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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

#141

Post by johannes1234321 »

cercatrova wrote: post #108
parker_mountain wrote: post #45

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…

Twitter API is what publishers use to bring content onto Twitter. That content is a reason why other users visit Twitter. With that content gone, Twitter is a lot less attractive to many.

Will be interesting to observe ... will publishers pay? Will users enjoy without those?

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

#142

Post by Semaphor »

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…

> Most of Twitter's important features (retweets […]) ultimately originated in third party clients,

Not sure about the others, but RTs did not originate with 3rd party clients, but simply organically with users. Back then we did RT @author OriginalText, third party client support for automating this came after it was established and displaying them differently much later.

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

#143

Post by johannes1234321 »

conductr wrote: post #103
rsynnott wrote: post #62

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 don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter in the same way they're additive to Apple at all.

They bring the content users want to consume.

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

#144

Post by enkid »

cercatrova wrote: post #108
parker_mountain wrote: post #45

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…

The gp comment is talking about the indirect benefits of having an API, which is a large number of free developers and researchers help you improve your product at a pretty low cost (compared to if you paid them directly

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

#145

Post by romanovcode »

anigbrowl wrote: post #90
bvoq wrote: post #84

Honestly the amount of money hedge funds and high frequency traders make from twitter is insane. API could be profitable for huge amounts!

Again, they already have an enterprise tier for business intelligence/market research, and have had for years. This is going to crush the providers of small bots, utilities, social science researchers etc, which are generally free or courtesy services. Right now it looks as if they're proposing to start the pricing at $149/month which allows up to 100 search requests a month, going rapidly into the thousands for any…

Wait, what? 1.5 dollars per API query?

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

#146

Post by binarymax »

jmeister wrote: post #127
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

This is mostly untrue. While it’s possible to stay anonymous you need a phone number, and it can’t be from twilio or other services. It’s been this way for years. I strongly suspect the bots that are unverified use headless browsers. The problem won’t go away.

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

#147

Post by JamesMcMinn »

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…

I created the Events2012 dataset which has around 120,000,000 tweets reduced from an original sample of several billion. It is now over 10 years old, but still cited and still requested fairly regularly.

Previously, my response has been to send over the Tweet IDs, but now I have a dilemma because I understand the privacy concerns that resulted in the ID only policy but also think that Twitter data offers quite a lot of value to researchers. Interestingly, one of Twitter's policies around this also requires researchers to regularly remove tweets that have been deleted on Twitter from the local copies of their datasets, which of course requires checking each Tweet individually using the API...

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

#148

Post by dividedbyzero »

moomoo11 wrote: post #129
dividedbyzero wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think so. I'd just miss out on more and filtering what's relevant and what isn't would be more time-consuming (I can scan 2-3 sentences in a Tweetdeck cell a lot quicker than a rambling blog post in heavily styled blog). If there's something I need/want to know in detail, I'll read up on it and maybe research further, so that wouldn't change, but I'd have a harder time finding these things and I'd probably spot emerging trends later (that's what Twitter conversations tend to be pretty useful for).

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

#149

Post by bantunes »

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…

He's a troll, so whatever the outcome he'll be able to say it was his intent all along (as trolls do).

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

#150

Post by hyperpape »

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

If no researchers studied Twitter, that would be a massive failure to analyze a major piece of online activity. I believe that no one giving even basic thought to what researchers do would endorse what you just said.
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