YHK - yet another hacker news clone

131 points orange999 2 hours ago 35 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 48 minutes ago | parent

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

xvxvx 46 minutes 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 28 minutes ago | parent

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

behole 46 minutes ago | parent

You are referring to X/Twitter right?

Petersipoi 4 minutes 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.

xvxvx 48 minutes 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 28 minutes 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 14 minutes ago | parent

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

Grombobulous 4 minutes ago | parent

It seems like you’re reading an emotional connection that the commenter didn’t actually state or even allude to. They just use the service from a utilitarian standpoint: they have some people they follow that they have bookmarked on xcancel so that they don’t need to make an account.

I find it somewhat sensationalist to interpret a moral choice to use or not use a product with a negative connotation phrase like virtue signaling.

But that’s neither here nor there because the parent commenter never actually mentioned any moral objection to using the product. They just don’t like the fact that X is a closed platform that doesn’t allow content viewing without being logged in.

frogperson 4 minutes 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.

ButlerianJihad 40 minutes ago | parent

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

MBCook 36 minutes ago | parent

The US east coast?

nightpool 34 minutes ago | parent

No, the East Coast observes EDT until November

rsstack 31 minutes ago | parent

Many humans write EST in the summer.

Computer0 28 minutes ago | parent

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

morkalork 26 minutes ago | parent

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

xp84 3 minutes 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.

SoftTalker 16 minutes ago | parent

EST is valid year-round, if specified.

stock_toaster 31 minutes ago | parent

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

afavour 29 minutes 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 16 minutes 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 7 minutes ago | parent

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

seattle_spring 2 minutes ago | parent

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

Waterluvian 8 minutes 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.

inatreecrown2 21 minutes ago | parent

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

altcognito 16 minutes ago | parent

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

S0y 13 minutes 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 5 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

hoshi73 9 minutes 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 8 minutes ago | parent

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

joshdavham 1 minute 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!