[VERGE] Twitter has started blocking unregistered users

Because what Twitter really needs right now is less engagement.

They're trying to juice up their stats for advertisers. More registered users = more surveillance capitalism.

Lol. "Town Square". Hah.

Honestly, thank you, Elon. Now I'm not even tempted to visit that toxic hellscape echo chamber of awful shit.

Bastard somehow did something that'll probably have a more positive effect on my mental health.

This is a net positive (for me), but it's still fucking dumb, and his fault. "Too many sites were scraping us :(" Yeah, dude, that's what happens when you pull the "API is only for the wealthy now" nonsense.

I swear, this could be prescient, actually. Could easily see Huffman pulling this shit within the next few weeks. (Lol, I wouldn't put it past him to do it tomorrow.)

The advertisers must love this.

He kind of already has implemented something like this. If you ever try and load a mobile reddit thread in your browser, you're greeted with a download the app-wall like 50% or more of the time.

it's better in the app
Watching him destroy that site is quite astonishing. I've never had an account with twitter. It never appealed to me. Making it a requirement to have an account to even see content isn't going to convince me to sign up.

Since many companies use twitter as their mouthpiece on the internet. I wonder how they're going to react when they're now only able to engage with registered users. I'd be surprised if this works out well for the company to be honest.
Huffman?
- Lol, probably should have specified. My bad.
  
  Steve Huffman. You may know him as /u/spez on reddit.

This is hilarious. The biggest inconvenience this will cause, is people asking "can you post a screenshot? I dont use Twitter."

It is kind of a disaster for emergencies. Twitter is the defacto social network whenever any disaster strikes round here, the sheer volume of people, emergency services and the versatility of hashtags make it great for that.
- Which it never should have been in the first place. There should be some kind of publicly funded twitter like clone used for this purpose.

Can already tell you this is negatively affecting furries. A lot of people use Twitter as a platform for furry art and discussion. Now that Twitter can't be accessed by the public, furry art can't be spread as easily theough embed, and this hurts furry artists in the long run.

Actually, more generally this could hurt artists period.

Well, that makes it even easier to never visit Twitter again. Right now I was sometimes tempted to follow a link and see what it was about, but I'll be happy to quit that habbit too.

Twitter users can't post to the general public anymore. Their posts are visible to users logged into Twitter only. That should render Twitter useless to whoever wants to post something to people on the Internet. I wonder what journalists, companies, or politicians think about it.

Permanently Deleted

I was just over on the r/worldnews livethread on the Ukraine war and the embedded tweets were showing up just fine. I'd actually forgotten about this thread and tried clicking on one for further details, and got the "you're not logged in" notification.

Ironically, I had a Twitter account years ago that I created purely because something I was doing at the time required one for login purposes. I never used it and I can only assume it was deleted a few months back when Twitter said they were purging "inactive" accounts. I'm certainly not creating a new one now.

actually start doing their fucking jobs as journalists and write out the content of the tweet in their own words.

They've got ChatGPT for that now.
They should use Twitter for what it is, not as the main source of information. I'm so sick of it. Use Twitter as an additional channel to promote your stuff, chat with people maybe. But goddammit, don't use Twitter as the main channel (just like how it was with Facebook years back, spit).
start doing their fucking jobs as journalists and write out the content of the tweet in their own words.

if they'd be doing their jobs as journalists they wouldn't be typing out "tweets" at all, they should be reporting things that matter like the god damn corruption everywhere.
Embedded tweets use the Twitter API AFAIK so that should still work.
- Permanently Deleted

That's certainly one way to begin a social media detox along with Reddit's idiocy over third party apps. This will make it much easier to ignore Twitter since I deleted my account there and have no intention of signing up again just to view tweets.

These social media giants seem to be self destructing themselves on purpose.

Seriously though, what is causing all of these various media platforms to ramp up the attacks on their users so obviously? Reddit blocking apps, Twitter login-hiding posts, Google shutting down adblockers. Is it coordinated? Does it just make sense to make a rush for money when every company is doing the same?
- A lot of the tech companies were slammed by investors over the last two years for missing their earnings and many of them are still struggling to go back to 2021 optimistic growth rates. The layoffs last year have also cost them a lot of their best talent, so the quality of innovation, decision making, and execution has suffered. You are now left with a bunch of older executives who never really understood that it was their younger talent that was the core of their company's success, so they fall back on older methods like increasing prices and cutting costs to try and lead the board / shareholders into thinking that their ridiculous executive salary packages are somehow justified.

Will this affect Google search? That’s got to be a good driver for Twitter right?

Maybe trying to get people that end up there after a search to sign up would be a better tactic.

Google is happy to link to news sites with a paywall, I don't see why they'd have an issue with a free signup.

Mastodon is better anyway. I deleted Twitter ages ago when Musk took over. It's amazing how many people have stayed there despite how much he's shit all over the userbase. He makes Spez look like a saint.

Mastodon might be "better" but it's in a completely different league if it's missing 99% people I actually care about following on twitter. On mastodon the feed is just random people talking about their personal stuff and misusing hashtags, and usually when you bring this up the answer is "well duh, mastodon is not supposed to be twitter, it is its own thing".
- Agreed. There's a lot mixed messaging from the userbase where we're recommended to switch to Mastodon from Twitter but also respect that Mastodon is not supposed to be a Twitter replacement.

Man seeing all these big websites kill themselves slowly with poor decisions, kind of gives me hope for the future of the internet. Now we just need facebook to really mess up, and things will be even better.

Welp, this kills Twitter for me permanently. I closed my account after Mush took it over but sometimes I’d check out tweets and replies my Discord friends would share. Big tech just keeps shooting itself in the foot lately.

Good, I don't want to use Twitter anyway. :)

It's a weird day when I read a read a Tim Sweeney quote and agree with him.

Thank god. Hopefully Elon Musk will require a blue checkmark to be able to make new tweets.

I mean it kind of already was, right? You could view specific tweets and a couple replies before a banner showed up asking you to sign in and preventing you from scrolling further. It did the same thing if you tried to click on certain things. I had a firefox extension to bypass it which worked wonders. I assume there'll probably be a new one for this.

Welp, this kills Twitter for me permanently. I closed my account after Mush took it over but sometimes I’d check out tweets and replies my Discord friends would share. Big tech just keeps shooting itself in the foot lately.

This feels like a big milestone in their enshittification journey, and also in the maturity of the fediverse. Part of what made Twitter so widely popular I think is that tweets were available to everyone, not just the few people who were online enough to actually have an account. To lock things behind a wall after so many people have left seems like a bad idea.

Stop. Don't. Come back.

Says its temporary, but we'll have to see how temporary. It's also blocked off access via nitter too.

I've never used Twitter, but on occasion been linked to something there. So if that's intentional they're killing off that kind of traffic on purpose. It seems all these corpo social media sites are monetizing themselves to death.

This is actually the interesting part of this move for me. Organic traffic into the platform from google searches, websites (like news orgs and such) that link directly to the tweets as sources, etc. if that’s not going to work, that will likely tank their engagement.