https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/twitter-silently-removes-login-requirement-for-viewing-tweets/
Days after requiring users to log in to view tweets on the web, Twitter has silently removed these restrictions.
They actually likely did this due to SEO. Google was allegedly in the process of removing tweets from the search index because they weren’t accessible. This happens automatically for most sites.
This feels like an extremely basic thing to miss. Something 10 seconds of thought would have fixed.
I guarantee you whoever pushed this to prod knew exactly what was going to happen, but the super genius(🤮) in charge is always right and must never be questioned.
Does anyone else think a lot about the incredible irony of western freedom-loving democracies being fine and dandy with the fact that nearly 100% of workplaces are top-down dictatorships? Even when you're "given" freedom to act independently, it's always predicated upon your decisions and actions aligning with the wishes of your superiors. The second that isn't the case, you get your marching orders, and you can either comply or fuck off.
It would be one thing if employment were "optional" to some degree, or there were always more jobs than people to do them, but so many people are one missed paycheck or medical emergency away from homelessness, you basically have no choice but to grin and bear it.
My upper manager always goes on about "empowerment" being part of the new direction for the business, but wouldn't you know, we still get drawn and quartered for the smallest errors.
There are solutions to level the playing field like unions or European works councils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council . but it's still top down in the end. Always seemed strange to me, perhaps it's the way to get things done...
The real solution isn't those things; it's structuring the businesseses as employee-owned co-ops.
It would be one thing if employment were “optional” to some degree, or there were always more jobs than people to do them, but so many people are one missed paycheck or medical emergency away from homelessness, you basically have no choice but to grin and bear it.
Well, it is "optional" to some degree. I know plenty of people across Europe who are doing oke enough on basic support. It's not an amazing living but it's not like you are out on the streets. And a medical emergency will not cripple you with debt.
At least far as actually freedom-loving democracies go (as in, free to abort, free to express your identity, free to protest, ...).
So much this. The leader on top is the one who instills the corporate culture. In this case, the engineers have no say in the matter. They need to do what they're told.
How does Pinterest get around this then? They pollute image searches like crazy, and require you to login to see anything. At least they did, I blocked them from searches so maybe it's different now.
Pinterest is cancer. They act like their content belongs to them when it's all stolen images
They must have changed their paywall behavior, I just went and was able to see every image I clicked on.
The login popup appears after a few pages but you can just exit out and keep viewing. Google should be able to index the pages without access issues
Maybe that previous aggressive login screen killed their SEO before, I see much less pinterest images than I used to years ago
it 100% did, google removed over half the twitter links on its index due to dead links/login requirements, which if kept like that would basically kill all Twitter traffic since most traffic comes from search engines
Easy - detect if you're getting accessed by a search crawler or a human. Serve a full page or just a login request.
Ever heard of https://12ft.io/ ? It allows you to bypass alot of pay walls by basically pretending to be a search engine trying to index a website. For SEO reasons a lot of pay walled sites allow search engines to access the whole article to index. 12ft.io leverages this to show you whole articles behind paywalls. This is something you could also achieve by spoofing the User-Agent. It would probably work for things like Pinterest without an account as well, but that's something I have never tried (since I have no interest in the cancer that is Pinterest).
Most of these sites serve the information, then put up something to block being able to view it.
And if they didn't fire everyone, someone with a spec of sense would have told them this
Same with popups that try to throw you to only a mobile app
What makes you think that even if someone told Musk that, he would have listened to them?
He was firing people before who told him something wasn't going to work, so it wouldn't surprise me if everyone who knew this would fail stayed silent in fear for their jobs.
Every single one of these "iNDePENdeNT/liBerTaRian" tech bros think they're the smartest man in the room. Too high on their own farts.
Yes, most likely, within days they lost half of their links in Google.
How tf they did not see this happening?
Since Elon I don’t think Twitter has been thinking about the long term effects of their actions. Everyone predicted the blue checkmark fiasco but they went ahead with it anyway so this doesn’t surprise me.
Probably also advertisement revenue. Why would people go on twitter if they can't see anything? Why would advertisers pay money to show ads to no-one?
I think Elon got quite a talking to.
https://www.rawstory.com/google-twitter/
Yeah they were already doing that, I imagine he took a look at how many inbound visits come from Google and quickly U-turned
This is hilarious. You don't change your mind about a new policy unless it was absolutely terrible and threatened your business. I can't see twitter surviving much longer; how are they even going to make money?
I saw one reporter describe it as if Costco decided to make every checkout "10 items or less."
Assuming you're genuinely asking. It's a retail store primarily in the US that is for buying items in bulk.
But he's a deadbeat who doesn't pay his bills like Trump. He's squatting sand isn't paying rent, so there's no way he's using his own money for that
Plus, people should really understand how someone being a billionaire works. They don't have billions of dollars sitting in a bank account somewhere.
They leverage their investments to take out short term loans or the like against their invested capital.
Musk is a billionaire on paper. Like most. His wealth is represented by his ownership shares of Tesla, speculation on the valuation of space x and solar city.
He's not selling his interests or shares in Tesla to buy things here. He's leveraging them.
Similar to how you can have your house paid off, and then get a new mortgage against your house for an injection of capital. You're leveraging the equity you have in your home. Which is based on the current perceived value of your home in the current market.
If the market changes drastically, so does the amount you can leaverage.
TL;DR; he does not have cash sitting around he can burn through to actually pay bills, and he's absolutely not going to pay his Google cloud hosting bill with his Tesla shares unless absolutely forced to (at which point he'd probably just sell Twitter).
Or Saudi or Qatari slave state money.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake
A lot of government agencies use Twitter for breaking news, notifications, and alerts that they're trying to get out as quickly as possible to as many people as possible, such as tornado warnings, amber alerts, traffic conditions, etc. I can't imagine they'd stick around a platform that requires logging in to view these messages.
Kind of terrible that we ever got to this point. I've seen announcements from government agencies that are ONLY available on social media. Who thought that was okay?
I can’t imagine they stick around on a platform that isn’t stable and in the last year has changed direction so many times that almost no one can keep up with it. It’s the instability and constant changing that makes people jump ship from a previously stable platform. It’s not like a Lemmy instance where it’s to be expected for a while.
Ideally governments should be pushing things like threat to life alerts out via a digital emergency alert system (e.g. Amber alerts) rather than hoping those potentially impacted are checking Twitter.
Which is funny because the UK decided to finally implement this recently and my god the Twitter Boomers were mad.
I reluctantly disabled all government alerts on my phone a few years ago because despite theoretically having multiple levels of importance (minor alerts, major alerts, critical alerts), apparently they weren't categorizing the alerts when they sent them out so I kept receiving all alerts, even minor ones and alerts for things happening far from where I live, and to make matters worse they overrode do not disturb. Hopefully they've improved the system by now, but I haven't thought to check until this conversation thread.
Let me guess... Amber Alerts in Canada being sent as the "presidential alert" which bypasses everything on your phone and wakes you up at 3AM? Goddamn Alert Ready is a mess.
Thanks for the context. I see why you would want to turn off the alerts. That’s definitely an irritating misuse of the system.
This morning storm Poly smashed the Netherlands, especially North Holland (Amsterdam region). Digital emergency alert system was used, three times, and directed people to Twitter.
Which was closed, of course. It's a political shitshow right now. Amsterdam municipality already runs its own Mastodon, and this fuckup will probably have consequences in moving official broadcast channels off Twitter.
Which was closed, of course. It’s a political shitshow right now. Amsterdam municipality already runs its own Mastodon, and this fuckup will probably have consequences in moving official broadcast channels off Twitter.
Germanys gov runs its own Mastodon instance - social.bund.de - where the cabinet, the ministries, state institutes etc have their official accounts.
Some non-political examples are: The German Weather Service, the German Aerospace Institute, and the Consumer Protection Agency.
Nonsense like this is why I believe outdoor warning sirens are still incredibly important. Mobile alerts are not foolproof, and can be bungled horribly, and not everybody has their phone on them, or a phone at all. If there's a severe storm or tornado coming, you need to know ASAP. Sirens are an excellent way of getting people indoors, regardless of who's outside. I heard the Netherlands was considering decommissioning its countrywide siren system, which I thought was absolutely fucking stupid. What you posted proves exactly why.
I read that public service annoucement accounts were excempt from the change, but it's just bad business either way.
Just today we had a severe storm alert pushed to phones through the emergency system here in the Netherlands and the alert contained the fire department’s twitter handle. I was like “welp, I guess I’ll hear the updates later”
I thought the exact same thing this morning when the NL alert had a Twitter reference in it
These companies know that the power is with the people. We just need regulars who are not tech educated to get themselves educated and see how the power shifts from these companies to FOSS and decentralized platforms.
You're talking about an issue humanity has had since forever, getting people to do what is best for their own interests. In business they actually needed to create the concept of a union just so that people would organize in a way to help all workers. Without that force driving them together what you get is the Reddit 48hr blackout. People can't stop using the service long enough to invoke actual change because their addiction to Reddit was too high.
This rollback of login requirements was because Google stopped indexing them. The only power the people had in the Twitter situation was being the consumers of Google who were being directed away from Twitter.
It's a problem of collective consciousness, the majority of humanity are about 30-100 years behind the bleeding edge of education and comprehension. It takes a long time to bring all those people up to speed. There's a reason they say "Science advances one funeral at a time."
This younger generation is the first to really get it though. And yet personal wants still trump actual progress.
When you do something abysmally stupid, then have to walk it back, not saying anything is a lot safer than trying to explain.
I don't know though. I'd find a certain amount of entertainment in watching him ummm and stutter his way through the explanation.
I still can't see any tweets. Because I value my mental health and don't go looking for the horrible things.
I'm in Canada and can see a tweet IF it is directly linked. If you click on the person's feed it says "there's a problem". So it is not as useless as before but still is for any sort of emergency or critical news dissemination.
And yet Fritter doesn't work right now. Are they blocking 3rd party apps like Reddit, or is it something with Fritter?
Fritter works by scraping the twitter website, so it should be working. The only issue is however that the website changed a lot so I guess the scraping strategies don't work as well now.
I love your username! It's so hard to come up with a good one, but that's one is great!
So trying out changes to a platform isn’t a bad thing and can lead to a lot of good optimization, but usually you don’t just push them onto the entire user base without testing/marketing research to try and anticipate their effects.
How exactly do these changes make it to production without being evaluated? I know blame is mostly on Musk here but do the software devs really never stand up and say “we’ll look into it and get back to you in a few weeks”?
The only devs left are those whose visas are tied to employment, so they can't piss of the management or they get deported.
The reason this doesn't make sense to you is because of how you're framing it.
This corpo is being run unilaterally by someone unconcerned with its longevity. It's that simple.