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.
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)
I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.
There's the dichotomy of the walled garden, how to minimize scraping/bots/inauthentic amplification etc. Is a town square a town square if you can't hear what's going on from the public lawn on the edge of the square? I feel like HN does a better job, and the ecosystem of external views, LLM/human summary, HN search etc. Is quite exciting! but the scale between the two is one factor and the moderation we accept here also comes with a constraint on topics discussed and restrictions on speech (tradeoffs that I feel are worth it in our context here) So worlds apart and yet adjacent!
Is the point really to be profitable? Or could perhaps its owners be willing to risk losing money for more power over the information landscape?
Yep precisely it. Worth it to control the narrative, even if it's for his own vanity. When you have that much money what else do you spend it on. X is a toy.
Thank God there aren't any other media companies like that
Yeah, that's a really good point that I hadn't really considered. Although, maybe the same argument stands? If X's lockdown leads to less users, then doesn't that translate to less control over the information landscape too?
Well, if one of the big social media platforms is now a far-right playground, that changes the political landscape.
Elon Musk is using twitter to create a global far-right platform that right-wing politicians can use to experiment with talking points before watering them down and bringing them to the public.
All media orgs have X accounts, and see such things. And posts on X are in the news regularly.
So I don't think experimentation is an angle.
Reddit seems to have reversed course with making users sign in as well (or my adblock has updated and removed the forced login modal or something.) but my thought was simply: "Well, I guess I just won't view Reddit content anymore, big whoop."
> "Reddit seems to have reversed course with making users sign in as well (or my adblock has updated and removed the forced login modal or something.)"
I don't know if Reddit are doing it less now or not, but it's worth noting that it's always been somewhat hit and miss.
I suspect a mix of very data-driven testing (to try to show it to people who will login, and not show it to those who'll just bounce), and technical debt confusing things. But often it will vary not only from one person to another, but even for the same person between two different web browsers, or connected through two different IPs, or whatever.
I actually wish all social media companies would do this aggressively so I have no choice but to stop using social media
Not exactly. They only require login for old reddit. The reason given is that AI companies were still scraping old reddit.
(I'm not necessarily agreeing with this; after all it's trivial to make an account for an AI company. I'm just saying that's the reasoning behind it)
Well, Twitter/X is also a service with very large network effects. So many people I knew at some level tuned out that it became a very optional thing to glance at--and none of the replacements really took off in my estimation. The bottom line is that I just stopped using that whole category of social media.
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
The Firefox add-on triggers HTTP 451 response
Don't you still have to log in to xitter with those?
No, but they are limited. Longer tweets are cut off, and you don't get to see replies.
X should provide an option to make youor posts public. And govt reps should be required to use it.
Govt reps should be required to use govt sites and only then repost to private sites, or leave that up to the people.
govts should be forbidden from using X. Or any other commercial for-profit message service.
It's not like one-way communication is a hard problem. Just post that stuff on a website ffs!
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?
> immediately flagged as a bot account
You have to disable all ad-blocking (either extensions or Pi-Hole) in order to make it past that "feature".
Imginn.com/whateverrouteoninstagram
So instagram.com/foo becomes Imginn.com/foo
Hope this helps!
I know there are like 5 trillion Instagram viewers. But I've never actually needed to use any of them because there is absolutely nothing so important on Instagram that I must see it. The entire site is optional.
Lucky for you, but many people aren't so lucky.
My kids school puts some information that I need to see (not just "would like to see") on Instagram. Same with the sports team they play for.
I've complained to both about it but change is glacial. I'm lucky in that I know how to work around it, and I do my best to keep others who aren't so tech savvy updated about things they need to know but may have missed.
Irony is they moved most of this info from Twitter/X to Instagram.
What!? It's the entire, singular purpose and meaning of life for millions of people to make themselves look glamorous on Instagram, and you say it's optional?! /s
I think I'm shadow banned from instagram. I can't even log in without weird stuff happening.
did you sign up with your actual details? or were you using a throwaway email and/or phone?
as for using it without an account, try https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
Actual details.
I'm sorry that I keep posting this but it gets said often enough that I'm just going to hopefully kill it permanently
People say repeatedly Instagram was a 'great acquisition' (it was. It destroyed Facebook's competition. Great for them, not for users). That Zuckerberg bought it when it was 'barely a company'. That it's somehow not antitrust (Zuckerberg in emails: "Instagram can hurt us"). People loved Instagram. Not anymore, not for a long time. Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt
I would listen to every single episode of a podcast that could get the real skinny, not the sanitized feel-good post-facto rationalization, from founders who had a legitimate shot at being a major player in an industry but chose to sell out during their meteoric rise.
^ this and the entire drama is just an ad campaign to make the rebranding stick. what is really going to work is to keep calling it Twitter, as it identifies itself, and slowly move over the scene to Bluesky/Mastodon.
What demoralize them the most is to show whoever pays for it doesn't matter.
It would be really funny if Elon lost the Twitter trademark due to not using it.
Just a few days ago there was an article about how they lost the bluebird logo and the word "tweet," so it seems possible!
That was close to happening. He already lost the logo and “tweet”.
https://thenextweb.com/news/musk-x-twitter-bird-logo-tweet-t...
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
Make companies give up power? Never going to happen.
Indeed, with the best will in the world, nothing on X is that essential. XCancel is the only way I read it.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it feels like X may be growing again. I don't post, but I do have an account for reading things on there and a few years ago I was never visiting. Now it seems like I'm going there a few times a month.
I have a shitter account, I don't use the app but just the web app on safari iOS.
recently with videos I can't change playback speed. so I have to use xCancel.
before I just used to use Tweetdeck. but that went away or went pro.
Twitter itself doesn't even suck too much for me it's the broader context that makes it a no go
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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".
> 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/
>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.
>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
I remember when you paid your ISP for internet access and in that cost they also provided you with an e-mail address, they ran a Usenet server for their customers, and gave you space for web hosting. Now all of that is expected to be paid for with ads instead.
Im too young to remember this but it would be an interesting idea if ISPs paid website hosts (kinda like cable companies pay networks based on viewership)
The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
That battle was called "net neutrality", and the reason we who lost it fought it was to prevent web 2.0 becoming a set of giant moated properties.
That's creative and could probably be crafted so it turns out better than it is now.
OTOH how about commercial websites paying ISPs for access to the ISP's valuable customers' eyeballs?
And structuring it so that it more than covers everything, then the ISPs can pay the non-commercial websites to be there. If nothing else but to have an abundance of relief for tired eyeballs :)
If the average commercial websites aren't rolling in the dough well enough to afford supporting the non-commerical, what are they doing there anyway, find some that are ;)
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
It's basically impossible to not engage with any corporate products at all. It's trivially-easy to not engage with specific corporate products. I don't engage with Twitter, because I won't sign up and that makes it useless to me. I'm not missing out on anything I care about.
Just one example: Facebook is mandatory for school/university in large parts of Asia. You cannot trivially block them. They should be considered an utility.
How did facebook make its way into education like this? Can you explain to an outsider?
> How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
By not using it. Which is exactly why I don't use X or Facebook, and minimize my use of Google (I use DuckDuckGo for search, and as Maps continues to suck more I use it less).
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.
> they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is
FLOSS invalidates that statement.
Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it.
Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago...
There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts").
But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
> There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101)
Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.
Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
> valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.
And then it turned out that all that was a long con by the companies, who started reneging on all their promises of lifetime employment, good benefits, and retirement pensions as soon as the costs of those things began to exceed the profits available to them by using those promises to attract employees.
The key thing to address is the near zero marginal cost part.
If the philosophy extended beyond a binary blob, we would have a whole parallel economy of free tangible goods, from workers using their expertise on their own time. But this basically doesn't exist because real costs are involved.
This thread started with me citing a counterexample to your wide sweeping attempt to lump self-interested corporations in with humans who tend to be generous under many circumstances. I've made my point, so I'm done here.
What about books or art or movies?
The electronic version of all those is also near zero marginal cost.
>What is the alternative exactly
There's not supposed to be an alternative.
To fully function within the system you need to be a corporation your dang self.
That doesn't mean you have to be a capital corporation, you can go forward without any of Other Peoples' Money and therefore not be an actual capitalist yourself. Even if you make more money per invested dollar that alone does not make you a capitalist, regardless of how much true capitalists can admire the returns. Without capital you would be merely an entrepreneur, sometimes that's a better choice, sometimes not.
Beyond that you still need to function in a capitalist market either way, no matter what because that's what dominates.
Which could be overwhelming too, and the kind of thing that would make a promising alternative seem very attractive also :\
The system is so totally dominated that you can't enumerate anything that is not . . . corporate-controlled.
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.
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.
And when the creator decided to make that free to access, it's improper for a company to throw up a wall in front of it.
I think you might be confused, because any creator can make their content free to access. If they are playing in someone else's house, yeah there might be rules they don't like, but it's also not their house.
Nothing stops creators from self-hosting and absorbing the full cost themselves.Yt doesn't even care if you link to your own hosted version of the video on their platform.
It used to be that when your house is the size of a city or even country that it isn't just your house anymore and you don't get to set the rules on your own. When a platform becomes big enough it should be treated more like a utility and a startup.
I meant what I said. Companies are allowed to be rude to everyone but it's still bad for them to be rude.
Rude that they don't give you free unencumbered access?
When they got the content for free, usually yes.
Youtube pays 60% of revenue to creators...
Youtube is pretty much fine. Outside of a few janky age restrictions, you can just go to youtube and watch videos.
Remember right at the start: "There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads." This is how youtube works.
X is the one blocking or messing up views without accounts (and also being too likely to ban accounts that don't give a phone number).
Though most people posting on youtube are doing it for free or negligible revenue (I'm not sure how it works out on a per-view basis), and a lot of the rest make almost all their money elsewhere.
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.
this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.
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.
i don't think there is a page on x that just gives you a login wall that a normal non-logged in user would go to. if you link to something like a tweet or a profile page it shows you them. these services are for scraping.
Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.
it is legal if you can do it, doesn't mean they have to like it. keeping features for logged in seems super reasonable to me.
"features" for logging in is in a broad sense reasonable.
When one of those features is being able to see the most recent tweets from an account, that's asinine.
In other words: If you link to a profile page, X doesn't properly show you. It gives you a random selection of popular tweets that person has made, often several years old.
Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
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.
True, but I can make my own boogers, and kind of do automatically, so that's pretty common. Some people get fecal transplants, which is rarer, but let's say if I want to build... I don't know, lets say a house. I can lay the bricks myself, which is a transaction against my lifespan (not just a transaction on a product of my body like boogers or fecal matter), or I can hire you. When you're hired, I essentially get two lives since I can do life things at a rate of 2x while you remain employed. I guess the real value comes in buying your time, not necessarily the product of 'you.'
Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because yt pays creators more than the others, both in absolute (total dollars) and relative (revenue share) terms.
As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block, youtube gets to keep it's monopoly. They have literately turned people's greed back against themselves, since it ensures starvation of competitors. And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
Even with creators who post on both Nebula and YouTube, I still end up watching them on YouTube for some reason.
> As long people are "sticking it to the man" with ad-block…
Do you think people are using as blockers because they are being rebellious?
Modern day ads interrupt the content people are intending. The content isn’t built around them like back in the days of tv with commercial breaks, they usually just randomly intercede.
They also aren’t what anyone is watching the content for. The only exception I can think of is the superbowl where the ads are legitimately something people intend to watch.
> And yt doesn't have anything to do with it, hence not monopolistic.
That is inherently not true. A company doesn’t have to take an action to be a monopoly. And actually that’s even more not true after thinking about it. YouTube has nothing to do with YouTube being the number one video site?
Actually that’s a decent counter example.
YouTube hasn’t degraded in service or quality and when I pay them for the ad free service, they don’t try and sneak more ads in anyway like some other services have or the historical example of cable tv.
I’d probably be a lot happier if most software companies produced a product and kept a user relationship with me the way YouTube has.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
Cooperation is possible, and can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions. However, those conditions are currently not present.
Market economies create economic cooperation. The dinner you ate required countless people from ranchers, farmers, mechanics, chemical manufacturers, steel manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, paper manufacturers, tubing manufacturers, oil manufacturers, fastener manufacturers and countless others working on intermediate factors of production. None of them deliberately and knowingly cooperated, rather prices in the market economy allowed for decentralized cooperation between people who don't even know each other. That is the power of market economies. Command economies cannot deliberately arrange cooperation at the same scale due to information being too disbursed and rapidly changing.
So you are correct that cooperation can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions; those conditions require a small population though.
All of these entities are competing ruthlessly to extract as much value from each other as possible. When they don't compete, the ones they're competing with steal their lunch. See: supermarket monopsonies in Australia pushing food prices to unsustainably low levels, American farm megacorporations taking over from small farmers, everything open source getting sherlocked by amazon.
The discussion wasn't about market vs command economy but about capitalism vs socialism/communism.
See: Market socialism
The discussion wasn't about any economy except for the one we currently live in.
Seems like people who try to argue that Capitalism creates greed are almost always just narcissistic looking for something to blame their greediness on.
> Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible.
Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me more capital, by hook or by crook".
But that's not what actually built most of the wealth in the modern world. What built most of that was cooperation, specialization, and positive sum trades, in which everyone involved became better off, but nobody obsessed about counting down to the last penny exactly how much better off they were than the next person, and complaining about unfairness if things didn't balance out exactly the way they thought things should. In other words, focusing on creating wealth, not on grabbing whatever you can, or making sure you grabbed more than anyone else.
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Convenient that your "principles" disallow you from seeing critique of said principles.
Funny that your critique is still capitalist...
It's not though. That's literally the point of the article.
The article that I need to hand over my monetizable information over to read? The article written by a journalist getting paid to produce content so it can be pushed to the market of articles to retrieve more than it's cost to procure?
If they are going to claim to ride a high horse, I'm not paying them any credence when they show up on the same dinkey donkey as everyone else they loudly spite.
Quite the mental gymnastics to simultaneously acknowledge the bootstrapping problem when it suits you, and pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.
I can assure you that whatever the nymag article written by a creative writing major turned socialist journalist says, isn't going to be a life changing read to a long time economics geek.
Pure cope and baseless assumptions.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
This isn’t voting, i’m just trying to sell or buy some crap. For a while I listed stuff both places. In your voting analogy i guess i was voting third party? After a few dozen times where the only responses were from marketplace - i moved on.
Blaming people for doing what’s simplest, is just a way to feel smug and superior.
> 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.
They went login only in the wake of Hi-Q vs LinkedIn, which established that scraping a login-free site is legal.
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.
Personally I have no problem with ads if they're based on the content. But your post inadvertantly sums the problem: tracking and ads have become inseparable. If you talk about removing tracking, people come out of the woodwork and say how ads are critical for the business model.
There was a time where ads were based on the thing you were looking at, and assumptions around your demographics and intentions. It actually worked though returns were lower. (Which makes sense since the psychological warfare was limited to what advertisers thought they knew about the viewer. )
Now, though, if you want to block tracking you're a freeloader, siphoning off resources that other people pay for. And since targeted ads are so (relatively) effective, there is no discussion of separation.
> 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.
Scalar Monomania (profit maximization in this case) is the root of so much evil :/
It's usury that's the root of this evil. Always has been. Whether it's private equity or public shareholders, when you have someone getting more and more money for simply putting in money then that value has to be extracted from somewhere.
The "content" in twitter largely isn't monetized, only the platform profits via rent seeking on other people's writings.
>everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads,
that's not a realistic expectation for everything but it's completely realistic for text based short form communication given how affordable it is to run. That's why there's ad and tracking free alternatives to twitter already.
the competitors don't say "lol nope" they'd gladly take the users, it's the latter who stay on twitter like lambs running to the slaughter
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.
It's trivially easy to spin up a website and host your own content. Especially today with LLMs to handhold even the most tech illiterate person through it.
I'd imagine you are totally confused why they don't do this. If you aren't confused why, well then you have your answer for why X has a right to monetize it.
I'm not disputing that X has a legal right to monetize the content, but I am not remotely convinced that (1) X has the _exclusive_ legal right to monetize the content (content creators add no value and thus have no right to the content, which seems obviously absurd) (2) X has the exclusive legal right to prevent others from distributing the content for free or (3) your "network-effects-derived moats justify a legal right to monetize content".
You seem to be depending on a whole lot of assumptions to get to your "XCancel/Nitter/etc shouldn't be allowed to exist" conclusion.
So many people tend to forget what made the internet great.
>The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
Roger.
I guess you had to be there, either that or have above-average powers of observation, but That's. The. Foundation. Of. The. Internet.
And that's how "doesn't suck" has always been defined, except for people who are just trying to make shit up that is quite a bit removed from reality. Now I've accepted ads when I feel like it although lots of times I prefer none, regardless commercial websites have always been less worthwhile than non-commercial, it's not like there's any question. This was settled way before the 1990s were over.
I know perfection can not be achieved and I settle for less as much as anybody, plus "absolutely doesn't suck" may not be reached either but it is not a movable goalpost, more like a brick wall where the closer you get the better. If you are willing and able you might be able to do an outstanding job. Otherwise you're going to end up some distance away on the spectrum of "sucks more than it should."
You were always already paying plenty to your ISP, and last time I checked you still are.
Anything less has always been less than the whole internet you were paying for.
The math is not that hard :\
Instagram is filled with ads, and it sucks.
Facebook? Same.
Xitter? Same.
Youtube? Enshittified beyond measure.
Google? Unusable.
So tell me. Where are these great amazing services supported by ads?
Enshittification is the new normal, unfortunately.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
cfaa has broad interpretations
AFAIK it's been interpreted that getting public data while being someone the data holder doesn't like is, unusually, one of the very few things that is not a CFAA violation. Bright Data vs X for example.
So long as the "getting" doesn't consist of circumventing something that is ostensibly a security mechanism, such as a URL that had never been presented to you by the server but is fairly easily guessed.
You mean vs Meta
How can an automated process be a party in the terms of services though?
> 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.
> 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.
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?"
That's not how ToS work though. ToS are contracts. If you don't sign the contract nobody can sue you for violating it.
> 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?"
That's the difference between criminal and civil justice. You don't need to sign a law for it to bind you, but for contracts you do.
> If you don't sign the contract nobody can sue you for violating it.
But terms of service are contracts which you sign by agreeing.
Courts have looked somewhat favorably on "I didn't read that" defenses, but accepting the agreement is a legal contract between you and the service provider.
My point is that you don't have to accept anything.
Sure. But then you don't get credentials and can't scrape.
You keep saying that but unless company start doing KYC there's absolutely no link between auth and ToS.
The authentication mechanisms used by websites don't have a specific legal power, it's just a POST request among other GET requests sent during scraping. And we have jurisprudence saying scrapping is legal no matter what the ToS of the website says, because the scraping entity never signed up the contract.
The only protection against scrapping that auth is giving you isn't a legal one, it's a technical one (you can detect and ban the scraping user account).
*scraping
Even if you get the credentials via middle man?
> That's the difference between criminal and civil justice. You don't need to sign a law for it to bind you, but for contracts you do.
Patently false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract
The person who sets up that robot is the person responsible and effectively signing the contract by those actions.
> Who are you gonna sue then?
The person who set up the robot.
It seems that simple, I agree, but digging in we're winding up in a bit of a "responsible party" black hole, at least it seems from my non-legal engineer perspective. If I ask an AI to find me articles on some arbitrary things and it hacks the Gibson to do it; and I am not a computer expert, it will be a struggle a bit to honestly put the blame on me. It's always been that way I think.. in what reasonable world can a non-lawyer agree to 100+ pages of a ToS and actually understand it? No world. But that's the point I think. What if I modify every TOS in HTML before I submit it and then agree by checking the box under my "redlined" version of the contract? I think this stuff is going to become exponentially murkier as time goes on.
Completely agree that the world is full of absolute nonsense, but legally determining responsible parties appears to be relatively straightforward (but does involve a judge or jury)
Yes, agreed. Except "involve a judge or jury" is where the wildcard comes in. I believe there will be reasons to doubt culpability as we move further into the nonsense. Justified or not. My point is really just that we're in some weird territory, so I guess I'm going to make popcorn and watch. Some deeper legal questions lurk in this mess, and I don't think the obvious answers will always necessarily be right.
> The person who sets up that robot is the person responsible and effectively signing the contract by those actions.
If that was true, then all scraping of a website with a ToS would be illegal, yet it's established by jurisprudence that it's not. And “authentication” doesn't change the picture here in Amy way, because it's not actually authentication.
Good luck finding them or proving it, esp. if done via third party contractors in another jurisdiction
It's much easier when they release huge PR whitepapers about how many felonies they've committed recently, I think. Makes the civil suit much more straightforward in my opinion.
>I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are
as I recall it was the large number of bot accounts not scraping but commenting.
Both can cause a product to suck.
A company can make their produce suck, on purpose (out of malice), because it fits their bottom line better (at least, in the short term) vs. a better UX.
OP may simply be asking companies to put their customers ahead of their (short-term) profit.
Reddit is another great example of this, where users have been looking for workarounds to their (increasingly more) hostile login wall since they started pressuring people to use their app years ago.
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
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.
A system that makes "business decisions" indistinguishable from malice is an interesting one.
If I have something you want and I could give it to you but instead charge you money, is that malice? If so, what system wouldn't make malice indistinguishable from business decisions? If not, what distinguishes that from a login wall in exchange for viewing content?
It's pretty much the standard to either soft-block or hard- block access into silos. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, etc ... all do it. Of course it's an openly anti-consumer practice, but it's one they get away with when they're big enough to flip the service burden to the client.
how is it anti-consumer? Claiming you should be able to freely access the content on some service feels like claiming you should be able to walk into any fast-food place and help yourself to their soda machine.
A business is free to choose that you must login to access their content and you are free to choose not to do business with them if you don't like it. I generally chose the latter
Your analogy does not work since they can still show ads to logged-out users, nobody is getting anything for free. Meta even creates shadow-profiles of users without accounts to track them across the internet.
It's all about getting people locked into walled gardens. I wish the EU DMA had taken a harder stance on this and required all social media to federate to some extent.
You’re absolutely right. I can just choose to not participate. If I’m lucky enough, enough people realize that they have the agency to not give into this, but if they don’t it doesn’t affect me at all.
Either way, I don’t care. The Internet has become so hostile to users that the only moral and rational choice is to not participate on platforms that have become so hostile that threatening legal action is the only way that they can protect their relevancy in facilitating social discourse.
So business decisions are absolved of morality?
No. “Malice” isn’t the only possible descriptor with moral weight. There’s many more ways this decision could be immoral without malice.
Do you consider a login-wall immoral?
My biggest pet peeve is when people on sites like HN assume software should be tailor made for their objectives and not the company's objectives.
Sometimes the objectives align, but not always. And yes, the world would be a better place if they were better aligned, but we don't live in that world.
I'm sure X's motivation is something along the lines of forcing logins creates more users, or the downside of scraping outweighs the benefits.
I don't really understand this comment. The simplest way to put pressure on companies to align with their user's objectives is to complain loudly. It's not that HN "assumes" anything, it's just that people call shitty things as they are, in the hope that if enough people agree, it'll create enough pressure for the company to change course.
Will it work? Probably not. But not even trying would be self-defeating.
I don't think it's effective though because you're not actually addressing the reality on the ground. To pursuade someone you need to start with their assumptions.
If your argument doesn't even seem aware of them, then they won't listen.
I guess you could say "who cares, X is evil anyway, might as well try" but it just seems ineffective and frankly a little naive.
On the other hand, it is fair to be upset when the objectives seemingly used to align and you had put significant work into creating content for the company as well as providing bootstrapping network effects only to have them change the software against your previously aligned objectives.
This is the same as being mad at sports fans for complaining about the owners. No one would be anywhere near twitter, especially since it got covered in Elon’s ketamine cologne, if not for the users. Thinking the corporation profiting from those users should be free to change the deal on a whim is not a good look.
One of the problems is that many companies motives are so incredibly misaligned with society at large.
Google, Facebook, X are all explicitly designed to be addictive and provide as little value as possible. Because they want to give everything away for free in a way that keeps you on the site to maximise scraping your data so they can screw you over more later.
They are not even aligned at the most basic level. Everyone needs to stop using it. Or at least circumvent their measures.
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By functional do you actually mean impossible to use?
Just fuckin log in?
I can't create an account. No matter what I try, the app just keeps saying it don't wanna.
Well, I do not have an account and when I open any profile on it right now, I cannot read it properly. I cannot click on posts. I cannot read replies. I cannot open images.
In my opinion, that is quite far from "functional".
Such a behavior alone is a sufficient justification, in my opinion, for the services like xcancel to exist.
And if the X social network does not want their content to be publicly available, fine. They are free to gate it behind a login.
Then create a burner account to access said resources, instead of doing gymnastics with a broken third party middleware.
There is no "gymnastics" needed. And those "middleware" layers are working just fine.
A user just opens the original X link in xcancel or some of the similar web service. And it will display the actual content only. Without ads and without other user-alienating features.
I think that it is also way simpler than "creating an account".
So what now, xcancel is already cancelled.
Suggesting a burner account to access the most basic functionality of a website is quite the technique to prove your point that the website is the most functional website.
??? Have you never tried to visit X on a mobile device? Functional is far from what I'd call it, given that you can't see replies to the tweet or indeed do much else on the site
Yes? I use it exclusively in the mobile browser, logged in of course.
By uncucked you mean anti-cisgender?
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
What an idealistic nonsense. Companies do anything not for people, but for money. We are not living in a socialist utopia (fortunately!).
Companies also have to stay within the bounds determined by the rest of our society. For example just dumping your waste in the next river is more profitable than disposing it responsibly but its bad for everyone so we don't let companies do that.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it's worth pointing out that most businesses outside of tech don't operate a "build a monopoly then bleed it dry" model, and are a lot nicer for it, while still making money.
Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.
(I do get that tech VC doesn't work under this principle and it's not simpld to just change a sectors funding model, but it is worth pointing out that making money does not normally equal making a bad product)
> Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.
There are plenty of dark patterns and enshittification in all of these as well. Tech is just way ahead of the curve but the rest isn't innocent either.
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.
Twitter promised an open publishing platform with extensive API access. They're the ones who broke the (social) contract, not us.
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.
> If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
I am 100% okay with this. I don't want what Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer, so I no longer have an account these platforms. But I do have an account with my local electric utility. It's my only option. And if I want to find information about an outage, it's posted on their Facebook page. I'm 0% okay with this.
> you dont have to consume its content
That's the issue though, it's not Twitter's "content" and I'm not trying to "consume" it. I want to be able to read and see what others including public official and primary sources for ongoing events have to say. That they are on twitter is coincidental and generally only because Twitter has captured the "public square". That doesn't make what's posted on there theirs anymore than the postal service owns the letters you send.
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.
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> 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.
This is where freedom of choice is great. You can follow the people you want on platforms of your preference.
The smartest people i know, i mostly know because of their X presence.
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?
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.
> Clearly they approve or they'd at least stop advertising their twitter handles on their websites and handouts
I'm not so sure of your claim that one implies the other.
I bet if you just asked them, they'd prefer for the loginwall to be undone.
I won't read anything on twitter as it currently stands, because the product sucks. The "fixed" functionality provided by xCancel is what makes it worth it for me to read. So, if you want me as a customer, you need to provide similar functionality.
Not all customers are as particular as I am, therefore a shitty product continues to thrive, and I can go do other things.