Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

182

mmotownphilly about 6 hours ago 89 commentsRead Article on twitterwebviewer.com

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57% Positive

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Discussion (89 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kemotep•about 4 hours ago

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.

But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!

Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).

It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.

a_imho•about 4 hours ago

Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?

GPerson•about 1 hour ago

My phone can’t even open most of the apps since it’s so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).

giancarlostoro•about 2 hours ago

> Reddit is now this way too.

Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.

The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.

ModernMech•about 2 hours ago

Notably this was called a “temporary emergency measure” by Elon Musk — yet another promise he couldn’t keep

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...

ibejoeb•about 1 hour ago

I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.

sailfast•about 2 hours ago

“Temporary emergency” should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.

alyeska2•about 3 hours ago

Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.

I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.

Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.

deltoidmaximus•about 1 hour ago

I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.

filoleg•about 3 hours ago

Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?

Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?

Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.

omoikane•about 1 hour ago

Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762

But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.

alyeska2•about 1 hour ago

It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).

I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.

anotherpaul•about 4 hours ago

totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.

arjie•about 4 hours ago

The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.

But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.

andrepd•about 3 hours ago

The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.

tuesdaynight•about 3 hours ago

It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies

rplnt•about 3 hours ago

Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.

y-c-o-m-b•about 2 hours ago

Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.

I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.

At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.

tmp10423288442•about 2 hours ago

Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?

jm4•about 2 hours ago

The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.

nomilk•about 2 hours ago

From Musk in Dec 2022 (right after purchasing Twitter):

> we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll

Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s

angoragoats•about 2 hours ago

I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.

[0] https://elonmusk.today

nomilk•about 2 hours ago

Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.

Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.

tharmas•about 4 hours ago

And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.

Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.

Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.

fuzzfactor•about 4 hours ago

>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted

To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.

celsoazevedo•about 3 hours ago

Politics aside, Twitter/X has become a bad place to share information on and to link to. It's a bad option from a technical point of view.

We can't read a multi-part tweet (or follow-ups from the author) or check the latest updates from an official account without an account, which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications. A digital "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.

Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.

andrewmutz•about 3 hours ago

Anyone know the specifics of how this works under the hood? I assumed the people over at Twitter/X would aggressively block systems like this from working. Are they doing something creative to get around that?

SoKamil•about 5 hours ago

It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I could’ve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.

vlod•40 minutes ago

How does this work, does it use the twitter api?

john_strinlai•about 5 hours ago

it's brave to look at other companies receiving cease and desist notices and treat it as a market opening

thehamkercat•about 5 hours ago

twitterwebviewer.com was registered in Hong Kong

according to https://www.whois.com/whois/twitterwebviewer.com

Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess

SXX•about 5 hours ago

.com domain zone is managed by Verysign US company. They will just C&D them.

zerop•about 3 hours ago

the maker - https://peterslab.co/products/twitter-web-viewer

doublepg23•about 4 hours ago

I guess my brain has been cooked by internet libertarianism but what's the basis of a C&D for proxying a website?

Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?

paxys•about 3 hours ago

Well yeah the copyright violation is pretty clear cut here.

itintheory•about 2 hours ago

My understanding is that copyright of what's posted is retained by the poster. The Nitter C&D was around a ToS violation for scraping.

xmprt•about 4 hours ago

Bigger "guns" diplomacy. They don't need any legal basis for a C&D. Just depends on whether you have enough money to fight it in court.

john_strinlai•about 4 hours ago

i dont know the legal basis used, or the validity. i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it

oriettaxx•about 1 hour ago

https://www.autistici.org offer great services with very strong effort to protect privacy, for more then 20 years, now... and all is done by volunteers.

Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good

daedrdev•about 4 hours ago

Listen I know this comment is off topic, flag this if you want but I think it’s an important discussion

Speaking of twitter, are there any posts here about the ycombinator discourse?

Given a high level member of ycombinator blocked the chairman of the FTC after an argument over immigration, I foresee issues in the future.

MiscCompFacts•about 3 hours ago

Is there a link to this argument?

iAMkenough•about 3 hours ago

I don’t think it’s an issue. Their site, their rules.

johannes1234321•about 3 hours ago

And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.

1vuio0pswjnm7•about 4 hours ago

API works great, for now

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]&uid=[id...

Beware the website is jam-packed with ads and tracking

jwilk•about 1 hour ago

The latter URL looks wrong.

HelloUsername•about 5 hours ago

Show HN some months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513823

teravor•about 1 hour ago

.com is the wrong domain to use for law ignoring sites.

skeledrew•about 5 hours ago

Prepping for another C&D I see. The only way something like this can survive is through Tor or similar, fully anonymous and decentralized.

jjordan•about 5 hours ago

What ever happened to IPFS? Wasn't it built for just this kind of thing? I remember trying it years ago and it was absolutely unusable, but was kinda hoping it had made a turnaround by now.

skeledrew•about 4 hours ago

IPFS might be in trouble. Haven't really followed the tech so I have no idea how much of an effect there will be with Shipyard dropping it, but from the number of things I see named in their exit post I'd guess the blast radius is sizable.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489

- https://ipshipyard.com/blog/2026-the-end-of-ipfs-at-shipyard...

physicalecon•about 5 hours ago

Dead, approximately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489

jp_sc•about 2 hours ago

I don't think the worldwide trendings are right. The ones I see (with personalization disabled) are not all in arabic (?)

tlvbaf•about 4 hours ago

Hmm, on the one hand Elon begs for new users with animated ads on the x.com front page, on the other hand one of his (likely) alt accounts claims that "Every $1 [of advertising on X] spent delivered an average return of $5.42":

https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092490213121761787

I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.

Jtarii•about 5 hours ago

The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.

twilo•about 1 hour ago

What is Twitter?

nancyminusone•about 1 hour ago

the enduring result of the stupidest brand name change ever

dhiraj113•about 1 hour ago

Nice, how do you make this freely available?

ThouYS•about 2 hours ago

Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!

121kahG•about 5 hours ago

The site is very fast even though it should be overloaded now. Registered in Hong Kong (good), handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California:

https://github.com/peters-lab/twitter-viewer

Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.

seebeegeebee•about 5 hours ago

We need this for Linkdin too!

add-sub-mul-div•about 5 hours ago

Sometimes a walled garden can be a good thing, if it functions as a quarantine.

tantalor•about 4 hours ago

More like a tall fence around a superfund site.

newsomix9xl•about 5 hours ago

I ignored Twitter before Musk bought it and oddly I still have no problem ignoring it.

It doesn't even have good cat pictures.

baggachipz•about 4 hours ago

I built dailycat.app and it has good cat pictures!

abraham•about 3 hours ago

for daily cat apps! I run daily.cat

drop_star•about 1 hour ago

you guys are doing the important work. Keep it up!

RIMR•about 5 hours ago

Literally every time I decide to stop ignoring X, I log in and am greeted with overt racism and religious hatred. Always a good reminder to just ignore that cesspit.

I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.

charles_f•about 5 hours ago

To this day I am still calling the website Twitter and access it every single time typing twitter.com. That rename was so dumb. So, I really love the name

DivingForGold•about 4 hours ago

It does not work for me like xcancel did

xacky•about 3 hours ago

You've been told for years not to use X, (twitter is now clearly the pre Musk era), but Elon knows you crave his dopamine so he can keep imposing harsher conditions.

ChrisArchitect•about 5 hours ago

Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283

bigbadfeline•about 5 hours ago

whackamole is the only way for now, unfortunately.

benjaminclauss•about 5 hours ago

It's disappointing that this is even necessary given earlier promises of opening up the Twitter algorithm.

aeyes•about 5 hours ago

https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm

LightBug1•about 3 hours ago

How about ... fuck shitter ... I don't even want to view via proxy anymore.

PSA: I'm not interested in your shitter-specific content. Hit me up elsewhere. Thanks

ck2•about 4 hours ago

paypal should have never ever given back Musk the x domain

and ICANN should have nuked it long ago

but all that aside, wtf is anyone still on it

Musk is a mass murderer

apparently the nazis would still be in power today if they just had a web service people were too freaking lazy and addicted to ever quit

and Tesla "FSD" is still trying to murder passengers a decade later but that's also definitely a choice

kijashdkujdfhas•about 3 hours ago

Based on the downvotes, there's a lot of folks who just can't stand to be reminded who and what they're associating with by continuing to use Twitter.

Folks, you don't have to give the nazi bar your business. You will live without Twitter.

iAMkenough•about 3 hours ago

I think you’re talking to bots. Anything that doesn’t align with Trump/Elon’s perceived worldview gets downvoted here.

kijashdkujdfhas•about 3 hours ago

Don't care. The occasional human who might see the comment still makes it worth it. Even if they don't change their behavior, they've been reminded that they are hanging out at the nazi bar.

It's important to remind people of what they're doing, when they're doing something like that.