[niklasd]

The last point always confuses me. Twitter can show ads to me without me having an account. Instead, they block me from reading on Twitter after a few tweets, thus loosing my eyeballs. Maybe that's compensated by signups, but it certainly didn't work for me.

[wincy]

Good news, one of Elon’s top priorities is to remove this nagging stuff and make Twitter fully usable via browser again.

[anigbrowl]

Believe it when you see it, not when you hear it.

[bombcar]

I was just able to doom scroll Elon's feed back into October, so maybe it's only enabled on some accounts?

[anigbrowl]

Try it and see, I suppose. My experience of it is that you can read an individual conversation but if you just look at some random person's timeline it will only show you a few tweets before asking you to log in.

[Arrath]

That specific behavior seems to have gone away when musk culled a whole bunch of microservices a couple weeks back. I know well what you're talking about and it annoyed the hell out of me, but now its gone! For now, on desktop browsers, anyway.

[bombcar]

That's what I did (I think, I don't know how to use twitter) - went to https://twitter.com/elonmusk and kept spinning my mouse wheel down.

Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?

[anigbrowl]

Could be desktop. Mobile browsing still seems to trigger demands for the app to be installed followed by login requests, though I just picked a few tweets at random rather than checking systematically.

[nonameiguess]

That seems to not be true. I just made the mistake of not noticing a Hacker News post was to Twitter a few minutes ago, clicked on it, and couldn't even read the Tweet because it was covered by a modal telling me to turn on notifications, which I'd never seen before. What can Twitter even notify me of if I don't have an account? Everything that is ever Tweeted globally? That would probably be billions of notifications a day.

[acedTrex]

Twitter makes more money showing TARGETED ads, ads that dont have a demo targeting are not nearly as valuable

[klyrs]

Old school webmasters (perhaps this is redundant phrasing) know that's okay. Back in the day, you'd say "I'll put your animated gif on my site for $500 per month" and if you had a networking forum Cisco or whoever would happily pay that secure in the knowledge that your viewers were in the market for their product.

Lesson: target the content, not the viewer. You know the general demographics of who is engaging positively with the tweet, and you show ads relevant to that group. A small fraction of the viewers need to be logged in for that to work.

[aparks517]

Print magazines worked on the same principle; the ones that are left still do. I subscribe to one magazine. In it, all of the editorial content is up front and the back third is nothing but ads. I still read them -- sometimes I start there! -- because I genuinely want to know what's going on and what products are available in the niche this magazine covers.

[bee_rider]

This seems like so obvious an observation that I don’t get why advertisers haven’t made it. If I’m in work-mode, and you show me an ad related to a hobby of mine, I have a 0% chance of clicking it. If you show me an ad related to my work, it is probably more like .01%. Which is still an infinite-times improvement.

[klyrs]

It's because there's an arms race to maximally exploit the massive amount of data they're collecting about individuals. The more specificity you can claim, the more the ad-buyers will pay. I'm not convinced it's doing any good, but I think a draw-down would be a hard sell for all parties involved in that market.

[jrs235]

Re-targeting ads seem like a joke. Many times I've already bought their product or competitor's and am no longer interested. Hopefully they are paying for click throughs and not impressions.