{"id":39941,"date":"2023-07-03T16:33:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T20:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=39941"},"modified":"2023-07-13T13:21:57","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T17:21:57","slug":"twitter-now-requires-logging-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/03\/twitter-now-requires-logging-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Now Requires Logging In"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jess Weatherbed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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If you currently try to access Twitter without logging in to your user account, you’ll be unable to see any of the content that was previously available to the wider public. Instead, you’ll meet a Twitter window that asks you to either sign in to the platform or create a new account, effectively blocking you from viewing tweets and user profiles or browsing through threads unless you’re a registered Twitter user.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted, claiming<\/a> in a reply that the change is a “Temporary emergency measure,” blaming “data pillaging” for degrading the service for all users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Amanda Silberling<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Like many of Twitter’s recent<\/a> changes<\/a>, this could easily backfire. If tweets aren’t publicly accessible, search engine algorithms could rank the site’s content lower, meaning that fewer people would be directed to the site from Google. Also, it’s just kind of annoying.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

It also breaks Nitter<\/a>, which is what I was using to get RSS feeds, since I don’t want to use the official client or Web site. I may check now and then to see if there’s anything interesting at the top of my timeline, but it’s no longer practical for me to be a completionist.<\/p>\n\n

Ivan Mehta<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, Elon Musk limited the number of tweets<\/a> users can read in a day, which he said was to prevent data scraping. While this measure has affected all Twitter users, TweetDeck users in particular are today reporting major problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load.<\/p>

Musk initially enforced read-limits of 6,000 daily posts for verified users and 600 daily posts for unverified users. Hours later, he increased these limits to 10,000 tweets and 1,000 tweets, respectively. Given that TweetDeck loads up multiple tweets through various columns simultaneously, it’s likely that the effects of the read restrictions are amplified within TweetDeck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The bigger, more fundamental change Musk instituted over the weekend is making it such that tweets aren’t visible unless you’re logged in to a Twitter account. This broke all sorts of things. Messaging apps (like Apple’s Messages) can no longer render preview cards for tweets, for one thing. Closer to home, it broke the @daringfireball auto-posting account<\/a>. More amusingly, as documented by Sheldon Chang<\/a>, this change completely broke Twitter itself — some part of the Rube Goldberg-ian machine that assembles users’ timeline feeds was itself subjected to these rate limits, so Twitter wound up DDOSing itself. It’s like a gasoline company instituting rations that stranded its own fleet of tanker trucks.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Now it’s a walled garden, like most of Facebook, available only to logged-in users. I suspect this change will prevent the Internet Archive from caching tweets, too. That just sucks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n