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Twitter's API is down?

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Re: Twitter's API is down?

#171

Post by mschuster91 »

highwaylights wrote: post #103
philliphaydon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook had downtime on all services, globally... for like 7 hours 2021, facebook is how many orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter? And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?

Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most. A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it. Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get. You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly. Since this time last year he’s said that both…

> Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy

At least in the case of SpaceX the US government will more likely than not step in and nationalize them out of national security requirements.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#172

Post by kortilla »

highwaylights wrote: post #103
philliphaydon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook had downtime on all services, globally... for like 7 hours 2021, facebook is how many orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter? And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?

Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most. A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it. Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get. You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly. Since this time last year he’s said that both…

>SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy

Companies months from bankruptcy don’t get to take a higher valuation in a down market: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/03/elon-musks-space...

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#173

Post by h0h0h0h0111 »

manholio wrote: post #165
raspberry1337 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion, so they are irrelevant. Also, what you call "left" might simply be the truth, and it's very hard to fight against that. For an example of toxic ideological delusion in the left camp you can see the harm done to adolescents by the gender nuts, it's absolutely out of control on Reddit and there will be reckoning day with its many victims.

>They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion

According to some infographic in a thread on HN yesterday, reddit is currently the most viewed site in the US, Australia and a few other countries, so it seems like it could have a sway on large parts of public opinion

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#175

Post by actualwitch »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #132
input_sh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia and NZ experienced a 16h outage last week. Was there someone to fix it eventually? Sure. Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? I'm going with no. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2023/01/twitter-down-australia/

Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.

Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#176

Post by mlatu »

mrtksn wrote: post #168
black_puppydog wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you get into an armsrace where twitter will obfuscate the markup to just wear out the scraper devs. which they can, because $$$

Then just OCR the rendered output. It's cheap and easy these days.

i heard it works best on iphones, best of luck

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#177

Post by samwillis »

mrtksn wrote: post #155
samwillis wrote: post #67

It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too. He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on ea…

Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on. I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy? So: 1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, mak…

While it's quite possible to build an app that way, using scraping. The danger is that users of that app will get suspended from Twitter (users have explicitly agreed not to scrape), once thats happened to a couple of users, thats the end of your app.

Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#179

Post by kortilla »

wpietri wrote: post #170
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at FB's staff from back when they had comparable revenue and way more users. I believe that 2013-14 FB was comparable in terms of revenue and users, and they had approximately half the staff.

So? WhatsApp had 35 developers and 350 million users. By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed. Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne…

WhatsApp wasn’t a social network with public posts of rich media. It’s trivial from an architectural perspective because there isn’t anything that needs to be sent to millions of users.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#180

Post by aaron695 »

iainmerrick wrote: post #116
highwaylights wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most. A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it. Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get. You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly. Since this time last year he’s said that both…

Not to disagree with your general point, I just want to nitpick this: Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook. I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude. And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down hi…

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