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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

621–630 of 809 posts

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#621
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My municipality does! Guess what they still don't really use... most of it still ends up on X exclusively.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#622
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We even saw it with RSS. Everyone using RSS was lamenting Google Reader going away. Isn't the client supposed to be the most easily replaceable part of RSS?

Normies dont think in protocols, they think in apps.

Websites said "follow our RSS feed," not "follow on Google Reader." Then again maybe normies never used RSS.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#623
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been working like that in the US for a while. Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires? Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.

Well I have heard that some people managed to sue some corporations and actually win some cases before.

PFAS case is a rare occurrence, and this is after DuPont knowing the harms and downplaying or ignoring it for decades.

A similar thing has been surfaced in Dalton, Georgia, again about PFAS [0]. Let's see how will it play out...

[0]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches. multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle). Insta delete, every time.

This isn't a criticism, but I do think this comment actually raises part of the problem. There are people on twitter telling people they should be on twitter, and it's apparently effective enough that at least some people are still signing up or trying to at least. The world needs more of the inverse, people telling those they care about who are on twitter to get off it.

And likewise, continuing to call it "Twitter" when that is long dead, which has amazingly positive brand association as near as I can tell entirely from the name doesn't do any of us a service.

If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to:

"Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#625
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been working like that in the US for a while. Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires? Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.

Well I have heard that some people managed to sue some corporations and actually win some cases before.

When I said the tech billionaires I meant the actual oligarchs.

Companies will eventually take a cost benefit evaluation and stop fighting if the risk is too high or the fines too large.

A personal billionaire who decides to fuck you over is capable of behaving irrationally and just beating you via resources.

Look at trumps infinite appeal strategy which apparently works.

He only just was forced to pay Jean Carrol a few months ago, four years after he lost his civil case.

If you’re a regular Joe and some billionaire harmed you in a way that hurt your income. You’re not gonna be able to afford 4 years of legal battles.

As long as money buys power in our legal system, you can’t compete with someone with effectively infinite more wealth than you.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#626

I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public services/institutions aware that some people do not have or want access to the site. That is the only way anything might change someday. Maybe I’m just being naive here, but what else can you do? xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since…

The unfortunate part is that each individual who attempts to leave is fighting the Network Effect[0]. It's fighting against the human organism's basic social nature. If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platfor…

If there were an API or reliable way to delete accounts programmatically, you could create a reverse-kickstarter-like site in which you pledged automatic future deletion of your account once a critical percentage of the people you followed (or who followed you) did the same. Action would be suspended for all participants until that critical threshold was reached.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#627
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay. At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~…

Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor. There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally bre…

Actually that’s a decent counter example.

YouTube hasn’t degraded in service or quality and when I pay them for the ad free service, they don’t try and sneak more ads in anyway like some other services have or the historical example of cable tv.

I’d probably be a lot happier if most software companies produced a product and kept a user relationship with me the way YouTube has.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is FLOSS invalidates that statement. Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.

I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it. Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago... There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume bui…

> There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101)

Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.

Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#629

I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public services/institutions aware that some people do not have or want access to the site. That is the only way anything might change someday. Maybe I’m just being naive here, but what else can you do? xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since…

The unfortunate part is that each individual who attempts to leave is fighting the Network Effect[0]. It's fighting against the human organism's basic social nature. If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platfor…

Unfortunate, yes.

Futile? No.

Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last.

Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last.

Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.

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