108
votes
Twitter is now forcing us to create an account. Here's another way of viewing tweets without an account.
Just replace "twitter.com" to "nitter.net"
Example:
https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver
to
https://nitter.net/iamjohnoliver
I never thought I'd be that nostalgic for the "old Internet", but it's sad to see some of these cornerstone sites on the Internet slowly transform into dark pattern golems.
I feel like every year I need to devote more time to circumventing enshittification. It used to be that running an adblock was enough, but now it's a matrix of adblocking, privacy tools, user-agent manipulators, greasemonkey scripts, and redirection services.
I think the issue is that a lot of these sites have been fueled by cheap money due to low interest rates for over a decade. But that cheap money has dried up and now sites have to figure out how to actually make money themselves if they want to stay in business. That leads these companies to make anti-user decisions in the name of self-preservation.
I think we’re going to see the face of the internet change a lot this decade. It’s a prime time for the giants we know to fall and for new, more agile companies to come in and create something to displace the old. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I personally hope for a future where everything online isn't funded by ads. Where companies have to focus on providing a good product that people are willing to pay for. Please the consumers, not the advertisers. Though it will probably be an uphill battle because consumers want everything for free, so ads and tracking is sadly still the most viable business plan in many cases.
Old internet used to be more or less designed around a great user experience. Whether it’s creating communities to discuss topics of interest, websites to post fun/interesting things, etc. it was mostly designed to create something the users enjoy and would want to come back to.
Priorities have now changed to simply be “how many ads can we serve you and still get away with it”. User experience is an afterthought, so long as it’s somewhat passable, it’s being designed around ad monetization.
Old internet UX was very uneven. It was a lot more about creative self-expression IMO. There was great UX and there was awful UX. I think the main reason Facebook beat MySpace ultimately was because it was clean and smooth vs. MySpace and all the custom HTML or CSS people could do.
But the old internet was, comparatively, fast. If people designed like they used to, there would be basically pages that aren't streaming media to have perceptible delays or loading times at all. I just had to check in for a flight and just inputting my information into a form took as much time as doing anything on a 56k modem back in the day.
Yeah, totally right. Facebook was easier to use and had a cleaner look compared to MySpace's messy profiles. Plus, Facebook gave users better control over their privacy, so people felt more comfortable using it. Another thing that helped Facebook was its focus on college students at the beginning. It created a sense of exclusivity and made it cool to be on Facebook. Then, they introduced the News Feed feature, which showed real-time updates from friends, making it more engaging. Then, similarwly, but more powerfully, they opened up the platform to outside developers, so there were lots of fun games and apps to use. They also did a good job with their mobile app, so people could easily check Facebook on their phones. Overall, Facebook just made better choices and adapted to what people wanted. They partnered with other companies and made it easy to log in to other websites with your Facebook account. These things all helped Facebook grow and become more popular than MySpace.
Then it became a thing of the boomers and lost some cool factor, criticism and controversies surrounding issues such as privacy breaches, misinformation, and its impact on society, decline in popularity and user trust.
I distinctly remember being weirded out once “the masses” started getting on Facebook because they just started friending everyone randomly. At some point my moms hairdresser friended me and talked to my mother about how I must be popular because I have so many friends on there when really I was just in college.
"...now it's 'how many ads can we serve at you'..."
i remember old internet throwing so many ad pop-ups at you it would fill your screen with a cascade of windows.
As websites have grown from static HTML pages that one could write with an HTML For Dummies book, to mostly 3-tiered web applications where you have to be a graphics designer, JavaScript developer, database admin, security expert, backend services developer, compliance officer, cloud systems administrator, spam fighter, etc, it's become waaaay more expensive and complicated to administer a public website than it was in the 90's or early 2000's. Considering the salaries of developers and how expensive it is to do all of those things at scale, monetization is really the only option in most cases unless you have content that people are willing to pay for (eg Netflix).
I've been watching my growing list of extensions and filters to make common sites usable and thinking the same, it's getting out of hand.
Happy to add here that there are browser extensions that automatically redirect twit links to nitter -- here is the Nitter Redirect Firefox extension that I have been using for a while: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect.
Or for a more general purpose redirector, shoutout to @Bauke's Re-Nav.
Thank you! Been using Redirector, but the one you linked seems much straightforward.
It's pretty straightforward, but it also has some pretty awesomely deep features... like regex support, so you can do things like redirect:
https?://(?<wiki>.+)\.fandom\.com/wiki/(?<page>.+)tohttps://breezewiki.com/$<wiki>/wiki/$<page>.And even share your redirects with others who have the extension installed, E.g. fandom to breezewiki
@Bauke is a bloody genius. :)
Yeah i liked that too but sadly the creator passed away. So that meant no support or updates anymore. I also had a bug where some sites caused heavy cpu use.
@cfabbro thx for that. Seems like a great alternative
That's a great extension, thanks for sharing!
(Edit: This extension works fine on Chrome for Mac)
Has anyone been using this extension on MS Edge for Mac? The extension doesn't seem to work.
I would like to report this issue, however the website hosting the issue tracker appears to be a personal website.
Otherwise, from the looks of it, this seems to be a great extension!
You could try messaging @Bauke directly, or posting in here:
https://tildes.net/~tech/139s/re_nav_a_webextension_to_create_custom_redirects_for_any_website
Hi, I just tried it for myself on Edge and it seems to work fine? I don't have a Mac so can't see if I would have the same problem there. You should be able to go to
edge://extensionsand click on the Details link for Re-Nav, maybe there's something about an error there?Also yes that's my personal site, but you can always reach me via email or here on Tildes, any way is fine.
These addons can also be used on Firefox Mobile Beta or Nightly if you create a custom addon collection: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/10/20/firefox-beta-for-android-now-supports-custom-add-on-collections/
The settings page can be buggy though, I had to export my LibRedirect settings from desktop and import them on mobile because I couldn't chose instances.
I've been using it too, though I wonder how on earth it can keep working.
Tip: I often have to try the different instances. Delete the url from the "Nitter Instance" text box (it autofills it with the default instance) but when you click the text field again, a drop down of instances appears to choose from.
Update:
Check out the comment by @Neko. It has a much better direct link to the list.
In case nitter.net is down or facing issues, you can choose one of the many other instances from here!
Also, shoutout to LibRedirect - another extension/add-on that works for a bunch of sites including the likes of Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc.
I've been playing with bookmarklets for a few months now and have written/collected a bunch of the useful ones. One of which is
Open in Nitter- it does what it sounds like, opening the current Twitter page in a specified Nitter instance once you click on the bookmarklet. Here's the simple one-liner:It appears all Nitter instances are completely down.
For those who are desperate, there are a few other ways to view Tweets without an account:
Twitter's Syndication Feeds:
Twitter Embeds:
Thanks! Saw these getting shared here and there but didn't know how they worked.
My solution to this change is to just block Twitter entirely in Control D. If Twitter doesn't want to let me view content without logging in then I just won't view Twitter content anymore. There's no longer anything there I really want/need to see anyway.
I'll probably do the same for Reddit before too much longer.
Twitter wants to raise the friction of accessing content on their site? I'll go all-in.
To the people suggesting Nitter, please be aware that it isn't immune to this problem. I have had decent luck so far, but don't be surprised if it conks out.
Elon is claiming it is a "temporary emergency measure" (mirror from HN: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2023/twitter.png).
Yeah, all my nitter feeds seem down as well. It seems a bit random.
Using twiiit.com instead of nitter.net will avoid most rate limiting by randomly picking a Nitter server for you.
Neat! (pun intended)
I alredy knew about this little tool, but I used it mostly to bypass Twitter's javascript bloat. Considering Twitter's new API policy is phohibitely expensive (even more than Reddit's), I'm impressed this site's creator managed to bypass the login prompt. If that's due to a programming oversight on Twitter page, I expect this loophole to be closed sooner or later.
On Android you can use Fritter or Quacker without an account. Don't know for how long but still working this morning...
Fritter seems to be completely dead today.
Yep. The login thing broke both.
I'm actually slightly glad of this change. I tend to check on my ex's social media when I'm depressed (which then makes me more depressed), so if this change can be a barrier to stop, good for me.
That said, I can understand why it's a bad change for a lot of people. Hopefully it'll also make other people use twitter less?
With Reddit and Twitter becoming close to unusable, where do people plan to get their news?
I saw this in a different comment, but now I have an rss feed to Wikipedia Current Events. No opinion or spin, just the news of the day, once a day, like a newspaper.
My mental health has shot up. I can read about what SCOTUS had done or what's happening with the migrant crisis, but I don't need 10 articles saying how horrible it is. I know it's horrible, I just want the news.
Separately, I also have a feed to ISW for updates on Ukraine. Still working on solutions for local news, but this is probably going to be better for me overall.
Most reputable news sources have an RSS-feed. I just switched to an RSS-reader and added BBC, ArsTechnica etc. to it. It’s just not as “curated” or echo-chambered as it was on Reddit which means I read more news about “other stuff”.
The downside is that it can be a LOT of news. :D I wake up to around 500 unread news stories.
Newsminimalist is also pretty good. I’ve just started using it though, but it looks really promising.
I’ve been considering just using an RSS reader like @Raistlin mentioned. There was a thread here not too long ago about people’s favorite RSS feeds so I’ll probably subscribe to a few of those. Now I just need to find a good cross-platform RSS reader that manages to work across iOS, Android, macOS and Linux. Or, I could also just build my own if I actually put my mind to it.
I just ended up not clicking on Twitter links anymore. I'm sure it's better for my mental health. The times that I went on it I noticed how easy it was to get sucked into the replies and fall into a Twitter blackhole.
Twitter makes another hilariously stupid decision, more news at 11 (but this is actually completely useless and pointless, considering anyone who cares (ie nitter instance operators) can use the intensely hard strategy of... making an account)
You can kinda sorta recreate a Twitter timeline on a Nitter instance if you don't care about posting tweets. There's two options:
nitter.net/account1,account2,account3. This is easy but stops working if the URL gets too longlist:LIST_ID_HERE. The list ID shows up in the url on Twitter, should be all numbers. You can also addexclude:repliesto the query if you want something more twitter like.Also, I've found this instance to be pretty reliable and the people running it seem pretty legit at first glance
Yeah I'm not going to make an account. This just means I'm not going to look at the handful of tweets here and there
This makes me to not use Twitter as well along with Reddit.
But currently Twitter is one of the most real time source of information for news/current events happening in the world.
What alternative you would suggest other than Twitter?
It appears to be temporary according to El Musko. Or so he's saying not too long ago in an update.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Quoting Elon's tweet:
Twitter already gave a very cut back experience to non-logged-in users so not sure what Musk is talking about really, you'll see the search function is very crippled without an account (and is even pretty crippled with, if you search anything remotely common the results are obviously curtailed vs what Twitter used to deliver years ago).
Can't see why Twitter even had any function without an account, is there any other social media site that allows it? Facebook seems to be mostly locked down, Instagram... and then I realised I have no clue beyond that, assume TikTok etc don't offer much either.
To wildly speculate to give the best-possible reason for Twitter, maybe Twitter broke a caching layer. Beyond direct bandwidth costs, the expense of web scraping is really Twitter's responsibility, since it controls the whole server-side chain.
Twitter has been interested in better-monetizing itself, including giving bluechecks quasi-promoted tweets. It's possible that some combination of these recent changes means that timeline feeds are less static, and thus less cacheable. If each web scraper now forces Twitter's servers to expensively re-generate tweet views on load, Twitter might have increased its own costs by an order of magnitude despite little change in web-scraping behaviour.
We can also add to this the shutdown of the free API, pushing existing "read-only" uses from regulated and presumably cheap API access to more expensive web-scraping.
I find this change particularly ironic because, if I remember correctly, eliminating Twitter's aggressive pushes to login/create an account was one of the first changes that Musk insisted upon.
Twitter isn't all that large in the grand scheme of things. Facebook has about 3bn monthly active users, per the first couple results of a Google search, whereas Twitter has about 370m.
Since the vast majority of Internet users aren't users of Twitter†, the site still has plenty of organic room to grow by encouraging lurking behaviour, and from that account creation and participation. This hard "you must
be this highhave an account to view" wall breaks most of that flow.Additionally, many of the more notable smaller social media sites don't have hard login requirements. Reddit, to give the canonical example, allows lurkers to see approximately all of its SFW content. Imgur allows free browsing. Tiktok (at a glance) seems to present lots of front-page content.
† — There are at least as many Internet users as Facebook users, and the number of Twitter users is about 13% of the number of Facebook users. Ergo, at most that fraction of Internet users can possibly be Twitter users.
Didn't he shut down a bunch of server sites last year to cut costs?
Getting spez vibes from this
I have an account I set up a forever ago and haven't used it. Y'all can use it to look at stuff.
Ooo if you’re serious I’d love to access it. I only started using Twitter since the war in Ukraine and basically only use it to pay attention to a handful of analysts. However, I’ve found it useful enough I would’ve made an account by now if Musk hadn’t bought it last year.
I do have a Twitter account, but I haven't used it for years, and I don't intend on doing anything with it soon. In my opinion, there is nothing worth viewing on Twitter, personally speaking. It is as simple as dropping my usage for the entire platform if I won't miss its contents and disagree with their new way of operation.
YouTube's three strikes ad block system? I will go through the trouble of mpv + ffmpeg + ytdlp, since every content creator I give a shit about post on YouTube. Twitter? Nothing of value is lost if I stop seeing tweets - other platforms I use will push Twitter screenshots to me if they mattered enough.
We could also choose to abandon platforms like reddit and twitter if they impose restrictions we don't like...