[HN Gopher] Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in m...
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
Author : ikarandeep
Score : 195 points
Date : 2020-04-27 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dansdeals.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dansdeals.com)
| koverda wrote:
| > I'd guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it's much
| cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to
| send out SMS.
|
| I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than
| push notifications.
| cassalian wrote:
| IMO the reasoning is more likely "you have to use our official
| app" rather than "text messages are expensive to send so let's
| discontinue"
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| But you don't. The mobile website works. Worse of the worse
| cases use Dabr.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| For extremely generous definitions of "works." I am
| constantly amazed at how long (and how many attempts) it
| often takes to load a single tweet page. The SPA-
| initializing state is usually measured in minutes on my
| iphone regardless of what kind of connection I'm on, and
| the result is often that message that the page failed to
| load because my browser made too many attempts. I don't
| know how you can possibly do this badly at delivering what
| _should_ be the smallest web pages ever.
|
| My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the
| URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a
| new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB
| to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my
| own browser. (edit: and note this is _while using FB in my
| mobile browser_. Think about how much more complicated a FB
| page should be than a single tweet, and it 's still 100x
| faster to load.)
|
| I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional
| because they'd _really_ like me to install the app and
| therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile
| experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for
| content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web
| page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard
| eventually reverses.
| buckminster wrote:
| I had the same behaviour from Android Firefox, so I
| disabled Javascript and now Twitter gives me the old
| (i.e. fast) site.
| AndrewGaspar wrote:
| I just loaded a link to a tweet in a private browsing
| window on my iPhone in some sub-second amount of time. So
| whatever issue you're running into is a bug, not
| intentional.
| karatestomp wrote:
| I get frequent failures for various reasons on multiple
| connection types, including Google Fiber. Referrer seems
| to be part of it. Mobile does seem much worse (WiFi or
| cell network) which makes it feel intentional.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Interesting how different our experiences are. This is a
| two-month old iphone, fully patched and with very few
| apps installed. Same experience as my previous iphone
| _and_ android phones. Just verified: I sat and watched
| the "loading" spinner for over three minutes before
| starting to write this response. No idea how long it
| actually took, but it finished with just a blank white
| page with a twitter logo and a search bar. Maybe it's my
| mobile network (AT&T), who knows. But the experience is
| basically unusable, and I see at least one other person
| in this thread mentioning the error that indicates
| requests are being throttled, so I know I'm not alone.
| icedchai wrote:
| If you try it on wifi, is it still slow?
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Yes, as mentioned, it's regardless of what kind of
| connection I'm on.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I don't know what's up with your specific iPhone, but
| I've never experienced anything like that on mine.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| If you do want notifications then at least on iOS the
| mobile website doesn't cover that.
| kevincox wrote:
| Are they serving ads over SMS? It seems like that is the
| biggest reason.
| fastball wrote:
| I originally read your comment as "I'd have to second guess
| this" and I was very confused.
| paxys wrote:
| In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to
| keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything
| else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but
| rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems
| compared to how much they are used.
| Felz wrote:
| You might not realize just how expensive SMSes can be. Based
| on AWS SMS pricing, they cost 6/10ths of a cent to US
| destinations each, so each deal sent to 90,000 people in the
| article would cost twitter $540. That's not even getting into
| Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS, but I doubt
| twitter supported that.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time
| to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much
| everything else
|
| This is an extremely aggressive claim that I doubt holds up.
|
| I would absolutely agree with "In _many_ such cases", or "In
| _most_ such cases", but it's almost certainly false to claim
| "In _all_ such cases".
| eigen-vector wrote:
| This is quite unfortunate. In countries where whether the people
| have access to internet or not is under the control of the
| government, this was a neat work around to get voices heard. In
| the recent history, an 'internet lockdown' has been the MO of
| many (oppressive) governments, including India.
|
| edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the
| intended point.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I don't think there are any countries with government
| controlled internet that don't also have government controlled
| mobile networks, and SMS is sent in the clear?
| saagarjha wrote:
| They'd have to remember to shut down the SMS network.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| dont have to shut it down entirely, just block twitters
| shortcodes and numbers.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Which is work, especially if you're the kind of
| government that just shuts down the internet rather than
| blocking undesirable content.
| joombaga wrote:
| This wasn't about 2FA via SMS. That still works.
| eigen-vector wrote:
| I intended it to be a comment on how security is a reason why
| this was purportedly removed and that I understand, but I see
| that I muddled my statements there.
| herf wrote:
| I was on a flight a couple years ago that had free texting
| through T-Mobile.
|
| What else to do but use Twitter through SMS? It was surprisingly
| still very good--could follow the news at very low bandwidth.
| seancoleman wrote:
| This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free
| SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS
| notification delivery was hard and expensive.
|
| At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of
| tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account
| and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification
| content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts follow the
| "notification" account. These dummy accounts had recipient phone
| numbers with SMS notifications turned on.
|
| The flow was: Web App -> Twitter API -> Tweet from "notification"
| account -> followers received SMS notifications. Free SMS
| delivery!
|
| It was clunky and SMS notifications looked like they came from
| twitter (they did) but it solved my use case perfectly.
| scandox wrote:
| I used Clickatell for years before Twilio and it really wasn't
| hard or mad expensive.
| zamfi wrote:
| Hah! I did something quite similar back in the day for text
| message notifications of server downtime.
|
| The problem was that sometimes Twitter's messages were delayed
| by hours...
| bnt wrote:
| Does anyone remember the drama of failwhale and their Rails
| issues? Those were the times!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| was thinking about the failwhale a few weeks back when
| github went down and was throwing angry pink unicorns.
| Different, pre-coronavirus times.
| eigen-vector wrote:
| If the phone numbers were of your users you were presumably
| unauthorized to sign up for a different service using those.
| That is sketchy.
| seancoleman wrote:
| This was an internal app so all users were known and gave
| authorization, but I hear your concern.
| w1 wrote:
| Lol I may or may not currently be using a Twitter account and
| cron to broadcast any changes to my (non-static) home ip
| address, encrypted, so I can ssh into my workstation when I'm
| on vacation.
| icedchai wrote:
| Seems like a strange way to achieve this. Why not just have
| it send you an email? Or update a DNS record through an API?
| w1 wrote:
| I did first try to setup email, but I couldn't figure out
| how to do that without providing a static ip address. This
| was a "what can I make work in the two hours before we
| drive across the country" solution lol.
| thirtyseven wrote:
| Are dynamic DNS services no longer a thing?
| w1 wrote:
| It looks like they are, thanks! This is just what I could
| hack together before I went on Christmas break a couple
| years back lol.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| They've been around for well over a decade.
| pkaye wrote:
| Some home routers even have a feature to keep your IP
| address updated with the DDNS service.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yep, free dynamic DNS still exists, for example NoIP
| https://www.noip.com/ However, you have to refresh it each
| month by filling out a "I'm still using it" web form they
| email you. So, you can't just set it & forget it.
| [deleted]
| traden210 wrote:
| I use Namecheap, but other providers offer it as well:
| free dyndns service with a domain - no monthly checkin
| required.
| cmckn wrote:
| Cloudflare's API supports this for free; my Ubiquiti router
| updates my DNS records when/if something changes. But I love
| your hack :)
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Twitter used to be a wonderful platform to hack on. I feel like
| the early days of developer and poweruser friendliness helped
| keep the platform from dying in some niche microblogging
| category.
| djsumdog wrote:
| It was originally a base for which people made all kinds of
| neat things like TwitPic. But then Twitter started
| integrating everything and competing with all the people who
| made them great; sometimes even suing them.
|
| I started using Twitter via SMS and before the age of modern
| smart phones (I was on my Palm Treo. The girl in the cube
| behind me just got an EDGE eyePhone) and for all my
| university friends, we used it as a big SMS-based group chat
| room. It was kinda fun, the total opposite of what Twitter is
| today.
|
| If you want to hack on platforms and build tooling around
| them, I suggest people look at ActivityPub implementations:
| Pleroma, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed and others. ActiviyPub
| is really where a lot of the neat federated social networking
| stuff is happening, and having more devs hacking on it and
| making more implementations can help keep it diverse and
| falling into the state where modern E-mail is.
| schnevets wrote:
| I have similar memories from college. It's weird to think
| that API Craze was an apex for hacking culture, but things
| haven't felt as exciting since.
|
| Or maybe I'm just reflecting on a younger period with
| nostalgia and have lost touch. Maybe those Instagram
| stickers and TikToks are equally as hackworthy as the
| things we spun up in the ol' days.
| wolco wrote:
| They seem like our older geocities pages or myspace
| profiles or tublr blogs but used by more and offering
| less but expecting less effort to create.
| milquetoastaf wrote:
| I think a key difference is the Twitter API externalized
| things (people building on top, creating an ecosystem)
| whereas IG/TikTok stickers are inclusive and focused on
| people building within
| arkh wrote:
| The experience of people getting their business fucked by
| platforms when they get traction mean that less people
| will try it again with those new ones.
| oprypin wrote:
| A video by Tom Scott exploring that sentiment
| https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| I did a similar thing with Google Calendar! Sadly they shut
| down their SMS notifications in November 2018.
| meigwilym wrote:
| There's some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140
| character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features
| of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled
| nicely with mobile/cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone
| era).
| gojomo wrote:
| Similarly ironic: that Twitter essentially now requires a phone
| number for continued use of their service - by freezing all new
| users' accounts, soon after minor activity, until a phone
| number is provided. But, they won't let you use that phone
| endpoint for reading/posting.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I had one account that got locked because of that and it took
| a lot of digging to find the right support link, but
| eventually I made a support request saying I didn't want to
| give them my phone number and violate my privacy and they
| finally unlocked that account. It wasn't easy though.
| yepguy wrote:
| That infuriated me last year when I finally tried to create a
| Twitter account.
|
| During registration I was given a choice between providing an
| email address or a phone number. I provided an email address,
| only to immediately have my account locked until I provided a
| phone number. Well, I wouldn't have given my email address if
| I knew a phone number was required anyway! It wouldn't even
| let me visit my account settings to delete my account, and I
| never got a reply when I emailed Twitter support.
| jo6gwb wrote:
| I had a similar experience. In my case they allowed my
| account to be opened without a phone number as I requested
| that they delete the account because I didn't want to
| provide my phone number. I deleted my account soon
| afterward anyway.
| 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote:
| On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to
| what it was a decade ago. It's materially the same, which is
| rare for unicorns of this time.
| ken wrote:
| 10 years ago, did you have to tap "no" through 2 separate
| alerts to view a tweet in your web browser rather than the
| app?
| Dunedan wrote:
| For me, an occasional reader without a Twitter account, the
| experience became much worse in the past decade. That's
| because Twitter switched of RSS feeds and when opening links
| to individual tweets nowadays there is this ubiquitous
| "Something Went Wrong, Try Again" on first page load.
| pests wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken that "Something Went Wrong" is their
| web API keys being throttled...
| heleninboodler wrote:
| If this happens to a client attempting to load a single
| page in isolation (which it does, a lot), you are a
| failed web site. They may be a very successful mobile
| _app_ , but as a website, they've failed miserably.
| rakoo wrote:
| I use nitter.net as an alternative frontend, it's better in
| every way
| djsumdog wrote:
| I love nitter and threadreaderapp. They make reading
| Tweets tolerable. The stock UI is just a confusing
| cluster fuck of Web 5.0 bloated webpacked Javascript
| bullshit.
| rakoo wrote:
| There is absolutely nothing the original UI offers that I
| want, it's all bloated all I want is the content.
| Unfortunately when I'm looking at a tweet I want to see
| the whole conversation with replies and such, but nitter
| doesn't show it, only some of the threads that start at
| the given tweet, so if I want to read it all I have to
| click everywhere and open 10 tabs. I wish there was a
| frontend that loaded the whole conversation in one go,
| the way HN or old reddit do
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| Materially in 2010 twitter was not the bullhorn of a
| political dictator.
| zymhan wrote:
| That's not really relevant to the technical discussion at
| hand though.
| TLightful wrote:
| An asteroid, a mile in diameter, approaches earth and is
| on course for a direct hit. It exhibits strange
| gravitational readings.
|
| > Run for your lives!!!!!
|
| > That's not really relevant to the technical discussion
| at hand though.
| flatTheCurve wrote:
| Disagree. Before you could follow people.
|
| Now you have an algorithm of forced political tweets.
| zymhan wrote:
| You can follow people. But if the people you follow "like"
| a political post, then you might see that. You can also
| tell Twitter to "Show you less" of any kind of post.
| xxpor wrote:
| Or just turn off the feature entirely in settings.
| samatman wrote:
| I used to think that worked, and at some point it (maybe)
| did. There were/are also magic strings you can mute.
|
| I think currently your only hope is to use the "latest
| tweets" timeline, complete with periodically resetting
| your preference when Twitter decides to change it for
| you, which is abusive behavior on their part.
|
| I prefer the chrono timeline and no "likes are stochastic
| retweets" nonsense, so that's a happy convergence for me.
| Who knows how long it'll last; Twitter seems to despise
| their users and I'm quite convinced no one in power at
| the company actually uses the platform.
| flatTheCurve wrote:
| Where in settings? I've just checked everything.
| 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote:
| A twitter-like service whose only ban-able TOS violation
| (besides obviously illegal stuff) is to post any political
| content... that sounds amazing! I'd be there in a
| heartbeat.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The thing is, _everything_ is political. Take LGBT
| people, _especially_ trans people. Their entire right to
| existence is a hotly debated topic. Same for abortions.
| Religions. Sport events. Porn preferences. Sex work. Even
| such utterly mundane things as lipstick.
|
| Take that out and you'd be left with essentially a feed
| of cute animals and still get fights between people
| arguing if dogs or cats are cuter.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > The thing is, everything is political...
|
| That's true, but even more so than your list suggests.
| It's not just socio-cultural controversies that are
| political, but even basic elements of the economic status
| quo. Why do I have health insurance but not my Uber
| driver? Is my labor worth more than his? Is it OK that
| Pat Bowlen owns the Denver Broncos, or should the city of
| Denver own it instead (a la the Green Bay Packers)?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Sure, my list was focused on things that at least on the
| first glance don't appear "political". Your items
| definitely cross that threshold ;)
| arkitaip wrote:
| Twitter is getting worse on a monthly basis. Just the fact
| that they have begun adding random tweets and accounts to
| follow while you're trying to read an existing conversation
| makes everything more confusing and toxic.
| jedberg wrote:
| The reddit experience is pretty similar to a decade ago.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| Only if you use the "old" layout, who knows how long
| that'll last.
| munificent wrote:
| It will be a very sad day (for me, at least) when that
| happens.
| jedberg wrote:
| I want to say that my reddit usage will go way down, but
| I know that's probably not the case.
|
| On the other hand, I know a few of the old-timers at
| reddit still use old.reddit, so that might help keep it
| alive.
|
| In theory reddit can rebuild as an alternate front end,
| or someone else could do it. A good chuck of it is open
| source. You'd have to do a lot of work integrating the
| new APIs though.
| paxys wrote:
| In some ways that's the problem with Twitter. A decade ago
| people used to post what they ate for lunch and any random
| thoughts that entered their head. It was true
| "microblogging". Now it's mostly politics and bots, and the
| service itself hasn't evolved at all to handle them.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I "lost" 250,000 followers back in the day due to a Twitter
| change.
|
| People used to think we-- @Twitter_Tips --worked for Twitter.
| When Twitter forced us to change our username to @TweetSmarter,
| @Twitter_Tips became a "new" account (that no one could use) that
| started with zero followers. In a few weeks it racked up over
| 250,000 followers--that were "ours"--because of all the press,
| blogs, lists, good will, etc we had on that account.
|
| We supported the great software ecosystem that grew up around
| Twitter, and watched closely as Twitter killed it all off.
| aaronlifshin wrote:
| He writes: "Of course if that's a major problem, then offering
| 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn't make
| much sense either."
|
| But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone
| number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was
| sent to another number.
| paxys wrote:
| He also skips over the fact that 2FA means _second_ factor.
| Even if insecure it 's still better than nothing.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Only if 2FA doesn't open up customer support channels that
| defeat the point of 2FA, like the common "oops I lost my
| phone lol" channel attack that gives you access to an account
| if you can provide the other factor.
|
| (Still) works against Amazon btw:
| https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-
| backd...
|
| I'd say 2FA is often worse than 1FA because customer support
| systems are rarely prepared to say "sorry, can't give you
| access to your account :/". Because 99.9% of the time, it
| really is a user accidentally locked out of their account.
| [deleted]
| helloworldmanji wrote:
| https://mediafox.jp/
| jdofaz wrote:
| Twitter via SMS stopped being useful when they blocked sending
| commands via SMS.
| mkchoi212 wrote:
| Author's claims are valid. SMS is still relied upon in countries
| without stable internet connection. Twitter should use its
| resources to fix the vulnerabilities and not just kill it off.
| Seems like they are straying away from their mission of allowing
| everyone to create and share ideas without barriers.
| epx wrote:
| Nowadays SMS take longer to deliver than WhatsApp. Have tried
| to use SMS being in very remote areas with bad cell coverage to
| tell my wife where I was, they never arrived. WhatsApp
| delivered as soon as I overcame a hill crest and there was a
| sliver of 3G signal.
| raverbashing wrote:
| "Starting away"? The writing on the wall for SMS was at least
| 10 years ago.
|
| Mobile twitter works fine with 2G connections and the right
| settings.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm curious how much money Twitter is saving by cutting the
| option.
| dylan33x wrote:
| It's strictly due to security and feature development From what
| I understand
| jdofaz wrote:
| Supposedly they had deals with the carriers
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3668372/how-was-twitter-...
| mtnGoat wrote:
| I'd venture to bet its pretty significant, and i'll bet
| whatever provider they were using is scrambling right now.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I mean, Twitter over SMS made perfect and necessary sense back in
| the first decade of its life.
|
| But honestly the time has long since passed where it still makes
| sense to support. Smartphone notifications with the app are far
| superior in every way. (And if you don't want to install the app?
| I mean, just don't use Twitter then.)
|
| And the only people who don't have smartphones these days are the
| kind of people who have made an intentional choice to reduce
| their always-on digital connection. They are the very least
| likely people to use Twitter anyways.
|
| It's a good thing when a company is able to simplify its software
| architecture to remove code that's expensive to maintain and keep
| protected from security vulnerabilities.
| AkshatM wrote:
| > the only people who don't have smartphones these days are the
| kind of people who have made an intentional choice to reduce
| their always-on digital connection
|
| This needs to be qualified: _with respect to Twitter 's target
| audience_.
|
| It's empirically not true that smartphone penetration is
| universal. Only ~350 million smartphones exist in India for 1
| billion people, for example (source: McKinsey Global
| Institute's "Digital India" report publication from April
| 2019).
|
| It's a fair statement to say that the majority of prospective
| and current Twitter users have smartphones, which justifies
| this decision.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Totally agreed. I'm wondering if Twitter still supports SMS
| in India, but unfortunately can't locate any page that lists
| the countries they're still supporting.
|
| Bizarrely, the relevant link in their help center is broken:
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/supported-
| mobile-c...
|
| It used to work:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200420041309/https://help.twit.
| ..
| donatj wrote:
| My wife will be disappointed, she still uses it regularly.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-04-27 23:00 UTC)