X Is Opening Any Tweet Link in a Webview Whether You Press It or Not
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I run an ecom store that gets a lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this explanation.
Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn't get a clear signal whether the content is any good"[1]. A bit of a rewriting of history since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms, even banning people who shared profiles of other social networks (including Paul Graham for a period). They suppressed all links shortly after.
[0] https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985464687350485092
[1] https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1979994223224209709
The X (formerly Twitter) app is now preloading links in a webview when a tweet is opened, causing inflated traffic numbers and user frustration. The change has sparked debate about the platform's intentions and user experience.
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Elon absolutely on his track to copy this important feature [1]
The webview works as a traffic faucet. Elon can turn it on or off for every third-party site, you know, for "Internet safety".
My take:
Next step is X.com proprietary APIs inside the Webview, like payment and everything.
The ultimate goal is a "mini-app" framework that use PWA-like techs to run everything based on the Webview and circumvent Appstore.
And last a phone that runs the "mini-app" framework because why not, as an "AI edge node" like Elon recently proposed.
[1]: https://x.com/danmurrays/status/1683446630245187584
In and Out has 5 menu items, similar to an app made in the USA, not too many features
A Chinese market can list 50 items similar to WeChat that has 50 different features.
The culture is reflected in the app design.
source: https://digitalcreative.cn/blog/how-china-ux-is-different
The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in the end it's still a collection of external applications neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
That's an interesting word to describe a platform that was previously the undisputed playground of Feds and NGOs.
Censorship and propaganda at breathtaking scale.
This is a good place to start: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyers/in...
> “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.
> The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
> “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.” The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.
> Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.
Don't worry, though. Under Musk's leadership, free speech is well protected. Just ask https://x.com/elonjet, which Musk specifically promised (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456) to protect! They would never ban a news story just because it was from a hack! (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...)
> Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot.
This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel
And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365
Edit: Some more posts -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.
(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)
There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.
I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).
At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.
The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only.
You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate through the API. It wasn’t the complete firehose, though.
Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in.
Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.
Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too.
> Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.
The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon.
> Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform.
In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in.
I'm getting downvoted because people are either to young to remember the web in the 00s, or just misremembering what the web was like.
> The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon.
I gave examples of big platforms that weren't accessible without a login. And modern platforms were also heading this way long before LLMs existed.
Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem. LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before. And before then, it was just people leeching off other people's work. This is a tale as old as the web. And I remember it well, having been both a web developer and user of the web since 1994.
Lets also not forget all the attempts that Microsoft took to try and control the internet and how AOL had their own walled gardens too. Yahoo had a plethora of cool features, most of which weren't available without a Yahoo account. And so on and so forth.
Walled gardens are not a recent phenomenon.
> In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in.
You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)
For example this archived page from Facebook. Notice how there's no way to advance without signing up? https://web.archive.org/web/20070630190243/https://register....
---
I know people want to blame AI for everything that goes wrong these days be that simply isn't the reason that platforms lock down. They do it because thats how you make money. You either:
1. lock down and charge people for access
or
2. lock down and sell your user data
(or, depressingly too often, both)
Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.
What AI has changed is the increase in invasive bot detection on sites that don't monetise anonymous access.
Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose.
> LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before.
LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data. When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.
> You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)
It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature. Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.
> Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.
Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data. This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.
Exactly. LLMs aren't the cause of that change.
> LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data.
Clearly I know that. My point wasn't that LLMs are literally scraping the sites but instead making the differentiation between scraping that happened before LLMs and scraping that happened after.
> When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.
Actually, that's not always true. Search engines have included snippets from sites for years and that's also been a well-discussed point of contention.
Then there's also Google's attempt to switch people to AMP to further lock people into Google's walled garden. I accept this isn't quite the same thing but it's still an example of how search engines fight to prevent people from leaving their ecosystem.
Some sites, like MSN, literally host news articles from others sites on their own site too. I'm sure Microsoft has an agreement to do this, but it's yet another example of how companies try to lock visitors into their own site.
I accept the AMP and MSN examples are tangential, but they do still illustrate the same point I'm making about how it's not a new thing for platforms to use dark patterns to keep people from navigating away from their platform. This isn't something new that's happened in the last couple of years.
> It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature
Would you rather I just said you were citing falsehoods like you accused me of?
Also I'm not talking about a different feature. I'm talking about the exact same stuff I was talking about from my original comment in this thread.
> Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.
So you agree that platforms have locked content down and this isn't a recent phenomenon then ;)
Making the distinction between profile data and public comments is a little strained when it's clear that Facebook has invested heavily into their walled garden and the vast majority of content on Facebook has always been hidden behind that walled garden.
> Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data.
Smaller sites make money from ads. But we were talking about big platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sites that make money from ads are just making small change compared to platforms.
> This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.
This I do agree with. But that wasn't the statement that was originally made. Those sites will remain open or shutdown entirely. They're not going to go private ala Twitter and Instagram. Their business model is entirely different -- often intentionally not run as a business in the first place. Sometimes just passion projects with no ads and/or run at a loss.
The part I was disagreeing with was that the dark patterns seen in Instagram et al are a result of the rise of LLMs. That simply isn't true.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britains-bbc-...
Maybe it’s time to reevaluate whether your perspective is worth sharing, or perhaps some time is needed internally to reposition what you think you know
Is that the same as the fail whale era?
I would much prefer if Google just stopped showing inaccessible information completely.
If the search engine orders by relevance, than I can make the decision for myself of where to trade-off with paywalls.
I don’t want a search engine to make the decision for me because it cannot: what if the only answer to my question is behind a paywall?
I didn’t make that claim, i am contesting the claim “Only relevance should decide ranking”. I am arguing ease of accessibility should be a factor.
Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some of the most important content are on social media, and most of them only serve logged in users.
If you want to decide yourself how search results are presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search engine.
It's just not scalable into the exploitative cash cows that VCs drool over.
Quality has never been synonymous with monetization for as long as I can remember. The primary driver of low quality or harmful content is greed. Guess what fuels the most greed in modern society?
> A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.
Are you suggesting that including Twitter in search results would mitigate propaganda?
And that's different from Google, how?
A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human level content curation, with a reasonably performant scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and use natural language rules like "does this content contain text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate policy XYZ?"
Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a curated list from the already censored and politically filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their own index and crawler.
I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting as much money as possible from their adtech customers.
Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that service. If that service is honest curation of and effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and extracting fractions of profit from commercial interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to do with.
Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to me.
The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login results should be de-ranked.
Most sites serve a special version of the page to visitors with "googlebot" in their UA string and/or coming from an IP range google controls with more SEO'd contents too.
I avoid most Twitter/X content after I deleted my account but it's helpful when it gets linked in HN.
URL Auto Redirector:https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-cont...
Not being updated any more, but might be useful to someone.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
What if those errors are trying to tell you to install one?
As a plain webview would mean that you can grab everyone's details.
My interest is this: It appears that it's not possible to over-ride the training effectively since NSFW material bleeds into normal image requests. Musk had this problem before trying to over-ride Grok's training, so at one point said he would have to retrain Grok. It's interesting to me that LLMs can't be steered effectively, which makes me wonder if they can ever really be aligned ("safe")
(sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example with a model liking howl to showcase this)
Hard to avoid that problem.
Agree. Even the Christian Bible has horrific content that in some communities would require trigger warnings
Have none of these people ever had or been a teenager? At least teens have some overlapping biological requirements with non-teens that will force some amount of alignment.
I think the assumption you mention is, frankly, sociopathic.
I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions
https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service
Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.
Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness).
> Is it just my friends?
If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls").
If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.
site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos
There is an extremely toxic component to Bluesky’s user base, unfortunately, with the many attacks on the CEO for not banning Jesse Singal being testament to that. But for what it’s worth in the circles I’ve cultivated there I now see very little of those toxic people, and I don’t see any support for their behaviour. So I hope in time a more open culture will win out.
Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults, doesn't it?
How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?
> How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?
You assume that "having principles" means having your principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean they are unprincipled and simply chasing money/audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters en masse want nothing to do with it.
The reality is that many millions of people are principled, and they simply have different principles.
For example, "opposing views should be aired and discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time understanding, respecting, and digesting.
Look at JK Rowling. Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left.
Say Rogan sticks to his guns. He would face similar, never-ending attacks, no left-leaning figure could attend his podcast without becoming guilty by association, so he'd end up interviewing basically the same people as he does now, only he wouldn't cater to some people that, given somewhat recent events, would most probably celebrate him getting murdered.
I reckon we shouldn't take away the agency away from the adults who made purity testing a common practice, given the utter disaster we are experiencing as a consequence.
This framing is laying on the narrative a little bit thick don't you think? It makes it seem like she's hated for being wealthy, when it is actually because she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked.
The "standing up for women" rhetoric is a little bit hollow in the face of her non-existent feminism when the subject isn't physically attacking trans women, she didn't make a single comment during the recent uptick in abortion debates taking place in the UK for example.
Can you provide any source for her "calling for trans people to be physically attacked"? Because you seem fixated on it, and I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking for one, and I can't find it.
What I can find is her spending so much goddamned money on philanthropy that she stops being a billionaire, while not dodging a dime of taxes precisely because she considers it her obligation. A fortune amassed in what is probably the most ethic way possible, through exploitation of nobody, writing books.
Related to this I can find the foundation of the Volant Charitable Trust, "a grant-making trust to support charitable causes in Scotland, helping vulnerable groups with an emphasis on women, children and young people."
I can also find a comment of "every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them".
And that's the point. You want to paint her as some lunatic who would like to hunt trans people down for sport, when it's crystal clear that she has the "radical" (standard 2018 radical leftist) notion that trans women are not the same thing as biological women and that the definition of women shouldn't be changed to appease to them.
But again. It's not worth it to engage, because we both know I can spend 20+ minutes working on this reply and you are not going to change your stance. An apostate is worse than a heathen, which is why people complain about Rowling rather than anyone who is actually right wing. Because you are scared that if you defended her, you would face the same judgement. Making the world a worse place through and through.
She has done neither of these things you claim. Please refrain from spreading misinformation.
Deciding what political party to vote for is entirely a matter of picking a team, which is entirely dependent on who is on that team. Of course it's "everyone else's fault" whose team you decide to pick. That is literally the game. People are picking representatives. Deciding what representatives to pick is 100% a case of who those representatives are, how they act, and what they believe.
If one team antagonizes you and attempts to harm you, and you therefore decide to vote for the other team, not only is that so reasonable as to be completely unsurprising, but it's also quite justifiable to say, "This is their fault."
Somehow people have forgotten that politics is about garnering willing votes, not smugly browbeating and shaming people about our superior morals and ethics.
I reckon there's more of a correlation between this type of statement and being a Bluesky user than being right-wing and using X.
I mean X userbase is enormous compared to that of Bluesky, you can't be serious.
Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.
Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
> Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites.
I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for this X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be declining in active users.
Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X after a while.
https://bsky.app/search?q=%22induced+operator+norm%22 https://x.com/search?q=%22induced%20operator%20norm%22&src=t...
There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.
There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.
And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.
Believe me, you can live without Twitter.
https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/
Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half.
What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda
If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you
Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back)
X will tell you to invest in <Scam>
X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire.
People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate.
X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.
As a user I like to get out as soon as I click because I can trace back the link and I can do clipping or bookmark in my browser.
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