> There's some really good stuff on there that I miss

Tbh, same. I do miss getting some information about Windows betas pretty much, but other than that, I won't miss Twitter at all.

People need to publish more on more open and community driven solutions. Heck, even publishing information for a site that still works on older PCs is better than publishing information on Twitter.

It's the Great Tune Out. More people are joining this movement every day.

I don't understand.

There are some handy mechanisms you can use on Twitter to filter and curate what you get to see.

You can mute any word or hashtag you want.

You can create lists containing specific people or orgs you'd like to keep up with.

Occasionally something slips through the cracks but nothing is perfect.

With those mechanisms in mind though, Twitter is pretty hackable. You can get it into a state where you can still consume things you're interested in. And if you don't want to give ad impressions you can access it with a browser that can block ads.

They're saying: I don't read Twitter anymore [because I don't want to get a log in and now it requires a login]

You're right. I'd just figure at that point it's not that complicated to get a random spam email box just to create an account with.

They don't ask for a phone #? I would consider making an account or two in that case. If only because many services that start out requiring only an email end up requiring a phone # (like google did) and those old anonymous accounts become useful.

In my experience, they do indeed ask for a phone number.

They will also demand your phone number, by pretending to politely request it, then insta-banning your account if you decline.

What I find weird, is of all the things I totally ignore because of its corporate shitfuckery, Twitter is the one that should be the easiest to read. How in 2024 is it possible that I, using a text only browser without JavaScript, cannot read what are short text-only messages on what's really a jumped up version of NNTP?

With each passing day we regress technically .

They want to at least try to reduce data scraping. At least attempt. Do you have a better idea because we’d love to hear it

Ignore it. What's the reason to restrict it? Scraping is important to interoperability.

> data scraping.

What we old people call "reading"? But if that's what you crazy kids call it these days.

> Do you have a better idea because we’d love to hear it

Oh well, now you mention it, it'd be rather nice if Elon Musk went and stuck his head up the back of a cow.

Anyway gotta go scrape some more HN posts...

Have cows not suffered enough?

I mean, yes? There are many techniques for blocking or throttling high volume scraping. You don't even need to understand the techniques, plenty of companies sell this as a service.

That's beside the point though. There's no actual need to force logins, it's just something Elon wants. Given what a dumpster fire Twitter has turned into the rational move for most people is probably to just forget about the site at this point.

While this is tangential, you've stoked my curiosity. What could prevent scraping? In this case, they're combating against scraping from other major businesses, so another company doing something like setting up thousands of distinct IPs to scrape from at rates which are specifically intended to mimic organic usage would not be difficult.

Only thing I can think of is starting to get into gaming-site type territory where you end up trying to do things like analyze mouse position, click patterns (every 30 seconds at exactly the 0,0 pixel or whatever), and so on. But this sort of stuff is a cat and mouse game, where I think the cat is generally going to be at a pretty big disadvantage.

IMO literally nothing, as long as the analog hole exists. The best they can do is make it more expensive. Requiring an account is one way to do that. Another option is to take the RIAA route and sue everyone involved. Of course they will likely fail, but they can weaponize the legal system against less well resourced companies.

A better idea would be to sell access to the firehose and API at a reasonable cost such that it makes more sense to pay them for this rather than set up a whole scraping farm, aka the Netflix model. Unlike Netflix, they won't be crippled by 3rd parties unlicensing content.