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Twitter silently removes login requirement for viewing tweets
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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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 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.
My upper manager always goes on about "empowerment" being part of the new direction for the business, but wouldn't you know, we still get drawn and quartered for the smallest errors.
Are you sure they didn’t mispronounce “employee disembowelment”?
Perhaps - I am notorious for my issues processing verbal communication!
There are solutions to level the playing field like unions or European works councils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council . but it's still top down in the end. Always seemed strange to me, perhaps it's the way to get things done...
The real solution isn't those things; it's structuring the businesseses as employee-owned co-ops.
Well, it is "optional" to some degree. I know plenty of people across Europe who are doing oke enough on basic support. It's not an amazing living but it's not like you are out on the streets. And a medical emergency will not cripple you with debt.
At least far as actually freedom-loving democracies go (as in, free to abort, free to express your identity, free to protest, ...).
Nah, I actually like Wile E. Coyote
I like this.
The supreme leader is always right!
All hail plankton
So much this. The leader on top is the one who instills the corporate culture. In this case, the engineers have no say in the matter. They need to do what they're told.
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.
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
Most of these sites serve the information, then put up something to block being able to view it.
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 browser addon can spoof useragents:https://add0n.com/useragent-switcher.html
You're going to need a special hat.
Adding a clipboard and a ladder will make it even more official
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).
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?
He was firing people before who told him something wasn't going to work, so it wouldn't surprise me if everyone who knew this would fail stayed silent in fear for their jobs.
True. If it were a good idea he would have already thought of it, right?
Every single one of these "iNDePENdeNT/liBerTaRian" tech bros think they're the smartest man in the room. Too high on their own farts.
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.
https://www.rawstory.com/google-twitter/
Yeah they were already doing that, I imagine he took a look at how many inbound visits come from Google and quickly U-turned