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Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

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Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#771

Post by GJim »

TitaRusell wrote: post #52
NoboruWataya wrote: post #6

What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to. Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.

> Breaking news.

Except you now need to create a Xitter account to view posts in chronological order (i.e. breaking news).

No thanks.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#772

Post by jambalaya8 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #613
jambalaya8 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All due respect, but how would anyone survive, no less find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN, in a world that made not just some 'patents' free but removed property and invention such as the extremities Doctorow's fiction often espouses? America is sorta known for pretense of mutual benefit. We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice. Don't get me wr…

Maybe in the past, but who in the present who isn’t already rich is or would have the income hurt by eliminating IP laws? Keep in mind that most indie projects make barely any money, most of those that do are free + ads or Patreon, any software not under expensive DRM is easy to pirate, and AI companies pirate to train LLMs. > what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't…

cool. as long as we are clear people are free to commit mass genocide and i dunno peel peoples' skin back or i dunno, something out of a robin wiliams scifi movie or phosphorus bombing or something with what you have invented. just trying to get some clarity on the concept of 'belongings' and property law.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#773

Post by kopirgan »

maelito wrote: post #616

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.

Has always been a political project only the politics changed.

API access etc are business issues. Can't mix them up.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#774

Post by BobAliceInATree »

delegate wrote: post #701

Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ? Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take…

> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.

Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).

Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#775

Post by rwmj »

dimitarbogdanov wrote: post #763
expedited123 wrote: post #664

Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.

I know it is Meta-owned and is just as algorithmic, but Threads is a breath of fresh air in terms of access - the website is pratically the same in terms of UX as the app, and it does not require an account to browse at all. Just thought it'd be worth mentioning.

I assume only because Meta have forgotten about it or haven't got around to closing it down yet.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#776

Post by dudefeliciano »

zanellato19 wrote: post #330
negura wrote: post #322

Middle powers should heed Cory Doctorow's advice [0] and start offering legal protection in their jurisdictions for precisely this type of projects. America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to ev…

Brazil is trying that and getting a bad look from the USA. Can you imagine a smaller nation doing the same? What would the USA do?

i remember when, after 9/11, the US introduced webcams and fingerprint scanners, at airports to take pictures of incoming travellers and Brazil had a similar lo-fi response, with ink blots and cameras only for Americans. Something like this needs to happen more and everywhere now.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#777

Post by TaLiTr »

xigoi wrote: post #250
suddenlybananas wrote: post #7

It's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need t…

> Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok Reply with a screenshot showing that you can’t view the content. > a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.

> Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.

This is a wild take to me. Around here pretty much nobody posts their menu online on any website, the technical literacy is just quite poor. If you limited yourself to places that did, you'd only get big fast-food chains.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#778

Post by carlosjobim »

delegate wrote: post #701

Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ? Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take…

The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists.

> This needs to be regulated somehow.

Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#779

Post by protoster »

asimovDev wrote: post #618
ehnto wrote: post #564

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 remember using old.reddit to bypass login requirements and quite often it would let me read with VPN on (otherwise it kicks you out if you are not logged in with VPN on). Only recently did they introduce the same authentication blocks to the old.reddit, so I am assuming everyone was taking advantage of it

FYI web extension "Old Reddit Redirect" was just updated. Restores anonymous access and old reddit. I looked under the hood and it's just setting a "redesign_optout" cookie, so I'd say our days are numbered regardless.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#780

Post by ragnese »

roryirvine wrote: post #699
maelito wrote: post #616

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.

"The world's town square", where everyone could gather and see what was going on. And, for more than a decade, it appeared to work pretty well. Governments, media outlets, public-facing services of all kinds came to rely on it as their main way to talk to the public. But now it's impossible to use without a login, most of that value has been lost. The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a p…

I always cringed at that framing anyway, for two reasons. First, it was obvious to me that it was a private, centralized, closed-source, piece of software whose owner(s) could always manipulate or take away from people they didn't like. Second, it's genuinely depressing to think that the modern marketplace of ideas was supposed to take place in 180 (or whatever the hell it is now) characters or fewer. Yeah, sure- let's hash out the complexities and nuances of life and society in single-sentence messages. And we wonder why everything has become "polarized" and rage-bait-y. When all you have room to write is "This thing is bad", what the hell else are you supposed to do?

What a stupid platform. I can't believe it's still so popular.

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