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Sorry, my public officials seem to be using it as an official communications platform. For many people, it is in fact mandatory.
>You can find content elsewhere online.
Not if someone sends you a link to a twitter thread and you can only see the first tweet without logging in. You can only see that content right there.
> I have an account that I use solely for reading. The overwhelming number of similar comments actually makes me want to use it more.
This attitude will make you fit right in there.
Aside from that, critical information is not exclusively posted on Twitter, although it used to be "locked" behind a radio or a TV receiver. An online account is not the insurmountable hurdle that you paint it as.
You could get user tracking added by a company called Nielsen but they actually paid you a small sum for your data.
I think this is quite different.
I didn't use Twitter for the better part of the last decade and don't feel like I missed anything important. Idem with Facebook that I haven't touched in over ten years. If I cared enough about defeating trackers I could spin up a personal Nitter instance with a pseudonymous account, otherwise I see it as the price to pay to have access to such a large volume of information instantaneously, and I would rather be tracked by private interests than by the government.
I also find it frustrating when any organization, government or otherwise, only publishes information on restricted channels, but that is nothing new.
Then we agree :)
Oof
I don't believe that anyone but Elon Musk use twitter as its only communicatuon platform.
Also: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/ (which includes a news section)
I said "only" and you moved it to "primary".
Proving it to be his only source is likely impossible to do, but also has little value (do you want to learn the latest news now or in a weeks time when secondary sources catch up?)
People that create twitter accounts do so because they want reach. They want to be able to publish freely, to the internet, to share ideas, information they have, memes, whatever. But now, their reach is limited to other twitter accounts. Their voice is no longer public on the internet.
Twitter has some inertia that will carry this new model for now, there's a lot of twitter accounts, so many that most people won't know the difference at first. But as time goes on and people want to make things public and people slowly stop posting twitter links everywhere because they're useless (only useful to people with twitter accounts, so why share them outside of twitter in the first place) and every reference to something on twitter becomes a screenshot, people will look for alternatives to broadcast their thoughts.
Twitter is supposed to be a website where people can share ideas. You need an account to share ofc, but it's still supposed to be a website, you go there and read things. That's not possible anymore. Reading what someone has to say is only "using it" in the most tenuous sense. Using twitter is posting to it. People being able to read what you say is the whole point. They think they're forcing the whole world to get twitter accounts, but what they're really doing is forcing twitter users to share their ideas in more than one place, it's not going to turn out good for the company in the long run.
Is this necessarily true? At this point, I would figure that people who continue to publish on Twitter are aware of its restrictions and continue to communicate there with that knowledge. If anything, one could argue that trying to access Twitter content without an account is what's actually inappropriate here, as posters can no longer trust the guarantees of the platform.
> Twitter is supposed to be a website where people can share ideas.
Twitter used to be a website where people can share ideas. Twitter currently is a website where people can share ideas with other Twitter users. If you post on Twitter now with the intention of being truly public on the internet, I'd say you're using the wrong tool for the job. Whether that's a good business decision or not is irrelevant; the fact is that Twitter has changed its purpose, and users should update their expectations accordingly, however they see fit.
Your point about other users potentially not understanding the change is well-taken, and some of the other comments in this thread prove it (like a city's police department communicating exclusively via Twitter), but trying to make an open platform out of one that's fundamentally not (anymore, at least) seems like the wrong way to solve the problem.
It's ok for people to say, "I like how it was before."
There is content on Twitter that is not available anywhere else. It frequently breaks news faster than any other source, and there are many high profile posters who use it as their only broadcast source. Some memorable examples include the FTX and OpenAI fiascos.
The website isn't stellar, but it is functional. Lists are a great feature to separate content into custom feeds.
Maybe there will be something in the future that can serve as an alternative, but there is none currently.
Why is it surprizing? What's there to understand? It's web. Twitter used to be a decent web citizen, and allowed you to read its posts like you would read web pages. I don't want an account on Mastodon; yet I can read content posted to Mastodon. I don't want an account on Bluesky; yet I can read content posted to Bluesky. Twitter used to be like that, and we got used to it, and now it's not, and it's infuriating.