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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

#811

Post by madaxe_again »

beart wrote: post #486
chrysoprace wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old Reddit is now completely unusable without an account. Maybe it's time for me to finally stop using it.

New Reddit is too. They were A/B testing it for a while, but now you can't use it without the login pop-up after a short timespan. The funny thing is, it has nothing to do with how much content you view. So if you really want to read something, you can hit F5 and scroll back down every time the pop-up is shown. Still not worth it. But honestly, Reddit content has taken such a plummeting nose dive over the last few ye…

Cynically, I think the purpose is to inflate page view counts. You refresh 10x to read the comments, they report 10x user engagement, and high five each other over successfully meeting their KPIs.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#812

Post by ben_w »

carlos22 wrote: post #712
vaylian wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.

And it has much less users, I would say its max 1-5% of X users.

In the context of:

  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.
It simply does not matter how big Bluesky is relative to X. You put messages somewhere and tell your population about this, that's that.

For comparison, I have NINA installed on my phone, a German government app for exactly this category: https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/wa...

Number of users? Google play story says "10M+", same as the Bluesky app.

90% of an app like this (broadcast, one-way, no comments, no need for moderation system because only governments get to push content) was already for the most part a piece of piss to write before LLMs came along. The 10% part that's hard is going to be backup infrastructure that X also won't help much with, because the first two items in the list of hazards icons is "Attack on IT systems" then "Attack with nuclear weapons". (4 is "IT system outage", 6 is "Telephone line outage").

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#814

Post by raffael_de »

what I like about xcancel is that it allows me to read but protects me from giving in to the temptation of wasting time by engaging in fruitless discussions. same problem with reddit. funny thing is that my current account just got permanently banned due to ban evasion ... that's fantastic as I can still join and read subs but I cannot post or comment.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#815

Post by ecshafer »

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.

As opposed to the Jack Dorsey days of twitter where you would be banned for mildly right wing opinions, even if they were factually correct. That wasn't a political project?

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#817

Post by doodpants »

echelon wrote: post #720
vaylian wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.

> The fediverse is a viable alternative Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on. I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users. A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not…

> Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.

> I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.

As someone who's never joined Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc., I find it weird that this would be the case. If I join as a new user, why would my feed not be empty, until I choose who to follow? If I don't want to see furries and kink, I'll never follow such users, so I'd expect that content will never show up the first place. But if these services pre-populate new users' feeds with random people's posts, well, that's just bizarre to me.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#818

Post by electriclove »

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…

I agree with you. I hope you've had similar outrage for Facebook over the last 20 years.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#819

Post by electriclove »

conradfr wrote: post #761
esarbe wrote: post #704

That's it for me. No more twitter. Elmo really has ruined it.

To be honest it was quite closed as well before he bought it. Before AI or whatever reason for being closed again he actually open it back.

Sad to see you getting downvotes for facts. What you stated is exactly what I witnessed myself.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#820

Post by smallmancontrov »

yuck39 wrote: post #790
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…

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.

That's what Elon said, but it's clearly not what he was thinking, which was more along the lines of "this would make a brilliant propaganda megaphone."

This was around the time when he started to be openly post-truth (talking about how twitter was overrun with bots and he was going to save it and shortly afterwards feigning surprise at the same when he wanted an excuse to wiggle out after the market moved against him, continuing to push the "government censored twitter" narrative when the Twitter Files revealed the truth to be almost the polar opposite, talking about building an un-biased Grok and then getting caught with an "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" size thumb on the scale, etc). When someone starts being openly post-truth like this, they stop deserving the benefit of the doubt. This wasn't a boyish fantasy, he knew exactly what he was doing, and it was saying one thing while thinking another.

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