X Is Opening Any Tweet Link in a Webview Whether You Press It or Not

> 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)

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.

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.

site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos

> 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.

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.