Live data from Hacker News

XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

171–180 of 702 posts

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.

I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.

Nah 10 years ago I could view the whole website logged out. Now it's been reduced to a single post with no replies.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#173
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?

Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?

I think users implicitly consent to their public data being public data when they put it in public together with other public data.

How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.

I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be. Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services…

right, it's not free, like you said

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#176
post #109

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

I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”. Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.

Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#177
post #94

Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.

So media outlets, influencers, etc have something to link to, and a way to promote Twitter by including tweets in their articles.

If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?

[flagged]

I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or diversion.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#179
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?

Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?

Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.

I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.

I disagree. There was a noticeable change some time after Elon bought it to make it even worse.
Post reply on HN