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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   4127 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Sometimes I see all the tweets on my feed become blank tweets dated 01/01/1980, but that's the only bug I've seen.

The real issue that needs fixing is onlyfans thot follow spamming bots.

I've seen sponsored ads (with the "ad" tag) for individual OnlyFans thots. I've also seen ads for "Bubbling" AI services like it's 2014 4chan. I love the site, but it's going to die.

Yeah, the other issue is that bots have become a lot worse, though I can't clearly connect that to anything Musk has done. The biggest issues for me are crypto scammers and people who post irrelevant videos as replies. My best guess is that this is actually due to my following Vitalik Buterin.

You can't see threads anymore without being logged in, which I assume is a load shedding measure to keep the servers from falling over.

User hostile design like "you have to log in to see this" is really common in the social media site space, it's not just Twitter. Instagram does it, Pinterest does it, etc. I assume that it has something to do with wanting to show advertisers "look we have this many users" so that they can demand higher prices for ads, but I don't actually know for sure.

I think it’s something more substantive than that. In particular, a logged-out lurker is far less valuable than a user. Users are able to engage, create content, drive interactions, and yield far more data for the website to track. So if a lurker is led to sign up for an account because of a logout wall, even if that lurker is initially only intending on using that account to continue to lurk, it’s very likely that they’ll end up engaging with the site in some meaningful way. Even just liking posts gives the site owner a ton of data that can be used to target ads.

(An anecdotal datapoint: this account of mine on The Motte was originally only intended to allow me to lurk more effectively and view the most recent comments across subthreads, a feature forbidden to non-logged-in lurkers. But sure enough, I ended up posting here (albeit very rarely). That’s the sort of behavior that Twitter is trying to capture, but on a far more massive scale.)

There must have been a reason Twitter didn't do it previously.

Sure. But whatever the reason they didn't do it previously, they are now. It seems more likely to me that they are doing so because they hope to capture whatever value other social media platforms find in forcing logins, rather than they are trying to prop up failing infrastructure.

Not sure that I'd call that a "bug" to be "noticed". Didn't Musk publicly announce it, saying that they were finally fighting back against scraper bots, or something?

Scrapers can't log in? I can still use nitter.

It adds a barrier and allows more targeted rate limiting, I guess? The controversy was a while ago, and I didn't pay much attention at the time.

Edit: I feel like I've also seen Nitter display isolated posts the same way Twitter does.

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