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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

#821

Post by zdragnar »

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 free API was closed off well before Twitter ownership changed hands. Even the paid API became untenable for many early users well beforehand.

The writing was on the wall for Twitter well before musk got involved, sadly.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#822

Post by parineum »

ragnese wrote: post #791
parineum wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe. Certainly the policy of the opposition has nothing to do with the backlash. No definitely not. It's certainly just dumb people being tricked by the bad guys. If these people could just get properly educated and shielded from the bad ideas surely they'd see the light.

So you're saying that the current management of Twitter does not favor politically-right messaging? Otherwise, your message is a non-sequitur. The comment you replied to made no statement about the effectiveness of the project. It's like saying that George Soros is engaged in trying to elect left-wing leadership; nobody denies that.

I'm saying the right wing push and it's attractiveness doesn't come from the top down.

Media is a bottom up industry, successful media is the media people want to consume. If right wing media is popular, it's because right wing messages are popular.

Acting like the media are the tastemakers is a convenient way for people to avoid looking in the mirror and doing any kind of self reflection.

The right wing is making a push in Europe because Elon Musk has a trillion dollars, not because the parties in power have done anything wrong. Their ideas are only unpopular because the bad man is lying to them. If it wasn't for all this fake news, everyone would see that I am obviously correct and we'd have 100% support.

X and it's right wing lean isn't the problem. People are attracted to right wing politics because they don't like what they currently have. The problems isn't that an alternative exists, the problem is the people don't like them.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#823

Post by kova12 »

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 recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#824

Post by hsuduebc2 »

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 do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#825

Post by strenholme »

electriclove wrote: post #818
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.

The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1]

I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.

[1] This isn’t actually true, as I detail at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html

[2] https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-fe...

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#826

Post by brynnbee »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #824
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 do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.

Mine rarely shows rage bait and when it does I just block everyone involved or add words to mute list. I think people who see this a lot are in fact baited and it creates a cycle. Which isn't to say it's a good system, more that it's easily avoided

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#828

Post by strenholme »

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.

Actually, the correct solution is Mastodon, which is an open protocol which can not become a walled garden the way Threads (based on Meta’s activity with Instagram and Facebook) will inevitably become a walled garden.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#829

Post by ButlerianJihad »

xvxvx wrote: post #309

Read-only mode is a great way to entice new users to your platform. If you want to share or comment, you need an account. Blocking ALL access will not have that effect. I went from an active Twitter user to simply having a dozen X accounts bookmarked via xcancel. I can live without them.

It is apparent that HN users do not comprehend how useful X is to normal and ordinary people who are not terminally online, and who are not "influencers" and are not "junkies" of social media.

X, and Facebook as well, are homes to companies, politicians, news outlets, government organs, and non-profit orgs. Any public service is going to have an X account to pump out announcements and updates about whatever is within their remit.

For example, you can follow local law enforcement agencies, local and national weather services, your senators and congresspeople, your health care providers, and much more. You can get urgent updates about traffic construction, accidents, and emergency response in your area. You can receive updates from your respresentatives in government, about their campaigns, about current issues and legislation, about good news and bad news.

The network effect here is strong. Even if all ordinary users and individuals decided to pack up, delete their X, and move to BlueSky or Mastodon, the official mouthpieces will stay on X and stay on Facebook. They will be there, and be available to the ordinary individuals. They'll be sending out updates to everyone who follows. That's the utility of X, and it's only become stronger and more robust over the past decade.

So it doesn't matter how the techies feel, it doesn't matter if there is no longer a viable "read-only mode" and it doesn't matter if you stay or if you leave, because the "normies" are there, the "normies" have legit accounts, and they're monitoring the accounts that have something to say to them.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#830

Post by roryirvine »

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.

Yeah, exactly. I feel like there must have been a better way to make the town square thing work.

I heard that ads on Twitter used to be much less profitable than on other platforms because the lack of a login wall meant they weren't able to track their viewers so precisely. Fine. But, at the same time, they hosted so much valuable content that contextual advertising might well have made up much of the difference. But Twitter's support for that was apparently very basic, with only very simple keyword targetting available.

It might not have been enough once they were loaded up with debt by Elon, but before that they would only have needed a relatively small uptick in income to make them more consistently profitable. And that could have made the town square version of Twitter a sustainable business for the foreseeable future.

And now we all have to deal with the rotting corpse of X, making it much harder for whoever or whatever wants to build any new form of public realm in that area. So more than just an opportunity wasted, it's acting as deterrent to trying again.

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