131–140 of 488 posts
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.
corollary: never build a company that depends on web scraping
- 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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it. Now they could spend 3 months but w…
But it provide monetary benefits by attracting and keeping users, which encourages ad spend.
Or at least it used to, until the big advertisers were driven away.
If someone is trying to run a business and doesn't understand how indirect income works they might want to consider something less challenging.
What this actually does is remove API access from small startups, solo developers, and other innovators, and reserves it for corporations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the App Store had been free for 15 years and then Apple said "if you don't pay us $100 a year in one week, we'll delete your app" then you can bet that Tim Cook would be seeking new opportunities _within hours_. There's a big difference between "this has always cost something" and "this is going from free to paid with _one week's notice_".
I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter in the same way they're additive to Apple at all. If that's true at all, why would Twitter provide services for free? Why would Apple charge at all? (Especially from the beginning). It's a hard comparison because the value of the Apple ecosystem is so obvious and mutual. Twitter is junk on both sides; unless as a third party dev you just happened to find…
I used to use Tweetbot which has now stopped working, as a result I don't use Twitter any more, the advertisers have lost one extra person to sell to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter in the same way they're additive to Apple at all. If that's true at all, why would Twitter provide services for free? Why would Apple charge at all? (Especially from the beginning). It's a hard comparison because the value of the Apple ecosystem is so obvious and mutual. Twitter is junk on both sides; unless as a third party dev you just happened to find…
Because Twitter makes money from advertising not selling direct to end users. I used to use Tweetbot which has now stopped working, as a result I don't use Twitter any more, the advertisers have lost one extra person to sell to.
Which is aligned with Musk's strategy thus far, but there's also a good argument to be made that that product should have never been needed if twitter was providing a decent first party client. They should have wanted to provide that to control the advertising. Letting the third parties take that up was a poor strategy -- business-wise that is, I get that people may have liked it and have used it for a long time and are probably sad to lose it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Providing a read-only API still costs Twitter money though. He's trying to make it profitable. Seems obvious that stuff like this would be cut.
If I woke up feeling evil (really money seeking) I might add some clause to the terms and conditions that you need to prominently display "Powered by Twitter" if you use the API and aggressively check all websites using Twitter API, one way or another.
But I guess my perspective would be considered more long term while Musks management of Twitter seems to be heavily focused on short term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Other than Twitter losing money every year?
- 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.
Usage for reading is something like (but not identical to)
1.sh screen_name > 1.json
yy059 1.txt
less 1.txt
unset connection
export Connection=keep-alive
yy059 1.htm
links -no-connect 1.htm
Alternatively if I do not trust the URLs I might use a script called "www" instead of ahref. It takes URLs on stdin and fetches archive.org URLs wrapped in simple HTML to stdout, using the IA's cdx API.
#!/bin/sh
SCREEN_NAME=$1
COUNT=500
PUBLIC_TOKEN="Bearer AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANRILgAAAAAAnNwIzUejRCOuH5E6I8xnZz4puTs%3D1Zv7ttfk8LF81IUq16cHjhLTvJu4FA33AGWWjCpTnA"
GT=$(exec curl -A "" -s https://twitter.com/$SCREEN_NAME|sed -n '/gt=/{s/.*gt=//;s/;.*//p;}');
echo "x-guest-token: $GT" >&2;
REST_ID=$(exec curl -A "" -H "authorization: $PUBLIC_TOKEN" -H "content-type: application/json" -H "x-guest-token: $GT" -s "https://twitter.com/i/api/graphql/mCbpQvZAw6zu_4PvuAUVVQ/UserByScreenName?variables=%7B%22screen_name%22%3A%22$SCREEN_NAME%22%2C%22withSafetyModeUserFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withSuperFollowsUserFields%22%3Atrue%7D"|sed 's/\(rest_id\":\"[0-9]*\)\(.*\)/\1/;s/.*\"//');
echo "rest_id: $REST_ID" >&2;
curl -A "" -H "authorization: $PUBLIC_TOKEN" -H "content-type: application/json" -H "x-guest-token: $GT" -s "https://twitter.com/i/api/graphql/3ywp9kIIW-VQOssauKmLiQ/UserTweets?variables=%7B%22userId%22%3A%22${REST_ID}%22%2C%22count%22%3A$COUNT%2C%22includePromotedContent%22%3Atrue%2C%22withQuickPromoteEligibilityTweetFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withSuperFollowsUserFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withDownvotePerspective%22%3Afalse%2C%22withReactionsMetadata%22%3Afalse%2C%22withReactionsPerspective%22%3Afalse%2C%22withSuperFollowsTweetFields%22%3Atrue%2C%22withVoice%22%3Atrue%2C%22withV2Timeline%22%3Atrue%7D&features=%7B%22dont_mention_me_view_api_enabled%22%3Atrue%2C%22interactive_text_enabled%22%3Atrue%2C%22responsive_web_uc_gql_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22vibe_tweet_context_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22responsive_web_edit_tweet_api_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22standardized_nudges_misinfo%22%3Afalse%2C%22responsive_web_enhance_cards_enabled%22%3Afalse%2C%22include_rts%22%3Atrue%7D"
This solution isn't pretty but I can easily keep tabs on Twitter feeds without any need for a Twitter account, a Twitter "API key" or a so-called "modern" browser.