> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
'Echo chamber' is an odd thing to say. X has many center left and hard left accounts, they're not banned in the same "women can't be men" was during Woke 1.0.
> signups are often still rejected with no explanation given
That's pretty odd. When I google this, there are claims that this is to prevent spam accounts. Obviously, if you choose not to take them at their word, one can read all sorts of odd reasons into it.
That exchange might be believable if bots didn't exist on X, but they absolutely do, hence the search for other explanations.
Considering who owns it, it'd be weird if they didn't want a carefully curated echo chamber of sanitized thought.
HN and Reddit are much more of an echo chamber than X is.