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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

#781

Post by ragnese »

roryirvine wrote: post #700
maelito wrote: post #617

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.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#782

Post by trashb »

erulabs wrote: post #53

The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it. I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing . Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X…

Don't reinvent the wheel PHPBB, MyBB and others are still updated.

I hate the closed web purely for disrupting archiving efforts, you can add chat apps like discord, whatsapp, zoom and teams in that list as well. As a lot of communities have moved there.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#783

Post by yuck39 »

expedited123 wrote: post #665

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 actually paid for their dumb monthly subscription only so that I could download videos within the app to share with my friends who don't use X. Only after paying did I realize that by "download videos" it means "cache videos locally inside the app for offline playback". It still would not allow me to save the video to my local device. Misleading, tacky, possibly even desparate.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#784

Post by user43928 »

llm_nerd wrote: post #680
Razengan wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)

There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code. The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on. I personally…

Or they just disagree with you.

I believe Musk might be a decent person. He is obviously smart, but perhaps he fears foreigners too much.

X is decent for getting the latest news. The comment sections are often filled with garbage, even more so than Reddit. Ads are hard to distinguish from normal posts. There is a lot of bots in the comments.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#785

Post by rjzzleep »

throw0101d wrote: post #771
ghastmaster wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

> RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. A "foo-announce@" or "foo-alerts@" mailing list.

Acquire and extinguish with google mailing lists and RSS

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#787

Post by linuxftw »

dimitarbogdanov wrote: post #764
expedited123 wrote: post #665

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.

You gotta build the garden before you build the walls.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#788

Post by delegate »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #739
delegate wrote: post #702

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…

>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.

Of course I don't have a right to Twitter.

But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information.

They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services.

The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#789

Post by EgregiousCube »

MattDaEskimo wrote: post #753
roryirvine wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Never had an X account, never will. Now I'm completely locked out of police reports & municipal updates in my area because it's the only platform they post on.

You say completely locked out, but be fair, that's a choice you're making. I don't particularly like Facebook but there are a few things I can only keep up with there, so I have a minimal account for that purpose.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#790

Post by yuck39 »

roryirvine wrote: post #700
maelito wrote: post #617

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 don't understand why they are so dead set on this anti-user short term profit seeking design. During the acquisition wasn't the general sentiment that "I understand this won't be super profitable but I'm doing it on principle"? Trying to chase this boyish fantasy of creating the "everything app" is incompatible with "worlds town square". Those are two different problems with different solutions.
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