I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public services/institutions aware that some people do not have or want access to the site. That is the only way anything might change someday. Maybe I’m just being naive here, but what else can you do?
xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
The unfortunate part is that each individual who attempts to leave is fighting the Network Effect[0]. It's fighting against the human organism's basic social nature.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
I think Twitter is the best counterargument to this defeatism. I don't personally know anyone that uses the platform any more, and I don't recall needing it for anything for years. From that remove, it's now just the platform for lazy politicians, lazy journalists, and scammers of one form or another. If there's more exclusive information there I'm not aware of, I really don't need it.
My solution to this is creating bots that repost content on sites like bluesky. The network effect can be overcome because people use a site for the content it has and not necessarily to interact with others
Of course I only do it with accounts that are very obviously intended to be public like news and government accounts otherwise x and meta can argue you were violating user privacy or some shit like that
Not really relevant for public service announcements like gp is talking about. I just want a live feed of my local services updates. I get weather alerts from my city and county over text (contracted by the government through a third party platform), I would take them as a dedicated app or rss feed or anything. I'm not connecting to my friends or family through a weather alert or train delay notice
I find texting pretty decent but not ideal. Most alert systems offer it already, you know it's going to be a short message, and you'll be informed quickly of things instead of having to reach out somewhere.
Maybe there should be a texting app where you can make pages of contacts to swipe between, and you can customize notifications. If you want to get fancy, maybe local AI to determine if something looks important or not? They'll always have ALERT or something in the message.
By killing Google Reader they essentially killed RSS. Yes, I know there are other clients some of us still use, but Google's was the biggest and most popular.
I like this reasoning. Network effect means if a website gets very big it will be very big forever. This is why I get my news from the o rly owl on the world’s most popular website, the OffTopic Forums
If there were an API or reliable way to delete accounts programmatically, you could create a reverse-kickstarter-like site in which you pledged automatic future deletion of your account once a critical percentage of the people you followed (or who followed you) did the same. Action would be suspended for all participants until that critical threshold was reached.
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.
(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.)
Ad hominem would be if the GP was making a personal attack on you. Saying a question is "silly" is not that.
Downvoting can also mean that the downvoter doesn't think it's worth the time to engage with prose. It's a bit arrogant to assume that a downvote means someone can't come up with a cogent argument against you; the fact that you make that assumption points even more strongly at the idea that it's not worth arguing with you.
I agree that SV's regressive culture is a problem. I've seen it up close.
I don't have a solution, but I am concerned about where this trend might lead us.
Maybe it is different elsewhere but I have seen little reason to use X at all and none of the public services or institutions seems to use it all that much. If they do post to it, they are also posting to all the other major social media services.
All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.
Nobody needs social media of any sort. Everyone should just turn it off and stop making excuses for yourselves to stay addicted. That said, it's easier said than done. Trust me, I know.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
> but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely [...] xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
I expect that the percentage of politicians and public services/institutions who have even heard of xcancel is incredibly small.
The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents.
Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
I feel like the answer is not that hard... someone just needs to make a copy of the basic functionality of twitter with better intentions and not owned by Musk et al. If they are sufficiently trustworthy and competent in how they do it, I really believe that lots of people would be willing and even eager to jump ship immediately.
Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go and demonstrate more empathy for them than twitter does (not hard).
Implementing this should not be too hard in the AI era and considering that a lot of people would probably donate engineering effort to a Twitter replacement. Paying for it is of course annoying, especially at scale but maybe that's solvable (ideally with a donation model / raising money from people who want to see it exist instead of taking outside investment, or at least limiting the influence of investors so you don't end up making Twitter again). Running it should be easy, just "try to do a good job" (I volunteer, but I don't even use Twitter so I'd probably not be a good candidate). Getting sued for patent violations or something might be a real problem, but maybe it's circumventable, I dunno.
It often feels like every knew large-scale project is corrupted by the Silicon valley funding model (yes I know I'm on a site that has a lot to d with that), so everyone has lost any trust that a new thing will ever be benevolent... but seriously it is not that hard to start a website, that's what Twitter and Reddit and all them did back in the day. The problem is aligning the site to people's morals enough that everybody hypes you up for free. Which ... I think things have gotten so bad now that one could get a lot of free labor if you even start moving in this direction and seem like a serious contender. Although all the VCs are trying to cash in, all the other 'normal' people really just want to live in a safe and happy world where institutions operate prosocially instead of the opposite, and they'll often do whatever they can to manifest that... if somebody just makes it easy to do.
From my vantage point the decentralization stuff distracted them from winning, but I am too ignorant to be sure if that's valid or not.
The ideal twitter clone does, unfortunately, have to clone the "virality" aspect, including the recommendation algorithm, at least at first. A necessary evil, but at least it would be in better hands if it was rebuilt by more prosocial owners.
No, we don’t have to ignore it completely. You might be unable to tolerate a company CEO having a different worldview to your own, but the rest of us don’t care, and we’ll use whatever online services we like, thank you very much
It's gotten ridiculous. I get it if they have a login wall. I've had a Twitter account for years for occasional reasons. But suddenly it thinks I'm a bot and wants me to scan some QR code, download an app on my phone separately, and take photos of my hand. For whatever reason, that didn't work on my phone, maybe cause it's a Samsung A16 (not to be confused with a16z) they decided is too poor to generate ad money.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. It's not worthwhile to me to view stuff on there anymore.
"We reserve the right to retain your security feet pics indefinitely, but won't use them for advertising purposes. We may use them for other business purposes, subject to change at any time without notification."
--new TOS
Then, a few months later x.ai announces a new SOTA frontier model, FeetGrok.
The prospect of going to a website I've never visited before, getting a captcha, and it saying "we don't think those are YOUR feet, access denied" is a little TOO believable.
You know, as a television personality, Jeremy Clarkson is a pretty polarising figure. The gammons see him as all that's wrong with Britain with his pro-EU views, the cartoon student lefties are whining about "oh it's all just about him zoomzoomzooming about dangerously in fast cars", some people actually like him.
But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.
Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.
And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
I don't understand who all these people are who keep saying 'but I need twitter for my local politicians.' Like really? I have not followed any local politicians or authorities twitter and I still get relevant information. Believe it or not, which you might not if all you do is parrot these comments and I have seen this very comment line of thinking parroted for YEARS about twitter, most people do not follow the city hall twitter if they even have a twitter, and they get by fine. I mean people are citing they need to follow their utility. Are you kidding me? Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
Where I live currently in Europe utility companies need to inform me even in an offline way. There is no need for internet for this.
I'm reading the news with a two week delay for almost a decade, and I haven't missed anything worthwhile. There are exactly zero reasons to read Facebook/Twitter for it. For example, the value of the current US administration's word is zero. When they say something, there is no change in probability distributions in anything anymore. This two week delay makes this very obvious on the occasions when I checked the latest state of some issues. But others are the same, just for different reasons: in reality you have a very small effect on any highly politicized topics. When parents trust their kids less than politicians, then there is not much to do with everyday tools, like arguing (there are some places where there is a value, but those won't ever move the needle).
That is an European privilege. Paper costs money so in the global south companies want to get rid of it asap because money is much more scarce for everyone because many things are imported from industrialized countries
The current American government is basically entirely comprised of people who were terminally online on Twitter and communicating with the right politicians - those people got everything they wanted. This seems like evidence that it actually does matter.
I got through the first trump presidency without reading his tweets. I'm halfway through the second with the same streak. I don't expect this should change. What is the worst he tweets, nukes away? I would rather have my remaining 15 minutes be of peace.
Remember when Obama was lauded as the first 'online' president, with everyone from Redditors to news media gushing about his BlackBerry? What is the point you are trying to make, aside from "VC-funded apps and smartphones and how we use them have naturally evolved since 2008"?
I've always had this thought that the Trump administration's views of other countries comes disproportionately from insanely online users on Twitter and Reddit, who might actually be bots too. Like the thing about not working with European countries "that hate us."
> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.
Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.
You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.
OK, I am out of the loop. But, my point is, what loop? What is an essential piece of information that was only possible to reach you via twitter? Did this make or break your life recently? Would there truly have been no other way for you to find this information out?
Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.
I'm not going to say RSS is inherently inaccessible to normies, because the blogosphere of 20 years ago saw even elderly non-techies happily using it. However, I think the trends in computing in the years since, where most people use the internet solely through popular phone apps, mean that RSS is no longer going to see any significant use. So, a municipality is not doing a palpable service to its constituency by moving communications there.
We even saw it with RSS. Everyone using RSS was lamenting Google Reader going away. Isn't the client supposed to be the most easily replaceable part of RSS?
The most practical way would probably be to create that feed yourself based on their Twitter feed. You could automate it using some Nitter-like service (please do not scrape public Nitters, but you can run your own Nitter and scrape it as you like). It is generally easier to do something like this yourself than to convince someone else, who does not care at all, to do it. I don't know how you would advertise it.
How about municipal councils looking around at any remaining "mainstream media" local outlets and committing to post relevant notices/updates on their websites?
This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.
This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.
No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.
Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.
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.
All my local groups are on facebook. It's horrendous. Could do with a browser plugin which only shows posts I want to see, it might even be good enough to send me back to facebook
I think the last facebook group I was participant of was in school some 15 or 20 years ago before parents were allowed to make their own facebook accounts. Life has been just fine without any such dependence on twitter or facebook. It is always surprising to me how the people who use these networks so religiously cannot imagine living without them. I am here to say that yes, it is possible, and probably more people around your periphery are living like that to success without you even realizing it.
about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches.
multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).
This isn't a criticism, but I do think this comment actually raises part of the problem. There are people on twitter telling people they should be on twitter, and it's apparently effective enough that at least some people are still signing up or trying to at least. The world needs more of the inverse, people telling those they care about who are on twitter to get off it.
And likewise, continuing to call it "Twitter" when that is long dead, which has amazingly positive brand association as near as I can tell entirely from the name doesn't do any of us a service.
If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to:
"Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"
Nitter has to be logged into an account to read tweets so it can show them to you. Elon made it quite difficult to make even one account, let alone many. If you have an unused registered account, some Nitter instance operator would be happy to have it. The same is true for all the other alternative front-ends, like the ones for Instagram, and Play Store.
This would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means.
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
Not since then, but before it, I could read smart people's opinion there about random topics. Of course, when the takeover happened, almost all of them left already years prior.
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
Support and platforming of neo-Nazis and nation state sockpuppets are big reasons to avoid X. Boycott, divest, sanction, and shun those who intend to harm society.
You violated just about every HN guideline and failed to make an argument. Maybe you shouldn't participate here or anywhere else until you can be more civilized and respectful.
maybe my brian is memory holed but twitter used to not require an account which made the whole public square gov thing very valid even if u were banned for political reasons u could still read and be informed.
x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official.
i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts.
No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.
Twitter stopped publishing stats on its user counts when it went private, so we don’t know if those have gone up, down, or sideways. We do have some numbers for Europe since about 2023 because of reporting mandates, and they seem to show a downward trend.
We could split hairs about numbers or acknowledge that X (and TikTok, and Instagram) still owns the zeitgeist. No normie gives a shit about BlueSky and Threads is anemic considering they gave every Instagram user a free account. I'm being real here.
Certainly it didn't implode and is not failing but it's not clear to me that its user base is increasing from pre-Musk. And Threads supposedly has a similar number of active users.
Twitter had around 230 million monetizable daily active users in 2022 before Elon Musk acquisition. They didn't publish monthly active users. [1]
Twitter IPO S-1 in 2013 said 500 million tweets per day from 215 million MAU and 100 million DAU. "We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs." [2]
2024 Elon Musk claims 600 million monthly active users [3]
2025 SpaceX S-1 Filing 520 million monthly active users. [4]
2026 Also SpaceX S-1 Filing 550 million monthly active users. 350 million daily posts. "The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active" [4]
Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 [5]
Pretty well everyone who still posts on X is deep fried, smart or dumb. Some of them can tell but can't stop (Nate silver, one of the greens, Zvi) and some seem unaware.
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are, but AFAIK the general trend of login-walling services over the past few years has happened due to a court decision saying that it's legal to scrape publicly available data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn ). If they gate content behind a login wall and put a clause in the EULA forbidding scraping, this lets them use the CFAA to go after anybody who still scrapes the site.
Effectively it forces scrapers to become a party to the terms of service, which usually contains the "no programmatic access (other than via paid API)" or specifically prohibits automated scraping.
AFAIK it's been interpreted that getting public data while being someone the data holder doesn't like is, unusually, one of the very few things that is not a CFAA violation. Bright Data vs X for example.
> If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.
AFAIK, there isn't an single auth scheme on earth that guarantee human intervention[1]. Anyone can set-up a robot creating new users on a whim using single-use email addresses and even phone numbers. In fact, we know that OpenAI's agent have been doing exactly that when attacking Rubygem. And all AI labs are likely doing it for scrapping social media as well.
Who are you gonna sue then?
[1] the closest thing is Altman iris scanning venture, but without a broad adoption it's remains functionally useless.
By setting that up, you take on the liability for it. The defendant is whoever set it up. No different from "if I roll a car down a hill and it hits something at the bottom, how can you hold the car liable?"
> If you don't sign the contract nobody can sue you for violating it.
But terms of service are contracts which you sign by agreeing.
Courts have looked somewhat favorably on "I didn't read that" defenses, but accepting the agreement is a legal contract between you and the service provider.
It's ineptitude. Of course it is. Otherwise it would be indefensible.
EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability
The decision to force you to sign in to view replies is clearly not by accident or ineptitude. It's probably not malice either - just a business decision.
If I have something you want and I could give it to you but instead charge you money, is that malice? If so, what system wouldn't make malice indistinguishable from business decisions? If not, what distinguishes that from a login wall in exchange for viewing content?
I hate when companies do this. Instagram is a black box for me. Whenever someone sends me a link the web app is completely nonfunctional; clicking links just reload the page, it constantly tries opening the app, etc
The last time I signed up for an Instagram account (2016) it got immediately flagged as a bot account. I think I was supposed to appeal it to have it reinstanted, but why bother if this is how badly they treat users?
Can you imagine going to work as Instagram's web developer, spending your day finding new ways that the app accidentally works and disabling them?
The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.
A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.
On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for.
On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.
I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it.
Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago...
There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts").
But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
> There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101)
Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.
Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
The key thing to address is the near zero marginal cost part.
If the philosophy extended beyond a binary blob, we would have a whole parallel economy of free tangible goods, from workers using their expertise on their own time. But this basically doesn't exist because real costs are involved.
This thread started with me citing a counterexample to your wide sweeping attempt to lump self-interested corporations in with humans who tend to be generous under many circumstances. I've made my point, so I'm done here.
>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
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.
I think you might be confused, because any creator can make their content free to access. If they are playing in someone else's house, yeah there might be rules they don't like, but it's also not their house.
Nothing stops creators from self-hosting and absorbing the full cost themselves.Yt doesn't even care if you link to your own hosted version of the video on their platform.
True, but I can make my own boogers, and kind of do automatically, so that's pretty common. Some people get fecal transplants, which is rarer, but let's say if I want to build... I don't know, lets say a house. I can lay the bricks myself, which is a transaction against my lifespan (not just a transaction on a product of my body like boogers or fecal matter), or I can hire you. When you're hired, I essentially get two lives since I can do life things at a rate of 2x while you remain employed. I guess the real value comes in buying your time, not necessarily the product of 'you.'
Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
Users were affected in exactly the same way. And every user - i.e. poster - was first just a visitor. Much fewer would have become posters if they'd been greeted by a login wall that wanted an e-mail and phone-number.
i don't think there is a page on x that just gives you a login wall that a normal non-logged in user would go to. if you link to something like a tweet or a profile page it shows you them. these services are for scraping.
Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.
I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay.
At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.
We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.
The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor.
There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates.
There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
It's interesting to think about what is actually so good about YouTube. Is it being able to go to the homepage and see a bunch of stuff to click on? Nebula has that.
I signed up to Nebula to support alternative platforms, yet I still click on YouTube all the time and not Nebula. Why is that? I'm not sure.
Because yt pays creators more than the others, both in absolute (total dollars) and relative (revenue share) terms.
As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block, youtube gets to keep it's monopoly. They have literately turned people's greed back against themselves, since it ensures starvation of competitors. And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
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.
What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
>If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
Seems like people who try to argue that Capitalism creates greed are almost always just narcissistic looking for something to blame their greediness on.
The article that I need to hand over my monetizable information over to read? The article written by a journalist getting paid to produce content so it can be pushed to the market of articles to retrieve more than it's cost to procure?
If they are going to claim to ride a high horse, I'm not paying them any credence when they show up on the same dinkey donkey as everyone else they loudly spite.
I can assure you that whatever the nymag article written by a creative writing major turned socialist journalist says, isn't going to be a life changing read to a long time economics geek.
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.
But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
Did you know that Facebook got started by scraping MySpace using people's real accounts they provided the passwords for, and Reddit got started by anonymously copying popular posts from Slashdot and Digg? Were these correct actions?
None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.
The login wall provides one more avenue for profit: selling the data of logged-in users. A profile with a history of likes, read-times, etc is more valuable then a pair of eyeballs that are glazed-over and not clicking on an ad...
Is it that much more valuable to click on an ad than see it? I mean, network television operated on ads you can't click on for decades and made billion-dollar empires.
True, and Britain ruled the waves with wooden warships for a long time. But if they went back to wooden warships they would not rule the waves. The world has changed. Adblock, archive.is, third party mirrors all exist today.
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.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.
Sure, it definitely didn't happen in the wake of its new owner feeling like it in one of his first major changes to the platform because of his "concerns" with bot traffic.
Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.
It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.
That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.
Your comment seems to implicitly assume that X has some ethical claim to the content they're monetizing, when in fact they're trying to monetize _others'_ content.
You want to read what service XYZ offers, but you dont want to do it within the constraints of service XYZ.
If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
The market would dictate that if X content consumers found it too inconvenient to consume from X and that would result in a significant drop in demand, the X content producers would stop producing their content on X.
I dont like many things about X -- random ads, bookmark folders being a paid feature, enshittification of the algorithm if you god forbid linger over some controversial video or content.
But i keep coming back to it because its the best way to follow the minds of brilliant techies. The basic sign up flow that i did years ago was basically a no-op.
I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.
> If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
I am 100% okay with this. I don't want what Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer, so I no longer have an account these platforms. But I do have an account with my local electric utility. It's my only option. And if I want to find information about an outage, it's posted on their Facebook page. I'm 0% okay with this.
Last time I tried creating a Twitter account, I couldn't even complete the sign-up flow before getting automatically banned pending giving them my phone number. After that, I went to like and follow things. My account was then banned again for suspicious activity.
Clearly they approve or they'd at least stop advertising their twitter handles on their websites and handouts. Most brands cannot ignore such a vast network effects and have made the decision to continue despite the changes.
Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
If the name Bright Data is ringing a bell to anyone, it’s probably because they are a (the?) primary offender running the LG TV “residential proxy” (botnet)
Which, btw, was the least bad thing about those TVs. I support residential proxying as a means to liberate public data that's being held captive by people like Elon.
Notice it says "terms of service or copyright". If X's lawyers have any intelligence, they'll have a reason why XCancel is not identical to Bright Data. Perhaps this time, instead of claiming it's a copyright violation, they'll claim it's wire fraud because multiple accounts are used.
Anyone can make an account, though, and instantly access that content, so Elon doesn't really have any leg to stand on by claiming they're private. It's not the same as Cambridge Analytica scraping stuff you had to have certain privileges to see by tricking the system into granting those privileges.
Elon unfortunately may have a leg to stand on, because it doesn't functionally matter whether "anyone can make an account and see it". I don't believe any legal ruling to date has been fine with that distinction.
It depends what you mean by "not allowed". Breaking ToS isn't a crime, but you might be sued for damages, but how can they show there were any damages?
But if they ban the nitter operator surely you can't just bypass that ban legally by making a new X account. That there are bans and the operator has to bypass bans by pretending to be a new person I think that this makes it different.
It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.
It's not that cut and dry or else search engines wouldn't be legal. It depends on how much is used, for what context, etc. This very well may wind up being fair use.
Search engines "modify" it ie. show snippets + direct to the actual site.
In general fair use pretty much always requires it to be transformative and/or point to the source. Simply scraping it to prevent people from going to X isn't free use in any definition I've heard.
I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.
Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
> Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.
I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
I think that's more true in image generation than in text? At least, all the money is in LLMs that write code, not LLMs that write O'Reilley-style coding books.
If you have a websites that offers guides, how-tos or tutorials, LLMs directly compete with you. StackOverflow would also have a really good case
After all LLMs don't just code, they also answer questions and give step-by-step instructions. In terms of total userbase those features are used a lot more than writing code
If a society operates under a rule like this, it is no better than Russia or any other tyranny where law is for me but not for thee. This is not how it should work in a supposedly free and lawful country.
It’s been working like that in the US for a while.
Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires?
Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.
There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.
If LLMs only made SO redundant by writing code and solving my technical problems autonomously so I never have to think about it, I would agree. But often I do ask LLMs technical questions, and they answer in great detail. And that part is a very direct SO competitor
And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.
It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
> Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use.
Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.
Well, adblockers don't copy the copyrighted content. They just control how it's rendered on the user's machine. Copyright cares about making copies and especially distributing them.
Xcancel isn't copying the copyrighted content either. It takes the raw JSON/HTML data from twitter/x via reverse proxy and redisplays it on xcancel, as opposed to twitter/x. How is that copying?
You have a point on this, I recognize, but it still seems a very thin line to walk (for X) - at least morally, because I don't think they are actually loosing real big money to anyone.
X doesnt own msot of those copyrights, except where its elon musk's own posts.
i dont think the actual copyright owners care, given they put their content onto a vaguely public view where they aim to get the most traffic to something else they are doing
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"?
Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.
That would definitely limit damages to strictly those accounts.
I'm not even sure he can use his own account as one of them. The SEC might be pretty friendly to him but I'm not sure that limiting access to a location where material information about Tesla/SpaceX is provided won't become a problem.
But I'm not even sure what damages the accounts are suffering as revenue sharing is going away [1]. With Bartz the damage is a loss of sale. With X the damage is $0 per post to the poster.
There is a newer Original Content Rewards program [2] but it seems to split revenue from X Premium and presumably people that have X Premium are not using XCancel so the damages would be 0.
How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)
fair, but recipes aren't the only thing where AI summaries at the top of search results are simultaneously transformative and competitive. Any information that is scraped from a website and then summarized by AI in a way that prevents that website from getting views is both transformative and competitive.
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
So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?
That's exactly the way UK courts are heading, see Getty vs Stability AI. The court ruled that there's no infringment because the model doesn't store exact copies, just derived weights, and therefore when it generates new images those aren't copies of protected works.
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.
They can't unless the tuner produces a copyrighted work for whatever their purpose would be, because they can step in and "detune" the thing at 3am for a competitive advantage.
You can produce copyrighted works and have just been tuned not to lol. I fail to see how limiting an ability to comply with the law is any different from just complying with the law?
The point is that you can't steal someone else's content 1:1. But you can use it for a different use (say, display the tweet in an article, then comment on it).
scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.
if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.
Meta has no exclusive rights to the content on Instagram, and X has no exclusive rights to the content on X. They have a non-exclusive license to republish it, etc.
I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?
We put up with it mostly because it enables a lot of communication to happen at all.
You want to hold the corporations legally liable for the content their host, you can say goodbye to basically reddit as a whole, any twitter clone, youtube comment sections and a whole more stuff.
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.
I am also doing something, by hosting one of the public instances of Nitter.
Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?
Yes, exactly. I limit the scraping to popular enough accounts. The wikimedia community is already organized to decide who deserves a Wikipedia page so I use that.
Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
mtr xcancel.com
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?
No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.
You don't want fully-specified rules because a rule with strict boundaries has loopholes. You actually want a clearly allowed area, a clearly disallowed area, and a gradually increasing gradient of punishment in between, so that a small change in behaviour produces only a small change in punishment, and avoiding punishment requires a large change in behaviour.
Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.
I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.
It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.
The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.
Oh yeah, I understood your point, but given MDY Industries, LLC v .Blizzard who knows what the "right" judge would rule? With IP laws these days we're really getting into weird places.
> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.
You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)
> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.
Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.
Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.
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.
That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.
If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X.
On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.
It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.
For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.
It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.
I think Wikipedia has become a cancerous blight on world politics, and I would love to see Wikipedia die so that a Mastodon-like distributed alternative could rise from the ashes.
You can knowledge it's there, and just not read it. There's lots of links on the internet that I don't click.
I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.
Damn it's almost as if this was a conversation we should have had around 2018 at the latest. Like evident bias in social networks was a real concern all along.
What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter".
I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this.
Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.
> 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.
So journalists ran a study with extremely poor sampling, base rate, and classification methodology designed by left-wing researchers and activists groups (including groups explicitly opposed to X), found the conclusions they wanted to find, and spent the second half of their article decrying the lack of heavy-handed moderation that pre-Musk Twitter used to control speech.
All we can actually derive from that article is that X’s new user recommendation system exposed a small number of near-default, low-feedback, synthetic accounts to more content that left-wing “misinformation” researchers classified as “right-wing”.
Andrew Anglin, the subject of the first article, was re-banned in 2023 for the same reason that crimethink, inc was banned.
The subjects of the second article are particularly odious right-wing conspiracy theorists and racists that lost their reach, which they believe was connected to arguing with Elon.
That seems like an action you’d be in favor of, and also it counters the propaganda claim — but regardless, their claim that they were shadow-banned, that the cause was direct intercession by Elon, and that the motivation was their merely disagreeing with him, is unsupported by any evidence.
I'm not sure where you got any of that from. Where are you reading anything about the researchers working for Sky News, a Comcast subsidiary (!) being "left wing"? What are you basing your criticism of sampling and classification on?
I provided a study that literally won the Royal Statistical Societies' "Statistical Excellence in Journalism" award [0]. You provided unfounded dismissal and conspiracy. The burden of proof is on your side.
I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).
Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.
I've stopped using xcancel even for that. If anything is important enough, it will reach me via other channels. Particularly from any contact who give af ... if they don't it's not important.
I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.
I never liked Twitter and I don't like X as a medium but they were and still are used by others as a communication channel. To partake of what is communicated without having to sign up and/or subject myself to the barrage of nonsense spewed through X I use a self-hosted Nitter instance. This way I get to follow those X links without needing a (real, active) account. For passive X users Nitter offers a far better - lighter, faster - experience than X itself. This makes Nitter (which is what Xcancel - a misnomer since it doesn't cancel X - is based on) especially useful for those who only use X because others used it to distribute information.
There are places like government agencies, public transit org aisations, and similar organisations, which still use it as adhoc quick notification channel. If I want to see if a train route ist interrupted it's the best source. However using it once in a while (not via app or such) has long loading times and nagging screens for sign in, cookie compliance and so on, which makes the whole thing an annoyance ...
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
Exactly. If you boycott X, shouldn't you also boycott the people who are on X? But this kind of slacktivism has always been more virtue signaling than anything.
No idea how it looks right now, but at some point Twitter started to block reading replies without an account. And sometimes it blocked even more, so you could not follow links to read.
The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
I admit I'm not nor have been a Twitter/X user so am able to look at the situation without a sense of entitlement or attachment.
> The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
Yes. Because we have to participate in a society in which sometimes, that's where the info is. Some towns only post their announcements on Facebook/X! Some people prominent on my framework of choice are only on X.
> How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
Virtue isn't a binary. I can reduce my externalities, even if I can't eliminate them.
Not really, unfortunately. If it were just a bunch of bros laughing at fascist memes amongst themselves I would happily boycott everything, but unfortunately a lot of "public" service announcements and discourse also happens on 卐itter. Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements, city council decisions, public transport notices, official statements by MEPs/local politicians/companies, etc. Not to mention a certain demented orange geriatric who happens to control nukes and posts his daily threats and declarations of war there.
These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
>Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements
I am shocked you get this served via twitter instead of usual service notices for these things. I don't use twitter and I still get these notices and other news.
Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
> Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact
We don't. We let six or seven far right billionares do that.
> And regarding copyright
Copyright of tweets are owned by original authors. Unless you have permission, the copyright infringement which occurs is against the individual, not X.
I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point when it doesn't serve the public interest or the interest of customers who deserve at least some choice. It's as unreasonable for them as using Instagram or a dating app for something intended for broad reach and accessibility.
I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.
The reason is simple: they were using Twitter when it was publicly readable and had RSS, and they have no selfish reason to stop. (Selfless reasons don't count, everybody is selfish)
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point
Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?
I extend this to people. I understand old habits and what not, but I'm surprised at the culture on social media. Twitter is literally orthodox white supremacy or however they brand it. Quite odd, but not considering current politics. We've decided to devolve.
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X
It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but two whole apps. Yet, whenever there's an incident they immediately reach for X (on which I can't access their posts), while their apps lag behind.
As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.
That update was made 9/6: 5 days prior to archival and on the same day xcancel.com previously also "returned". I can find no public updates regarding Nitter project after the 9/11 archival.
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.
In cases like these, companies often try to go after the upstream project, not just operators. The law gives them lots of tools for this: the CFAA has a conspiracy provision; The DMCA has a provision against making software for circumventing copyright; Trademark law might make the name nitter or xcancel illegal; and finally even if the claims are weak the litigation itself is an enormous burden
The repo being archived happened after that UPDATE post that you mention. So the project has gone from suspended, to un-suspended, and now it's suspended again (and the repo got archived this time).
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com.
People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)
Some organizations only post information on Twitter, especially those with limited resources. And if their followers are themselves limited in number, then that information is not disseminated.
Do you need updates about the Dutch Air Force's ongoing airborne exercise or can you just ignore that exercise? If they weren't posting it on Twitter but were only performing it for a live audience, would you clamor to be part of that audience? Or are you only interested because of the fact it's on Twitter?
It's the daily schedule I want. The exercise lasts 12 days and has a variable daily schedule that is posted day-of exclusively on Twitter. I have no interest in Twitter; I just want to know what time they'll fly by.
given that twitter is claiming ownership over the content, I expect they will start posting takedowns when a government official say, posts the notice to both twitter and bluesky
I have been suspended from Ex-Twitter for months for "inauthentic behavior" despite only ever just using the site normally.
I would very much like to have nothing to do with this site anymore, but unfortunately many people and organizations from before Elon took it over still post there and I can't make them all move to another site (and the same site for that matter), so here we are.
I have had my account since like 2013. I browse the site and hit like on things, but I only have a handful of posts going back over the years. Occasionally, when I do try to post, it stops me because they think I am a bot. Meanwhile, I see what are clearly and unambigously bots follow me all the time, I see identical messages repeated across obvious botnets. Their bot detection is just very bad.
Also, while we're on the subject, I used to have two factor enabled. After Elon bought the site, they forced me to disable two factor for insane reasons, iirc you needed to pay for a blue checkmark if you wanted two factor. Today for the first time they've started blocking my access to even view the site until I authenticate with a qr code from an android or ios device. The future of the internet is bleak.
EDIT: I actually broke down and tried to verify on my phone. It wants me to fucking download the x app, and it implies that they want biometric data. This is actually outrageous. What's more, they're so incompetent that I can bypass the lockout screen by resizing my window to half size and browse twitter somewhat normally.
It happened to me this past weekend. I post engineering related things, and out of nowhere blocked, no reason, no email, no communication. I just sent an "appeal" but don't know what the hell I'm appealing.
This destroys my trust not just in X, but in social media. If bots are this big of a problem, then I guess I can't use them if there is a risk out of nowhere my account is hit. The network effect is real though.
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
> signups are often still rejected with no explanation given
That's pretty odd. When I google this, there are claims that this is to prevent spam accounts. Obviously, if you choose not to take them at their word, one can read all sorts of odd reasons into it.
To be clear I agree that another reason is pretty likely. I'm just phrasing it neutrally since I don't know.. Above all I'm saying it's weird. I'm used to thinking of twitter and all the others in the same category as wanting to drive user metrics up at the expense of a lot of other priorities. Preventing new accounts seems to run counter to expectations.
'Echo chamber' is an odd thing to say. X has many center left and hard left accounts, they're not banned in the same "women can't be men" was during Woke 1.0.
That’s not a market. You are not exchanging anything of value. It’s a public service. One might as well lament that Ferrari doesn’t offer cars to the millions of people who would gladly take one for free.
They are now telling me that I need an account to use old.reddit.com (the only usable version of Reddit UI). Needless to say, I have stopped visiting Reddit completely.
Perhaps more frustratingly, if you bite the bullet and browse the "new" version on your mobile browser, the page will eventually become non-responsive and have ~60% of your screen covered by a bottom banner that prompts you to download their app to continue. It's like they are actively trying to kill their userbase.
On mobile, uBO has been able to get around the "use our app" block. It took a week or two for the filters to get updated but now it is a non-issue. Tested in Firefox and Vivaldi on Android.
Like most big tech companies now, they are actively trying to kill their non-contributing userbase, where contributing means viewing an ad for every second post. They know that perhaps 5% of the non-contributing userbase they kill will become contributing userbase, while the other 95% will just leave, and this trade seems good to them.
Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
> without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to
That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.
They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
Many feel X, or gating access to X, is fundamentally unjust, superseding the guidelines.
Feeling injustice converts the loss into a claim: "I didn't just lose free access, we're owed free access." The GP questioned whether the inconvenience is an injustice. The flags came because that question threatened the claim.
Free speech talk decorates a claim that, imo, doesn't really have much purchase.
You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.
Sure but my point is the Twitter experience is trash and not required like, say, paying an evil ISP or interacting with Google (for 99.9% of people abandoning and fully dodging Google is incredibly difficult). It’s working out for him because people won’t leave (even though engagement and user numbers are still below pre-acquisition numbers). It only has value because of his acquiring it with his other company. Prior its value was tanked. It’s a crap site that isn’t profitable and serves as a mouthpiece for his politics and whims.
You don't need an ISP or Google either. It's incredibly difficult for some people to leave either, but it's also incredibly difficult for some people to leave Twitter.
I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.
The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.
Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.
"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.
> "Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
This is one way to define it, yes, but Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist” which I would argue means that he feels speech should be maximally free.
> It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost".
I have never meant it in that way, and I’m not sure why you thought I did.
> To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
This is possibly pedantic but this statement as written is false. I can view single tweets just fine, and I don’t see ads.
> Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
That analogy doesn’t really work here, IMO. My only point is that it’s objectively true that speech behind a login wall is less free (as in freedom) than speech not behind a login wall, and so a (non-hypocritical) “free speech absolutist” should always prefer the latter.
Free Speech isn’t about who is listening, it’s about who is speaking. Just because you can’t hear it doesn’t necessarily mean the person did not speak freely.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or diversion.
I assumed the parent post was referring to the Constitutional meaning when they said "Yes, we all know what 'free speech' really means and it has nothing to do with X," but if I misunderstood then I apologize!
For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.
I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.
And remember, Elon only granted that so he wouldn't be (rightfully) banned from Google. At first you couldn't view anything, then Google delisted X because it only indexes public pages, then Elon conceded you can view the direct thing you linked to, and then Google relisted it.
pretty sure it was even worse ten years ago cause very active twitter users would pay for 3rd party twitter apps (maybe twitter didn't have an official app back then? ~2012-2013)
The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.
The reasons it's unusable are precisely the reasons they don't want you using anything else. Direct control over your eyeballs. They decide where the ads go on the page, they decide what comes next in your feed, they track everywhere you look or move the mouse. Anything that circumvents this is a business risk to them.
So media outlets, influencers, etc have something to link to, and a way to promote Twitter by including tweets in their articles.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
They managed to get pretty close to decomming it which is that it's now impossible to sign up on desktop without an account that requires a phone number tied to it.
What other versions of twitter there are? I use it on both pc and mobile in browser with adblock and the experience is the same as 20 years ago. If anything the "for you" feed has become actually usable in last couple of years.
So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
Sadly, the success rate is significantly better than 0.1%. as a broad strategy, it clearly works. I wish it didn't, but there is a reason why all these companies do it.
Yeah, or local governments, or governments in general, seems strange to me too. But then probably they'd use Facebook/Instagram/Whatever instead of Twitter if Twitter wasn't available, and seemingly it's impossible for them to use something that isn't built like a panopticon that also wants to slurp up as much data from their users as possible.
There should be a law mandating government agencies to not limit their electronic communications to private third party platforms.
If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.
The same reason is wrong to require a Google or Apple phone to exercise basic civil duties within government services. You are gating the service, or information, behind a 3rd party ToS, a login, and basically stating that you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data to such companies.
Why is it wrong?
Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools? I don’t think so.
It’s the same thing as requiring dress code to go to the tribunal or anything formal.
> Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools?
As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.
In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...
Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.
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.
Just by googling "twitter api" I am able to find an "unofficial API" (scraped, obviously), that gives you access to tweets for around $0.15/1k tweets. Which is expensive if you want to, let's say, train a model, but super cheap for a casual user.
A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.
Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.
What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.
You can scrape twitter pretty easily yourself with an account (lots of free code on github) but that's the thing - you need an account which is legally complicated but for your own personal use you can just create a dummy account and you'll never be blocked.
Don't they require a phone number? Even if they don't, they probably require email. I don't really want to give them my main email and even less - phone number. So, buying an account seems like less of a hassle, than figuring out where to get a temporary email.
These are all available for couple of cents per email/phone number. I don't want to advertise these services directly but they work very well and you can find them with keywords like "SMS otp code service"
They make it really hard to get an account, no matter how legit you are, but if you eventually get one, you can plug it into your own private Nitter instance.
it's going to be a cat and mouse game for as long as X can legally afford to keep it going (i.e. til the heat death of the universe)
regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon network and Bluesky existing.
whatever. i've redirected x to 0.0.0.0 when the first warning shot was fired and called it a day. rocks are looking like a great place to live under right about now anyway.
The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
I'd be more interested in your concrete alternative recommendation on where to get the rumors/insider news about AI rather than your opinion on how I should use social media.
There isn't much TBH. All newswires are even propaganda by selection mostly. I'd say the newswires that still sort of pretend to be news and usually are only biased through selection: AP and Reuters.
Why even keep using zombie Twitter? I used to scroll Twitter a lot but deleted my account back when. Literally any other social network seems more appealing these days, and not by a small margin.
When I read this, the Arweave project [1] comes to mind.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
Does things like that even matter anymore? Lots of things shouldn't be what they are, and vice-versa, yet no one seem to do anything. If Microsoft listens to the demands of XCorp, then that's the reality, regardless of what courts say.
> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
> Continue to X
This was hard to swallow for me! Why you are redirecting to X, which is the exact opposite of what you are offering?! Don't get me wrong, I use XCancel and Nitter regularly an I like them, it just hits hard!
This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
We used to have that, it was called a blog. I used to subscribe to all my local politicians and journalist blogs back in the late 2000s and would recieve everything I needed in my inbox, but now everyone posts on Twitter. That's where we have ActivityPub.
Indeed, the shitter authors recommended you buy a bundle of Twitter accounts with 2FA details when setting up your own instance, to avoid getting rate-limited.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
I do take your point, that someone against using twitter for training data in AI who then uses a service that might be violating copyright seems hypocritical. But first of all, the people voicing these opinions may not be the same person, despite commenting on the same website.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access.
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.
It's not that they can't. They don't want to. The reasons it is unusable are the things that make them so much money. If they made a usable one they'd lose even more money.
Not a popular question here, but what's the difference between xcancel or archive.org, and torrents and other pirate services alike?
(except twitter is user content, yet per their tos xcancel is still piracy)
Torrents can be used to spread information that is in the public domain or licensed freely, just as much as they can be used to spread copyrighted information. Obviously most of what people actually use torrents for is pirating copyrighted media against the wishes of the copyright-holders, but that's not inherent to the protocol.
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
Because removing public content from the internet for profit is wrong and shouldn't be allowed. One man, or one company, should not be in charge of the free speech of half a billion people.
A good idea would be: Make a decision. A trade-off.
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
Lots of the local and also smaller government agencies in my country exclusively put out stuff on Twitter, Instagram and other social media, instead of their own websites.
Does that suck? Yes. Have I tried getting them to change? Yes. Are they still posting things first there? Also yes.
Don't have much choice if I want to know what's going on around me and want it straight from the source.
It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.
It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.
The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
Not because this is also my opinion (I have a lot of opinions that people don't share, and I completely don't care, believe me!), but for deeper reasons, I'd love to understand why this is so unpopular, although it's absolutely what every sane person would do in everyday cases.
My only explanation would be to imagine all down-voters as chain smokers when they get involved into discussions whether smoking is a good thing.
People don't like to be reminded that they're hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
Standing outside and looking through the Nazi Bar's window is still pretty much hanging out at the Nazi Bar. It still brings traffic and attention to their establishment.
Sure, it's not buying drinks from the Nazis, and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly. But it's still hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
Yes, I like the analogy. Even if you don't agree with "Nazi", it makes the illustration quite obvious:
There is a bar that scares you off so much that you wouldn't even go in. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. It's not just not your favorite beer, but you absolutely avoid even to enter. There must be a strong reason for that, right?
What people are then important enough to watch through the windows? I mean, at first, you just make a fool of yourself. Just imagine the analogy. That's exactly xcancel and friends, right? And then, don't forget: These people explicitly do not share your view in a matter fundamental and important enough for you to not enter the bar.
Are they friends? I can't imagine friendships with these differences really need that deep devotion.
Are they politicians? Maybe there are enough media around you that already preprocess the conversations at the Nazi bar for you?
Wider community (around your job, hobby, ...)? That's probably the most challenging one. But still, wouldn't it be definitely the goal to push them to better places? I know it's not a matter of a day or two, but why couldn't we at least agree on that goal, and then start acting in some way?
btw: This is not specific to X or Musk imho. There are other networks out there that aren't in control of such a madman today, but they share a lot of problematic properties.
Very well reasoned and it fits a long evolved pattern but what you’re describing fits the mass sociopathic behavior called shunning, as engaged in by some religions like JW if you need a neutral example to think about. It is in no way good for society or for individuals in the long term.
> and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly
If you convert someone who was buying drinks into someone who only looks through the window, the world gets less Nazi. If you convert someone who was passing by into someone who looks through the window, the world gets more Nazi. And we see both classes of people in this thread - people who think each of those directions is dominant.
White nationalist is a wild, wild misreading though. Though not an uncommon one.
The Overton window doesn’t allow talking about all real issues, so people like yourself mistake race as the crux of the matter, when other issues are the real topic.
If you want understanding, work on helping open, not close, the Overton window.
These people includes pretty much every politician. I personally do have an X account and I do use X, but I completely understand why someone would want to read what their politicians are saying without wanting to create an account anywhere
The hatred and jealousy for Musk is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt.
They all secretly want to use X because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
The hatred and jealousy for Spez is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt.
They all secretly want to use Reddit because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an Reddit account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
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
IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website.
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
I don't want to be tracked by x.com, but still want to be able to read links people send me to tweets. It's pretty reductive to say that people are using it because they "hate Elon so much," or even that they "want to engage with it.'
Is engaging with the site just reading its content, not liking or retweeting? Sometimes I just want to read a tweet thread that was sent to me without ditractions in a straightforward UI.
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.
xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
What do we really think we're missing out on by not using X?
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
Maybe there should be a texting app where you can make pages of contacts to swipe between, and you can customize notifications. If you want to get fancy, maybe local AI to determine if something looks important or not? They'll always have ALERT or something in the message.
Let's revive RSS.
It's still good, even if it's been on the floor beyond the "five second rule".
Futile? No.
Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last.
Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last.
Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.
Which social network has larger reach than X? Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X?
Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink? Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink?
Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know. What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me. Show the facts and figures that support your claims. That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. It's not worthwhile to me to view stuff on there anymore.
What is next? Run some arbitrary command? Make photos of your feet?
We really ought to think what is an acceptable way to verify that someone is an actual human.
--new TOS
Then, a few months later x.ai announces a new SOTA frontier model, FeetGrok.
But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.
Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.
And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
All we know is, he's called the Stig
I'm reading the news with a two week delay for almost a decade, and I haven't missed anything worthwhile. There are exactly zero reasons to read Facebook/Twitter for it. For example, the value of the current US administration's word is zero. When they say something, there is no change in probability distributions in anything anymore. This two week delay makes this very obvious on the occasions when I checked the latest state of some issues. But others are the same, just for different reasons: in reality you have a very small effect on any highly politicized topics. When parents trust their kids less than politicians, then there is not much to do with everyday tools, like arguing (there are some places where there is a value, but those won't ever move the needle).
It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.
Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.
You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.
We've had RSS for about 27 years.
Google Reader was around for less than 8 of those years, and it has now been 13 years since it died.
This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.
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.
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"
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.
I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.
In an ideal world nothing would be able to change that.
Edit: not my downvote btw, where did that come from? - - corrective upvote instead contrary to bot action
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I should hang your post on the refrigerator.
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.
In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.
People have been saying this since the Dorsey days, they were wrong back then and they're still wrong today.
Twitter had around 230 million monetizable daily active users in 2022 before Elon Musk acquisition. They didn't publish monthly active users. [1]
Twitter IPO S-1 in 2013 said 500 million tweets per day from 215 million MAU and 100 million DAU. "We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs." [2]
2024 Elon Musk claims 600 million monthly active users [3]
2025 SpaceX S-1 Filing 520 million monthly active users. [4]
2026 Also SpaceX S-1 Filing 550 million monthly active users. 350 million daily posts. "The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active" [4]
Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 [5]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/twitter-twtr-earnings-q1-202...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...
[3] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1793779530282443086
[4] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
[5] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/metas-threads...
If HN has a bubble of X users
BTW if BlueSky is fading to obscurity why did a post about how they put their logo on their screenshots got 715 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338459
Schrödinger‘s BlueSky?
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.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912
If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.
The person who provides that, and the subsequent automated scraping, is the party, and would be the recipient of a civil suit.
AFAIK, there isn't an single auth scheme on earth that guarantee human intervention[1]. Anyone can set-up a robot creating new users on a whim using single-use email addresses and even phone numbers. In fact, we know that OpenAI's agent have been doing exactly that when attacking Rubygem. And all AI labs are likely doing it for scrapping social media as well.
Who are you gonna sue then?
[1] the closest thing is Altman iris scanning venture, but without a broad adoption it's remains functionally useless.
> No different from "if I roll a car down a hill and it hits something at the bottom, how can you hold the car liable?"
That's the difference between criminal and civil justice. You don't need to sign a law for it to bind you, but for contracts you do.
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.
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
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
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
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.
A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.
We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.
The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates.
There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
I signed up to Nebula to support alternative platforms, yet I still click on YouTube all the time and not Nebula. Why is that? I'm not sure.
As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block, youtube gets to keep it's monopoly. They have literately turned people's greed back against themselves, since it ensures starvation of competitors. And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
YouTube hasn’t degraded in service or quality and when I pay them for the ad free service, they don’t try and sneak more ads in anyway like some other services have or the historical example of cable tv.
I’d probably be a lot happier if most software companies produced a product and kept a user relationship with me the way YouTube has.
login wall != paywall
As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
(https://archive.is/wSmtd)
It's all greed, all the ways down.
I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
If they are going to claim to ride a high horse, I'm not paying them any credence when they show up on the same dinkey donkey as everyone else they loudly spite.
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
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'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.
I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.
Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.
I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.
It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.
That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.
If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
The market would dictate that if X content consumers found it too inconvenient to consume from X and that would result in a significant drop in demand, the X content producers would stop producing their content on X.
I dont like many things about X -- random ads, bookmark folders being a paid feature, enshittification of the algorithm if you god forbid linger over some controversial video or content.
But i keep coming back to it because its the best way to follow the minds of brilliant techies. The basic sign up flow that i did years ago was basically a no-op.
I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.
It's just a different kind of gate, though.
I am 100% okay with this. I don't want what Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer, so I no longer have an account these platforms. But I do have an account with my local electric utility. It's my only option. And if I want to find information about an outage, it's posted on their Facebook page. I'm 0% okay with this.
Most people do not use X.
X usage is down year over year.
The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.
The smartest people i know, i mostly know because of their X presence.
Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?
I'm not so sure of your claim that one implies the other.
I bet if you just asked them, they'd prefer for the loginwall to be undone.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?
See hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn using accounts, and they were found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms.
It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.
1) Nitter offers a deal: download our browser extension, sign up for Twitter, and we'll give you some kind of perk (Amazon credits, whatever).
2) Browser extension surfs Twitter on the user's behalf, scraping and sending copies to Nitter.
3) We find out how serious the legal system is about prosecuting scraping.
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.
Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.
I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
After all LLMs don't just code, they also answer questions and give step-by-step instructions. In terms of total userbase those features are used a lot more than writing code
Who has the gold makes the rules.
Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires?
Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.
A similar thing has been surfaced in Dalton, Georgia, again about PFAS [0]. Let's see how will it play out...
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...
Companies will eventually take a cost benefit evaluation and stop fighting if the risk is too high or the fines too large.
A personal billionaire who decides to fuck you over is capable of behaving irrationally and just beating you via resources.
Look at trumps infinite appeal strategy which apparently works.
He only just was forced to pay Jean Carrol a few months ago, four years after he lost his civil case.
If you’re a regular Joe and some billionaire harmed you in a way that hurt your income. You’re not gonna be able to afford 4 years of legal battles.
As long as money buys power in our legal system, you can’t compete with someone with effectively infinite more wealth than you.
If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?
But it is not the AI who is killing it, users are doing it.
Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use. Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.
i dont think the actual copyright owners care, given they put their content onto a vaguely public view where they aim to get the most traffic to something else they are doing
It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better
Of course they complete.
Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.
Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing
Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?
What cases are you citing when you say this?
Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.
I'm not even sure he can use his own account as one of them. The SEC might be pretty friendly to him but I'm not sure that limiting access to a location where material information about Tesla/SpaceX is provided won't become a problem.
But I'm not even sure what damages the accounts are suffering as revenue sharing is going away [1]. With Bartz the damage is a loss of sale. With X the damage is $0 per post to the poster.
There is a newer Original Content Rewards program [2] but it seems to split revenue from X Premium and presumably people that have X Premium are not using XCancel so the damages would be 0.
[1]: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/creator-revenue-sharing
[2]: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/original-content-rewards
Recipes can’t be copyrighted
Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...
Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.
Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company
Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.
It should have nothing to do with storing copies it should have to do with what the models can produce. And it's clear they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.
That shouldn't satisfy anyone.
In other words... they can't. A different one can but this one can't. The court is not stupid, and will consider this fact.
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.
Edit: not a moral stance
You want to hold the corporations legally liable for the content their host, you can say goodbye to basically reddit as a whole, any twitter clone, youtube comment sections and a whole more stuff.
You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.
Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)
Classic essay about techies not understanding the law: What Colour Are Your Bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.
Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.
How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.
Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.
> If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.
https://www.copyright.gov/512/
https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-c...
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
https://github.com/gavinhungry/nitter-bitter
You can self-host it anywhere, and use the aforementioned Redirector [1] extension:
[1] https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/Include pattern:
Redirect to:On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
IF those public institutions want to to connect with all their constituents, then move to a better platform. Not the other way around.
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.
Shitter is now irrelevant for me. If you want my engagement or attention or response or to keep up with you, move to a better platform.
I used to care enough to keep up with Shitter on xcancel. Now it's just faded into irrelevance. YMMV, particularly over time
Shitter isn't the gospel of human experience and creativity and expression. It's just ... Shitter.
But I still use Wikipedia.
That's what Grok as for.
Apples and Oranges...
That is a red herring. A corporation can act ethically. A charity can act disgracefully.
A government can protect people. A neighbourhood association can bully them.
A billionare can be philanthropic. A group of children can terrorise a community.
1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.
I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.
That sounds likes something a clickbait author would write.
5. Accept that you won't click on the link
What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter".
I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this.
Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.
> right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.
> Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.
> The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.
> Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.
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
https://futurism.com/twitter-shadow-ban-elon-musk
The subjects of the second article are particularly odious right-wing conspiracy theorists and racists that lost their reach, which they believe was connected to arguing with Elon.
That seems like an action you’d be in favor of, and also it counters the propaganda claim — but regardless, their claim that they were shadow-banned, that the cause was direct intercession by Elon, and that the motivation was their merely disagreeing with him, is unsupported by any evidence.
I provided a study that literally won the Royal Statistical Societies' "Statistical Excellence in Journalism" award [0]. You provided unfounded dismissal and conspiracy. The burden of proof is on your side.
[0] https://rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2026/g...
If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
Everyone using something was never a (good) reason to use it.
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
I admit I'm not nor have been a Twitter/X user so am able to look at the situation without a sense of entitlement or attachment.
Yes. Because we have to participate in a society in which sometimes, that's where the info is. Some towns only post their announcements on Facebook/X! Some people prominent on my framework of choice are only on X.
> How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
Virtue isn't a binary. I can reduce my externalities, even if I can't eliminate them.
These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
I am shocked you get this served via twitter instead of usual service notices for these things. I don't use twitter and I still get these notices and other news.
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.
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.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but the software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
Meanwhile it's OK for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to hack companies all willy-nilly. Mad world!
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
[1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
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?
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.
EDIT: I actually broke down and tried to verify on my phone. It wants me to fucking download the x app, and it implies that they want biometric data. This is actually outrageous. What's more, they're so incompetent that I can bypass the lockout screen by resizing my window to half size and browse twitter somewhat normally.
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.
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...
The internet used to be treated as a public service.
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.
It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
*if you log in to an account
A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
Free speech talk decorates a claim that, imo, doesn't really have much purchase.
You can all walk away. You don’t need it.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
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
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
We're talking about the quolloquial "free speech", here.
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette
People here overthink so much about this topic.
As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.
In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...
Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.
BTW: overthinking is how society moves forward :)
Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.
You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
Continue to X
Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
“Does the other side need to show any good faith?”
“No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”
“….great”
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.
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.
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
https://xxcancel.com
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
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.
Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login
Bad:
X requiring login
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
I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.
I just don't want to have an X account.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
[1] https://arweave.org/
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...
It's been discussed before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571634 ("Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns")
Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
> 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!
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
RSS.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
I understand that he is a vile POS, but I don't understand people supporting him and using his products.
The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
It feels like an end of an era.
But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.
yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
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.
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.
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.
The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
Despicable behavior.
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
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.
Oh no! How awful! So terrible! People who produce nothing of value might earn slightly less!
Moving on to more pressing matters...
^1: Concept of Acronyms
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
Lots of the local and also smaller government agencies in my country exclusively put out stuff on Twitter, Instagram and other social media, instead of their own websites.
Does that suck? Yes. Have I tried getting them to change? Yes. Are they still posting things first there? Also yes.
Don't have much choice if I want to know what's going on around me and want it straight from the source.
Or should things be like that?
It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.
It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.
The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
My only explanation would be to imagine all down-voters as chain smokers when they get involved into discussions whether smoking is a good thing.
Standing outside and looking through the Nazi Bar's window is still pretty much hanging out at the Nazi Bar. It still brings traffic and attention to their establishment.
Sure, it's not buying drinks from the Nazis, and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly. But it's still hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
There is a bar that scares you off so much that you wouldn't even go in. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. It's not just not your favorite beer, but you absolutely avoid even to enter. There must be a strong reason for that, right?
What people are then important enough to watch through the windows? I mean, at first, you just make a fool of yourself. Just imagine the analogy. That's exactly xcancel and friends, right? And then, don't forget: These people explicitly do not share your view in a matter fundamental and important enough for you to not enter the bar.
Are they friends? I can't imagine friendships with these differences really need that deep devotion.
Are they politicians? Maybe there are enough media around you that already preprocess the conversations at the Nazi bar for you?
Wider community (around your job, hobby, ...)? That's probably the most challenging one. But still, wouldn't it be definitely the goal to push them to better places? I know it's not a matter of a day or two, but why couldn't we at least agree on that goal, and then start acting in some way?
btw: This is not specific to X or Musk imho. There are other networks out there that aren't in control of such a madman today, but they share a lot of problematic properties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
If you convert someone who was buying drinks into someone who only looks through the window, the world gets less Nazi. If you convert someone who was passing by into someone who looks through the window, the world gets more Nazi. And we see both classes of people in this thread - people who think each of those directions is dominant.
The Overton window doesn’t allow talking about all real issues, so people like yourself mistake race as the crux of the matter, when other issues are the real topic.
If you want understanding, work on helping open, not close, the Overton window.
You may not realize this, but you're making excuses for his behavior. I'd recommend not doing that.
They all secretly want to use X because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
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?
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...