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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

291–300 of 763 posts

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#291

This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com. [1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox

People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)

Unfortunately not a luxury for all events.

Some organizations only post information on Twitter, especially those with limited resources. And if their followers are themselves limited in number, then that information is not disseminated.

For example, the Dutch Air Force is currently posting updates on their ongoing airborne exercise exclusively on Twitter: https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/f/falcon-leap

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#292
post #94

Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.

What other versions of twitter there are? I use it on both pc and mobile in browser with adblock and the experience is the same as 20 years ago. If anything the "for you" feed has become actually usable in last couple of years.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#294
post #290

it's going to be a cat and mouse game for as long as X can legally afford to keep it going (i.e. til the heat death of the universe) regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon net…

I use Twitter daily and haven't noticed any screws. How is Elon supposedly turning them?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really buy this. It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better Of course they complete. Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens. Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave…

It's not illegal to write a similar book or song to an existing one. Copyright only protects existing works from literal copying (possibly in part).

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#296
I have been suspended from Ex-Twitter for months for "inauthentic behavior" despite only ever just using the site normally. I would very much like to have nothing to do with this site anymore, but unfortunately many people and organizations from before Elon took it over still post there and I can't make them all move to another site (and the same site for that matter), so here we are.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#297

Regardless of the legality of the service: I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment. My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.

xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.

Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps more frustratingly, if you bite the bullet and browse the "new" version on your mobile browser, the page will eventually become non-responsive and have ~60% of your screen covered by a bottom banner that prompts you to download their app to continue. It's like they are actively trying to kill their userbase.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#299

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.

How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#300

Regardless of the legality of the service: I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment. My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads". The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product. xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized…

> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.

> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free

Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.

This vision is ripe for the picking:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

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