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”
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.
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 :)
To live in our 'free' western society, you need to register your birth, get a social security number, and attend state dictated education.
Life in general is now gated, and if you do not abide by the rules you do not get the benefits of society. How is this any different to "you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data".
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
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.
Just looked at it. Unfortunately it requests permissions for all domains, not only the relevant set.
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
> 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.
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”.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.
I say this as part of the exception. The only reason I don't use X is because they banned me for no reason. Probably not the common case.
If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
Everyone using something was never a (good) reason to use 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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Usually just information about events, road closures etc.
There is no way twitter is the sole channel of this over say pushing a text message like they do every other week with a silver alert. Just ridiculous to imagine twitter is some disaster tool.
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.
2. It is not reliant on any singular corporation, or trusting any singular corporation.
3. The established domain name system proves authenticity.
And of course the information can still be posted to X, etc.
2 is true: if you disagree, provide the name of that singular corporation. To be clear, you're always relying on corporations, but there's no single gatekeeper.
3 is not the same: if I see something published on "www.water.dcceew.nsw.gov.au" I can be reasonably confident that it is published by my local Government. If I see an X account of @NSWDCCEEW_Water then I need to start looking for context clues, most of which can be faked.
2. Wordpress or Tumblr respectively
3. but it's not, it's dcceew.tumblr.com or dcceew.wordpress.com
You can host a wordpress wherever you like with whichever provider you like or even on a potato in a closet. The format and data are open and can be switched to any platform at any time without an account or login.
RSS !
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
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.
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
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.
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.
The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
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?
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.
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.
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.
And in reverse, having a concentration of readers (users) on one platform, means that whoever controls that newspaper (platform) gets to be kingmaker for the government and the businesses.
Free speech as a constitutional requirement binding on a government to allow it is great; that government then using one specific private corporation that can use its own status as a non-government actor to have free speech rights rather than free speech responsibilities, means it is a de facto loss of free speech for everyone else.
> it is a de facto loss of free speech for everyone else.
You seem to be confused about what 1A is and what it guarantees. It is a restriction on government action against your speech, not a general requirement that everyone have equal access to every privately owned communications channel.
Should a government choose to communicate essential facts only through a restricted medium it is obviously no longer serving the larger public interest and thus no longer a government of "a people for a people".
Musk and fellow techoligarchs can have their private platforms.
Free peoples' governments and responsible social organizations must treat them as 'for profit entertainment channels' and not give them any legitimacy in the political space.
> There is no constitutional entitlement to receive government information through one's preferred newspaper, website, or social network.
and
> You seem to be confused about what 1A is and what it guarantees.
I am arguing that there should be, and why; I am not arguing what is.
Also I was careful not to use the words "first amendment"; this is because this argument, and this problem, applies more generally than just the USA.
That is your opinion and you are entitled to it, just remember other people have their own and they are entitled to theirs, and no one opinion is 'right'.
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...
Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
It's been discussed before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571634 ("Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns")
*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.
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.
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.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
RSS.
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
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...
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."
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.
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).
Slurs aren't allowed on most platforms.
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".
[citation needed] - an echo chamber you agree with is still an echo chamber.
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.
The internet used to be treated as a public service.
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
One can only assume Bluesky would go the same way were it to gain significant market share. One can even imagine a particular Mastodon instance going that way, were it to be popular enough and run by profit-minded people.
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.
I dont see signing up to twitter any differently to this. You register with an email address and you are granted access. Similarly to registering a birth and being granted access to 'society'.
You can all walk away. You don’t need it.
Except some people still want it, thats the uncomfortable truth that lots of people cant accept. I see lots of comments giving different reasons people think that other people cant leave twitter, but at the end of the day millions of people still like and use it all the time. Thats why its still there.
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.
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
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?
This is functionally the same as you not being able to say it.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
This type of loophole was (likely) closed after the ruling of Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order.
It’s a private company. Free speech doesn’t mean I’m entitled to use your property to post and amplify my speech.
I also find the context of the whole thing suspect since Trump in his second administration has openly used the FCC and other federal pressures to attack speech he doesn’t like and Musk’s X has not been “free speech absolutist.”
I always thought it was just the far right being mad their side wasn’t in charge, and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated.
The entire point of the case was to determine exactly that. Read the judgement. If it were an open and shut case, it never would have made it to the supreme court.
>and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated
How in the world did you get to that conclusion from Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" order?
I'm just saying overall behavior -- outside this specific case -- is not consistent with a regime (or a larger political movement) that believes in free speech. It's consistent with "we want to be the ones in charge determining speech," with opposition to Twitter's previous moderation being motivated by that rather than principled belief in free speech.
The net effect of the Twitter takeover was not to make it a free speech absolutist platform but to shift the pattern of selective boosting and selective de-boosting and moderation to one that favors the far right's message.
Free speech talk decorates a claim that, imo, doesn't really have much purchase.
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
Edit: not a moral stance
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
mtr xcancel.com
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.
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.
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.
Attempting to have a discussion with someone who participates like that pointless.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"?
But it is not the AI who is killing it, users are doing it.
Recipes can’t be copyrighted
Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...
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?
It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.
See hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn using accounts, and they were found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms.
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.
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.
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.
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
- bluesky - mastodon
Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?
Because not everybody thinks the same as you?
People are entitled to their own opinions, just because you think something is wrong doesnt make it objectively wrong.
On Bluesky/ATProto, I am free to chose my own algorithm or my own client software and affiliate with the people I want to. My data is always my own because I can host it on my own PDS. On Mastodon, I have similar freedoms, and you can opt into bridging ATProto with ActivityPub through Bridgy Fed. I like the freedom of the open web, but I guess not everybody thinks the same as me.
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. ;) ;) ;)
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
It feels like an end of an era.
But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
Despicable behavior.
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.
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
The 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:
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you think people are using as blockers because they are being rebellious?
Modern day ads interrupt the content people are intending. The content isn’t built around them like back in the days of tv with commercial breaks, they usually just randomly intercede.
They also aren’t what anyone is watching the content for. The only exception I can think of is the superbowl where the ads are legitimately something people intend to watch.
> And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
That is inherently not true. A company doesn’t have to take an action to be a monopoly. And actually that’s even more not true after thinking about it. YouTube has nothing to do with YouTube being the number one video site?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
There's not supposed to be an alternative.
To fully function within the system you need to be a corporation your dang self.
That doesn't mean you have to be a capital corporation, you can go forward without any of Other Peoples' Money and therefore not be an actual capitalist yourself. Even if you make more money per invested dollar that alone does not make you a capitalist, regardless of how much true capitalists can admire the returns. Without capital you would be merely an entrepreneur, sometimes that's a better choice, sometimes not.
Beyond that you still need to function in a capitalist market either way, no matter what because that's what dominates.
Which could be overwhelming too, and the kind of thing that would make a promising alternative seem very attractive also :\
The system is so totally dominated that you can't enumerate anything that is not . . . corporate-controlled.
Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
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.
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.
The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
OTOH how about commercial websites paying ISPs for access to the ISP's valuable customers' eyeballs?
And structuring it so that it more than covers everything, then the ISPs can pay the non-commercial websites to be there. If nothing else but to have an abundance of relief for tired eyeballs :)
If the average commercial websites aren't rolling in the dough well enough to afford supporting the non-commerical, what are they doing there anyway, find some that are ;)
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.
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.
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.
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'd imagine you are totally confused why they don't do this. If you aren't confused why, well then you have your answer for why X has a right to monetize it.
You seem to be depending on a whole lot of assumptions to get to your "XCancel/Nitter/etc shouldn't be allowed to exist" conclusion.
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?
There was a time where ads were based on the thing you were looking at, and assumptions around your demographics and intentions. It actually worked though returns were lower. (Which makes sense since the psychological warfare was limited to what advertisers thought they knew about the viewer. )
Now, though, if you want to block tracking you're a freeloader, siphoning off resources that other people pay for. And since targeted ads are so (relatively) effective, there is no discussion of separation.
>The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
Roger.
I guess you had to be there, either that or have above-average powers of observation, but That's. The. Foundation. Of. The. Internet.
And that's how "doesn't suck" has always been defined, except for people who are just trying to make shit up that is quite a bit removed from reality. Now I've accepted ads when I feel like it although lots of times I prefer none, regardless commercial websites have always been less worthwhile than non-commercial, it's not like there's any question. This was settled way before the 1990s were over.
I know perfection can not be achieved and I settle for less as much as anybody, plus "absolutely doesn't suck" may not be reached either but it is not a movable goalpost, more like a brick wall where the closer you get the better. If you are willing and able you might be able to do an outstanding job. Otherwise you're going to end up some distance away on the spectrum of "sucks more than it should."
You were always already paying plenty to your ISP, and last time I checked you still are.
Anything less has always been less than the whole internet you were paying for.
The math is not that hard :\
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
Patently false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract
> 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.
Because terms of service require both parties to accept!
If I hold a contract outside your window and scream "you accept this contract" it doesn't bind you simply by looking out the window.
as I recall it was the large number of bot accounts not scraping but commenting.
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.
If your argument doesn't even seem aware of them, then they won't listen.
I guess you could say "who cares, X is evil anyway, might as well try" but it just seems ineffective and frankly a little naive.
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.
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.
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
This add-on violates Mozilla's add-on policies by collecting user data without disclosure, consent or control and executing remote code
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the issue though, it's not Twitter's "content" and I'm not trying to "consume" it. I want to be able to read and see what others including public official and primary sources for ongoing events have to say. That they are on twitter is coincidental and generally only because Twitter has captured the "public square". That doesn't make what's posted on there theirs anymore than the postal service owns the letters you send.
Not all customers are as particular as I am, therefore a shitty product continues to thrive, and I can go do other things.
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?
as for using it without an account, try https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
So instagram.com/foo becomes Imginn.com/foo
Hope this helps!
My kids school puts some information that I need to see (not just "would like to see") on Instagram. Same with the sports team they play for.
I've complained to both about it but change is glacial. I'm lucky in that I know how to work around it, and I do my best to keep others who aren't so tech savvy updated about things they need to know but may have missed.
Irony is they moved most of this info from Twitter/X to Instagram.
You have to disable all ad-blocking (either extensions or Pi-Hole) in order to make it past that "feature".
People say repeatedly Instagram was a 'great acquisition' (it was. It destroyed Facebook's competition. Great for them, not for users). That Zuckerberg bought it when it was 'barely a company'. That it's somehow not antitrust (Zuckerberg in emails: "Instagram can hurt us"). People loved Instagram. Not anymore, not for a long time. Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt
But of course you can't tell the public this, Zuck's reputation in the Valley. So it indeed becomes the feel-good story about Our Beautiful Journey
It's not like one-way communication is a hard problem. Just post that stuff on a website ffs!
Perhaps something like that could be expanded upon and utilized for government communication to the public?
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.
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)
There are plenty of dark patterns and enshittification in all of these as well. Tech is just way ahead of the curve but the rest isn't innocent either.
What demoralize them the most is to show whoever pays for it doesn't matter.
https://thenextweb.com/news/musk-x-twitter-bird-logo-tweet-t...
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.
Elon Musk is using twitter to create a global far-right platform that right-wing politicians can use to experiment with talking points before watering them down and bringing them to the public.
So I don't think experimentation is an angle.
Media does report on far-right output on twitter sometimes, but not often. And when they do, it often boosts the message instead.
It's the same mechanism as how Donald Trump originally got elected.
...and at the same time, they are focus-testing extremist messaging.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
The purpose was to underline that catering to the far-right and providing them with a space try out messaging is not a very hidden aspect of X.
I didn't mean to imply that you don't think in general.
I don't know if Reddit are doing it less now or not, but it's worth noting that it's always been somewhat hit and miss.
I suspect a mix of very data-driven testing (to try to show it to people who will login, and not show it to those who'll just bounce), and technical debt confusing things. But often it will vary not only from one person to another, but even for the same person between two different web browsers, or connected through two different IPs, or whatever.
(I'm not necessarily agreeing with this; after all it's trivial to make an account for an AI company. I'm just saying that's the reasoning behind it)
Make companies give up power? Never going to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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...
These sites also wait until they are very large to act this way. HN has been pretty good I guess, but it's not quite social media.
Include pattern:
^https?://x.com/(.*)
https://xxcancel.com/$1https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/26...
https://github.com/gavinhungry/nitter-bitter
You can self-host it anywhere, and use the aforementioned Redirector [1] extension:
^https://(?:twitter|x)\.com/(.*)
https://nitter.example.tld/$1
> 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!
yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it possible to live without this knowledge? Of course. But it's not unreasonable to me that people would want to receive this sort of information or that it is of some value to them, or that they'd rather have it pushed to them in an app on their phone than have to call friends or the school office to find out whether the status of some event has changed.
If something happened e.g. a snow day at school surely you could call the office and find that out. There is no way twitter is the sole source of that sort of information. I guarantee it is on their school website.
You have to remember that the world has to work for the senile old person too.
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).
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
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.
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all have more users, more daily active users, more aggregate data transferred.
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.
Let's revive RSS.
It's still good, even if it's been on the floor beyond the "five second rule".
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.
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
I thought hubspot does that but looking at their website I have no idea what they do..
Search for social media management tools.
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.
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.
What do we really think we're missing out on by not using X?
i'm surprised any human is still there
However, I still call Meta Facebook, just because. :)
Also twitter is the worst of all the things I've listed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login
Bad:
X requiring login
The Open Web
Bad:
Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login Xitter requiring login
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.
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
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...
I understand that he is a vile POS, but I don't understand people supporting him and using his products.
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.
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.
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."
Just use the site, people
Now it'll be "Just don't use the site and encourage anyone else to stay away"
Not suggesting all of bluesky is bad, but it sure ain't the most pleasant crowd in it's own right either.
RSS is not a read-write medium. You can't realistically carry on a semi-realtime conversation over RSS.
Lulz
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 guess we're seeing Musk-defending-freedom-of-speech in action.
Cory Doctorow argues that the antidote to walled platforms is to restore the legal and technical right to adversarial interoperability. Users and developers should have the legal freedom to reverse-engineer APIs, build scrapers, create cross-platform bridges, and deploy third-party readers without facing lawsuits under anti-hacking statutes like the CFAA or DMCA Section 1201.
And yes I've on occasion had the same thought with TikTok - it'd be nice to see the vids that people send me, without making an account. But I'll just have to live my life without having seen that one super funny/interesting/enlightening video, or have to ask for a summary :)
The content itself isn't the problem, it's the website.
Other people keep linking me to X posts they want to share.
The website is so bad that it (was) faster to manually change the URL even on my phone than to let the browser try to load the original.
Now I ask people to share screenshots of the posts instead of sending links.
I'd like to see the fire department's tweet without having to sign up for X on the spot right now and do a 20 round captcha, followed by a prompt to install the app to verify my age, because suspicious activity was detected.
Of course - ideally - nobody would use this platform for anything important, but given that they do, I'd like open access to it.
I'm quite happy that something like LinkedIn is separate from general purpose social media (imagine the self-aggrandizing spam otherwise, or having to sift past someone's holiday photos when wanting to see what's new in the corpo world).
What's missing is something the same for any and all official messaging - imagine something like Twitter, but for governments, various institutions, politicians, public figues and all that, a degree more separated from the regular and more individual content you often see on the "unprofessional" social media, almost like a news feed.
Tbh that could be a Mastodon instance, it boggles the mind that fire departments and police precincts and all of those institutions are on such a user-hostile platform run by someone whose motivations are at best unclear.
It's sad that such a distinction never developed, especially cause a lot of the orgs just want broad reach (especially when you're a politician or something), so network effects are once more kicking everyone's butt and we're held hostage and no competitors can gain enough steam. So if you want to see those posts, guess you'll have to make that account and get datamined or whatever.
It exists and is called "a website". You can even host a Twitter-like microblogging platforms that allows others to follow your crap like https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/
I often run into businesses or events that only publish information on facebook. There was also a time (not sure how prevalent this still is) that people organized parties solely through facebook. I wish them well.
Although overall I agree that we basically dug a very deep and nasty hole for ourselves. xcancel or nitter not working anymore is quite irrelevant imho.