[Opinion] Please stop sharing Twitter and Youtube links. \ stacker news ~tech

[Opinion] Please stop sharing Twitter and Youtube links.

764 sats \ 29 comments \ @llamabyte 13 Jul 2023 tech

I know we have all got in the habit of using and sharing these sites, but they are anti-human, anti-social, abusive companies.

Consider alternative links such as Invidious, Nitter, or not at all. Try screen shots of tweets or direct links to project sites.

At least try and find a nostr account for the project or news item you are trying to share. And if they don't have one encourage them to create one.

Every time i see a Twitter or Youtube link on Stacker News, i get ptsd. Are Reddit, Youtube and Twitter not part of the enshitification of the internet ? It's like driving by a place someone crashed into you a while ago or that house from Forest Gump that your tear down when you grow up.

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116 sats \ 2 replies \ @Eljay 13 Jul 2023

Totally agree with you. Here is a simple solution: Install Libredirect addon in your browser. All links are opened in privacy respecting instances. That said it would be much better if people just post privacy respecting link themselves.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ae52f929c 13 Jul 2023

That is cool. I wonder if there is such a thing for pihole. I would love to redirect at DNS level.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Atreus 13 Jul 2023

Didn't know this, thanks for the protip.

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 13 Jul 2023

I agree with you and I stopped doing this for the most part. However, there are times when I forget. I'm trying to get in the habit of using Invidious more anyway.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @03365d6a53 13 Jul 2023

100%!

if you want to spread the poison that is youtube and twatter then f*ck off to reddit where they lap it up (probably, I don't go there as it's also a cesspit)

for the "oh but it's such good content, I had to share it with you" people how about you put some proof of work into that and actually share the content

in this case an additional link to the source now makes sense and is courteous (and doesn't need clicking unless you want to verify not trust)

5 sats \ 1 reply \ @037447d9ca 13 Jul 2023

It's getting more difficult every day, as twitter now rate limits and Youtube is in permanent combat with alternative frontends. Let's escape while we still can.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @llamabyte OP 13 Jul 2023

If we send out the message, the "smart" money can jump ship and leave the shitty signal to the septembrist. We simultaneously improve the content on alternatives like , nostr, newpipe, odysee and stacker news of course.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 13 Jul 2023

I agree, specially with the Twitter links.

21 sats \ 12 replies \ @ae52f929c 13 Jul 2023

Reddit's content quality has dropped off a cliff. Everyone that thought the front page sucked before had no idea how good they had it.

My biggest problem with getting information right now is Twitter provided a good avenue for me to keep up with certain OSINT things and journalists. It is not possible to do now without an account. Twitter links that get posted often still will not display anything without logging in, but sometimes they do.

The knowledge is walled off and left to die. What is being done at Twitter makes more sense when you frame it from the perspective of an authoritarian hungry for power. But it is not just Twitter. The crazy conspiratorial part of my brain says we're all becoming too good at understanding world events and the "powers that be" need to disrupt and erode the flow of knowledge in order to keep the curtains closed.

I have been through many chapters of the internet. These periods of transition between each chapter really suck to get through. Anyone that recalls the transition into web 2.0 should be able to tell you that.

Thankfully we now have all the technology required to build the internet as it should be and the way cypher punks from decades ago had imagined.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @mambru 13 Jul 2023

Nitter is working again.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @l0k18 14 Jul 2023

Yep, after a month of health related downtime Indra is full steam ahead and will be a low latency and async message channel where the timing data is scrambled as good as encryption.

I'm sure that it won't be too long before some surveillance capitalists start pushing to create the same kind of "trusted paths" bullcrap as we have in the HDMI standard. And of course ways of scraping those data streams will be found because you can't lock a person out of their own stuff without having a key that you can pobably eventually find a way to get, or bypass somehow.

If this subject pops up again in coversation with anyone I'm gonna lay an egg, I swear. I mean, it's the logical next step. Licensure of the right to host internet services. Up to now they have just been content to mainly block us with lawyers and ridiculous and unlawful adhesion contracts that disrespect any notion of us OWNING our own hardware.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @ae52f929c 14 Jul 2023

I have not heard of Indra, what is it?

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @l0k18 14 Jul 2023

It's a source-routed anonymity network with similar purpose as Tor but exclusively uses source routing, like Lightning (and sphirx messaging), and in order to encourage people to provide relay service on the network, they can be paid, presumably enough to cover their costs and thus continue to operate and maybe even expand as user base grows.

There's a lot more I can say about it, such as enabling anonymous, low latency remote access to remote servers, paywalling content to collect fees both for relaying and to forward on to content creators, and even enabling in-band payments for access to wireless hotspots, and facilitate community aggregation of content and bandwidth capacity, creating greater efficiencies at the local level as well as protecting people's privacy.

That will be enough for now.

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @ae52f929c 14 Jul 2023

That sounds cool as hell I am going to check it out!

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @l0k18 14 Jul 2023

Awesome.

I gotta keep plugging away at it, the sooner I can get a simple testnet working, one without the lighting payment integration done yet, the sooner other people can see what it can do and we can start refining how it works further.

Like decoys, really need to be able to model what a "well heeled attacker" on the network can learn by the timing of messages, and to find and refine the algorithms that create patterns that quickly break traces. This is simple stuff that can be easily tested on a small testnet where you can be gathering signal timing and volume from each node and validate the evasion sufficiently obscures the endpoints of the messages.

Anyhow, the more the merrier. I know that once people see what this enables it's gonna be a hit, like Tor was when it first appeared. For me the hype faded fast when I realised it was garbage for SSH and media streaming. Even with UDP based Mosh SSH over Tor is like sticking needles under your fingernails.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ae52f929c 14 Jul 2023

Those things under tor have improved a lot but it is still painful. Things like SSH extra painful because so many points along the network path can fail and kill your session. I never realized SSH could have latency until I tried over tor. It was funny to type something in only for it to actually type out a minute or two later into the terminal. Media streaming is also why I don't use tor. It is actually very useful to surf youtube over tor because the algorithm is more likely to show you a raw feed of content. Great for discovering new stuff.

I want a solution that allows me to securely access things remotely without exposing my ports and services to the world. There are VPN solutions that are quick to install to resolve this but none are decentralized.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @Bitman 14 Jul 2023

Regarding Twitter, I share your frustration; however, good news it seems Twitter was only walled off from people without accounts for a few days. You can still use your bookmarks in a browser (or use a FOSS app) to keep up with those journalists if you use any variant of the Nitter URL (i.e. nitter.fdn.fr nitter.it etc) and still do this without an account!

The only restriction that still applies is that anon users can't search within each feed anymore.

Just in case you've enjoyed Reddit and think that's off bounds to view anonymously - you can still use Redreader from Github or F-droid sources.

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @llamabyte OP 14 Jul 2023

He said he will stop this time

The mentality of domestic abuse.

It's over. We've seen this cycle before, if not even before the internet. These platforms serve evil now. Divest.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @ae52f929c 14 Jul 2023

The only thing logged out accounts can view are individual tweets. I cannot view timelines or even navigate for the context of a tweet if its apart of a thread. It is 100% still walled off to logged out accounts and this is easy to verify.

Nitter does appear to work for now. The frustrating thing is I switched from Nitter links back to Twitter links because just after Elon took over, Nitter was only able to pull information randomly. The API would just fail. This works for now though so that is good news.

Reddit does work because subreddit feeds are technically not an API request, so even things like Reddit is fun still works logged out. But Reddit did disable the ability to view NSFW subreddits outside of their website and official app so a bunch of content is walled off even if you are able to use a third party client.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bitman 14 Jul 2023

I cannot view timelines or even navigate for the context of a tweet if its apart of a thread

Maybe I've got a crazy setup (browser, vpn, no java, no cookies, tracking queries removed) but on Nitter when I click on the red 'show this thread' the whole thread still shows up. Dunno why...

¯_ (ツ) _/¯

...but I'm okay with that.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @llamabyte OP 13 Jul 2023

Good points !

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr 13 Jul 2023

a nice hack for stacking extra sats on SN is to post the actual articles when people share news in twitter posts here.

people like primary sources, and you can earn extra money by taking the two extra seconds that others won’t take.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @ewok 13 Jul 2023

agree, leave the bad world behind, nobody needs it

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @premitive1 3 Mar

[Opinion] Get over yourself. and therapy for your ptsd. I've heard of some good therapies using MDMA, or psilocybin, or dmt. Find a really good therapist and they could probably recommend the best way to get over yourself.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @john_doe 14 Jul 2023

Highly agree. It is annoying to get links publicly that you can't see anyway.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bitman 14 Jul 2023

I think if I were to post screenshots I'd have to have it hosted by another provider to post a link. My 'self-hosted' FOSS cloud service has limitations and so I can't do this.

I use all of the FOSS services you mention but also became unstuck there too. When I started posting on SN and started to see nice previews of tweets. I was surprised as this differed from what I created when posting Nitter links as my nitter links didn't generate previews.

After realising this, I just converted my nitter links back to twitter ones before sharing/posting them.

So, I can understand what you're saying, but for me I'd have to wait for the hard-working volunteers at SN to figure out how Nitter links could, in the future, generate previews.

Till then, I'll just get these fat fingers to 'reconvert' converted links...

It's a hack I know, but I don't really mind hacks - my love of DIY hacks¹ helped bring me to this space after all! 🧡

¹proper tech hacking/work-arounds (not 'cracking')

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @guts 13 Jul 2023

I would agree share nitter links, even if you don't like it for specific reasons Twitter is still the most used social media for crypto related news.

I embrace Nostr and Lemmy everywhere I lurk but some content are still available on Twitter.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @legxxi 13 Jul 2023

Whenever possible yes, but there’s some fine content still being created in those platforms. If you wanna hijack the mainstream social platforms, you gotta be there too :)

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @llamabyte OP 13 Jul 2023

I know what you mean, but i think you will find it's all psyop bullshit or specualtion.

The stuff on there that isn't brain-junk food is mental masturbation.

When Twitter Seppuku'd, I noticed a distinct improvement in my mood and productivity. I was coding and designing more, i was like "Well, i guess i'll read books"

It's not easy to ignore, when all the world is chattering away in the antiroom nearby, it's not as simple as just deleting twitter and staying away, but when you are bum-rushed out, you realize the party was kind of lame and drawing you in with psychological tricks.

Just notice what you are actually consuming.