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 post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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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.
Does anyone else think a lot about the incredible irony of western freedom-loving democracies being fine and dandy with the fact that nearly 100% of workplaces are top-down dictatorships? Even when you're "given" freedom to act independently, it's always predicated upon your decisions and actions aligning with the wishes of your superiors. The second that isn't the case, you get your marching orders, and you can either comply or fuck off.
It would be one thing if employment were "optional" to some degree, or there were always more jobs than people to do them, but so many people are one missed paycheck or medical emergency away from homelessness, you basically have no choice but to grin and bear it.
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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.
Pinterest is cancer. They act like their content belongs to them when it's all stolen images
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
it 100% did, google removed over half the twitter links on its index due to dead links/login requirements, which if kept like that would basically kill all Twitter traffic since most traffic comes from search engines
Easy - detect if you're getting accessed by a search crawler or a human. Serve a full page or just a login request.
So how can a user pretend to be a web crawler?
This firefox addon can spoof useragents:https://add0n.com/useragent-switcher.html
Ever heard of https://12ft.io/ ? It allows you to bypass alot of pay walls by basically pretending to be a search engine trying to index a website. For SEO reasons a lot of pay walled sites allow search engines to access the whole article to index. 12ft.io leverages this to show you whole articles behind paywalls. This is something you could also achieve by spoofing the User-Agent. It would probably work for things like Pinterest without an account as well, but that's something I have never tried (since I have no interest in the cancer that is Pinterest).
Most of these sites serve the information, then put up something to block being able to view it.
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?
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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.
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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."
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Business genius.
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.
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Irrelevant. Nitter still not working.
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.
Didn't like not being on googles results page did ya Elmo?
Damn it's like whoever is taking these decisions has no idea what he's doing
And yet Fritter doesn't work right now. Are they blocking 3rd party apps like Reddit, or is it something with Fritter?
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.
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.
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One does not simply mess with Google!
My eyeballs are scraping this thread at this very instant!
Lol too little too late.
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