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

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111–120 of 488 posts

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

#111
I have a hard time believing that bots were using the free API and Twitter wasn't able to shut them down easily. Even a mediocre programmer could do that.

Anyway, almost nothing Elon Musk has said about Twitter seems plausible and this also doesn't.

I'm on the fence if he's trying to just generate as much cash flow as possible (after driving away so much ads money) or if he's actively trying to run Twitter into the ground.

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

#112
post #76

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 t…

Grab them while they are hot. One week left

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

#113

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.

I think this every time there’s a “what cool thing should I build with OpenAI’s API?” post. A nice thought, but once OpenAI decides to pull the rug out from under you, it won’t matter what you built.

> “It’s just an OpenAI/ChatGPT wrapper” is the new “It’s just an AWS wrapper” that would have made you miss a generation of cloud-native companies.

https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1621204449959231493

People who build on top of them will have stacked cash in the meantime, even if the API does eventually get pulled.

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

#114
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

I'd love to have free API access to all kinds of companies.

Think how much easier and faster it would be booking your travel if all airlines and hotels let you straight in to the raw pricing and availability data from their reservation systems.

Think how much money you could save if retailers exposed all their product availability and pricing data, live.

They don't, because they all regard this stuff as "commercially sensitive".

Why should Twitter be any different?

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

#115

- 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)…

Musks promises of cutting down on bots only mattered to him and to the degree he made a big deal about it. He could have declared victory whenever and been done with it. Who would have argued.

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

#116
At some point I saw speculation that the idea is to turn twitter into some sort of super-app like wechat. If that is true then it makes sense to button down loose "ecosystem" thingies that were setup during a more innocent and hopeful era.

This will probably destroy a whole bunch of use-cases and motivations for people and organizations to use twitter, but might retain enough of a core (mostly low-information) user base to seed what will practically be an entirely new venture but one with a recognizable name. There might, for example, be new API's, for corporates to push product algorithmically and embed instant, buy now - pay later, buttons.

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

#117
post #76

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 t…

Maybe they should’ve considered whether it was wise to tie they research to a company that might not exist in 5 years

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

#120
is it really that hard to just not use twitter?

I swear to god replace meth with twitter and it’s sad how many addicts there are.

Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel.

Making bots? Try building something new in the AI space.

Need to reach your customers in case your service is down? Just use a different host for ur status.whatever.com and email/sms/whatever else them.

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