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Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

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631–640 of 1001 posts

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#631

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.

Not only requires you to log in, asks you your username once you do log in, which means for me I can't log in because I had a random username and there is no email from them where it is mentioned

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#633
post #588
post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recently deleted all of my Reddit accounts. The website had been unusable on mobile for a good while, with the constant and ever-more-aggressive nagging about switching to the app. Old Reddit was the one thing that made the site still usable. And now that requires a login. So fuck that. Bye Reddit. I'll miss some of the communities.

It's been real annoying to no longer be able to visit reddit posts for search results as it has been the de-facto public forum where recommendations and solutions to issues get posted for a while now. Never going to login there again though and I think I will follow your example and have them delete my account.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#636

Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page. Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API. Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog. Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.

[flagged]

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#637
post #565

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…

> Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?

Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely.

And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.

This will presumably make many on this site happy, since for many years an ad supported open web was consistently railed against.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#638

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.

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"

Yes and hiQ v. LinkedIn has already given us precedent that scraping is not inherently illegal, not to mention X's own scraping to train their AI.

Makes sense that they want to consult legal experts rather than just going with their gut though but I hope those legal experts will work something out that gets them back online.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#639

Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page. Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API. Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog. Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google has sent a cease and desist letter to youtube-dl. It didn’t work out well. And of course, Google is an AI company, too.

Wasn't it a DMCA takedown actually?
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