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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

#271

Post by flangola7 »

mlrtime wrote: post #185
binarymax wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is trivial to buy 1000's of phone numbers with SMS all available through APIs. You don't even need to keep them. The grey web is filled with many of these services. If I looked hard enough I could probably buy 10000 verified twitter accounts with API access right now, aged 1 year or older.

Where can you buy actual mobile phone numbers? (Not VoIP numbers)

I would think mobile carriers keep that in their own house

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

#272

Post by bruce343434 »

naasking wrote: post #227
tgv wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the paper showing that Twitter activity slightly predicted stock movements was incredibly interesting and valuable to know. I'm sure there are plenty of other papers as well, like analyses of Arab spring?

link to the stock movement one?

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

#273

Post by kibwen »

rchaud wrote: post #54
smoldesu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world? Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their…

Apple can nickel and dime developers because a good app on their ecosystem is profitable. Nobody is making enough profit via the Twitter API to make it worth staying on. Twitter is a distant #3 social network that itself has never really made money.

> Twitter is a distant #3 social network

This is being too generous. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all far larger than Twitter. Reddit is also just barely larger than Twitter, though at that scale you have to consider who has more bots. Twitter claims slightly more MAUs than Snapchat, but since Snapchat isn't a viral network it probably has no bots to speak of, making it larger than Twitter in terms of real users.

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

#274

Post by insane_dreamer »

this was clearly telegraphed some weeks ago when they cut off Twitter apps (Tweetbot at the like).

Not a good way to go about it in order to engender good will, but I would never recommend building something that you expect to last forever around a free API by a for-profit company (which could be cut at any time). We've seen this movie before.

As for Twitter's demise, I wouldn't count on it. I noticed a toot on Mastodon from someone I used to follow on Twitter mentioning they had 150K followers on Twitter and 1/10th of that on Mastodon. This person is a very harsh Elon (and Tesla) critic, so if anyone were to leave Twitter in protest it would be them. But that would mean losing a 150K audience, so not gonna happen (it's an influence, not money question).

I myself did drop Twitter (though I didn't delete my account mostly in case I want to look someone up there) for Mastodon, but find that I go very little to Mastodon anyway (doesn't have anywhere near Twitter's breadth of content). So basically I've dropped Twitter-like engagement altogether, which is a ReallyGoodThingTM because it was a time sync that added very little value to my life. But I think I'm in a very small minority; most people want to stay connected. I'm still on IG (family/friends photos), and HN (interesting content), but that's it.

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

#275

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

logifail wrote: post #210
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive [..] 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.

I've heard that they do a lot of price manipulation with holidays, so I can see why they wouldn't want to provide enough data for customers to track prices over time. Also, you'd be bypassing their advertising.

But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.

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

#276

Post by Vespasian »

college_physics wrote: post #248
Vespasian wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also regulators in on some of Twitters core markets (EU and US) are not to fond of ginormous Techconglomerates at the moment and might have a few words to say about that. In fact the EU recently passed laws to nip budding "market dominant companies" before they take out all of the competition and bundle lots of unrelated services. The political climate soured with regards to Big Tech and that's happening across party…

The perplexing thing is that all these headwinds are fairly well known and for some time (even though probably internalized more by participants in this particular forum). So this raises the question whether there was any rationality attached to the infamous $44bln purchase. One could hypothesise that it was just a random, discretionary action, made possible by an insane system that has lost any sense of value, purpo…

I'm in the "impulsive purchase including buyers remorse" camp. Also yes (wo)men in Elons Musks inner circle who are unable to contradict him.

Now that the deals i done he needs to make the best of it (for his ego but also for Tesla control reasons).

What will come of it remains to be seen. It could still end in a number of ways

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

#277

Post by kibwen »

Ciantic wrote: post #47
aspyct wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable.

This seems to be taken as given, but how specifically would you expect someone to simply monetize the social graph? Just because data exists doesn't mean that anyone wants to pay for it.

As for the value of the brand itself, we could say the same thing about Yahoo in 2010.

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

#278

Post by dmitriid »

m3kw9 wrote: post #256
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?

Everything that Twitter is right now is built on top of third-party innovations in the space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640515

Twitter's own app is a third-party acquisition.

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

#279

Post by TwiceCubed »

octacat wrote: post #260

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.

[dead]

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

#280

Post by kibwen »

brutuscat wrote: post #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%...

Headlines one week from now: "Twitter announces they will be discontinuing the web interface"
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