Technology

Are all the news articles with embedded tweet widgets busted now?

Now that Twitter has become what it is, I'm somewhat offended that my local government makes announcements on it. Hopefully this will be an impetus for them to stop... although many agencies use Facebook too, and FB and IG have been this way for years.

I've worked in local level government communication. Most of the time your just trying to hit as many places as possible in a hopeless effort to keep an interested public informed. The price is usually low, the audience is there, and information can be duplicated to other platforms easily, so it generally makes sense to use social media.

That said, low engagement on a platform would be a great reason to consider cutting it out. A citizen with feedback is enough to spark the flame too.

As much as I hate the idea of Yet Another Social Media App, I kind of wish there was some sort of official government-specific platform that was only available to state/local/federal government(s) or organizations for making important announcements. No memberships required (other than posters or commenters), no likes, upvotes, or retweeting or whatever, just postings of information that people can get to from anywhere. Something completely untied from any corporate entities.

That's what I'm experiencing. Every tweet and even going to the main url results in a redirect to a log in splash page.

It's not a suggestion. It's what they're doing right now.

Yep. I wonder what this is going to do to their traffic. I know I’m not signing up.

I bet Reddit will follow suit.

Is there a way to control the image size?

The day I realized it was actively trying to make me furious by pushing notifications of incendiary tweets from people I didn't know existed or cared about writing about stuff I didn't find interesting but extremely toxic and offensive I stopped using it. It was before Elon took over, but when he did I deleted the account. It's such a toxic hellscape, I wish the official outlets I followed would just publish to Mastodon instead, but I'd rather just not see anything from that page, it's absolutely not worth it.

It's the sewage of the Internet, and the rats there brutally fight each other for the silliest of reasons.

Can't believe I wasted 40 minutes on this, I shouldn't write this, but using Tor on Brave I was able to open an account without a phone number. Now I'll have to delete it...

I never understood the appeal. I have friends that send me random twitter links and I'm like I don't understand wtf I'm looking at, it's difficult to tell who is talking to whom, and whatever it was isn't funny or interesting to begin with. I don't care what chucklefart69 has to say about a famous person. If I want to read the news, I'll read the news. I'm ok with not knowing about a major event breaking within the first 5 minutes of it happening.

I think we're reaching that point in the technology cycle where the money people have finally realized that running a social media platform is essentially unprofitable. People absolutely loathe ads and go to extremes to block them, and legislative and regulatory controls are starting to squeeze the manipulative aspects of social media such that what few ads the platforms can serve aren't as relevant anymore, and the data they collect from their users is protected in more and more jurisdictions.

So they're bailing on the open platform idea. They're slapping paywalls up, putting things behind required-accounts, and trying to build a walled garden they can control.

I wish them the best. I remember what happened to Prodigy, CompuServer, and AOL.