New Twitter owner Elon "Please Like Me" Musk seems intent in driving the platform into the ground as quickly as possible. Now, he seems to have taken an unprecedented step by making it a true gated community: without an account, you can't even browse the website anymore. If you want to lay your eyes on even a single Tweet at its source, you must pledge your soul to Mr. Musk by letting him scrape your personal data instead of the AI startups he blames for the move.
This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup's outrageous valuation.
This change doesn't seem to affect embedded Tweets (until you click through them to the source), however, meaning we at Boing Boing can still proudly display vital pieces of Internet history like this one:
