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Ask HN: Can we ban Twitter links, please?
235 points by whyoh on Feb 22, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 127 comments
Every day there are posts here with some Twitter thread as the source.

This used to be just annoying in the past (because of the overall low quality of such sources), but now it's gone too far. Twitter won't let you see the content without logging in anymore. At least this is what I see when I open a Twitter link and scroll down: https://i.imgur.com/E0h2CtQ.png

There are many free blog posting platforms out there that don't annoy users like that and — needless to say — are in a much more readable format. All it takes is a couple of minutes to sign up...

I think such a HN rule could help in promoting common decency on the web.

EDIT: A couple of posters made valid points against an outright ban. Someone suggested flagging paywalls/credential-walls. How about lowering the score for Twitter-link submissions (something like: 1 vote counts 0.5 votes)?



Doesnt the HN voting system kind of take care of this problem? If the tweet is low-quality, not important, then it wont get many upvotes.

But if the tweet is highly important, has information people believe is valuable etc - then it gets upvoted towards the top of HN.

An outright ban on tweets also creates a secondary problem; what if there was some single tweet that was extremely important to the HN community. The inability to post it means people miss out on the news/discussion, until later on when it is re-submitted as a news story elsewhere.


That's one way to view it.

Personally, I think it works the opposite. The voting only gives the community so much power. Often the content starts dictating the community, not the other way around. With enough low effort and uninteresting content clogging up the chronological feed, you eventually see core- and power users migrating to other sites or communities. The community is eventually transplanted by those who seek out the kind of content that made the core community leave, perpetuating the new kind of content.

I've seen it happen to a lot of subreddits.


But...the community provides the content, too. It's not like submissions of Twitter posts just materialize out of the aether. They're made by HN users.

So if you want different content, answer the question: What are you providing?


I wouldn't say that the community provides the content. Some of it, yes, but anyone can provide content, be they passerby, lurker, or indeed part of the community. But generally, the lurkers vastly outnumber the participants. Therefore, the actual community has very little power in the face of the faceless and voiceless masses. hn is a pretty niche site, all things considered. Given a surge in popularity, an influx of new lurkers, you might see the type of link being upvoted change over night. Your voice is powerless, the vote decides everything, and the lurkers have 90% of the votes.


I've seen it happen on various subreddits too, but preventing that is not done by blanket banning Twitter. It's by moderating the content so that the easy to consume stuff doesn't overwhelm the thoughtful content. And I do believe moderation is the only way to ensure the issue doesn't arise where quality content gets drowned out because the quick and easy to consume content will gather upvotes far faster.


I agree with this.

This is asked for somewhat regularly as well as banning paywalled sites. It would be wrong to do so.

In general I think it's good to have the primary source be the linked posting. If that's a Twitter thread or an original price of journalism on a paywalled site, and its interesting to the HN community it should be linked here.

What the OP if suggesting is that the only Twitter threads that are submitted are submitted by the Twitter user themselves, that's a tiny proportion of posts. If someone sees a twitter thread that would be interesting to the HN community there is no other option but to post it.


Not anymore.

Last week we had an article about "Why babies cry" on the first page.

Exact title was "Why babies cry in the first three months, how to tell them apart, and what to do"


Exactly this. I don't click Twitter links myself and have considered taking the time to filter them out often. But I don't feel the need to impose that on others. Just because I think Twitter is a poor way to share and discuss information, and that the website is painful to use doesn't mean that I should deprive others.

Now an account-level domain filter. That would be a fantastic idea.


This is an easy question to decide once you understand that there's a single thing we're optimizing for on HN, namely intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

We're not going to ban Twitter because, like it or not, it's the source of some of the most intellectually interesting material that gets posted here. It's also, of course, the source of a lot of gunk. We penalize such sites by default (almost all major media sites are penalized this way on HN), but we don't ban them, because we'd miss out on too many good things if we did. It's more important not to miss good things than it is to ban bad things: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The paywall question is a different one. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 for how we handle paywalls. I don't think twitter.com is hardwalled, though like a lot of big sites, its behavior seems to vary a lot across different regions. It shouldn't be hard for people to post workarounds in the threads, though.


It's disappointing that some very clever and interesting people now write posts (exclusively?) on twitter. This means that many people, like myself, cannot read them (for non-technical reasons).

I have a couple of solutions to this:

The first is very low-tech. If you post a twitter link please copy/paste the tweet into a HN comment.

The second is please simul-post your tweets to your personal blog. Of course this requires extra effort, but it could be alleviated by making a twitter client which provides simul-posting. Although such a client is probably against corp-law.

As more people are making informative tweets, we are locking too much valuable information away behind the tweet-wall.

I think this is an important post and am glad [whyoh] has raised the general topic.


> some very clever and interesting people

Clever people value their time. When twitter reaches a large audience and has the lowest friction for sharing content, then that's what they use.


>cannot read them

Just type nitter.net over twitter.com


https://twiiit.com redirects to a random online instance of nitter.


Thanks.

I just tried this (recent SSD submission) and it worked. I also have a non-javascript browser so I was not optimistic, but it did work. https://nitter.net/xenadu02/status/1495693475584557056


Other public instances can be found here https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances


See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30425746


No.

People that barely participate on HN are the ones with the loudest voices when it comes to what should/may be posted and what not. But you have all the power you need to improve HN right at your fingertips: quality submissions, rather than ASK HN's requesting blanket censorship, upvotes of articles on the new page that are interesting (and note that there is more than one new page). That's far more effective than a ban on one of the most popular social media sites, that also happens to be a pretty good conduit for timely stuff.

Have a look at a couple of these pages and decide if you wanted to lose all of the highly upvoted links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com


You are missing part of the point, in my view.

There are people who don't have access to the content. Simple as that. Good content is irrelevant if it cannot be accessed.

Yes, quite often a good samaritan will come and provide a workaround link, but there are two problems with that:

1. The immediate one which is that, if the canonically accessible article is at a separate link, then this is the link that should be the main article. Not the pay/loginwalled one.

2. The ethical one: should we as a community be promoting content controlled by a closed platform (and thus endorsing/promoting/requiring subscription to that platform)? There's a reason you don't get facebook stories on HN. Up until now twitter was not closed like facebook, but now it is.


> You are missing part of the point, in my view.

I think you are missing part of the rest of this thread.

> There are people who don't have access to the content. Simple as that. Good content is irrelevant if it cannot be accessed.

No, the same goes for paywalled links, and HN definitely allows those. Besides that Twitter can be a very good source for things that are happening as we speak with the rest of the web playing catch-up.

> 1. The immediate one which is that, if the canonically accessible article is at a separate link, then this is the link that should be the main article. Not the pay/loginwalled one.

That's not for you to decide. HN favors the original content, for a reason.

> 2. The ethical one: should we as a community be promoting content controlled by a closed platform (and thus endorsing/promoting/requiring subscription to that platform)? There's a reason you don't get facebook stories on HN. Up until now twitter was not closed like facebook, but now it is.

Twitter is still far more open than Facebook. Possibly there will come a time that that is not the case but for now it is. You can still read tweets without being logged in.


> Twitter is still far more open than Facebook. Possibly there will come a time that that is not the case but for now it is. You can still read tweets without being logged in.

No I can't. That's the exact point being discussed, the recent changes to Twitter which block access to non-subscribers.


Interesting, I have no such problems. Both in anonymous windows as well as browsers that have never been logged into twitter I can see linked tweets.

Wonder what's up with that if it is location related or something else.


As of this moment, 4 of the first 10 stories at your link are [dead] or [flagged] [dead].

Edit: compare to 1 of the first 10 and 2 of the first 30 for washingtonpost.com.

Twitter appears to be a very low-quality source overall.

> People that barely participate on HN are the ones with the loudest voices when it comes to what should/may be posted and what not.

I participate quite a bit, and I think Twitter is cancer.


> As of this moment, 4 of the first 10 stories at your link are [dead] or [flagged] [dead].

Yes, but in the first couple of pages there are plenty with 100's of upvotes that we would have missed out on. To me this is proof that the system works.

> I participate quite a bit, and I think Twitter is cancer.

I don't think that's either accurate or in good taste.


> there are plenty with 100's of upvotes that we would have missed out on

You have no way of knowing that they wouldn't have been submitted in another form.

> I don't think that's either accurate or in good taste.

Twitter is designed to produce shallow hot takes of the most superficial nature. It drives engagement by stoking maximum outrage among its participants, encouraging online mob action.

IMO, it is not healthy for either its participants or society as a whole. I think the comparison is 100% accurate.


> You have no way of knowing that they wouldn't have been submitted in another form.

I do because this is the original content on Twitter, anything 'in another form' is by definition then a derivative and I'd much rather read the original when it is fresh.

> IMO, it is not healthy for either its participants or society as a whole. I think the comparison is 100% accurate.

As they say: you can't argue about taste.


If the original content is solely on Twitter, I question its value on the large scale. Most of the ones I see that I would personally consider valuable are actually Twitter links to other sites. Genuinely important stuff doesn't fit in 230 characters, as a rule.

You don't see stuff like Newton's Principia, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Mahabharata, or Confucius's Analects on Twitter. Conversely, the platform is heavily optimized for rage-bait of the "Burn the witch!" "Lynch the black!, or "Throw the Jew down the well!" school.

And of course the overwhelming bulk of Twitter consists of junk like which vapid "celebrity" is currently having sex with which other vapid "celebrity".

It's the supermarket tabloid of online discourse.


Just a couple of examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30370551

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30318634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30266226

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30231611

> If the original content is solely on Twitter, I question its value on the large scale.

This goes for the web in general I guess, but Twitter, like any source needs some filtering and HN filters just fine. If it makes the homepage with more than 100 upvotes I'll have a look.

> You don't see stuff like Newton's Principia, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Mahabharata, or Confucius's Analects on Twitter.

You don't see them on Medium, Facebook. Wordpress or any one of a 100 other outlets either. The classics are the classics because they went through 100's of years of filtering and in the most literal sense they stood the test of time.

> Conversely, the platform is heavily optimized for rage-bait of the "Burn the witch!" "Lynch the black!, or "Throw the Jew down the well!" school.

There's that. But there is also some pretty good content, you just need to be very selective.

> And of course the overwhelming bulk of Twitter consists of junk like which vapid "celebrity" is currently having sex with which other vapid "celebrity".

As opposed to Google News and millions of other news outlets? You seem to be angry with media in general rather than with Twitter per-se, which I can totally sympathize with but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, it is not all bad and that is what this blanket ban is all about.

> It's the supermarket tabloid of online discourse.

No, it also has the supermarket tabloid of online discourse. But it also has fascinating exchanges between scientists and other people with interesting jobs, as well as a huge network of other professionals. Like everything else online: Twitter is what you make it. I get more - and better - feedback on my projects on Twitter than on HN, and the relationships tend to last longer than just an article and the immediate response on that.

I still write to my blog and post the links on Twitter because I want to control where my content ends up, so you won't see me write 'articles' for twitter, though I've done the occasional thread when it was inconvenient to write a blog post, which typically is a very large amount of work.

Anyway, this is all moot: nobody forces you to visit Twitter, you can filter out the links if you don't want to see them, that's pretty easy.


> You don't see them on Medium, Facebook. Wordpress or any one of a 100 other outlets either.

You'd be far more likely to see them on Medium or Wordpress, if only because those platforms let you write something more than 230 characters long without resorting to some sort of ugly hack.

> You seem to be angry with media in general rather than with Twitter per-se

Ah, yes. "You seem angry". Note that I specifically provided the Washington Post as a counter-example of content that appears to be of higher quality.


> decide if you wanted to lose all of the highly upvoted links

To be fair, they are already lost to a sizeable fraction of the audience now that Twitter pesters you for signing in.


As opposed to all the paywalled articles that are regularly submitted to HN? Really, I don't see the difference, if anything Twitter wins out there because (1) it is free and (2) it's super easy to circumvent.


For the record, I support the informal system used for paywalls: Its allowed if there is a viewable alternative (archive.is or another news site).

In the case of twitter, we have https://threadreaderapp.com (used to also have threader.app but they got ACK!-quihired by Twitter)


No blanket bans on websites please. I dislike Twitters interface as much as the next guy, but if it annoys you so much, then use an adblocker filter.

  twitter.com##[id^="layers"] > [class^="css-"]:has([dir^="auto"]):not(:has([aria-expanded])):has(a[href^="/"]):has-text(/Log in|Sign Up/)
  twitter.com##html[dir]:style(overflow: auto !important;)


I've just done some rudimentary testing...

  1. Incognito window -> No Model Popup, just the accept cookies/sign-in bottom bar

  2. Edge with no add-ons -> No Model Popup, just the accept cookies/sign-in bottom bar

  3. Chrome with uBlock Origin -> Model Popup, impossible to browse Twitter if not logged in.
So, are they detecting an ad-blocker, and ONLY doing the model popup on those browsers?


If Chrome's your main browser, they're probably just tracking you and detecting that you've visited Twitter a number of times without signing up.


By the way you can enable extensions in Incognito if you wanted to test this


Chrome with uBlock Origin here, and I've never seen the modal*, so it can't be as simple as that. I'd guess country plays a role. Of course, even without the modal, I often can't find the comments/replies that other people seem to, but that's a different problem.

*Yes, not "model", "modal" as in "mode", but not spelled as in "mode".


Firefox + ublock origin = no annoyances on twitter without being signed in.


Twitter Threads are the absolute worst!

Just write a blog post already!

But I guess for better or worse, the Twitter Threads get people more internet points!


You're shouting at the wrong people. The problem isn't HN users posting their insights to Twitter and then submitting those links. The problem is other people, often some with useful or valuable insights, post to Twitter, and then HN people find that information.

What to do?

We can copy that information to our own site and post a link to that, but the guidelines ask us to post original sources.

We can ignore it,but that means ignoring a possible source of useful and insightful information.

Or we can post a link to the tweet, and rely on HN users to find a way to read it, such has been suggested elsewhere in this discussion.

But telling HN readers to post on their own blog is a bit pointless.


Twitter played well in the impulse control game and unfortunately won over many people. Crafting a blog post takes way more effort compared to a rant like loosely connected stream of tweets.


I wrote this about 13 years ago (a little tongue in cheek) but it held up:

https://sensepost.com/blog/2009/twitter-killed-the-infosec-b...

-snip- There’s something liberating about saying “here’s a link”, as opposed to taking the time to formulate your thoughts into a full blown posting.

We were curious if this twitter-effect was real, imaginary or only applicable to lazy people like us.. Thanks to python-twitter and a few lines of script we can look at the the blogging habits of some info-sec superstars (and maybe confuse correlation and causation to jump to conclusions while we at it). -snip-


I've never come to understand the disdain for tweet threads. Sure, a blog would be nice, but as a reader I have no idea if it's going to render correctly on mobile or be inundated with terrible ads. At minimum there'll be a braindead cookie banner taking up 1/3 of the screen. Meanwhile, the author now has to go set up a blog somewhere, link to it, moderate comments on two forums, etc. All because people can't read with a faint horizontal line between coherent thoughts? Or is there something I'm missing?


> but as a reader I have no idea if it's going to render correctly on mobile (...). At minimum there'll be a braindead cookie banner taking up 1/3 of the screen

This is the reality of reading twitter on mobile if you aren't logged in/using their app though.


> I have no idea if it's going to render correctly

This is actually my problem with that website and the main reason I hate Twitter threads. Twitter doesn't let me open anything in a new tab properly, sometimes (like last week) opening images in posts doesn't work for days, and I stopped using the site because after about a month the notifications stopped showing anything new, I literally had to scroll through my own profile and manually look for answers to my posts! In the best case this is an unreadable mess where everything has to be unfolded like a messy origami; and sometimes this reloads the site, sometimes it doesn't, either way it comes with at least a second of loading time.

I'd like those threads if they were as readable as comments here on HN. But Twitter seems to test how inaccessible they can make their main content without people leaving.


>All because people can't read with a faint horizontal line between coherent thoughts? Or is there something I'm missing?

It's more than just a horizontal line. There are icons and buttons in every post, that is, every couple of sentences. Hover-over popups that obfuscate content. Distractions and irrelevant click-bait content on the side and on the bottom. Embedded media (images, videos) behave poorly. Obfuscated external links. Cookie/sign-in banners that take more space than on other websites. I could probably go on if I took another look, but seeing how Twitter is now forcing me to log-in, I can't.

And I think just about every remotely popular blogging platform works properly on mobile, it's not 2005 anymore. Ads might be a problem on some, I'm not sure. But I bet even with ads it's not as bad as Twitter overall. For testing I opened a Blogspot link now with no adblock and there was just one unobtrusive ad on the side, way better than Twitter in terms of readability.


> Twitter Threads are the absolute worst!

It really depends on what corner of Twitter you live in. I follow a dozen or so people and see nothing but high quality content.


I don't have any problems with Twitter threads. Why don't you like them? I can consume them easily on mobile and on my desktop.

On the other hand I think apps that unroll threads are the worst. All the spammy answers just saying "@threadreaderapp" or something like that - THAT is the worst in my eyes.

Nothing against blog posts, I'd also prefer a blog post over a Twitter thread.


> All the spammy answers just saying "@threadreaderapp" or something like that - THAT is the worst in my eyes

Agreed, I wish Twitter would just crack down on that and ban bots like that.


I'd prefer if twitter just made its interface not terrible so that there'd be no need for threadreaderapp.


I'm not a fan of Twitter threads but the interface got a lot better since they added proper threading. Adding x/x identifiers isn't really necessary any more and reading is a much better experience than it used to be.

I'm almost convinced that people just post the @threadreaderapp unroll for engagement.


Better than it used to be is not a very high bar to clear.

As a reader, I actively seek the threadreaderapp posters and follow these links to improve the reading experience. Or just go to nitter since I discovered that it's a thing.


What about rewriting links to Nitter?

https://nitter.net/about


Better yet, using this extension: Privacy Redirect[0]

[0]: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect


Came here to say this. It's less user-hostile.


Right up to the point that it dies, takes all those links with it or redirects them to something completely different (or malicious).


when that happens you can just change the domain back to twitter.com


>There are many free blog posting platforms out there that don't annoy users like that [...] All it takes is a couple of minutes to sign up...

Your proposed suggestion usually can't be followed as it seems like you're not noticing the difference between the HN submitter userid vs the Twitter userid. The HN submitters sharing the links are usually not the Twitter authors.

Consider the Twitter SSD thread on the HN frontpage right now and look at the metadata fields : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30419618

* The HN user who submitted it : ahachete

* The Twitter user: xenadu02

Side note: I notice that xenadu02's Twitter profile has a link to his blog website (http://russbishop.net) but he hasn't put any articles there since 2019. (It looks like that site doesn't have SSL enabled so it's not even modernized for https.)

The SSD comparison was only published to his Twitter page. It's been frequently discussed why people do that even though many readers don't like it: the Twitter platform has more engagement from a bigger audience than a personal blog site.


I think there already is a rule. Something like "If it's a link to another link, just link to that one."

My suspicion is they do it hoping that people who click it will also follow them on Twitter.


> My suspicion is they do it hoping that people who click it will also follow them on Twitter.

In my experience tweets are almost never submitted by the tweet's author.


I don't understand this ... people aren't posting links to their own tweets, they're posting links to tweets by other people that they found.


Is that different from posting a link to a webpage you found?


In short, no, linking to a thing you found on Twitter is absolutely no different from posting a link to a webpage you found. That's what I'm saying.

Other people seem to think that HN users are submitting links to tweets that they themselves authored, and that's generally not the case, so there seem to be a lot of misconceptions flying around.


I misread your original comment and can see that now. I don’t like the slow degrade of the twitter experience for non-users and would like to see them get pushback from turning twitter into a Pinterest-like walled garden. But this isn’t the place to do it.


Links to Twitter discussions are fine, but it would be nice if they automatically redirected to a tweet-reader app and/or a self post that contained the entire discussion.


Somebody linked to nitter the other day (As an alternative to a twitter post) -- maybe thats what we should require-- if you must post a twitter link, please use nitter or similar


Or as a community, if we don't see a nitter link in the comments, add one.


I don't really like linking to alternative frontends. It actually makes it harder for people to decide for themselves. If I use extensions that redirect Twitter to my preferred Nitter instance hard-coding a Nitter link makes it worse for me. I feel the same way about people linking to old.reddit.com. I have configured Reddit to use the old UI automatically on desktop but on mobile I find the new UI the best of the awful options. However the old links still use the old UI because it was explicitly requested.

Basically the canonical URL serves as a consistent identifier, and the reader can choose how it opens. By linking to alternatives that you prefer you are depriving the power-user reader that choice to apply their preference.

So I think we should use canonical URLs most of the time (especially for popular sites) because I value viewers preferences more than submitters preferences or a better default.


There are some posts where Twitter is the primary source. Banning Twitter outright isn't a solution for this type of situation.


I used to have the same misgivings with Twitter threads being linked, but after discovering Privacy Redirect¹ (and Privacy Redirect for Safari²)—which automatically redirects Twitter links to a alternative Twitter frontend (like Nitter)—Twitter threads are much nicer to read.

――――――

¹ — https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

² — https://github.com/smmr-software/privacy-redirect-safari


> Every day there are posts here with some Twitter thread as the source

These threads are extremely and overwhelmingly popular and that surprises me.

These threads always start off like "Here's how to make $100MM in 10 hours" and then multiple sub posts of most generic nonsense I've ever seen.

What's even interesting is people think they get tremendous value out of there and share/re-tweet and go crazy about them.

Am I really stupid or are most people on Twitter who engage with these threads on some kind of hallucinogen(s)?


Indeed, let's make sure only articles allowed are those with a cheesy work anecdote at the start for those who fall asleep too easily, then the entire life story of the subject person beginning with their dad, and ten screenfuls down you may finally learn what the article is supposedly about.

I'm not even exaggerating, that's one of the top posts from the past week. Editors of longreads in ‘serious’ publications love this formula for some mysterious reason.


Perhaps HN could automatically convert Twitter links into nitter.net?


A simple userscript should do the trick instead of HN changing the URL.

    var nitterUrl = window.location.toString().replace('twitter.com', 'nitter.net');
    window.location.replace(nitterUrl);
Though if you want to be sure you never send a single packet to Twitter, you'll have to make a script that operates on all sites and rewrites URLs in the anchor tags.

Edit: Just saw someone mention this extension which could be a better option https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect


redirector is another alternative but on mobile it's a pain in the ass (you could make an userscript with ff nightly iirc)


That just sets you up for long term issues similar to the ones associated with URL redirectors and shorteners.


Thanks, but dang could do a search and replace if that ever occurred?


Dan has enough on his plate I would say. HN links to original sources, that's in the guidelines, if that's Twitter then so be it, if you want to replace the links there are browser plug ins that will do that for you with ease.


Yeah the browser plugin route looks like the best solution for now. Cheers.


First of all, absolutely not.

- Twitter hosts some of the highest quality content that get into the nitty gritty of some topic, exactly because it's so low friction to post to Twitter. Those of you saying "just put it on a blog" are either oblivious to how much more effort that is, or have already spent a lot of time making blogging low friction for your needs. That's not the rule however.

- There are countless posts with a mixed quality here from NY Times and other subscription based sites that show a pay wall when opened. Do you propose banning those too?

- If someone really cares to find out what's there to see, they'll sign up. If not, they move on and the post doesn't get any upvotes. Works itself out. As others have mentioned, script it out of your view if it really bothers you that much.


It's such a joke that even officials at least in my country post their stuff to Twitter, where people without account can't read it... The platform is clearly unsuitable for any serious communication.


For what it's worth, I do not have a twitter account but have never seen this popup you are seeing. Likely due to better browser blocking. I'm using FF with UBlock, ABP, and Privacy Badger.


FF with uBO (default lists + "annoyances") and noscript here (with Twitter itself whitelisted, otherwise it doesn't seem to work anymore), no popups in sight either.


One tip is to replace twitter.com in the URL with nitter.net. But I realise that isn’t a great solution. I think one must accept that, annoying as the platform may be, Twitter is the place where many discussions of interest to HN happen and so I think it ought to be acceptable to link it. One could imagine an alternative where people post buzzfeed-style blog posts that merely repost Twitter threads and I think that would be worse.


This got me wondering, are there any websites that are banned from HN?


Absolutely, turn showdead on and check the 'new' page.


Some domains are shadowbanned (Huffington Post, for example), but the list is not public.


There was another recent complaint about this 'twitter not letting you see content without popups asking you to login'.

What is this about? Doesn't seem to be case. Tweets are public for the most part, even the replies.

I cannot duplicate this behavior on Chrome or Firefox (Windows, logged out, incognito, because you seem to want to use a site without actually being a participant). Are you using some weird addons or something, ad blocker? Weirdness. Tweet links wouldn't keep being shared on here if they weren't accessible by majority of readers.

The side issue is the reason for these shares is trend of more content being shared only as tweets, breaking news, the dreaded threads etc....with no other non-social source at the time.... breaking news with no associated blog post or news story yet etc, so as HN moves fast, it's the tweet that gets shared.


Seeing the investigating below where some mention behaviour with popups may be related to ad-blockers. Not the best move by Twitter but also no sympathy from me here. You want to read content without logging in to be an actual participant on the site and ad-block also out of paranoia or whatever? Ease up on the entitlement.

It's not in Twitter's interest really to wall-off all their content and I'm all for the open web but them trying to onboard users visiting that aren't signed in and encourage people to use the site where yes, there will be ads, is their right.


Unfortunately Twitter still remains as a major information source.

Since Twitter does not care about UX for unregistered users (so do Facebook, Instagram, Medium, Reddit on mobile and so on), users can switch to Nitter instances or using some extensions to block it.

It would be also somehow helpful to disable Cookie on twitter.com.


The main problem I have with twitter links is that they're too short to understand what they're saying if you don't already know the whole context. I almost always have to dig through the HN comment section hoping that someone explained what the tweet said.


> There are many free blog posting platforms out there that don't annoy users like that and — needless to say — are in a much more readable format.

That is of no significance if the content you want to share is not on those platforms and you did not make the content.


Right. My suggestion/rant is not just strictly about HN posts, but about Twitter in general. I'm hoping HN discouraging such links would have a wider effect and encourage Twitter users to write their next blog post elsewhere.


There could be a personalized setting to show/hide Twitter links.


Those links have been usable again since I installed this extension (automatically redirects to Nitter, which is an alternative client for Twitter).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...

Feels like déjà-vu with 'old twitter redirect', but it works wonderfully for me.


If you don't want to login to twitter, then install the Redirector addon: https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/

Then set a redirect from twitter links to https://nitter.net or https://threadreaderapp.com/


I tend to scan an RSS feed of HN articles that hit at least 100 points and I don't think I ever see twitter links.

If you're reading `new` then I think you're going to have to wade through the garbage.

Every now and then there's a good twitter thread by a legit expert in their field which adds context to something in the news which you really can't get anywhere else. Particularly during the pandemic.


You don't get to decide for others where they are writing, and you don't get to decide for others what they are upvoting on HN.

There aren't many Twitter submissions, at least on the front page.

Get over it, nobody forces you to click on a Twitter link. There are plenty of other submissions.


As Twitter now requires ID and it closes down alternative front ends such as nitter.net, these posts will naturally lose relevance and not be upvoted by those who cannot view them. We have similar situation with Facebook.


I'd rather educate people on how to use social platforms instead of banning some links.

We should use social media primarily for sharing links, not to fill them by content. Then this problem would disappear.


I don't have a Twitter account, but I view posts and threads simply by opening Twitter links in a private browser window. Does that not work for you all?


> I don't have a Twitter account, but I view posts and threads simply by opening Twitter links in a private browser window. Does that not work for you all?

No. After a while there's a huge modal layer asking me to log in


IMO it should be configurable per user.

Not only twitter, but all social media, paywalls, politics, etc.

Also HN desperately lacking tags: I only interested in couple of tech stacks/protocols and several problem domains/verticals - why do I need sift through all these unrelevant submissions?


I think that would be complex to implement in a way that would be useful to enough people without getting in the way of everyone else, you are either putting a log of load on detecting what content is into the site, or putting that load onto submitters by expecting them to take time to tag things appropriately.

And the just isn't enough traffic to make it worthwhile IMO (is scanning a page, or maybe two, of HN to see if anything piques your interest really a chore?).

I avoid clicking twitter links generally, Medium too, but the discussion they bring up can be interesting, and often include links to relevant information from less irritating sources, so I wouldn't want them to simply not be here.

If you do want fully rid of the links yourself, maybe a userscript is a practical answer? Though if you are a Chrome user that option will be less convenient in future as IIRC Manifest 3 will break options like Tapermonkey (a bookmarklet will still work, assuming you don't mind an extra click).


IMHO that's the beauty of HN. By "sifting" through "unrelevant" submissions you discover things that you wouldn't have looked at otherwise.


I have agreed with all your points at one time or another but I now think that it's HNs structure that stops it turning into Reddit/social media or another echo chamber. I don't program or develop for a living or hobby any more but the realtively high quality submissions and the super high quality comments and discussions make the the trawl worth while, I regularly find interesting discussion in subjects I have no real interest in that cause me to reflect on my own opinions and thinking, to me that is invaluable and I don't get it anywhere else.


I'm disappointed by what Twitter has become and wish this could happen.

But sometimes the content is relevant or innovative; not sure it's fair to expect HN to take a principled stance against the platform.

How about a preference that hides Twitter submissions? Half the time I skip them anyway or hit Back before the site finishes loading. If enough readers move along, perhaps it would incentivize publishers to as well.


Twitter lets you see that specific content but nothing else w/o logging in. Still better than full blown paywalls IMO.


NYTimes is just a paywall. There are a few of these. Flagging them as credential_walls or pay_walls would be cool.


Flagging would be better than nothing, I guess. But it's not enough IMO.

My main problem with Twitter is the UI, which is bad in general and terrible for long posts (threads). The second problem is the "culture" of posting outrage and low quality content in general, often full of typos (due to Twitter being a mobile-centric platform). Requiring credentials is just the last straw.

So I think a stronger deterrent is needed. If not a ban, lowering the score for Twitter-link submissions (each vote counts 0.5 votes)?


I do not want content missing out on page 1 simply because it's on Twitter. That content may not be available elsewhere, meaning that people are very likely to miss useful and informative posts. And it's not like a vote bias on HN is going to make those people move off of Twitter.

Either use an extension to redirect you to a site like nitter.net, manually adjust the URL yourself, or just don't click on Twitter links at all.


Someone will mostly put an archive link in the comments. Some of those stories are valuable.


Linking from HN to paywalled sites does nothing to discourage such site's behaviour. Fine, if you want a paywalled internet just don't suck the life out of the open version.

It's a common complaint that decent websites don't get surfaced on Google - well given so many valuable links are going to cloaked sites such as NYT, it's no wonder?


> Twitter won't let you see the content without logging in anymore.

I don't know why people don't make a bigger deal out of it. I guess everyone has twitter now.


If content is relevant for HN, I would like to see it, even if it’s on Twitter. Yes, we would collectively prefer that it’s in a blog and that there are no paywalls or login screens, that RSS is available everywhere, that Google Reader is still alive, etc. But that’s not the current reality.

To make things less abstract, John Carmack is active on twitter. Should we ban a link to his tweets if it’s something interesting?


As a submitter I have no control over the platform the original content is published on.


Post link to nitter?


I would do the same for all the paywall links, there are really a lot of HN lately.


Yes, please.


A very valid point is that Twitter asks for an account to view content. This makes it unacceptable to be posted here as is, imo.

All OPs posting Tweets should be required to post an alternative link which doesn't require an account, just like with other paywalled content.


This comment is your only contribution on this site, and that contribution is demanding censorship?

Seems legit.


The irony in complaining about censorship while censoring someone for 'having a new account'. Cheers for the warm welcome! The 'register' page is there for a reason...


Welcome around. I can assure you, that you're not being censored. I was merely voicing my opinion, that it seems weird that someone who just joined this place would have their first post be voicing their support to demand censorship of the submission process of the site. Perhaps it was a coincidence, if so, my apologies.


Let's ban Medium as well when we're at it. They go a step further and actually paywall free articles, rather than twitter that just needs a free account.


I'd much rather we ban paywalled links.


Paywalled links without an alternative are disallowed as far as I know.

When you encounter one, go into the comments and there will be an archive.is link.


Twitter is a platform for politicians and the rich to announce stuff and new laws. Haven't u... 1/8


Ha ha haha - EXACTLY to the last dot!

I am terrified of where we are headed as a society. I get that writing blogs are more time consuming than tweeting but for the consumer - is this content really valuable in the long term?




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