Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 836 posts

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#801

Post by throwatdem12311 »

angoragoats wrote: post #757
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free Speech isn’t about who is listening, it’s about who is speaking. Just because you can’t hear it doesn’t necessarily mean the person did not speak freely.

I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right). In the context of this type of free speech, if you have two identical posts, and one is behind a login wall and one isn’t, the one not behind the login wall is objectively more free.

> I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right).

So am I.

If a comedian is doing a bit at a bar and they charge a $5 cover to get in is that infringing on “free speech”. Of course not, that’s absurd. Why would be it any different online?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#802

Post by Dylan16807 »

WarmWash wrote: post #756
Dylan16807 wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they got the content for free, usually yes.

Youtube pays 60% of revenue to creators...

Youtube is pretty much fine. Outside of a few janky age restrictions, you can just go to youtube and watch videos.

Remember right at the start: "There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads." This is how youtube works.

X is the one blocking or messing up views without accounts (and also being too likely to ban accounts that don't give a phone number).

Though most people posting on youtube are doing it for free or negligible revenue (I'm not sure how it works out on a per-view basis), and a lot of the rest make almost all their money elsewhere.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#803

Post by mahboi »

Levitz wrote: post #650
vrganj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.

Damn it's almost as if this was a conversation we should have had around 2018 at the latest. Like evident bias in social networks was a real concern all along. What was the response every single time ? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter". I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this. Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit…

Yeah, most of the people are upset because they're Democrats politically on Twitter, and the old one catered to them.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#804

Post by Dylan16807 »

spullara wrote: post #790
like_any_other wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.

it is legal if you can do it, doesn't mean they have to like it. keeping features for logged in seems super reasonable to me.

"features" for logging in is in a broad sense reasonable.

When one of those features is being able to see the most recent tweets from an account, that's asinine.

In other words: If you link to a profile page, X doesn't properly show you. It gives you a random selection of popular tweets that person has made, often several years old.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#805

Post by mahboi »

vrganj wrote: post #208
frumplestlatz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given its extremely liberal content moderation policy, how is X a propaganda machine?

Here's a pretty in-depth investigation into the workings of X as far-right propaganda machine: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo... > right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning. > Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content s…

Before X flagged me as a bot for no reason, I had a mostly unused account and can confirm it was showing me a ton of right-wing content. Also lots of stuff related to Elon Musk in particular.

On the flip side, X has less moderation, and it's pretty even-handed. They're allowing a lot of pretty mild right-wing content that Twitter was banning people for.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#806

Post by emmelaich »

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.

X should provide an option to make youor posts public. And govt reps should be required to use it.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#807

Post by [deleted] »

immibis2 wrote: post #704
Forgeties79 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but my point is the Twitter experience is trash and not required like, say, paying an evil ISP or interacting with Google (for 99.9% of people abandoning and fully dodging Google is incredibly difficult). It’s working out for him because people won’t leave (even though engagement and user numbers are still below pre-acquisition numbers). It only has value because of his acquiring it with his other company. Prior…

You don't need an ISP or Google either. It's incredibly difficult for some people to leave either, but it's also incredibly difficult for some people to leave Twitter.

[deleted]

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#808

Post by caymanjim »

vladgur wrote: post #418
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…

How does one not engage with the corporate product at all? Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by…

It's basically impossible to not engage with any corporate products at all. It's trivially-easy to not engage with specific corporate products. I don't engage with Twitter, because I won't sign up and that makes it useless to me. I'm not missing out on anything I care about.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#809

Post by boie0025 »

jaggederest wrote: post #754
stymaar wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated. AFAIK, there isn't an single auth scheme on earth that guarantee human intervention[1]. Anyone can set-up a robot creating new users on a whim using single-use email addresses and even phone numbers. In fact, we know that OpenAI's agent have been doing exactly that when attacking Rubygem. And all AI labs are likely doing it for scrapping social media as well.…

The person who sets up that robot is the person responsible and effectively signing the contract by those actions. > Who are you gonna sue then? The person who set up the robot.

It seems that simple, I agree, but digging in we're winding up in a bit of a "responsible party" black hole, at least it seems from my non-legal engineer perspective. If I ask an AI to find me articles on some arbitrary things and it hacks the Gibson to do it; and I am not a computer expert, it will be a struggle a bit to honestly put the blame on me. It's always been that way I think.. in what reasonable world can a non-lawyer agree to 100+ pages of a ToS and actually understand it? No world. But that's the point I think. What if I modify every TOS in HTML before I submit it and then agree by checking the box under my "redlined" version of the contract? I think this stuff is going to become exponentially murkier as time goes on.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#810

Post by pdonis »

t-writescode wrote: post #799
pdonis wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.). What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And…

Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company. For many people and the companies or organizations they lead, “everyone uses X/Twitter” and/or “everyone can access X/Twitter”. We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying…

> Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company.

Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.

Post reply on HN