104
votes
Should Twitter links be banned?
Or at the very least, should there be a requirement to have users take screenshots of Twitter content if they want to link to it? It feels a little backwards to have to make an account for another website in order to consume certain content on this site.
I'm just gonna ignore it if I can't read it, banned or not. In the end, doesn't make sense to share anything from twitter since not everyone can see it.
Not everyone can read paywalled articles either, but they're still allowed to be submitted here. If people want to post mirrors to said paywalled articles in a comment, that's allowed as well, but it's not a requirement. And I feel the exact same should apply to twitter.
There are websites that let you bypass paywalls. I’ve been using them lately and they work. Someone can at least post a link to an article with the bypass included.
Yes, but if they are submitted as the topic submission link, I (or one of the other users with link editing) will very likely change it to the original source link. Deimos has repeatedly stated that original sources should be linked to in submissions, not mirrors, or archives. If people want to link to mirrors/archives in the comments, that's fine though. And I even frequently do that myself for paywalled article submissions: https://i.imgur.com/V5ssfE8.png
Surely you can view the direct image link at least ?
I’ve been using imgbb for the same reason.
I've been guilty of accidentally posting paywalled articles before. I'm so used to ad blockers and paywall bypassing extensions that I forget other people don't use the same thing.
Would you mind name dropping that extension or sharing a link here?
Certainly.
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
I mean i feel the same about paywalled stuff. Its like sharing an ad.
I do not think it should be banned but i just dont see the point of sharing it in the first place.
It's fine to feel that way. And if you don't want to see paywalled articles you can always add
paywallto your topic tag filters. But some people do still find value in sharing, reading, and discussing paywalled articles, especially since most are pretty trivial to get around.Agreed. If they lock down access to their content that just means less and less reason to link it.
Paywalled content typically gets posted when it is more noteworthy. And in many of those cases people (sometimes the OP) will provide a non-paywalled mirror or snapshot.
For text/picture tweets it doesn't even make sense to link them honestly. They might as well just be a picture.
My understanding is that for articles on sites with paywalls, someone else usually puts a link to a un-paywalled version in the comments. I don't see why the same procedure wouldn't work for Twitter.
I think that is probably a good solution. A potential rule could be that any content that is not publicly viewable must be rehosted before posting.
That's not a rule. You can politely ask for someone to do it for you, though, and some people will do it on their own.
The problem with that rule for news articles is, that many news sites post articles for free in the first hours after they get published, but once engagement has increased (people have started to post links on social media, ect.), they turn on the paywall.
So often, by the time OP posts a link it's not obvious that the article will be paywalled 3 hours later.
I agree. I think a screenshot or a link to ThreadReader would work. I don't like Twitter or Musk, but like it or not, there's still folks putting valuable information on the website like front line breaking news. All this said, Twitter isn't the most frequently posted website on Tildes.
Perhaps we can even implement a Twitter tag if we haven't already, and folks who are entirely opposed to Twitter can filter out Twitter posts.
Can I hijack this post to ask for folks to kindly add a screenshot or text copy-paste for twitter content? Or share a way to see the post without visiting it?
I really don't want to use their site but I recognize that sometimes there is good content that just happens to be in that place
I liked the old habit back in the forum days where any link to another site/article/anything would have the relevant part quoted in the post in normal text. If it’s a long form article then usually at least a good couple paragraphs were quoted to give you an idea of whether it was worth clicking.
With a preference for text because of disabilities, I'd say
Imagine if the idiot disables text copying lol.
Copy and pasting is the weapon that the web scrapers use to run up Twitter’s hosting bills /s
PowerToys to the rescue? I’ve been finding its text copying screengrab widget extremely useful.
Blurry hieroglyphics only. 🙄
Stack overflow disabling it for April fool's was one of their best pranks.
I didn’t even know you could do that back then. They got me good that time.
I don't think it would be desirable to ban a domain containing a lot of important and relevant information.
As suggested, my advice would be to post the link and some kind of archived version in the comments.
If you truly don't wanna submit a Twitter link ever, you can create a text post with the textual content of the Tweet alongside a link to Twitter and/or to an archived link. And also a little comment of your own for good measure.
Yeah, but what about Twitter?
Could convert to nitter links instead. Maybe a user setting?
If a nitter link gets posted here, I (or one of the other users with link editing) will very likely change it to the original twitter link. Deimos has repeatedly stated that original sources should be linked to in submissions, not mirrors, or archives. If people want to link to the nitter version in the comments, that's fine though.
Fair enough. I was thinking it would be nice if users could have a setting that would swap links with archive/mirror/alternative links automatically as an opt-in thing.
IE instead of
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/rioting-less-intense-france-overnight-719-arrested-2023-07-02/
The first link is > 5mb, the second link is < 10kb.
It would swap the link to
https://neuters.de/world/europe/rioting-less-intense-france-overnight-719-arrested-2023-07-02/
Basically opt-in LibRedirect support but done by the server so that users don't have to install LibRedirect (which is actually a little difficult to do).
One thing to keep in mind is that Tildes is a Canadian non-profit bound by Canadian law.
I am not a lawyer, but I very much doubt giving people a setting to automatically bypass paywalls would be considered legal here, since paywalls technically count as "Technological Protection Measures" which it's prohibited to circumvent. And AFAIK, the only reason links to paywall bypasses are allowed in comments is because some measure of protection is afforded to social sites, due to the liability mostly being on the users who post comments, not on the site itself for merely for providing those users a platform for making comments. But if a paywall bypass was built into the site itself that would very likely open Tildes up to potential lawsuits.
I'm not a lawyer - you might be right. It's curious that LibRedirect can exist within the Firefox add-on listing on Mozilla.org without legal challenge. I wonder where the line on this sort of thing actually is.
I suspect the lines aren't very clear or well established yet anywhere for this particular issue, due to how slow legal systems tends to work, but that likely varies by country. However, in the case of Firefox extensions, I imagine the same sort of laws apply to them as Tildes. Firefox/Mozilla is merely providing a platform for users to publish extensions, so they have some measure of protections afforded to them when it comes to liability. And so most liability probably falls on the creators of the extensions and the users who download them.
Haven't these waters been tested already in regards to CP? I thought platforms were on the hook for that sort of content as it is. Probably not a stretch to believe the shield platforms have against liability is not that strong.
Perhaps I'm misremembering and platforms were financially held accountable by ad agencies or payment systems over actual government interference...can't recall now.
I guess not, I hadn't checked.
Last I'd heard nitter isn't working anymore.
Or a bot
Yes, they should be banned. As long as Twitter does not revert course. Their loginwall is hard and means that without a Twitter account posts are not viewable full stop.
I understand you're angry at twitter, and rightly so. I personally hate the place, and despise Elon Musk. But by that logic, should Financial Times and every other hard paywall site be banned here too? If not, why single out twitter?
To me it's an argument in favor of maintaining the quality of Tildes. One of the ongoing worsening problems of other discussion platforms was people who haven't read the OP's article getting into the comments and arguing with people anyway.
A login wall for Twitter is something bypassed for free by just making an account or posting a relatively small screenshot, but I actually think it's more reasonable to ban paywalled news sources because that economically divides participation in the thread. However, if we ask every OP to transcribe paywalled articles we could be going down the road of news article piracy - if that's a thing, so it's a complicated issue there too.
If we want to make sure commenters have actually read the post/tweet/article, shouldn't we at least have this discussion about the limitations of access and what to do about it?
I never said it wasn't worth discussing. But IIRC Deimos has already stated he's not going to ban paywalled articles. So even if we all discussed it, it's ultimately him that would have to be convinced to change his mind.
As for what we can do to about paywalled articles, linking to mirrors in the comments is fairly common here already, and the same will likely be true of twitter links now too, but unfortunately doing much more than that could potentially open Tildes up to lawsuits.
And when it comes to people commenting before reading the article, that's something that's probably best solved by simply fostering a culture that discourages that, IMO. If you see someone commenting that clearly hasn't read the article, don't vote on that comment, and/or say something (politely) to encourage them to read the article, and/or discourage them from commenting before they have. And if someone is arguing in bad faith, or spreading misinformation, and clearly hasn't read the article, then use the Malice label on one of their comments so Deimos can take appropriate action, if action is required.
Oh, I'm surprised I gave that impression. I don't have any emotions towards Twitter almost whatsoever. Of course I have some towards Elon Musk, but I wasn't really considering them.
Yes: and I thought this was already the case. I haven't noticed a paywalled article on Tildes that cannot be viewed through some combination of cookie fuckery, referer boggling, JavaScript blocking, proxy swapping, and Internet-Archive-using. I am particularly well set up to do such things so I forgot that the vast majority of Tildes users do not have access to such tools or technical information and that hard paywalls are actually hard paywalls for them.
However: Twitter is a hard hard
paywallloginwall. You can't get past the account requirement: and they're making strong (and overbearing) attempts to make it impossible for proxies or caching services to function, as I understand it.Nope. No rules against it, AFAIK. Not many sites actually have a totally hard paywall though, so it's not surprising you haven't seen any posted here. Some studies that have been posted were behind totally hard paywalls though, requiring paid journal subscriptions to see anything more than the abstract.
No it's not. It's not a even paywall at all. And a hard paywall implies it's viewable by paid subscriber accounts only with no permeability. Twitter simply requires an account, which is totally free to make, to view the contents.
s/paywall/loginwall for that last one, yes. That it is a hard hard loginwall is shocking.
Not even Facebook, or Instagram, or LinkedIn, and obviously not Tumblr and Reddit, are quite that bad. I'd imagine people with Twitter accounts don't really notice / care about the changes but frankly this change is worse than the Reddit API changes for me: it moves Twitter to a list of sites that I simply cannot link to my friends including Discord, and uh. Is that it actually?
Actually though, for a while Discord was better than Twitter now is on this front - since you could simply enter in a username to create an "unclaimed" account without an email or anything more. Despite this, I wouldn't submit a link to an interesting Discord thread to Tildes alongside the relevant server invite and say "Discord simply requires an account, which you are totally free to make! Why are you complaining?"
To be clear, I am absolutely not a fan of this Twitter change either. And even Discord annoys the hell out of me in that regard, especially since so many official technical support forums have been shut down and moved there... which is especially idiotic because Discord communities are totally opaque to everyone who hasn't joined them, and can't be searched via search engines. But Discord isn't like Twitter. Twitter can still be searched via search engines, and is unfortunately still the source of a tremendous amount of news, updates, etc. So I very much doubt it will be banned here as a submission source, no matter how much of a PITA it is.
I disagree. The primary complaint against Discord that I hear and particularly against Discord as it has replaced so many forums is that Discord is not indexable (by search engines, yes), not not internally seachable. This is now the case for Twitter as well.
I honestly think that the loginwall is idiotic and will be walked back or reduced to a circumventable state because of the lack of search engine indexing. But a certain someone's got the wheel, so who knows what Twitter may do.
Ah, if that is the case, then that certainly does change things, IMO. But despite how much I dislike the site, and this change, I still don't think it should be totally banned though, since it is unfortunately still a major source of news, updates, etc. Ultimately that decision would be up to Deimos though.
There used to be a lot of ways to archive a Twitter thread, including bots. You could link to the original and post a link to the archive, similar to any paywalled site.
But I expect Twitter thread archive sites stopped working. A cut-and-paste somewhere else, like maybe a Github gist, might do if it's news.
Alternatively, find someone else who quotes it and link to them.
Some technical notes on what exactly this means, because I see a lot of musing about whether proxies or the like or what not will continue to work in the comments here.
Twitter's changes are very robust and difficult to circumvent. As a result, this breaks all proxy services like Nitter, crawlers and archival services (yes, including Googlebot: Twitter links should soon disappear from Google), and any service that doesn't go through Twitter's official API.
(aside: third-party reddit clients continue to work even without logging in because reddit is an indexable website and so can be scraped.)
Twitter is now requiring people to log in to view any content and imposing a rate limit on the # of tweets viewable daily by individual accounts. This loginwall is not gameable like LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram's by fucking about with referers, cookies, proxies, or the frontend (JavaScript). These are very robust measures to kill unofficial third-party services, because: any interaction with Twitter now requires authentication, and any interaction over a (very small) amount requires a massive army of burner accounts.
Their SEO is dead, too, because if there was a way for Googlebot to view the content of a tweet to index it - normal users could just do the same thing. The HTTP spec is a stateless text-only specification. Every part of HTTP is spoofable by the individual with enough effort. The only part that is not spoofable and could potentially be used to enforce a distinction between Googlebot traffic and everyone-else traffic is IP addresses, at the level of TCP (below HTTP). Any competent network admin, though, knows that IP addresses are transient and impossible (aside from at a nation-state level) to track robustly, and so while blacklists may be used, whitelists - which is what Twitter would somehow need to do, against specifically the Google IPs hosting Googlebot, somehow - are universally not used.
There are still two (Twitter-provided) alternatives to view a Tweet or profile without an account and rate limitations — Twitter embeds and syndication feeds.
I wonder if proxies, scrapers, archive services, etc. will now switch to these. You could theoretically have a scraper visit every Tweet as they are posted, since Tweet IDs are consecutive numbers.
Although, I'm surprised these still exist. I suspect Twitter will eventually kill off access to these services, regardless of scrapers and proxies, considering the extent they have already limited API and HTML access.
Google and Twitter have been friendly for years before the Musk takeover. I can guarantee Google is utilizing the Twitter API. Now I know Musk has ruined the API for most users but he likely kept whatever existing deal with Google existed. That being said I don't expect this relationship to continue, especially if Twitter is a paywall. So it's likely Google removes Twitter, but not for technical reasons.
That's not quite true either. Any existing third-party clients were using the existing API. When you make requests using this API you supply certain identification data. In all likelihood Reddit (but possibly app developers in order to keep their quotas at zero and avoid a bill) revoked part of this identification data. I would expect any app that still works without logging in will start to break after the US holiday.
Making a huge breaking change on a Friday before a long weekend is a terrible idea. While the new policy is in effect it is not yet fully enforced. I would expect this upcoming week (possibly the one after) to completely cut off third-party API access.
Now it is true that scraping APIs or similar tools will likely continue to work, but apps definitely aren't using them.
Either screenshot or copy and paste. Twitter isn’t going to be around forever, and you now need an account to view tweets.
I think Twitter links should be allowed, but a screenshot should also be required. Twitter is the source of a lot of content.
Or rather a text copy. Thinking of visually disabled users that can't view pictures here, or that want to copy text into a translator, or select a word for looking up or doing a web search on, or...
I think a better solution would be to let people filter out results from specific URLs the same way we can filter tags.
Stage:Accepted feature request. It just hasn't been implemented yet.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/117
Nah. They've effectively banned themselves by limiting what users can read and locking everything behind a login requirement.
Let Musk drive that place to the ground. Either he's grossly incompetent at running a business or he's up to something highly nefarious and likely illegal.
My knee-jerk reaction is "hell yes," but then we'd have to do the same for paywalled articles. Considering that we can screenshot, copy/paste the text, or otherwise get around Twitter's latest boneheaded move, I don't think we need to ban Twitter links outright.
I say treat them like any other site that could be hard to get to-- link it, but make the content accessible.
This has been considered a violation of copyright and disallowed on paywalled posts in the past (ex). How is Twitter now any different?
(cc. @cfabbro since you're active in this thread and would likely know)
Related comments of mine from above:
So posting links to mirrors in comments is generally fine. But posting mirrors as the submitted link, or copying entire articles into comments, not so much.
Thank you for the clarification!
Hey, not only am I a filthy pirate, I'm also relatively new to this site. I appreciate that course correction!
In that case, if we can't add an alternative way to check out a tweet, it may be better to ban 'em (or as someone mentioned elsewhere, have it optional to hide Twitter sources; I like that better).
Yarr! I may be also a pirate but it's certainly different for those who captain the ship, and when the ship isn't a pirate ship but a regular old cruise ship, and when you're not there as a pirate but there on vacation from sailing the high seas, I suppose.
Indeed indeed! I gotta remember to read the room, sometimes. XD
I hate them, but I would say they should be allowed if the post title is the text of the tweet (assuming they fit in a title--I have no idea what the Twitter character limit is) AND assuming the tweet is the notable part. So if a news article would be better, we should wait for the article. It will come soon enough and we don't need every post to be made as soon as possible. Five minutes isn't going to make a difference on Tildes. But if the notable bit is exclusively what a tweet says (e.g. @POTUS tweets out "I'm launching nukes right now, good luck world lmao" or an athlete tweets "my sport's commissioner is a POS") then that tweet should be posted.
CNN or ESPN tweeting the news should not be linked when we could just link the article. Linking to tweets is inherently starting a low-quality discussion.
Censorship and ignorance is not how things should ever work.
Just ignore it or ask users to transcribe the stuff.
I disagree it should be banned, there should be a point (or not sure if it is there) for any paywall content add a screenshot of the source.
I'd say it probably depends on the content
Yes.