Having a personal website with contact information is not URL cloaking or plaintext onfuscation. Those TOS are ludicrous to begin with, but are not by any reasonable understanding written to say that you can not have a personal website with other social media.
Sure, you can have a personal website with links to other social media. You just can’t advertise that fact on Twitter.
“We will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms.”
I don’t see how “I have an account on Mastodon and here’s how you can find it” doesn’t violate that. The policy doesn’t require the promotion to be direct. If there was any doubt, the policy explicitly includes linktr.ee.
>At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, *such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter*, or *providing your handle without a URL*
Notice that *all* definitions and examples of "promotion" specifically involve having your URL or username in a tweet.
The "non-technical means" of bypassing policy are still about communicating the username in a tweet.
It is a ludicrous policy, but alleging that it prohibits even mentioning existence of other accounts is a ludicrous interpretation of the ludicrous policy.
"You can find my contact info on my website" is a violation under this interpretation.
As is stating "Twitter isn't the only way to reach me"... and having any off-twitter links (God forbid your FB account is reachable via some sequence of clicks from there!).
I’d agree with you except that linktr.ee was also referenced as a violation. That’s the part that makes me pretty sure that his original intention was to cover links to links.
Hey, can we have this discussion without referring to disagreements as “ludicrous”? It’s a moot point now, but still.
>I’d agree with you except that linktr.ee was also referenced as a violation.
It was listed as a forbidden platform.
Paul Graham's personal website was not listed as a forbidden platform.
* We can't infer from the policy that Paul Graham's personal website can't be linked to, or mentioned.
* We can't infer from the policy that merely talking about forbidden platforms (including Mastodon and Link Tree) is a violation, unless a link or a username is provided.
* Therefore, Paul G saying that he has a website with a Mastodon link on it isn't a violation of the policy.
Generalizing from LinkTree to any website is unwarranted.
Further, such a generalization effectively prohibits links outside Twitter (since Facebook can be reached from nearly every page out there via some sequence of clicks). But that's beside the point.
It's not like he said he'll just write on his site from now on, and got banned because his site also has links to his other social media.
He expressly said you can find his mastodon, a prohibited social media site as outlined by Twitter, on his website.
So he was promoting his mastodon with non-technical means and circumvented the new policy. While linking to the new policy... showing moderators he was well aware of it.
