[avs733]

Did they properly remove it or does no one there even know it was/is happening. They didn’t shut it down, the seem to have left the lights on with nobody home.

Bigger picture - given the role news making and sharing in real time has always played in Twitter, it seems logical that services which may not provide obvious returns but which build a platform that journalists find useful would help do that.

[stathibus]

I agree, it seems like they left it to rot instead of shutting it down. But again it is irrelevant to the business so who cares?

[rmwaite]

My understanding is the onion service was launched to provide access for people in places where Twitter is blocked. How is this "irrelevant to the business"?

[pests]

"Profit over everything."

I think it was laudable that Twitter ran one in the first place. Sad to see it languish.

[dfadsadsf]

What's benefit of onion service vs run of the mill VPN? I assume if you can access onion, you should also be able to access VPN

[anonym29]

I'm not someone who's ever used the onion service, but as someone who accesses the site regularly over VPN, I can testify that it's a huge PITA. Tons of very aggressive captcha-type challenges (various tasks, never simple text recognition, but not Google ReCaptcha), often 5, 7, or 10 to be allowed to proceed.

[depereo]

If it's a safety mechanism that people relied on, leaving it to rot and getting people in the habit of clicking through on an expired or invalid certificate warning is irresponsible.

A degraded service can be worse than an offline one.