"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/
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.
https://www.cablecompare.com/blog/us-cable-subscriber-statis...
I wouldn't say that's comparable to ~15%.
I know lots of people who spend an immensely unhealthy amount of time in front of TVs (even me from time to time, not judging), and few of them have a cable subscription.
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.
Also, blocking scraping is very rich (and expectedly hypocritical) for an AI company, which SpaceX is now.
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.
https://bsky.app/
https://www.threads.com/
Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.
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.
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.
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
I'll make every effort to avoid his products and bad mouth him every single time his name comes up.
he is hated.
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.
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).
I wish them the best in the legal fight!
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 don't have a similar answer for GMT/BST though.
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.
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 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.
And media often won't play without doing bypass shenanigans (forcing native controls).
The main site won't even let you attempt to search but nitter and xcancel search worked great.
Twitter is basically unusable on the official site without logging in, even though it may not seem that way after a cursory check.