XCancel also down, at least for time being
195
oorange999 about 5 hours ago 92 comments
DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Message on xcancel website:
"On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel."
https://xcancel.com/
Discussion (92 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
Where does this come from? You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal to no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
I have no X account, but I read content there all the time without issue.
[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack
[2] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2091983940609245467
Only 5 posts, and when you click on any of them, you don't see the post, you see a sign up popup
It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.
And so I gladly oblige.
Only if you're part of the club. If not, fuck off!
I choose to fuck off.
Though I think Pinterest takes the cake for being just the ugliest example of this.
Maybe it’s time to just download it and Wikipedia, then point an LLM / vectordb at it.
Fail upwards. That's all they know how to do
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.
Reddit users are not customers. The advertisers and AI labs are the customers because they're the ones paying. The users are the cattle in the pen being sold to the advertisers and the monkeys at the typewriters whose output gets sold as AI training data.
That's not true for X. You can read content without being signed in.
https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/public-and-protect...
But that's beside the point. I was pointing out that X does allow non-logged in users view posts.
https://bsky.app/
https://www.threads.com/
Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.
I don't like the mastodon culture but tbh I can't fault them for this move. Imagine if every post on r/all suddenly shows up on HN.
You can still do read-only things like see threads and follow users as an anonymous user. Just can't post or comment. Only thing I don't like is that it's app-only for now.
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
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.
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
It has some default options built in like Nitter for Twitter, Invidious for YouTube, Redlib for Reddit, etc
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.
I'll make every effort to avoid his products and bad mouth him every single time his name comes up.
he is hated.
Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.
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.
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?
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).
One thing I have universally noticed is it doesn't matter what it is or how many sides there are to it, someone always thinks HN is unfair to one side in favor of another. Usually multiple someone at the same time, and usually not even from the opposing side as each other claims.
And I don't know, maybe there is an 80/20 bias or something. I just don't know how I would or wouldn't reliably know that on intuition/things I notice rather than running the numbers on comment data.
I wish them the best in the legal fight!
"Gated Community" is a much better description, but I guess that doesn't sound so cool.
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.
1. A lot of data vendors key information on phone numbers or email, that's why all rewards program are thirsty for it.
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.
It's a kind of enshittification pattern where a site based on user content closes off more and more access over time.
Xcancel and Nitter are/were easier to work with, afaict.
It's mostly useful if you want to link someone to a post on twitter to people who don't have an twitter account.
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.