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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

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Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#201

Post by Planktonne »

brainwad wrote: post #176
rich_sasha wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”. Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.

Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

> Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.

I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#203

Post by immibis2 »

zahlman wrote: post #158
arrowsmith wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?

Can someone please explain to me any actual guidelines-based reason for the parent comment to have been flagged and killed (I vouched for it)?

The reason is likely not guidelines-based.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#204

Post by brainwad »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #186
brainwad wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

> Precedent is pretty clear: What cases are you citing when you say this?

Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#205

Post by 27183 »

immibis2 wrote: post #194
27183 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it . So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run mtr xcancel.com I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?

No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downlo…

I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#206

Post by immibis2 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #126
arrowsmith wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?

You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.

Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#207

Post by swed420 »

ImJamal wrote: post #165

It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access. It feels like an end of an era.

Reddit is still viewable, though they did finally axe "old" reddit for those not logged in.

But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#208

Post by vrganj »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #88
vrganj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.

Given its extremely liberal content moderation policy, how is X a propaganda machine?

Here's a pretty in-depth investigation into the workings of X as far-right propaganda machine: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...

> right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.

> Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.

> The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.

> Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#209

Post by immibis2 »

weberer wrote: post #190
angoragoats wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.

"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it. It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads. Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to…

Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#210

Post by InsideOutSanta »

freedomben wrote: post #134
Forgeties79 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.

I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be. Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services…

Elon Musk, gratis speech absolutist.
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