from Hacker News

Twitter cut off the ability to read a tweet by fetching its URL with a HTTP GET

by LyalinDotCom on 12/18/20, 5:49 AM with 187 comments

• by bArray on 12/18/20, 6:47 AM

  > We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in this

  > browser. Please enable JavaScript or switch to a supported

  > browser to continue using twitter.com. You can see a list

  > of supported browsers in our Help Center.

  So long then, Twitter.

  Consider for a minute the number of services/programs that just got screwed, the number of people on slow internet connections they just cut off, the number of people on low-end mobile devices that just lost access to local community discussions - the list goes on.

  Was it really so much to ask for a basic HTML interface to display text and images? In terms of resources, surely this is quite easy to support? I've been using mbasic.facebook.com without JS for years, for example. Sure, some features are screwed, but for the most part it works.

• by nullify88 on 12/18/20, 8:27 AM

  You can HTTP GET tweets again by changing your useragent to Googlebot.

  curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://google.com/bot.html)" "https://twitter.com/zarfeblong/status/1339742840142872577"

  Peak SEO when users are faced with more friction than Googlebots and crawlers.

• by shakow on 12/18/20, 11:27 AM

  Speaking of Twitter UI, am I the only one having to hard refresh every other Twitter page to get rid of the “This is not available for you” message?

• by bonoboTP on 12/18/20, 10:01 AM

  I also got blocked a few hours after registering and had to give my phone number to get unblocked. I did nothing suspicious: filled out my profile in a normal way with nothing political and followed a few researchers but nothing en masse. I wrote to support to ask why this is, but no reply of course.

  I still gave it because I'm a little guy and want to get the benefits of being tapped into my professional community, to know what's up, to be visible myself etc. Such individual decisions result in this.

  We users have a hard time coordinating as we have individual incentives while Twitter is one entity and can do whatever it decides.

• by herbst on 12/18/20, 9:25 AM

  Twitter once enflamed my enthusiasm for API programming. Today i can barely make an account without getting blocked. Its sad how it changed

• by zarfeblong on 12/18/20, 7:37 AM

  Thanks for the nitter.net pointer -- I wasn't aware of that. That will be helpful.

  I know (in principle) how to use curl to send an authenticated API request via HTTP. That's authenticated; you have to log in. I already have a twitter client for that use case.

  There's also unauthenticated API access (read-only public tweets only, as you'd expect). (I assume this is what nitter.net is doing.) Less tracking, but you still have to request an API key, so it is under Twitter's control and they could in theory cut it off. It's still not supporting the basic web principle of "you can GET the flippin' data".

  Anyhow, I'm glad this is getting some public attention. I'm a little surprised that I was the first one to make a fuss about it.

• by Tipewryter on 12/18/20, 6:53 AM

  Thought experiment:

  How hard would it be to write a centralized 1-to-many message pipe that replicates Twitters core functionality?

  How hard would it be to run such a thing? The moral and legal needs to censor content would probably be a bigger task then the technical implementation?

• by ThePhysicist on 12/18/20, 11:48 AM

  It's really annoying that I can't consume information from social media sites without also opting into all of their slot-machine like mechanisms. Twitter is designed to pull people in and the main website contains a lot of gamification mechanisms that are designed to keep people on the site.

  For a while already I had the idea of building a "diet social media" software that would display information from e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other platforms without gamified addiction mechanisms. Turns out this is impossible to do as all platforms have drastically restricted the way you can consume their data.

• by cblconfederate on 12/18/20, 7:59 AM

  You cant even link to a tweet that is part of a thread , only to the top tweet. It takes effort to do such blunders

• by dvfjsdhgfv on 12/18/20, 10:44 AM

  So they joined the ranks of websites that can't be used without JS. Websites that basically just display text. This is breaking the web happening right in front of us.

• by kilroy123 on 12/18/20, 12:39 PM

  This explains why my broken link checker bot is blowing up for every single twitter URL.

• by cyberCleve on 12/18/20, 11:56 AM

  I guess this means a lot of malware/botnets that uses Twitter to communicate just broke today.

• by ffpip on 12/18/20, 7:03 AM

  Twitter previously didn't serve up a preview with mobile.twitter.com links. I noticed it in Whatsapp, so not sure whether it's twitter's fault or Whatsapp's fault. Changing mobile.twitter.com to twitter.com enabled the tweet preview.

• by X-Istence on 12/18/20, 9:35 AM

  This is an issue I've noticed too... when I open a new tab (in the background) to Twitter, then Safari won't execute the javascript until I go to the tab and hit refresh.

  It sucks, because it adds a new refresh cycle just to see the tweet.

• by specialist on 12/18/20, 3:56 PM

  I have never understood how to use Twitter. I simply cannot follow "the flow".

  I expect an RSS style newsreader. I just want to see what's new, in order.

  IMHO John Carmacks' old school finger file updates was the pinnacle of human achievement. Just aggregate everyone's finger updates into a swanky offline mail reader style UI. Heaven.

  I don't understand why links aren't links. eg Open this in a new tab.

  I don't understand why pull quotes are images.

  And tellingly, I don't care enough to figure it out, find a better way.

  PS- One thing missing from Twitter is the drive-by downvote. Too bad.

• by BlueTemplar on 12/18/20, 10:36 AM

  Hmm, so I guess that Twitter just feels big enough to just leave the World Wide Web?

• by rhn_mk1 on 12/18/20, 9:30 AM

  I'm surprised this has been noticed now. This has been happening to me with Firefox on and off for about a year, until I decided to switch to nitter.

• by ArcVRArthur on 12/18/20, 5:46 PM

  nitter.net still allows you to view tweets without JavaScript.

  Just replace the twitter.com part of the tweet URL.

• by throwawaysea on 12/18/20, 8:02 AM

  So what’s the alternative? Is there some easy scripting tool to automate a browser to login (?) and issue requests to read tweets? I’m not very clear on what exactly is blocked here and what the workarounds are.

• by known on 12/19/20, 7:12 AM

  Twitter recently moved to AWS; Is it due to it?

• by mellosouls on 12/18/20, 6:56 AM

  Where is the evidence/documentation for this claim; ie that it's a general policy? I'm not disputing it but its just a tweet that doesn't provide context.