YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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”

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.

Why?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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)

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

> 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...

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

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

It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but two whole apps. Yet, whenever there's an incident they immediately reach for X (on which I can't access their posts), while their apps lag behind.

As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.

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.

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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

RSS.

> permanently archived

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

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

On that same page:

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

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

Reddit says hello

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."

> 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.

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.

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

> 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

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.

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

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

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

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

He speaks out both sides of his mouth.

It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping

Edit: not a moral stance

  mtr xcancel.com

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

Thin skins over at there at X

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)

With alternatives available:

- bluesky - mastodon

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

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.'

> 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?

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.

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".

> 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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Then it'll just be another Bluesky...

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.

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

Come on, be honest, what did you do?

Pending legal advice I would assume

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.

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

the president? I think all presidents does the same.

Exactly. I hate that we have people still pushing X even after knowing about a racist pedo feudalist running the corp for propaganda

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?

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.