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Twitter's API is down?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Twitter's API is down?

#351

Post by tumult »

Nextgrid wrote: post #197
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…

You will have 2 problems with this: 1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement. 2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approva…

1) The Supreme Court's 2021 ruling of Van Buren vs United States CFAA ended the era of the CFAA being used as a legal tool to stop interoperability.

2) You can use another company's marks, names, etc. to indicate your product works with their product. You have to follow some guidelines.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#352

Post by kredd »

heystefan wrote: post #286
numpad0 wrote: post #157

Is this potentially retaliatory to negative responses to recent Twitter Blue changes? I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way, which resulted in non-subscribers removing and blocking subscribers. I’ve also seen that some users were subscribing Blue expecting their deboosting penalties to clear, only for it to be worsened. That weakly suggests to me that Blue subscriber d…

> I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way What way is that? Looks the same on my end.

Basically replies of subscribers get pushed to the top, so if you do a quick scroll you’ll see as if everyone is subscribed. If you expand, you’ll see everyone else.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#353

Post by Jcowell »

SllX wrote: post #339
numpad0 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter allowing ban evasion and discussions about it had been a real clever move IMO. Users make a lot of noises and calls for exodus, none working, because it always happens inside the very platform.

It was real clever how they revoked the only means I was willing to access their service. Good for them, really sticking to their guns and committing to that “burn it all down and let God sort it out” approach.

By accessing an external client do you count as a monetizable user?

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#354

Post by _djo_ »

h0h0h0h0111 wrote: post #173
manholio wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reddit's usage is heavily oriented toward silos though, being the subreddits that people subscribe to, and the most controversial are excluded from the All feed.

It doesn't have the same dynamics as Facebook and Twitter in terms of how posts/tweets/ideas get spread out all over the network.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#356

Post by SllX »

Jcowell wrote: post #353
SllX wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was real clever how they revoked the only means I was willing to access their service. Good for them, really sticking to their guns and committing to that “burn it all down and let God sort it out” approach.

By accessing an external client do you count as a monetizable user?

If Twitter tried, yes. I already paid for a client app, why wouldn’t I pay for the server access?

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#357

Post by nathanvanfleet »

rsynnott wrote: post #240

It's worth noting that we've been here before; back in 2012 Twitter attempted to curtail third party clients (albeit in a far more organised, less haphazard way): https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-4 Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a…

> We'll see if new leadership learns the same lesson

We'll see if new leadership is capable of learning any lesson at all

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#358

Post by alkonaut »

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.

If something is built as a browser extension and the requests it sends look like the browser would normally then it must be hard to detect.

The requirement for the extension/plug-in has to be that: it looks like someone uses Twitter normally.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#359

Post by dcormier »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #357
rsynnott wrote: post #240

It's worth noting that we've been here before; back in 2012 Twitter attempted to curtail third party clients (albeit in a far more organised, less haphazard way): https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-4 Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a…

> We'll see if new leadership learns the same lesson We'll see if new leadership is capable of learning any lesson at all

Narrator: They are not.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#360

Post by ryukafalz »

marban wrote: post #253
rsynnott wrote: post #240

It's worth noting that we've been here before; back in 2012 Twitter attempted to curtail third party clients (albeit in a far more organised, less haphazard way): https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-4 Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a…

I was the creator of Twidroyd (First and biggest Android Twitter app w/ ~70% marketshare) and there was a larger story behind the first big anti-3rd party move. Basically we had some plans to bring users over to a new network after we got acquired by Idealab — and Twitter got wind of it. Think Mastodon 2010 style.

And Facebook 2007(?)-style: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...
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