Twitter Shuts Down Nitter

Richard Speed (Hacker News 3):

XCancel’s home page now contains some minimal text stating: “On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.” It says the service has been halted “until further notice.” Nitter provided a way for users to read posts on X without requiring an account. There was no JavaScript or ads, a user’s IP could not be tracked, and it was generally a good deal snappier than the official X client, just read-only. It was the service behind platforms such as XCancel.

The only thing surprising about this is how long it took.

Nick Heer:

Companies like X and Meta are very happy to scrape the web at unprecedented scale and without permission, but have zero tolerance for the same to be done to them by, in effect, individual users. That is not because they are protective of the creative works users have contributed to these platforms. It is simply because users are not trusted to use the platforms. X does not permit third-party readers, and neither does Instagram, because their value does not come from us using these services as we wish, but from how they dictate we must.

Previously:

• Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In
• Reddit Pushes Web Visitors to App
• Instagram Shuts Down Basic Display API
• Twitter for Mac Dead Again
• Social Media AI Training
• Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee
• Twitter Now Requires Logging In
• Migrating From Twitter to Mastodon