A real shame. Even if you put all the political arguments aside it sucks when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.
That's being very generous to Xitter. Almost nobody ever deals with Xitter, but tons of people watch Fox News.
It was made useless for my community when posts with links got deprioritized. It killed any linking to papers or valuable material. When most scientists got completely needed by the algorithm, it caused a mass exodus because scientists could no longer talk with each other. LinkedIn ended up gaining most of the discussion.
X chose its own path to be a small niche social media platform. Always sad to see the destruction of so much value, especially when the obvious path of higher value was right there, but poor capital allocation is the cost of allowing such extreme wealth in society.
Nice to see everyone taking a break from their day jobs at Google of continually breaking yt-dlp so it's impossible to use, to comment how this is an injustice.
To the aggrieved I say: 403 Forbidden.
In their defense, you're not getting the full YouTube experience without ads of an AI doctor selling you suppositories.
spez is a problem. And if it's not spez, then enlighten me. But they've taken years of built up network effects and absolutely wrecked it. It's so hostile when companies do this. They just ignore their users, straight up. That should be a firable offense. The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in. And as much as I hate the UX too… Reddit user numbers have grown a ton in the last few years. It’s difficult to make the argument that these changes are a failure.
The LibRedirect extension lets you use any alt-frontend for [Twitter|YouTube|Reddit|Fandom|you name it] and automatically redirects you when you click a link. That way you can just save the original url and let your browser redirect for you. Would highly recommend
I don't understand being so emotionally attached to a personality to virtue signal about everything they're connected to. I'm no fan of the guy itself for many reasons, but it's just a service like any other, you either use it or you don't.
> I'm no fan of the guy itself for many reasons, but it's just a service like any other, you either use it or you don't.
It's not just a service, using it actively helps increase and spread his influence in the same way using Facebook/Insta/Threads helps increase and spread Zuck's influence, or using Truth Social helps spread Trump's influence.
You can't separate the man from Twitter, any more than you can separate him from Tesla or SpaceX.
The us system of government and many of its agencies are under attack by an administration that elon helped secure a win for. Excuse me for getting a little emotional towards a Nazi who supports the concentration camps we have on US soil.
I'll make every effort to avoid his products and bad mouth him every single time his name comes up.
I'm not sure why Threads makes your cut here, trading one walking negative externality of person in control for another is not really a sell to most folks.
it has Fediverse interop. Skepticism obviously is warranted towards the owners but you can at least interact with an open protocol or consume threads content from a Mastodon instance, say.
They all get to the point where anime contents start flooding in pinning the system at capacity 24/7, scaring the wrong set of people,
and then they chicken out and start dying a long death. This situation itself is downstream event of Twitter doing the same, in a sense.
Whenever Meta is mentioned on HN, there will be HN users asking why people are still on Facebook or Instagram when we all know Meta hired psychology PHDs to make their products addictive yadda yadda. Usually you will just see people tell each other that they have gotten off Facebook before it became uncool. You hardly see anyone accusing each other of virtue signaling or having any kind of political slant.
But Twitter or X comes up, someone will say they don't use it, and people will start calling out their supposed virtue signaling and making wild speculations about their politics in no time.
Elon is much more explicitly/publicly on one side of US politics than Meta is. That's why people accuse his critics of playing politics (a convenient scapegoat).
Musk and his supporters project a lot. They have some neural condition or notoriety as popularity strategy or something that makes him/them hate everything, and they performatively state that "___ hates Elon"(often verbatim) out of that. It's not exactly organic.
It's insane that their sign-up process now requires a phone number to complete on the web, and even basic features like playing a video in a tweet recently stopped working on x.com without an account. (In the past, searching for tweets, looking at an account's entire timeline, etc., never required logging in at all.)
But Twitter has and embraces that. The bots are all verified. Go on any tweet that mentions crypto or "my friends account got hacked" and dive into the deep well of hidden tweets.
Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.
X.com makes it nearly impossible to run bot accounts, with its phone number per account requirement, and the astronomical fees for using its API.
Twitter, by comparison, was trivially easy to run bots on. I ran many automated Twitter accounts (for legit purposes). I had to shut them all down when Musk bought Twitter.
Just Google « buy x.com retweets » or similar and you will see a dozen company offering their services. Doesn’t look like a lack of activity on that area
That's just a lie. Twitter has been overrun by "verified" African-Middle Eastern spambots posting completely nonsensical spams since AFTER it was bought. It's clearly connected to someone higher up than its head of products, considering said head of products was forced to rollback an anti-spam measure at least once.
Perhaps the ability to de-anonymize[1] users and algorithmically influence those remaining is more valuable to him than whatever ARPU is for Twitter, especially with significant elections coming up around thr world.
1. A lot of data vendors key information on phone numbers or email, that's why all rewards program are thirsty for it.
I've been trying for years (by example) to popularize using PT, MT, CT, ET. Since it's always after a number ("Are you avail at 4ET?") there has never been one instance of confusion, and I save typing and avoid the small but real possibility of being interpreted too literally (suppose someone asks a computer "What time is 4:00 PM EST in London time" during the summer, and gets a 'technically correct' answer).
This is the kind of imprecision that enrages me, though, because I am a resident of Arizona, and we observe MST all year long. It is currently MST. It is not MDT here. Therefore if we say, like, "it's 4:33pm MT" here and someone presumes that we are in DST, they would be wrong, and they would make the wrong conversion.
That is exactly why I am enraged by "EST"-users out of season. Because they are deliberately insensitive to people who are actually in Standard Time.
But it actually seems to be deeply ingrained into American-centric corporate culture. I had a WFH job in a large company that was nearly 100% WFH, and they consistently used "EST" to their detriment. And I kept challenging this apparently-unwritten policy, and they just said "it's always been this way". And this month I've even caught UPS using it: yeah, the United Parcel Service was quoting transit times for one of my parcels in terms of EST, which was utterly nonsensical to me.
It seems that people don't mean "Standard Time" anymore when they write "EST" but simply "EaStern Time" and it is implicitly understood by human communicators to definitely not mean Standard Time except when it does. I went around with Gemini LLM about this for awhile. I cannot explain why people would embrace an obviously incorrect acronym, but they really have.
Others have explained about not being able to see all content, profiles and such.
I’ll add another reason why I redirect to it: XCancel is/was a lot faster than X and had IMO a much cleaner UI, especially when reading larger conversations or groups of tweets. I don’t browse X much, but I already have an extension installed to redirect certain sites, so adding a redirect was an easy win. I’ll miss it.
You need to be linked to specific tweets to know where they are. You can't just open up a timeline and read more than the last few posts (literally like 5, including any pinned post.)
That is the point. It's a way to get the value of a service you don't like, while signaling to everyone that you're too virtuous to use the service you're getting value out of.
So that's supposed to be the motive? Frankly I think most users just see it as a path of least resistance to a tweet. You guys really aren't familiar with this Internet thing.
I prefer not to share links that require the people receiving the link to create an account to read the content or post to such websites for that matter. That's basic netiquette.
A real shame. Even if you put all the political arguments aside it sucks when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.
Indeed. I’d only reengaged with any Xitter content when I realized I could get it through xcancel. Without a door like this, it’s invisible to me.
The modern hipster equivalent of "I don't even own a TV."
Over 85% of the US is not on twitter. It's not at all comparable to television.
This seems really out of touch tbh.
Not even close. Any given social network is not ubiquitous, socially.
Surely not. Twitter is a niche social networking site. It’s something like 1/6 the active user base of Facebook, which would be the better comparison.
Not really. More like the modern equivalent of "I don't watch Fox News."
That's being very generous to Xitter. Almost nobody ever deals with Xitter, but tons of people watch Fox News.
It was made useless for my community when posts with links got deprioritized. It killed any linking to papers or valuable material. When most scientists got completely needed by the algorithm, it caused a mass exodus because scientists could no longer talk with each other. LinkedIn ended up gaining most of the discussion.
X chose its own path to be a small niche social media platform. Always sad to see the destruction of so much value, especially when the obvious path of higher value was right there, but poor capital allocation is the cost of allowing such extreme wealth in society.
Nice to see everyone taking a break from their day jobs at Google of continually breaking yt-dlp so it's impossible to use, to comment how this is an injustice.
To the aggrieved I say: 403 Forbidden.
In their defense, you're not getting the full YouTube experience without ads of an AI doctor selling you suppositories.
This might be the first HN thread I’ve seen where the statement “regiwalled content is bad” is somehow attracting a lot of negative reactions…
Reddit is the worst for this. I hate the disgusting, low class UX design where they let you read about 10-15 seconds of a page before locking you out.
Though I think Pinterest takes the cake for being just the ugliest example of this.
Old Reddit is now completely unusable without an account. Maybe it's time for me to finally stop using it.
spez is a problem. And if it's not spez, then enlighten me. But they've taken years of built up network effects and absolutely wrecked it. It's so hostile when companies do this. They just ignore their users, straight up. That should be a firable offense. The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
Fail upwards. That's all they know how to do
> They just ignore their users, straight up.
Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in. And as much as I hate the UX too… Reddit user numbers have grown a ton in the last few years. It’s difficult to make the argument that these changes are a failure.
Sites that force you to login to actually use it feel very arrogant.
Yeah, it’s connected to Nitter.
I had a number of bookmarked X accounts I would check in on via xcancel. I’ll keep them for now but I assume they’re done for.
I have zero desire to ever crate an X account. Keep closing doors, Elon, and watch usage drop even more than it already has.
The LibRedirect extension lets you use any alt-frontend for [Twitter|YouTube|Reddit|Fandom|you name it] and automatically redirects you when you click a link. That way you can just save the original url and let your browser redirect for you. Would highly recommend
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
It has some default options built in like Nitter for Twitter, Invidious for YouTube, Redlib for Reddit, etc
I don't understand being so emotionally attached to a personality to virtue signal about everything they're connected to. I'm no fan of the guy itself for many reasons, but it's just a service like any other, you either use it or you don't.
> I'm no fan of the guy itself for many reasons, but it's just a service like any other, you either use it or you don't.
It's not just a service, using it actively helps increase and spread his influence in the same way using Facebook/Insta/Threads helps increase and spread Zuck's influence, or using Truth Social helps spread Trump's influence.
You can't separate the man from Twitter, any more than you can separate him from Tesla or SpaceX.
Hardly any one is virtue signaling, but people vice signal all the time.
The us system of government and many of its agencies are under attack by an administration that elon helped secure a win for. Excuse me for getting a little emotional towards a Nazi who supports the concentration camps we have on US soil.
I'll make every effort to avoid his products and bad mouth him every single time his name comes up.
he is hated.
https://joinmastodon.org/
https://bsky.app/
https://www.threads.com/
Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.
I'm not sure why Threads makes your cut here, trading one walking negative externality of person in control for another is not really a sell to most folks.
it has Fediverse interop. Skepticism obviously is warranted towards the owners but you can at least interact with an open protocol or consume threads content from a Mastodon instance, say.
They all get to the point where anime contents start flooding in pinning the system at capacity 24/7, scaring the wrong set of people, and then they chicken out and start dying a long death. This situation itself is downstream event of Twitter doing the same, in a sense.
This article has a good explanation of why "you, yes you" should leave:
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
lol
In the meanwhile for anyone that have android, use QuaX (still requires account)
Especially rich coming from X Corp, with their xAI-Bot web scrapers.
Regardless of the outcome, I’m very thankful for xcancel and all the excellent work they’ve done.
I wish them the best in the legal fight!
Whenever Meta is mentioned on HN, there will be HN users asking why people are still on Facebook or Instagram when we all know Meta hired psychology PHDs to make their products addictive yadda yadda. Usually you will just see people tell each other that they have gotten off Facebook before it became uncool. You hardly see anyone accusing each other of virtue signaling or having any kind of political slant.
But Twitter or X comes up, someone will say they don't use it, and people will start calling out their supposed virtue signaling and making wild speculations about their politics in no time.
Why?
Edit: OK, I think I see your question.
Elon is much more explicitly/publicly on one side of US politics than Meta is. That's why people accuse his critics of playing politics (a convenient scapegoat).
Musk and his supporters project a lot. They have some neural condition or notoriety as popularity strategy or something that makes him/them hate everything, and they performatively state that "___ hates Elon"(often verbatim) out of that. It's not exactly organic.
It's insane that their sign-up process now requires a phone number to complete on the web, and even basic features like playing a video in a tweet recently stopped working on x.com without an account. (In the past, searching for tweets, looking at an account's entire timeline, etc., never required logging in at all.)
It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.
But Twitter has and embraces that. The bots are all verified. Go on any tweet that mentions crypto or "my friends account got hacked" and dive into the deep well of hidden tweets.
Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.
X.com makes it nearly impossible to run bot accounts, with its phone number per account requirement, and the astronomical fees for using its API.
Twitter, by comparison, was trivially easy to run bots on. I ran many automated Twitter accounts (for legit purposes). I had to shut them all down when Musk bought Twitter.
Just Google « buy x.com retweets » or similar and you will see a dozen company offering their services. Doesn’t look like a lack of activity on that area
That's just a lie. Twitter has been overrun by "verified" African-Middle Eastern spambots posting completely nonsensical spams since AFTER it was bought. It's clearly connected to someone higher up than its head of products, considering said head of products was forced to rollback an anti-spam measure at least once.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
Elon was more or less made in environments where the informational flow was free. I'm not sure what he thinks he's doing with all this.
X is really a bad joke with their "Public Town Square".
I wonder why X waited until now to send cease and desist letters. I assumed the issue was resolved somehow - maybe they were unenforceable - long ago.
I'm also surprised they don't already have their response prepared to this inevitable event, though maybe they are just seeking to fine-tune it.
Wait until Musk discovers that without these additional services, people will care even less about what happens there.
Perhaps the ability to de-anonymize[1] users and algorithmically influence those remaining is more valuable to him than whatever ARPU is for Twitter, especially with significant elections coming up around thr world.
1. A lot of data vendors key information on phone numbers or email, that's why all rewards program are thirsty for it.
EST, huh? Where is this poster located that they are in an Eastern Standard Time zone?
The US east coast?
No, the East Coast observes EDT until November
Many humans write EST in the summer.
I've been trying for years (by example) to popularize using PT, MT, CT, ET. Since it's always after a number ("Are you avail at 4ET?") there has never been one instance of confusion, and I save typing and avoid the small but real possibility of being interpreted too literally (suppose someone asks a computer "What time is 4:00 PM EST in London time" during the summer, and gets a 'technically correct' answer).
I don't have a similar answer for GMT/BST though.
This is the kind of imprecision that enrages me, though, because I am a resident of Arizona, and we observe MST all year long. It is currently MST. It is not MDT here. Therefore if we say, like, "it's 4:33pm MT" here and someone presumes that we are in DST, they would be wrong, and they would make the wrong conversion.
That is exactly why I am enraged by "EST"-users out of season. Because they are deliberately insensitive to people who are actually in Standard Time.
But it actually seems to be deeply ingrained into American-centric corporate culture. I had a WFH job in a large company that was nearly 100% WFH, and they consistently used "EST" to their detriment. And I kept challenging this apparently-unwritten policy, and they just said "it's always been this way". And this month I've even caught UPS using it: yeah, the United Parcel Service was quoting transit times for one of my parcels in terms of EST, which was utterly nonsensical to me.
It seems that people don't mean "Standard Time" anymore when they write "EST" but simply "EaStern Time" and it is implicitly understood by human communicators to definitely not mean Standard Time except when it does. I went around with Gemini LLM about this for awhile. I cannot explain why people would embrace an obviously incorrect acronym, but they really have.
Then they are wrong.
I also only use the S variant in human conversation in my time zone.
I assure you that I human and never, ever, write EDT in a conversation. My phone even tries to autocorrect it to EST
EST is valid year-round, if specified.
What's the point of such a service? It sounds like performative nonsense.
Others have explained about not being able to see all content, profiles and such.
I’ll add another reason why I redirect to it: XCancel is/was a lot faster than X and had IMO a much cleaner UI, especially when reading larger conversations or groups of tweets. I don’t browse X much, but I already have an extension installed to redirect certain sites, so adding a redirect was an easy win. I’ll miss it.
Do you make the same complaint when folks post links to archive.is? If not, why is this different?
You need an account to access X. Change the URL to xcancel and you can view these accounts.
It also looks like X requires a Google or Apple account to sign up if you don’t use your phone number. I’m not linking any of that to the X cesspool.
You do not need an account to access specific X posts/tweets. You do need an account to read all replies.
You need to be linked to specific tweets to know where they are. You can't just open up a timeline and read more than the last few posts (literally like 5, including any pinned post.)
You are referring to X/Twitter right?
That is the point. It's a way to get the value of a service you don't like, while signaling to everyone that you're too virtuous to use the service you're getting value out of.
So that's supposed to be the motive? Frankly I think most users just see it as a path of least resistance to a tweet. You guys really aren't familiar with this Internet thing.
I prefer not to share links that require the people receiving the link to create an account to read the content or post to such websites for that matter. That's basic netiquette.