alt Hacker NewsIt's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need training data.
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> Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok
Reply with a screenshot showing that you can’t view the content.
> a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram
Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.
I think we will see the internet closed off more and more as AI usage grows.
Twitter was doing stupid growth hacks, like requiring login to view replies, even before AI scrapers were a concern. (And I suspect many of the scrapers are just using logged-in accounts.)
libredirect is very good for these kinda of things. But the platforms keep trying to make it stop working so is a constant battle of the frontents to build workarounds
It's tracking and data harvesting, always is
The other day someone on here gave me a useful framing. Non-publicly accessible sites are the dark web. If a project told you they were moving all their docs and support to the dark web they would sound crazy, but if they say they're moving it to discord (the same thing) then it's fine.