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Comment by BTCOG | Hacker News Reader

I just want to be able to occasionally read a few tweets with no required login or account. Just the same with Instagram and similar, I just won't use it and I'll forget about it. I guess Twitter is next. No, I've never had a Twitter account. I don't have a Facebook account.

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I don't think Twitter cares that you won't use it. They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.

The rule of thumb is that 99% of users are lurkers. Since more and more people are privacy focused and it's clear that forcing lurker to register is not in their best interest they obviously miscalculated.

Reddit, Qora and Pinterest all tried it, shot themselves in the foot, lost a huge readership and reversed it or will reverse it.

It's hard to realise how bad it is as only lurker don't have a sunk cost fallacy and easily quit and their quitting is invisible.

How do you make that kind of calculus though? Presumably Twitter will want to stay around for a very long time. If people like BTCOG take away a negative experience from it then doesn't it seed a future negative opinion of Twitter?

10 years ago when a government banned Twitter it was almost universally seen as bad. That's probably not the case anymore. Will it be worse in the future?

>They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.

I'm sure they have. And I, being used to being in the minority of users, will likely find some 3rd party solution around the problem they created. Win-win outside of me wasting a few minutes installing another extension.

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