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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

#941

Post by amelius »

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.

Make companies give up power? Never going to happen.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#942

Post by wraptile »

instantlyblocke wrote: post #869
wraptile wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can scrape twitter pretty easily yourself with an account (lots of free code on github) but that's the thing - you need an account which is legally complicated but for your own personal use you can just create a dummy account and you'll never be blocked.

> and you'll never be blocked. Youll be instantyl blocked, because accounts without Biometric login and Phone numbers get flagged and asked for validation after 36 hours.

Well that wouldn't be instantly but either of those can be added with almost no real costs at personal-use scale. Throw away phone number for x.com registration is https://github.com/CloakHQ/CloakBrowser-Manager and mobile IP hotspot. x.com is so heavily botted that your personal 1,000 scrapes per day will not even trigger any alarms.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#943

Post by amelius »

jakevoytko wrote: post #470
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.

I hate when companies do this. Instagram is a black box for me. Whenever someone sends me a link the web app is completely nonfunctional; clicking links just reload the page, it constantly tries opening the app, etc The last time I signed up for an Instagram account (2016) it got immediately flagged as a bot account. I think I was supposed to appeal it to have it reinstanted, but why bother if this is how badly they…

I think I'm shadow banned from instagram. I can't even log in without weird stuff happening.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#944

Post by simondotau »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #845
simondotau wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Horrific. Wikipedia is one of the very few large entities on the web left that are not actively harming the species.

In terms of species-level harm arising from the ways their systems can be abused, I’d rank them roughly as follows. To be clear, I’m ranking a platform’s potential for species-level harm based on its scale and its ability to concentrate, enforce, or algorithmically amplify a shared narrative or behaviour while limiting meaningful challenge or escape.

  S-tier: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube [shorts, recommendations]
  A-tier: Facebook
  B-tier: Wikipedia, Reddit
  C-tier: X, YouTube [subscriptions]
  D-tier: Most major LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT.
  Null-tier: Bluesky, Truth Social, Mastodon, etc. (too irrelevant to have any meaningful species-level effect.)
I can imagine how this analysis might look bonkers at first blush. But I strongly account for how much disagreement is surfaced. Say what you will about X, at least the arguments are visible for all to see. By contrast, the proportion of Wikipedia readers who also read the talk pages to understand active disputes probably rounds to zero.

LLMs such as ChatGPT are problematic because they can reflect and reinforce prevailing views embedded across their source material, most significantly Wikipedia. But their conversational nature provides an important escape hatch: you can challenge an answer, interrogate its assumptions, ask for competing interpretations, and explore multiple perspectives.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#945

Post by simondotau »

nozzlegear wrote: post #931
simondotau wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It suffers from the same fundamental flaw as a self-selected poll: the people most motivated to participate are not necessarily representative, impartial or even particularly reasonable. What appears like a diverse community of fair, objective and well-intentioned people is nothing of the sort. The community-driven model necessarily means that control of narrative rewards persistence and an aptitude for social engine…

That makes sense, thanks for explaining! Sounds a lot like the overly-opinionated reddit mod problem.

The key difference is that Reddit has never been treated like a synonym for objectivity.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#946

Post by simondotau »

smaudet wrote: post #907
simondotau wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet, wikipedia is not owned by... That is a red herring. A corporation can act ethically. A charity can act disgracefully. A government can protect people. A neighbourhood association can bully them. A billionare can be philanthropic. A group of children can terrorise a community.

Your "counter" is nonsensical - if you are referring to the concept of a logical "red herring", something to distract by introducing an irrelevant topic, this is not that. Your comment pertained to your (dislike of) use of wikipedia in contrast to the relevant site (X.com). My comment pertains to both of the relevant websites you had related (wikipedia is no more related to x.com than governments, neighborhoods, etc.…

You substituted a different question ("who owns the platform") for the one I originally raised ("how its information and narratives are governed in practice"). Call that a red herring or simply a non sequitur; the label isn't important. It didn't rebut the argument.

You're missing the point of those examples. Of course you can reverse them -- and that is precisely my point! Organisational form or ownership tells you very little, by itself, about whether an institution behaves well. My criticism of Wikipedia concerned how authority over contested information emerges and is exercised. "But Wikipedia isn't owned by an evil oligarch" doesn't answer that criticism.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#948

Post by mitxela »

Plont wrote: post #781
mitxela wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is social media.

I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here. I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately. As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an…

Could you make your own HN?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#949

Post by prolly97 »

ITT. Non-X users complaining that they can't use X. If you don't like the content on X enough to make an account, I don't see how this is a big loss.

And yes I've on occasion had the same thought with TikTok - it'd be nice to see the vids that people send me, without making an account. But I'll just have to live my life without having seen that one super funny/interesting/enlightening video, or have to ask for a summary :)

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#950

Post by simondotau »

vrganj wrote: post #885
simondotau wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.

That's not what the data says: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...

That's what some motivated cable news researchers decided to abuse statistics to say. To be generous, I would say the article makes a significantly stronger causal claim than the experiment supports. The best description is a good exploratory algorithm audit with weak statistical and causal inference.

The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.

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