When You Accidentally Click A Link To X

Hey, remember Gisnep, my free daily solve-the-quote game? You might have forgotten about it during the tumult of the last few weeks. But now is the perfect time to relax for a bit by getting lost in the game and its archives. Check it out!

So you finally left X. Congratulations! Maybe you saw the writing on the wall and left a while ago, or maybe the last straw was when Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration rally. Or maybe you are just sick of being on a platform that constantly pushes hate, sexism, cryptocrap, slop, and Musk’s own musings into your feed. So you left.

But there are still times when you accidentally find yourself back on X. Maybe a coworker shares a link on Slack, or you follow a link in an article that takes you to a post on X. And then you’re back in the thick of it — being bombarded with hate on a platform that feeds on negativity, tempting you down rabbit holes you know you’ll regret later. And it’s bringing you down.

At least, that was my experience. I kept finding myself accidentally back there when I was just trying to stay informed or look at something a colleague shared. And I was overcome with bad feelings each time, like Luke entering the Dark Side cave on Dagobah.

So I came up with a solution.

Introducing: SkipX

SkipX is a Chrome plug-in that intercepts links to posts on X and just displays that post all by itself on an otherwise blank page.

(Well, it’s mostly blank. It has a button you can press if you really need to see the post in context. Pressing it bypasses the block and takes you to the post on X.)

So instead of seeing this:

You just see this:

No extra fluff, nothing else yelling at you, no other links to click on. It’s just enough to give you the context you need for whatever brought you there.

I’ve been using this plugin since October and it does what I need it to do, but some things are imperfect due to quirks of how X works. For example, if I click on an image that’s part of a post so I can see it bigger, it gets intercepted by the plugin again and doesn’t take me to the enlarged image. I tried a few fixes for this but didn’t get it to work exactly as I wanted. So this means there is friction preventing me from going any deeper on X unless I really need to, which come to think of it actually is what I wanted. So its imperfections are actually perfect.

How to get and install SkipX

The plugin is not available on the Chrome Web Store. I need a Google Developer account for that, and I wouldn’t feel right doing it unless I could actually provide support for this plug-in, which I can’t really do. The code for this was written mostly by ChatGPT and I don’t think it’s interested in providing support for everyone, either.

But it’s still easy to get SkipX anyway. Just download it and unzip into a folder. You’ll have to keep the files there for the plugin to work, so pick someplace that won’t get in your way. Then follow these installation instructions:

1. Open Chrome. In the address bar, type chrome://extensions and press Enter.

2. Toggle the “Developer mode” switch in the top right corner.

3. Click the “Load unpacked” button at the top left.

4. Select the SkipX folder and click “Select Folder.”

That’s it. Now SkipX should appear in the list of extensions and it should just work. At least, it works for me. I initially made this just for me to use, and I figured I’d share it in case other people would also find it useful. But I didn’t test it on any other computers so your mileage may vary.

Feel free to improve it and/or redistribute.

Again, in case you missed the link above, the plugin can be downloaded here. I think it should work in any Chromium browser (Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc).

While I’m thinking of it, I also finally removed X from Gisnep as one of the sharing choices. When you finish a game of Gisnep, you’re presented with some quick buttons for sharing your results on your social platform of choice. It used to look like this:

But now it looks like this:

Although perhaps I should simplify it even further and just have a single generic “copy to clipboard” button that you can use for whichever platform you use. That’s what that first icon does anyway. Hmm.

One last thing on this topic. Since you’re no longer on X, here’s where you can find me on whichever of these platforms you’ve migrated to:

Bluesky | Mastodon | Threads

And that’s it! Thank you for reading, as always. And don’t forget, you can support this newsletter by becoming a paid subscriber, or making a one-time donation. Your contribution is appreciated and helps keep me going.

See you next time!

David