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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.
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Over 85% of the US is not on twitter. It's not at all comparable to television.
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Only 36% pays for cable TV. Seems pretty comparable to me.

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

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If anyone's curious, 98.4% of US households had television in the mid 90s (most likely the peak). In 1960 it was 90%.
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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.
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If you're implying ~60% of the pop is pirating cable I don't believe it's anywhere near that high

edit: oh I think you meant streaming-only. Yeah, maybe a lot higher...I don't have a good gauge on that

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Streaming only, OTA+streaming, etc.

The only people I know under the age of 40 with "cable TV" use it pretty much exclusively to watch sports.

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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%.

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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.

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Over 60% uses Twitter in Japan, behind only to LINE and YouTube. Also comparable if English was not language of business.
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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.
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This seems really out of touch tbh.
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Not even close. Any given social network is not ubiquitous, socially.
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Not really. More like the modern equivalent of "I don't watch Fox News."
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This. It bugs me that we can’t read without logging in, and other UX decisions that basically made me quit using it for like 7 or 8 months now.
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You don't have to comply with a cease and desist notice, depending on your risk tolerance. They're not legally binding, like court orders. Rather, they are threats, equivalent to "gimme your lunch money or I'll beat you up"
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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.

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Reddit seems to have let this AI demand go to their heads.

I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.

Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!

And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D

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Interesting, because multiple accounts for the same person is explicitly allowed by Reddit:

https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204535759-I...

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You're lucky you only got email address. I got selfie+ID. No thank you.
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Old Reddit is now completely unusable without an account. Maybe it's time for me to finally stop using it.
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Do database dumps of it still exist?

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

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See if https://github.com/Tryhard-cs/reddit-download-tool works, the readme enumerates the data sources it pulls from.

Perhaps the way to solve for X is having a scraper serve the data via torrent and/or IPFS vs centralized systems like nitter and xcancel.

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New Reddit is too. They were A/B testing it for a while, but now you can't use it without the login pop-up after a short timespan. The funny thing is, it has nothing to do with how much content you view. So if you really want to read something, you can hit F5 and scroll back down every time the pop-up is shown. Still not worth it. But honestly, Reddit content has taken such a plummeting nose dive over the last few years, this just feels like a final reminder that it's time to move on.
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Interesting--I'm still using old.reddit.com with no problem, without an account. Maybe the change is not broadly rolled out?
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They’ve been rolling it out gradually. There was a thread on HN about it a couple of weeks ago, it just started affecting my IPs a few days ago.

It’s managed to do what years of self-imposed content blockers etc. on my own side have failed to do - finally broke my Reddit addiction!

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Could be regional - however it's odd that it pops up on old.reddit.com but not reddit.com.
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It happens to me on not old reddit as well
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Old reddit on the tor onion domain still works for me.
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Use a LibReddit/Redlib/Teddit/etc. instance.
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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

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> 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.

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People who aren’t logged in are still (very arguably) users, IMHO. They see ads, and make Reddit money with their eyeballs.
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If you actually look at the content of Reddit it's obvious they're almost all bots.
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> Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in.

I am an existing Reddit user, but don't want to be logged in everywhere and always. Sometimes I had a few free moments and wanted to kill some time, so until recently I could go to Old Reddit on my mobile phone and just see what the 'general human zeitgeist' was discussing: from something serious in /r/worldnews to some pop culture news story.

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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.
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> 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.

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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

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It's not day 1, so it's irrelevant what would've happened on day 1.
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What is your point. The product has been ruined and I'm saying that by 'customers' I just meant users
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It's possible that the lack of these alternatives will decrease engagement enough that Twitter would loosen these rules. Perhaps not that likely, but it's possible.
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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.

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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.

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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…
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I don't get it, are you implying everyone who's not a fan of this change is a Google employee?
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Maybe he's saying everyone who works at Google works on breaking yt-dlp...?
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It goes against the whole “global town square" declaration.

Only if you're part of the club. If not, fuck off!

I choose to fuck off.

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Want to come to the free town square ? Gotta show ID first to the guard at the wall
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& the town square forces you to listen to famous gossippers and dumb popular people you've never heard of
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... and so many people shilling scams as hard as they possibly can.
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> when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.

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

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I received an Amber Alert a few days ago, which linked to a Twitter post containing the details, and the "x" in the "plz login" modal that blocked the entire screen was non-functional. I just sat there pounding on the x, and then a little hand gif popped up and pointed at the login button.
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It always confuses me because the X you need to click is in the upper right and very small.

Not the giant X in the middle.

Horrible UI choices.....

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> https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack

Only 5 posts, and when you click on any of them, you don't see the post, you see a sign up popup

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Unless it has changed, the posts are in random order; they aren't the latest, which makes the ones you see basically worthless.
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A few months ago you needed to log in to view any replies, which was critical for some threads.
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I don't know how it works, but it is very inconsistent.

On mobile right now, I can't scroll past the second post of [1] without getting blocked by an undismissable popup.

If I click on the "read more" button of the first post, I can't scroll down at all before getting that same non-dismissable popup. It makes it hard to read the post itself, because even scrolling a tiny bit (e.g. to get what I'm reading closer to the center of my vision) triggers it.

I've also had other times where I couldn't play a video someone linked to me, but sometimes I can, don't know why.

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Not sure how you manage that - twitter, insta, and pinterest all begrudgingly let you see one, maybe two things, then lock down and prevent you from interacting without logging in.

It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.

And so I gladly oblige.

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Sites that force you to login to actually use it feel very arrogant.
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> a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.

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...

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Only if it's directly linked to you. Can't go scrolling on someone's profile without getting blocked by a pop-up. Also can't click a post and see replies.

Edit: also can't read a thread because each new post is considered a "reply", so blocked too.

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Not in any useful way that makes Twitter better or different than other sources of news.
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I can't think of another platform that carries a more diverse range of news and perspectives.

But that's beside the point. I was pointing out that X does allow non-logged in users view posts.

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We're probably cross purposes, but, yes, you can view posts in isolation if directly linked to that individual post.

But try to go anywhere 'related' or follow a trail of replies and you're blocked by either a login prompt or a post limit or some other guest-unfriendly pattern. And that means, for me personally, that the original 'thing' is not worth the time because I can't follow the train of thought that it creates - which is probably why it's designed that way: annoy people into signing up.

I can not and will not reward that (mostly, I'm probably hypocritical in a couple of facets of my life choices).

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Text posts, yes. Videos can't be watched with volume on web as any interaction with the video player redirects you to the App Store
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> Text posts, yes. Videos can't be watched with volume on web as any interaction with the video player redirects you to the App Store

While inconvenient, I would be surprised if isn't a relatively small use case. Most people who use X on their phones are using the app.

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