Then the topics started coming in. First it was infosec and cybersecurity and they were fine for a bit so I tolerated it. But then it turned into just a bunch of hot women saying basically nothing. If before it was some random person talking about finding a bug in X with a fuzzer, next it was someone talking about completely non-technical things like graduating from a university and starting a career in cybersecurity. Later it of course turned into culture war nonsense. So I unsubscribed. I could reasonably see this being a foreign influence campaign it was such an obvious slide from sometimes useful to total nonsense.
Then Twitter started flooding my account with topics and "based on your interests" and of course the feed turned to garbage again and I had to manually unsubscribe from all of them.
Twitter. Please. I'm begging you. I follow arms control people, software people, and government accounts. I've got this figured out. Please leave me alone I was happy.
Edit:
I forgot about the inability to turn of "[Somebody you follow] follows" tweets. Can I disable these? Doesn't appear like I can.
1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords
2) Not at all
I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) you won’t go back.
Granted, you need an account to use a third party client so the no-login thing is obviously not working there either, but at least you are protected from the constant front end churn in the official clients. This is just one such example.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
I use browser plugin that redirects me to nitter when clicking a twitter link.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
They have not.
They have ruled that when a government actor uses social media for official communication, the government actor involved cannot also restrict access to and interaction with that content in ways that they would be prohibit from limiting access to official government communications not made on a private platform (e.g., by engaging in viewpoint discrimination), applying the limited public forum doctrine which is much older than the web.
[citation needed]
Twitter is kind of disintegrating, though. They've hit a growth plateau, the users are really fractious, management doesn't understand what they want out of it, and it's the venue for social strife.
Twitters profitability has always been a contentious issue, they launched their first subscription service (Twitter Blue) last year. My assumption is that they are potentially trying to move towards a more subscription based revenue model. The push back against ads is only going to get stronger and maybe they are trying to get ahead of the curve.
On top of that with GDPR and all the inevitable legislation that's coming, having people "registered" ensures that they have accepted Ts&Cs and can be tracked legally for advertising purposes. Maybe they anticipate not being able to run (particularly) profitable ads for unregistered users.
Finally, with the new CEO he probably wants a quick win on metrics, this could push more registrations, good news to report to the board.
IANAL, but I do work in the public sector and my customers do have to make data public. This does not mean that anywhere they choose to post links to documents has to help out. It means they need their own site to post documents. It also can mean that documents are offline, but FOIA-able. Frankly, in the small town that I live in, some documents are still tacked to a bulletin board in the park.
So yes, documents have to be public, but no, it is not the responsibility of Twitter to ensure those regulations are met.
That being said, I do agree that Twitter is making "interesting" choices. Just not illegal ones.
It's a terrible website. Character limit leads to terribly shallow discussions that still need to be split into multiple posts. It's a dumb medium of exchange.
I have been bothered often when finding that city council members (and others) use facebook to put info out there, and I refuse to use fbook on most days of the year, and who knows what fbook is doing with the feed/timeline or whatever they call it so I may miss what council person posted while I get distracted by the half-truth politic meme aunt B posted..
Am wanting to find some leverage to force gov stuff to be at least cross posted to a web site, even a wordpress.com or something with an rss so I can actually get notices about whats happening rather than reading later or hearing from someone about what happened (too late to add to discussions)
So, any court case stuff, I'd love to know more about. I thought of showing politicians how to cross post, or start a petition demanding easier access to info.. but I feel those would be feeble attempts to get nothing done compared to a court thing or some new fed regulation or something.
Nowadays my feed is a total mess of ads, things somebody liked, things some others follow, uninteresting recommendations, random topics and a lot of bullshit I don't care and are just noise to me.
I already deleted facebook several years ago and not missing it any single bit. I think my twitter account is following the same destiny pretty soon.
In growth mode, investors hand out free candy to companies, companies hand out free candy to you. In consolidation mode, investors want their candy (+ returns) back, so companies start taking away your candy until they determine the minimum users will accept. Many such cases.
You would be better served accessing official government communications via .gov sites. This is their purpose.
If you want official bot communications from troll farms, then Twitter is the best!
So technically they're not preventing access, but they nag you incessantly after you've scrolled past the fold.
Imagine donald trump being able to sell his funny red hats to his angry followers. Or the powerball lottery except they buy from twitter and its open to the planet!
I am just saying, they have the money, the tech to get around legalities and the lawyers to skirt it exist.
Either way, to answer the question: new boss. @Jack left.
The solution I came to has genuinely brought joy into my daily life: delete my account completely, and don't look back.
I highly recommend it!
My life has substantially improved once I replaced default front-ends
They crippled Twitter on the web with these changes because going back to the old position on my timeline has become too tedious. Consequently, I spent less time on Twitter.
That has been transformative for my enjoyment of the 'main feed'. That and sorting by recent - even if you have to keep re-toggling it.
I used to use outwit (Twitter being fed into Outlook) for this.
Expect an acquisition soon, or transition of management and ownership structure
There's a "normalization" that it's acceptable for companies such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc to enourage the world to post information on their website, and then block access to casual visitors once they got successful.
It's ABHORRENT FILTH and morally grotesque. They are causing human misery every day by deciding certain people are [outgroup] and do not have the same rights as logged-in users [ingroup].
Reddit, Twitter and Facebook are psychopath companies, and anyone working for them is part of the "ingroup vs outgroup" degradation of society.
Read it somewhere (maybe HN) and it worked quite well.
Except for the shareholder lawsuit of course.
It’s a pain in the ass though.
Same is the story with Quora.
Minimal Twitter lets me disable all advertisements, all topics, have a chronological feed, etc. Each of these things is individually toggleable so if you want topics but want to get rid of everything else, you can. It also makes the UI much better.
Bot Sentinel makes it easy for me to unfollow people who are constantly liking, retweeting, or replying to disruptive/misinformation accounts, or when they themselves drift into that area. It's not perfect. Completely normal, kind accounts who happen to be politically active and on the more conservative side will often have a higher disruption/bot score despite never doing anything disruptive themselves. I assume it's some NLP algo in the background lumping them in with the crazy misinfo bots based on some words in their tweets but really who knows.
Answer: They hired a "ruthless" product manager, who believes in things like "we should do things that are good for Twitter, but not necessarily good for the world", and probably wants to be remembered as the PM who took the route that no one was willing to take. (S)he has the data to backup these decisions, like some analytics dashboard that shows very many unauthenticated users browsing twitter. Also wears a tough face in meetings.
/s
On Android the only browser I have found to do this is brave
on Desktop I think all of them but I use Firefox, and just disable all cookies for Twitter.
As a user, when I tweet something, I do want the whole world to be able to read it. Without logging in. Ideally via the interface of their choice.
Orbis is a proof of concept:
A Twitter clone that stores the tweets on Arweave.
Edit: I'm not seeing the issue in an incognito tab.