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

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151–160 of 488 posts

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

#151
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…

It seems to me that as a subject pool, Twitter is extremely bad (like other options that researchers tend pick out of frugality, like Mechanical Turk). Why use it at all?

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

#152
post #24

[flagged]

And that's what they're relying on. Companies who rely on the twitter API to have no choice but to pay up to stay afloat

Well that is their fault for basing their entire business on someone else’s API.

Twitter’s API terms are subject to change and now it has become a paid service. So it is time for those companies to pay up.

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

#153
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not that obvious, if I was in the same position I wouldn't cut API access, if I was thinking about profits. Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully. My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another, and less links back to Twitter. If I woke up feeling evil (real…

>My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another,

the real problem from a business standpoint is less people trying stuff out and figuring hey maybe I could actually build a business on this, time to move up to the paid tier.

Also no devs at companies have played with twitter api because devs not going to spend money to play, so never say in meeting actually we can solve this with Twitter's api, we just have pay for a licence and I can write the solution! So maybe business look for other ways to solve problems.

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

#154

- 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)…

API reads/writes don’t generate ad impressions. It’s really that simple. All the bot nonsense is rhetoric.

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

#155

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…

> Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply?

That’s a false equivalency. We agree that he’s allowed to run twitter however he wants to (barring deliberately running into the ground, which is probably illegal).

We just think he’s an idiot in how he goes about it.

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

#156
post #85

One week to the introduction of a paid tier, and I haven't even received an email to notify me of the change. Surely your joking Mr Musk!

At least you got a week of notice, instead of your account suspended and notice two days later.

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

#157
Time to crawl! You can use something like Webrecorder, which IPFS also uses to pin tweets: https://blog.ipfs.tech/announcing-pin-tweet-to-ipfs/

See https://webrecorder.net

Example https://replayweb.page/?source=https%3A%2F%2Freplayweb.page%...

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

#158

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

They are clarifying that it should not affect SSO, but games relying on Twitter SSO are already moving towards deprecating it for fear.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Twitter hasn't my phone number, just checked. Maybe is it because my account is old?

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

#160
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…

No, that's the Premium Search API price (which is for business intelligence/market research like you mentioned) Prices for the new basic API have not been announced yet
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