Ask HN: Should we stop posting X links on HN?

[theGeatZhopa]

Just of today, i see a lot of postings on HN with linking to X/Twitter. Obviously X decided to not present the content.

just like here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392157

If you want to see how Prince of Persia animations have been done, you'll see nothing.

By now, i saw quite a few entries on HN that will lead into the literal nothing.

I dont have a twitter/X account. And i don't think it won't change anything, if I make one, because the HN URL is already not the proper one...

[chankstein38]

I would prefer that as I also don't have a twitter account and don't intend to get one. But obviously that's just me.

[moritzwarhier]

No, it's not just you.

Paywals might be debatable, but login-walled links to social media are not in the spirit of HN as I imagine it.

[rwmj]

As of a few days, X.com tries to trick you into disabling Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection. Any link shows only a completely black page that says "[WARNING] Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com"

[timeon]

> is known to cause issues on x.com

Interesting, other sites do not have this problem. Maybe they shouldn't have fired all those people.

[essdas]

Yes - no more links to Twitter/X.

PS: Twitter was the only social media website I used for the last decade. Unfortunately it’s a cesspool now.

[pram]

While we’re on the subject: For the last ~4 months on my desktop, when I click a Twitter link, there is nothing displayed at all. Cleared my cache multiple times and everything. It works on my phone, it’s actually so bizarre it makes me laugh rather than upset.

[chrismorgan]

For at least a year, Twitter links have only loaded the one message, not any other messages in the thread, or other irrelevant tweets like it used to. Happens across browsers, with configurations that aren’t particularly exotic. No idea what’s going on.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

If this is a vote, I vote yea.

That example HN submission is useless. It is like submitting a redirect URL. The X account name is only provided in a comment.

https://nitter.poast.org/jmechner

This X account holder is probably just using X to promote content that is found somewhere else, e.g., on his website, in his book, in the games, etc.

Suggestion: Submit to HN the original source not the X promotion.

[skilled]

Is there no one here who works at Twitter and can chime in?

What is the deal with these new weird links?

Also, I would vote no, but if links no longer render for logged out users then I would be willing to discuss alternative measures. I am just not entirely sure about the link you shared and its URL structure.

Twitter has a lot of people using it and posting stuff there exclusively, a lot of which is genuinely interesting and provokes curiosity.

[archagon]

I think anyone still working at Twitter would be too nervous about getting the boot to post in a thread like this.

[theGeatZhopa]

yes absolutely. But if no one can read it / logged out user cant read it - so whats the purpose of it, then? So, hence, my question

[AH4oFVbPT4f8]

I vote for yes, we should stop posting X links in as many places as possible. I don't have an account and do not plan to create one.

[op00to]

I simply don't click on X links since I don't have an account and can't see context of the links like tweets before and after. People should feel free to continue posting for those who have an X account. It's not such a big deal to move on with my day.

[theGeatZhopa]

... but it's a post about Prince of Persia and how that animations have been made. Such an iconic content for a legend! If you don't click on it, you never lived :))

I need to see it!

[piva00]

Deleted my Twitter account since Musk took over and don't intend on getting a new one.

Apart from getting login-walled for threads it also happens quite often that the link simply won't load even the original message, I cannot see what's being discussed and the apps I used to rely on to unroll threads stopped working after the API changes.

It's simply unusable for me and whenever I see a link to Twitter I have to ignore it, as much as the discussion could be interesting there is no way I can participate in it.

[nwoli]

Didn’t HN use to have actual polls? Anyway my vote for this is no

[theGeatZhopa]

I didn't find the polling. Sorry.

Do you mind to elaborate why no? I mean, there is obviously content, but it cant be accessed. Its different with like paywalls, where some nice hacker-human posts an archive link. For twitter it isn't possible the same way.

[politelemon]

Yes wholeheartedly. Their site has changed to make it hostile and difficult to access information. There has no need to encourage that behaviour.

[Lockal]

This is incredibly stupid, but I think we've reached the stage where it's time to add a new rule to the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html page: "links must be working (i.e., show content that matches the title of submission)"

[ChrisArchitect]

Was gonna say the submitted links are just broken, but I think it's HN code rewriting them that's breaking the posts. x.com/ link submitted becomes twitter.com/whatever, but then it pulls it again or something and x is returning a migrate/redirect and HN is then rewriting the link with that url instead. Sure we can fix this. NBD

[LeoPanthera]

We should stop posting them, yes. But it seems unlikely that "we", meaning all the users of HN, will.

Musk has deliberately repositioned X as a social network that encourages hate speech, and the users have followed. It maintains a veneer of respectability only because of it's pre-Musk history, and because of the number of corporations and media outlets who continue to use it, presumably out of inertia rather than anything else.

If it were up to me, HN would not support any site that supports hate speech. And it mostly already doesn't. X is a weird quirk as it is in transition from what it used to be to what Musk wants it to be, and a lot of people haven't really accepted it yet.

[nunez]

I would friggin love it if we did OR if the posts had a [twitter/x] flag in the title so I can avoid them.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I would appreciate that. I don't want to login, so any thread is useless

[nashashmi]

So it seems like all twitter.com links break? But x.com links are ok and and don’t require logging in?

[O1111OOO]

If we decide to stop submitting X/Twitter links, then we should do the same for NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Medium, Threads and a ton of others.

I don't like the idea of picking and choosing a flavor of the week to cancel. So let's cancel every single site that requires a sign-in or has set up a paywall ..or.. leave them all alone.

As solutions... I like what slashdot does with their comprehensive summaries. It is a thing of beauty. Not only does it help solve some of these issues, it has found a way to archive content. osnews.com is another site that's similar.

If you go back even just a few months on HN, you'll see that lots of the submitted links are dead, 404s. We still have the (opinionated) conversation but not the actual content.

I also like archive.ph as another solution that can be used to bypass many paywalled sites.

I think we need to look to solutions to these problems. Just look at the subscription model... and things are just going to get worse as far as accessing linked content.

[piva00]

Yes, please. At least for NYT, WSJ and others it's possible to link to an Internet Archive version to be read which isn't possible with Threads/Twitter.

I'd like at least a screenshot of the Twitter thread being discussed, or a copy pasted version of it.