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

901–910 of 1000 posts

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#901

Post by benrutter »

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.

Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)

I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#902

Post by suslik »

pred_ wrote: post #339
vova_hn2 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are now telling me that I need an account to use old.reddit.com (the only usable version of Reddit UI). Needless to say, I have stopped visiting Reddit completely.

FWIW, Old Reddit Redirect manages to somehow still be usable without a user.

For me it requires login even with ORR.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#903

Post by benrutter »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #145
angoragoats wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.

That’s not what free speech is.

I agree, but also, it gets kinda messy here because Musk's "free speech" purchase if twitter was based on his understanding that Twitter not publishing content they deemed inflammatory or misinform was a violation of free speech, which I also don't think is true?

So I guess we're several layers of misunderstanding deep at this stage, and X's lockdown is ironic if its not free speech according to the flawed understanding of free speech it advocates? I dunno.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#904

Post by Nemo_bis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #363
Klonoar wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not. Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

To fix this: 1) Nitter offers a deal: download our browser extension, sign up for Twitter, and we'll give you some kind of perk (Amazon credits, whatever). 2) Browser extension surfs Twitter on the user's behalf, scraping and sending copies to Nitter. 3) We find out how serious the legal system is about prosecuting scraping.

Tall order. The main Nitter instances were using tens of thousands of accounts to evade detection, IIRC. Adding money to the mix creates more legal liability and a paper trail towards people who can be sued.

It's much easier if thousands of people set up their own Nitter instances.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#905

Post by troupo »

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…

Instagram is filled with ads, and it sucks.

Facebook? Same.

Xitter? Same.

Youtube? Enshittified beyond measure.

Google? Unusable.

So tell me. Where are these great amazing services supported by ads?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#906

Post by Nemo_bis »

znpy wrote: post #235
zqwt3k wrote: post #109

Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.

scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not. if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well. sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose politica…

The copyright implications of displaying Instagram content elsewhere are still unclear. There were many lawsuits over Instagram embeds. https://copyrightlately.com/legal-embed-instagram-photos-web...

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#907

Post by mitxela »

numpad0 wrote: post #832
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.

^ this and the entire drama is just an ad campaign to make the rebranding stick. what is really going to work is to keep calling it Twitter, as it identifies itself, and slowly move over the scene to Bluesky/Mastodon. What demoralize them the most is to show whoever pays for it doesn't matter.

It would be really funny if Elon lost the Twitter trademark due to not using it.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#908

Post by mitxela »

heavensteeth wrote: post #456
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…

Last time I tried creating a Twitter account, I couldn't even complete the sign-up flow before getting automatically banned pending giving them my phone number. After that, I went to like and follow things. My account was then banned again for suspicious activity.

[dead]

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#909

Post by dns_snek »

jack_h wrote: post #827
immibis2 wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooperation is possible, and can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions. However, those conditions are currently not present.

Market economies create economic cooperation. The dinner you ate required countless people from ranchers, farmers, mechanics, chemical manufacturers, steel manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, paper manufacturers, tubing manufacturers, oil manufacturers, fastener manufacturers and countless others working on intermediate factors of production. None of them deliberately and knowingly cooperated, rather prices in t…

The discussion wasn't about market vs command economy but about capitalism vs socialism/communism.

See: Market socialism

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#910

Post by mitxela »

immibis2 wrote: post #698
j-bos wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cfaa has broad interpretations

AFAIK it's been interpreted that getting public data while being someone the data holder doesn't like is, unusually, one of the very few things that is not a CFAA violation. Bright Data vs X for example.

You mean vs Meta
Post reply on HN