It's both funny and sad that despite several malicious actions like this, despite wasting a ton of Twitter's social capital and despite years of broken promises (e.g., dealing with bots, bringing back free speech, ending algo/report manipulation), none of the writers and artists whose work I enjoy have even attempted to move away. I mostly just read there, but presumably posters feel bound to their social network. Maybe the site really was worth $44B.
Nobody is leaving X apparently. If anything, I see people using it more now than ever before. I also see non political people using it more.
I need X for work but I don't really enjoy posting as it feels like you have to shitpost constantly to get engagement. That's not how I want to spend my energy.
Meanwhile, the non-Facebook Threads alternatives (Bluesky / Mastodon) are edgy spaces where furry, kink, and progressive DSA content reigns. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bad first experience for newcomers when content like that is worn on the sleeve, shown as the first experience, and used to exclude outsiders.
Paraphrasing, but seeing profiles that say "If you're not [8 acronyms I don't understand], go to hell" - why is that even on my feed? What is this? I don't get any of this.
I remember when I signed up the main feed was full of horny anime profiles, sex toys, and death wishes for politicians intermixed with an occasional tech post. I'm pretty sure they didn't have that tracking data on me to tailor my feed.
There's nowhere middle of the road average. (Maybe Threads is that?) The other alternatives have certainly niched down and become unattractive to the mainstream.
It's like Reddit with Voat a decade or so ago, except Voat attracted people that were banned from Reddit for typically valid reasons.
Building an all inclusive social network is hard, because it depends on who the first users are. It sets the stage for growth and limits the ultimate appeal if it over-indexes on one type of user.
I wish this was all a protocol like email, but everyone building a protocol makes it weird and exclusive and ruins the vibes before users even arrive.
Plus they all insist on federation, when P2P is the way to go. It's scalable if people use super nodes to publish and gulp down content. The problem is Mastodon and Bluesky effectively have super nodes run by people that want to exclude mainstream. You can't do that and hope to get the world on board.
Yeah, I call my friends on some platforms "my furs" but of course I have a shtick that attracts them. [1]
On Bluesky in particular you have to put some effort into having a good feed. You just can't follow the people who posted about Donald Trump 20 times a day. If you use the "more like this" and "less like this" buttons on the discover feed consistently #uspol will fall away and you will find the people who are into cat pictures, #bloomscrolling and maybe even Jacobin/Joan Williams/Catherine Liu instead of the cultural stuff.
[1] ... in real life there was that day I got off the bus as-a-fox and there was somebody waiting for me wearing an animal ear hat and holding a chicken purse
What I find even more amusing is that all the people that screech about how much they hate Elon, Trump, Conservatives etc. They also still basically only use Twitter err X.
The network effect is hard to pull away from especially when you realize nobody is listening elsewhere.
You can't underestimate the power of two-sided networks. Every day "Ask HN" people underestimate the difficulty of starting a new community platform by orders of magnitude. And no matter how you mismanage a platform it's close to impossible to kill.
Not that it matters, but my use case for Nitter and XCancel was to provide a link to accompany a screen shot when discussing a tweet on Mastodon. Now I'lll just use a screen shot, there is zero chance I will send them direct traffic of any kind.
And I still can't go over how this title looks like draft version with placeholder, published a bit too fast. How could anyone thing a single letter is good choice for an company/service name?
> How could anyone thing a single letter is good choice for an company/service name
In this case, Musk is stuck being his 12 year old self and carrying a 30 year old obsession to use this very cool naming for his "everything company", after losing that name along with him leaving PayPal. He finally got the chance.
Seeing all companies are hellbent to have all users logged in with accounts, it means they definitely integrated these accounts to some centralized database in the US or plantir aggregator to accurately track any, or basically ban them and remove them from any social media interaction. I have to warn that this gatekeeping is coming to non social media platforms as well, including your own blog, since you can’t control the domain names.
It’s also hilarious how hypocritical these tech companies, meta steal and sell users data and sue a company for scraping, xitter send C&D letters, AI companies are building models from stolen books and sometimes even physically destroying them, then lecture others when their models get distilled, basically: rules for thee and not for me.
From my understanding scraping a public website you'd otherwise have access to is legal in the US. However, re-hosting that scrapped copyright content, particularly if it isn't transformative/fair-use (inc. only partial content) is very much either violates copyright, or best case is legally a gray area.
Google got dragged into court for exactly this, and they were summarizing/snipping, so they had a fair-use argument to make. This is a 1:1 reproduction of the content, so the legal arguments on fair-use would be harder to make I suspect.
I've personally used XCancel, and I really like it, but stepping back legally they're on shaky ground if Twitter decides to stop it.
AFAIK, to date Twitter hasn't required its users agree to a copyright assignment or an exclusive license to the content of their tweets, so it wouldn't be a copyright suit. Twitter wouldn't have standing to bring suit, as that would be reserved for the actual copyright holders, i.e. Twitter's userbase.
-ish. A lot of legal issues are heavily based on the particular circumstances, so a general statement like "scraping is legal" summarizing the results of hiQ v LinkedIn is a gross oversimplification of the actual findings of said case.
In general, the cases where scraping has been found to be legal have largely turned on the basis of things like accessing the public parts of the website and attempting to minimize potential copyright violation. Here, these services are bypassing a login requirement and reproducing the scraped data in full--actions that have generally led to findings of illegality in the past.
It's not a slam-dunk case in either direction, and I think the result would come down more to the quality of the lawyers to craft their arguments. And SpaceX has the cash right now to afford the better lawyers.
Civil law is not centered around what is or is not legal. It is about resolving problems that fall outside of criminal law. It is a completely different set of procedures and approach to the law.
It's both funny and sad that despite several malicious actions like this, despite wasting a ton of Twitter's social capital and despite years of broken promises (e.g., dealing with bots, bringing back free speech, ending algo/report manipulation), none of the writers and artists whose work I enjoy have even attempted to move away. I mostly just read there, but presumably posters feel bound to their social network. Maybe the site really was worth $44B.
You’re alluding that others shouldn’t use the site, but you still do? You need an account to read there don’t you?
> You need an account to read there don’t you?
Normally yes, but if you use nitter then no.
No, they don't. Or at least didn't. See what the news article is about...
Nobody is leaving X apparently. If anything, I see people using it more now than ever before. I also see non political people using it more.
I need X for work but I don't really enjoy posting as it feels like you have to shitpost constantly to get engagement. That's not how I want to spend my energy.
Meanwhile, the non-Facebook Threads alternatives (Bluesky / Mastodon) are edgy spaces where furry, kink, and progressive DSA content reigns. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bad first experience for newcomers when content like that is worn on the sleeve, shown as the first experience, and used to exclude outsiders.
Paraphrasing, but seeing profiles that say "If you're not [8 acronyms I don't understand], go to hell" - why is that even on my feed? What is this? I don't get any of this.
I remember when I signed up the main feed was full of horny anime profiles, sex toys, and death wishes for politicians intermixed with an occasional tech post. I'm pretty sure they didn't have that tracking data on me to tailor my feed.
There's nowhere middle of the road average. (Maybe Threads is that?) The other alternatives have certainly niched down and become unattractive to the mainstream.
It's like Reddit with Voat a decade or so ago, except Voat attracted people that were banned from Reddit for typically valid reasons.
Building an all inclusive social network is hard, because it depends on who the first users are. It sets the stage for growth and limits the ultimate appeal if it over-indexes on one type of user.
I wish this was all a protocol like email, but everyone building a protocol makes it weird and exclusive and ruins the vibes before users even arrive.
Plus they all insist on federation, when P2P is the way to go. It's scalable if people use super nodes to publish and gulp down content. The problem is Mastodon and Bluesky effectively have super nodes run by people that want to exclude mainstream. You can't do that and hope to get the world on board.
Yeah, I call my friends on some platforms "my furs" but of course I have a shtick that attracts them. [1]
On Bluesky in particular you have to put some effort into having a good feed. You just can't follow the people who posted about Donald Trump 20 times a day. If you use the "more like this" and "less like this" buttons on the discover feed consistently #uspol will fall away and you will find the people who are into cat pictures, #bloomscrolling and maybe even Jacobin/Joan Williams/Catherine Liu instead of the cultural stuff.
[1] ... in real life there was that day I got off the bus as-a-fox and there was somebody waiting for me wearing an animal ear hat and holding a chicken purse
What I find even more amusing is that all the people that screech about how much they hate Elon, Trump, Conservatives etc. They also still basically only use Twitter err X.
The network effect is hard to pull away from especially when you realize nobody is listening elsewhere.
You can't underestimate the power of two-sided networks. Every day "Ask HN" people underestimate the difficulty of starting a new community platform by orders of magnitude. And no matter how you mismanage a platform it's close to impossible to kill.
Not that it matters, but my use case for Nitter and XCancel was to provide a link to accompany a screen shot when discussing a tweet on Mastodon. Now I'lll just use a screen shot, there is zero chance I will send them direct traffic of any kind.
If XCancel is gone then I'm cancelling X. I don't need to read what people have to say on that website.
Main discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
And I still can't go over how this title looks like draft version with placeholder, published a bit too fast. How could anyone thing a single letter is good choice for an company/service name?
> How could anyone thing a single letter is good choice for an company/service name
In this case, Musk is stuck being his 12 year old self and carrying a 30 year old obsession to use this very cool naming for his "everything company", after losing that name along with him leaving PayPal. He finally got the chance.
Possible alternative? https://twitterwebviewer.com/
At this point just ditch Twitter.
Also sotwe.com although you need to filter your javascript pretty heavily to use it safely.
A long time ago twitter had built in rss feeds. No need to scrape.
Seeing all companies are hellbent to have all users logged in with accounts, it means they definitely integrated these accounts to some centralized database in the US or plantir aggregator to accurately track any, or basically ban them and remove them from any social media interaction. I have to warn that this gatekeeping is coming to non social media platforms as well, including your own blog, since you can’t control the domain names.
It’s also hilarious how hypocritical these tech companies, meta steal and sell users data and sue a company for scraping, xitter send C&D letters, AI companies are building models from stolen books and sometimes even physically destroying them, then lecture others when their models get distilled, basically: rules for thee and not for me.
Scraping is legal. It's amazing how much these companies benefit from scraping but don't want others to do it.
From my understanding scraping a public website you'd otherwise have access to is legal in the US. However, re-hosting that scrapped copyright content, particularly if it isn't transformative/fair-use (inc. only partial content) is very much either violates copyright, or best case is legally a gray area.
Google got dragged into court for exactly this, and they were summarizing/snipping, so they had a fair-use argument to make. This is a 1:1 reproduction of the content, so the legal arguments on fair-use would be harder to make I suspect.
I've personally used XCancel, and I really like it, but stepping back legally they're on shaky ground if Twitter decides to stop it.
AFAIK, to date Twitter hasn't required its users agree to a copyright assignment or an exclusive license to the content of their tweets, so it wouldn't be a copyright suit. Twitter wouldn't have standing to bring suit, as that would be reserved for the actual copyright holders, i.e. Twitter's userbase.
-ish. A lot of legal issues are heavily based on the particular circumstances, so a general statement like "scraping is legal" summarizing the results of hiQ v LinkedIn is a gross oversimplification of the actual findings of said case.
In general, the cases where scraping has been found to be legal have largely turned on the basis of things like accessing the public parts of the website and attempting to minimize potential copyright violation. Here, these services are bypassing a login requirement and reproducing the scraped data in full--actions that have generally led to findings of illegality in the past.
It's not a slam-dunk case in either direction, and I think the result would come down more to the quality of the lawyers to craft their arguments. And SpaceX has the cash right now to afford the better lawyers.
Sending a C&D ordering someone to stop doing a legal thing is also legal.
Civil law is not centered around what is or is not legal. It is about resolving problems that fall outside of criminal law. It is a completely different set of procedures and approach to the law.
Same strategy as Reddit seems data has too much monetary value
Wish I'd known about this years ago.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283