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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

241–250 of 763 posts

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#241
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good idea would be: Make a decision. A trade-off. Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform. Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people. There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy stea…

One possible decision is to use a deshittifying front-end, like Nitter.

It is a half-measure, though.

It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.

It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.

The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...

Remember the golden rule of the golden rules: Who has the gold makes the rules.

If a society operates under a rule like this, it is no better than Russia or any other tyranny where law is for me but not for thee. This is not how it should work in a supposedly free and lawful country.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transformation . Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no. Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company

So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed? Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.

That's exactly the way UK courts are heading, see Getty vs Stability AI. The court ruled that there's no infringment because the model doesn't store exact copies, just derived weights, and therefore when it generates new images those aren't copies of protected works.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#244
post #109

Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.

Pretty sure it's legal when you do it for your own use (same as browsing a website) but it's illegal to redistribute web scraped results.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#245
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?

> Why do we put up with it? You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.

I actually do want to do something. I started to scrape Twitter to make it freely available. The web should stay open.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or…

You are the only one who brought up that distraction from the fact that he routinely violates the first definition you mentioned.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think that's more true in image generation than in text? At least, all the money is in LLMs that write code, not LLMs that write O'Reilley-style coding books.

I thought LLM-authored books were rampant in Amazon, though?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#248
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reason for xcancel to exist A bit like your comment. It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?

A good idea would be: Make a decision. A trade-off. Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform. Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people. There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy stea…

These people includes pretty much every politician. I personally do have an X account and I do use X, but I completely understand why someone would want to read what their politicians are saying without wanting to create an account anywhere

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.

And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Bartz is an author though.

Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.

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