YHK - yet another hacker news clone

207 points orange999 3 hours ago 97 comments

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/

droptablemain 2 hours ago | parent

What's the point of such a service? It sounds like performative nonsense.

xvxvx 2 hours ago | parent

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.

droptablemain 1 hour ago | parent

You do not need an account to access specific X posts/tweets. You do need an account to read all replies.

pessimizer 1 hour ago | parent

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.)

Brybry 36 minutes ago | parent

I've also found sometimes you get (cached?) versions of profiles with really old posts if you're not logged in.

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.

behole 2 hours ago | parent

You are referring to X/Twitter right?

Petersipoi 1 hour ago | parent

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.

numpad0 1 hour ago | parent

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.

lern_too_spel 1 hour ago | parent

I prefer not to share links that require the people receiving the link to create an account to read the content and it's replies or post to such websites for that matter. That's basic netiquette.

sandcat_ 1 hour ago | parent

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.

afavour 1 hour ago | parent

Do you make the same complaint when folks post links to archive.is? If not, why is this different?

fauchletenerum 12 minutes ago | parent

If you read the comments on the Github issue for Nitter shutting down you'll see that's precisely what it is

xvxvx 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Yiin 1 hour ago | parent

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.

stuaxo 1 hour ago | parent

Hardly any one is virtue signaling, but people vice signal all the time.

frogperson 1 hour ago | parent

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.

nozzlegear 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

hiddencost 38 minutes ago | parent

Have you considered that people actually have ethical beliefs and you're the one that is weird?

AlexandrB 14 minutes ago | parent

Have you considered that other's ethical beliefs may not match yours?

culi 1 hour ago | parent

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

ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago | parent

EST, huh? Where is this poster located that they are in an Eastern Standard Time zone?

MBCook 1 hour ago | parent

The US east coast?

nightpool 1 hour ago | parent

No, the East Coast observes EDT until November

rsstack 1 hour ago | parent

Many humans write EST in the summer.

Computer0 1 hour ago | parent

I also only use the S variant in human conversation in my time zone.

morkalork 1 hour ago | parent

I assure you that I am human and never, ever, write EDT in a conversation. My phone even tries to autocorrect it to EST

xp84 1 hour ago | parent

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.

ButlerianJihad 1 hour ago | parent

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.

fooker 47 minutes ago | parent

This is how language works, things mean what people using language want it to mean. Not the more precise version you want it to mean.

bigstrat2003 15 minutes ago | parent

No, when people misuse the language they are wrong. Their bad use does not become correct just because it's popular. Linguistic descriptivism is a nonsense idea.

acheron 1 hour ago | parent

Then they are wrong.

SoftTalker 1 hour ago | parent

EST is valid year-round, if specified.

stock_toaster 1 hour ago | parent

Especially rich coming from X Corp, with their xAI-Bot web scrapers.

afavour 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Arubis 1 hour ago | parent

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.

xp84 1 hour ago | parent

The modern hipster equivalent of "I don't even own a TV."

seattle_spring 1 hour ago | parent

Not really. More like the modern equivalent of "I don't watch Fox News."

culi 1 hour ago | parent

Over 85% of the US is not on twitter. It's not at all comparable to television.

hedora 44 minutes ago | parent

Only 36% pays for cable TV. Seems pretty comparable to me.

https://www.cablecompare.com/blog/us-cable-subscriber-statis...

Catloafdev 36 minutes ago | parent

That's a higher percentage of the population than those who voted for the winning candidate in the last presidential election.

I wouldn't say that's comparable to ~15%.

vel0city 36 minutes ago | parent

There's a pretty radical difference between the statements "I don't have cable" and "I don't even own a TV".

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.

numpad0 35 minutes ago | parent

Over 60% uses Twitter in Japan, behind only to LINE and YouTube. Also comparable if English was not language of business.

culi 34 minutes ago | parent

If anyone's curious, 98.4% of US households had television in the mid 90s (most likely the peak). In 1960 it was 90%.

bigstrat2003 19 minutes ago | parent

And I would wager that the numbers are still very similar. One doesn't need to pay for cable TV to watch TV these days.

afavour 1 hour ago | parent

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.

happytoexplain 1 hour ago | parent

Not even close. Any given social network is not ubiquitous, socially.

nozzlegear 1 hour ago | parent

This seems really out of touch tbh.

Waterluvian 1 hour ago | parent

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.

alex1138 1 hour ago | parent

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

afavour 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

trompetenaccoun 33 minutes ago | parent

What kind of users though? OnlyFans models, porn addicts, LLMs and child groomers... maybe. I could be ignorant because I'm not the target user for their brave new vision but no one I know uses reddit anymore. And with the locking of old.reddit and forcing sign-ups they probably lost the last few old timers who were still there for what was supposed to be an open forum to freely exchange ideas.

AlexandrB 22 minutes ago | parent

> The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway

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.

alex1138 14 minutes ago | parent

I understand this, but the distinction is academic

The people using their product. The people who, if the product were shit from day 1 - as Reddit wasn't - would have never signed up for it. Who have been effectively and literally lied to

chrysoprace 1 hour ago | parent

Old Reddit is now completely unusable without an account. Maybe it's time for me to finally stop using it.

hedora 42 minutes ago | parent

Do database dumps of it still exist?

Maybe it’s time to just download it and Wikipedia, then point an LLM / vectordb at it.

throwaway85825 20 minutes ago | parent

Old reddit on the tor onion domain still works for me.

ryandrake 20 minutes ago | parent

Interesting--I'm still using old.reddit.com with no problem, without an account. Maybe the change is not broadly rolled out?

chrysoprace 7 minutes ago | parent

Could be regional - however it's odd that it pops up on old.reddit.com but not reddit.com.

UltraSane 1 hour ago | parent

Sites that force you to login to actually use it feel very arrogant.

gnuplustoejam 1 hour ago | parent

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.

afavour 1 hour ago | parent

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…

miloignis 52 minutes ago | parent

There's a bit difference between breaking a scraper and sending Cease and Desist letters.

Also, blocking scraping is very rich (and expectedly hypocritical) for an AI company, which SpaceX is now.

Catloafdev 28 minutes ago | parent

I don't get it, are you implying everyone who's not a fan of this change is a Google employee?

ryandrake 21 minutes ago | parent

Maybe he's saying everyone who works at Google works on breaking yt-dlp...?

inatreecrown2 1 hour ago | parent

X is really a bad joke with their "Public Town Square".

"Gated Community" is a much better description, but I guess that doesn't sound so cool.

altcognito 1 hour ago | parent

Wait until Musk discovers that without these additional services, people will care even less about what happens there.

overfeed 1 hour ago | parent

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.

S0y 1 hour ago | parent

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.

numpad0 1 hour ago | parent

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.

davidw 1 hour ago | parent

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...

loufe 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Barrin92 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

pibaker 20 minutes ago | parent

Aren't many big mastodon instances talking about blocking Threads?

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.

mrcwinn 1 hour ago | parent

lol

huebnerob 45 minutes ago | parent

Wasn’t xcancel, sort of by definition, for people who have already left X?

TkTech 21 minutes ago | parent

An interesting new one for Canadians (that's built on AT and interops with bsky) is https://gandersocial.ca/. It uses our national postal service's identity validation, so it dramatically reduces foreign actors and bots, and without handing PII to shady private companies like Persona. They collect no PII either, they just get an "is_a_human" response back from Canada Post.

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.

hoshi73 1 hour ago | parent

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.)

cbeach 1 hour ago | parent

It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.

jdiff 1 hour ago | parent

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.

cbeach 1 hour ago | parent

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.

numpad0 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

dgellow 59 minutes ago | parent

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

joshdavham 1 hour ago | parent

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!

pibaker 1 hour ago | parent

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?

happytoexplain 1 hour ago | parent

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).

numpad0 1 hour ago | parent

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.

thataccount 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mmooss 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

Trung0246 56 minutes ago | parent

In the meanwhile for anyone that have android, use QuaX (still requires account)

huebnerob 44 minutes ago | parent

Sad, if inevitable.

w-ll 38 minutes ago | parent

The other day in the bay there was an amber alert. it had a bit.ly link which opened up twitter (or i guess x) app. that wouldnt let me see the alert unless i logged in.

senderista 33 minutes ago | parent

well I guess I won't be reading anything on that hellsite anymore

trompetenaccoun 29 minutes ago | parent

First Instagram and Facebook, then Reddit, now Twitter. This is the new normal, paywalls and walled gardens everywhere. Not to get started on quickly increasing nation-state censorship and trail blazers such as China with the entirety of their national web locked down already.

rustcleaner 25 minutes ago | parent

We move to the fediverse, hyphanet, etc, and leave the normies in the slop shops. We build a high information quality environment for us which is not easily centralize-able or lockin-able, and eventually the slop shops fall due to the lack of our high quality communications. Enshittification will ensure the slop shops' ultimate failure in their futures.