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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

#321

Post by WarmWash »

swed420 wrote: post #300
WarmWash wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-me…

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

What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.

A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.

The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#322

Post by fragmede »

afavour wrote: post #313
WarmWash wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.

They went login only in the wake of Hi-Q vs LinkedIn, which established that scraping a login-free site is legal.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#323

Post by immibis2 »

tehwebguy wrote: post #276
dannyw wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Which, btw, was the least bad thing about those TVs. I support residential proxying as a means to liberate public data that's being held captive by people like Elon.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#324

Post by immibis2 »

Klonoar wrote: post #267
immibis2 wrote: post #189

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…

Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not. Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

Anyone can make an account, though, and instantly access that content, so Elon doesn't really have any leg to stand on by claiming they're private. It's not the same as Cambridge Analytica scraping stuff you had to have certain privileges to see by tricking the system into granting those privileges.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#325

Post by WarmWash »

thewebguyd wrote: post #301
WarmWash wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.

But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#326

Post by ratelimitsteve »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #317
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe Recipes can’t be copyrighted Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...

fair, but recipes aren't the only thing where AI summaries at the top of search results are simultaneously transformative and competitive. Any information that is scraped from a website and then summarized by AI in a way that prevents that website from getting views is both transformative and competitive.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#327

Post by ranger_danger »

tehwebguy wrote: post #276
dannyw wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

And the company's previous name was, ominously... Luminati.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#328

Post by ranger_danger »

Klonoar wrote: post #267
immibis2 wrote: post #189

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…

Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not. Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

Aurora Store does the same thing to facilitate downloading Play Store apps.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#329

Post by swed420 »

WarmWash wrote: post #321
swed420 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-me…

>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable. What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them. A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spen…

> A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user.

login wall != paywall

As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?

Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...

(https://archive.is/wSmtd)

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#330

Post by thewebguyd »

WarmWash wrote: post #325
thewebguyd wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor. But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.

None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.
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