xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
XCancel service is suspended until further notice (xcancel.com)
187 pointsby gaganyaan8 hours ago454 comments
phforms 34 minutes ago
I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public services/institutions aware that some people do not have or want access to the site. That is the only way anything might change someday. Maybe I’m just being naive here, but what else can you do?
demo4567 30 minutes ago
Exactly. I hate that we have people still pushing X even after knowing about a racist pedo feudalist running the corp for propaganda
asdff 26 minutes ago
I don't understand who all these people are who keep saying 'but I need twitter for my local politicians.' Like really? I have not followed any local politicians or authorities twitter and I still get relevant information. Believe it or not, which you might not if all you do is parrot these comments and I have seen this very comment line of thinking parroted for YEARS about twitter, most people do not follow the city hall twitter if they even have a twitter, and they get by fine. I mean people are citing they need to follow their utility. Are you kidding me? Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
bpt3 7 minutes ago
> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.
Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.
You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.
jdc0589 21 minutes ago
about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches.
multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).
Insta delete, every time.
trey-jones 5 hours ago
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.
WarmWash 3 hours ago
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 content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
swed420 3 hours ago
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
WarmWash 2 hours ago
>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 spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
swed420 2 hours ago
> A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user.
login wall != paywall
As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
WarmWash 2 hours ago
All the evidence in the world that corporations are greedy doesn't detract from the fact the end users are also greedy.
It's all greed, all the ways down.
I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
immibis2 2 hours ago
What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
WarmWash an hour ago
The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them.
And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
swed420 2 hours ago
Convenient that your "principles" disallow you from seeing critique of said principles.
WarmWash an hour ago
Funny that your critique is still capitalist...
8note an hour ago
profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel
WarmWash an hour ago
I can't write out here how economics works, how things have value, and how humans barter time and energy using abstractions like money.
By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.
like_any_other an hour ago
You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
spullara an hour ago
this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.
like_any_other 20 minutes ago
Users were affected in exactly the same way. And every user - i.e. poster - was first just a visitor. Much fewer would have become posters if they'd been greeted by a login wall that wanted an e-mail and phone-number.
lovich an hour ago
I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay.
At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.
We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.
The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
WarmWash an hour ago
Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor.
There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates.
There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
vladgur 43 minutes ago
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 a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.
What is the alternative exactly
WarmWash 3 minutes ago
On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for.
On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.
butlike 33 minutes ago
Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
pennomi 24 minutes ago
Advocating for demonetization of a service is not the same as trying to maximize personal profits. Maybe not everything in the world is about money.
thewebguyd 3 hours ago
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
WarmWash 2 hours ago
Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.
But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago
None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.
arjie 2 hours ago
True, and Britain ruled the waves with wooden warships for a long time. But if they went back to wooden warships they would not rule the waves. The world has changed. Adblock, archive.is, third party mirrors all exist today.
WarmWash 2 hours ago
You can rest assured, 100%, that account walls are also there for money.
I'd be tickled if you argue that corporations create friction for any other reason than money.
bigfishrunning an hour ago
The login wall provides one more avenue for profit: selling the data of logged-in users. A profile with a history of likes, read-times, etc is more valuable then a pair of eyeballs that are glazed-over and not clicking on an ad...
butlike 19 minutes ago
Is it that much more valuable to click on an ad than see it? I mean, network television operated on ads you can't click on for decades and made billion-dollar empires.
kennywinker an hour ago
> But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this
Sorry, what? The internet is unwilling to create twitter clones?
Bluesky, mastodon, pleroma, misskey, diaspora, threads, fucking truth social… there is no shortage of twitter alternatives.
WarmWash 35 minutes ago
None of which has more the 1-2% of twitters MAU.
If any of those were highly profitable, they would be able to grow. But more profit for them, means less profit for users, means they are stuck fighting over crumbs from Twitter.
kennywinker 22 minutes ago
You've moved the goalpost.
The internet is happy to create alternatives. Network effects mean it's VERY hard to change the default social network once it's established.
I hate using facebook marketplace, but over the past 6-ish years everybody in my city has moved off craigslist to marketplace - so now I use marketplace because otherwise I can't sell my shit. Am I the problem?
- also, an aside, but threads has 400 mil monthly active users, or at least facebook says that. so ~70% of twitter's audience. But threads is even more locked down than twitter, so not really a win.
8note an hour ago
the issue is consistently network effects.
large social media companies arent there because theyre good or that there are no competitors, its that switching cost is high.
you should be pointing at the government to enforce interoperability standards such that logins and so on are not locked to one place.
afavour 3 hours ago
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.
fragmede 2 hours ago
They went login only in the wake of Hi-Q vs LinkedIn, which established that scraping a login-free site is legal.
input_sh an hour ago
Sure, it definitely didn't happen in the wake of its new owner feeling like it in one of his first major changes to the platform because of his "concerns" with bot traffic.
Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.
throwaway894345 2 hours ago
Your comment seems to implicitly assume that X has some ethical claim to the content they're monetizing, when in fact they're trying to monetize _others'_ content.
wolrah 13 minutes ago
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.
It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.
That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.
swed420 3 hours ago
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
rusk an hour ago
It's ineptitude. Of course it is. Otherwise it would be indefensible.
spuz an hour ago
The decision to force you to sign in to view replies is clearly not by accident or ineptitude. It's probably not malice either - just a business decision.
butlike 37 minutes ago
So business decisions are absolved of morality?
drewbeck 30 minutes ago
No. “Malice” isn’t the only possible descriptor with moral weight. There’s many more ways this decision could be immoral without malice.
treyd 37 minutes ago
A system that makes "business decisions" indistinguishable from malice is an interesting one.
ndiddy 18 minutes ago
I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are, but AFAIK the general trend of login-walling services over the past few years has happened due to a court decision saying that it's legal to scrape publicly available data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn ). If they gate content behind a login wall and put a clause in the EULA forbidding scraping, this lets them use the CFAA to go after anybody who still scrapes the site.
nkozyra 9 minutes ago
Effectively it forces scrapers to become a party to the terms of service, which usually contains the "no programmatic access (other than via paid API)" or specifically prohibits automated scraping.
stymaar 6 minutes ago
How can an automated process be a party in the terms of services though?
timcobb an hour ago
Twitter itself doesn't even suck too much for me it's the broader context that makes it a no go
runjake an hour ago
These browser extensions still work:
For Chrome: https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire...
For Safari: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
vladgur an hour ago
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.
I dont like many things about X -- random ads, bookmark folders being a paid feature, enshittification of the algorithm if you god forbid linger over some controversial video or content.
But i keep coming back to it because its the best way to follow the minds of brilliant techies. The basic sign up flow that i did years ago was basically a no-op.
I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.
cobbal an hour ago
Twitter promised an open publishing platform with extensive API access. They're the ones who broke the (social) contract, not us.
nkozyra 7 minutes ago
Well if you're willing to accept that the extensive API access comes at a price, they at least somewhat fulfilled that promise.
It's just a different kind of gate, though.
ImPostingOnHN 43 minutes ago
They want to consume XYZ, written by A,B,C and posted on twitter.
Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?
clcaev 25 minutes ago
Clearly they approve or they'd at least stop advertising their twitter handles on their websites and handouts. Most brands cannot ignore such a vast network effects and have made the decision to continue despite the changes.
porkshoe 27 minutes ago
> I suspect that for most people
Most people do not use X.
X usage is down year over year.
The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.
heavensteeth 23 minutes ago
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.
jakevoytko 7 minutes ago
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 treat users?
Can you imagine going to work as Instagram's web developer, spending your day finding new ways that the app accidentally works and disabling them?
zqwt3k 6 hours ago
Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.
wahnfrieden 6 hours ago
It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping
Edit: not a moral stance
zqwt3k 6 hours ago
That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.
echelon 5 hours ago
Grok can do that if you give it an HN thread or other websites.
jm4 5 hours ago
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?
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
> Why do we put up with it?
You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.
flaburgan 4 hours ago
I actually do want to do something. I started to scrape Twitter to make it freely available. The web should stay open.
immibis2 2 hours ago
I am also doing something, by hosting one of the public instances of Nitter.
Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?
simianparrot 5 hours ago
Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?
conception 5 hours ago
Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.
27183 5 hours ago
Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
mtr xcancel.com
immibis2 5 hours ago
No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
27183 5 hours ago
I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.
rimunroe 4 hours ago
Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.
27183 4 hours ago
> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
rimunroe 4 hours ago
> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
card_zero 3 hours ago
There's the matter of linking to copyrighted works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...
If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.
Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.
rimunroe 3 hours ago
Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.
amiga386 4 hours ago
It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.
You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)
Classic essay about techies not understanding the law: What Colour Are Your Bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
sekh60 4 hours ago
I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.
rimunroe 3 hours ago
It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.
The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.
sekh60 2 hours ago
Oh yeah, I understood your point, but given MDY Industries, LLC v .Blizzard who knows what the "right" judge would rule? With IP laws these days we're really getting into weird places.
immibis2 4 hours ago
It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
rimunroe 4 hours ago
And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.
bakies 5 hours ago
i just screenshotted this comment without your consent
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
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.
roosterIllusi0n 5 hours ago
Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.
wahnfrieden 4 hours ago
No it’s not
akerl_ 3 hours ago
Are they distilling?
Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.
immibis2 2 hours ago
That's not what distilling is either. Distilling is training your AI to exactly copy someone else's AI.
ranger_danger 2 hours ago
How do you know data is copied to their servers?
> If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.
https://www.copyright.gov/512/
https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-c...
HumblyTossed 5 hours ago
There's a button on X that allows me to repost someone else's content.
wahnfrieden 5 hours ago
That’s not rehosting
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
bel8 5 hours ago
there's a setting to disable that
blitzar 5 hours ago
Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.
HumblyTossed 5 hours ago
Aaron Swartz died so that "AI" billionaires can live.
rich_sasha 5 hours ago
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.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
Transformation.
Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.
Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company
bluefirebrand 4 hours ago
So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?
Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.
brainwad 4 hours ago
That's exactly the way UK courts are heading, see Getty vs Stability AI. The court ruled that there's no infringment because the model doesn't store exact copies, just derived weights, and therefore when it generates new images those aren't copies of protected works.
bluefirebrand 3 hours ago
That's stupid, these courts are stupid
It should have nothing to do with storing copies it should have to do with what the models can produce. And it's clear they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.
That shouldn't satisfy anyone.
immibis2 2 hours ago
> they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.
In other words... they can't. A different one can but this one can't. The court is not stupid, and will consider this fact.
dismalaf 4 hours ago
The point is that you can't steal someone else's content 1:1. But you can use it for a different use (say, display the tweet in an article, then comment on it).
brainwad 5 hours ago
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.
bonsai_spool 5 hours ago
> Precedent is pretty clear:
What cases are you citing when you say this?
immibis2 5 hours ago
brainwad 5 hours ago
Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.
lesuorac 4 hours ago
Bartz is an author though.
Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.
brainwad 4 hours ago
They can just round up some friendly users and sue under their names. Starting with their own corporate accounts?
bonsai_spool 2 hours ago
These statements would suggest that the precedent is not, in fact, clear
lesuorac an hour ago
That would definitely limit damages to strictly those accounts.
I'm not even sure he can use his own account as one of them. The SEC might be pretty friendly to him but I'm not sure that limiting access to a location where material information about Tesla/SpaceX is provided won't become a problem.
But I'm not even sure what damages the accounts are suffering as revenue sharing is going away [1]. With Bartz the damage is a loss of sale. With X the damage is $0 per post to the poster.
There is a newer Original Content Rewards program [2] but it seems to split revenue from X Premium and presumably people that have X Premium are not using XCancel so the damages would be 0.
Planktonne 5 hours ago
> 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.
It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.
I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
brainwad 5 hours ago
I think that's more true in image generation than in text? At least, all the money is in LLMs that write code, not LLMs that write O'Reilley-style coding books.
_flux 4 hours ago
I thought LLM-authored books were rampant in Amazon, though?
wongarsu 3 hours ago
If you have a websites that offers guides, how-tos or tutorials, LLMs directly compete with you. StackOverflow would also have a really good case
After all LLMs don't just code, they also answer questions and give step-by-step instructions. In terms of total userbase those features are used a lot more than writing code
nixpulvis 4 hours ago
I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...
bayindirh 4 hours ago
Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:
Who has the gold makes the rules.
atemerev 4 hours ago
If a society operates under a rule like this, it is no better than Russia or any other tyranny where law is for me but not for thee. This is not how it should work in a supposedly free and lawful country.
bio_hacker 3 hours ago
That’s how works everywhere
lovich an hour ago
It’s been working like that in the US for a while.
Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires?
Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.
bluefirebrand 4 hours ago
No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days
If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?
brainwad 4 hours ago
There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.
darkwater 4 hours ago
And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.
brainwad 4 hours ago
It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
darkwater 4 hours ago
> Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use. Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.
brainwad 4 hours ago
Well, adblockers don't copy the copyrighted content. They just control how it's rendered on the user's machine. Copyright cares about making copies and especially distributing them.
darkwater 3 hours ago
You have a point on this, I recognize, but it still seems a very thin line to walk (for X) - at least morally, because I don't think they are actually loosing real big money to anyone.
8note an hour ago
X doesnt own msot of those copyrights, except where its elon musk's own posts.
i dont think the actual copyright owners care, given they put their content onto a vaguely public view where they aim to get the most traffic to something else they are doing
butlike 5 minutes ago
Xcancel isn't copying the copyrighted content either. It takes the raw JSON/HTML data from twitter/x via reverse proxy and redisplays it on xcancel, as opposed to twitter/x. How is that copying?
bluefirebrand 3 hours ago
I don't really buy this.
It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better
Of course they complete.
Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.
Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing
Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?
brainwad 3 hours ago
It's not illegal to write a similar book or song to an existing one. Copyright only protects existing works from literal copying (possibly in part).
immibis2 2 hours ago
And derivative works, like AI makes
wongarsu 3 hours ago
If LLMs only made SO redundant by writing code and solving my technical problems autonomously so I never have to think about it, I would agree. But often I do ask LLMs technical questions, and they answer in great detail. And that part is a very direct SO competitor
immibis2 2 hours ago
If two things are competing, they are in the same market by definition.
MentalM 24 minutes ago
> weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?
But it is not the AI who is killing it, users are doing it.
ratelimitsteve 3 hours ago
How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)
bonsai_spool 2 hours ago
> How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe
Recipes can’t be copyrighted
Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...
ratelimitsteve 2 hours ago
fair, but recipes aren't the only thing where AI summaries at the top of search results are simultaneously transformative and competitive. Any information that is scraped from a website and then summarized by AI in a way that prevents that website from getting views is both transformative and competitive.
kelvinjps10 34 minutes ago
but xcancel is not putting ads or making a commercial product
htrp 4 hours ago
except a bunch of paywalled stuff did end up in training corpora
immibis2 5 hours ago
Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
dannyw 4 hours ago
At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
immibis2 4 hours ago
Notice it says "terms of service or copyright". If X's lawyers have any intelligence, they'll have a reason why XCancel is not identical to Bright Data. Perhaps this time, instead of claiming it's a copyright violation, they'll claim it's wire fraud because multiple accounts are used.
tehwebguy 3 hours ago
If the name Bright Data is ringing a bell to anyone, it’s probably because they are a (the?) primary offender running the LG TV “residential proxy” (botnet)
immibis2 2 hours ago
Which, btw, was the least bad thing about those TVs. I support residential proxying as a means to liberate public data that's being held captive by people like Elon.
ranger_danger 2 hours ago
And the company's previous name was, ominously... Luminati.
like_any_other an hour ago
I wonder if anti-SLAPP laws could be used to shield nitter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
Klonoar 3 hours ago
Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not.
Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?
ktm5j 3 hours ago
Yes, that's what they went on to point out.
immibis2 2 hours ago
Anyone can make an account, though, and instantly access that content, so Elon doesn't really have any leg to stand on by claiming they're private. It's not the same as Cambridge Analytica scraping stuff you had to have certain privileges to see by tricking the system into granting those privileges.
Klonoar 2 hours ago
Elon unfortunately may have a leg to stand on, because it doesn't functionally matter whether "anyone can make an account and see it". I don't believe any legal ruling to date has been fine with that distinction.
immibis2 an hour ago
Do you mean this will be the first legal ruling about this particular variation of the issue?
charcircuit 43 minutes ago
But if they ban the nitter operator surely you can't just bypass that ban legally by making a new X account. That there are bans and the operator has to bypass bans by pretending to be a new person I think that this makes it different.
It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.
ranger_danger 2 hours ago
Aurora Store does the same thing to facilitate downloading Play Store apps.
CamperBob2 an hour ago
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.
bigfishrunning an hour ago
The whole point is not signing up for twitter. If signing up for twitter wasn't a problem, Nitter wouldn't exist in the first place.
CamperBob2 26 minutes ago
But the fact remains, people continue to sign up for Twitter. As long as that's the case, Nitter should probably try to take advantage of it.
sifar an hour ago
I like this framing, like Schrödinger's cat.
znpy 4 hours ago
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 political ideas we like more.
immibis2 2 hours ago
Meta has no exclusive rights to the content on Instagram, and X has no exclusive rights to the content on X. They have a non-exclusive license to republish it, etc.
dismalaf 4 hours ago
Pretty sure it's legal when you do it for your own use (same as browsing a website) but it's illegal to redistribute web scraped results.
burnte 4 hours ago
It's not that cut and dry or else search engines wouldn't be legal. It depends on how much is used, for what context, etc. This very well may wind up being fair use.
dismalaf 4 hours ago
Search engines "modify" it ie. show snippets + direct to the actual site.
In general fair use pretty much always requires it to be transformative and/or point to the source. Simply scraping it to prevent people from going to X isn't free use in any definition I've heard.
gosub100 3 hours ago
Remember ~10 years ago when Google had "cached" versions of the websites? I believe they removed that feature for this reason.
gosub100 3 hours ago
Now I want to know, what happens if you redistribute an "AI summary" of the copyright material?
Quitschquat an hour ago
Thin skins over at there at X
DavCreator an hour ago
https://xxcancel.com is up and redirecting to working Nitter instances.
pamcake 6 hours ago
Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.
latexr 6 hours ago
> permanently archived
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
zImPatrick 6 hours ago
Zedeus said "it's hopefully temporary, but it'll remain that way until further notice." in the matrix room
Leonard_of_Q 5 hours ago
On that same page:
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
petcat 5 hours ago
> Following legal advice
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but the software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
graemep 5 hours ago
I imagine it will be hosted in jurisdictions other than the US.
advisedwang an hour ago
In cases like these, companies often try to go after the upstream project, not just operators. The law gives them lots of tools for this: the CFAA has a conspiracy provision; The DMCA has a provision against making software for circumventing copyright; Trademark law might make the name nitter or xcancel illegal; and finally even if the claims are weak the litigation itself is an enormous burden
angoragoats 5 hours ago
The repo being archived happened after that UPDATE post that you mention. So the project has gone from suspended, to un-suspended, and now it's suspended again (and the repo got archived this time).
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...
ranger_danger 2 hours ago
Development still continues by others: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter
Aerocatia 3 hours ago
I have been suspended from Ex-Twitter for months for "inauthentic behavior" despite only ever just using the site normally.
I would very much like to have nothing to do with this site anymore, but unfortunately many people and organizations from before Elon took it over still post there and I can't make them all move to another site (and the same site for that matter), so here we are.
ralfd 3 hours ago
Come on, be honest, what did you do?
captainbadass33 an hour ago
dared to use twitter with only an anonymous email is my guess. musk demands you phone and biometrics
newscracker 6 hours ago
This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com.
Forgeties79 5 hours ago
People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)
stingraycharles 5 hours ago
Yeah as long as the audience is there, people will keep posting on Twitter.
rolymath 5 hours ago
I mean, you clearly don't use Twitter if you think that's how it's used.
PxldLtd 5 hours ago
I don't use twitter but it feels like a platform for bothering terminally-online celebrities
BizarreByte 5 hours ago
Who uses twitter for current events? I’m there for extremely niche hobby related posts.
larsmaxfield 3 hours ago
Unfortunately not a luxury for all events.
Some organizations only post information on Twitter, especially those with limited resources. And if their followers are themselves limited in number, then that information is not disseminated.
For example, the Dutch Air Force is currently posting updates on their ongoing airborne exercise exclusively on Twitter: https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/f/falcon-leap
immibis2 2 hours ago
Do you need updates about the Dutch Air Force's ongoing airborne exercise or can you just ignore that exercise? If they weren't posting it on Twitter but were only performing it for a live audience, would you clamor to be part of that audience? Or are you only interested because of the fact it's on Twitter?
larsmaxfield 4 minutes ago
It's the daily schedule I want. The exercise lasts 12 days and has a variable daily schedule that is posted day-of exclusively on Twitter. I have no interest in Twitter; I just want to know what time they'll fly by.
xyst 39 minutes ago
With alternatives available:
- bluesky - mastodon
Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?
Anonyneko 25 minutes ago
Inertia, friend groups, and also a lot of countries other than the US that have no idea about US politics or don't care enough about it.
rob74 6 hours ago
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
pluc 6 hours ago
Reddit says hello
forestingfisher 5 hours ago
And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.
immibis2 5 hours ago
And demanding ID!
vova_hn2 3 hours ago
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.
boston_clone 3 hours ago
Perhaps more frustratingly, if you bite the bullet and browse the "new" version on your mobile browser, the page will eventually become non-responsive and have ~60% of your screen covered by a bottom banner that prompts you to download their app to continue. It's like they are actively trying to kill their userbase.
immibis2 2 hours ago
Like most big tech companies now, they are actively trying to kill their non-contributing userbase, where contributing means viewing an ad for every second post. They know that perhaps 5% of the non-contributing userbase they kill will become contributing userbase, while the other 95% will just leave, and this trade seems good to them.
saratogacx an hour ago
On mobile, uBO has been able to get around the "use our app" block. It took a week or two for the filters to get updated but now it is a non-issue. Tested in Firefox and Vivaldi on Android.
pred_ 2 hours ago
FWIW, Old Reddit Redirect manages to somehow still be usable without a user.
immibis2 2 hours ago
You're being A/B tested.
jwilk an hour ago
They do this by setting cookie "redesign_optout=true" for www.reddit.com (and then using that domain).
RKearney 44 minutes ago
Didn't Reddit ban open access to their APIs and kill third party viewers/apps as well by charging outrageous amounts for continued API access?
Waterluvian 6 hours ago
They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
swed420 5 hours ago
> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
asveikau an hour ago
> signups are often still rejected with no explanation given
That's pretty odd. When I google this, there are claims that this is to prevent spam accounts. Obviously, if you choose not to take them at their word, one can read all sorts of odd reasons into it.
JsonDemWitOster 5 hours ago
Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
tencentshill 4 hours ago
Do they not understand you can still serve ads to non-logged-in users? They can still be tracked nearly as effectively with fingerprinting.
frankacter 3 hours ago
I assume the limit is related to 3rd party AI scraping training.
pwg 3 hours ago
> without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to
That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.
arjie 2 hours ago
That’s not a market. You are not exchanging anything of value. It’s a public service. One might as well lament that Ferrari doesn’t offer cars to the millions of people who would gladly take one for free.
xyst 36 minutes ago
As if the new owners of twitter give a shit about its sustainability.
It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.
It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires
simondotau 8 hours ago
If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X.
On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.
somedude895 8 hours ago
Exactly. If you boycott X, shouldn't you also boycott the people who are on X? But this kind of slacktivism has always been more virtue signaling than anything.
azan_ 8 hours ago
I don’t want to crate account there because I’ll get into endless useless discussions. And you can’t use this website without an account.
pickleRick243 8 hours ago
why is that? Why can't you just use it in read only fashion?
fabian2k 8 hours ago
No idea how it looks right now, but at some point Twitter started to block reading replies without an account. And sometimes it blocked even more, so you could not follow links to read.
frogulis 8 hours ago
I think this changed recently, but at least prior to that, when not logged in, you only saw the initial post and none of the replies.
MPSimmons 8 hours ago
It seems intellectually dishonest to blanket-label any principled stance that you disagree with as "virtue signaling".
pickleRick243 8 hours ago
I think the claim is that the principled stance would be to ignore all X content.
ceejayoz 8 hours ago
Which is just the "yet you participate in society" meme again.
bbg2401 2 hours ago
No, it's not. Don't be so intellectually lazy.
The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
I admit I'm not nor have been a Twitter/X user so am able to look at the situation without a sense of entitlement or attachment.
ceejayoz 27 minutes ago
> The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
Yes. Because we have to participate in a society in which sometimes, that's where the info is. Some towns only post their announcements on Facebook/X! Some people prominent on my framework of choice are only on X.
> How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
Virtue isn't a binary. I can reduce my externalities, even if I can't eliminate them.
cudder 7 hours ago
Not really, unfortunately. If it were just a bunch of bros laughing at fascist memes amongst themselves I would happily boycott everything, but unfortunately a lot of "public" service announcements and discourse also happens on 卐itter. Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements, city council decisions, public transport notices, official statements by MEPs/local politicians/companies, etc. Not to mention a certain demented orange geriatric who happens to control nukes and posts his daily threats and declarations of war there.
These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
asdff 30 minutes ago
>Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements
I am shocked you get this served via twitter instead of usual service notices for these things. I don't use twitter and I still get these notices and other news.
Kotlopou 8 hours ago
It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.
simondotau 8 hours ago
I think Wikipedia has become a cancerous blight on world politics, and I would love to see Wikipedia die so that a Mastodon-like distributed alternative could rise from the ashes.
But I still use Wikipedia.
smaudet 8 hours ago
And yet, wikipedia is not owned by an evil (incompetent?) oligarch who made his mission to make the platform as shitty as possible...
That's what Grok as for.
Apples and Oranges...
simondotau 7 hours ago
> 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.
sunaurus 8 hours ago
For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.
LightBug1 8 hours ago
I used to be you. Now I just dismiss the tweet.
Shitter is now irrelevant for me. If you want my engagement or attention or response or to keep up with you, move to a better platform.
I used to care enough to keep up with Shitter on xcancel. Now it's just faded into irrelevance. YMMV, particularly over time
Shitter isn't the gospel of human experience and creativity and expression. It's just ... Shitter.
mitxela 7 hours ago
Get the Libredirect extension and this will happen automatically (to a server that is actually working).
Leonard_of_Q 8 hours ago
I never liked Twitter and I don't like X as a medium but they were and still are used by others as a communication channel. To partake of what is communicated without having to sign up and/or subject myself to the barrage of nonsense spewed through X I use a self-hosted Nitter instance. This way I get to follow those X links without needing a (real, active) account. For passive X users Nitter offers a far better - lighter, faster - experience than X itself. This makes Nitter (which is what Xcancel - a misnomer since it doesn't cancel X - is based on) especially useful for those who only use X because others used it to distribute information.
mitxela 8 hours ago
Suppose you're on HN and someone posts a link to X. Is the correct reaction
1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.
madeofpalk 8 hours ago
You can knowledge it's there, and just not read it. There's lots of links on the internet that I don't click.
I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.
mitxela 7 hours ago
What if the post is like "we discovered AGI (for real this time, not clickbait)" - will you pretend AGI wasn't discovered?
addandsubtract 7 hours ago
That would A) still be clickbait, and B) be posted on a corporate blog, not just X.
fWEFVEEGLKJH 7 hours ago
> (for real this time, not clickbait)
That sounds likes something a clickbait author would write.
madeofpalk an hour ago
If it's important enough, it'll be elsewhere.
simondotau 8 hours ago
4. Click the link
5. Accept that you won't click on the link
vrganj 8 hours ago
Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.
simondotau 8 hours ago
Yes, and? I can't bend reality to make it otherwise.
vrganj 7 hours ago
XCancel can.
simondotau 7 hours ago
"XCancel Taken Down Again" is the title of this thread.
vrganj 7 hours ago
Indeed. But they've been doing good work and fighting is better than just giving in to apathy and losing by default.
frumplestlatz 6 hours ago
Given its extremely liberal content moderation policy, how is X a propaganda machine?
vrganj 5 hours ago
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 sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.
> The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.
> Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.
frumplestlatz 2 hours ago
So journalists ran a study with extremely poor sampling, base rate, and classification methodology designed by left-wing researchers and activists groups (including groups explicitly opposed to X), found the conclusions they wanted to find, and spent the second half of their article decrying the lack of heavy-handed moderation that pre-Musk Twitter used to control speech.
All we can actually derive from that article is that X’s new user recommendation system exposed a small number of near-default, low-feedback, synthetic accounts to more content that left-wing “misinformation” researchers classified as “right-wing”.
monocasa an hour ago
Musk also uses plenty of heavy handed moderation; it's just almost all directed at the left. For instance: https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethinc-...
frumplestlatz an hour ago
They were banned for literally advocating for political violence. The fact that they hadn’t been banned earlier is the only concerning fact here.
The current top article on their website argues for punching their political opponents in the streets.
monocasa 31 minutes ago
And yet right wingers openly calling for the west to ethnically cleanse the non white races get reinstated.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...
And simply criticizing Musk is enough to get a shadow ban
frumplestlatz 26 minutes ago
Andrew Anglin, the subject of the first article, was re-banned in 2023 for the same reason that crimethink, inc was banned.
The subjects of the second article are particularly odious right-wing conspiracy theorists and racists that lost their reach, which they believe was connected to arguing with Elon.
That seems like an action you’d be in favor of, and also it counters the propaganda claim — but regardless, their claim that they were shadow-banned, that the cause was direct intercession by Elon, and that the motivation was their merely disagreeing with him, is unsupported by any evidence.
monocasa 17 minutes ago
He had already been banned for the same reason, and Musk unbanned him in the same wave that had him ban crimethinc.
vrganj an hour ago
I'm not sure where you got any of that from. Where are you reading anything about the researchers working for Sky News, a Comcast subsidiary (!) being "left wing"? What are you basing your criticism of sampling and classification on?
I provided a study that literally won the Royal Statistical Societies' "Statistical Excellence in Journalism" award [0]. You provided unfounded dismissal and conspiracy. The burden of proof is on your side.
[0] https://rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2026/g...
nickthegreek 2 hours ago
algo is what can make or break a propaganda machine.
amelius 8 hours ago
I wish HN would simply ban links to X.
mitxela 7 hours ago
HN is a venture capital fund. That will happen if and only if it becomes profitable to do so.
simondotau 7 hours ago
If you want to make the rules, start your own club.
browningstreet an hour ago
If you think that's remotely viable, you'll be very surprised what most of the YC partners believe and post about on X.
zem an hour ago
at the very least whoever posts the link has presumably accessed it, so we should normalise pasting the full text in here
dandellion 8 hours ago
I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).
LightBug1 7 hours ago
I've stopped using xcancel even for that. If anything is important enough, it will reach me via other channels. Particularly from any contact who give af ... if they don't it's not important.
slowmovintarget 5 hours ago
Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.
If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
pibaker 8 hours ago
I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.
smaudet 8 hours ago
Like it or not network effects can be overcome, but not with this sort of prisoner's dilemma thinking.
Everyone using something was never a (good) reason to use it.
vrganj 8 hours ago
Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
simondotau 7 hours ago
> Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact
We don't. We let six or seven far right billionares do that.
> And regarding copyright
Copyright of tweets are owned by original authors. Unless you have permission, the copyright infringement which occurs is against the individual, not X.
sureglymop 8 hours ago
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.).
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
simondotau 8 hours ago
Maybe if people didn't make services like XCancel, the impracticality of X would be more salient.
mitxela 7 hours ago
It isn't. We know this because there was a time before xcancel and people just accepted they needed an account.
It can happen - nobody would post an Instagram link to HN. But for X it did not happen.
Notice the EU's Digital Markets Act is a liability shield for Nitter instances hosted in the EU.
nativeit 5 hours ago
That assumes the people who need XCancel most are aware of its existence, but from what I can tell only folks like us are.
LightBug1 4 hours ago
Well, I stopped using Shitter first. Then I stopped using xCancel as a conduit for Shitter. Never happier.
IF those public institutions want to to connect with all their constituents, then move to a better platform. Not the other way around.
asdff 31 minutes ago
I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.
johannes1234321 7 hours ago
There are places like government agencies, public transit org aisations, and similar organisations, which still use it as adhoc quick notification channel. If I want to see if a train route ist interrupted it's the best source. However using it once in a while (not via app or such) has long loading times and nagging screens for sign in, cookie compliance and so on, which makes the whole thing an annoyance ...
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
phyzome 43 minutes ago
Today, for me, the reason was because I wanted to pull up a years-old tweet that had a video of a local road flooding.
xyst 35 minutes ago
I don’t use Twitter but assholes continue to reference posts on this cancerous site. That’s why this service exists lil bro
m3kw9 4 minutes ago
Yeah i don't get it, using xcancel is like "that'll show ya" in a weak manner. You are seeing the same tweet.
goda90 6 hours ago
> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website
*if you log in to an account
A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
ocd 7 hours ago
I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point when it doesn't serve the public interest or the interest of customers who deserve at least some choice. It's as unreasonable for them as using Instagram or a dating app for something intended for broad reach and accessibility.
I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.
mitxela 7 hours ago
The reason is simple: they were using Twitter when it was publicly readable and had RSS, and they have no selfish reason to stop. (Selfless reasons don't count, everybody is selfish)
cebert 7 hours ago
You go where your people are. I think it’s very reasonable to post updates on Facebook and X.
trekz 7 hours ago
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point
Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?
[1] https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-ope...
Freedumbs 7 hours ago
I extend this to people. I understand old habits and what not, but I'm surprised at the culture on social media. Twitter is literally orthodox white supremacy or however they brand it. Quite odd, but not considering current politics. We've decided to devolve.
thrance 7 hours ago
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X
It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but two whole apps. Yet, whenever there's an incident they immediately reach for X (on which I can't access their posts), while their apps lag behind.
As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.
yoz-y 6 hours ago
Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.
rob74 6 hours ago
So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
freedomben 5 hours ago
Sadly, the success rate is significantly better than 0.1%. as a broad strategy, it clearly works. I wish it didn't, but there is a reason why all these companies do it.
uurrnn 6 hours ago
So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.
IshKebab 5 hours ago
It did that long before Elon took over. He's made it worse, sure. But it was never really usable at any point.
macNchz 6 hours ago
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.
weberer 5 hours ago
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.
criley2 5 hours ago
Nah 10 years ago I could view the whole website logged out. Now it's been reduced to a single post with no replies.
immibis2 5 hours ago
And remember, Elon only granted that so he wouldn't be (rightfully) banned from Google. At first you couldn't view anything, then Google delisted X because it only indexes public pages, then Elon conceded you can view the direct thing you linked to, and then Google relisted it.
girvo 5 hours ago
I disagree. There was a noticeable change some time after Elon bought it to make it even worse.
asimovDev 3 hours ago
pretty sure it was even worse ten years ago cause very active twitter users would pay for 3rd party twitter apps (maybe twitter didn't have an official app back then? ~2012-2013)
Catloafdev 3 hours ago
No, it definitely was not as bad 10 years ago as it is today. Just objectively not true at all.
Zambyte 5 hours ago
The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.
figmert 5 hours ago
I don't know why but to me the worse bit of it is the giant emoji finger that keeps trying to click the sign up button.
RobotToaster 5 hours ago
You normally only see that crap on Chinese apps like Temu.
CM30 5 hours ago
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.
immibis2 5 hours ago
The reasons it's unusable are precisely the reasons they don't want you using anything else. Direct control over your eyeballs. They decide where the ads go on the page, they decide what comes next in your feed, they track everywhere you look or move the mouse. Anything that circumvents this is a business risk to them.
TiredOfLife 3 hours ago
What other versions of twitter there are? I use it on both pc and mobile in browser with adblock and the experience is the same as 20 years ago. If anything the "for you" feed has become actually usable in last couple of years.
thn-gap 3 hours ago
Is it? I've only ever used X on my phone through Brave. But always logged in, though.
downrightmike an hour ago
They fired that guy years ago, so no one knows how to decom it without breaking everything
viccis an hour ago
They managed to get pretty close to decomming it which is that it's now impossible to sign up on desktop without an account that requires a phone number tied to it.
p-o 6 hours ago
Free speech absolutist, btw.
arrowsmith 5 hours ago
What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?
Forgeties79 5 hours ago
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.
freedomben 5 hours ago
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 unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
angoragoats 5 hours ago
The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
freedomben 40 minutes ago
Indeed, fair point. I've conflated those in my comment above!
Operyl 5 hours ago
The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.
Forgeties79 16 minutes ago
Many municipalities have text message alerts these days. I doubt it’s 100% coverage but I bet most of us can live with that or currently do.
bakies 5 hours ago
right, it's not free, like you said
InsideOutSanta 5 hours ago
Elon Musk, gratis speech absolutist.
immibis2 5 hours ago
Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.
Forgeties79 an hour ago
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 its value was tanked. It’s a crap site that isn’t profitable and serves as a mouthpiece for his politics and whims.
You can all walk away. You don’t need it.
angoragoats 5 hours ago
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.
throwatdem12311 5 hours ago
That’s not what free speech is.
angoragoats 5 hours ago
Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.
zahlman 5 hours ago
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
p-o 5 hours ago
Nobody is arguing about the legal boundary of Freedom of speech, you're the only one making this argument.
We're talking about the quolloquial "free speech", here.
weberer 5 hours ago
Could you give your colloquial definition, because its clearly different than mine.
weberer 5 hours ago
"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
immibis2 5 hours ago
Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.
angoragoats 37 minutes ago
> "Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
This is one way to define it, yes, but Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist” which I would argue means that he feels speech should be maximally free.
> It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost".
I have never meant it in that way, and I’m not sure why you thought I did.
> To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
This is possibly pedantic but this statement as written is false. I can view single tweets just fine, and I don’t see ads.
> Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
That analogy doesn’t really work here, IMO. My only point is that it’s objectively true that speech behind a login wall is less free (as in freedom) than speech not behind a login wall, and so a (non-hypocritical) “free speech absolutist” should always prefer the latter.
basilikum 12 minutes ago
Twitter heavily censors speech on the platform itself by downranking things they do not like without any transparency.
throwatdem12311 3 hours ago
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.
zahlman 5 hours ago
Can someone please explain to me any actual guidelines-based reason for the parent comment to have been flagged and killed (I vouched for it)?
immibis2 5 hours ago
The reason is likely not guidelines-based.
mbmbn 5 hours ago
Can you point the way where Free Speech is being countered here?
immibis2 5 hours ago
"Nothing can shut down open source" - Elon Musk, LITERALLY TODAY: https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
gaganyaan 8 hours ago
XCancel service is suspended.
Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.
You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
Continue to X
Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
Lord-Jobo 34 minutes ago
Classic “we must show good faith and good will before the judicial system by keeping our stuff offline, until proceedings are complete”
“Does the other side need to show any good faith?”
“No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”
“….great”
cube00 8 hours ago
The fact that so many large companies are still on X is so wrong.
embedding-shape 8 hours ago
Yeah, or local governments, or governments in general, seems strange to me too. But then probably they'd use Facebook/Instagram/Whatever instead of Twitter if Twitter wasn't available, and seemingly it's impossible for them to use something that isn't built like a panopticon that also wants to slurp up as much data from their users as possible.
pibaker 8 hours ago
There should be a law mandating government agencies to not limit their electronic communications to private third party platforms.
If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.
melodyogonna 8 hours ago
Why?
frumplestlatz 8 hours ago
Why is it “so wrong” to meet your audience where they are?
harrisoned 7 hours ago
The same reason is wrong to require a Google or Apple phone to exercise basic civil duties within government services. You are gating the service, or information, behind a 3rd party ToS, a login, and basically stating that you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data to such companies.
frumplestlatz 6 hours ago
The comment I replied to said "large companies", not government, and I don't see the equivalence.
maipen an hour ago
Why is it wrong?
Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools? I don’t think so.
It’s the same thing as requiring dress code to go to the tribunal or anything formal.
People here overthink so much about this topic.
squeegmeister 38 minutes ago
Because the owner of said tool is a white nationalist
frumplestlatz 24 minutes ago
I think you’ve confused HN for BlueSky.
cferry 25 minutes ago
> Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools?
As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.
In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...
Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.
BTW: overthinking is how society moves forward :)
vova_hn2 3 hours ago
Just by googling "twitter api" I am able to find an "unofficial API" (scraped, obviously), that gives you access to tweets for around $0.15/1k tweets. Which is expensive if you want to, let's say, train a model, but super cheap for a casual user.
A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.
Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.
What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.
wraptile 3 hours ago
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.
vova_hn2 3 hours ago
Don't they require a phone number? Even if they don't, they probably require email. I don't really want to give them my main email and even less - phone number. So, buying an account seems like less of a hassle, than figuring out where to get a temporary email.
wraptile 3 hours ago
These are all available for couple of cents per email/phone number. I don't want to advertise these services directly but they work very well and you can find them with keywords like "SMS otp code service"
immibis2 2 hours ago
They make it really hard to get an account, no matter how legit you are, but if you eventually get one, you can plug it into your own private Nitter instance.
butlike 43 minutes ago
The MOMENT xcancel gets shut down, someone should sue the president for putting official communication on a closed platform.
xyst 41 minutes ago
Then take ownership lil bro. Any of those scumbag lawyers will be happy to take your money to do whatever you want.
mococa 41 minutes ago
the president? I think all presidents does the same.
throwa356262 8 hours ago
Proposal:
Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.
This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.
morningsam 8 hours ago
I've been wondering why ~everyone hasn't already been doing this, so my guess is that Twitter's API doesn't allow it.
aaroninsf 8 minutes ago
Surprised there are still people who think the issue with "X" is that it is a bad product.
It is a bad product, and it is pathological in the way all degraded social media platforms are bad.
But it's also worse than those others, in well documented ways; and it's long past time anyone with integrity found alternatives.
The failure of the "AI" industry to do so is an indictment and serious red flag.
aucisson_masque 8 hours ago
What was the Chinese alternative ? At this point I’m just going to use that instead, lawyers won’t be able to take that down.
Markoff 6 hours ago
I think you mean https://twitterwebviewer.com/en which was also taken down anyway
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
999900000999 5 hours ago
Makes sense, the legal system is pay to play.
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
nunez 3 hours ago
it's going to be a cat and mouse game for as long as X can legally afford to keep it going (i.e. til the heat death of the universe)
regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon network and Bluesky existing.
whatever. i've redirected x to 0.0.0.0 when the first warning shot was fired and called it a day. rocks are looking like a great place to live under right about now anyway.
blfr 3 hours ago
I use Twitter daily and haven't noticed any screws. How is Elon supposedly turning them?
joquarky 12 minutes ago
Don't sea lion.
zem an hour ago
I wonder if part of the lawsuit required them to link to twitter - it doesn't seem like a very on-brand thing to do.
redbell an hour ago
> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
> Continue to X
This was hard to swallow for me! Why you are redirecting to X, which is the exact opposite of what you are offering?! Don't get me wrong, I use XCancel and Nitter regularly an I like them, it just hits hard!
outside1234 17 minutes ago
Why are people still using X? I mean seriously people, move on and stop using this closed ecosystem that is propaganda around elections.