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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?

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> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content

They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.

Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.

> signups are often still rejected with no explanation given

That's pretty odd. When I google this, there are claims that this is to prevent spam accounts. Obviously, if you choose not to take them at their word, one can read all sorts of odd reasons into it.

That exchange might be believable if bots didn't exist on X, but they absolutely do, hence the search for other explanations.

Considering who owns it, it'd be weird if they didn't want a carefully curated echo chamber of sanitized thought.

To be clear I agree that another reason is pretty likely. I'm just phrasing it neutrally since I don't know.. Above all I'm saying it's weird. I'm used to thinking of twitter and all the others in the same category as wanting to drive user metrics up at the expense of a lot of other priorities. Preventing new accounts seems to run counter to expectations.

HN and Reddit are much more of an echo chamber than X is.

'Echo chamber' is an odd thing to say. X has many center left and hard left accounts, they're not banned in the same "women can't be men" was during Woke 1.0.

...really?

Elon Musk declares ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ will be considered slurs on Twitter that can be punishable with suspension

https://fortune.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-declares-cis-cisgen...

https://x.com/search?q=cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live

There are tons and tons of people using the term. All the time. Last result was 11 seconds ago (as of posting this).

Their tweets are shadowbanned and you only found them because you searched for the slur. All other avenues of discovery are prevented.

Where did you get that from? I've seen this word multiple times on the feed over the years, too.

Direct link: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/167137028410281984

Slurs aren't allowed on most platforms.

Those aren't slurs

I’m not sure how much contact you’ve had with the far left but “cis het scum” is where you’ll most often hear the word.

Political Twitter is a radical far-right amplification machine now: https://protos.com/nate-silver-says-x-is-rigged-musk-cries-b...

FWIW, X is far less of an echo chamber than Bluesky, Truth Social or Reddit.

They're simply doing this to boost engagement and break scrapers.

I quit Twitter because a lot of the people I followed also quit so the site lost relevance/interest, but mainly because those who stay were turning slowly but steadily into something the network was clearly pushing. The force pushing of Elon twits into my timeline was too obvious, and once noticed that I noticed other less obvious pushes and even more insidious, silencing people I was interested in reading but suddenly their twits no longer pop in my timeline. I needed to go to their profile to read their twits.

In short, Twitter was actively pushing me into an echo chamber, even when my follows were diverse. Bluesky, Truth Social or Reddit are users that usually want to be in that echo chamber. At least bans are very notorious there, and not shadowbans/algorithm silencing while Elon says "I am a free speech absolutist".

> X is far less of an echo chamber

[citation needed] - an echo chamber you agree with is still an echo chamber.

X: "Before Musk acquired it, Twitter’s users were more liberal; now it’s about even on X" https://www.techpolicy.press/what-are-the-politics-of-a-plat...

Bluesky: "8% of the links were to right-leaning websites" https://labhorizons.co.uk/2025/02/new-study-highlights-blues...

Reddit: "There is a strong Pro-Left/Anti-Right bias to the top 100 posts of Reddit with 112x more posts (99.1%) favoring the American Left Wing compared to the Right" https://rsisinternational.org/journals/ijriss/articles/reddi...

TruthSocial: do I really need to pull that up?

That’s not a market. You are not exchanging anything of value. It’s a public service. One might as well lament that Ferrari doesn’t offer cars to the millions of people who would gladly take one for free.

It's unfortunate that this is not a downvoted comment on a "hacker" news website.

The internet used to be treated as a public service.

Reddit says hello

And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.

And demanding ID!

They are now telling me that I need an account to use old.reddit.com (the only usable version of Reddit UI). Needless to say, I have stopped visiting Reddit completely.

Perhaps more frustratingly, if you bite the bullet and browse the "new" version on your mobile browser, the page will eventually become non-responsive and have ~60% of your screen covered by a bottom banner that prompts you to download their app to continue. It's like they are actively trying to kill their userbase.

Like most big tech companies now, they are actively trying to kill their non-contributing userbase, where contributing means viewing an ad for every second post. They know that perhaps 5% of the non-contributing userbase they kill will become contributing userbase, while the other 95% will just leave, and this trade seems good to them.

On mobile, uBO has been able to get around the "use our app" block. It took a week or two for the filters to get updated but now it is a non-issue. Tested in Firefox and Vivaldi on Android.

Unfortunately, it seems uBO on Safari/iOS needs to get with it! The native “hide distracting items” feature does allow you to select and remove it, though.

FWIW, Old Reddit Redirect manages to somehow still be usable without a user.

You're being A/B tested.

They do this by setting cookie "redesign_optout=true" for www.reddit.com (and then using that domain).

For me it requires login even with ORR.

Didn't Reddit ban open access to their APIs and kill third party viewers/apps as well by charging outrageous amounts for continued API access?

Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?

Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.

If a user can't be arsed to take the car for a test drive what makes you think they'll buy it?

They won't, that's why dealerships don't give away free cars but it's still a market.

ISTR in the old days Twitter was easy to read when not logged in, much like Mastodon or Bluesky are now. But once they captured market share, and this happened before Musk!, they started gradually ramping up the pressure to log in or use the app to view tweets.

One can only assume Bluesky would go the same way were it to gain significant market share. One can even imagine a particular Mastodon instance going that way, were it to be popular enough and run by profit-minded people.

Do they not understand you can still serve ads to non-logged-in users? They can still be tracked nearly as effectively with fingerprinting.

I assume the limit is related to 3rd party AI scraping training.

> without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to

That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Actually you can write "Xitter" ("x" is pronounced "sh" in the standard transliteration of Chinese and many other languages, although most of them are not really widespread, like Basque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_alphabet and Maltese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_alphabet).

As if the new owners of twitter give a shit about its sustainability.

It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.

It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires

[flagged]

He wasn't forced to sign the original agreement to buy it. He was forced to uphold the agreement he already signed.

They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.

It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."

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