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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

#251

Post by papito »

gonzo41 wrote: post #212
nickjj wrote: post #181

Wow this is disruptive given it's less than 1 week's notice. I've been using a Jekyll plugin for like 4 years to embed tweets on my site. Nothing crazy, just using: https://github.com/rob-murray/jekyll-twitter-plugin Since it uses the API I guess that's going to go away. Sounds like I'll never link another tweet on my site again.

screenshots?

That is horrible. I quite often click on embedded tweets and then end up spending more time on the site. It's literally a cheap lead in for ad exposure. Musk does not seem to understand how this whole Internet thing works.

"If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the ­company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how ­computers work.”

https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover...

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

#252

Post by AstixAndBelix »

I don't understand the problem.

You can either use Twitter's official clients (and get served the ads from which they profit) or you can use a third party tool that uses the ad-less API but for which the developers must pay for each API call in your place.

I'm sure that research bodies and other particular institutions could strike up a deal with Twitter to get access to special keys at a much reduced price or even for free, but this concept of Twitter making avaiable themselves a way to bypass the only way they make money has always seemed crazy to me. Glad they monetized the API.

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

#253

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Jach wrote: post #199
klez wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not sure it's all that different, just maybe you see more of it if you interact with JP twitter? Like artists use integrations to share their art on twitter and elsewhere, and lots of various services/games/survey-things prefer or require you to use twitter login instead of making you sign up with them directly and they use the API on their backend for various things. But that happens outside Japan too. I just wo…

The Twitter sign in stuff will be huge but most of JP Twitter that I'm on doesn't seem to care much. Music probably cares more, but I follow a lot of personalities, voice actors, and artists and they're not that concerned.

Edit: Seems the SSO stuff is unaffected.

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

#254

Post by pessimizer »

crabbone wrote: post #229
clipsy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same reasoning, one shouldn’t build a company based on any API, regardless of whether it’s free or paid; the existence of a paid API does not automatically guarantee any future pricing or even availability. One could build a company around a paid API only to have the pricing jacked up 10x or the API shut down or neutered in some critical way and end up in, functionally, the same situation.

Not OP, but this is definitely not how OP meant the word "free". In the context of Twitter, think about free analogy being newsgroups (if you are young enough not to have witnessed it, in the early days of Internet, your ISP would provide you with email box with some space attached to it and a newsgroup access). Newsgroups were functionally very similar to what Twitter does, i.e. they were designed to share news betw…

Then the OP definitely does not want anything like that, since they said that they hate the idea of building a business around a free API. I think you're mistaken here.

The problem with building a business around a free API from a for-profit company is the rugpull. As a sibling comment mentions, even a paid API can get rugpulled. But I think that what the OP was trying to contrast a free API from a for-profit company with was actually an API from a non-profit company. A non-profit can run forever if it's just breaking even, and is sharing IP, so other people can jump up and replace it if they fail, and you might even be able to install it on your own servers.

edit: I'm not a big Mastodon booster (or even liker), but if you build your business around it, it would be nuts because the customer base is of course tiny at this point, but you run very little management risk from the Mastodon project itself. Whereas your relationship with twitter can be changed on a day to day basis, unilaterally.

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

#255

Post by pjc50 »

senttoschool wrote: post #2

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.

You should never build a company based around phone calls, because one day your phone might get cut off.

You should never build a company around electricity, because one day your electricity might get cut off.

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

#256

Post by m3kw9 »

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…

“ If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation.”

Are these innovations in the room right now?

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

#257

Post by ozim »

masklinn wrote: post #191
b800h wrote: 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.

> He's trying to make it profitable. Might have been smart to not make it unprofitable in the first place.

I think Twitter was never profitable to start with.

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

#258

Post by [deleted] »

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #252

I don't understand the problem. You can either use Twitter's official clients (and get served the ads from which they profit) or you can use a third party tool that uses the ad-less API but for which the developers must pay for each API call in your place. I'm sure that research bodies and other particular institutions could strike up a deal with Twitter to get access to special keys at a much reduced price or even f…

[deleted]

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

#259

Post by Hakkin »

altdataseller wrote: post #202
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can u scrape search feeds too? Ie tweets that match a certain string?

You can scrape anything you see in the UI (and sometimes stuff you cannot see). Twitter makes almost no effort to stop people from using their internal APIs, which is why them saying discontinuing the free public API is to stop malicious bots is pretty laughable. Unless they seriously increase their detection abilities for non-approved clients using their internal API, it would take any malicious actor all of a few hours to transition to using the internal API for whatever they want. Honestly, I assumed most bad actors would already be doing this, since things like spamming were already against the ToS of the public API.

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

#260

Post by octacat »

More like cutting down the alternative clients. Kinda reminds me facebook limiting API access to "protect privacy" (and kill the way to scrap posts, so you can make an app with a different feed ordering). Though, still instagram is full of porn/spam bots with names annapeterson20243324 and the same profile description.
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