Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter's API is down?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 431 posts

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#181

Post by amelius »

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…

Where can I vote for this project?

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#182

Post by smcl »

dmitriid wrote: post #81
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Musk threw them all out, so it will slowly but surely degrade. There was a reason Twitter had such a large workforce.

The tragedy of Twitter is that: - they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed - Musk's approach was absolutely undoubtedly insane shenanigans of a stupid rich cry-baby Both are true at the same time

This is roughly my feeling, but I'm a little less sure of the absolutely/undoubtedly part. Someone below is asking for evidence but I don't think any one of us could produce evidence for or against this. It all boils down to either "Twitter had ~7500 employees and..."

1. ... that feels like a huge amount for a company that has basically a single product

2. ... that feels entirely appropriate for a company operating at their scale

What we've observed is that they've kinda managed to keep going despite Elon axing an enormous number of employees, but they've also had a few high-profile outages like this one today, the 2FA issue and 16hr Aus outage. I don't know if these are enough for either side to declare that they're correct.

One thing I would like to say - even though I had a feeling Twitter was probably overstaffed, I was in no way celebrating the redundancies. Similarly even though I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, I'm not delighting in all these little goofs he's doing and how it's impacting him personally - every little embarrassment he suffers and every dip in Tesla stock makes it more likely he'll just call it quits or fuck up Twitter more. For all its faults, I quite like Twitter and I don't want it to just disappear.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#183

Post by kortilla »

esperent wrote: post #105
sho wrote: post #18

This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..

Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it. But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it. But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?

God forbid someone stops using a product because it’s no longer nice to use. No no no, every commercial interaction must be driven by a deep political alignment strategy.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#184

Post by mrtksn »

mlatu wrote: post #176
mrtksn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i heard it works best on iphones, best of luck

Apple’s vision framework is actually very good, so effective on-device extraction is really just a few lines of code on iPhone(all Apple device tbh).

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#185

Post by amelius »

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…

Can't we have the EU force them to provide an API and thus interoperability with competitors?

Also, the whole silo thing reminds me of the old telephony days. We got over that, so what is the problem now?

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#186

Post by mlindner »

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…

Why are people jumping to a ridiculous conclusion about the API being removed, especially because it's literally in the middle of the night in California? Like why assume the much more reasonable opinion that it's simply an outage.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#187

Post by nigamanth »

samwillis wrote: post #150
nigamanth wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet there are people who make Twitter applications for a living. How is he damaging.

Oh sure, I feel incredibly sorry for small business and indi-developers who may loose their income from this. I hope they have contingency plans for this eventuality and have started to diversify. There is also a whole ecosystem of "publisher" apps like Buffer and Typefully that haven't been blocked yet , if I was them I would be very worried right now.

Twitter should've announced this, giving developers time to switch.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#188

Post by mlindner »

JdeBP wrote: post #127

Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion. * https://tapbots.social/@paul/109679939029741163 There are additional reports in the #TwitterDown and #TweetBot hashtags on the FediVerse. * https://tapbots.social/tags/twitterdown * https://tapbots.social/tags/tweetbot

[flagged]

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#189

Post by 14 »

input_sh wrote: post #43
philliphaydon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, the day he took over twitter people were saying "it wont be up this weekend" "it will be down in a week" "it will be offline in 2 weeks"... yet the reality is, its up and running well. The system is running as good as before. The only thing I've noticed is theres more ad's than usual. ---- Edit: Currently there isn't any outage of Twitter as far as anyone knows. It looks like 3rd party apps have been kick…

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/

Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#190

Post by mrtksn »

samwillis wrote: post #177
mrtksn wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On Apple devices that wouldn’t be an issue because you you can load the Twitter Web interface into a real Safari and get the markup from there for processing. Twitter can try things like CAPTCHA but this will degrade the experience for all Twitter users and you can simply delegate this CAPTCHA to your user to solve anyway.
Post reply on HN