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Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

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Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#71

Post by dmonitor »

krageon wrote: post #14
anigbrowl wrote: post #3

- announced at 10pm - basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project - No information to help you make that decision This seems like more management by manchild. I strongly suspect that Musk realized his promises of cutting down bots etc. were failing and that they either couldn't or wouldn't develop abuse detection, so he's decided to solve the problem by making it cost money, with the (perhaps desired)…

It's simple: Use the website. It will never stop working because people use it and you can automate and scrape it just fine. Kind of sucks that you have to go through the effort - but then there is no social media corporation that isn't toxic in some way to it's userbase.

I think it’s a terrible move to kill the stuff like postybirb that a lot of people use to make posts on multiple websites at once. they’ll have to either change their workflow to make a tweet (annoying) or just abandon twitter altogether. just makes the website worse for practically no benefit.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#72

Post by zimpenfish »

hmry wrote: post #58

That sucks. I have some personal Twitter automation scripts that only make 20 requests per week or so. No way I could justify paying for API access for something small like that.

I've got a few bots and a timeline archiver - if it's, say, $50 for a year of v1.1 API access, 1000 calls a day, I'd probably sign up for a year just to give people more time to follow the Fedi versions (migrated them in November.) If it works out to more than about $50 a year for my usage, I'm out.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#73

Post by clipsy »

senttoschool wrote: post #2

This is why I will never build a company based around a free API from a for-profit company. I'd never be able to sleep well at night knowing that years of work and all the employees/families that depend on the business is dependent on someone who could wake up one day and decide on a whim to end access.

By the same reasoning, one shouldn’t build a company based on any API, regardless of whether it’s free or paid; the existence of a paid API does not automatically guarantee any future pricing or even availability. One could build a company around a paid API only to have the pricing jacked up 10x or the API shut down or neutered in some critical way and end up in, functionally, the same situation.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#74

Post by indrora »

rsynnott wrote: post #60

Okay, so this one is nearly making me buy into those conspiracy theories that Musk is deliberately breaking Twitter because 4d chess (only nearly; this is incompetence rather than anything else). There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should: - A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting sa…

You may enjoy taking a trip to botsin.space - it's an instance dedicated to beepy bots & their conneseuirs.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#75

Post by angoragoats »

groffee wrote: post #56
dan_pixelflow wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Why? You're freeloading. Pay for the service you use. It's as simple as that.

Ah, yes, freeloading on a service that has been available free of charge for over 16 years and which is now being shut off with a week's notice and with no details regarding the paid plans that will supposedly replace it. Definitely not appropriate for them to be mad about that at all.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#76

Post by cguess »

A huge concern that no one seems to be mentioning is that pretty much all academic data sets that used the Twitter API were required by the TOS to only be released publicly with the tweet ids, not the content of the tweet. Some of these have hundreds of thousands of tweets, and the only way to check the work of the researchers, or to build on it, is to use the api to reseed everything yourself.

With this new policy that practically becomes impossible (the costs would be outrageous for a researcher, much less an individual).

This will have the effect of essentially destroying 15 years worth of social science work that was based on Twitter data, it's all gone.

If you're a researcher who has published a data set with only IDs but have a private version with all tweet data I highly encourage you to publish that internal dataset. I'm putting together some hosting for anyone that needs it, feel free to get in touch and we can take it from there.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#77

Post by dragonwriter »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #36
olliej wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the twitter website goes to great lengths to mangle itself to prevent ad blockers presumably. Of course this used to have the side effect of breaking significant swathes of basic browser UX, especially in areas of accessibility. I assume they’re better now than they once were, but given musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic.

> musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic. I don't see why would he spend more to make website less accessible. Not fixing bugs - yes, just about everyone does so. But breaking it intentionally costs money. Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is.

> Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is.

SpaceX is... an accessible EV? What?

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#78

Post by dragonwriter »

parker_mountain wrote: post #45
Felkomo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is no need for Twitter to allow you to do that for free just because. From a pure business perspective it's either Twitter dies or Elon pays the bills.

From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.

> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem.

Musk is trying to monetize every last aspect of current Twitter possible while cutting costs to stave off bankruptcy that his acquisition made imminent long enough to pivot Twitter into a completely different business model centering on being a payment intermediary, apparently to relitigate his firing twice from X.com before it became PayPal.

He doesn't care about the ecosystem, because its an ecosystem for a completely different busoness than the one he wants Twitter to be. He cares that use of Twitter outside of the 1st party frontends bypasses monetization, so he wants it monetized or gone.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#79

Post by lizzardbraind »

rsynnott wrote: post #60

Okay, so this one is nearly making me buy into those conspiracy theories that Musk is deliberately breaking Twitter because 4d chess (only nearly; this is incompetence rather than anything else). There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should: - A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting sa…

Personally, I like the theory that he's planning to discharge all of the debts he's run up in one fell swoop with a bankruptcy filing.

It will be sad, but not unexpected if the courts let him get away with it. I wish I could buy a house with a mortgage in the house's name, make the house declare bankruptcy, and then keep ownership of it.

Replace "house" with "Twitter", and that's the gambit. Although, the amount of debt that he'll be discharging would be about enough to buy a house for every chronically homeless person in the US.

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