> 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

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".

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).

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.

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?

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

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.

It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping

Edit: not a moral stance

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

On that same page:

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

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

> permanently archived

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

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.

> 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.

Reddit says hello

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

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.

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."

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)

Come on, be honest, what did you do?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

He speaks out both sides of his mouth.

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

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.

Pending legal advice I would assume

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

Then it'll just be another Bluesky...

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

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.

> 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?

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

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.

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

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.

> 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

I want to know what intelligent people say on X.