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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

#381

Post by 8note »

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.

the issue is consistently network effects.

large social media companies arent there because theyre good or that there are no competitors, its that switching cost is high.

you should be pointing at the government to enforce interoperability standards such that logins and so on are not locked to one place.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#382

Post by input_sh »

fragmede wrote: post #322
afavour wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, it definitely didn't happen in the wake of its new owner feeling like it in one of his first major changes to the platform because of his "concerns" with bot traffic.

Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#383

Post by pino83 »

immibis2 wrote: post #217
pino83 wrote: 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.

Are these cat and mouse games (that you are about to lose atm) maybe an indicator that something is wrong with it?

Or should things be like that?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#384

Post by zem »

mitxela wrote: post #25
simondotau wrote: post #10

If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X. On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible des…

Suppose you're on HN and someone posts a link to X. Is the correct reaction 1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.

at the very least whoever posts the link has presumably accessed it, so we should normalise pasting the full text in here

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#385

Post by 8note »

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.

X doesnt own msot of those copyrights, except where its elon musk's own posts.

i dont think the actual copyright owners care, given they put their content onto a vaguely public view where they aim to get the most traffic to something else they are doing

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#386

Post by rusk »

swed420 wrote: post #303
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

It's ineptitude. Of course it is. Otherwise it would be indefensible.

EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#387

Post by viccis »

downrightmike wrote: post #373
yoz-y wrote: post #94

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

They fired that guy years ago, so no one knows how to decom it without breaking everything

They managed to get pretty close to decomming it which is that it's now impossible to sign up on desktop without an account that requires a phone number tied to it.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#388

Post by WarmWash »

8note wrote: post #375
WarmWash wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel

I can't write out here how economics works, how things have value, and how humans barter time and energy using abstractions like money.

By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#390

Post by frumplestlatz »

monocasa wrote: post #377
frumplestlatz wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So journalists ran a study with extremely poor sampling, base rate, and classification methodology designed by left-wing researchers and activists groups (including groups explicitly opposed to X), found the conclusions they wanted to find, and spent the second half of their article decrying the lack of heavy-handed moderation that pre-Musk Twitter used to control speech. All we can actually derive from that article…

Musk also uses plenty of heavy handed moderation; it's just almost all directed at the left. For instance: https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethinc-...

They were banned for literally advocating for political violence. The fact that they hadn’t been banned earlier is the only concerning fact here.

The current top article on their website argues for punching their political opponents in the streets.

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