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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

#301

Post by thewebguyd »

WarmWash wrote: post #297
trey-jones wrote: post #221

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".

Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#302

Post by darkwater »

brainwad wrote: post #257
darkwater wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit... Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use. Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.

Well, adblockers don't copy the copyrighted content. They just control how it's rendered on the user's machine. Copyright cares about making copies and especially distributing them.

You have a point on this, I recognize, but it still seems a very thin line to walk (for X) - at least morally, because I don't think they are actually loosing real big money to anyone.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#303

Post by swed420 »

trey-jones wrote: post #221

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.

> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#305

Post by ralfd »

Aerocatia wrote: post #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.

Come on, be honest, what did you do?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#306

Post by rimunroe »

card_zero wrote: post #282
rimunroe wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes. Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.

There's the matter of linking to copyrighted works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink... If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright. Conclusion: copyright is not about copying,…

Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#307

Post by wraptile »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #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 accou…

You can scrape twitter pretty easily yourself with an account (lots of free code on github) but that's the thing - you need an account which is legally complicated but for your own personal use you can just create a dummy account and you'll never be blocked.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#308

Post by akerl_ »

roosterIllusi0n wrote: post #179
simianparrot wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?

Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.

Are they distilling?

Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#309

Post by vova_hn2 »

wraptile wrote: post #307
vova_hn2 wrote: post #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 accou…

You can scrape twitter pretty easily yourself with an account (lots of free code on github) but that's the thing - you need an account which is legally complicated but for your own personal use you can just create a dummy account and you'll never be blocked.

Don't they require a phone number? Even if they don't, they probably require email. I don't really want to give them my main email and even less - phone number. So, buying an account seems like less of a hassle, than figuring out where to get a temporary email.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#310

Post by Catloafdev »

weberer wrote: post #157
macNchz wrote: post #106

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.

No, it definitely was not as bad 10 years ago as it is today. Just objectively not true at all.
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