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.
Both Imgur and Reddit have put a lot of roadblocks up lately as well. I think some of it is driven by trying to reduce bot traffic. It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed. If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage…
I guess that's their traffic so that's their market but ugh. Imagine if flickr or some other photo site was run over by people posting photos of text messags.