday Twitter erodes its worth for short-term wealth.

      This is, and will always be, the main push of capitalism. This isn’t some cute new term like “enshittification” or something, this is just good ol fashion rent seeking and it’s capitalism working as intended.

    • xuxebiko@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      In areas experiencing ongoing conflict where maintream media is either muzzled/ unable to keep up, twitter is used by people & journalists to provide updates. In countries with dictatorial governments where the mainstream media cannot be trusted , twitter (&other SM) are used to organize protests and discussions.

      • Pseu@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        In countries with dictatorial governments where the mainstream media cannot be trusted , twitter (&other SM) are used to organize protests and discussions.

        It was good for this, but it is not anymore

        • xuxebiko@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          It still is. Let me explain, in India MSM cannot be trusted (they are called godi media aka modi’s lapdog media) . Even though SM also routinely blocks & throttles opposition and jounalists to favour the majoritarian Hindutva (aka violent Hindu supremacists). they cannot block/ throttle everyone and information could still get out and reach people. Those who who didn’t wish to be tracked could access this info without having to log in to twitter and risk their identity being exposed to the govt. Now that access to info is blocked.

          TW: violence, SA

          rn, one of our North-Eastern states Manipur, is experiencing large-scale & intense govt. backed communal & sectarian violence ( a govt. backed ethnic cleansing) The situation is ghastly.
          100s have been killed, 4000+ weapons have been stolen from the army, girls & women have been gang-raped. the mob burned alive an injured 7 year old ichild, his mother and his aunt inside an ambulance. Since the violenece is govt. backed, neither the central govt nor the sstate govt is interested in quelling it and their pet godi media has either blanked it or is spouting the state govt.'s lies. The only way, the rest of India is able to know details (to organize civil society protests) is through SM.

    • Kaldo@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      There are plenty of people on twitter to follow that are are good influence and creators of quality content, or just nice to keep track of what they’re up to. No other platform unfortunately gives us the same amount of (casual) information about stuff like that. I hate what twitter’s become just like the next person but there’s just simply no alternative for casual user that provides the same experience.

    • Jarmer@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “we were getting data pillaged” … LOL I wonder what on earth that means in his feeble mind.

      • eliz@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Just some deranged rich snob who thinks UGC is … his? Kinda sad if you think about it. People posted on Twitter with the expectation of it being public, not some man’s sandbox.

      • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        That whole tweet reads like a screenwriter shit it out to fill some tech mumbojumbo plot point for a police procedural.

    • lozunn@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “Temporary” in corpo-speak means permanent if it generates profit and there-were-some-technical-issues if it doesn’t, so this is just Felon Muskrat testing the waters.

      • nameless_prole@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Right, they will do a cost/benefit analysis to see if the amount of traffic and engagement that they lost cost more or less than what they made or saved by forcing log in.

  • Stern@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Because that works so well for Pinterest right? I mean, we all have Pinterest accounts so we can access all that content on Pinterest don’t we?

    Oh… we don’t? People add -site:pinterest.com to their google searches to avoid the site entirely? Well then… dang.

      • curiosityLynx@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Or not anymore, anyway. Google’s algorithm seems to have come to the conclusion that pinterest isn’t worth linking as much anymore.

    • Pseu@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Twitter is going even harder than Pinterest. They’re not even showing a preview of the content, they’re just immediately redirecting users to a login page before seeing anything at all.

  • Elevator7008@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    This is a much more extreme version of the same reason I never used Quora. I’d be allowed on one page, but after that, clicking on any internal link in the site would push a “create an account” dialogue and wouldn’t let me click off to see the content. The way around that was just reloading the page, but the irritation and tiny extra step was enough to stop me from browsing that site. Just checked right now and Quora doesn’t do this on PC, but it does on my phone.

    Now Twitter won’t let you on the site at all without logging in.

  • OneMoreB@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    LinusTechTips just had an issue with this on WAN show tonight where Luke was trying to show a video on Twitter but he wasn’t signed in on his stream laptop and Linus was remote so he couldn’t share his screen.

    Luckily the creator of the video they wanted to show had also posted it to YouTube so they were able to show it anyway, but it still disrupted the flow of the show and led them to not be able to use the platform as a news source.

  • djquadratic@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    saw this too! looks like it broke a ton of tweet embeds too… Muskrat says its to mitigate scrapers but–this feels heavy handed

    • Chozo@kbin.social
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      What damage do web scrapers actually cause Twitter? I don’t understand Elon’s logic in this move.

      • NotMyOldRedditName@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Extra traffic that their infrastructure can’t handle since he fired all the people that knew how.

        Like reddit, he also probably sees it as losing millions of dollars for data he wants to be paid for.

        So losing money from degraded services and losing potential money from data being taken.

        What’s worth more - the loss of ad revenue from walled login, or the loss of potential revenue selling the data

      • eu8@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        There’s no way they cause more damage than what they have done now. The vast majority of users (and eyes on ads, etc) are not going to have accounts. The majority of accounts that might pay money only do so because lots of people (who may not be logged in) see them.

  • Kraiden@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I mean they have to protect all that content that they’ve been given for free, right?

    • spez probably
    • DPS_Not_Included@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Same I rarely went there to check specific people’s posts. I have not made a twitter yet and certainly not going to make one now.

  • Firefox@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It’s starting to feel like LinkedIn. Can’t view a page without the person getting notified you looked.