I follow ~200 extremely high quality people on twitter, never use the algorithmic timeline -- just the "Following" tab, and it is easily 10x more signal to noise than HN for me, I'm almost upset I didn't start using it sooner.
Only works if you can resist the temptation to follow national news orgs, politics, etc. In my little niche, though, I essentially never see any of that, even less than one sees on HN. It's all just tech, AL/ML, space/rockets, startups, etc.
Do you mean closed source software? Because that would rule out Hackernews. But I agree on the principle. Maybe it's the type of discussion. I would be happier if this very exciting superconductor story was unfolding somewhere else than Twitter.
A walled garden is a site that degrades significantly or is unavailable without an account, like Twitter. Anyone can view all of HN modulo dead comments without an account.
I appreciate the clarification, thanks. This forum is open to the public at the moment. Though Hackernews could go down or take the conversation offline at any moment (this is an issue of trust more than anything, and I think HN does a good job, certainly more than Twitter)
Links behind logins wall/paywall should be totally forbidden, Twitter, Quora, news websites, etc.
I don't even get why they are indexed by Google, as this is cloaking, and forbidden by the ToS (+ gets annoying)
Google has a rule where links from google can't be paywalled. So you can see Quora posts if you enter from a Google link, but not if you go to the URL directly.
In this brave new Twitter-y world, if the Twitter link loads at all (hardly a sure thing lately) it'll only show the tweet without any replies, unless you're logged in. Nitter will show the whole thing (it's ultimately dependent on Twitter so may also be broken, but in several recent partial Twitter outages nitter has been usable while the twitter web UI was not loading).
You are not wrong. I certainly was no fan of the old twitter’s ultra woke circle jerk and bullyism but you could at least mostly ignore it and the verified accounts were actual verified people.
Today the misinformation and shitposting crap is impossible to avoid, the top comments are invariably random 8 dollar people (?) that add little to the discussion and porn bots / onlyfans all over the place.
On top of that it seems there might be a bias in the accounts that get selected for payouts and there is indeed quite the incentive for ragebait there.
Yes. It must be that and not at all the fact that Twitter is unavailable at worst or degraded at best if you don't have an account. There's something uninspired and tiring but I don't think it's people avoiding Twitter.
Twitter is so slow to load on mobile that it's faster to hand-replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.nl" than to wait for the load time and the close the multiple pop-ups.
Off the top of my head I think it's basically using the same publicly undocumented API that the Twitter-hosted front ends use - Twitter did successfully block nitter et al recently with the "must be logged in to view tweets" change but rolled that back (partly?) after Threads launched.
I surmise that to block such access by Nitter completely while keeping Twitter's own front ends open to the public, Twitter would need to be extensively re-factored on both the front and back ends, a goal that the organization may not be capable of successfully completing at this time, but is presumably working towards.
