[ineedaj0b]

Make an account. Only follow those guys. You don’t even need to include your real name man.

This is like saying you wanna use windows without a user account.

You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

[orangecat]

This is like saying you wanna use windows without a user account.

It's like saying I want to use Windows without a Microsoft account, which I do.

[Liquix]

If you choose to roll over and give $PRISMpartner unfettered access to your data in exchange for a modicrum of convenience, go for it. But there are millions of people who stopped using Windows, Chrome, Android, Facebook, etc because they care. Many people will stop interacting with Twitter after this change. Don't bash them for being principled where you have surrendered.

[serf]

>You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

how does having an account to view twitter meaningfully change anything during this mystick time of AI?

If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.

>It don’t work like that anymore

well if a company doesn't follow customer demand they fail; I don't intend to continue using a service that requires me to have an account to lurk -- i'm not the only one. The rules for customer service don't somehow just get cast away because of magic software.

[anileated]

> how does having an account to view twitter meaningfully change anything during this mystick time of AI?

> If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.

If you require an account, it’s harder to scrape you and train an AI for free using platform you've build with your own investment and effort. Until court rule in favor of copyright holders, welcome to the future where nothing is shared in the open anymore.

[soraminazuki]

I'm curious who you consider that rights holder to be.

[anileated]

The creator.

[soraminazuki]

I asked because it sounded as if you considered it to be the platform. And let's not kid ourselves by pretending that this has to do with protecting the creators.

[anileated]

No, it’s simply that if it’s a violation against the creator, then the platform by extension doesn’t get hammered.

By the way, you know for legal purposes those creators (copyright holders) also include guys like Disney, Warner Bros, Penguin et al. right?

[jamesear]

> Make an account. Only follow those guys. You don’t even need to include your real name man.

I understand this is easy, and others won't mind doing this. That's fine.

I object to the idea of needing an account solely to read heavily linked, otherwise free, content.

Besides, my browser doesn't store logins/cookies, so it'd be another login I have to do on each session.

> You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

So be it, I guess? The content isn't that valuable to me anyway.

[j1elo]

> my browser doesn't store logins/cookies, so it'd be another login I have to do on each session.

To be fair, that's a burden you imposed on yourself.

But I agree that requiring an account just to browse and read content, is BS.

[Liquix]

no, adtech and walled gardens collecting your browsing data and monetizing/weaponizing it against you is the imposition. refusing to provide this data by wiping cookies is not a "burden" this guy chose to impose on himself for fun, it is the logical answer to the adtech companies' hostile action.

[j1elo]

adtech monetizes your browsing data by collecting it across lots of sites we visit, and aggregating them all to build a profile.

It's true that wiping cookies was the most effective to prevent building up this trail of cookies from every visited site adhered to those ad companies.

But this seems to me like a solved issue since Mozilla deployed their Total Cookie Protection [1] with Firefox i.e. each domain has its own isolated set of cookies.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-rolls-out-total-...

[swells34]

> This is like saying you want to use Windows without a user account

If only I was able to do what you describe, I would use Windows. But sadly, Microsoft wants to invade users' lives like a malignant cancer, so Linux it is.

[charcircuit]

Linux requires a user account too. There is no anonymous mode. You will always be running something as a user who has a user id. getuid and geteuid are always successful and correspond to a valid user. In theory there could be a way to run things without a user, but Linux was designed to not allow that.

[felixgallo]

Linux user accounts are local to the system, not centralized in a cloud service. There is no corporation tracking or monetizing your uid or gid.

[charcircuit]

That's beside the point. Linux has a login wall before you are able to do anything. You must have an account in order to use it.

[autoexec]

I thought you could skip creating a MS account if you ran the setup entirely offline. Does that trick not work anymore? To be honest, even if it did work you can't trust MS to stay out of your business. Windows is constantly collecting data on the what you do on your system including the name of the file you open and what software you have installed. Jumping through hoops to try and work around a user hostile OS is a losing battle. You'll always be one forced update away from defeat. Linux is the way to go. I'm forced to use windows at work, but at home the last windows OS I had was 7 professional and it looks like it'll be the last I ever use.

[Marsymars]

> I thought you could skip creating a MS account if you ran the setup entirely offline. Does that trick not work anymore?

It still works. There are several alternative workarounds as well. I have a laptop that normally runs Debian that I can dual-boot to Windows for BIOS updates or to use Acer’s app to limit battery charge to 80%. I use a local Windows account without a password, as I don’t keep any data on the Windows partition.

[jasonfarnon]

Is this level of tracking (files you open) something you can't opt out of? If so I hadn't realized that. Do you have a link so I can read more?

[autoexec]

I don't know if you can opt out that specifically or not. There are third party tools that claim to disable a lot more than MS will normally allow, but I don't put much faith in them (if for no other reason than the fact that MS can undo anything with an update)

MS took these pages down, but there were two posts that I think gave users the most in depth look at at the kinds of data they've been collecting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175209/https://docs.micr...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170407072948/https://technet.m...

This only gives examples of some of the types of things they collect though. For example, it says that the Photo App (default image viewer) will tell MS if the file was on your hard drive or a network share or a cloud server or an SD card, and it will send them the metadata (resolution, file size, encoding, etc) and tell them if you looked at the photo or video in fullscreen mode, as well as how long you spent looking at each file, but you shouldn't assume that's all the information they take. That's why the start of each section has the words "such as"

Now that they're fully committed to using their OS as an ad delivery platform they likely collect everything that they think will help them target those ads to you better.

[elsjaako]

I had an account to follow two or three guys, and maybe 4-5 accounts that only post every few months. The timeline gets filled with all kinds of things. Besides the horrible clickbait ads, it puts in random posts from unsubscribed parties. You really have to look between the crap for the stuff you're subscribed to.

If this is Twitter in the age of AI, Twitter isn't worth the effort to me in the age of AI.

Especially since I can use Mastodon, and that is actually very nice. I get that not all interests are as well represented, but I like it.

[Marsymars]

I’d actually be willing to use a Twitter account, except that I find the Twitter front-end unusably bad. Nitter doesn’t really support the use-case of serving as an alternative front-end with an account (and is discontinued), so I’m done with Twitter.