Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions.

I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.

View on HN

Tearing something out only to re-build it a few months later is classic tech industry move fast and break things hubris.

Most things exist for a reason, and if you don’t know the reason that doesn’t mean it’s a bad reason - it just means you don’t know the whole story.

I wonder when the re-building part is going to start for all the stuff that DOGE tore out.

Not just when. Also if.

Chesterton’s login?

I was hardly a heavy twitter user before acquisition but I recall generally being able to read threads and reply chains without logging in.

I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but it completely destroyed what little use the platform had left to me.

They started requiring log-ins when industrial level scraping for LLM data became a thing.

if someone shares me a link to x.com, it is literally faster for me to edit the URL to xcancel, even on my phone which makes this awkward, and load that, than to wait for the original URL to load.

xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.

Of all the many ways to automate that redirect, https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ isn't bad.

  Redirect: https://x.com/*
        to: https://xcancel.com/$1

and

  Redirect: https://twitter.com/*
        to: https://xcancel.com/$1

( also reddit to old.reddit, various cdn image servers to deliver hi-res versions, etc )

Interesting. That won't work for me directly (iOS), but it made me search around and find this, which has xcancel in one of the screenshots: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/redirectweb-smart-url-router/i...

The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though.

When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.

It was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now.

Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).

X has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time.

I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.

Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).

I actually agree, they did the world a favor walling themselves off. The vile trash would be shared way more otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com