Twitter silently removes login requirement for viewing tweets

They actually likely did this due to SEO. Google was allegedly in the process of removing tweets from the search index because they weren’t accessible. This happens automatically for most sites.

This feels like an extremely basic thing to miss. Something 10 seconds of thought would have fixed.
- I guarantee you whoever pushed this to prod knew exactly what was going to happen, but the super genius(🤮) in charge is always right and must never be questioned.
- Okay but that would involve whoever is in charge there to think longer than 10 seconds.
How does Pinterest get around this then? They pollute image searches like crazy, and require you to login to see anything. At least they did, I blocked them from searches so maybe it's different now.
- They must have changed their paywall behavior, I just went and was able to see every image I clicked on.
  The login popup appears after a few pages but you can just exit out and keep viewing. Google should be able to index the pages without access issues
  Maybe that previous aggressive login screen killed their SEO before, I see much less pinterest images than I used to years ago
- Most of these sites serve the information, then put up something to block being able to view it.
- Easy - detect if you're getting accessed by a search crawler or a human. Serve a full page or just a login request.
And if they didn't fire everyone, someone with a spec of sense would have told them this
Same with popups that try to throw you to only a mobile app
- What makes you think that even if someone told Musk that, he would have listened to them?
Yes, most likely, within days they lost half of their links in Google.
How tf they did not see this happening?
- Since Elon I don’t think Twitter has been thinking about the long term effects of their actions. Everyone predicted the blue checkmark fiasco but they went ahead with it anyway so this doesn’t surprise me.
Probably also advertisement revenue. Why would people go on twitter if they can't see anything? Why would advertisers pay money to show ads to no-one?
I think Elon got quite a talking to.
https://www.rawstory.com/google-twitter/
Yeah they were already doing that, I imagine he took a look at how many inbound visits come from Google and quickly U-turned

This is hilarious. You don't change your mind about a new policy unless it was absolutely terrible and threatened your business. I can't see twitter surviving much longer; how are they even going to make money?

I saw one reporter describe it as if Costco decided to make every checkout "10 items or less."
- What is a Costco?
They could probably survive off of elon's surplus cash alone for a few years

A lot of government agencies use Twitter for breaking news, notifications, and alerts that they're trying to get out as quickly as possible to as many people as possible, such as tornado warnings, amber alerts, traffic conditions, etc. I can't imagine they'd stick around a platform that requires logging in to view these messages.

Kind of terrible that we ever got to this point. I've seen announcements from government agencies that are ONLY available on social media. Who thought that was okay?
- The joys of neoliberalism and privatization. When you're convinced the private sector can do no wrong and the government can do no right, is it any surprise that this is the outcome?
- Welcome to the dumbest timeline
I can’t imagine they stick around on a platform that isn’t stable and in the last year has changed direction so many times that almost no one can keep up with it. It’s the instability and constant changing that makes people jump ship from a previously stable platform. It’s not like a Lemmy instance where it’s to be expected for a while.
This morning storm Poly smashed the Netherlands, especially North Holland (Amsterdam region). Digital emergency alert system was used, three times, and directed people to Twitter.
Which was closed, of course. It's a political shitshow right now. Amsterdam municipality already runs its own Mastodon, and this fuckup will probably have consequences in moving official broadcast channels off Twitter.
- Which was closed, of course. It’s a political shitshow right now. Amsterdam municipality already runs its own Mastodon, and this fuckup will probably have consequences in moving official broadcast channels off Twitter.
  Germanys gov runs its own Mastodon instances - social.bund.de - where the cabinet, the ministries, state institutes etc have their official accounts.
  Some non-political examples are: The German Weather Service, the German Aerospace Institute, and the Consumer Protection Agency.
- Nonsense like this is why I believe outdoor warning sirens are still incredibly important. Mobile alerts are not foolproof, and can be bungled horribly, and not everybody has their phone on them, or a phone at all. If there's a severe storm or tornado coming, you need to know ASAP. Sirens are an excellent way of getting people indoors, regardless of who's outside. I heard the Netherlands was considering decommissioning its countrywide siren system, which I thought was absolutely fucking stupid. What you posted proves exactly why.
Ideally governments should be pushing things like threat to life alerts out via a digital emergency alert system (e.g. Amber alerts) rather than hoping those potentially impacted are checking Twitter.
Which is funny because the UK decided to finally implement this recently and my god the Twitter Boomers were mad.
- I reluctantly disabled all government alerts on my phone a few years ago because despite theoretically having multiple levels of importance (minor alerts, major alerts, critical alerts), apparently they weren't categorizing the alerts when they sent them out so I kept receiving all alerts, even minor ones and alerts for things happening far from where I live, and to make matters worse they overrode do not disturb. Hopefully they've improved the system by now, but I haven't thought to check until this conversation thread.
I read that public service annoucement accounts were excempt from the change, but it's just bad business either way.
Just today we had a severe storm alert pushed to phones through the emergency system here in the Netherlands and the alert contained the fire department’s twitter handle. I was like “welp, I guess I’ll hear the updates later”
I thought the exact same thing this morning when the NL alert had a Twitter reference in it

Business genius.

Irrelevant. Nitter still not working.

These companies know that the power is with the people. We just need regulars who are not tech educated to get themselves educated and see how the power shifts from these companies to FOSS and decentralized platforms.

You're talking about an issue humanity has had since forever, getting people to do what is best for their own interests. In business they actually needed to create the concept of a union just so that people would organize in a way to help all workers. Without that force driving them together what you get is the Reddit 48hr blackout. People can't stop using the service long enough to invoke actual change because their addiction to Reddit was too high.
This rollback of login requirements was because Google stopped indexing them. The only power the people had in the Twitter situation was being the consumers of Google who were being directed away from Twitter.
- It's a problem of collective consciousness, the majority of humanity are about 30-100 years behind the bleeding edge of education and comprehension. It takes a long time to bring all those people up to speed. There's a reason they say "Science advances one funeral at a time." Because new lessons aren't learned by old people, why would you relearn something you already know?

And the number of people surprised...?

No, 800. Aaaarrrrgh!

Didn't like not being on googles results page did ya Elmo?

When you do something abysmally stupid, then have to walk it back, not saying anything is a lot safer than trying to explain.

I don't know though. I'd find a certain amount of entertainment in watching him ummm and stutter his way through the explanation.

Damn it's like whoever is taking these decisions has no idea what he's doing

I still can’t see any tweets. Maybe it’s a Canada thing..

I still can't see any tweets. Because I value my mental health and don't go looking for the horrible things.
- Granted. That’s why I got myself permanently banned from Twitter.
I'm in Canada and can see a tweet IF it is directly linked. If you click on the person's feed it says "there's a problem". So it is not as useless as before but still is for any sort of emergency or critical news dissemination.
- I see, now, yeah. Pretty terrible.

One does not simply mess with Google!

Fritter works by scraping the twitter website, so it should be working. The only issue is however that the website changed a lot so I guess the scraping strategies don't work as well now.

Not here...

Exactly. Idk why, but I still need to log in.
Did you check an individual linkend Tweet? That works for me at least. Everything else, like looking for a user, still needs a login, I think...

My eyeballs are scraping this thread at this very instant!

Lol too little too late.

So trying out changes to a platform isn’t a bad thing and can lead to a lot of good optimization, but usually you don’t just push them onto the entire user base without testing/marketing research to try and anticipate their effects.

How exactly do these changes make it to production without being evaluated? I know blame is mostly on Musk here but do the software devs really never stand up and say “we’ll look into it and get back to you in a few weeks”?

The only devs left are those whose visas are tied to employment, so they can't piss of the management or they get deported.
The reason this doesn't make sense to you is because of how you're framing it.
This corpo is being run unilaterally by someone unconcerned with its longevity. It's that simple.

Twitter 2.0 is really just a startup company

always be fail whalin'

I love your username! It's so hard to come up with a good one, but that's one is great!

Still doesn't work for me?

It may be rolling out, there was a point after the change was initially implemented when some people reported still being able to get in
- Ahh, that makes sense

Elon is speedrunning bankruptcy right now.

Tech giants fighting each other.

Interesting to see how they have all managed a system with each other that is so hard to switch around.

Based on how this was (apparently?) an automatic response by the Google search algorithm, seems more like a case of:
Twitter: ”You took everything from me!”
Google: ”I don’t even know who you are”
Probably coulda just like… emailed someone at Google and asked before making the switch.