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

With "debatable", I meant that paywalls are more acceptable to me.

Luckily, anything worthwhile originally posted on X tends to surface on the open web after a while anyway. And most of the times, the value of xitter threads is entirely in external links anyway.

So OK, to each their own.

I hope this won't extend towards tolerating links to Instagram or Facebook groups as HN submissions.

Not for me to decide.

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

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.

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.

I need to see it!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2017/12/19/how-the-o...

"Jordan Mechner offers a postmortem on the classic platforming game Prince of Persia." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjE4JyfMVLc

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.

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.

It's a little-known and barely-used feature that's mentioned in the sites' FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

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.

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.

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

If newer embeds work and older don't maybe the calculus was that the older embeds weren't worth migrating.

I feel like such an idiot for ever embedding content from Twitter, especially after Musk took over.

on edit: well evidently I just have no patience or am cynical because the Oct 2023 ones are working now, I better turn everything into images though - will perform better anyway.

We just share screenshots in my friend group. Used to share links. It may as well not be on the Web at all anymore.

[edit] and also it’s now actually broken, but it was so close to broken before that I think they should have been blocked here, and most places, months ago.

At the very least, Twitter (and Youtube) should be whitelisted and rated by individual accounts, and not sitewide, so that the wheat can be separated from the chaff.

Now, since this post is on the frontpage, I'll ask a better question: should we stop posting paywalled articles on HN? (I'm in favor, I wish more people were in favor.)

It’s really weird to try to build a culture of “do read TFA before posting” when a high percentage of links can’t actually be read by most posters. Relying on someone to comment with a working link is silly and backwards.

The paywalled was also a nail in my eye. But, people pointed out, that there's still a possibility to ask for an archive link. Thats true. So no hard arguments against it.

People have no problem posting links to paywalls, there's just always someone kind enough to come along and post an archive.org link.

Having many instances was great; however even when there were many to choose from, in practice I only chose to use one, whichever one worked the most consistently.

This would eliminate like what, 30% of HN content?

Don't open X links or set up ad blocker to remove posts linking to it from the DOM.

Thats good service by some fellow hackers. thanks!