Comment by simondotau
11 hours ago
If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X.
On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.
It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.
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.
It makes me sad that the level of discourse around here is approaching that of Reddit.
Maybe if people didn't make services like XCancel, the impracticality of X would be more salient.
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.
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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.
Get the Libredirect extension and this will happen automatically (to a server that is actually working).
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.
It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.
I think Wikipedia has become a cancerous blight on world politics, and I would love to see Wikipedia die so that a Mastodon-like distributed alternative could rise from the ashes.
But I still use Wikipedia.
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...
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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.
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.
What if the post is like "we discovered AGI (for real this time, not clickbait)" - will you pretend AGI wasn't discovered?
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4. Click the link
5. Accept that you won't click on the link
Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.
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at the very least whoever posts the link has presumably accessed it, so we should normalise pasting the full text in here
I wish HN would simply ban links to X.
If you think that's remotely viable, you'll be very surprised what most of the YC partners believe and post about on X.
HN is a venture capital fund. That will happen if and only if it becomes profitable to do so.
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I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).
Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.
If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
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.
Because for some reason people link to it here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are places like government agencies, public transit org aisations, and similar organisations, which still use it as adhoc quick notification channel. If I want to see if a train route ist interrupted it's the best source. However using it once in a while (not via app or such) has long loading times and nagging screens for sign in, cookie compliance and so on, which makes the whole thing an annoyance ...
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
Exactly. If you boycott X, shouldn't you also boycott the people who are on X? But this kind of slacktivism has always been more virtue signaling than anything.
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.
why is that? Why can't you just use it in read only fashion?
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It seems intellectually dishonest to blanket-label any principled stance that you disagree with as "virtue signaling".
I think the claim is that the principled stance would be to ignore all X content.
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Not really, unfortunately. If it were just a bunch of bros laughing at fascist memes amongst themselves I would happily boycott everything, but unfortunately a lot of "public" service announcements and discourse also happens on 卐itter. Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements, city council decisions, public transport notices, official statements by MEPs/local politicians/companies, etc. Not to mention a certain demented orange geriatric who happens to control nukes and posts his daily threats and declarations of war there.
These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
>Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements
I am shocked you get this served via twitter instead of usual service notices for these things. I don't use twitter and I still get these notices and other news.
Yeah i don't get it, using xcancel is like "that'll show ya" in a weak manner. You are seeing the same tweet.
Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
> Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact
We don't. We let six or seven far right billionares do that.
> And regarding copyright
Copyright of tweets are owned by original authors. Unless you have permission, the copyright infringement which occurs is against the individual, not X.
I don’t use Twitter but assholes continue to reference posts on this cancerous site. That’s why this service exists lil bro