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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

#461

Post by ndiddy »

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

I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are, but AFAIK the general trend of login-walling services over the past few years has happened due to a court decision saying that it's legal to scrape publicly available data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn ). If they gate content behind a login wall and put a clause in the EULA forbidding scraping, this lets them use the CFAA to go after anybody who still scrapes the site.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#462

Post by monocasa »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #449
monocasa wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet right wingers openly calling for the west to ethnically cleanse the non white races get reinstated. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus... And simply criticizing Musk is enough to get a shadow ban https://futurism.com/twitter-shadow-ban-elon-musk

Andrew Anglin, the subject of the first article, was re-banned in 2023 for the same reason that crimethink, inc was banned. The subjects of the second article are particularly odious right-wing conspiracy theorists and racists that lost their reach, which they believe was connected to arguing with Elon. That seems like an action you’d be in favor of, and also it counters the propaganda claim — but regardless, their c…

He had already been banned for the same reason, and Musk unbanned him in the same wave that had him ban crimethinc.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#464

Post by Forgeties79 »

Operyl wrote: post #148
freedomben wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be. Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services…

The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.

Many municipalities have text message alerts these days. I doubt it’s 100% coverage but I bet most of us can live with that or currently do.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#465

Post by wolrah »

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".

I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.

It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.

That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#466

Post by joquarky »

blfr wrote: post #294
nunez wrote: 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?

Don't sea lion.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#467

Post by basilikum »

weberer wrote: post #190
angoragoats wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.

"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it. It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads. Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to…

Twitter heavily censors speech on the platform itself by downranking things they do not like without any transparency.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#468

Post by nkozyra »

ndiddy wrote: post #461
swed420 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are, but AFAIK the general trend of login-walling services over the past few years has happened due to a court decision saying that it's legal to scrape publicly available data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn ). If they gate content behind a login wall and put a clause in the EULA forbidding scraping, this lets them use the CFAA to go after anybody who…

Effectively it forces scrapers to become a party to the terms of service, which usually contains the "no programmatic access (other than via paid API)" or specifically prohibits automated scraping.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#469

Post by aaroninsf »

Surprised there are still people who think the issue with "X" is that it is a bad product.

It is a bad product, and it is pathological in the way all degraded social media platforms are bad.

But it's also worse than those others, in well documented ways; and it's long past time anyone with integrity found alternatives.

The failure of the "AI" industry to do so is an indictment and serious red flag.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#470

Post by nkozyra »

cobbal wrote: post #413
vladgur wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to read what service XYZ offers, but you dont want to do it within the constraints of service XYZ. If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content. The market would dictate that if X content consumers found it too inconvenient to consume from X and that would result in a significant drop in demand, the X content producers would stop producing their content on X…

Twitter promised an open publishing platform with extensive API access. They're the ones who broke the (social) contract, not us.

Well if you're willing to accept that the extensive API access comes at a price, they at least somewhat fulfilled that promise.

It's just a different kind of gate, though.

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