[ve55]

I should add about the government ID part, that I understand why they do it. I've worked with anti-abuse in online ecosystems before, and I undertsand how difficult their challenges are at their scale, but it's nonetheless a pattern that I'm just tired of at this point.

I'm tired of platforms asking me for my government-ID to allow me to use them. I'm tired of having every message I type 'privately' to someone being stored and owned by a company that has no obligation nor motive to treat it the way I'd want. I'm tired of being forced to 'log in' to services just to read important information (now being trialed by Twitter and Reddit as well!). Honestly I am just tired of having what feels like no rights or control whatsoever in the general online sense of my life, having to deal with and accept whichever new 'feature' or 'usage of my data to improve my experience' the products I 'choose' to use decide to rollout.

I apologize for this turning into a such a rant, but this has been upsetting me a lot lately. I have this wonderful illusion of choice of which products I use, but the punishments I receive for trying to opt-out have become untenable in the last few years. I can't even pay my rent without using a finance app that scrapes and sells my transaction data (which app does this? almost all of them), let alone get help with free software when the answers to my questions are now all contained within Discord chat history which asks for my phone-number to join so that I may even search it, rather than on an openly-searchable forum.

While I still am able to use the software I prefer like Signal, IRC, and Matrix with some of my unique technically-gifted friends, the network effects of having millions/billions of users and owning all of their data are a particularly strong force that I have not yet found a way to reckon with.

[judge2020]

This all stems from natural monopolies. Our antitrust laws in the U.S. were modeled with the presumption that it'd be extremely hard to create such an efficient process to the point that the company could harm user choice without the business being a national or global actor - and this was proven when only truly logistics-centric companies like big oil could reach the threshold of being considered a monopoly. The internet flipped that on its head when anyone with enough money could hire the absolute best talent possible from across the globe to create a product that undoubtedly is the absolute best solution for the (majority of) users that choose to use such platform.

The only reason you can't find important information without logging in is because these consumers profit off of the product by using it as the only place they post their findings (profit, as in, not having to deal with the headache of posting something to multiple news feeds and go through the cruft of editing a personal website with insignificant <280 character content). If these products were terrible, people might be more open to designing a website in their own image with the information in the format they choose.

[guywhocodes]

I called this forced trust. It's a major source of dissonance for me.

Effectively we have they choice of iphone, Android or complete Luddite.

[indentit]

> I'm tired of being forced to 'log in' to services just to read important information (now being trialed by Twitter and Reddit as well!).

As a non-user of both Twitter and Reddit, I'm genuinely curious about what "important information" is there that isn't anywhere else? Presumably I'm missing something big?

[michaelmdresser]

There are many niche subreddits with deep knowledge about their respective subjects. This knowledge comes out in product recommendations, discussions about interesting nuances, and as a place to share original creations (which I don’t think should be undervalued, even if one is an advocate of personal websites—I think content aggregation and easy posting does have value). Subreddits that personally come to mind are /r/fountainpens (a wealth of knowledge on maintaining and restoring pens), /r/mechanicalkeyboards (fascinating when it comes to custom boards), /r/watches, and of course /r/buildapc (an unparalleled resource of computer building lore for part compatibility, build failure debugging, etc). I’m certain there are plenty of other subreddits that provide similarly excellent value for their communities. Why should anyone have to log in to Reddit just to read someone’s post on /r/buildapc about how they should fix their unique issue?

My experience with Twitter is more limited, but I know people use it as sort of a microblogging platform sometimes and it benefits from the same ease of posting+content aggregation setup I mentioned earlier.

This is all my take, of course! I just hope we can avoid balkanizing the internet, despite all of the incentives these social media companies have to do so.

[zorr]

Also, Twitter threads are frequently posted to HN and lately they've becoming almost impossible to read without an account or dancing with js/ad-blockers.

For Reddit, some programming languages and frameworks have a subreddit on which issues or solutions are discussed instead of Stackoverflow