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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

#861

Post by t-writescode »

denismi wrote: post #842
t-writescode wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people have Wifi but not cell phone signal. A single tweet has very robust, existing infrastructure, over the “one email per person in a mailing list” style of email; and SMS is DoA when there’s no cell phone.

No phone, no TV, only a PC that they sit at logged in to Twitter all day refreshing their feed in case a local emergency comes up?

They have a cell phone on them because they have WiFi in their house, because they have Internet, and they have notifications turned on to their local emergency servers. Since Twitter has a push notifications and a shorter refresh timer, you get messages more regularly that you’ll actually read.

Compare that to email, which you’d get hundreds of messages a day and only care about 3 of them, so you’re not constantly checking.

Edit: dude you live in Australia. Do you know how people in the Bush get their emergency updates that they need to respond to urgently? I bet at least some of them use Twitter or something similar to it. They're not huddled around their weather radio all day (and that doesn't cover everything). Because I had family in rural California and that is exactly how they got theirs. Twitter and Facebook.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#862

Post by kalleboo »

socalgal2 wrote: post #837
muyuu wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much the standard to either soft-block or hard- block access into silos. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, etc ... all do it. Of course it's an openly anti-consumer practice, but it's one they get away with when they're big enough to flip the service burden to the client.

how is it anti-consumer? Claiming you should be able to freely access the content on some service feels like claiming you should be able to walk into any fast-food place and help yourself to their soda machine. A business is free to choose that you must login to access their content and you are free to choose not to do business with them if you don't like it. I generally chose the latter

Your analogy does not work since they can still show ads to logged-out users, nobody is getting anything for free. Meta even creates shadow-profiles of users without accounts to track them across the internet.

It's all about getting people locked into walled gardens. I wish the EU DMA had taken a harder stance on this and required all social media to federate to some extent.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#863

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#867

Post by kingkandu »

Twitter is a weird one because I absolutely hate using it and as someone who's built many feeds I can see how they're trying to farm engagement at the cost of their user's health.

But it is simultaneously the best place to get real time information and after reddit the best place to find human/bot generated content so I do still need access to the data.

Trusting Zuck to fill the gap with Threads is a moron's endeavour and Mastadon is too fragmented we need a centralized good actor to fix this.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#868

Post by stymaar »

nkozyra wrote: post #605
stymaar wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that you don't have to accept anything.

Sure. But then you don't get credentials and can't scrape.

You keep saying that but unless company start doing KYC there's absolutely no link between auth and ToS.

The authentication mechanisms used by websites don't have a specific legal power, it's just a POST request among other GET requests sent during scraping. And we have jurisprudence saying scrapping is legal no matter what the ToS of the website says, because the scraping entity never signed up the contract.

The only protection against scrapping that auth is giving you isn't a legal one, it's a technical one (you can detect and ban the scraping user account).

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#869

Post by alightsoul »

alterom wrote: post #753
mitxela wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it be? I know we've all got accustomed to the idea that preventing a billionaire from extorting money gets you in trouble, and it usually does, but it's not illegal.

>Why wouldn't it be? Well, for one, because xcancel was forced to suspend its service. There's legal as in "what the law says", and legal as in "what the judge will order you to do", and the latter sense is not as clear-cut as we'd want it to be.

Is it legal to make the whole world addicted to your product? Litigation, in the same way, is a ticking time bomb for meta worldwide.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#870

Post by alightsoul »

alterom wrote: post #753
mitxela wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it be? I know we've all got accustomed to the idea that preventing a billionaire from extorting money gets you in trouble, and it usually does, but it's not illegal.

>Why wouldn't it be? Well, for one, because xcancel was forced to suspend its service. There's legal as in "what the law says", and legal as in "what the judge will order you to do", and the latter sense is not as clear-cut as we'd want it to be.

Xcancel was accused of using the twitter API. You don't have to use it. You can have a machine vision model process screenshots. You can also process the Dom. You don't offer a freely usable service or software to the public, only the final result. That final result is opinionated according to the very public accounts you want and does not offer broad scope access to accounts. You do not let the public control it nor provide a product to browse to random or posts about anything like nitter. Or you can process the content into your own news account with ai which is what most news accounts do anyways and then it becomes yours.
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