They built their monopolies on top of the goodwill of users. I'm pretty sure that subject matter experts who wrote extremely long-winded and well-researched articles on Roman battle tactics, did not do so with the intent, that some nebulous internet money-man could charge $5/month in the future to view the articles they wrote for free.
All these internet companies are essentially engaging in rent-seeking behavior, but are trying to boil the frog only slowly, so they don't get swept away by the tides of user discontent.
If you are a space of “public conversation”, then banning users is also antithetical to that end.
Presumably their ToS absolves them of any legal liabilities but it's still wrong to offer an open garden only to close it once the people created an arboretum.
instead it was the worst sellout ever, using the greatest power in time, to build megaliths that have humongous power of distortion.
yes, it hurts. and it should. much more. but they manage to make people to 'move on'.
in the end. we forgot. It's always about power.
Sorry! But you never know.
You're misremembering, but please feel to prove me wrong by pointing to any of these services positioning themselves as the "Wikipedia of [thing they do]".
"Quora's mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge."
"Quora aims to allow anyone to easily share their knowledge and in the process to dramatically increase the total amount of knowledge available to the world."
"We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, a place where hundreds of millions of people go to learn about anything and share everything they know."
> be me
> be in Library of Alexandria
> row upon row of books as far as the eye can see
> any topic, any subject, all the collected information in the world available just because it's humanly possible to enable that
> you can practically see the titles on the book spines
> one of them looks familiar... could it be...?
> take a single step forward
> hologram stutters and flickers out
> "Phis service requires authorisation to perpetually access your Realtime User Feed in order to continue. Process authorisation?"
> (you later learn the book title that looked familiar was algorithmically constructed by a model that keyed off of the Realtime User Feeds of your public friends list.)
Social contracts don't exist merely because you expect something
It's primarily a social network, but that's never clear if your only exposure to Tumblr is some random blogs, some of which use blog themes that have usability issues. Most of Tumblr's functionality is literally invisible to you if you never create an account. It's a lot closer to "LiveJournal meets Geocities" than it is to WordPress.
However, a login wall was a no-go since it's obnoxious and interferes with users who want their blog to be a public-facing presence, or use Tumblr as a CMS, or as a traditional blogging platform etc.
In terms of the "login wall or no" question, for platforms that combine social networking with public-facing user-generated content, I don't really think anyone's found a good solution yet.
I mean, no one's forcing you to. That's my point though!
Casual web visitors to the public-facing (no account needed) portion of the product simply aren't exposed to the majority of the product, and have a sub-par experience as a result. This reduces the likelihood of the product being successful. Some products try to solve this with a hard login wall, but that's problematic for both casual viewers as well as a portion of the content creators. There's no good solution.
In the example of Tumblr, even if you just want to consume content without posting anything, the reading experience is much better in the logged-in dashboard (newsfeed / activity stream) vs separately visiting random blogs that all have different themes.
> As for the other side, publishing your texts or photos on the Internet for others to view, isn't enough?
If you want to just publish photos, you can use a product that specializes in this, rather than choosing a combination publishing site / social network where the community interaction is inherently a huge part of the product.
No, their experiences are perfectly fine.
Maybe the company believes that monetization is worse when account-free users read the site, but being account-free is an ideal experience for the majority of users. Companies love to lie about this, both externally and internally.
Going back to my Tumblr example, I've had a lot of conversations with people on HN who fundamentally didn't grok that there's substantially more to the product than the public-facing blog network, in part because there isn't a login wall. A few examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607197 (interesting quote further downthread "I never felt the need to make an account since I was just reading. They didn't make it clear that the service was incomplete without an account.")
Meanwhile the Tumblr dashboard (logged in user experience / social network side) has a uniform user interface which does provide these things.
But there is no way for Tumblr to prevent this problem on the blog side while still allowing users to have full control over their blog's public appearance. If they forced themes to contain specific template tags or design elements, it would no longer be usable as a freeform CMS.
Same reason Tumblr doesn't/can't have a login wall. But as a result of this, casual readers get a mistaken impression of the product and its capabilities.
I click back. The third hit on google was also reddit. I repeat the above.
Reddit jumped the shark already and the current state of affairs is an offense to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Problem is that a new mass migration (as happened in the Digg→Reddit move) is way more difficult due to the inertia and amount of content available. I just hope that, when it finally happens, it would be to a distributed or federated system -- Lemmy.ml seems to be the most promising for now.
They're clearly "improving" it.
Oh of course. But then it should have been that way from the start. Instead they were user-friendly at first, and only once they'd grown enough so they could rely on network effects for dominance, did they turn hostile. A bait and switch, tricking people into relying on them, and then turning evil once switching to a different platform becomes too difficult.
Twitter is 15 years old. You can't except them to remain unchanged forever. Priorities change, people change, goals change. Didn't they change CEO some time ago? Then the latest change might be even something from the new managment.
From the capitalist perspective I guess it's just a decision based on lost revenue from eyeballs like mine going elsewhere vs. revenue/data gained by users who make an account that wouldn't otherwise.
We could discuss that aspect—sharing accounts on computers that don’t belong to me—but that’s why I’m often thwarted from reading content. I have the account, just not on me.
The obvious solution is still for Twitter to not suck.
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-numb...
I have four accounts that have been soft-locked this way. The whole point in my use is I do not want an identity tied to them.
Twitter doesn't seem to have an option of a read-only account, where a phone number is only required to post.
Since creating an account is both more work and causes privacy violations, the obvious question is the other way around. Why would I even want to create an account if not fundamentally necessary?
Which is strange, because the term “hacking” used to set jimmies a’rustlin’ and underwear a’bunchin’ whenever it came up.
The first thing a malicious nontechnical investor wants to know about your competition: "Well, can't you just hack them?!"
Russ on Silicon Valley came from somewhere, ha..
Twitter’s experience for users today is the same as it was at the start.
The word “user” is key, though. The experience has only changed for people who aren’t yet users (with logged in user accounts) of Twitter.
> A bait and switch, tricking people into relying on them,
This doesn’t really make sense. If you rely on Twitter, you make an account. You can’t really rely on Twitter or even be a user without having an account.
I don’t really expect community platforms to cater to non-users of the community.
It seems like there are two definitions of "user" here: someone that uses something, and someone that has an account. It's possible to use Twitter without an account (reading tweets seems like the primary use case of Twitter), and it's possible to have an account that you never use. People in the second case are counted as "inactive users" or, in other words, users that don't use Twitter.
When people talk about the UX or UI of a website, they usually aren't talking about whether you have an account or not. It's possible for a website's UX to be bad before you even make an account, e.g. if the sign up page is bad.
You can't just make throwaway accounts on Twitter though, they ban them after a few hours if you don't verify by phone number. So really it's forcing you to hand over a lot of personal information just to read what is essentially a few forum posts.
> Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account.
i'm fine with both of your alls-fair-in-love-and-war attitudes, but it makes me sick that twitter became a near defacto monopoly as the all-connected public-social-media before locking down & exploiting their position, before transforming into a propeietary closed experience.
and it makes me even more disturbed thinking what an epic project it would be to dislodge or replace this vast once public network. the switching costs are asteonomical, require millions of people of recognize how rudely governed their once open & reasonable platform has become, has fallen to.
the value propositions can keep changing. quickly. under society's feat. civil society has no control, the enemy has all the control. society has such a slow response time, our side of the free hand moves only over the course of decades, not days. it's a trashfire thing twitter is doing to us, and i fully support their right to self (re)define themselves as snakey lowlife punks who've renegged on their bargain of being the public social system, but damn i wish society could respond & shift course & adapt in some sort of fashion, and it just cant; this assemblage is trapped, and so things will only forever now get worse. it's terrible. platforms are social treachery, they all fall down.
Adopt an abundance mentality. Our world is awash in transient dopamine hits. Why do you need this one, when there's so many you can have for truly free, or for small amounts of money, or via any other mechanism that isn't trading such a transient personal value for some quasi-permanent cost?
And I'm only describing the technical aspect of it. The culture it encourages of people screaming divisive hate at each other, makes it possibly the worst corporation to have ever existed.
Notice that it's almost impossible to find people on HackerNews admitting they work there.
What Reddit doesn’t seem to realise is that right now there is a primed opportunity for a competitor to take its market share.
Administratively, it feels good to know that I'm doing the right thing, and to know that you will eventually come around to the new layout design. You have to, because I'm right.
That's my theory. Smugness, maybe? Is that it? Overconfidence?
I never liked the site, but plenty of people did, and they just accidentally destroyed it. A lesson that you should be able and willing to quickly revert major changes, at the very least.
I was "permanently" banned after over 12 years of contributing content to reddit by a random subreddit mod (banned from all of reddit) just for doing a music video cross posting to a music subreddit and suddenly my own subreddit was orphaned and I could not access content posted by others including on Google search because I then had no account. To this day, all of my posts are orphaned and now owned by reddit with no way for me to delete them, and all I got was vague boiler plate responses as to why with no means of requesting reinstatement.
The content wall also limits outreach for people that use Twitter to promote their business behind the scenes too, pretty much voiding a major benefit of posting to Twitter for everyone (unbeknownst to users).
It's completely hostile behavior that does not get addressed because it is inflicted on such an individual basis. Most people with user accounts don't know about the content blocking because they're always logged in and being tracked.
These sites do not own the content, the people that make the content are the actual content owners, if there was more awareness about underhanded things these sites do, this would not be seen as good business.
No no no, companies should not be allowed to this kind of bait and switch:
1) provide a free service
2) gain market dominance, push out competitors, and turn into a necessity for millions of users
3) create lock-in and exploit the userbase
Essential public utilities are regulated (properly, in many countries) to avoid this.
In 2022 services like ISP, mobile carriers, email and instant messaging are almost essential. Millions of people need them to work, buy food, have access to health and government services.
And yet tech companies are never held responsible.
Reminder: by dominating a market a company removes options and better alternatives from the end users.
This change happened during last summer. Funilly enough it was just ad I considered getting an account to share a bike trip live, but:
1. I didn’t want my new account to help their A/B-testing.
2. I didn’t want family and friends to have to sign up to follow my trip.
End result: No account, and I read twitter less since they don’t value my passive engagement.
That's exactly what they want though. Their real user growth has slowed down and they're trying to juke the numbers by coercing the hold outs to sign up.
Reddit's unusable with an account too. So annoying when I just want to read a thread and it want's to draw my attention every which way. Notifications and the reply text never work on Firefox and using old is getting more and more inconvenient.
Frankly, I'm continually amazed that they haven't killed it off yet, but for now it's a big improvement.
I'm not sure if this is desperation or simply callous disregard for users intelligence.
I agree with this to a degree. However, it's so much easier to find and interact with/around content tailored to your interests on FB/Twitter/Reddit than to use the indie web. Network effects mean the silos are growing and the experience of using the more open internet is increasingly niche. This seems a shame to those of us who really enjoyed the more open internet. (I'm not saying it's dead, just that the people who missed it are so well catered for by the silos that they don't go looking for it, so it stays niche).
To be fair, it does work, because whenever I crack and register a new account, I end up commenting to avoid someone being wrong on the Internet.
Why? You can show people the same advertising either way so signifying up with a junk e-mail address and forcing a login is really kind of a pointless hoop.
Not reasonable at all. If I'm not posting, an account doesn't serve any purpose (for me). I can read HN all day long without an account, same for blogs, normal websites, etc. Accounts on websites should not be the norm, and never was before.
Twitter doesn’t have “old twitter”… well… one time, I somehow magically summoned mobile interface that looked like from 2013, but I haven’t been able to repeat it. Something with Javascript I suppose
Try old.reddit.com (or i.reddit.com on mobile).
Sure, but then it should be banned from use by politicians for public announcements made in official fashion.
Would there be anyone left on Twitter?
If it's a party announcement put it first on your party's page.
Mind you, this whole thing of presidents/premieres/PMs making announcements as if they are making up the policies ... if they are then everyone is screwed (and their advisors and party should stop that immediately), if they're doing it right and the policy has gone through party committees, government departments, experts, then the head of that group should be announcing it. Why the heck do we need everything filtered through some ignorant dickhead; whither democracy.
The cult of celebrity is ruin for humanity. Urgh.
Don’t forget Reddit. Reddit’s login pop-ups are more aggressive than Twitter’s for me.
> Now you can perhaps read ten tweets or replies to a linked tweet without an account before the same thing occurs
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think any company is obligated to provide unlimited access for free without an account. If you’re trying to scroll deep into conversations or someone’s Tweets, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d need to become a user of the website.
The only login-wall that doesn’t make sense to me is Medium’s, as the site is primarily designed as a publishing platform rather than a community platform. Forcing users to create an account to read a blog post isn’t a great way to generate wide viewership of your blog posts.