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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

#121

Post by ecmascript »

Very short notice but otherwise I don't get why people are mad that it is going paid only. Try making an API request to Instagram or the other thousands of large websites that doesn't evne have an api.

If you like the service, just pay for it. I pay for a lot of services already and I do not see why Twitter must absolutely be free. Honestly, I prefer a world where people charge for their products because it will make it easier for everyone when people stop expecting great stuff to be free.

I also love how the people who mainly hate on Twitter now is roughly the same people that constantly said "If you don't like how it's being rung, build your own" etc. Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply?

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

#122

Post by altacc »

college_physics wrote: post #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 b…

I think that's nothing more than a pipe dream. It seems that Twitter is bordering dysfunctional internally and is hemorrhaging money at the worst possible time (massive debts to support, slowing economy, less accessible loans). I think Twitter's current strategy is desperately trying to make money and stop the losses.

Many APIs do have price tiers but it depends upon the business model, if the API is the product, or the app is the product and the API drives traffic and use cases. For a super-app, arguably the app is the product & profit generator and an open, free API would support usage of that.

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

#123

Post by esskay »

akmarinov wrote: post #117
cguess wrote: 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

That clearly wasn't even an issue in the past. It's only since Musk took over that theres been anything said on the possibility of Twitter closing up shop, which as we all know frm Musks' well know history of spewing nonsense, will not happen.

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

#124

Post by esskay »

iamevn wrote: post #53
jacooper wrote: post #26

Will this affect SSO with twitter? It should since SSO apps are API V1.1/v2 apps right?

There have been no carveouts announced for SSO. I am migrating as many of my accounts on other websites as I can off of Twitter SSO because it seems likely to me that they'll stop working and I'd lose access to those accounts if I am not proactive.

Thankfully a lot of those sites will still have your email address so you can bet a ton of places will be emailing people asking them to update their accounts this coming week.

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

#125

Post by dividedbyzero »

moomoo11 wrote: post #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.

I use it to keep on top of what my field of work is doing. Since pretty much all companies and many relevant people regularly post concise short updates with relatively little spam I can do that in about half an hour every few days. I could stop using Twitter and check everyone's website/blog/facebook(?) directly, but that would take a lot more time and I don't know where I would even find most of the individuals, I suspect they only use Twitter, and not all companies crosspost either. It would be a real shame to lose that.

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

#126

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

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)…

Your problem could be solved by providing read-only API for free - you don't need to write access to do academic research (unless you want to influence the discourse).

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

#127

Post by jmeister »

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)…

"Free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621259936524300289

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

#128

Post by rkagerer »

anigbrowl wrote: post #15
krageon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actually don't mind scraping it that much, and even enjoy the adversarial aspects of writing scrapers. but it makes a lot of high level functionality like filtered streams or historical search much less accessible; I'd probably never have learned a lot of network analysis stuff over the last decade or so if I'd had to to pay to access streaming data first. Also, I think it's going to be harder for academic research…

It's ironic, for a couple (non-Twitter) projects I wound up scraping because either a) they didn't have an API yet (e.g. early crypto pricing sites) or b) I wasn't confident the API would remain intact over the long term. Kind of depressing.

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

#129

Post by moomoo11 »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #125
moomoo11 wrote: post #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.

I use it to keep on top of what my field of work is doing. Since pretty much all companies and many relevant people regularly post concise short updates with relatively little spam I can do that in about half an hour every few days. I could stop using Twitter and check everyone's website/blog/facebook(?) directly, but that would take a lot more time and I don't know where I would even find most of the individuals, I…

Yeah but wouldn’t your quality of the information you take in go up?

Conversations on twitter are awful especially interesting ones in tech or science with the noise and chaos that always ensues.

Personally I’ve been enjoying using my browsers bookmark manager. I’ve added maybe a hundred bookmarks last year of blogs and whatnot and it’s cool to organize my links and my home tab shows me them easily.

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

#130

Post by npteljes »

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.

I generally feel that if you like to sleep at night, business is not the way to go. I don't see how business people can just do one thing over a long time, and be sustainable. Rather, I see that successful business people (and I don't mean the outliers like Bill Gates) react to changes quickly and constantly adapt to new environments. The nature of their business always changes.

So we enter Business Continuity Plans. The businesses either had that, or they were diverse enough so that one leg failing doesn't mean end of the business.

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