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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

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271–280 of 764 posts

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#271
post #259

So are you, dear reader, for intellectual property laws or not. I see a lot of "anti-this" sentiment confused with "anti-AI [data collection]." The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.

I do take your point, that someone against using twitter for training data in AI who then uses a service that might be violating copyright seems hypocritical. But first of all, the people voicing these opinions may not be the same person, despite commenting on the same website.

But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.

I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.

pretty sure it was even worse ten years ago cause very active twitter users would pay for 3rd party twitter apps (maybe twitter didn't have an official app back then? ~2012-2013)

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#274
Just by googling "twitter api" I am able to find an "unofficial API" (scraped, obviously), that gives you access to tweets for around $0.15/1k tweets. Which is expensive if you want to, let's say, train a model, but super cheap for a casual user.

A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.

Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.

What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#275
post #184

IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website. You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".) If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives…

I don't want to be tracked by x.com, but still want to be able to read links people send me to tweets. It's pretty reductive to say that people are using it because they "hate Elon so much," or even that they "want to engage with it.'

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#276
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers. I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an acc…

At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty. Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks. As an example o…

If the name Bright Data is ringing a bell to anyone, it’s probably because they are a (the?) primary offender running the LG TV “residential proxy” (botnet)

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#277
post #184

IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website. You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".) If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives…

> You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)

Why? The site still hosts plenty of content worth seeing. Is it really so silly to do it via a better UI, or to not want an account?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or get this: you could read news if that's what you're interested in. Social media isn't news. It's entertainment.

> Social media isn't news What is? TV, Radio, Newspapers, Town square, are all entertainment

There isn't much TBH. All newswires are even propaganda by selection mostly. I'd say the newswires that still sort of pretend to be news and usually are only biased through selection: AP and Reuters.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#279
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit says hello

And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.

They are now telling me that I need an account to use old.reddit.com (the only usable version of Reddit UI). Needless to say, I have stopped visiting Reddit completely.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#280
post #99

Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?

Do they not understand you can still serve ads to non-logged-in users? They can still be tracked nearly as effectively with fingerprinting.

I assume the limit is related to 3rd party AI scraping training.
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