191–200 of 488 posts
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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.
Might have been smart to not make it unprofitable in the first place.
"tax what you want less of"
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Sure. Is that person going to run it for free alone in his basement? It's not only the code base. It's employees, servers, processes, data... Even if you get twitter for free, you still need to pay to run it.
The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable. Even if they went bust and the service would be unavailable for a year, the social graph and brand value are important. One reason Mastodon and others have trouble is that people don't want to follow random people, they want to follow the same people they did on Twitter. It's their community. Certain communities did make a successful switch, like Apple and Tech journali…
I've used the API since then for on-off things, but the one I'm sore about now is a little Python script I've had running in a nightly cronjob for years that I've used to make local copies of images/videos from tweets I starred (now heart'd). It's a simple bit of code to get all my favorites and download any new ones. (If I recall correctly you need to get all of them, because the response doesn't necessarily give them to you in the order you liked them, so if today you like an old tweet from say 2012 you might have to paginate a while to get it in the response.) Looks like the json of all ~9800 liked tweets I build up to parse for new URLs is 1.5 MB gzipped, it's true their API returns a lot of unnecessary extra data. Currently debating with myself whether to cobble together a new script from one of the existing scrapers (gallery-dl might be easiest), or say screw it and write some Lisp code (more stable than Python) to fire up Selenium and waste more of twitter's bandwidth pretending to be a full browser.
One of my first programming jobs involved helping the boss make a twitter sharecropping service. I remember at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I was doing something else by then but it was a good warning to not let myself ever depend too much on sharecropping; over the years I've seen a lot of people learn that lesson the hard way. I've used…
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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 produc…
Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.
One of my first programming jobs involved helping the boss make a twitter sharecropping service. I remember at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I was doing something else by then but it was a good warning to not let myself ever depend too much on sharecropping; over the years I've seen a lot of people learn that lesson the hard way. I've used…
I remember. We shelved the product idea we had because of that.
There were a couple API changes that disrupted development and it became clear that betting the company on someone else's API was a terrible idea.
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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.
Twitter wouldn't die if they don't pay bills, someone would buy it for huge discount. It seems like it would be the best way forward, depending on who would buy it. A lot of people don't follow news or Elon drama, the brand still has a lot of value. Especially abroad where news about Elon are much fewer.
Twitter probably doesn't care about non US stuff, but RIP Japan Twitter. They use the free API for so much. J Twitter is frantically telling all the people to use non Twitter accounts before they lose access.
I'm intrigued. How does Japan Twitter works differently than western Twitter? Can you shed some light or provide a link to read about it?
- 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)…
