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.

• mahboi

  today at 7:05 PM

  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 Samsung phone. It's complicated itself to the point where I can't even view posts on it.

• jdc0589

  today at 5:49 PM

  about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches.

  multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).

  Insta delete, every time.

  • immibis2

    today at 6:56 PM

    You should prefer to donate accounts to circumvention efforts rather than deleting them.

• sailfast

  today at 6:18 PM

  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.

• whalesalad

  today at 6:13 PM

  > at some point we have to ignore the X site completely

  I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.

  • ruszki

    today at 7:09 PM

    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.

• asdff

  today at 5:45 PM

  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?

  • immibis2

    today at 6:56 PM

    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.

  • bpt3

    today at 6:04 PM

    > Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?

    It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.

    Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.

    You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.

    • aperrien

      today at 6:16 PM

      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.

      • immibis2

        today at 6:57 PM

        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.

    • iso1631

      today at 6:18 PM

      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

• demo4567

  today at 5:41 PM

  [flagged]

  • gfdd

    today at 6:28 PM

    [dead]

  • tommica

    today at 6:13 PM

    Holy buzzword-salad, Batman!

    In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.

    • bigyabai

      today at 6:32 PM

      > as long as you mute the topics that get annoying

      People have been saying this since the Dorsey days, they were wrong back then and they're still wrong today.

• adamrezich

  today at 6:28 PM

  [flagged]

  • today at 6:30 PM

Regardless of the legality of the service:

I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.

My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

• swed420

  today at 3:13 PM

  > 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

  • ndiddy

    today at 5:53 PM

    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.

    • today at 7:10 PM

    • nkozyra

      today at 6:02 PM

      Effectively it forces scrapers to become a party to the terms of service, which usually contains the "no programmatic access (other than via paid API)" or specifically prohibits automated scraping.

      • immibis2

        today at 6:58 PM

        Breaking terms of service isn't a crime, at least, although the company is legally permitted to retaliate against it, such as by banning you.

      • stymaar

        today at 6:05 PM

        How can an automated process be a party in the terms of services though?

        • nkozyra

          today at 6:13 PM

          > How can an automated process be a party in the terms of services though?

          If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.

          The person who provides that, and the subsequent automated scraping, is the party, and would be the recipient of a civil suit.

          • stymaar

            today at 6:55 PM

            > If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.

            AFAIK, there isn't an single auth scheme on earth that guarantee human intervention[1]. Anyone can set-up a robot creating new users on a whim using single-use email addresses and even phone numbers. In fact, we know that OpenAI's agent have been doing exactly that when attacking Rubygem. And all AI labs are likely doing it for scrapping social media as well.

            Who are you gonna sue then?

            [1] the closest thing is Altman iris scanning venture, but without a broad adoption it's remains functionally useless.

            • immibis2

              today at 6:59 PM

              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?"

  • today at 3:44 PM

  • rusk

    today at 5:04 PM

    It's ineptitude. Of course it is. Otherwise it would be indefensible.

    EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability

    • spuz

      today at 5:18 PM

      The decision to force you to sign in to view replies is clearly not by accident or ineptitude. It's probably not malice either - just a business decision.

      • treyd

        today at 5:34 PM

        A system that makes "business decisions" indistinguishable from malice is an interesting one.

      • butlike

        today at 5:34 PM

        So business decisions are absolved of morality?

        • drewbeck

          today at 5:41 PM

          No. “Malice” isn’t the only possible descriptor with moral weight. There’s many more ways this decision could be immoral without malice.

      • today at 5:22 PM

• runjake

  today at 5:21 PM

  These browser extensions still work:

  For Chrome: https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek

  For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire...

  For Safari: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox

• timcobb

  today at 4:54 PM

  Twitter itself doesn't even suck too much for me it's the broader context that makes it a no go

  • today at 5:23 PM

  • gfdd

    today at 6:35 PM

    [dead]

• jakevoytko

  today at 6:04 PM

  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?

• WarmWash

  today at 3:08 PM

  The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

  The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.

  xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.

  Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".

  • swed420

    today at 3:12 PM

    > The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

    There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.

    > The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free

    Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.

    This vision is ripe for the picking:

    https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

    • WarmWash

      today at 3:56 PM

      >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.

      • vladgur

        today at 5:28 PM

        How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?

        Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.

        What is the alternative exactly

        • WarmWash

          today at 6:08 PM

          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.

      • pennomi

        today at 5:46 PM

        Advocating for demonetization of a service is not the same as trying to maximize personal profits. Maybe not everything in the world is about money.

        • WarmWash

          today at 6:15 PM

          No, it's about value.

          Money is just a convenient abstraction of time and energy. Basically everyone, all the time, is focused on min-maxing their time and energy (optimally is another question, hah). These are both fundamentally scarce things and likewise have intrinsic value to everyone.

          If you spend time reading an article or watching a YouTube video, it defacto has value to you, and the creator of it spent both time and energy making it. And just like that, there is a market.

      • 8note

        today at 4:58 PM

        profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel

        • WarmWash

          today at 5:04 PM

          I can't write out here how economics works, how things have value, and how humans barter time and energy using abstractions like money.

          By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.

      • butlike

        today at 5:37 PM

        Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.

        • scottyah

          today at 6:47 PM

          Scarcity is only one factor in a valuation. You can't make more of my boogers yet I doubt you'd trade any of your time or money for them haha.

      • like_any_other

        today at 5:08 PM

        You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.

        • spullara

          today at 5:24 PM

          this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.

          • like_any_other

            today at 5:51 PM

            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.

      • swed420

        today at 4:04 PM

        > A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user.

        login wall != paywall

        As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?

        Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised

        https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...

        (https://archive.is/wSmtd)

        • WarmWash

          today at 4:11 PM

          All the evidence in the world that corporations are greedy doesn't detract from the fact the end users are also greedy.

          It's all greed, all the ways down.

          I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.

          • immibis2

            today at 4:17 PM

            What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.

            • WarmWash

              today at 5:00 PM

              The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them.

              And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.

              • immibis2

                today at 6:51 PM

                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.

              • scottyah

                today at 6:56 PM

                Seems like people who try to argue that Capitalism creates greed are almost always just narcissistic looking for something to blame their greediness on.

            • cindyllm

              today at 5:09 PM

              [dead]

          • swed420

            today at 4:17 PM

            Convenient that your "principles" disallow you from seeing critique of said principles.

            • WarmWash

              today at 4:55 PM

              Funny that your critique is still capitalist...

      • lovich

        today at 5:09 PM

        I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay.

        At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.

        We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.

        The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.

        • WarmWash

          today at 5:24 PM

          Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor.

          There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates.

          There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.

          • immibis2

            today at 7:02 PM

            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.

  • thewebguyd

    today at 3:12 PM

    > The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

    Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.

    • WarmWash

      today at 3:59 PM

      Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.

      But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.

      • immibis2

        today at 7:02 PM

        Did you know that Facebook got started by scraping MySpace using people's real accounts they provided the passwords for, and Reddit got started by anonymously copying popular posts from Slashdot and Digg? Were these correct actions?

      • thewebguyd

        today at 4:04 PM

        None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.

        • WarmWash

          today at 4:13 PM

          You can rest assured, 100%, that account walls are also there for money.

          I'd be tickled if you argue that corporations create friction for any other reason than money.

        • bigfishrunning

          today at 4:59 PM

          The login wall provides one more avenue for profit: selling the data of logged-in users. A profile with a history of likes, read-times, etc is more valuable then a pair of eyeballs that are glazed-over and not clicking on an ad...

          • butlike

            today at 5:52 PM

            Is it that much more valuable to click on an ad than see it? I mean, network television operated on ads you can't click on for decades and made billion-dollar empires.

        • arjie

          today at 4:09 PM

          True, and Britain ruled the waves with wooden warships for a long time. But if they went back to wooden warships they would not rule the waves. The world has changed. Adblock, archive.is, third party mirrors all exist today.

      • 8note

        today at 5:01 PM

        the issue is consistently network effects.

        large social media companies arent there because theyre good or that there are no competitors, its that switching cost is high.

        you should be pointing at the government to enforce interoperability standards such that logins and so on are not locked to one place.

      • kennywinker

        today at 4:48 PM

        > But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this

        Sorry, what? The internet is unwilling to create twitter clones?

        Bluesky, mastodon, pleroma, misskey, diaspora, threads, fucking truth social… there is no shortage of twitter alternatives.

        • WarmWash

          today at 5:36 PM

          None of which has more the 1-2% of twitters MAU.

          If any of those were highly profitable, they would be able to grow. But more profit for them, means less profit for users, means they are stuck fighting over crumbs from Twitter.

          • kennywinker

            today at 5:48 PM

            You've moved the goalpost.

            The internet is happy to create alternatives. Network effects mean it's VERY hard to change the default social network once it's established.

            I hate using facebook marketplace, but over the past 6-ish years everybody in my city has moved off craigslist to marketplace - so now I use marketplace because otherwise I can't sell my shit. Am I the problem?

            - also, an aside, but threads has 400 mil monthly active users, or at least facebook says that. so ~70% of twitter's audience. But threads is even more locked down than twitter, so not really a win.

            • WarmWash

              today at 6:47 PM

              >Am I the problem?

              Is the person who stays home and doesn't vote the problem?

              Network effects are strong, but trends can absolutely upend them with disruptions. This is much harder nowadays, because for each user who refuses ads or a subscription, your VC runway needs to be that much longer, or your megacorp parent (meta) needs to sustain you.

              My core point is that if the internet hates the current status quo, they need to drop their current status quo (free/no ads or bust). We're stuck in a local minimum because people absolutely refuse to even consider the idea of paying (in any form) to move out of it, and they pat themselves on the back for it.

  • afavour

    today at 3:38 PM

    > The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads

    I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.

    • fragmede

      today at 3:57 PM

      They went login only in the wake of Hi-Q vs LinkedIn, which established that scraping a login-free site is legal.

      • input_sh

        today at 5:01 PM

        Sure, it definitely didn't happen in the wake of its new owner feeling like it in one of his first major changes to the platform because of his "concerns" with bot traffic.

        Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.

  • wolrah

    today at 5:58 PM

    > 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.

  • throwaway894345

    today at 4:05 PM

    Your comment seems to implicitly assume that X has some ethical claim to the content they're monetizing, when in fact they're trying to monetize _others'_ content.

• vladgur

  today at 5:23 PM

  You want to read what service XYZ offers, but you dont want to do it within the constraints of service XYZ.

  If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.

  The market would dictate that if X content consumers found it too inconvenient to consume from X and that would result in a significant drop in demand, the X content producers would stop producing their content on X.

  I dont like many things about X -- random ads, bookmark folders being a paid feature, enshittification of the algorithm if you god forbid linger over some controversial video or content.

  But i keep coming back to it because its the best way to follow the minds of brilliant techies. The basic sign up flow that i did years ago was basically a no-op.

  I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.

  • cobbal

    today at 5:24 PM

    Twitter promised an open publishing platform with extensive API access. They're the ones who broke the (social) contract, not us.

    • nkozyra

      today at 6:03 PM

      Well if you're willing to accept that the extensive API access comes at a price, they at least somewhat fulfilled that promise.

      It's just a different kind of gate, though.

  • heavensteeth

    today at 5:48 PM

    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.

  • porkshoe

    today at 5:43 PM

    > I suspect that for most people

    Most people do not use X.

    X usage is down year over year.

    The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.

  • ImPostingOnHN

    today at 5:28 PM

    They want to consume XYZ, written by A,B,C and posted on twitter.

    Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?

    • clcaev

      today at 5:46 PM

      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.

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

• immibis2

  today at 1:25 PM

  Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.

  I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).

  • dannyw

    today at 1:42 PM

    At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.

    Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.

    As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.

    According to Wikipedia:

    > In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies

    But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?

    • tehwebguy

      today at 2:50 PM

      If the name Bright Data is ringing a bell to anyone, it’s probably because they are a (the?) primary offender running the LG TV “residential proxy” (botnet)

      • immibis2

        today at 3:57 PM

        Which, btw, was the least bad thing about those TVs. I support residential proxying as a means to liberate public data that's being held captive by people like Elon.

      • ranger_danger

        today at 4:01 PM

        And the company's previous name was, ominously... Luminati.

    • immibis2

      today at 1:50 PM

      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.

    • like_any_other

      today at 5:10 PM

      I wonder if anti-SLAPP laws could be used to shield nitter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

  • Klonoar

    today at 2:42 PM

    Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not.

    Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

    • immibis2

      today at 3:57 PM

      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.

      • brushfoot

        today at 6:57 PM

        Not true. Creating an account requires agreeing to the ToS. And if the ToS prohibit this kind of usage, then legally, it's not allowed.

        See hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn using accounts, and they were found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms.

      • Klonoar

        today at 4:35 PM

        Elon unfortunately may have a leg to stand on, because it doesn't functionally matter whether "anyone can make an account and see it". I don't believe any legal ruling to date has been fine with that distinction.

        • immibis2

          today at 5:13 PM

          Do you mean this will be the first legal ruling about this particular variation of the issue?

      • charcircuit

        today at 5:28 PM

        But if they ban the nitter operator surely you can't just bypass that ban legally by making a new X account. That there are bans and the operator has to bypass bans by pretending to be a new person I think that this makes it different.

        It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.

        • immibis2

          today at 6:55 PM

          Nor would it be illegal to report outside of the club about things people said in the club.

    • ktm5j

      today at 2:46 PM

      Yes, that's what they went on to point out.

    • CamperBob2

      today at 4:47 PM

      To fix this:

      1) Nitter offers a deal: download our browser extension, sign up for Twitter, and we'll give you some kind of perk (Amazon credits, whatever).

      2) Browser extension surfs Twitter on the user's behalf, scraping and sending copies to Nitter.

      3) We find out how serious the legal system is about prosecuting scraping.

      • bigfishrunning

        today at 5:00 PM

        The whole point is not signing up for twitter. If signing up for twitter wasn't a problem, Nitter wouldn't exist in the first place.

        • CamperBob2

          today at 5:45 PM

          But the fact remains, people continue to sign up for Twitter. As long as that's the case, Nitter should probably try to take advantage of it.

    • ranger_danger

      today at 4:03 PM

      Aurora Store does the same thing to facilitate downloading Play Store apps.

  • sifar

    today at 5:20 PM

    I like this framing, like Schrödinger's cat.

• rich_sasha

  today at 1:12 PM

  I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.

  Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.

  • brainwad

    today at 1:18 PM

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

    • Planktonne

      today at 1:31 PM

      > Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

      It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.

      I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.

      • brainwad

        today at 1:39 PM

        I think that's more true in image generation than in text? At least, all the money is in LLMs that write code, not LLMs that write O'Reilley-style coding books.

        • wongarsu

          today at 2:56 PM

          If you have a websites that offers guides, how-tos or tutorials, LLMs directly compete with you. StackOverflow would also have a really good case

          After all LLMs don't just code, they also answer questions and give step-by-step instructions. In terms of total userbase those features are used a lot more than writing code

        • _flux

          today at 2:08 PM

          I thought LLM-authored books were rampant in Amazon, though?

    • nixpulvis

      today at 1:50 PM

      I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...

      • bayindirh

        today at 1:54 PM

        Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:

        Who has the gold makes the rules.

        • atemerev

          today at 2:03 PM

          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.

          • lovich

            today at 5:14 PM

            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.

          • bio_hacker

            today at 2:56 PM

            That’s how works everywhere

            • seanw444

              today at 6:33 PM

              You're downvoted, but it's true. Some places just mask it with fancy processes and manners a bit better.

      • bluefirebrand

        today at 1:55 PM

        No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days

        If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

        • MentalM

          today at 5:47 PM

          > weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

          But it is not the AI who is killing it, users are doing it.

        • brainwad

          today at 2:00 PM

          There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.

          • wongarsu

            today at 2:58 PM

            If LLMs only made SO redundant by writing code and solving my technical problems autonomously so I never have to think about it, I would agree. But often I do ask LLMs technical questions, and they answer in great detail. And that part is a very direct SO competitor

          • darkwater

            today at 2:12 PM

            And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.

            • brainwad

              today at 2:15 PM

              It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...

              • darkwater

                today at 2:21 PM

                > Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...

                Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use. Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.

                • brainwad

                  today at 2:23 PM

                  Well, adblockers don't copy the copyrighted content. They just control how it's rendered on the user's machine. Copyright cares about making copies and especially distributing them.

                  • butlike

                    today at 6:06 PM

                    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?

                  • darkwater

                    today at 3:13 PM

                    You have a point on this, I recognize, but it still seems a very thin line to walk (for X) - at least morally, because I don't think they are actually loosing real big money to anyone.

                  • 8note

                    today at 5:02 PM

                    X doesnt own msot of those copyrights, except where its elon musk's own posts.

                    i dont think the actual copyright owners care, given they put their content onto a vaguely public view where they aim to get the most traffic to something else they are doing

          • immibis2

            today at 4:19 PM

            If two things are competing, they are in the same market by definition.

          • bluefirebrand

            today at 2:54 PM

            I don't really buy this.

            It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better

            Of course they complete.

            Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.

            Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing

            Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?

            • brainwad

              today at 3:07 PM

              It's not illegal to write a similar book or song to an existing one. Copyright only protects existing works from literal copying (possibly in part).

              • immibis2

                today at 4:23 PM

                And derivative works, like AI makes

    • bonsai_spool

      today at 1:25 PM

      > Precedent is pretty clear:

      What cases are you citing when you say this?

      • brainwad

        today at 1:33 PM

        Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.

        • lesuorac

          today at 2:12 PM

          Bartz is an author though.

          Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.

          • brainwad

            today at 2:18 PM

            They can just round up some friendly users and sue under their names. Starting with their own corporate accounts?

            • lesuorac

              today at 4:43 PM

              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.

              [1]: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/creator-revenue-sharing

              [2]: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/original-content-rewards

            • bonsai_spool

              today at 3:42 PM

              These statements would suggest that the precedent is not, in fact, clear

        • today at 1:41 PM

      • immibis2

        today at 1:26 PM

        Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....

    • kelvinjps10

      today at 5:37 PM

      but xcancel is not putting ads or making a commercial product

    • ratelimitsteve

      today at 3:11 PM

      How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)

      • bonsai_spool

        today at 3:47 PM

        > How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe

        Recipes can’t be copyrighted

        Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...

        • ratelimitsteve

          today at 3:59 PM

          fair, but recipes aren't the only thing where AI summaries at the top of search results are simultaneously transformative and competitive. Any information that is scraped from a website and then summarized by AI in a way that prevents that website from getting views is both transformative and competitive.

  • embedding-shape

    today at 1:17 PM

    Transformation.

    Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.

    Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company

    • bluefirebrand

      today at 1:57 PM

      So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?

      Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.

      • brainwad

        today at 2:04 PM

        That's exactly the way UK courts are heading, see Getty vs Stability AI. The court ruled that there's no infringment because the model doesn't store exact copies, just derived weights, and therefore when it generates new images those aren't copies of protected works.

        • bluefirebrand

          today at 2:58 PM

          That's stupid, these courts are stupid

          It should have nothing to do with storing copies it should have to do with what the models can produce. And it's clear they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.

          That shouldn't satisfy anyone.

          • scottyah

            today at 7:03 PM

            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?

          • immibis2

            today at 4:24 PM

            > they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.

            In other words... they can't. A different one can but this one can't. The court is not stupid, and will consider this fact.

            • butlike

              today at 6:09 PM

              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.

          • today at 3:01 PM

      • dismalaf

        today at 2:30 PM

        The point is that you can't steal someone else's content 1:1. But you can use it for a different use (say, display the tweet in an article, then comment on it).

  • htrp

    today at 1:53 PM

    except a bunch of paywalled stuff did end up in training corpora

• Quitschquat

  today at 5:05 PM

  Thin skins over at there at X

• dismalaf

  today at 2:06 PM

  Pretty sure it's legal when you do it for your own use (same as browsing a website) but it's illegal to redistribute web scraped results.

  • burnte

    today at 2:26 PM

    It's not that cut and dry or else search engines wouldn't be legal. It depends on how much is used, for what context, etc. This very well may wind up being fair use.

    • dismalaf

      today at 2:28 PM

      Search engines "modify" it ie. show snippets + direct to the actual site.

      In general fair use pretty much always requires it to be transformative and/or point to the source. Simply scraping it to prevent people from going to X isn't free use in any definition I've heard.

      • gosub100

        today at 2:46 PM

        Remember ~10 years ago when Google had "cached" versions of the websites? I believe they removed that feature for this reason.

• gosub100

  today at 3:03 PM

  Now I want to know, what happens if you redistribute an "AI summary" of the copyright material?

• blitzar

  today at 12:45 PM

  Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.

  • HumblyTossed

    today at 12:59 PM

    Aaron Swartz died so that "AI" billionaires can live.

    • rougehuh

      today at 1:25 PM

      [flagged]

      • seenitlol

        today at 1:26 PM

        Someone should add a hitman to the corner of the image

• znpy

  today at 1:55 PM

  scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.

  if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.

  sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.

  • immibis2

    today at 4:24 PM

    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.

• wahnfrieden

  today at 12:35 PM

  It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping

  Edit: not a moral stance

  • jm4

    today at 12:46 PM

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

    • embedding-shape

      today at 1:05 PM

      > Why do we put up with it?

      You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.

      • flaburgan

        today at 2:06 PM

        I actually do want to do something. I started to scrape Twitter to make it freely available. The web should stay open.

        • immibis2

          today at 4:28 PM

          I am also doing something, by hosting one of the public instances of Nitter.

          Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?

    • simianparrot

      today at 1:07 PM

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

      • conception

        today at 1:11 PM

        Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.

        • 27183

          today at 1:24 PM

          Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.

          So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run

            mtr xcancel.com
          

          I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?

          • immibis2

            today at 1:27 PM

            No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.

            Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.

            • 27183

              today at 1:33 PM

              I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.

              • immibis2

                today at 1:46 PM

                It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.

                Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.

                If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.

                • rimunroe

                  today at 1:54 PM

                  And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.

                  • immibis2

                    today at 6:54 PM

                    You don't want fully-specified rules because a rule with strict boundaries has loopholes. You actually want a clearly allowed area, a clearly disallowed area, and a gradually increasing gradient of punishment in between, so that a small change in behaviour produces only a small change in punishment, and avoiding punishment requires a large change in behaviour.

              • rimunroe

                today at 1:45 PM

                Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.

                • sekh60

                  today at 2:18 PM

                  I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.

                  • rimunroe

                    today at 3:29 PM

                    It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.

                    The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.

                    • sekh60

                      today at 4:18 PM

                      Oh yeah, I understood your point, but given MDY Industries, LLC v .Blizzard who knows what the "right" judge would rule? With IP laws these days we're really getting into weird places.

                      • rimunroe

                        today at 6:11 PM

                        Yeah I gotchu. I have no idea how that would go in a court for real. I was just trying to explain how and why things are the way they (sometimes) are

                • 27183

                  today at 1:57 PM

                  > Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?

                  Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.

                  Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).

                  So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.

                  • amiga386

                    today at 2:40 PM

                    It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.

                    You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)

                    Classic essay about techies not understanding the law: What Colour Are Your Bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

                  • rimunroe

                    today at 2:00 PM

                    > Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.

                    Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.

                    • card_zero

                      today at 2:55 PM

                      There's the matter of linking to copyrighted works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...

                      If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.

                      Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.

                      • rimunroe

                        today at 3:20 PM

                        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.

      • bakies

        today at 1:15 PM

        i just screenshotted this comment without your consent

      • embedding-shape

        today at 1:18 PM

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

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

      • roosterIllusi0n

        today at 1:20 PM

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

        • akerl_

          today at 3:21 PM

          Are they distilling?

          Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.

          • immibis2

            today at 4:31 PM

            That's not what distilling is either. Distilling is training your AI to exactly copy someone else's AI.

        • bluecalm

          today at 6:41 PM

          Because LLM's output is not copyrightable?

        • wahnfrieden

          today at 2:24 PM

          No it’s not

      • ranger_danger

        today at 4:13 PM

        How do you know data is copied to their servers?

        > If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.

        https://www.copyright.gov/512/

        https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-c...

  • zqwt3k

    today at 12:37 PM

    That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.

  • HumblyTossed

    today at 1:00 PM

    There's a button on X that allows me to repost someone else's content.

    • bel8

      today at 1:09 PM

      there's a setting to disable that

    • wahnfrieden

      today at 1:09 PM

      That’s not rehosting

      Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting

  • echelon

    today at 12:42 PM

    Grok can do that if you give it an HN thread or other websites.

https://xxcancel.com is up and redirecting to working Nitter instances.

• philip-b

  today at 6:12 PM

  Is there a way to make Firefox autoredirect to that?

  • pelzatessa

    today at 6:46 PM

    Libredirect does exactly that: https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

  • tommica

    today at 6:14 PM

    Probably with some userscript?

Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

• Leonard_of_Q

  today at 12:47 PM

  On that same page:

  UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

  • petcat

    today at 1:00 PM

    > Following legal advice

    It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but the software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

    Those people should seek their own legal advice.

    • rany_

      today at 6:24 PM

      > Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

      Meanwhile it's OK for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to hack companies all willy-nilly. Mad world!

    • advisedwang

      today at 4:54 PM

      In cases like these, companies often try to go after the upstream project, not just operators. The law gives them lots of tools for this: the CFAA has a conspiracy provision; The DMCA has a provision against making software for circumventing copyright; Trademark law might make the name nitter or xcancel illegal; and finally even if the claims are weak the litigation itself is an enormous burden

    • graemep

      today at 1:05 PM

      I imagine it will be hosted in jurisdictions other than the US.

  • angoragoats

    today at 1:00 PM

    The repo being archived happened after that UPDATE post that you mention. So the project has gone from suspended, to un-suspended, and now it's suspended again (and the repo got archived this time).

    Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].

    [0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

    [1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...

• zImPatrick

  today at 12:30 PM

  Zedeus said "it's hopefully temporary, but it'll remain that way until further notice." in the matrix room

• latexr

  today at 12:29 PM

  > permanently archived

  Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.

• ranger_danger

  today at 4:11 PM

  Development still continues by others: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter

I have been suspended from Ex-Twitter for months for "inauthentic behavior" despite only ever just using the site normally. I would very much like to have nothing to do with this site anymore, but unfortunately many people and organizations from before Elon took it over still post there and I can't make them all move to another site (and the same site for that matter), so here we are.

• ralfd

  today at 3:19 PM

  Come on, be honest, what did you do?

  • captainbadass33

    today at 5:19 PM

    dared to use twitter with only an anonymous email is my guess. musk demands you phone and biometrics

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.

[1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox

• xyst

  today at 5:32 PM

  With alternatives available:

  - bluesky - mastodon

  Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?

  • Anonyneko

    today at 5:46 PM

    Inertia, friend groups, and also a lot of countries other than the US that have no idea about US politics or don't care enough about it.

• Forgeties79

  today at 12:45 PM

  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)

  • larsmaxfield

    today at 3:01 PM

    Unfortunately not a luxury for all events.

    Some organizations only post information on Twitter, especially those with limited resources. And if their followers are themselves limited in number, then that information is not disseminated.

    For example, the Dutch Air Force is currently posting updates on their ongoing airborne exercise exclusively on Twitter: https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/f/falcon-leap

    • immibis2

      today at 4:33 PM

      Do you need updates about the Dutch Air Force's ongoing airborne exercise or can you just ignore that exercise? If they weren't posting it on Twitter but were only performing it for a live audience, would you clamor to be part of that audience? Or are you only interested because of the fact it's on Twitter?

      • larsmaxfield

        today at 6:07 PM

        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.

  • BizarreByte

    today at 1:13 PM

    Who uses twitter for current events? I’m there for extremely niche hobby related posts.

    • tommica

      today at 6:15 PM

      Curious, what is the hobby?

  • stingraycharles

    today at 12:57 PM

    Yeah as long as the audience is there, people will keep posting on Twitter.

  • rolymath

    today at 1:09 PM

    I mean, you clearly don't use Twitter if you think that's how it's used.

    • PxldLtd

      today at 1:15 PM

      I don't use twitter but it feels like a platform for bothering terminally-online celebrities

If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X.

On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.

• sureglymop

  today at 10:35 AM

  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.

  • asdff

    today at 5:39 PM

    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.

  • LightBug1

    today at 2:17 PM

    Well, I stopped using Shitter first. Then I stopped using xCancel as a conduit for Shitter. Never happier.

    IF those public institutions want to to connect with all their constituents, then move to a better platform. Not the other way around.

  • simondotau

    today at 10:39 AM

    Maybe if people didn't make services like XCancel, the impracticality of X would be more salient.

    • mitxela

      today at 10:43 AM

      It isn't. We know this because there was a time before xcancel and people just accepted they needed an account.

      It can happen - nobody would post an Instagram link to HN. But for X it did not happen.

      Notice the EU's Digital Markets Act is a liability shield for Nitter instances hosted in the EU.

      • nativeit

        today at 1:39 PM

        That assumes the people who need XCancel most are aware of its existence, but from what I can tell only folks like us are.

      • roryirvine

        today at 11:59 AM

        [dead]

• sunaurus

  today at 10:21 AM

  For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.

  • mitxela

    today at 10:44 AM

    Get the Libredirect extension and this will happen automatically (to a server that is actually working).

  • LightBug1

    today at 10:31 AM

    I used to be you. Now I just dismiss the tweet.

    Shitter is now irrelevant for me. If you want my engagement or attention or response or to keep up with you, move to a better platform.

    I used to care enough to keep up with Shitter on xcancel. Now it's just faded into irrelevance. YMMV, particularly over time

    Shitter isn't the gospel of human experience and creativity and expression. It's just ... Shitter.

• Kotlopou

  today at 10:20 AM

  It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.

  • simondotau

    today at 10:33 AM

    I think Wikipedia has become a cancerous blight on world politics, and I would love to see Wikipedia die so that a Mastodon-like distributed alternative could rise from the ashes.

    But I still use Wikipedia.

    • smaudet

      today at 10:39 AM

      And yet, wikipedia is not owned by an evil (incompetent?) oligarch who made his mission to make the platform as shitty as possible...

      That's what Grok as for.

      Apples and Oranges...

      • simondotau

        today at 10:48 AM

        > And yet, wikipedia is not owned by...

        That is a red herring. A corporation can act ethically. A charity can act disgracefully.

        A government can protect people. A neighbourhood association can bully them.

        A billionare can be philanthropic. A group of children can terrorise a community.

• mitxela

  today at 10:24 AM

  Suppose you're on HN and someone posts a link to X. Is the correct reaction

  1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.

  • madeofpalk

    today at 10:30 AM

    You can knowledge it's there, and just not read it. There's lots of links on the internet that I don't click.

    I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.

    • mitxela

      today at 10:47 AM

      What if the post is like "we discovered AGI (for real this time, not clickbait)" - will you pretend AGI wasn't discovered?

      • madeofpalk

        today at 5:26 PM

        If it's important enough, it'll be elsewhere.

      • addandsubtract

        today at 11:07 AM

        That would A) still be clickbait, and B) be posted on a corporate blog, not just X.

      • fWEFVEEGLKJH

        today at 11:10 AM

        > (for real this time, not clickbait)

        That sounds likes something a clickbait author would write.

  • simondotau

    today at 10:31 AM

    4. Click the link

    5. Accept that you won't click on the link

    • vrganj

      today at 10:37 AM

      Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.

      • frumplestlatz

        today at 11:55 AM

        Given its extremely liberal content moderation policy, how is X a propaganda machine?

        • nickthegreek

          today at 4:33 PM

          algo is what can make or break a propaganda machine.

        • vrganj

          today at 1:34 PM

          Here's a pretty in-depth investigation into the workings of X as far-right propaganda machine: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...

          > right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.

          > Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.

          > The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.

          > Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.

          • frumplestlatz

            today at 4:18 PM

            So journalists ran a study with extremely poor sampling, base rate, and classification methodology designed by left-wing researchers and activists groups (including groups explicitly opposed to X), found the conclusions they wanted to find, and spent the second half of their article decrying the lack of heavy-handed moderation that pre-Musk Twitter used to control speech.

            All we can actually derive from that article is that X’s new user recommendation system exposed a small number of near-default, low-feedback, synthetic accounts to more content that left-wing “misinformation” researchers classified as “right-wing”.

            • monocasa

              today at 5:00 PM

              Musk also uses plenty of heavy handed moderation; it's just almost all directed at the left. For instance: https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethinc-...

              • frumplestlatz

                today at 5:06 PM

                They were banned for literally advocating for political violence. The fact that they hadn’t been banned earlier is the only concerning fact here.

                The current top article on their website argues for punching their political opponents in the streets.

                • monocasa

                  today at 5:40 PM

                  And yet right wingers openly calling for the west to ethnically cleanse the non white races get reinstated.

                  https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...

                  And simply criticizing Musk is enough to get a shadow ban

                  https://futurism.com/twitter-shadow-ban-elon-musk

                  • frumplestlatz

                    today at 5:45 PM

                    Andrew Anglin, the subject of the first article, was re-banned in 2023 for the same reason that crimethink, inc was banned.

                    The subjects of the second article are particularly odious right-wing conspiracy theorists and racists that lost their reach, which they believe was connected to arguing with Elon.

                    That seems like an action you’d be in favor of, and also it counters the propaganda claim — but regardless, their claim that they were shadow-banned, that the cause was direct intercession by Elon, and that the motivation was their merely disagreeing with him, is unsupported by any evidence.

                    • monocasa

                      today at 5:54 PM

                      He had already been banned for the same reason, and Musk unbanned him in the same wave that had him ban crimethinc.

            • vrganj

              today at 5:10 PM

              I'm not sure where you got any of that from. Where are you reading anything about the researchers working for Sky News, a Comcast subsidiary (!) being "left wing"? What are you basing your criticism of sampling and classification on?

              I provided a study that literally won the Royal Statistical Societies' "Statistical Excellence in Journalism" award [0]. You provided unfounded dismissal and conspiracy. The burden of proof is on your side.

              [0] https://rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2026/g...

              • frumplestlatz

                today at 5:13 PM

                [dead]

      • simondotau

        today at 10:40 AM

        Yes, and? I can't bend reality to make it otherwise.

        • vrganj

          today at 11:04 AM

          XCancel can.

          • simondotau

            today at 11:12 AM

            "XCancel Taken Down Again" is the title of this thread.

            • vrganj

              today at 11:16 AM

              Indeed. But they've been doing good work and fighting is better than just giving in to apathy and losing by default.

  • zem

    today at 5:02 PM

    at the very least whoever posts the link has presumably accessed it, so we should normalise pasting the full text in here

  • amelius

    today at 10:40 AM

    I wish HN would simply ban links to X.

    • browningstreet

      today at 4:43 PM

      If you think that's remotely viable, you'll be very surprised what most of the YC partners believe and post about on X.

    • mitxela

      today at 10:47 AM

      HN is a venture capital fund. That will happen if and only if it becomes profitable to do so.

      • simondotau

        today at 10:55 AM

        If you want to make the rules, start your own club.

        • captainbadass33

          today at 5:22 PM

          [flagged]

  • today at 10:29 AM

• dandellion

  today at 10:24 AM

  I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).

  • slowmovintarget

    today at 1:37 PM

    Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.

    If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.

  • LightBug1

    today at 10:45 AM

    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.

• pibaker

  today at 10:31 AM

  I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.

  • smaudet

    today at 10:34 AM

    Like it or not network effects can be overcome, but not with this sort of prisoner's dilemma thinking.

    Everyone using something was never a (good) reason to use it.

• phyzome

  today at 5:28 PM

  Today, for me, the reason was because I wanted to pull up a years-old tweet that had a video of a local road flooding.

• Leonard_of_Q

  today at 10:22 AM

  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.

• johannes1234321

  today at 11:09 AM

  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.

• m3kw9

  today at 6:07 PM

  Yeah i don't get it, using xcancel is like "that'll show ya" in a weak manner. You are seeing the same tweet.

• somedude895

  today at 10:19 AM

  Exactly. If you boycott X, shouldn't you also boycott the people who are on X? But this kind of slacktivism has always been more virtue signaling than anything.

  • azan_

    today at 10:21 AM

    I don’t want to crate account there because I’ll get into endless useless discussions. And you can’t use this website without an account.

    • pickleRick243

      today at 10:32 AM

      why is that? Why can't you just use it in read only fashion?

      • fabian2k

        today at 10:36 AM

        No idea how it looks right now, but at some point Twitter started to block reading replies without an account. And sometimes it blocked even more, so you could not follow links to read.

      • frogulis

        today at 10:39 AM

        I think this changed recently, but at least prior to that, when not logged in, you only saw the initial post and none of the replies.

      • today at 10:46 AM

  • MPSimmons

    today at 10:24 AM

    It seems intellectually dishonest to blanket-label any principled stance that you disagree with as "virtue signaling".

    • pickleRick243

      today at 10:34 AM

      I think the claim is that the principled stance would be to ignore all X content.

      • ceejayoz

        today at 10:37 AM

        Which is just the "yet you participate in society" meme again.

        • bbg2401

          today at 4:32 PM

          No, it's not. Don't be so intellectually lazy.

          The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.

          How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).

          I admit I'm not nor have been a Twitter/X user so am able to look at the situation without a sense of entitlement or attachment.

          • ceejayoz

            today at 5:44 PM

            > The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.

            Yes. Because we have to participate in a society in which sometimes, that's where the info is. Some towns only post their announcements on Facebook/X! Some people prominent on my framework of choice are only on X.

            > How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).

            Virtue isn't a binary. I can reduce my externalities, even if I can't eliminate them.

  • cudder

    today at 11:05 AM

    Not really, unfortunately. If it were just a bunch of bros laughing at fascist memes amongst themselves I would happily boycott everything, but unfortunately a lot of "public" service announcements and discourse also happens on 卐itter. Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements, city council decisions, public transport notices, official statements by MEPs/local politicians/companies, etc. Not to mention a certain demented orange geriatric who happens to control nukes and posts his daily threats and declarations of war there.

    These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.

    • asdff

      today at 5:41 PM

      >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.

• vrganj

  today at 10:33 AM

  Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?

  And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?

  • simondotau

    today at 10:43 AM

    > Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact

    We don't. We let six or seven far right billionares do that.

    > And regarding copyright

    Copyright of tweets are owned by original authors. Unless you have permission, the copyright infringement which occurs is against the individual, not X.

• xyst

  today at 5:36 PM

  I don’t use Twitter but assholes continue to reference posts on this cancerous site. That’s why this service exists lil bro

Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?

• swed420

  today at 12:44 PM

  > users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content

  They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.

  Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.

  • asveikau

    today at 5:14 PM

    > 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.

  • abletonlive

    today at 6:17 PM

    HN and Reddit are much more of an echo chamber than X is.

  • today at 2:45 PM

• arjie

  today at 4:12 PM

  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.

• pluc

  today at 12:25 PM

  Reddit says hello

  • RKearney

    today at 5:27 PM

    Didn't Reddit ban open access to their APIs and kill third party viewers/apps as well by charging outrageous amounts for continued API access?

  • forestingfisher

    today at 1:17 PM

    And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.

    • vova_hn2

      today at 2:52 PM

      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.

      • pred_

        today at 4:13 PM

        FWIW, Old Reddit Redirect manages to somehow still be usable without a user.

        • jwilk

          today at 4:41 PM

          They do this by setting cookie "redesign_optout=true" for www.reddit.com (and then using that domain).

        • immibis2

          today at 4:31 PM

          You're being A/B tested.

      • boston_clone

        today at 3:09 PM

        Perhaps more frustratingly, if you bite the bullet and browse the "new" version on your mobile browser, the page will eventually become non-responsive and have ~60% of your screen covered by a bottom banner that prompts you to download their app to continue. It's like they are actively trying to kill their userbase.

        • immibis2

          today at 4:32 PM

          Like most big tech companies now, they are actively trying to kill their non-contributing userbase, where contributing means viewing an ad for every second post. They know that perhaps 5% of the non-contributing userbase they kill will become contributing userbase, while the other 95% will just leave, and this trade seems good to them.

        • saratogacx

          today at 4:53 PM

          On mobile, uBO has been able to get around the "use our app" block. It took a week or two for the filters to get updated but now it is a non-issue. Tested in Firefox and Vivaldi on Android.

    • immibis2

      today at 1:29 PM

      And demanding ID!

• JsonDemWitOster

  today at 1:31 PM

  Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?

  Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.

• tencentshill

  today at 2:15 PM

  Do they not understand you can still serve ads to non-logged-in users? They can still be tracked nearly as effectively with fingerprinting.

  • frankacter

    today at 2:52 PM

    I assume the limit is related to 3rd party AI scraping training.

• pwg

  today at 2:57 PM

  > 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.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

• xyst

  today at 5:35 PM

  As if the new owners of twitter give a shit about its sustainability.

  It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.

  It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires

• Waterluvian

  today at 12:31 PM

  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."

I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point when it doesn't serve the public interest or the interest of customers who deserve at least some choice. It's as unreasonable for them as using Instagram or a dating app for something intended for broad reach and accessibility.

I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.

• mitxela

  today at 10:50 AM

  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)

• trekz

  today at 11:07 AM

  > I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point

  Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?

  [1] https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-ope...

• cebert

  today at 10:50 AM

  You go where your people are. I think it’s very reasonable to post updates on Facebook and X.

• Freedumbs

  today at 11:10 AM

  I extend this to people. I understand old habits and what not, but I'm surprised at the culture on social media. Twitter is literally orthodox white supremacy or however they brand it. Quite odd, but not considering current politics. We've decided to devolve.

• thrance

  today at 11:17 AM

  > 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.

> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website

*if you log in to an account

A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.

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

• macNchz

  today at 12:27 PM

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

  • weberer

    today at 1:11 PM

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

    • girvo

      today at 1:20 PM

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

    • Catloafdev

      today at 3:28 PM

      No, it definitely was not as bad 10 years ago as it is today. Just objectively not true at all.

    • criley2

      today at 1:17 PM

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

      • immibis2

        today at 1:31 PM

        And remember, Elon only granted that so he wouldn't be (rightfully) banned from Google. At first you couldn't view anything, then Google delisted X because it only indexes public pages, then Elon conceded you can view the direct thing you linked to, and then Google relisted it.

    • asimovDev

      today at 2:46 PM

      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)

• Zambyte

  today at 12:41 PM

  The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.

• uurrnn

  today at 12:24 PM

  So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.

  • IshKebab

    today at 1:03 PM

    It did that long before Elon took over. He's made it worse, sure. But it was never really usable at any point.

• immibis2

  today at 1:30 PM

  The reasons it's unusable are precisely the reasons they don't want you using anything else. Direct control over your eyeballs. They decide where the ads go on the page, they decide what comes next in your feed, they track everywhere you look or move the mouse. Anything that circumvents this is a business risk to them.

• CM30

  today at 1:18 PM

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

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

• figmert

  today at 12:56 PM

  I don't know why but to me the worse bit of it is the giant emoji finger that keeps trying to click the sign up button.

  • RobotToaster

    today at 1:11 PM

    You normally only see that crap on Chinese apps like Temu.

• thn-gap

  today at 3:13 PM

  Is it? I've only ever used X on my phone through Brave. But always logged in, though.

• downrightmike

  today at 4:57 PM

  They fired that guy years ago, so no one knows how to decom it without breaking everything

  • viccis

    today at 5:04 PM

    They managed to get pretty close to decomming it which is that it's now impossible to sign up on desktop without an account that requires a phone number tied to it.

• TiredOfLife

  today at 3:01 PM

  What other versions of twitter there are? I use it on both pc and mobile in browser with adblock and the experience is the same as 20 years ago. If anything the "for you" feed has become actually usable in last couple of years.

• rob74

  today at 12:24 PM

  So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...

  • freedomben

    today at 12:58 PM

    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.

Free speech absolutist, btw.

• arrowsmith

  today at 12:44 PM

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

  • zahlman

    today at 1:11 PM

    Can someone please explain to me any actual guidelines-based reason for the parent comment to have been flagged and killed (I vouched for it)?

    • immibis2

      today at 1:33 PM

      The reason is likely not guidelines-based.

  • Forgeties79

    today at 12:47 PM

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

    • immibis2

      today at 1:33 PM

      Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.

      • Forgeties79

        today at 5:13 PM

        Sure but my point is the Twitter experience is trash and not required like, say, paying an evil ISP or interacting with Google (for 99.9% of people abandoning and fully dodging Google is incredibly difficult). It’s working out for him because people won’t leave (even though engagement and user numbers are still below pre-acquisition numbers). It only has value because of his acquiring it with his other company. Prior its value was tanked. It’s a crap site that isn’t profitable and serves as a mouthpiece for his politics and whims.

        You can all walk away. You don’t need it.

    • freedomben

      today at 12:56 PM

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

      Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.

      • Operyl

        today at 1:04 PM

        The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.

        • Forgeties79

          today at 5:55 PM

          Many municipalities have text message alerts these days. I doubt it’s 100% coverage but I bet most of us can live with that or currently do.

      • bakies

        today at 1:18 PM

        right, it's not free, like you said

      • angoragoats

        today at 12:58 PM

        The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.

        The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.

        • freedomben

          today at 5:31 PM

          Indeed, fair point. I've conflated those in my comment above!

      • InsideOutSanta

        today at 1:34 PM

        Elon Musk, gratis speech absolutist.

  • angoragoats

    today at 12:51 PM

    Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.

    • throwatdem12311

      today at 1:03 PM

      That’s not what free speech is.

      • angoragoats

        today at 1:08 PM

        Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.

        • weberer

          today at 1:26 PM

          "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.

          • basilikum

            today at 5:59 PM

            Twitter heavily censors speech on the platform itself by downranking things they do not like without any transparency.

          • immibis2

            today at 1:34 PM

            Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.

          • angoragoats

            today at 5:34 PM

            > "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.

        • throwatdem12311

          today at 2:57 PM

          Free Speech isn’t about who is listening, it’s about who is speaking. Just because you can’t hear it doesn’t necessarily mean the person did not speak freely.

        • zahlman

          today at 1:17 PM

          > Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.

          Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.

          • p-o

            today at 1:25 PM

            Nobody is arguing about the legal boundary of Freedom of speech, you're the only one making this argument.

            We're talking about the quolloquial "free speech", here.

            • weberer

              today at 1:28 PM

              Could you give your colloquial definition, because its clearly different than mine.

  • HumblyTossed

    today at 1:04 PM

    [flagged]

    • angoragoats

      today at 1:19 PM

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

      • applfanboysbgon

        today at 2:07 PM

        You are the only one who brought up that distraction from the fact that he routinely violates the first definition you mentioned.

        • angoragoats

          today at 6:15 PM

          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!

• immibis2

  today at 1:32 PM

  "Nothing can shut down open source" - Elon Musk, LITERALLY TODAY: https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523

  He speaks out both sides of his mouth.

• mbmbn

  today at 12:46 PM

  Can you point the way where Free Speech is being countered here?

XCancel service is suspended.

Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.

You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:

Continue to X

Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.

• Lord-Jobo

  today at 5:37 PM

  Classic “we must show good faith and good will before the judicial system by keeping our stuff offline, until proceedings are complete”

  “Does the other side need to show any good faith?”

  “No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”

  “….great”

The fact that so many large companies are still on X is so wrong.

• embedding-shape

  today at 10:10 AM

  Yeah, or local governments, or governments in general, seems strange to me too. But then probably they'd use Facebook/Instagram/Whatever instead of Twitter if Twitter wasn't available, and seemingly it's impossible for them to use something that isn't built like a panopticon that also wants to slurp up as much data from their users as possible.

  • pibaker

    today at 10:34 AM

    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.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette

• melodyogonna

  today at 10:19 AM

  Why?

• frumplestlatz

  today at 10:21 AM

  Why is it “so wrong” to meet your audience where they are?

  • harrisoned

    today at 10:51 AM

    The same reason is wrong to require a Google or Apple phone to exercise basic civil duties within government services. You are gating the service, or information, behind a 3rd party ToS, a login, and basically stating that you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data to such companies.

    • frumplestlatz

      today at 11:51 AM

      The comment I replied to said "large companies", not government, and I don't see the equivalence.

    • maipen

      today at 4:45 PM

      Why is it wrong? Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools? I don’t think so. It’s the same thing as requiring dress code to go to the tribunal or anything formal.

      People here overthink so much about this topic.

      • cferry

        today at 5:45 PM

        > Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools?

        As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.

        In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...

        Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.

        BTW: overthinking is how society moves forward :)

      • squeegmeister

        today at 5:32 PM

        Because the owner of said tool is a white nationalist

        • frumplestlatz

          today at 5:46 PM

          I think you’ve confused HN for BlueSky.

        • tempaccountabcd

          today at 6:09 PM

          [dead]

  • earth-tattoo

    today at 10:26 AM

    [flagged]

Just by googling "twitter api" I am able to find an "unofficial API" (scraped, obviously), that gives you access to tweets for around $0.15/1k tweets. Which is expensive if you want to, let's say, train a model, but super cheap for a casual user.

A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.

Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.

What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.

• wraptile

  today at 3:20 PM

  You can scrape twitter pretty easily yourself with an account (lots of free code on github) but that's the thing - you need an account which is legally complicated but for your own personal use you can just create a dummy account and you'll never be blocked.

  • vova_hn2

    today at 3:23 PM

    Don't they require a phone number? Even if they don't, they probably require email. I don't really want to give them my main email and even less - phone number. So, buying an account seems like less of a hassle, than figuring out where to get a temporary email.

    • immibis2

      today at 4:35 PM

      They make it really hard to get an account, no matter how legit you are, but if you eventually get one, you can plug it into your own private Nitter instance.

    • wraptile

      today at 3:32 PM

      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"

Proposal:

Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.

This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.

• morningsam

  today at 10:29 AM

  I've been wondering why ~everyone hasn't already been doing this, so my guess is that Twitter's API doesn't allow it.

  • abletonlive

    today at 6:19 PM

    Because mastadon is not relevant to anybody but the people on HN. It's 2026, I really can't believe HN is still stuck on mastadon.

What was the Chinese alternative ? At this point I’m just going to use that instead, lawyers won’t be able to take that down.

• Markoff

  today at 11:42 AM

  I think you mean https://twitterwebviewer.com/en which was also taken down anyway

  I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/

  or

  https://xxcancel.com

Makes sense, the legal system is pay to play.

Bluesky is here anyway.

Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.

it's going to be a cat and mouse game for as long as X can legally afford to keep it going (i.e. til the heat death of the universe)

regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon network and Bluesky existing.

whatever. i've redirected x to 0.0.0.0 when the first warning shot was fired and called it a day. rocks are looking like a great place to live under right about now anyway.

• blfr

  today at 3:05 PM

  I use Twitter daily and haven't noticed any screws. How is Elon supposedly turning them?

  • joquarky

    today at 5:59 PM

    Don't sea lion.

The MOMENT xcancel gets shut down, someone should sue the president for putting official communication on a closed platform.

• mococa

  today at 5:30 PM

  the president? I think all presidents does the same.

• xyst

  today at 5:30 PM

  Then take ownership lil bro. Any of those scumbag lawyers will be happy to take your money to do whatever you want.

I wonder if part of the lawsuit required them to link to twitter - it doesn't seem like a very on-brand thing to do.

Good:

Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login

Bad:

X requiring login

> 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!

Why would anyone use any xitter service voluntarily at this point

• user43928

  today at 10:29 AM

  The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.

  For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.

  X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.

  Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.

  I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.

  I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.

  • Freedumbs

    today at 11:15 AM

    Or get this: you could read news if that's what you're interested in.

    Social media isn't news. It's entertainment.

    • user43928

      today at 11:17 AM

      I'd be more interested in your concrete alternative recommendation on where to get the rumors/insider news about AI rather than your opinion on how I should use social media.

      • Freedumbs

        today at 11:51 AM

        If you're interested in being entertained, continue to consume. If you want to learn about science, setup a system to consume Arxiv.

    • TiredOfLife

      today at 12:07 PM

      > Social media isn't news

      What is? TV, Radio, Newspapers, Town square, are all entertainment

      • Freedumbs

        today at 2:50 PM

        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.

I wish X would allow browsing threads, which is the only reason I use xcancel.

I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.

I just don't want to have an X account.

Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.

I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.

Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.

• unfocso

  today at 12:24 PM

  There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.

  • amiga386

    today at 12:37 PM

    > 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.

    No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/

    • embedding-shape

      today at 12:54 PM

      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.

      https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...

      • forestry

        today at 3:53 PM

        I thought the US courts decided that APIs aren’t copyrightable, and the rest of it is not their content.

        • embedding-shape

          today at 4:10 PM

          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.

• immibis2

  today at 1:35 PM

  https://status.d402.de/ and many other index pages

  Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.

  • jwilk

    today at 4:48 PM

    ITYM https://status.d420.de/

    • immibis2

      today at 5:12 PM

      yes, sorry

• today at 1:04 PM

• today at 12:24 PM

wtf the guy payed what 40billion for this website?

yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .

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?

[1] https://arweave.org/

I think XCancel should use their momentum and set up their own social media network, instead of scrapping the domain.

• dismalaf

  today at 2:31 PM

  Then it'll just be another Bluesky...

  • abirch

    today at 2:47 PM

    or mastodon...

https://nitter.click still works right as rain, and so do many other Nitter instances.

What reason could there be that they can't share details?

• immibis2

  today at 4:36 PM

  You never share information about a lawsuit unless a lawyer says you can. I'm not sure why - I presume it's because it might help the other side.

• AntonyGarand

  today at 3:54 PM

  Pending legal advice I would assume

Surprised there are still people who think the issue with "X" is that it is a bad product.

It is a bad product, and it is pathological in the way all degraded social media platforms are bad.

But it's also worse than those others, in well documented ways; and it's long past time anyone with integrity found alternatives.

The failure of the "AI" industry to do so is an indictment and serious red flag.

Man the RSS feeds are busted too now :/

This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.

There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.

This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.

• forestingfisher

  today at 1:21 PM

  We used to have that, it was called a blog. I used to subscribe to all my local politicians and journalist blogs back in the late 2000s and would recieve everything I needed in my inbox, but now everyone posts on Twitter. That's where we have ActivityPub.

• throw_m239339

  today at 1:37 PM

  > There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.

  RSS.

• DaedalusII

  today at 12:23 PM

  but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?

  • jasonlotito

    today at 12:37 PM

    On the off chance someone thinks this is serious, being locked behind a login doesn't prevent your site from being scraped.

    • amiga386

      today at 12:43 PM

      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.

      https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...

      • zImPatrick

        today at 12:53 PM

        This wasn‘t recommended officially by the authors, right? I saw it on someone‘s codeberg fork but not on the official repo

        • amiga386

          today at 1:17 PM

          Sure, let's say shitter's authors: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Creating-session-...

    • immibis2

      today at 1:36 PM

      also, public broadcasts should be scraped as much as possible

Why are people still using X? I mean seriously people, move on and stop using this closed ecosystem that is propaganda around elections.

So are you, dear reader, for intellectual property laws or not. I see a lot of "anti-this" sentiment confused with "anti-AI [data collection]."

The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.

• arijun

  today at 2:46 PM

  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.

Their browser verification never made it into the same room as my browser anyway...

i just want to unmute the video and full screen it without logging in. i click twitter link and it is muted.

It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access.

It feels like an end of an era.

• swed420

  today at 1:34 PM

  Reddit is still viewable, though they did finally axe "old" reddit for those not logged in.

  But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.

  • ImJamal

    today at 1:52 PM

    New reddit was getting login popups for a while as well. From my rudimentary checks it varied from subreddit to subreddit.

every official government entity needs to get off X

every local, state and federal entity

nothing published there can be read logged out or archived

has to be violating law if not best practices

Any details about what's going on? Is Nitter/their Github still up?

Has anyone ever succeeded going up against Elon legally?

There are now about 10 different people running them, and you can also run your own. https://status.d420.de/

The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.

So X is down again. Oh well.

As a reminder - get off Twitter and get onto Mastodon (Bluesky is dead to rights). Those of you addicted to what was formerly Twitter need to move on.

Xitter can't make a web UI that's actually usable to save their lives - so they're going after the one platform that does with lawfare.

Despicable behavior.

• immibis2

  today at 1:36 PM

  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.

https://status.d420.de/

Another "victory" for the freedom of information.

Not a popular question here, but what's the difference between xcancel or archive.org, and torrents and other pirate services alike? (except twitter is user content, yet per their tos xcancel is still piracy)

• JuniperMesos

  today at 10:41 AM

  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.

• draw_down

  today at 10:26 AM

  [dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

• lapkaaaa

  today at 10:09 AM

  They don't want to make it irrevelant, it's only readonly so you can't post. Not everyone wants to create a xitter account just to find 1-2 posts

• danlitt

  today at 10:11 AM

  Because removing public content from the internet for profit is wrong and shouldn't be allowed. One man, or one company, should not be in charge of the free speech of half a billion people.

  • earth-tattoo

    today at 10:27 AM

    Ok, let's start a petition to remove the restrictions put on you to make a free public competitor. Oh wait, there are none. Nobody is stopping you!

    • danlitt

      today at 10:49 AM

      Why do you think having a free public competitor would solve the problem? Did you think about the problem at all before posting this?

• aucisson_masque

  today at 10:11 AM

  Third party client websites have existed for a long time. It’s just about freedom.

• tomlockwood

  today at 10:11 AM

  I don't want to log on to his stupid ragebait website. I hate him for entirely different reasons to the usability of a shit website. Problem?

[flagged]

• kijashdkujdfhas

  today at 1:27 PM

  > It takes away earnings from X users

  Oh no! How awful! So terrible! People who produce nothing of value might earn slightly less!

  Moving on to more pressing matters...

• yawpitch

  today at 1:07 PM

  Anything that takes money away from narcoleptic, right wing [self]-abusers of the COA^1 is a net good for humanity.

  ^1: Concept of Acronyms

There is no reason for xcancel to exist.

Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.

Or you just visit X.com.

Right? Right?

• embedding-shape

  today at 12:51 PM

  > There is no reason for xcancel to exist

  A bit like your comment.

  It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?

  • pino83

    today at 1:21 PM

    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. ;) ;) ;)

    • immibis2

      today at 1:37 PM

      One possible decision is to use a deshittifying front-end, like Nitter.

      • pino83

        today at 5:02 PM

        Are these cat and mouse games (that you are about to lose atm) maybe an indicator that something is wrong with it?

        Or should things be like that?

      • kijashdkujdfhas

        today at 2:01 PM

        It is a half-measure, though.

        It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.

        It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.

        The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.

        • natch

          today at 7:09 PM

          [delayed]

        • pino83

          today at 4:57 PM

          Not because this is also my opinion (I have a lot of opinions that people don't share, and I completely don't care, believe me!), but for deeper reasons, I'd love to understand why this is so unpopular, although it's absolutely what every sane person would do in everyday cases.

          My only explanation would be to imagine all down-voters as chain smokers when they get involved into discussions whether smoking is a good thing.

          • kijashdkujdfhas

            today at 5:38 PM

            People don't like to be reminded that they're hanging out at the Nazi Bar.

            Standing outside and looking through the Nazi Bar's window is still pretty much hanging out at the Nazi Bar. It still brings traffic and attention to their establishment.

            Sure, it's not buying drinks from the Nazis, and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly. But it's still hanging out at the Nazi Bar.

            • pino83

              today at 6:34 PM

              Yes, I like the analogy. Even if you don't agree with "Nazi", it makes the illustration quite obvious:

              There is a bar that scares you off so much that you wouldn't even go in. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. It's not just not your favorite beer, but you absolutely avoid even to enter. There must be a strong reason for that, right?

              What people are then important enough to watch through the windows? I mean, at first, you just make a fool of yourself. Just imagine the analogy. That's exactly xcancel and friends, right? And then, don't forget: These people explicitly do not share your view in a matter fundamental and important enough for you to not enter the bar.

              Are they friends? I can't imagine friendships with these differences really need that deep devotion.

              Are they politicians? Maybe there are enough media around you that already preprocess the conversations at the Nazi bar for you?

              Wider community (around your job, hobby, ...)? That's probably the most challenging one. But still, wouldn't it be definitely the goal to push them to better places? I know it's not a matter of a day or two, but why couldn't we at least agree on that goal, and then start acting in some way?

              btw: This is not specific to X or Musk imho. There are other networks out there that aren't in control of such a madman today, but they share a lot of problematic properties.

              • natch

                today at 7:00 PM

                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.

            • immibis2

              today at 6:52 PM

              > and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly

              And that's the rub. 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.

        • immibis2

          today at 6:52 PM

          It takes away the impulse to engage, hopefully, since you can't engage through Nitter, only observe.

    • zeratax

      today at 2:10 PM

      These people includes pretty much every politician. I personally do have an X account and I do use X, but I completely understand why someone would want to read what their politicians are saying without wanting to create an account anywhere

• maipen

  today at 4:53 PM

  The hatred and jealousy for Musk is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt.

  They all secretly want to use X because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.

  Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.

  • gamessucknow

    today at 4:54 PM

    The hatred and jealousy for Spez is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt. They all secretly want to use Reddit because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites. Making an Reddit account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.

• tekla

  today at 1:36 PM

  Of course not.

  Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content

  • bananaflag

    today at 1:42 PM

    The way the platform works can be shit while the content on it can be good.

• bananaflag

  today at 12:50 PM

  [flagged]

  • pino83

    today at 1:12 PM

    Well, there's X.com for that.

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.

• arijun

  today at 2:49 PM

  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.'

• protoster

  today at 1:43 PM

  I don't want to use "X", I want to read updates from orgs and people who, unfortunately, don't post them elsewhere.

• somehnguy

  today at 1:55 PM

  I don't visit his website. That's the whole point.

• sortoflog

  today at 2:50 PM

  > You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)

  Why? The site still hosts plenty of content worth seeing. Is it really so silly to do it via a better UI, or to not want an account?

• JeremyNT

  today at 1:35 PM

  My municipality, and many other governmental entities, post official updates to x.com

• Banditoz

  today at 3:42 PM

  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.