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trey-jones 18 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.
benrutter 52 minutes ago [-]
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)
I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.
xvedejas 22 minutes ago [-]
Is the point really to be profitable? Or could perhaps its owners be willing to risk losing money for more power over the information landscape?
^ this and the entire drama is just an ad campaign to make the rebranding stick. what is really going to work is to keep calling it Twitter, as it identifies itself, and slowly move over the scene to Bluesky/Mastodon.
What demoralize them the most is to show whoever pays for it doesn't matter.
mitxela 39 minutes ago [-]
It would be really funny if Elon lost the Twitter trademark due to not using it.
emmelaich 7 hours ago [-]
X should provide an option to make youor posts public. And govt reps should be required to use it.
tomashubelbauer 1 hours ago [-]
Govt reps should be required to use govt sites and only then repost to private sites, or leave that up to the people.
maybewhenthesun 27 minutes ago [-]
govts should be forbidden from using X. Or any other commercial for-profit message service.
It's not like one-way communication is a hard problem. Just post that stuff on a website ffs!
jakevoytko 13 hours 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?
voidnullvalue 7 hours ago [-]
Imginn.com/whateverrouteoninstagram
So instagram.com/foo becomes
Imginn.com/foo
Hope this helps!
jakevoytko 4 hours ago [-]
I know there are like 5 trillion Instagram viewers. But I've never actually needed to use any of them because there is absolutely nothing so important on Instagram that I must see it. The entire site is optional.
Cockbrand 34 minutes ago [-]
What!? It's the entire, singular purpose and meaning of life for millions of people to make themselves look glamorous on Instagram, and you say it's optional?! /s
bjord 11 hours ago [-]
did you sign up with your actual details? or were you using a throwaway email and/or phone?
I have a shitter account, I don't use the app but just the web app on safari iOS.
recently with videos I can't change playback speed. so I have to use xCancel.
before I just used to use Tweetdeck. but that went away or went pro.
WarmWash 16 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 16 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.
>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.
Dylan16807 12 hours ago [-]
I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
kalleboo 3 hours ago [-]
I remember when you paid your ISP for internet access and in that cost they also provided you with an e-mail address, they ran a Usenet server for their customers, and gave you space for web hosting. Now all of that is expected to be paid for with ads instead.
abustamam 2 hours ago [-]
Im too young to remember this but it would be an interesting idea if ISPs paid website hosts (kinda like cable companies pay networks based on viewership)
The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
GolfPopper 12 hours ago [-]
>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
vladgur 14 hours 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
caymanjim 7 hours ago [-]
It's basically impossible to not engage with any corporate products at all. It's trivially-easy to not engage with specific corporate products. I don't engage with Twitter, because I won't sign up and that makes it useless to me. I'm not missing out on anything I care about.
mafuy 6 minutes ago [-]
Just one example: Facebook is mandatory for school/university in large parts of Asia. You cannot trivially block them. They should be considered an utility.
pdonis 8 hours ago [-]
> How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
By not using it. Which is exactly why I don't use X or Facebook, and minimize my use of Google (I use DuckDuckGo for search, and as Maps continues to suck more I use it less).
WarmWash 13 hours 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.
swed420 12 hours ago [-]
> they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is
FLOSS invalidates that statement.
Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
WarmWash 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it.
Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago...
There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts").
But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
swed420 11 hours ago [-]
> There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101)
Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.
Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
pdonis 8 hours ago [-]
> valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
And then it turned out that all that was a long con by the companies, who started reneging on all their promises of lifetime employment, good benefits, and retirement pensions as soon as the costs of those things began to exceed the profits available to them by using those promises to attract employees.
WarmWash 11 hours ago [-]
The key thing to address is the near zero marginal cost part.
If the philosophy extended beyond a binary blob, we would have a whole parallel economy of free tangible goods, from workers using their expertise on their own time. But this basically doesn't exist because real costs are involved.
swed420 10 hours ago [-]
This thread started with me citing a counterexample to your wide sweeping attempt to lump self-interested corporations in with humans who tend to be generous under many circumstances. I've made my point, so I'm done here.
IcyWindows 5 hours ago [-]
What about books or art or movies?
The electronic version of all those is also near zero marginal cost.
butlike 14 hours ago [-]
Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
scottyah 13 hours ago [-]
Scarcity is only one factor in a valuation. You can't make more of my boogers yet I doubt you'd trade any of your time or money for them haha.
butlike 12 hours ago [-]
True, but I can make my own boogers, and kind of do automatically, so that's pretty common. Some people get fecal transplants, which is rarer, but let's say if I want to build... I don't know, lets say a house. I can lay the bricks myself, which is a transaction against my lifespan (not just a transaction on a product of my body like boogers or fecal matter), or I can hire you. When you're hired, I essentially get two lives since I can do life things at a rate of 2x while you remain employed. I guess the real value comes in buying your time, not necessarily the product of 'you.'
Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
like_any_other 14 hours 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 14 hours ago [-]
this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.
like_any_other 14 hours 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.
spullara 11 hours ago [-]
i don't think there is a page on x that just gives you a login wall that a normal non-logged in user would go to. if you link to something like a tweet or a profile page it shows you them. these services are for scraping.
like_any_other 10 hours ago [-]
Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.
spullara 7 hours ago [-]
it is legal if you can do it, doesn't mean they have to like it. keeping features for logged in seems super reasonable to me.
Dylan16807 7 hours ago [-]
"features" for logging in is in a broad sense reasonable.
When one of those features is being able to see the most recent tweets from an account, that's asinine.
In other words: If you link to a profile page, X doesn't properly show you. It gives you a random selection of popular tweets that person has made, often several years old.
pennomi 14 hours 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.
WarmWash 13 hours ago [-]
No, it's about value.
Money is just a convenient abstraction of time and energy. Basically everyone, all the time, is focused on min-maxing their time and energy (optimally is another question, hah). These are both fundamentally scarce things and likewise have intrinsic value to everyone.
If you spend time reading an article or watching a YouTube video, it defacto has value to you, and the creator of it spent both time and energy making it. And just like that, there is a market.
Dylan16807 11 hours ago [-]
And when the creator decided to make that free to access, it's improper for a company to throw up a wall in front of it.
WarmWash 11 hours ago [-]
I think you might be confused, because any creator can make their content free to access. If they are playing in someone else's house, yeah there might be rules they don't like, but it's also not their house.
Nothing stops creators from self-hosting and absorbing the full cost themselves.Yt doesn't even care if you link to your own hosted version of the video on their platform.
Dylan16807 11 hours ago [-]
I meant what I said. Companies are allowed to be rude to everyone but it's still bad for them to be rude.
WarmWash 10 hours ago [-]
Rude that they don't give you free unencumbered access?
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
When they got the content for free, usually yes.
WarmWash 8 hours ago [-]
Youtube pays 60% of revenue to creators...
Dylan16807 7 hours ago [-]
Youtube is pretty much fine. Outside of a few janky age restrictions, you can just go to youtube and watch videos.
Remember right at the start: "There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads." This is how youtube works.
X is the one blocking or messing up views without accounts (and also being too likely to ban accounts that don't give a phone number).
Though most people posting on youtube are doing it for free or negligible revenue (I'm not sure how it works out on a per-view basis), and a lot of the rest make almost all their money elsewhere.
8note 15 hours 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 14 hours 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.
lovich 14 hours 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 14 hours 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.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
It's interesting to think about what is actually so good about YouTube. Is it being able to go to the homepage and see a bunch of stuff to click on? Nebula has that.
I signed up to Nebula to support alternative platforms, yet I still click on YouTube all the time and not Nebula. Why is that? I'm not sure.
WarmWash 12 hours ago [-]
Because yt pays creators more than the others, both in absolute (total dollars) and relative (revenue share) terms.
As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block, youtube gets to keep it's monopoly. They have literately turned people's greed back against themselves, since it ensures starvation of competitors. And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
immibis2 12 hours ago [-]
Even with creators who post on both Nebula and YouTube, I still end up watching them on YouTube for some reason.
lovich 11 hours ago [-]
Actually that’s a decent counter example.
YouTube hasn’t degraded in service or quality and when I pay them for the ad free service, they don’t try and sneak more ads in anyway like some other services have or the historical example of cable tv.
I’d probably be a lot happier if most software companies produced a product and kept a user relationship with me the way YouTube has.
swed420 15 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
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 15 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 15 hours 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.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
WarmWash 12 hours ago [-]
>If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
immibis2 9 hours ago [-]
Cooperation is possible, and can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions. However, those conditions are currently not present.
jack_h 6 hours ago [-]
Market economies create economic cooperation. The dinner you ate required countless people from ranchers, farmers, mechanics, chemical manufacturers, steel manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, paper manufacturers, tubing manufacturers, oil manufacturers, fastener manufacturers and countless others working on intermediate factors of production. None of them deliberately and knowingly cooperated, rather prices in the market economy allowed for decentralized cooperation between people who don't even know each other. That is the power of market economies. Command economies cannot deliberately arrange cooperation at the same scale due to information being too disbursed and rapidly changing.
So you are correct that cooperation can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions; those conditions require a small population though.
dns_snek 38 minutes ago [-]
The discussion wasn't about market vs command economy but about capitalism vs socialism/communism.
See: Market socialism
scottyah 13 hours ago [-]
Seems like people who try to argue that Capitalism creates greed are almost always just narcissistic looking for something to blame their greediness on.
pdonis 8 hours ago [-]
> Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible.
Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me more capital, by hook or by crook".
But that's not what actually built most of the wealth in the modern world. What built most of that was cooperation, specialization, and positive sum trades, in which everyone involved became better off, but nobody obsessed about counting down to the last penny exactly how much better off they were than the next person, and complaining about unfairness if things didn't balance out exactly the way they thought things should. In other words, focusing on creating wealth, not on grabbing whatever you can, or making sure you grabbed more than anyone else.
cindyllm 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
swed420 15 hours ago [-]
Convenient that your "principles" disallow you from seeing critique of said principles.
WarmWash 15 hours ago [-]
Funny that your critique is still capitalist...
swed420 12 hours ago [-]
It's not though. That's literally the point of the article.
WarmWash 12 hours ago [-]
The article that I need to hand over my monetizable information over to read? The article written by a journalist getting paid to produce content so it can be pushed to the market of articles to retrieve more than it's cost to procure?
If they are going to claim to ride a high horse, I'm not paying them any credence when they show up on the same dinkey donkey as everyone else they loudly spite.
swed420 12 hours ago [-]
Quite the mental gymnastics to simultaneously acknowledge the bootstrapping problem when it suits you, and pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.
WarmWash 11 hours ago [-]
I can assure you that whatever the nymag article written by a creative writing major turned socialist journalist says, isn't going to be a life changing read to a long time economics geek.
swed420 11 hours ago [-]
Pure cope and baseless assumptions.
thewebguyd 16 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 16 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.
immibis2 12 hours ago [-]
Did you know that Facebook got started by scraping MySpace using people's real accounts they provided the passwords for, and Reddit got started by anonymously copying popular posts from Slashdot and Digg? Were these correct actions?
thewebguyd 15 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.
WarmWash 15 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 15 hours 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 14 hours 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.
arjie 15 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.
8note 15 hours 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.
kennywinker 15 hours 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 14 hours 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 14 hours 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.
WarmWash 13 hours ago [-]
>Am I the problem?
Is the person who stays home and doesn't vote the problem?
Network effects are strong, but trends can absolutely upend them with disruptions. This is much harder nowadays, because for each user who refuses ads or a subscription, your VC runway needs to be that much longer, or your megacorp parent (meta) needs to sustain you.
My core point is that if the internet hates the current status quo, they need to drop their current status quo (free/no ads or bust). We're stuck in a local minimum because people absolutely refuse to even consider the idea of paying (in any form) to move out of it, and they pat themselves on the back for it.
kennywinker 2 hours ago [-]
This isn’t voting, i’m just trying to sell or buy some crap. For a while I listed stuff both places. In your voting analogy i guess i was voting third party? After a few dozen times where the only responses were from marketplace - i moved on.
Blaming people for doing what’s simplest, is just a way to feel smug and superior.
afavour 16 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 16 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 15 hours 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.
wolrah 14 hours 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.
layla5alive 11 minutes ago [-]
Scalar Monomania (profit maximization in this case) is the root of so much evil :/
Barrin92 8 hours ago [-]
>everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads,
that's not a realistic expectation for everything but it's completely realistic for text based short form communication given how affordable it is to run. That's why there's ad and tracking free alternatives to twitter already.
the competitors don't say "lol nope" they'd gladly take the users, it's the latter who stay on twitter like lambs running to the slaughter
troupo 43 minutes ago [-]
Instagram is filled with ads, and it sucks.
Facebook? Same.
Xitter? Same.
Youtube? Enshittified beyond measure.
Google? Unusable.
So tell me. Where are these great amazing services supported by ads?
throwaway894345 15 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.
vladgur 14 hours 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 14 hours ago [-]
Twitter promised an open publishing platform with extensive API access. They're the ones who broke the (social) contract, not us.
nkozyra 13 hours 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.
encomiast 12 hours ago [-]
> If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
I am 100% okay with this. I don't want what Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer, so I no longer have an account these platforms. But I do have an account with my local electric utility. It's my only option. And if I want to find information about an outage, it's posted on their Facebook page. I'm 0% okay with this.
porkshoe 14 hours 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.
vladgur 12 hours ago [-]
This is where freedom of choice is great. You can follow the people you want on platforms of your preference.
The smartest people i know, i mostly know because of their X presence.
heavensteeth 14 hours 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.
mitxela 38 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
ImPostingOnHN 14 hours 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 14 hours 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.
ImPostingOnHN 11 hours ago [-]
> Clearly they approve or they'd at least stop advertising their twitter handles on their websites and handouts
I'm not so sure of your claim that one implies the other.
I bet if you just asked them, they'd prefer for the loginwall to be undone.
karim79 5 hours ago [-]
Enshittification is the new normal, unfortunately.
timcobb 15 hours ago [-]
Twitter itself doesn't even suck too much for me it's the broader context that makes it a no go
14 hours ago [-]
gfdd 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
zx8080 6 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.
What an idealistic nonsense. Companies do anything not for people, but for money. We are not living in a socialist utopia (fortunately!).
benrutter 56 minutes ago [-]
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it's worth pointing out that most businesses outside of tech don't operate a "build a monopoly then bleed it dry" model, and are a lot nicer for it, while still making money.
Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.
(I do get that tech VC doesn't work under this principle and it's not simpld to just change a sectors funding model, but it is worth pointing out that making money does not normally equal making a bad product)
swed420 16 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.
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 13 hours 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.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
Breaking terms of service isn't a crime, at least, although the company is legally permitted to retaliate against it, such as by banning you.
j-bos 10 hours ago [-]
cfaa has broad interpretations
immibis2 9 hours ago [-]
AFAIK it's been interpreted that getting public data while being someone the data holder doesn't like is, unusually, one of the very few things that is not a CFAA violation. Bright Data vs X for example.
hunter2_ 7 hours ago [-]
So long as the "getting" doesn't consist of circumventing something that is ostensibly a security mechanism, such as a URL that had never been presented to you by the server but is fairly easily guessed.
mitxela 37 minutes ago [-]
You mean vs Meta
stymaar 13 hours ago [-]
How can an automated process be a party in the terms of services though?
nkozyra 13 hours ago [-]
> How can an automated process be a party in the terms of services though?
If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.
The person who provides that, and the subsequent automated scraping, is the party, and would be the recipient of a civil suit.
stymaar 13 hours ago [-]
> If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.
AFAIK, there isn't an single auth scheme on earth that guarantee human intervention[1]. Anyone can set-up a robot creating new users on a whim using single-use email addresses and even phone numbers. In fact, we know that OpenAI's agent have been doing exactly that when attacking Rubygem. And all AI labs are likely doing it for scrapping social media as well.
Who are you gonna sue then?
[1] the closest thing is Altman iris scanning venture, but without a broad adoption it's remains functionally useless.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
By setting that up, you take on the liability for it. The defendant is whoever set it up. No different from "if I roll a car down a hill and it hits something at the bottom, how can you hold the car liable?"
stymaar 12 hours ago [-]
That's not how ToS work though. ToS are contracts. If you don't sign the contract nobody can sue you for violating it.
> No different from "if I roll a car down a hill and it hits something at the bottom, how can you hold the car liable?"
That's the difference between criminal and civil justice. You don't need to sign a law for it to bind you, but for contracts you do.
friendzis 1 hours ago [-]
> That's the difference between criminal and civil justice. You don't need to sign a law for it to bind you, but for contracts you do.
> If you don't sign the contract nobody can sue you for violating it.
But terms of service are contracts which you sign by agreeing.
Courts have looked somewhat favorably on "I didn't read that" defenses, but accepting the agreement is a legal contract between you and the service provider.
stymaar 12 hours ago [-]
My point is that you don't have to accept anything.
nkozyra 11 hours ago [-]
Sure. But then you don't get credentials and can't scrape.
stymaar 3 hours ago [-]
You keep saying that but unless company start doing KYC there's absolutely no link between auth and ToS.
The authentication mechanisms used by websites don't have a specific legal power, it's just a POST request among other GET requests sent during scraping. And we have jurisprudence saying scrapping is legal no matter what the ToS of the website says, because the scraping entity never signed up the contract.
The only protection against scrapping that auth is giving you isn't a legal one, it's a technical one (you can detect and ban the scraping user account).
cuu508 3 hours ago [-]
*scraping
lazide 6 hours ago [-]
Even if you get the credentials via middle man?
jaggederest 8 hours ago [-]
The person who sets up that robot is the person responsible and effectively signing the contract by those actions.
> Who are you gonna sue then?
The person who set up the robot.
boie0025 6 hours ago [-]
It seems that simple, I agree, but digging in we're winding up in a bit of a "responsible party" black hole, at least it seems from my non-legal engineer perspective. If I ask an AI to find me articles on some arbitrary things and it hacks the Gibson to do it; and I am not a computer expert, it will be a struggle a bit to honestly put the blame on me. It's always been that way I think.. in what reasonable world can a non-lawyer agree to 100+ pages of a ToS and actually understand it? No world. But that's the point I think. What if I modify every TOS in HTML before I submit it and then agree by checking the box under my "redlined" version of the contract? I think this stuff is going to become exponentially murkier as time goes on.
jaggederest 6 hours ago [-]
Completely agree that the world is full of absolute nonsense, but legally determining responsible parties appears to be relatively straightforward (but does involve a judge or jury)
boie0025 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, agreed. Except "involve a judge or jury" is where the wildcard comes in. I believe there will be reasons to doubt culpability as we move further into the nonsense. Justified or not. My point is really just that we're in some weird territory, so I guess I'm going to make popcorn and watch. Some deeper legal questions lurk in this mess, and I don't think the obvious answers will always necessarily be right.
stymaar 2 hours ago [-]
> The person who sets up that robot is the person responsible and effectively signing the contract by those actions.
If that was true, then all scraping of a website with a ToS would be illegal, yet it's established by jurisprudence that it's not. And “authentication” doesn't change the picture here in Amy way, because it's not actually authentication.
4 hours ago [-]
lazide 5 hours ago [-]
Good luck finding them or proving it, esp. if done via third party contractors in another jurisdiction
jaggederest 4 hours ago [-]
It's much easier when they release huge PR whitepapers about how many felonies they've committed recently, I think. Makes the civil suit much more straightforward in my opinion.
fsckboy 1 hours ago [-]
>I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are
as I recall it was the large number of bot accounts not scraping but commenting.
12 hours ago [-]
jader201 5 hours ago [-]
Both can cause a product to suck.
A company can make their produce suck, on purpose (out of malice), because it fits their bottom line better (at least, in the short term) vs. a better UX.
OP may simply be asking companies to put their customers ahead of their (short-term) profit.
Reddit is another great example of this, where users have been looking for workarounds to their (increasingly more) hostile login wall since they started pressuring people to use their app years ago.
16 hours ago [-]
rusk 14 hours ago [-]
It's ineptitude. Of course it is. Otherwise it would be indefensible.
EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability
spuz 14 hours 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.
treyd 14 hours ago [-]
A system that makes "business decisions" indistinguishable from malice is an interesting one.
ToValueFunfetti 10 hours ago [-]
If I have something you want and I could give it to you but instead charge you money, is that malice? If so, what system wouldn't make malice indistinguishable from business decisions? If not, what distinguishes that from a login wall in exchange for viewing content?
muyuu 6 hours ago [-]
It's pretty much the standard to either soft-block or hard- block access into silos. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, etc ... all do it. Of course it's an openly anti-consumer practice, but it's one they get away with when they're big enough to flip the service burden to the client.
socalgal2 5 hours ago [-]
how is it anti-consumer? Claiming you should be able to freely access the content on some service feels like claiming you should be able to walk into any fast-food place and help yourself to their soda machine.
A business is free to choose that you must login to access their content and you are free to choose not to do business with them if you don't like it. I generally chose the latter
kalleboo 4 hours ago [-]
Your analogy does not work since they can still show ads to logged-out users, nobody is getting anything for free. Meta even creates shadow-profiles of users without accounts to track them across the internet.
It's all about getting people locked into walled gardens. I wish the EU DMA had taken a harder stance on this and required all social media to federate to some extent.
Quibblingeek 5 hours ago [-]
You’re absolutely right. I can just choose to not participate. If I’m lucky enough, enough people realize that they have the agency to not give into this, but if they don’t it doesn’t affect me at all.
Either way, I don’t care. The Internet has become so hostile to users that the only moral and rational choice is to not participate on platforms that have become so hostile that threatening legal action is the only way that they can protect their relevancy in facilitating social discourse.
butlike 14 hours ago [-]
So business decisions are absolved of morality?
drewbeck 14 hours ago [-]
No. “Malice” isn’t the only possible descriptor with moral weight. There’s many more ways this decision could be immoral without malice.
newfriend 6 hours ago [-]
Do you consider a login-wall immoral?
14 hours ago [-]
asdfman123 7 hours ago [-]
My biggest pet peeve is when people on sites like HN assume software should be tailor made for their objectives and not the company's objectives.
Sometimes the objectives align, but not always. And yes, the world would be a better place if they were better aligned, but we don't live in that world.
I'm sure X's motivation is something along the lines of forcing logins creates more users, or the downside of scraping outweighs the benefits.
roblabla 7 hours ago [-]
I don't really understand this comment. The simplest way to put pressure on companies to align with their user's objectives is to complain loudly. It's not that HN "assumes" anything, it's just that people call shitty things as they are, in the hope that if enough people agree, it'll create enough pressure for the company to change course.
Will it work? Probably not. But not even trying would be self-defeating.
rileymat2 7 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, it is fair to be upset when the objectives seemingly used to align and you had put significant work into creating content for the company as well as providing bootstrapping network effects only to have them change the software against your previously aligned objectives.
tclancy 5 hours ago [-]
This is the same as being mad at sports fans for complaining about the owners. No one would be anywhere near twitter, especially since it got covered in Elon’s ketamine cologne, if not for the users. Thinking the corporation profiting from those users should be free to change the deal on a whim is not a good look.
2muchcoffeeman 7 hours ago [-]
One of the problems is that many companies motives are so incredibly misaligned with society at large.
Google, Facebook, X are all explicitly designed to be addictive and provide as little value as possible. Because they want to give everything away for free in a way that keeps you on the site to maximise scraping your data so they can screw you over more later.
They are not even aligned at the most basic level. Everyone needs to stop using it. Or at least circumvent their measures.
temptemptemp111 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vachina 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dented42 2 hours ago [-]
By functional do you actually mean impossible to use?
vachina 1 hours ago [-]
Just fuckin log in?
mitxela 34 minutes ago [-]
I can't create an account. No matter what I try, the app just keeps saying it don't wanna.
pbasista 2 hours ago [-]
Well, I do not have an account and when I open any profile on it right now, I cannot read it properly. I cannot click on posts. I cannot read replies. I cannot open images.
In my opinion, that is quite far from "functional".
Such a behavior alone is a sufficient justification, in my opinion, for the services like xcancel to exist.
And if the X social network does not want their content to be publicly available, fine. They are free to gate it behind a login.
vachina 1 hours ago [-]
Then create a burner account to access said resources, instead of doing gymnastics with a broken third party middleware.
mitxela 35 minutes ago [-]
By uncucked you mean anti-cisgender?
abustamam 2 hours ago [-]
??? Have you never tried to visit X on a mobile device? Functional is far from what I'd call it, given that you can't see replies to the tweet or indeed do much else on the site
vachina 1 hours ago [-]
Yes? I use it exclusively in the mobile browser, logged in of course.
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.
CSMastermind 33 minutes ago [-]
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point
If your logic is that some citizens won't be able to read what is posted there, then I assume you similarly object to other social media platforms, newspapers, cable TV stations, etc.
gnfargbl 31 seconds ago [-]
A better analogy would be objecting to the government posting notices inside a privately-owned club that requires your personal details and ID as a condition of entry.
mitxela 21 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 21 hours ago [-]
You go where your people are. I think it’s very reasonable to post updates on Facebook and X.
trekz 20 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?
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 20 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.
pamcake 19 hours ago [-]
Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
pamcake 12 hours ago [-]
That update was made 9/6: 5 days prior to archival and on the same day xcancel.com previously also "returned". I can find no public updates regarding Nitter project after the 9/11 archival.
petcat 19 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.
rany_ 13 hours ago [-]
> Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Meanwhile it's OK for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to hack companies all willy-nilly. Mad world!
mitxela 33 minutes ago [-]
It's about risk tolerance. Some people stop when there's a hint of legal trouble. Others keep going when there's nothing more to lose.
advisedwang 15 hours 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
graemep 18 hours ago [-]
I imagine it will be hosted in jurisdictions other than the US.
angoragoats 19 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].
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 16 hours ago [-]
Come on, be honest, what did you do?
suby 10 hours ago [-]
I have had my account since like 2013. I browse the site and hit like on things, but I only have a handful of posts going back over the years. Occasionally, when I do try to post, it stops me because they think I am a bot. Meanwhile, I see what are clearly and unambigously bots follow me all the time, I see identical messages repeated across obvious botnets. Their bot detection is just very bad.
Also, while we're on the subject, I used to have two factor enabled. After Elon bought the site, they forced me to disable two factor for insane reasons, iirc you needed to pay for a blue checkmark if you wanted two factor. Today for the first time they've started blocking my access to even view the site until I authenticate with a qr code from an android or ios device. The future of the internet is bleak.
proc0 10 hours ago [-]
It happened to me this past weekend. I post engineering related things, and out of nowhere blocked, no reason, no email, no communication. I just sent an "appeal" but don't know what the hell I'm appealing.
This destroys my trust not just in X, but in social media. If bots are this big of a problem, then I guess I can't use them if there is a risk out of nowhere my account is hit. The network effect is real though.
Terr_ 5 hours ago [-]
Had this happen on Reddit, and the kafkaesque injustice rankles.
No reason, no communication, just one morning 10+ years of posts and comments all gone as well as anyone who had ever replied. The "appeals" page said my appeal (for ???) was granted, but it's still broken, and the appeals page lies and mocks my by claiming my account is in good-standing as a reason not to let me contact anyone. And good luck contacting anyone with a new account when it infects the new one!
Especially on the tail end of COVID isolation, it was a social sucker-punch, a whole online identity gone, with no reason or solution. I considered responding to their pre-IPO email offers just to contact someone...
mahboi 12 hours ago [-]
Happened to me when I did literally nothing but make an account. Tied to a Gmail.
captainbadass33 14 hours ago [-]
dared to use twitter with only an anonymous email is my guess. musk demands you phone and biometrics
declan_roberts 12 hours ago [-]
Phone number requirement was thankfully removed some time after Musk took over.
mitxela 31 minutes ago [-]
Right now you need either a phone number or an actual phone (hardware ID) plus email
cindyllm 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
newscracker 19 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.
Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?
Anonyneko 14 hours 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.
Forgeties79 19 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)
BizarreByte 18 hours ago [-]
Who uses twitter for current events? I’m there for extremely niche hobby related posts.
tommica 13 hours ago [-]
Curious, what is the hobby?
larsmaxfield 17 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.
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 13 hours 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.
stingraycharles 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah as long as the audience is there, people will keep posting on Twitter.
mahboi 12 hours ago [-]
Anything posted there won't be elsewhere in minutes, maybe not ever. I'd probably use Twitter if I cared a lot about current events.
8note 12 hours ago [-]
given that twitter is claiming ownership over the content, I expect they will start posting takedowns when a government official say, posts the notice to both twitter and bluesky
rolymath 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
PxldLtd 18 hours ago [-]
I don't use twitter but it feels like a platform for bothering terminally-online celebrities
rob74 19 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?
swed420 19 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.
olalonde 4 hours ago [-]
FWIW, X is far less of an echo chamber than Bluesky, Truth Social or Reddit.
They're simply doing this to boost engagement and break scrapers.
otherme123 2 hours ago [-]
I quit Twitter because a lot of the people I followed also quit so the site lost relevance/interest, but mainly because those who stay were turning slowly but steadily into something the network was clearly pushing. The force pushing of Elon twits into my timeline was too obvious, and once noticed that I noticed other less obvious pushes and even more insidious, silencing people I was interested in reading but suddenly their twits no longer pop in my timeline. I needed to go to their profile to read their twits.
In short, Twitter was actively pushing me into an echo chamber, even when my follows were diverse. Bluesky, Truth Social or Reddit are users that usually want to be in that echo chamber. At least bans are very notorious there, and not shadowbans/algorithm silencing while Elon says "I am a free speech absolutist".
asveikau 14 hours 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.
swed420 12 hours ago [-]
That exchange might be believable if bots didn't exist on X, but they absolutely do, hence the search for other explanations.
Considering who owns it, it'd be weird if they didn't want a carefully curated echo chamber of sanitized thought.
asveikau 11 hours ago [-]
To be clear I agree that another reason is pretty likely. I'm just phrasing it neutrally since I don't know.. Above all I'm saying it's weird. I'm used to thinking of twitter and all the others in the same category as wanting to drive user metrics up at the expense of a lot of other priorities. Preventing new accounts seems to run counter to expectations.
abletonlive 13 hours ago [-]
HN and Reddit are much more of an echo chamber than X is.
nailer 11 hours ago [-]
'Echo chamber' is an odd thing to say. X has many center left and hard left accounts, they're not banned in the same "women can't be men" was during Woke 1.0.
qlte 9 hours ago [-]
...really?
Elon Musk declares ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ will be considered slurs on Twitter that can be punishable with suspension
There are tons and tons of people using the term. All the time. Last result was 11 seconds ago (as of posting this).
mitxela 29 minutes ago [-]
Their tweets are shadowbanned and you only found them because you searched for the slur. All other avenues of discovery are prevented.
17 hours ago [-]
arjie 15 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.
hightrix 10 hours ago [-]
It's unfortunate that this is not a downvoted comment on a "hacker" news website.
The internet used to be treated as a public service.
pluc 19 hours ago [-]
Reddit says hello
RKearney 14 hours 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?
forestingfisher 18 hours ago [-]
And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.
vova_hn2 17 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 16 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.
saratogacx 15 hours 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.
immibis2 15 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.
pred_ 15 hours ago [-]
FWIW, Old Reddit Redirect manages to somehow still be usable without a user.
suslik 49 minutes ago [-]
For me it requires login even with ORR.
jwilk 15 hours ago [-]
They do this by setting cookie "redesign_optout=true" for www.reddit.com (and then using that domain).
immibis2 15 hours ago [-]
You're being A/B tested.
immibis2 18 hours ago [-]
And demanding ID!
JsonDemWitOster 18 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.
mitxela 28 minutes ago [-]
If a user can't be arsed to take the car for a test drive what makes you think they'll buy it?
They won't, that's why dealerships don't give away free cars but it's still a market.
tencentshill 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
I assume the limit is related to 3rd party AI scraping training.
pwg 17 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.
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
pessimizer 12 hours ago [-]
He was forced to buy it after desperately trying to pull out, and shitlibs cheered.
mitxela 27 minutes ago [-]
He wasn't forced to sign the original agreement to buy it. He was forced to uphold the agreement he already signed.
Waterluvian 19 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."
goda90 19 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.
armanckeser 5 hours ago [-]
I wrote about how to redirect to nitter instances on any platform a month ago [1], and a few days later we had the cease and desist. Fortunately, you can redirect to twiiit.com and that will find a working instance for you.
What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?
zahlman 18 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)?
hitekker 11 hours ago [-]
Many feel X, or gating access to X, is fundamentally unjust, superseding the guidelines.
Feeling injustice converts the loss into a claim: "I didn't just lose free access, we're owed free access." The GP questioned whether the inconvenience is an injustice. The flags came because that question threatened the claim.
Free speech talk decorates a claim that, imo, doesn't really have much purchase.
immibis2 18 hours ago [-]
The reason is likely not guidelines-based.
Forgeties79 19 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.
immibis2 18 hours ago [-]
Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.
Forgeties79 14 hours 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.
immibis2 9 hours ago [-]
You don't need an ISP or Google either. It's incredibly difficult for some people to leave either, but it's also incredibly difficult for some people to leave Twitter.
7 hours ago [-]
freedomben 19 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.
Operyl 18 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.
mitxela 25 minutes ago [-]
Be the change to want to see. Mirror their tweets on cityname.com
Forgeties79 14 hours 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.
Operyl 11 hours ago [-]
My municipality does! Guess what they still don't really use... most of it still ends up on X exclusively.
bakies 18 hours ago [-]
right, it's not free, like you said
angoragoats 19 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 14 hours ago [-]
Indeed, fair point. I've conflated those in my comment above!
InsideOutSanta 18 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk, gratis speech absolutist.
angoragoats 19 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 18 hours ago [-]
That’s not what free speech is.
benrutter 46 minutes ago [-]
I agree, but also, it gets kinda messy here because Musk's "free speech" purchase if twitter was based on his understanding that Twitter not publishing content they deemed inflammatory or misinform was a violation of free speech, which I also don't think is true?
So I guess we're several layers of misunderstanding deep at this stage, and X's lockdown is ironic if its not free speech according to the flawed understanding of free speech it advocates? I dunno.
angoragoats 18 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.
weberer 18 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 18 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.
basilikum 14 hours ago [-]
Twitter heavily censors speech on the platform itself by downranking things they do not like without any transparency.
zahlman 5 hours ago [-]
Back when they disliked and downranked the opposite kind of thing, nobody on your side agreed that it was "censorship".
mitxela 20 minutes ago [-]
Is there a difference between downranking "gas the Jews" and downranking "trans women are women", or are those both equally bad censorship?
basilikum 4 hours ago [-]
How do you even know what "side" I'm on?
zahlman 4 hours ago [-]
From the fact that you are speaking about the site's actions in present tense.
basilikum 4 hours ago [-]
Because that's what's being discussed?
angoragoats 14 hours 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.
8note 12 hours ago [-]
is that how musk defines it?
i get the sense he instead thinks of free speech maximalism as people need to hear him and completely censor alternatives
angoragoats 8 hours ago [-]
He is a hypocrite, so he defines it however is convenient at the time. But I think my interpretation is a reasonable one for someone calling themselves a free speech absolutist.
throwatdem12311 17 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.
mitxela 19 minutes ago [-]
That is the Musk philosophy - if you disagree with him, you can say it but nobody will hear it.
This is functionally the same as you not being able to say it.
angoragoats 8 hours ago [-]
I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right). In the context of this type of free speech, if you have two identical posts, and one is behind a login wall and one isn’t, the one not behind the login wall is objectively more free.
throwatdem12311 7 hours ago [-]
> I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right).
So am I.
If a comedian is doing a bit at a bar and they charge a $5 cover to get in is that infringing on “free speech”. Of course not, that’s absurd. Why would be it any different online?
angoragoats 5 hours ago [-]
> if you have two identical posts, and one is behind a login wall and one isn’t, the one not behind the login wall is objectively more free.
Do you disagree with this statement? If so, why?
zahlman 18 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 18 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.
zahlman 5 hours ago [-]
I have no idea what definition you're using, and I've commonly seen people who make your argument demonstrate all the same sorts of bias they allege Musk to have.
weberer 18 hours ago [-]
Could you give your colloquial definition, because its clearly different than mine.
mitxela 18 minutes ago [-]
Speech is more free when there are less barriers to receiving it.
HumblyTossed 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
angoragoats 18 hours ago [-]
I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or diversion.
applfanboysbgon 17 hours ago [-]
You are the only one who brought up that distraction from the fact that he routinely violates the first definition you mentioned.
angoragoats 13 hours ago [-]
I assumed the parent post was referring to the Constitutional meaning when they said "Yes, we all know what 'free speech' really means and it has nothing to do with X," but if I misunderstood then I apologize!
bad_username 3 hours ago [-]
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences", as some people like to say
mbmbn 19 hours ago [-]
Can you point the way where Free Speech is being countered here?
Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.
macNchz 19 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 18 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.
girvo 18 hours ago [-]
I disagree. There was a noticeable change some time after Elon bought it to make it even worse.
Catloafdev 16 hours ago [-]
No, it definitely was not as bad 10 years ago as it is today. Just objectively not true at all.
criley2 18 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 18 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.
asimovDev 17 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)
qlte 4 hours ago [-]
A vibrant ecosystem of full-featured 3rd party apps able to offer unique spin on the UX, tailored to different preferences of their user base who are willing to pay is a good thing. Not an indicator of a problem.
Now for Twitter/X we get One (1) ad-infested first party app requiring login/tracking, an unusably crippled logged out web view, and an API exposing a limited subset of data with a tiny free tier.
Is that really better than 10 years ago?
Zambyte 19 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.
uurrnn 19 hours ago [-]
So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.
IshKebab 18 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.
immibis2 18 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.
CM30 18 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.
figmert 19 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 18 hours ago [-]
You normally only see that crap on Chinese apps like Temu.
thn-gap 16 hours ago [-]
Is it? I've only ever used X on my phone through Brave. But always logged in, though.
downrightmike 15 hours ago [-]
They fired that guy years ago, so no one knows how to decom it without breaking everything
viccis 14 hours 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.
TiredOfLife 17 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.
rob74 19 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 19 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.
cube00 21 hours ago [-]
The fact that so many large companies are still on X is so wrong.
embedding-shape 21 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 21 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.
How would you define it so the internet wouldn't also be considered a third-party platform?
melodyogonna 21 hours ago [-]
Why?
bigyabai 7 hours ago [-]
Because I want to identify with luxury brands, celebrities and lifestyle corporations, but can't stand when they virtue signal what I hate.
frumplestlatz 21 hours ago [-]
Why is it “so wrong” to meet your audience where they are?
harrisoned 21 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 20 hours ago [-]
The comment I replied to said "large companies", not government, and I don't see the equivalence.
maipen 15 hours 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.
cferry 14 hours 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 :)
squeegmeister 14 hours ago [-]
Because the owner of said tool is a white nationalist
frumplestlatz 14 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve confused HN for BlueSky.
tempaccountabcd 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
earth-tattoo 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gaganyaan 22 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 14 hours 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”
simondotau 21 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.
sureglymop 21 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.
pdonis 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.).
What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.
t-writescode 7 hours ago [-]
Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company. For many people and the companies or organizations they lead, “everyone uses X/Twitter” and/or “everyone can access X/Twitter”.
We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying the piper.
pdonis 6 hours ago [-]
> Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company.
Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.
t-writescode 6 hours ago [-]
I said organization on purpose to also include governments, especially local and small ones in the middle of nowhere.
riknos314 6 hours ago [-]
Public communications from government entities really should be legally required to be disseminated on public forums (ideally properly hosted on .gov domains for easy verification, with RSS feeds) Cross-posting on other platforms should be allowed (with backlink to the .gov), but the .gov should be authoritative.
jrflo 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that requires a level of technical competence that most government entities don't have in the US. Not to mention the ridiculous requirements/processes that are placed on official govt software.
Raed667 2 hours ago [-]
It is 2026, it is not hard to publish a "blog" , if you want to share that same content over social networks that's fine but it should be a requirement that the data doesn't solely live in private walled "social" networks
mitxela 14 minutes ago [-]
How is posting on wordpress.com or tumblr.com any different from posting on x.com?
asdff 14 hours 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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 8 hours ago [-]
For the most obscene example, life safety critical announcements during disasters.
Usually just information about events, road closures etc.
panopticon 9 hours ago [-]
The mountain passes near me have government-run twitter accounts, and it's usually the fastest way to get rich information on their status during storms.
There is a state government website with some of the same information, but it's usually more coarse (sometimes just the open/close status) and updated less frequently.
mplewis 9 hours ago [-]
Emergency notifications, mainly.
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
Such as what exactly? I imagine that comes through multiple channels.
t-writescode 7 hours ago [-]
Some people have Wifi but not cell phone signal. A single tweet has very robust, existing infrastructure, over the “one email per person in a mailing list” style of email; and SMS is DoA when there’s no cell phone.
denismi 5 hours ago [-]
No phone, no TV, only a PC that they sit at logged in to Twitter all day refreshing their feed in case a local emergency comes up?
t-writescode 4 hours ago [-]
They have a cell phone on them because they have WiFi in their house, because they have Internet, and they have notifications turned on to their local emergency servers. Since Twitter has a push notifications and a shorter refresh timer, you get messages more regularly that you’ll actually read.
Compare that to email, which you’d get hundreds of messages a day and only care about 3 of them, so you’re not constantly checking.
Edit: dude you live in Australia. Do you know how people in the Bush get their emergency updates that they need to respond to urgently? I bet at least some of them use Twitter or something similar to it. They're not huddled around their weather radio all day (and that doesn't cover everything). Because I had family in rural California and that is exactly how they got theirs. Twitter and Facebook.
dools 9 hours ago [-]
I deleted my twitter account when Elon took over and haven’t missed anything important.
LightBug1 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Yhippa 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
LightBug1 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
simondotau 21 hours ago [-]
Maybe if people didn't make services like XCancel, the impracticality of X would be more salient.
mitxela 21 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 18 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.
mitxela 13 minutes ago [-]
In the time before xcancel, nobody was aware of xcancel, that's correct.
roryirvine 20 hours ago [-]
Nitter existed well before Twitter first experimented with requiring a login wall to read posts.
People used it because it provided a lighter, cleaner interface, because it avoided Twitter's user tracking, and because it was reasonably useful without Javascript.
(I don't disagree that X has moved beyond the pale, but Nitter was a real boon in the past)
sunaurus 21 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.
mitxela 21 hours ago [-]
Get the Libredirect extension and this will happen automatically (to a server that is actually working).
14u2c 7 hours ago [-]
> Libredirect
Just looked at it. Unfortunately it requests permissions for all domains, not only the relevant set.
mitxela 13 minutes ago [-]
Review the code then. The set of domains changes based on your preferences.
LightBug1 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Kotlopou 21 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 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nozzlegear 9 hours ago [-]
> Wikipedia has become a cancerous blight on world politics
Genuine question: why? I don't understand how Wikipedia is relevant to world politics, are people reading it as a news source?
simondotau 8 hours ago [-]
It suffers from the same fundamental flaw as a self-selected poll: the people most motivated to participate are not necessarily representative, impartial or even particularly reasonable. What appears like a diverse community of fair, objective and well-intentioned people is nothing of the sort.
The community-driven model necessarily means that control of narrative rewards persistence and an aptitude for social engineering. Lift the lid on almost any contentious topic and you will find a fiefdom of committed obsessives who assert seniority, weaponise whatever rules they can, and ultimately wear down anyone with an opposing viewpoint.
nozzlegear 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
HeatrayEnjoyer 4 hours ago [-]
Horrific. Wikipedia is one of the very few large entities on the web left that are not actively harming the species.
smaudet 21 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 21 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.
smaudet 34 minutes ago [-]
Your "counter" is nonsensical - if you are referring to the concept of a logical "red herring", something to distract by introducing an irrelevant topic, this is not that.
Your comment pertained to your (dislike of) use of wikipedia in contrast to the relevant site (X.com).
My comment pertains to both of the relevant websites you had related (wikipedia is no more related to x.com than governments, neighborhoods, etc. that you have brought up), and to the specific reason why x.com came to be (it's current "authorship"), and how the directly related collary (grok) is not the thing you randomly brought up...
Which if there were a red herring here, it would be wikipedia (as it is not a site whose primary purpose is as a commentary website, nor it used in the same fashion)...
But for the topic you specifically brought up, this is entirely relevant, namely, your dislike of another website, and it's direct relation to the general topic at hand.
As for the rest, further nonsense. I can just as easily flip the subjects in each statement and they will remain true...my (factual) statement stands.
mitxela 21 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 21 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 21 hours ago [-]
What if the post is like "we discovered AGI (for real this time, not clickbait)" - will you pretend AGI wasn't discovered?
urbnspacecowboy 6 hours ago [-]
If someone discovered AGI for real, they're going to broadcast it in a lot more places than one social media network. The AI revolution will not be tweeted.
madeofpalk 14 hours ago [-]
If it's important enough, it'll be elsewhere.
addandsubtract 20 hours ago [-]
That would A) still be clickbait, and B) be posted on a corporate blog, not just X.
mahboi 10 hours ago [-]
Yes
fWEFVEEGLKJH 20 hours ago [-]
> (for real this time, not clickbait)
That sounds likes something a clickbait author would write.
mahboi 10 hours ago [-]
20 weird tricks Anthropic used to make AGI that will shock you
simondotau 21 hours ago [-]
4. Click the link
5. Accept that you won't click on the link
vrganj 21 hours ago [-]
Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.
hobo123 2 hours ago [-]
You mean like Zuck prevents me from seeing any Instagram content without login?
mitxela 11 minutes ago [-]
If you find yourself either ignoring or logging in to view Instagram posts, then yes. But history is path dependent, and this problem mainly occurs on X.
Levitz 11 hours ago [-]
Damn it's almost as if this was a conversation we should have had around 2018 at the latest. Like evident bias in social networks was a real concern all along.
What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter".
I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this.
Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.
mahboi 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, most of the people are upset because they're Democrats politically on Twitter, and the old one catered to them.
simondotau 4 hours ago [-]
As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.
> 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.
mahboi 7 hours ago [-]
Before X flagged me as a bot for no reason, I had a mostly unused account and can confirm it was showing me a ton of right-wing content. Also lots of stuff related to Elon Musk in particular.
On the flip side, X has less moderation, and it's pretty even-handed. They're allowing a lot of pretty mild right-wing content that Twitter was banning people for.
mitxela 10 minutes ago [-]
They didn't release the ranking algorithm as open source, but they released enough of a pretense that people got some hints, and we know that whether a post is by Elon Musk is one of the most important ranking factors.
frumplestlatz 15 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”.
TheAceOfHearts 7 hours ago [-]
Researchers use whatever tools are available, you cannot complaint about imperfect methodology when Elon refuses to provide researchers access to their APIs in order to do a better job at assessing the state of the system.
But for whatever it's worth I had made a new account around the same time and my experience was very similar to what was reported.
frumplestlatz 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t see why I can’t complain about unsupported conclusions derived from poor methodology. X doesn’t owe anyone API to run social research, but especially not activist groups with an active, expressed interest in denigrating the platform.
vrganj 1 hours ago [-]
Again, Comcast is not an "activist group" and the study literally got awarded by the Royal Statistical Society.
As a cherry on top, they do owe researchers in the EU (though this was done in the UK, I know Sky has an EU presence as well) API access or similar under Article 40 of the DSA.
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 14 hours ago [-]
He had already been banned for the same reason, and Musk unbanned him in the same wave that had him ban crimethinc.
vrganj 14 hours 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.
X is extremely aggressive in banning anti-Zionists, both left and right wing. It has some of the most anti-free speech policies on the internet.
amelius 21 hours ago [-]
I wish HN would simply ban links to X.
browningstreet 15 hours 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.
mitxela 21 hours ago [-]
HN is a venture capital fund. That will happen if and only if it becomes profitable to do so.
simondotau 21 hours ago [-]
If you want to make the rules, start your own club.
captainbadass33 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zem 15 hours ago [-]
at the very least whoever posts the link has presumably accessed it, so we should normalise pasting the full text in here
21 hours ago [-]
dandellion 21 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).
slowmovintarget 18 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.
LightBug1 21 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.
muyuu 6 hours ago [-]
Xcancel helps people migrate away from X, or simply stay outside of it. The fact that X is trying to shut them down, plus the fact that they silo replies and interactions in the first place, should be a good hint that X themselves don't regard that degree of openness to work in their favour.
pibaker 21 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 21 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.
davkan 2 hours ago [-]
They have something I want. Usually that’s to check an account for a status update on a service or organization, or view a link that’s been sent to me.
I was fine with occasionally wading into the shit pile for something I want. It’s fine, the door is open and I don’t live there. Get in get out.
But now they want me have a shit address and shit suit and a shitmail. They want me to say hey its me mr shit can you let me in so can I have some of that delicious shit?
Instead I think I’ll just put on a hazmat suit and steal the few pieces I want from their shit pile and get out.
Boycotting them is pointless. Holding to your principals does nothing but hinder your own usage of the internet and does not help bring about the end of X or whoever else. The 0.5% of X users using xcancel disappearing overnight would have no impact.
These monoliths of Internet consolidation are not worth our consideration. Steal their content, block their ads, get on with your life.
Leonard_of_Q 21 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.
phyzome 14 hours 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.
johannes1234321 20 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.
tjoff 11 hours ago [-]
Because for some reason people link to it here.
m3kw9 13 hours 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.
fwip 10 hours ago [-]
True, but with Xcancel, you don't have to sign into X, and you're also denying X some user data and engagement metrics.
vrganj 21 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 21 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.
xyst 14 hours ago [-]
I don’t use Twitter but assholes continue to reference posts on this cancerous site. That’s why this service exists lil bro
8 hours ago [-]
8 hours ago [-]
somedude895 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
azan_ 21 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 21 hours ago [-]
why is that? Why can't you just use it in read only fashion?
fabian2k 21 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.
pickleRick243 10 hours ago [-]
sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. What I mean is that you can create an account to view posts and not reply, i.e. have a lurker account.
medler 9 hours ago [-]
I tried to create an account but Elon banned it within a couple of hours for being inauthentic. Ironic given the large number of bots on the site
mitxela 7 minutes ago [-]
Can't you still read with a banned account?
frogulis 21 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.
21 hours ago [-]
MPSimmons 21 hours ago [-]
It seems intellectually dishonest to blanket-label any principled stance that you disagree with as "virtue signaling".
pickleRick243 21 hours ago [-]
I think the claim is that the principled stance would be to ignore all X content.
ceejayoz 21 hours ago [-]
Which is just the "yet you participate in society" meme again.
bbg2401 15 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 14 hours 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 20 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 14 hours 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.
_kst_ 8 hours ago [-]
Neither this post nor the linked site explain what XCancel is/was. Since I wasn't familiar with XCancel, an announcement that it's suspended is not particularly informative.
Apparently XCancel is an instance of Nitter. According to Wikipedia, "Nitter is designed to allow access to X without tracking, advertisements, or the need for an account. It only supports browsing, and cannot be used to sign in or interact with the X community."
Nowadays such clients are effectively impossible, because the XTwitter API pricing is designed for business users only. Some bigger services can afford to pay for the privilege to post via the API (e.g. Buffer I think?), which can work for corporate communications. The prices are such that often it's cheaper to pay a person to do the crossposting manually and do it properly while at it.
abletonlive 13 hours ago [-]
Because mastadon is not relevant to anybody but the people on HN. It's 2026, I really can't believe HN is still stuck on mastadon.
nunez 17 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 16 hours ago [-]
I use Twitter daily and haven't noticed any screws. How is Elon supposedly turning them?
joquarky 14 hours ago [-]
Don't sea lion.
vova_hn2 17 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 16 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 16 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.
immibis2 15 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.
wraptile 16 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"
instantlyblocke 3 hours ago [-]
> and you'll never be blocked.
Youll be instantyl blocked, because accounts without Biometric login and Phone numbers get flagged and asked for validation after 36 hours.
clcaev 6 hours ago [-]
What is the core value proposition of twitter? It seems simple, short form informations delivery (eg “follow me on twitter”) is central. The “likes”, retweets, and follower counts are secondary but perhaps important metrics that drive engagement. A simple link plus QR for paper is needed. Moderation seems a challenge. Are there simpler alternatives to mastodon? is federation possible? Why is RSS not used for this?
ronbenton 6 hours ago [-]
Inertia. It's extremely hard to build a network product and even moreso to dethrone the dominant player in the space
SwellJoe 6 hours ago [-]
Mastodon isn't all that complicated. But, obviously it's not where people went when people fled Xitter, by and large. The funny people and journalists mostly went to Bluesky and the normal people mostly went to Threads because they already had an Instagram account. The Nazis and child pornographers and the people who were comfortable being around Nazis and child pornographers remained on Xitter. But, a few nerds went to the fediverse and we are generally having a nice time there.
RSS is not a read-write medium. You can't realistically carry on a semi-realtime conversation over RSS.
cakeface 6 hours ago [-]
Bluesky strikes a balance between the federated Mastodon and the Twitter walled garden.
miladyincontrol 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not so sure about that. Bluesky by large migrated from twitter aiming to escape the likes of Elon's politics, but they still brought over some of the most toxic cancel/brigade culture that twitter had to offer.
Not suggesting all of bluesky is bad, but it sure ain't the most pleasant crowd in it's own right either.
aucisson_masque 21 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.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
harrouet 1 hours ago [-]
I used to be a heavy Twitter user. I quit when it started to become a dump area for fascist rhetoric.
I guess we're seeing Musk-defending-freedom-of-speech in action.
thesdev 18 hours ago [-]
https://nitter.click still works right as rain, and so do many other Nitter instances.
zqwt3k 19 hours ago [-]
Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.
immibis2 18 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 18 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?
tehwebguy 17 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 16 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 16 hours ago [-]
And the company's previous name was, ominously... Luminati.
immibis2 18 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.
Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not.
Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?
immibis2 16 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 15 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 14 hours ago [-]
Do you mean this will be the first legal ruling about this particular variation of the issue?
brushfoot 13 hours ago [-]
Not true. Creating an account requires agreeing to the ToS. And if the ToS prohibit this kind of usage, then legally, it's not allowed.
See hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn using accounts, and they were found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms.
immibis2 9 hours ago [-]
It depends what you mean by "not allowed". Breaking ToS isn't a crime, but you might be sued for damages, but how can they show there were any damages?
murderfs 8 hours ago [-]
It seems pretty easy? Someone viewing it through a mirror isn't going to see ads.
charcircuit 14 hours 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.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
Nor would it be illegal to report outside of the club about things people said in the club.
ktm5j 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's what they went on to point out.
CamperBob2 15 hours 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.
Nemo_bis 46 minutes ago [-]
Tall order. The main Nitter instances were using tens of thousands of accounts to evade detection, IIRC. Adding money to the mix creates more legal liability and a paper trail towards people who can be sued.
It's much easier if thousands of people set up their own Nitter instances.
bigfishrunning 15 hours 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.
immibis2 12 hours ago [-]
The account on its own is worthless - the problem with Twitter is not that people have accounts.
CamperBob2 14 hours 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.
ranger_danger 15 hours ago [-]
Aurora Store does the same thing to facilitate downloading Play Store apps.
sifar 14 hours ago [-]
I like this framing, like Schrödinger's cat.
Quitschquat 14 hours ago [-]
Thin skins over at there at X
rich_sasha 18 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.
brainwad 18 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.
Planktonne 18 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 18 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.
wongarsu 17 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
_flux 17 hours ago [-]
I thought LLM-authored books were rampant in Amazon, though?
nixpulvis 18 hours ago [-]
I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...
bayindirh 18 hours ago [-]
Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:
Who has the gold makes the rules.
atemerev 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
That’s how works everywhere
seanw444 13 hours ago [-]
You're downvoted, but it's true. Some places just mask it with fancy processes and manners a bit better.
lovich 14 hours 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.
atemerev 11 hours ago [-]
Well I have heard that some people managed to sue some corporations and actually win some cases before.
bayindirh 11 hours ago [-]
PFAS case is a rare occurrence, and this is after DuPont knowing the harms and downplaying or ignoring it for decades.
A similar thing has been surfaced in Dalton, Georgia, again about PFAS [0]. Let's see how will it play out...
When I said the tech billionaires I meant the actual oligarchs.
Companies will eventually take a cost benefit evaluation and stop fighting if the risk is too high or the fines too large.
A personal billionaire who decides to fuck you over is capable of behaving irrationally and just beating you via resources.
Look at trumps infinite appeal strategy which apparently works.
He only just was forced to pay Jean Carrol a few months ago, four years after he lost his civil case.
If you’re a regular Joe and some billionaire harmed you in a way that hurt your income. You’re not gonna be able to afford 4 years of legal battles.
As long as money buys power in our legal system, you can’t compete with someone with effectively infinite more wealth than you.
bluefirebrand 18 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?
MentalM 14 hours 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.
brainwad 18 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.
wongarsu 17 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
darkwater 17 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 17 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 17 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 17 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.
butlike 13 hours 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?
12 hours ago [-]
darkwater 16 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 14 hours 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
immibis2 15 hours ago [-]
If two things are competing, they are in the same market by definition.
bluefirebrand 17 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 16 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 15 hours ago [-]
And derivative works, like AI makes
bonsai_spool 18 hours ago [-]
> Precedent is pretty clear:
What cases are you citing when you say this?
brainwad 18 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 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
They can just round up some friendly users and sue under their names. Starting with their own corporate accounts?
lesuorac 15 hours 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.
but xcancel is not putting ads or making a commercial product
ratelimitsteve 16 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 16 hours ago [-]
> How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe
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.
embedding-shape 18 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
8note 12 hours ago [-]
twitter didnt make it though. they have a license to it
bluefirebrand 18 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 17 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 17 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 15 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.
butlike 13 hours ago [-]
They can't unless the tuner produces a copyrighted work for whatever their purpose would be, because they can step in and "detune" the thing at 3am for a competitive advantage.
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
This assumes the "tuning" (I assume you mean fine-tuning?) is lossless, which it isn't.
scottyah 12 hours ago [-]
You can produce copyrighted works and have just been tuned not to lol. I fail to see how limiting an ability to comply with the law is any different from just complying with the law?
bluefirebrand 10 hours ago [-]
Proprietary Computer systems shouldn't get the same leeway that humans do. Simple as that.
17 hours ago [-]
dismalaf 17 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).
htrp 18 hours ago [-]
except a bunch of paywalled stuff did end up in training corpora
dismalaf 17 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 17 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 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
Remember ~10 years ago when Google had "cached" versions of the websites? I believe they removed that feature for this reason.
gosub100 16 hours ago [-]
Now I want to know, what happens if you redistribute an "AI summary" of the copyright material?
blitzar 19 hours ago [-]
Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.
HumblyTossed 19 hours ago [-]
Aaron Swartz died so that "AI" billionaires can live.
rougehuh 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
seenitlol 18 hours ago [-]
Someone should add a hitman to the corner of the image
znpy 18 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.
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.
alterom 8 hours ago [-]
>scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.
So, I take it some Twitter users took an issue with their tweets being redistributed by another platform and sued XCancel?
Because surely you're not claiming that Twitter has any ownership of what gets posted on that platform, are you?
>if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
By that logic, Meta could sue me for posting my photos on other platforms.
Meta doesn't have a case here, and neither does Twitter, but something tells me Twitter is involved in this nevertheless.
wahnfrieden 19 hours ago [-]
It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping
Edit: not a moral stance
jm4 19 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?
Levitz 11 hours ago [-]
We put up with it mostly because it enables a lot of communication to happen at all.
You want to hold the corporations legally liable for the content their host, you can say goodbye to basically reddit as a whole, any twitter clone, youtube comment sections and a whole more stuff.
embedding-shape 18 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 17 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 15 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?
flaburgan 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, exactly. I limit the scraping to popular enough accounts. The wikimedia community is already organized to decide who deserves a Wikipedia page so I use that.
immibis2 9 hours ago [-]
Please do share with the other instance operators in #nitter:matrix.org!
simianparrot 18 hours ago [-]
Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?
conception 18 hours ago [-]
Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.
27183 18 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
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?
immibis2 18 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.
conception 8 hours ago [-]
I think its more than the law doesn’t understand the technology.
27183 18 hours ago [-]
I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.
immibis2 18 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 18 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.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
You don't want fully-specified rules because a rule with strict boundaries has loopholes. You actually want a clearly allowed area, a clearly disallowed area, and a gradually increasing gradient of punishment in between, so that a small change in behaviour produces only a small change in punishment, and avoiding punishment requires a large change in behaviour.
rimunroe 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly!
rimunroe 18 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.
sekh60 17 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 16 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 15 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.
rimunroe 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah I gotchu. I have no idea how that would go in a court for real. I was just trying to explain how and why things are the way they (sometimes) are
27183 18 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.
amiga386 17 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)
> 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.
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 16 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.
27183 2 hours ago [-]
> Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence.
I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.
> 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.
I have no idea at all how anything should matter as far as the law is concerned. Not my problem, unless I somehow get caught. But not getting caught is a problem grounded in reality, unlike legal ones. I think I can manage that.
That said, if laws about computers don't comport with how computers actually work, I'll take extra amounts of glee in violating them.
And, even more gleefully, nobody will be able to detect my violations. My internet traffic will look identically the same as someone "innocently copying" or whatever.
bakies 18 hours ago [-]
i just screenshotted this comment without your consent
embedding-shape 18 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.
8note 12 hours ago [-]
i have not deputized twitter to post takedowns on my behalf. its my content and copyright, not twitter's
roosterIllusi0n 18 hours ago [-]
Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.
akerl_ 16 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 15 hours ago [-]
That's not what distilling is either. Distilling is training your AI to exactly copy someone else's AI.
bluecalm 13 hours ago [-]
Because LLM's output is not copyrightable?
wahnfrieden 17 hours ago [-]
No it’s not
ranger_danger 15 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.
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.
HumblyTossed 19 hours ago [-]
There's a button on X that allows me to repost someone else's content.
bel8 18 hours ago [-]
there's a setting to disable that
wahnfrieden 18 hours ago [-]
That’s not rehosting
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
echelon 19 hours ago [-]
Grok can do that if you give it an HN thread or other websites.
phforms 14 hours 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?
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.
usernomdeguerre 11 hours ago [-]
The unfortunate part is that each individual who attempts to leave is fighting the Network Effect[0]. It's fighting against the human organism's basic social nature.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
I think Twitter is the best counterargument to this defeatism. I don't personally know anyone that uses the platform any more, and I don't recall needing it for anything for years. From that remove, it's now just the platform for lazy politicians, lazy journalists, and scammers of one form or another. If there's more exclusive information there I'm not aware of, I really don't need it.
Slow_Hand 10 hours ago [-]
Yes. And if something truly important should occur on the platform then it will be reported elsewhere.
What do we really think we're missing out on by not using X?
ValentineC 8 hours ago [-]
Also, for some reason, AI companies like DeepSeek who would rather post news exclusively there than vibecode their own news site.
Aeolun 8 hours ago [-]
And love that after many years, despite going all in on the silly x name, it’s still Twitter to many.
myko 8 hours ago [-]
my understanding is twitter is primarily bots at this point
i'm surprised any human is still there
redeeman 8 hours ago [-]
then your understanding seems to be quite limited :)
Plont 8 hours ago [-]
what even was the point of typing that? it just reads as kindergarten bully on an ipad.
alightsoul 11 hours ago [-]
My solution to this is creating bots that repost content on sites like bluesky. The network effect can be overcome because people use a site for the content it has and not necessarily to interact with others
Of course I only do it with accounts that are very obviously intended to be public like news and government accounts otherwise x and meta can argue you were violating user privacy or some shit like that
spicybright 10 hours ago [-]
Is there any service that exists to do this for people?
Like say you want your Twitter forwarded to your Facebook page and email list, you just punch in the logins and it does the rest?
Ideally it would fill in the details like formatting the images/video correctly
The key point is that you must not post in XTwitter first, but you have to use the crossposter's client as source. Pulling content out of XTwitter, even your own, is onerous.
rightnutwingjob 8 hours ago [-]
Many.
Search for social media management tools.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
If This Then That?
acomjean 9 hours ago [-]
I used to cross post any Instagram photos to twitter with if this then that. But the platforms have made it harder.
I thought hubspot does that but looking at their website I have no idea what they do..
shkurski_ 10 hours ago [-]
Is it legal?
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn't it be? I know we've all got accustomed to the idea that preventing a billionaire from extorting money gets you in trouble, and it usually does, but it's not illegal.
alterom 8 hours ago [-]
>Why wouldn't it be?
Well, for one, because xcancel was forced to suspend its service.
There's legal as in "what the law says", and legal as in "what the judge will order you to do", and the latter sense is not as clear-cut as we'd want it to be.
alightsoul 3 hours ago [-]
Xcancel was accused of using the twitter API. You don't have to use it. You can have a machine vision model process screenshots. You can also process the Dom. You don't offer a freely usable service or software to the public, only the final result. That final result is opinionated according to the very public accounts you want and does not offer broad scope access to accounts. You do not let the public control it nor provide a product to browse to random or posts about anything like nitter. Or you can process the content into your own news account with ai which is what most news accounts do anyways and then it becomes yours.
alightsoul 3 hours ago [-]
Is it legal to make the whole world addicted to your product? Litigation, in the same way, is a ticking time bomb for meta worldwide.
donio 9 hours ago [-]
I have a solution for this problem: just delete the fucking account anyway.
seki285 9 hours ago [-]
problem solved
aczerepinski 9 hours ago [-]
I deactivated my account when Musk took over, and am not aware of anything I’ve missed since then. Is there anything big that I missed?
simonsarris 9 hours ago [-]
I think you're playing dumb on purpose here but in general yes, you are missing out on all the friends and connections and interesting conversations you have not made. I don't know what those are for you, but they're transparently obvious for me in the counterfactual, and a lot of people on the site.
Morromist 8 hours ago [-]
Twitter is far from special. So I guess you're missing out on all the friends and connections and interesting conversations you have not made on Threads, Facebook, Linkedin, instagram, tiktok, reddit, bluesky, mastodon, discord & tumblr.
Also twitter is the worst of all the things I've listed.
ctkhn 11 hours ago [-]
Not really relevant for public service announcements like gp is talking about. I just want a live feed of my local services updates. I get weather alerts from my city and county over text (contracted by the government through a third party platform), I would take them as a dedicated app or rss feed or anything. I'm not connecting to my friends or family through a weather alert or train delay notice
spicybright 10 hours ago [-]
I find texting pretty decent but not ideal. Most alert systems offer it already, you know it's going to be a short message, and you'll be informed quickly of things instead of having to reach out somewhere.
Maybe there should be a texting app where you can make pages of contacts to swipe between, and you can customize notifications. If you want to get fancy, maybe local AI to determine if something looks important or not? They'll always have ALERT or something in the message.
AlexandrB 11 hours ago [-]
RSS was so good for this. No wonder Google had to kill it.
saghm 10 hours ago [-]
RSS still exists though? Do you mean Google Reader?
gralab 10 hours ago [-]
By killing Google Reader they essentially killed RSS. Yes, I know there are other clients some of us still use, but Google's was the biggest and most popular.
cjkaminski 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, yes, and yes.
Let's revive RSS.
It's still good, even if it's been on the floor beyond the "five second rule".
mrtesthah 11 hours ago [-]
If there were an API or reliable way to delete accounts programmatically, you could create a reverse-kickstarter-like site in which you pledged automatic future deletion of your account once a critical percentage of the people you followed (or who followed you) did the same. Action would be suspended for all participants until that critical threshold was reached.
cjkaminski 11 hours ago [-]
Unfortunate, yes.
Futile? No.
Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last.
Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last.
Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.
nradov 11 hours ago [-]
X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.
cjkaminski 10 hours ago [-]
Ok. Show your work.
Which social network has larger reach than X?
Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X?
Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink?
Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink?
Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know.
What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me.
Show the facts and figures that support your claims.
That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.
triceratops 9 hours ago [-]
How do you define "reach" and "influence"?
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all have more users, more daily active users, more aggregate data transferred.
cjkaminski 9 hours ago [-]
Excellent question. My definition is admittedly qualitative. I spend a fair bit of time listening to commentary by people who are connected to policy decisions at the state and federal level (in the USA). An unusual amount of people admit to relying upon X as their barometer of public sentiment, despite their intellectual understanding that Elon Musk has his thumb on the scale. Most of them have admitted they understand the "water has been poisoned" but they also claim that all alternatives are inferior. This might not apply to YouTube as much as the others, but I haven't seen evidence that disproves this theory. I'm open to the possibility, for sure. This said, I believe that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have a profound affect on large swaths of the population. The evidence I observe suggests that X is doing more work among the people who can text someone who makes decisions. Curious to know more about your POV. What am I missing?
nradov 10 hours ago [-]
Those are silly questions entirely irrelevant to the point above.
cjkaminski 10 hours ago [-]
How so?
Defend your position.
(edit: I genuinely don't understand how your replies are anything other than ad hominem attacks. Your responses are about as effective as a toddler asking "why?" over and over and over again. Either deliver a substantive counter argument or stop replying.)
(edit 2: I assume you are the one who downvoted this reply. That only adds to the factual evidence that you are struggling to defend your position via legitimate means. This isn't a personal attack. I hoped you would engage in legitimate discourse. Please do better in the future.)
kelnos 9 hours ago [-]
Ad hominem would be if the GP was making a personal attack on you. Saying a question is "silly" is not that.
Downvoting can also mean that the downvoter doesn't think it's worth the time to engage with prose. It's a bit arrogant to assume that a downvote means someone can't come up with a cogent argument against you; the fact that you make that assumption points even more strongly at the idea that it's not worth arguing with you.
cjkaminski 9 hours ago [-]
Fair points.
I would say that classifying an argument as "silly" without any supporting evidence is borderline ad hominem because it doesn't make a substantive critique of the assertion, and instead colors the character of the opposition. But that shouldn't take away from your position.
As for your suggestion that I am being arrogant, I can see where you're coming from but I also feel as though I'm within the bounds of fairness to push for a reasoned response (instead of an emotional appeal).
All that said, thanks for replying in a way that advances the discourse. Much appreciated.
nradov 9 hours ago [-]
You assume incorrectly. I flagged your comment for breaking site guidelines, not downvoted. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with how the site works but it's not possible to downvote a reply to one's own comment. The button isn't there.
cjkaminski 9 hours ago [-]
Okay, how did I break the guidelines per your assessment? I'm genuinely curious.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Why does Starlink matter in a Conversation about X?
cjkaminski 9 hours ago [-]
Because they are both part of the SpaceX Company. They are intimately tied together.
ahtihn 10 hours ago [-]
> Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink?
Why do remote regions matter? No one relevant lives there.
cjkaminski 10 hours ago [-]
lololol.
Obviously you don't know any Ukranians.
tredre3 9 hours ago [-]
> lololol. Obviously you don't know any Ukranians.
Please take a step back and remember that your original claim was "a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet (via starlink)"
That's demonstrably false. It's a small percentage. Even in Ukraine. You're now moving the goalposts.
cjkaminski 9 hours ago [-]
No, I did not claim "a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet (via starlink)". Try again.
I said that people in REMOTE regions, by which I mean those who are underserved by traditional internet access such as fiber or coax or twisted-pair, are served by Starlink in significant numbers.
Please give demonstrable facts that dispute this claim if you disagree.
skissane 9 hours ago [-]
> X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.
Starlink's market isn't "Internet access" in general. Anywhere you can get fibre, fibre will be faster and cheaper. For many use cases a cell tower works better too, if you are in its coverage area.
Starlink's market is "high bandwidth / low latency Internet access no matter where you are on Earth". And for that it is by far the market leader. Its closest competitors are way behind – second place Amazon's Kuiper has under 400 satellites in orbit, Starlink has over 11,000. So Starlink is over an order of magnitude in front.
nradov 8 hours ago [-]
If you define a market narrowly enough then pretty much any company has a "firm grip" on some market. That doesn't mean much in terms of overall market dynamics or broader power. My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.
skissane 8 hours ago [-]
> My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.
This is a bit of a silly comparison though – the market of providing high-speed low-latency Internet access (a highly general-purpose service) anywhere on the planet, versus the market of providing one particular type of food in a small localised area.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Remember AT&T only lost its monopoly because the government forced it to.
cjkaminski 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, yes! I might be old enough to remember when that happened.
akagusu 11 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk learned from the other two and many others. Unfortunately, Silicon Valey techno-feudalism is built to last.
cjkaminski 10 hours ago [-]
I agree that SV's regressive culture is a problem. I've seen it up close.
I don't have a solution, but I am concerned about where this trend might lead us.
jrflowers 9 hours ago [-]
I like this reasoning. Network effect means if a website gets very big it will be very big forever. This is why I get my news from the o rly owl on the world’s most popular website, the OffTopic Forums
mulderc 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe it is different elsewhere but I have seen little reason to use X at all and none of the public services or institutions seems to use it all that much. If they do post to it, they are also posting to all the other major social media services.
All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
hsuduebc2 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I do not use it at all and other than never ending propaganda or ridiculous ragebaiting claims I miss nothing of importance.
hyperman1 10 hours ago [-]
Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.
mapontosevenths 10 hours ago [-]
Nobody needs social media of any sort. Everyone should just turn it off and stop making excuses for yourselves to stay addicted. That said, it's easier said than done. Trust me, I know.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
Sabinus 8 hours ago [-]
We do, just not social media for the sake of extracting maximum ad revenue out of users. We're a widespread society we need large online spaces, but not ones algorithmically designed to addict and derrange users.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
HN is social media.
Plont 8 hours ago [-]
I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here.
I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.
As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
jdc0589 14 hours 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.
nullocator 12 hours ago [-]
This isn't a criticism, but I do think this comment actually raises part of the problem. There are people on twitter telling people they should be on twitter, and it's apparently effective enough that at least some people are still signing up or trying to at least. The world needs more of the inverse, people telling those they care about who are on twitter to get off it.
Henchman21 11 hours ago [-]
And likewise, continuing to call it "Twitter" when that is long dead, which has amazingly positive brand association as near as I can tell entirely from the name doesn't do any of us a service.
If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to:
"Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"
ValentineC 8 hours ago [-]
I call it "former Twitter" to honour the good times, and maybe because deep down I hope it'll one day escape from fElon Musk's evil clutches.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
You should prefer to donate accounts to circumvention efforts rather than deleting them.
zzzeek 11 hours ago [-]
explain?
immibis2 9 hours ago [-]
Nitter has to be logged into an account to read tweets so it can show them to you. Elon made it quite difficult to make even one account, let alone many. If you have an unused registered account, some Nitter instance operator would be happy to have it. The same is true for all the other alternative front-ends, like the ones for Instagram, and Play Store.
chamomeal 9 hours ago [-]
I tried installing it last year so I could something specific. I forget what it was.
Didn’t follow anybody or provide any interests. Open it up for the first time, and saw a bunch of posts by Elon musk.
Instant delete
1659447091 10 hours ago [-]
> but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely [...] xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
kelnos 9 hours ago [-]
I expect that the percentage of politicians and public services/institutions who have even heard of xcancel is incredibly small.
The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents.
Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
ryandrake 9 hours ago [-]
> The real way to combat this is to write to your representative.
I always kind of chuckle at this advice. Is there any case of a representative changing their mind on an issue because someone wrote to them about it? I've written to representatives in the past and you are always going to get one of two outcomes:
1. If you are writing in support of something the representative already agrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying:
"Thank you for your input. Representative Jones fully supports initiative X and is fighting to enact it in Congress!"
2. If you are writing in support of something the representative disagrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. While your input is valuable, Representative Jones is adamantly against initiative X and will not be supporting it in Congress."
I think of lawmakers as unchanging boxes of fixed beliefs and you only get to vote for and change the contents of that box every N years. The real way to combat this is to elect representative who already align with what you want.
pmyteh 8 hours ago [-]
My experience of being on the other end of this is quite old (2001-2002) but I doubt the fundamental dynamics have changed.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.
chadgpt5 9 hours ago [-]
Well, there's one or two more ways, but I think it's illegal to even say them.
cjkaminski 8 hours ago [-]
Politicians are lazy, sure. I also believe that hearing sustained and prolonged resistance to X as a communication platform will make a difference. It's real grassroots effort.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't this also apply to people who use X telling people who don't use X what happened?
asdff 14 hours 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?
ruszki 12 hours ago [-]
Where I live currently in Europe utility companies need to inform me even in an offline way. There is no need for internet for this.
I'm reading the news with a two week delay for almost a decade, and I haven't missed anything worthwhile. There are exactly zero reasons to read Facebook/Twitter for it. For example, the value of the current US administration's word is zero. When they say something, there is no change in probability distributions in anything anymore. This two week delay makes this very obvious on the occasions when I checked the latest state of some issues. But others are the same, just for different reasons: in reality you have a very small effect on any highly politicized topics. When parents trust their kids less than politicians, then there is not much to do with everyday tools, like arguing (there are some places where there is a value, but those won't ever move the needle).
alightsoul 11 hours ago [-]
That is an European privilege. Paper costs money so in the global south companies want to get rid of it asap because money is much more scarce for everyone because many things are imported from industrialized countries
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
The current American government is basically entirely comprised of people who were terminally online on Twitter and communicating with the right politicians - those people got everything they wanted. This seems like evidence that it actually does matter.
sippingabonedry 12 hours ago [-]
Remember when Obama was lauded as the first 'online' president, with everyone from Redditors to news media gushing about his BlackBerry? What is the point you are trying to make, aside from "VC-funded apps and smartphones and how we use them have naturally evolved since 2008"?
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
I got through the first trump presidency without reading his tweets. I'm halfway through the second with the same streak. I don't expect this should change. What is the worst he tweets, nukes away? I would rather have my remaining 15 minutes be of peace.
mahboi 12 hours ago [-]
I've always had this thought that the Trump administration's views of other countries comes disproportionately from insanely online users on Twitter and Reddit, who might actually be bots too. Like the thing about not working with European countries "that hate us."
bpt3 13 hours 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.
aperrien 13 hours ago [-]
Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.
multjoy 12 hours ago [-]
This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.
No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.
Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.
mahboi 12 hours ago [-]
On the last point, it's a lot harder to manage than you're making it sound. A public org isn't going to gate signups.
multjoy 12 hours ago [-]
You wouldn't let Joe Public create an email account on your mail server, why would you let them do so on a mastodon instance?
mahboi 12 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I misread your first comment. So only the org can post and people can only view. Doesn't seem like people would follow it then.
multjoy 11 hours ago [-]
But that's not how Mastodon works.
Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.
12 hours ago [-]
TFNA 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not going to say RSS is inherently inaccessible to normies, because the blogosphere of 20 years ago saw even elderly non-techies happily using it. However, I think the trends in computing in the years since, where most people use the internet solely through popular phone apps, mean that RSS is no longer going to see any significant use. So, a municipality is not doing a palpable service to its constituency by moving communications there.
mahboi 12 hours ago [-]
We even saw it with RSS. Everyone using RSS was lamenting Google Reader going away. Isn't the client supposed to be the most easily replaceable part of RSS?
ssl-3 11 hours ago [-]
It's weird that people still lament Google Reader going away.
We've had RSS for about 27 years.
Google Reader was around for less than 8 of those years, and it has now been 13 years since it died.
1over137 11 hours ago [-]
Normies dont think in protocols, they think in apps.
mahboi 11 hours ago [-]
Websites said "follow our RSS feed," not "follow on Google Reader." Then again maybe normies never used RSS.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
The most practical way would probably be to create that feed yourself based on their Twitter feed. You could automate it using some Nitter-like service (please do not scrape public Nitters, but you can run your own Nitter and scrape it as you like). It is generally easier to do something like this yourself than to convince someone else, who does not care at all, to do it. I don't know how you would advertise it.
samizdis 12 hours ago [-]
How about municipal councils looking around at any remaining "mainstream media" local outlets and committing to post relevant notices/updates on their websites?
This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
OK, I am out of the loop. But, my point is, what loop? What is an essential piece of information that was only possible to reach you via twitter? Did this make or break your life recently? Would there truly have been no other way for you to find this information out?
iso1631 13 hours ago [-]
All my local groups are on facebook. It's horrendous. Could do with a browser plugin which only shows posts I want to see, it might even be good enough to send me back to facebook
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
I think the last facebook group I was participant of was in school some 15 or 20 years ago before parents were allowed to make their own facebook accounts. Life has been just fine without any such dependence on twitter or facebook. It is always surprising to me how the people who use these networks so religiously cannot imagine living without them. I am here to say that yes, it is possible, and probably more people around your periphery are living like that to success without you even realizing it.
mahboi 12 hours ago [-]
It's gotten ridiculous. I get it if they have a login wall. I've had a Twitter account for years for occasional reasons. But suddenly it thinks I'm a bot and wants me to scan some QR code, download an app on my phone separately, and take photos of my hand. For whatever reason, that didn't work on my phone, maybe cause it's a Samsung A16 (not to be confused with a16z) they decided is too poor to generate ad money.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. It's not worthwhile to me to view stuff on there anymore.
J-Kuhn 11 hours ago [-]
Photos of your hand?
What is next? Run some arbitrary command? Make photos of your feet?
We really ought to think what is an acceptable way to verify that someone is an actual human.
gh02t 11 hours ago [-]
"We reserve the right to retain your security feet pics indefinitely, but won't use them for advertising purposes. We may use them for other business purposes, subject to change at any time without notification."
--new TOS
Then, a few months later x.ai announces a new SOTA frontier model, FeetGrok.
mahboi 11 hours ago [-]
They'd use it for AI training purposes <:S
gh02t 11 hours ago [-]
The prospect of going to a website I've never visited before, getting a captcha, and it saying "we don't think those are YOUR feet, access denied" is a little TOO believable.
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
You know, as a television personality, Jeremy Clarkson is a pretty polarising figure. The gammons see him as all that's wrong with Britain with his pro-EU views, the cartoon student lefties are whining about "oh it's all just about him zoomzoomzooming about dangerously in fast cars", some people actually like him.
But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.
Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.
And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
ssl-3 11 hours ago [-]
> And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
All we know is, he's called the Stig
sailfast 13 hours ago [-]
This would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means.
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
gong_hits 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ajkjk 10 hours ago [-]
I feel like the answer is not that hard... someone just needs to make a copy of the basic functionality of twitter with better intentions and not owned by Musk et al. If they are sufficiently trustworthy and competent in how they do it, I really believe that lots of people would be willing and even eager to jump ship immediately.
Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go and demonstrate more empathy for them than twitter does (not hard).
Implementing this should not be too hard in the AI era and considering that a lot of people would probably donate engineering effort to a Twitter replacement. Paying for it is of course annoying, especially at scale but maybe that's solvable (ideally with a donation model / raising money from people who want to see it exist instead of taking outside investment, or at least limiting the influence of investors so you don't end up making Twitter again). Running it should be easy, just "try to do a good job" (I volunteer, but I don't even use Twitter so I'd probably not be a good candidate). Getting sued for patent violations or something might be a real problem, but maybe it's circumventable, I dunno.
It often feels like every knew large-scale project is corrupted by the Silicon valley funding model (yes I know I'm on a site that has a lot to d with that), so everyone has lost any trust that a new thing will ever be benevolent... but seriously it is not that hard to start a website, that's what Twitter and Reddit and all them did back in the day. The problem is aligning the site to people's morals enough that everybody hypes you up for free. Which ... I think things have gotten so bad now that one could get a lot of free labor if you even start moving in this direction and seem like a serious contender. Although all the VCs are trying to cash in, all the other 'normal' people really just want to live in a safe and happy world where institutions operate prosocially instead of the opposite, and they'll often do whatever they can to manifest that... if somebody just makes it easy to do.
jonny_eh 9 hours ago [-]
You described Bluesky. They did get founded to pursue decentralization, but it's completely ignorable. It largely operated as a centralized service.
ajkjk 9 hours ago [-]
From my vantage point the decentralization stuff distracted them from winning, but I am too ignorant to be sure if that's valid or not.
The ideal twitter clone does, unfortunately, have to clone the "virality" aspect, including the recommendation algorithm, at least at first. A necessary evil, but at least it would be in better hands if it was rebuilt by more prosocial owners.
kelnos 9 hours ago [-]
I agree that the focus on decentralization is a distraction, but Mastodon and Bluesky are perfectly fine alternatives that are just as easy to use as Twitter.
The fact that they have not succeeded in attracting a critical mass of Twitter users to jump ship is all the evidence we need to show that network effects are real, and overcoming them is really hard.
Also, I don't think most people on Twitter "want" to move. I think most people don't care about Musk or his politics, at least not enough to care about leaving his social media site. (And a significant chunk of people in the US, at least, likely are in Musk's camp anyway.)
nomel 8 hours ago [-]
> someone just needs to
You did the meme. ;) Literally billions of dollars are waiting for you, after you complete this simple task!
Problem is, what's stopping you? What stopping everyone else? Why did everyone that tried so far fail? If the answer to a billion dollar, highly public, problem is trivial, but nobody has done that trivial thing, then that entire aspect of the problem is not actually that important, or even a factor at all, as an http server, serving a cloned twitter is in this case!
ajkjk 3 hours ago [-]
I did it on purpose! In one sense it's really hard, of course, but in another it's simple, right? Simple enough that if a bunch of people who skim this a try plus their personal touches, I could easily imagine one of them succeeding.
As with many problems in the world... the first subproblem is that not many people many are very inspired to fight. Which is why it's important to emphasize its straightforwardness.
RIMR 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think ignoring is the right choice. This site has power that must be challenged.
One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
There is absolutely no reason I should have to agree to a private company's TOS to receive communications from the government. It is a violation of my rights that refusal to agree to the X TOS would cut me off from public information.
It's fine if they post to X, but we need to demand laws that the government isn't allowed to have special private clubs where the general public isn't allowed without giving up some amount of their speech rights.
acomjean 9 hours ago [-]
>One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
This.
I’m in the northeast and I’d love to not have to go search x/facebook etc to find out it’s a snow emergency (which city dept will post this?). My city has a website, use it.
cbeach 9 hours ago [-]
No, we don’t have to ignore it completely. You might be unable to tolerate a company CEO having a different worldview to your own, but the rest of us don’t care, and we’ll use whatever online services we like, thank you very much
whalesalad 13 hours ago [-]
> at some point we have to ignore the X site completely
I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.
fuzzfactor 12 hours ago [-]
Things like twitter aren't supposed to be worth money anyway :)
In an ideal world nothing would be able to change that.
Edit: not my downvote btw, where did that come from?
- - corrective upvote instead contrary to bot action
ruszki 12 hours ago [-]
Not since then, but before it, I could read smart people's opinion there about random topics. Of course, when the takeover happened, almost all of them left already years prior.
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
DoesntMatter22 10 hours ago [-]
You are naive, yes. It's thier data. You have no claim to it. If you don't like it don't use it.
maxlin 8 hours ago [-]
Or, you know, just be a normal reasonable person and just use X.
We got to get rid of this extremist-esque narrative. X is more unbiased than it has ever been, and Community Notes work better than any other platform's nearest attempts.
rustystump 11 hours ago [-]
maybe my brian is memory holed but twitter used to not require an account which made the whole public square gov thing very valid even if u were banned for political reasons u could still read and be informed.
x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official.
i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts.
No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
conradfr 9 hours ago [-]
No Twitter was also sometimes walled off. Elon Musk actually opened it back at the start.
Instagram is also hard to browse without an account.
It's all so annoying.
DarmokTanagra 9 hours ago [-]
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Foreskin_Mafia 10 hours ago [-]
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wetpaws 10 hours ago [-]
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burnt-resistor 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sippingabonedry 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
burnt-resistor 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sippingabonedry 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
misiti3780 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
literalAardvark 11 hours ago [-]
Plenty of smart people on mastodon.
QuadmasterXLII 11 hours ago [-]
Pretty well everyone who still posts on X is deep fried, smart or dumb. Some of them can tell but can't stop (Nate silver, one of the greens, Zvi) and some seem unaware.
adamrezich 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
13 hours ago [-]
demo4567 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tommica 13 hours ago [-]
Holy buzzword-salad, Batman!
In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.
bigyabai 13 hours ago [-]
> as long as you mute the topics that get annoying
People have been saying this since the Dorsey days, they were wrong back then and they're still wrong today.
gfdd 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
arppacket 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cpach 11 hours ago [-]
Did it way before that.
xigoi 11 hours ago [-]
Shitter was already bad before Elon bought it.
dburkland 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
leonfarwrite2 8 hours ago [-]
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sippingabonedry 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
medler 12 hours ago [-]
Twitter stopped publishing stats on its user counts when it went private, so we don’t know if those have gone up, down, or sideways. We do have some numbers for Europe since about 2023 because of reporting mandates, and they seem to show a downward trend.
sippingabonedry 11 hours ago [-]
We could split hairs about numbers or acknowledge that X (and TikTok, and Instagram) still owns the zeitgeist. No normie gives a shit about BlueSky and Threads is anemic considering they gave every Instagram user a free account. I'm being real here.
Brybry 11 hours ago [-]
Certainly it didn't implode and is not failing but it's not clear to me that its user base is increasing from pre-Musk. And Threads supposedly has a similar number of active users.
Twitter had around 230 million monetizable daily active users in 2022 before Elon Musk acquisition. They didn't publish monthly active users. [1]
Twitter IPO S-1 in 2013 said 500 million tweets per day from 215 million MAU and 100 million DAU. "We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs." [2]
2024 Elon Musk claims 600 million monthly active users [3]
2025 SpaceX S-1 Filing 520 million monthly active users. [4]
2026 Also SpaceX S-1 Filing 550 million monthly active users. 350 million daily posts. "The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active" [4]
Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 [5]
How many of the userbase are real people and how many are bots?
nailer 12 hours ago [-]
I don't know, but the people that hate Elon and blame everythng on Jews are on X, whereas the people that don't aren't on Bluesky.
lapkaaaa 21 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone use any xitter service voluntarily at this point
user43928 21 hours ago [-]
The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
Freedumbs 20 hours ago [-]
Or get this: you could read news if that's what you're interested in.
Social media isn't news. It's entertainment.
user43928 20 hours ago [-]
I'd be more interested in your concrete alternative recommendation on where to get the rumors/insider news about AI rather than your opinion on how I should use social media.
Freedumbs 20 hours ago [-]
If you're interested in being entertained, continue to consume. If you want to learn about science, setup a system to consume Arxiv.
TiredOfLife 19 hours ago [-]
> Social media isn't news
What is? TV, Radio, Newspapers, Town square, are all entertainment
Freedumbs 17 hours ago [-]
There isn't much TBH. All newswires are even propaganda by selection mostly. I'd say the newswires that still sort of pretend to be news and usually are only biased through selection: AP and Reuters.
11 hours ago [-]
CodeWriter23 14 hours ago [-]
Good:
Insta requiring login
Facebook requiring login
Bad:
X requiring login
kingkandu 3 hours ago [-]
Twitter is a weird one because I absolutely hate using it and as someone who's built many feeds I can see how they're trying to farm engagement at the cost of their user's health.
But it is simultaneously the best place to get real time information and after reddit the best place to find human/bot generated content so I do still need access to the data.
Trusting Zuck to fill the gap with Threads is a moron's endeavour and Mastadon is too fragmented we need a centralized good actor to fix this.
okeuro49 21 hours ago [-]
I wish X would allow browsing threads, which is the only reason I use xcancel.
I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.
I just don't want to have an X account.
p0w3n3d 2 hours ago [-]
I don't want to sound like a geezer but backdays twitter was a web page, like hacker news. Now it's an app, that wouldn't work as a page in phone's browser. And installing an app is basically installing a spy nowadays
ArtTimeInvestor 21 hours ago [-]
When I read this, the Arweave project [1] comes to mind.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
I live a happy, fulfilling live without having an account in X or reading tweets from third party sites. Just saying...
rmarable 3 hours ago [-]
This is the way.
dpmartinez 19 hours ago [-]
Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
unfocso 19 hours ago [-]
There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
amiga386 19 hours ago [-]
> X DMCA'd the repo.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
I thought the US courts decided that APIs aren’t copyrightable, and the rest of it is not their content.
embedding-shape 15 hours ago [-]
Does things like that even matter anymore? Lots of things shouldn't be what they are, and vice-versa, yet no one seem to do anything. If Microsoft listens to the demands of XCorp, then that's the reality, regardless of what courts say.
This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
forestingfisher 18 hours ago [-]
We used to have that, it was called a blog. I used to subscribe to all my local politicians and journalist blogs back in the late 2000s and would recieve everything I needed in my inbox, but now everyone posts on Twitter. That's where we have ActivityPub.
throw_m239339 18 hours ago [-]
> There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
RSS.
DaedalusII 19 hours ago [-]
but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?
jasonlotito 19 hours ago [-]
On the off chance someone thinks this is serious, being locked behind a login doesn't prevent your site from being scraped.
amiga386 19 hours ago [-]
Indeed, the shitter authors recommended you buy a bundle of Twitter accounts with 2FA details when setting up your own instance, to avoid getting rate-limited.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
also, public broadcasts should be scraped as much as possible
butlike 14 hours ago [-]
The MOMENT xcancel gets shut down, someone should sue the president for putting official communication on a closed platform.
jayknight 11 hours ago [-]
Is he there again? I thought he did everything on his own service, whatever it's called.
mococa 14 hours ago [-]
the president? I think all presidents does the same.
xyst 14 hours ago [-]
Then take ownership lil bro. Any of those scumbag lawyers will be happy to take your money to do whatever you want.
zem 15 hours 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.
seatac76 15 hours ago [-]
Man the RSS feeds are busted too now :/
bithammerthunde 17 hours ago [-]
I think XCancel should use their momentum and set up their own social media network, instead of scrapping the domain.
Tepix 2 hours ago [-]
Suggestion: Every time someone uses nitter, the post in question is copied over to Mastodon and subsequent accesses just redirect to the copied post. That way you can interact with the copy on Mastodon.
dismalaf 17 hours ago [-]
Then it'll just be another Bluesky...
abirch 17 hours ago [-]
or mastodon...
redbell 14 hours 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!
accountrequired 19 hours ago [-]
i just want to unmute the video and full screen it without logging in. i click twitter link and it is muted.
parasti 12 hours ago [-]
Why even keep using zombie Twitter? I used to scroll Twitter a lot but deleted my account back when. Literally any other social network seems more appealing these days, and not by a small margin.
Grimeton 18 hours ago [-]
Their browser verification never made it into the same room as my browser anyway...
boomboomsubban 16 hours ago [-]
What reason could there be that they can't share details?
immibis2 15 hours ago [-]
You never share information about a lawsuit unless a lawyer says you can. I'm not sure why - I presume it's because it might help the other side.
AntonyGarand 16 hours ago [-]
Pending legal advice I would assume
mw888 17 hours ago [-]
So are you, dear reader, for intellectual property laws or not. I see a lot of "anti-this" sentiment confused with "anti-AI [data collection]."
The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
arijun 17 hours ago [-]
I do take your point, that someone against using twitter for training data in AI who then uses a service that might be violating copyright seems hypocritical. But first of all, the people voicing these opinions may not be the same person, despite commenting on the same website.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
ImJamal 18 hours ago [-]
It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access.
It feels like an end of an era.
swed420 18 hours ago [-]
Reddit is still viewable, though they did finally axe "old" reddit for those not logged in.
But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.
ImJamal 18 hours ago [-]
New reddit was getting login popups for a while as well. From my rudimentary checks it varied from subreddit to subreddit.
pogue 21 hours ago [-]
Any details about what's going on? Is Nitter/their Github still up?
11 hours ago [-]
chinathrow 21 hours ago [-]
Has anyone ever succeeded going up against Elon legally?
sourcecodeplz 14 hours ago [-]
wtf the guy payed what 40billion for this website?
yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
squirreljak 10 hours ago [-]
goyimx.com is still working fine thankfully
rmarable 3 hours ago [-]
X is a cesspool, hence the existence of XCancel.
maxlin 8 hours ago [-]
What did they expect.
Just use the site, people
SahAssar 8 hours ago [-]
If the site didn't require login, sure.
Now it'll be "Just don't use the site and encourage anyone else to stay away"
platevoltage 8 hours ago [-]
Or just not.
solarkraft 21 hours ago [-]
So X is down again. Oh well.
elAhmo 11 hours ago [-]
This is Mr. comedy is legal and free speech, and public town square, right?
I understand that he is a vile POS, but I don't understand people supporting him and using his products.
aaroninsf 13 hours 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.
mitxela 21 hours ago [-]
There are now about 10 different people running them, and you can also run your own. https://status.d420.de/
The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
tylerchilds 5 hours ago [-]
Remember when twitter was “the public sphere”
Lulz
VCFundedGenYer 17 hours ago [-]
As a reminder - get off Twitter and get onto Mastodon (Bluesky is dead to rights). Those of you addicted to what was formerly Twitter need to move on.
asadm 10 hours ago [-]
I don't really get the hate for X btw. What kind of kool-aid is everyone on?
I seem to be able to post/access pro-Palestinian content there easily, no other platform lets me do that.
It has also been great for my project and find the right community from scratch.
ck2 13 hours ago [-]
every official government entity needs to get off X
every local, state and federal entity
nothing published there can be read logged out or archived
has to be violating law if not best practices
outside1234 14 hours ago [-]
Why are people still using X? I mean seriously people, move on and stop using this closed ecosystem that is propaganda around elections.
ACCount39 18 hours ago [-]
Xitter can't make a web UI that's actually usable to save their lives - so they're going after the one platform that does with lawfare.
Despicable behavior.
immibis2 18 hours ago [-]
It's not that they can't. They don't want to. The reasons it is unusable are the things that make them so much money. If they made a usable one they'd lose even more money.
Not a popular question here, but what's the difference between xcancel or archive.org, and torrents and other pirate services alike?
(except twitter is user content, yet per their tos xcancel is still piracy)
JuniperMesos 21 hours ago [-]
Torrents can be used to spread information that is in the public domain or licensed freely, just as much as they can be used to spread copyrighted information. Obviously most of what people actually use torrents for is pirating copyrighted media against the wishes of the copyright-holders, but that's not inherent to the protocol.
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
Cost me $500 (to a good charity, oh well) and guess what, I was fucking right. I have subby-tendancies but some of you put me to shame. Me personally? I don't like the taste of rubber.
lol, go try to just even sign up for a new X account and let me know how that goes. god damn sycophancy.
fivetomidnight 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
captainbadass33 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
_giorgio_ 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lapkaaaa 21 hours ago [-]
They don't want to make it irrevelant, it's only readonly so you can't post. Not everyone wants to create a xitter account just to find 1-2 posts
danlitt 21 hours ago [-]
Because removing public content from the internet for profit is wrong and shouldn't be allowed. One man, or one company, should not be in charge of the free speech of half a billion people.
earth-tattoo 21 hours ago [-]
Ok, let's start a petition to remove the restrictions put on you to make a free public competitor. Oh wait, there are none. Nobody is stopping you!
danlitt 21 hours ago [-]
Why do you think having a free public competitor would solve the problem? Did you think about the problem at all before posting this?
aucisson_masque 21 hours ago [-]
Third party client websites have existed for a long time. It’s just about freedom.
tomlockwood 21 hours ago [-]
I don't want to log on to his stupid ragebait website. I hate him for entirely different reasons to the usability of a shit website. Problem?
small_model 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kijashdkujdfhas 18 hours ago [-]
> It takes away earnings from X users
Oh no! How awful! So terrible! People who produce nothing of value might earn slightly less!
Moving on to more pressing matters...
yawpitch 18 hours ago [-]
Anything that takes money away from narcoleptic, right wing [self]-abusers of the COA^1 is a net good for humanity.
^1: Concept of Acronyms
pino83 19 hours ago [-]
There is no reason for xcancel to exist.
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
embedding-shape 19 hours ago [-]
> There is no reason for xcancel to exist
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
pino83 18 hours ago [-]
A good idea would be: Make a decision. A trade-off.
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
embedding-shape 10 hours ago [-]
Lots of assumptions there.
Lots of the local and also smaller government agencies in my country exclusively put out stuff on Twitter, Instagram and other social media, instead of their own websites.
Does that suck? Yes. Have I tried getting them to change? Yes. Are they still posting things first there? Also yes.
Don't have much choice if I want to know what's going on around me and want it straight from the source.
immibis2 18 hours ago [-]
One possible decision is to use a deshittifying front-end, like Nitter.
kijashdkujdfhas 18 hours ago [-]
It is a half-measure, though.
It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.
It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.
The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
pino83 15 hours ago [-]
Not because this is also my opinion (I have a lot of opinions that people don't share, and I completely don't care, believe me!), but for deeper reasons, I'd love to understand why this is so unpopular, although it's absolutely what every sane person would do in everyday cases.
My only explanation would be to imagine all down-voters as chain smokers when they get involved into discussions whether smoking is a good thing.
kijashdkujdfhas 14 hours ago [-]
People don't like to be reminded that they're hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
Standing outside and looking through the Nazi Bar's window is still pretty much hanging out at the Nazi Bar. It still brings traffic and attention to their establishment.
Sure, it's not buying drinks from the Nazis, and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly. But it's still hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
pino83 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, I like the analogy. Even if you don't agree with "Nazi", it makes the illustration quite obvious:
There is a bar that scares you off so much that you wouldn't even go in. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. It's not just not your favorite beer, but you absolutely avoid even to enter. There must be a strong reason for that, right?
What people are then important enough to watch through the windows? I mean, at first, you just make a fool of yourself. Just imagine the analogy. That's exactly xcancel and friends, right? And then, don't forget: These people explicitly do not share your view in a matter fundamental and important enough for you to not enter the bar.
Are they friends? I can't imagine friendships with these differences really need that deep devotion.
Are they politicians? Maybe there are enough media around you that already preprocess the conversations at the Nazi bar for you?
Wider community (around your job, hobby, ...)? That's probably the most challenging one. But still, wouldn't it be definitely the goal to push them to better places? I know it's not a matter of a day or two, but why couldn't we at least agree on that goal, and then start acting in some way?
btw: This is not specific to X or Musk imho. There are other networks out there that aren't in control of such a madman today, but they share a lot of problematic properties.
natch 13 hours ago [-]
Very well reasoned and it fits a long evolved pattern but what you’re describing fits the mass sociopathic behavior called shunning, as engaged in by some religions like JW if you need a neutral example to think about. It is in no way good for society or for individuals in the long term.
Actual Nazis, sure. But don't believe everything you think.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
> and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly
If you convert someone who was buying drinks into someone who only looks through the window, the world gets less Nazi. If you convert someone who was passing by into someone who looks through the window, the world gets more Nazi. And we see both classes of people in this thread - people who think each of those directions is dominant.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
It takes away the impulse to engage, hopefully, since you can't engage through Nitter, only observe.
natch 12 hours ago [-]
White nationalist is a wild, wild misreading though. Though not an uncommon one.
The Overton window doesn’t allow talking about all real issues, so people like yourself mistake race as the crux of the matter, when other issues are the real topic.
If you want understanding, work on helping open, not close, the Overton window.
kijashdkujdfhas 12 hours ago [-]
Nah, he's shown his hand thoroughly at this point.
You may not realize this, but you're making excuses for his behavior. I'd recommend not doing that.
pino83 15 hours ago [-]
Are these cat and mouse games (that you are about to lose atm) maybe an indicator that something is wrong with it?
Or should things be like that?
zeratax 17 hours ago [-]
These people includes pretty much every politician. I personally do have an X account and I do use X, but I completely understand why someone would want to read what their politicians are saying without wanting to create an account anywhere
maipen 15 hours ago [-]
The hatred and jealousy for Musk is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt.
They all secretly want to use X because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
gamessucknow 15 hours ago [-]
The hatred and jealousy for Spez is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt.
They all secretly want to use Reddit because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an Reddit account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
tekla 18 hours ago [-]
Of course not.
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
bananaflag 18 hours ago [-]
The way the platform works can be shit while the content on it can be good.
bananaflag 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pino83 18 hours ago [-]
Well, there's X.com for that.
joshcsimmons 12 hours ago [-]
Good.
X is the public square. The algorithm is superior to any other social media site out there right now. They are right to charge for the API and right to shut down impostor sites.
What did they say around 2020? If you don't like it - BUILD YOUR OWN.
worik 12 hours ago [-]
> X is the public square
> They are right to charge for the API
I might just leave that there...
rob 18 hours ago [-]
IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website.
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
protoster 18 hours ago [-]
I don't want to use "X", I want to read updates from orgs and people who, unfortunately, don't post them elsewhere.
arijun 17 hours ago [-]
I don't want to be tracked by x.com, but still want to be able to read links people send me to tweets. It's pretty reductive to say that people are using it because they "hate Elon so much," or even that they "want to engage with it.'
somehnguy 18 hours ago [-]
I don't visit his website. That's the whole point.
sortoflog 17 hours ago [-]
> You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
Why? The site still hosts plenty of content worth seeing. Is it really so silly to do it via a better UI, or to not want an account?
JeremyNT 18 hours ago [-]
My municipality, and many other governmental entities, post official updates to x.com
8note 12 hours ago [-]
have you asked them to switch or to post to many places at once?
Banditoz 16 hours ago [-]
Is engaging with the site just reading its content, not liking or retweeting? Sometimes I just want to read a tweet thread that was sent to me without ditractions in a straightforward UI.
carefree-bob 8 hours ago [-]
We should update our laws to broaden fair use in order to support this type of copying. If you
1. do not charge anything
2. the original publisher did not charge anything
3. Your presentation is less user-hostile in the sense of reduced TOS, easier sign up, cleaner visual presentation, etc
Then you should be able to repro it and cannot be sued for copyright infringement.
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.
Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)
I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.
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
What demoralize them the most is to show whoever pays for it doesn't matter.
It's not like one-way communication is a hard problem. Just post that stuff on a website ffs!
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?
So instagram.com/foo becomes Imginn.com/foo
Hope this helps!
as for using it without an account, try https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
recently with videos I can't change playback speed. so I have to use xCancel.
before I just used to use Tweetdeck. but that went away or went pro.
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".
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:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
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.
The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
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
By not using it. Which is exactly why I don't use X or Facebook, and minimize my use of Google (I use DuckDuckGo for search, and as Maps continues to suck more I use it less).
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.
FLOSS invalidates that statement.
Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago...
There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts").
But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.
Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
And then it turned out that all that was a long con by the companies, who started reneging on all their promises of lifetime employment, good benefits, and retirement pensions as soon as the costs of those things began to exceed the profits available to them by using those promises to attract employees.
If the philosophy extended beyond a binary blob, we would have a whole parallel economy of free tangible goods, from workers using their expertise on their own time. But this basically doesn't exist because real costs are involved.
The electronic version of all those is also near zero marginal cost.
Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
When one of those features is being able to see the most recent tweets from an account, that's asinine.
In other words: If you link to a profile page, X doesn't properly show you. It gives you a random selection of popular tweets that person has made, often several years old.
Money is just a convenient abstraction of time and energy. Basically everyone, all the time, is focused on min-maxing their time and energy (optimally is another question, hah). These are both fundamentally scarce things and likewise have intrinsic value to everyone.
If you spend time reading an article or watching a YouTube video, it defacto has value to you, and the creator of it spent both time and energy making it. And just like that, there is a market.
Nothing stops creators from self-hosting and absorbing the full cost themselves.Yt doesn't even care if you link to your own hosted version of the video on their platform.
Remember right at the start: "There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads." This is how youtube works.
X is the one blocking or messing up views without accounts (and also being too likely to ban accounts that don't give a phone number).
Though most people posting on youtube are doing it for free or negligible revenue (I'm not sure how it works out on a per-view basis), and a lot of the rest make almost all their money elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
I signed up to Nebula to support alternative platforms, yet I still click on YouTube all the time and not Nebula. Why is that? I'm not sure.
As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block, youtube gets to keep it's monopoly. They have literately turned people's greed back against themselves, since it ensures starvation of competitors. And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
YouTube hasn’t degraded in service or quality and when I pay them for the ad free service, they don’t try and sneak more ads in anyway like some other services have or the historical example of cable tv.
I’d probably be a lot happier if most software companies produced a product and kept a user relationship with me the way YouTube has.
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...
(https://archive.is/wSmtd)
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.
And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
So you are correct that cooperation can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions; those conditions require a small population though.
See: Market socialism
Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me more capital, by hook or by crook".
But that's not what actually built most of the wealth in the modern world. What built most of that was cooperation, specialization, and positive sum trades, in which everyone involved became better off, but nobody obsessed about counting down to the last penny exactly how much better off they were than the next person, and complaining about unfairness if things didn't balance out exactly the way they thought things should. In other words, focusing on creating wealth, not on grabbing whatever you can, or making sure you grabbed more than anyone else.
If they are going to claim to ride a high horse, I'm not paying them any credence when they show up on the same dinkey donkey as everyone else they loudly spite.
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.
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.
I'd be tickled if you argue that corporations create friction for any other reason than money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is the person who stays home and doesn't vote the problem?
Network effects are strong, but trends can absolutely upend them with disruptions. This is much harder nowadays, because for each user who refuses ads or a subscription, your VC runway needs to be that much longer, or your megacorp parent (meta) needs to sustain you.
My core point is that if the internet hates the current status quo, they need to drop their current status quo (free/no ads or bust). We're stuck in a local minimum because people absolutely refuse to even consider the idea of paying (in any form) to move out of it, and they pat themselves on the back for it.
Blaming people for doing what’s simplest, is just a way to feel smug and superior.
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.
Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.
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.
that's not a realistic expectation for everything but it's completely realistic for text based short form communication given how affordable it is to run. That's why there's ad and tracking free alternatives to twitter already.
the competitors don't say "lol nope" they'd gladly take the users, it's the latter who stay on twitter like lambs running to the slaughter
Facebook? Same.
Xitter? Same.
Youtube? Enshittified beyond measure.
Google? Unusable.
So tell me. Where are these great amazing services supported by ads?
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.
It's just a different kind of gate, though.
I am 100% okay with this. I don't want what Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer, so I no longer have an account these platforms. But I do have an account with my local electric utility. It's my only option. And if I want to find information about an outage, it's posted on their Facebook page. I'm 0% okay with this.
Most people do not use X.
X usage is down year over year.
The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.
The smartest people i know, i mostly know because of their X presence.
Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?
I'm not so sure of your claim that one implies the other.
I bet if you just asked them, they'd prefer for the loginwall to be undone.
What an idealistic nonsense. Companies do anything not for people, but for money. We are not living in a socialist utopia (fortunately!).
Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.
(I do get that tech VC doesn't work under this principle and it's not simpld to just change a sectors funding model, but it is worth pointing out that making money does not normally equal making a bad product)
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912
If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.
The person who provides that, and the subsequent automated scraping, is the party, and would be the recipient of a civil suit.
AFAIK, there isn't an single auth scheme on earth that guarantee human intervention[1]. Anyone can set-up a robot creating new users on a whim using single-use email addresses and even phone numbers. In fact, we know that OpenAI's agent have been doing exactly that when attacking Rubygem. And all AI labs are likely doing it for scrapping social media as well.
Who are you gonna sue then?
[1] the closest thing is Altman iris scanning venture, but without a broad adoption it's remains functionally useless.
> No different from "if I roll a car down a hill and it hits something at the bottom, how can you hold the car liable?"
That's the difference between criminal and civil justice. You don't need to sign a law for it to bind you, but for contracts you do.
Patently false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract
But terms of service are contracts which you sign by agreeing.
Courts have looked somewhat favorably on "I didn't read that" defenses, but accepting the agreement is a legal contract between you and the service provider.
The authentication mechanisms used by websites don't have a specific legal power, it's just a POST request among other GET requests sent during scraping. And we have jurisprudence saying scrapping is legal no matter what the ToS of the website says, because the scraping entity never signed up the contract.
The only protection against scrapping that auth is giving you isn't a legal one, it's a technical one (you can detect and ban the scraping user account).
> Who are you gonna sue then?
The person who set up the robot.
If that was true, then all scraping of a website with a ToS would be illegal, yet it's established by jurisprudence that it's not. And “authentication” doesn't change the picture here in Amy way, because it's not actually authentication.
as I recall it was the large number of bot accounts not scraping but commenting.
A company can make their produce suck, on purpose (out of malice), because it fits their bottom line better (at least, in the short term) vs. a better UX.
OP may simply be asking companies to put their customers ahead of their (short-term) profit.
Reddit is another great example of this, where users have been looking for workarounds to their (increasingly more) hostile login wall since they started pressuring people to use their app years ago.
EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability
A business is free to choose that you must login to access their content and you are free to choose not to do business with them if you don't like it. I generally chose the latter
It's all about getting people locked into walled gardens. I wish the EU DMA had taken a harder stance on this and required all social media to federate to some extent.
Either way, I don’t care. The Internet has become so hostile to users that the only moral and rational choice is to not participate on platforms that have become so hostile that threatening legal action is the only way that they can protect their relevancy in facilitating social discourse.
Sometimes the objectives align, but not always. And yes, the world would be a better place if they were better aligned, but we don't live in that world.
I'm sure X's motivation is something along the lines of forcing logins creates more users, or the downside of scraping outweighs the benefits.
Will it work? Probably not. But not even trying would be self-defeating.
Google, Facebook, X are all explicitly designed to be addictive and provide as little value as possible. Because they want to give everything away for free in a way that keeps you on the site to maximise scraping your data so they can screw you over more later.
They are not even aligned at the most basic level. Everyone needs to stop using it. Or at least circumvent their measures.
In my opinion, that is quite far from "functional".
Such a behavior alone is a sufficient justification, in my opinion, for the services like xcancel to exist.
And if the X social network does not want their content to be publicly available, fine. They are free to gate it behind a login.
https://github.com/gavinhungry/nitter-bitter
You can self-host it anywhere, and use the aforementioned Redirector [1] extension:
[1] https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/Include pattern:
Redirect to: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.
If your logic is that some citizens won't be able to read what is posted there, then I assume you similarly object to other social media platforms, newspapers, cable TV stations, etc.
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...
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.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
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.
Meanwhile it's OK for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to hack companies all willy-nilly. Mad world!
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...
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
Also, while we're on the subject, I used to have two factor enabled. After Elon bought the site, they forced me to disable two factor for insane reasons, iirc you needed to pay for a blue checkmark if you wanted two factor. Today for the first time they've started blocking my access to even view the site until I authenticate with a qr code from an android or ios device. The future of the internet is bleak.
This destroys my trust not just in X, but in social media. If bots are this big of a problem, then I guess I can't use them if there is a risk out of nowhere my account is hit. The network effect is real though.
No reason, no communication, just one morning 10+ years of posts and comments all gone as well as anyone who had ever replied. The "appeals" page said my appeal (for ???) was granted, but it's still broken, and the appeals page lies and mocks my by claiming my account is in good-standing as a reason not to let me contact anyone. And good luck contacting anyone with a new account when it infects the new one!
Especially on the tail end of COVID isolation, it was a social sucker-punch, a whole online identity gone, with no reason or solution. I considered responding to their pre-IPO email offers just to contact someone...
[1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
- bluesky - mastodon
Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?
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
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.
They're simply doing this to boost engagement and break scrapers.
In short, Twitter was actively pushing me into an echo chamber, even when my follows were diverse. Bluesky, Truth Social or Reddit are users that usually want to be in that echo chamber. At least bans are very notorious there, and not shadowbans/algorithm silencing while Elon says "I am a free speech absolutist".
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.
Considering who owns it, it'd be weird if they didn't want a carefully curated echo chamber of sanitized thought.
Elon Musk declares ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ will be considered slurs on Twitter that can be punishable with suspension
https://fortune.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-declares-cis-cisgen...
There are tons and tons of people using the term. All the time. Last result was 11 seconds ago (as of posting this).
The internet used to be treated as a public service.
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.
They won't, that's why dealerships don't give away free cars but it's still a market.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
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
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."
*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.
[1] https://armanckeser.com/writing/redirecting-x-com
Free speech talk decorates a claim that, imo, doesn't really have much purchase.
You can all walk away. You don’t need it.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
So I guess we're several layers of misunderstanding deep at this stage, and X's lockdown is ironic if its not free speech according to the flawed understanding of free speech it advocates? I dunno.
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.
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.
i get the sense he instead thinks of free speech maximalism as people need to hear him and completely censor alternatives
This is functionally the same as you not being able to say it.
So am I.
If a comedian is doing a bit at a bar and they charge a $5 cover to get in is that infringing on “free speech”. Of course not, that’s absurd. Why would be it any different online?
Do you disagree with this statement? If so, why?
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.
We're talking about the quolloquial "free speech", here.
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
Now for Twitter/X we get One (1) ad-infested first party app requiring login/tracking, an unusably crippled logged out web view, and an API exposing a limited subset of data with a tiny free tier.
Is that really better than 10 years ago?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette
People here overthink so much about this topic.
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 :)
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.
“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”
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.
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.
What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.
We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying the piper.
Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.
Usually just information about events, road closures etc.
There is a state government website with some of the same information, but it's usually more coarse (sometimes just the open/close status) and updated less frequently.
Compare that to email, which you’d get hundreds of messages a day and only care about 3 of them, so you’re not constantly checking.
Edit: dude you live in Australia. Do you know how people in the Bush get their emergency updates that they need to respond to urgently? I bet at least some of them use Twitter or something similar to it. They're not huddled around their weather radio all day (and that doesn't cover everything). Because I had family in rural California and that is exactly how they got theirs. Twitter and Facebook.
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.
People used it because it provided a lighter, cleaner interface, because it avoided Twitter's user tracking, and because it was reasonably useful without Javascript.
(I don't disagree that X has moved beyond the pale, but Nitter was a real boon in the past)
Just looked at it. Unfortunately it requests permissions for all domains, not only the relevant set.
Genuine question: why? I don't understand how Wikipedia is relevant to world politics, are people reading it as a news source?
The community-driven model necessarily means that control of narrative rewards persistence and an aptitude for social engineering. Lift the lid on almost any contentious topic and you will find a fiefdom of committed obsessives who assert seniority, weaponise whatever rules they can, and ultimately wear down anyone with an opposing viewpoint.
That's what Grok as for.
Apples and Oranges...
That is a red herring. A corporation can act ethically. A charity can act disgracefully.
A government can protect people. A neighbourhood association can bully them.
A billionare can be philanthropic. A group of children can terrorise a community.
Your comment pertained to your (dislike of) use of wikipedia in contrast to the relevant site (X.com).
My comment pertains to both of the relevant websites you had related (wikipedia is no more related to x.com than governments, neighborhoods, etc. that you have brought up), and to the specific reason why x.com came to be (it's current "authorship"), and how the directly related collary (grok) is not the thing you randomly brought up...
Which if there were a red herring here, it would be wikipedia (as it is not a site whose primary purpose is as a commentary website, nor it used in the same fashion)...
But for the topic you specifically brought up, this is entirely relevant, namely, your dislike of another website, and it's direct relation to the general topic at hand.
As for the rest, further nonsense. I can just as easily flip the subjects in each statement and they will remain true...my (factual) statement stands.
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.
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.
That sounds likes something a clickbait author would write.
5. Accept that you won't click on the link
What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter".
I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this.
Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.
> 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.
On the flip side, X has less moderation, and it's pretty even-handed. They're allowing a lot of pretty mild right-wing content that Twitter was banning people for.
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”.
But for whatever it's worth I had made a new account around the same time and my experience was very similar to what was reported.
As a cherry on top, they do owe researchers in the EU (though this was done in the UK, I know Sky has an EU presence as well) API access or similar under Article 40 of the DSA.
The current top article on their website argues for punching their political opponents in the streets.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...
And simply criticizing Musk is enough to get a shadow ban
https://futurism.com/twitter-shadow-ban-elon-musk
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.
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...
If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
Everyone using something was never a (good) reason to use it.
I was fine with occasionally wading into the shit pile for something I want. It’s fine, the door is open and I don’t live there. Get in get out.
But now they want me have a shit address and shit suit and a shitmail. They want me to say hey its me mr shit can you let me in so can I have some of that delicious shit?
Instead I think I’ll just put on a hazmat suit and steal the few pieces I want from their shit pile and get out.
Boycotting them is pointless. Holding to your principals does nothing but hinder your own usage of the internet and does not help bring about the end of X or whoever else. The 0.5% of X users using xcancel disappearing overnight would have no impact.
These monoliths of Internet consolidation are not worth our consideration. Steal their content, block their ads, get on with your life.
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently XCancel is an instance of Nitter. According to Wikipedia, "Nitter is designed to allow access to X without tracking, advertisements, or the need for an account. It only supports browsing, and cannot be used to sign in or interact with the X community."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitter
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.
People have been crossposting to Mastodon and the fediverse for many years.
In the old days you would do it with a desktop or mobile client for Twitter and Identi.ca. In the 2020s there were many server-side crossposters like moa.party. https://wiert.me/2025/05/19/moa-link-your-mastodon-account-t...
Nowadays such clients are effectively impossible, because the XTwitter API pricing is designed for business users only. Some bigger services can afford to pay for the privilege to post via the API (e.g. Buffer I think?), which can work for corporate communications. The prices are such that often it's cheaper to pay a person to do the crossposting manually and do it properly while at it.
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.
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.
Youll be instantyl blocked, because accounts without Biometric login and Phone numbers get flagged and asked for validation after 36 hours.
RSS is not a read-write medium. You can't realistically carry on a semi-realtime conversation over RSS.
Not suggesting all of bluesky is bad, but it sure ain't the most pleasant crowd in it's own right either.
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
https://xxcancel.com
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
I guess we're seeing Musk-defending-freedom-of-speech in action.
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).
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?
Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?
See hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn using accounts, and they were found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms.
It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.
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.
It's much easier if thousands of people set up their own Nitter instances.
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.
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.
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
Who has the gold makes the rules.
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.
A similar thing has been surfaced in Dalton, Georgia, again about PFAS [0]. Let's see how will it play out...
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...
Companies will eventually take a cost benefit evaluation and stop fighting if the risk is too high or the fines too large.
A personal billionaire who decides to fuck you over is capable of behaving irrationally and just beating you via resources.
Look at trumps infinite appeal strategy which apparently works.
He only just was forced to pay Jean Carrol a few months ago, four years after he lost his civil case.
If you’re a regular Joe and some billionaire harmed you in a way that hurt your income. You’re not gonna be able to afford 4 years of legal battles.
As long as money buys power in our legal system, you can’t compete with someone with effectively infinite more wealth than you.
If they 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.
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.
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
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"?
What cases are you citing when you say this?
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.
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.
[1]: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/creator-revenue-sharing
[2]: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/original-content-rewards
Recipes can’t be copyrighted
Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...
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
Because that's stupid. These laws 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.
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.
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.
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.
So, I take it some Twitter users took an issue with their tweets being redistributed by another platform and sued XCancel?
Because surely you're not claiming that Twitter has any ownership of what gets posted on that platform, are you?
>if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
By that logic, Meta could sue me for posting my photos on other platforms.
Meta doesn't have a case here, and neither does Twitter, but something tells me Twitter is involved in this nevertheless.
Edit: not a moral stance
You want to hold the corporations legally liable for the content their host, you can say goodbye to basically reddit as a whole, any twitter clone, youtube comment sections and a whole more stuff.
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.
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?
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.
> 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.
I have no idea at all how anything should matter as far as the law is concerned. Not my problem, unless I somehow get caught. But not getting caught is a problem grounded in reality, unlike legal ones. I think I can manage that.
That said, if laws about computers don't comport with how computers actually work, I'll take extra amounts of glee in violating them.
And, even more gleefully, nobody will be able to detect my violations. My internet traffic will look identically the same as someone "innocently copying" or whatever.
How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.
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.
> 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...
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
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.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
What do we really think we're missing out on by not using X?
i'm surprised any human is still there
Of course I only do it with accounts that are very obviously intended to be public like news and government accounts otherwise x and meta can argue you were violating user privacy or some shit like that
Like say you want your Twitter forwarded to your Facebook page and email list, you just punch in the logins and it does the rest?
Ideally it would fill in the details like formatting the images/video correctly
The key point is that you must not post in XTwitter first, but you have to use the crossposter's client as source. Pulling content out of XTwitter, even your own, is onerous.
Search for social media management tools.
I thought hubspot does that but looking at their website I have no idea what they do..
Well, for one, because xcancel was forced to suspend its service.
There's legal as in "what the law says", and legal as in "what the judge will order you to do", and the latter sense is not as clear-cut as we'd want it to be.
Also twitter is the worst of all the things I've listed.
Maybe there should be a texting app where you can make pages of contacts to swipe between, and you can customize notifications. If you want to get fancy, maybe local AI to determine if something looks important or not? They'll always have ALERT or something in the message.
Let's revive RSS.
It's still good, even if it's been on the floor beyond the "five second rule".
Futile? No.
Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last.
Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last.
Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.
Which social network has larger reach than X? Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X?
Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink? Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink?
Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know. What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me. Show the facts and figures that support your claims. That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all have more users, more daily active users, more aggregate data transferred.
(edit: I genuinely don't understand how your replies are anything other than ad hominem attacks. Your responses are about as effective as a toddler asking "why?" over and over and over again. Either deliver a substantive counter argument or stop replying.)
(edit 2: I assume you are the one who downvoted this reply. That only adds to the factual evidence that you are struggling to defend your position via legitimate means. This isn't a personal attack. I hoped you would engage in legitimate discourse. Please do better in the future.)
Downvoting can also mean that the downvoter doesn't think it's worth the time to engage with prose. It's a bit arrogant to assume that a downvote means someone can't come up with a cogent argument against you; the fact that you make that assumption points even more strongly at the idea that it's not worth arguing with you.
I would say that classifying an argument as "silly" without any supporting evidence is borderline ad hominem because it doesn't make a substantive critique of the assertion, and instead colors the character of the opposition. But that shouldn't take away from your position.
As for your suggestion that I am being arrogant, I can see where you're coming from but I also feel as though I'm within the bounds of fairness to push for a reasoned response (instead of an emotional appeal).
All that said, thanks for replying in a way that advances the discourse. Much appreciated.
Why do remote regions matter? No one relevant lives there.
Please take a step back and remember that your original claim was "a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet (via starlink)"
That's demonstrably false. It's a small percentage. Even in Ukraine. You're now moving the goalposts.
I said that people in REMOTE regions, by which I mean those who are underserved by traditional internet access such as fiber or coax or twisted-pair, are served by Starlink in significant numbers.
Please give demonstrable facts that dispute this claim if you disagree.
Starlink's market isn't "Internet access" in general. Anywhere you can get fibre, fibre will be faster and cheaper. For many use cases a cell tower works better too, if you are in its coverage area.
Starlink's market is "high bandwidth / low latency Internet access no matter where you are on Earth". And for that it is by far the market leader. Its closest competitors are way behind – second place Amazon's Kuiper has under 400 satellites in orbit, Starlink has over 11,000. So Starlink is over an order of magnitude in front.
This is a bit of a silly comparison though – the market of providing high-speed low-latency Internet access (a highly general-purpose service) anywhere on the planet, versus the market of providing one particular type of food in a small localised area.
All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.
As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
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.
If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to:
"Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"
Didn’t follow anybody or provide any interests. Open it up for the first time, and saw a bunch of posts by Elon musk.
Instant delete
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents.
Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
I always kind of chuckle at this advice. Is there any case of a representative changing their mind on an issue because someone wrote to them about it? I've written to representatives in the past and you are always going to get one of two outcomes:
1. If you are writing in support of something the representative already agrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. Representative Jones fully supports initiative X and is fighting to enact it in Congress!"
2. If you are writing in support of something the representative disagrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. While your input is valuable, Representative Jones is adamantly against initiative X and will not be supporting it in Congress."
I think of lawmakers as unchanging boxes of fixed beliefs and you only get to vote for and change the contents of that box every N years. The real way to combat this is to elect representative who already align with what you want.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.
I'm reading the news with a two week delay for almost a decade, and I haven't missed anything worthwhile. There are exactly zero reasons to read Facebook/Twitter for it. For example, the value of the current US administration's word is zero. When they say something, there is no change in probability distributions in anything anymore. This two week delay makes this very obvious on the occasions when I checked the latest state of some issues. But others are the same, just for different reasons: in reality you have a very small effect on any highly politicized topics. When parents trust their kids less than politicians, then there is not much to do with everyday tools, like arguing (there are some places where there is a value, but those won't ever move the needle).
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.
No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.
Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.
Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.
We've had RSS for about 27 years.
Google Reader was around for less than 8 of those years, and it has now been 13 years since it died.
This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. It's not worthwhile to me to view stuff on there anymore.
What is next? Run some arbitrary command? Make photos of your feet?
We really ought to think what is an acceptable way to verify that someone is an actual human.
--new TOS
Then, a few months later x.ai announces a new SOTA frontier model, FeetGrok.
But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.
Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.
And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
All we know is, he's called the Stig
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go and demonstrate more empathy for them than twitter does (not hard).
Implementing this should not be too hard in the AI era and considering that a lot of people would probably donate engineering effort to a Twitter replacement. Paying for it is of course annoying, especially at scale but maybe that's solvable (ideally with a donation model / raising money from people who want to see it exist instead of taking outside investment, or at least limiting the influence of investors so you don't end up making Twitter again). Running it should be easy, just "try to do a good job" (I volunteer, but I don't even use Twitter so I'd probably not be a good candidate). Getting sued for patent violations or something might be a real problem, but maybe it's circumventable, I dunno.
It often feels like every knew large-scale project is corrupted by the Silicon valley funding model (yes I know I'm on a site that has a lot to d with that), so everyone has lost any trust that a new thing will ever be benevolent... but seriously it is not that hard to start a website, that's what Twitter and Reddit and all them did back in the day. The problem is aligning the site to people's morals enough that everybody hypes you up for free. Which ... I think things have gotten so bad now that one could get a lot of free labor if you even start moving in this direction and seem like a serious contender. Although all the VCs are trying to cash in, all the other 'normal' people really just want to live in a safe and happy world where institutions operate prosocially instead of the opposite, and they'll often do whatever they can to manifest that... if somebody just makes it easy to do.
The ideal twitter clone does, unfortunately, have to clone the "virality" aspect, including the recommendation algorithm, at least at first. A necessary evil, but at least it would be in better hands if it was rebuilt by more prosocial owners.
The fact that they have not succeeded in attracting a critical mass of Twitter users to jump ship is all the evidence we need to show that network effects are real, and overcoming them is really hard.
Also, I don't think most people on Twitter "want" to move. I think most people don't care about Musk or his politics, at least not enough to care about leaving his social media site. (And a significant chunk of people in the US, at least, likely are in Musk's camp anyway.)
You did the meme. ;) Literally billions of dollars are waiting for you, after you complete this simple task!
Problem is, what's stopping you? What stopping everyone else? Why did everyone that tried so far fail? If the answer to a billion dollar, highly public, problem is trivial, but nobody has done that trivial thing, then that entire aspect of the problem is not actually that important, or even a factor at all, as an http server, serving a cloned twitter is in this case!
As with many problems in the world... the first subproblem is that not many people many are very inspired to fight. Which is why it's important to emphasize its straightforwardness.
One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
There is absolutely no reason I should have to agree to a private company's TOS to receive communications from the government. It is a violation of my rights that refusal to agree to the X TOS would cut me off from public information.
It's fine if they post to X, but we need to demand laws that the government isn't allowed to have special private clubs where the general public isn't allowed without giving up some amount of their speech rights.
This.
I’m in the northeast and I’d love to not have to go search x/facebook etc to find out it’s a snow emergency (which city dept will post this?). My city has a website, use it.
I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.
In an ideal world nothing would be able to change that.
Edit: not my downvote btw, where did that come from? - - corrective upvote instead contrary to bot action
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
We got to get rid of this extremist-esque narrative. X is more unbiased than it has ever been, and Community Notes work better than any other platform's nearest attempts.
x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official.
i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts.
No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
Instagram is also hard to browse without an account.
It's all so annoying.
In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.
People have been saying this since the Dorsey days, they were wrong back then and they're still wrong today.
Twitter had around 230 million monetizable daily active users in 2022 before Elon Musk acquisition. They didn't publish monthly active users. [1]
Twitter IPO S-1 in 2013 said 500 million tweets per day from 215 million MAU and 100 million DAU. "We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs." [2]
2024 Elon Musk claims 600 million monthly active users [3]
2025 SpaceX S-1 Filing 520 million monthly active users. [4]
2026 Also SpaceX S-1 Filing 550 million monthly active users. 350 million daily posts. "The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active" [4]
Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 [5]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/twitter-twtr-earnings-q1-202...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...
[3] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1793779530282443086
[4] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
[5] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/metas-threads...
If HN has a bubble of X users
BTW if BlueSky is fading to obscurity why did a post about how they put their logo on their screenshots got 715 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338459
Schrödinger‘s BlueSky?
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
Social media isn't news. It's entertainment.
What is? TV, Radio, Newspapers, Town square, are all entertainment
Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login
Bad:
X requiring login
But it is simultaneously the best place to get real time information and after reddit the best place to find human/bot generated content so I do still need access to the data.
Trusting Zuck to fill the gap with Threads is a moron's endeavour and Mastadon is too fragmented we need a centralized good actor to fix this.
I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.
I just don't want to have an X account.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
[1] https://arweave.org/
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...
It's been discussed before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571634 ("Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns")
Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
RSS.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
> 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!
The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
It feels like an end of an era.
But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.
yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
Just use the site, people
Now it'll be "Just don't use the site and encourage anyone else to stay away"
I understand that he is a vile POS, but I don't understand people supporting him and using his products.
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.
The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
Lulz
I seem to be able to post/access pro-Palestinian content there easily, no other platform lets me do that.
It has also been great for my project and find the right community from scratch.
every local, state and federal entity
nothing published there can be read logged out or archived
has to be violating law if not best practices
Despicable behavior.
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
Cost me $500 (to a good charity, oh well) and guess what, I was fucking right. I have subby-tendancies but some of you put me to shame. Me personally? I don't like the taste of rubber.
lol, go try to just even sign up for a new X account and let me know how that goes. god damn sycophancy.
Oh no! How awful! So terrible! People who produce nothing of value might earn slightly less!
Moving on to more pressing matters...
^1: Concept of Acronyms
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
Lots of the local and also smaller government agencies in my country exclusively put out stuff on Twitter, Instagram and other social media, instead of their own websites.
Does that suck? Yes. Have I tried getting them to change? Yes. Are they still posting things first there? Also yes.
Don't have much choice if I want to know what's going on around me and want it straight from the source.
It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.
It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.
The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
My only explanation would be to imagine all down-voters as chain smokers when they get involved into discussions whether smoking is a good thing.
Standing outside and looking through the Nazi Bar's window is still pretty much hanging out at the Nazi Bar. It still brings traffic and attention to their establishment.
Sure, it's not buying drinks from the Nazis, and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly. But it's still hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
There is a bar that scares you off so much that you wouldn't even go in. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. It's not just not your favorite beer, but you absolutely avoid even to enter. There must be a strong reason for that, right?
What people are then important enough to watch through the windows? I mean, at first, you just make a fool of yourself. Just imagine the analogy. That's exactly xcancel and friends, right? And then, don't forget: These people explicitly do not share your view in a matter fundamental and important enough for you to not enter the bar.
Are they friends? I can't imagine friendships with these differences really need that deep devotion.
Are they politicians? Maybe there are enough media around you that already preprocess the conversations at the Nazi bar for you?
Wider community (around your job, hobby, ...)? That's probably the most challenging one. But still, wouldn't it be definitely the goal to push them to better places? I know it's not a matter of a day or two, but why couldn't we at least agree on that goal, and then start acting in some way?
btw: This is not specific to X or Musk imho. There are other networks out there that aren't in control of such a madman today, but they share a lot of problematic properties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
If you convert someone who was buying drinks into someone who only looks through the window, the world gets less Nazi. If you convert someone who was passing by into someone who looks through the window, the world gets more Nazi. And we see both classes of people in this thread - people who think each of those directions is dominant.
The Overton window doesn’t allow talking about all real issues, so people like yourself mistake race as the crux of the matter, when other issues are the real topic.
If you want understanding, work on helping open, not close, the Overton window.
You may not realize this, but you're making excuses for his behavior. I'd recommend not doing that.
Or should things be like that?
They all secretly want to use X because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
X is the public square. The algorithm is superior to any other social media site out there right now. They are right to charge for the API and right to shut down impostor sites.
What did they say around 2020? If you don't like it - BUILD YOUR OWN.
> They are right to charge for the API
I might just leave that there...
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
Why? The site still hosts plenty of content worth seeing. Is it really so silly to do it via a better UI, or to not want an account?
1. do not charge anything 2. the original publisher did not charge anything 3. Your presentation is less user-hostile in the sense of reduced TOS, easier sign up, cleaner visual presentation, etc
Then you should be able to repro it and cannot be sued for copyright infringement.