Hacker News Reader

Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.

View on HN

I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.

Nah 10 years ago I could view the whole website logged out. Now it's been reduced to a single post with no replies.

And remember, Elon only granted that so he wouldn't be (rightfully) banned from Google. At first you couldn't view anything, then Google delisted X because it only indexes public pages, then Elon conceded you can view the direct thing you linked to, and then Google relisted it.

I disagree. There was a noticeable change some time after Elon bought it to make it even worse.

pretty sure it was even worse ten years ago cause very active twitter users would pay for 3rd party twitter apps (maybe twitter didn't have an official app back then? ~2012-2013)

A vibrant ecosystem of full-featured 3rd party apps able to offer unique spin on the UX, tailored to different preferences of their user base who are willing to pay is a good thing. Not an indicator of a problem.

Now for Twitter/X we get One (1) ad-infested first party app requiring login/tracking, an unusably crippled logged out web view, and an API exposing a limited subset of data with a tiny free tier.

Is that really better than 10 years ago?

No, it definitely was not as bad 10 years ago as it is today. Just objectively not true at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com