201–210 of 488 posts
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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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.
Does not take much effort. Below is an example using curl. For reading Twitter feeds I just get the JSON and read the "full_text" objects. I have simple custom program I wrote that turns JSON of unlimited size into something like line-delimited JSON so I can use sed, grep and awk on it but HN readers probably prefer jq. For checking out t.co URLs I use HTTP/1.1 pipelining. Usage for reading is something like (but not…
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…
https://i.imgur.com/CE6UCac.png
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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…
When did you start using Twitter? Twitter as we know it today is largely a product of the community and third party developers. Retweets, hashtags, quote tweets, the use of a blue bird symbol; all came from either the community at large or specific third party devs. The fun bots also drive a lot of twitter engagement; honestly they're the only real thing I miss on Mastodon (while some of the most important ones did come across, a lot didn't). Third party software also makes Twitter a support system, a status reporting system... The list goes on.
However, beyond all that, even if there was a good argument for killing the API free tier (there is not), no-one sensible would do it with _one week's notice_. This will alienate even commercial users who would be willing to pay. If you're using your CRM's twitter integration to track customer complaints, say, unless you're huge the free API is probably sufficient today. With one week's notice, even assuming you hear about it the first day (most will not) good look getting a purchase order for the API within a week if your company is even remotely bureaucratic (most are).
The patron saint of Dunning-Kruger presumably thinks it's a good idea, but can't imagine anyone else does.
- 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)…
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 think this every time there’s a “what cool thing should I build with OpenAI’s API?” post. A nice thought, but once OpenAI decides to pull the rug out from under you, it won’t matter what you built.
- 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.
Twitter may be heading closer towards becoming a ghost town.
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> 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…
Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive as you don't typically want the end consumers to see how much profit is being made from them and how much discount is given to wholesalers. Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.
I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.