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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

#291

Post by ianburrell »

ozim wrote: post #257
masklinn wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Twitter can be profitable. It made over billion dollars in both 2018 and 2019 on revenues of $3 billion. 2020 was big loss but can blame the pandemic. 2021 was small loss but would have been profitable except for lawsuit settlement.

Without Musk, Twitter would likely have been profitable in 2022. No extra debt, no fleeing advertisers, no massive cuts. Some layoffs like everyone else is doing would probably have been enough.

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

#292

Post by flir »

kibwen wrote: post #266
pessimizer wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website is awful. It's horrific. It was the worst site I visited regularly until I started using Nitter instances. I'd rather not know what is going on than go to it. I wish they'd wind the UI back 10 years, to back when it was pleasant to browse.

I look forward to someone teaching Elon Musk what version control is, resulting in him wholesale rolling back Twitter's entire stack to 2008. At last, Twitter is written in Ruby again!

I too miss the fail whale.

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

#294

Post by geraldwhen »

anigbrowl wrote: post #15
krageon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually don't mind scraping it that much, and even enjoy the adversarial aspects of writing scrapers. but it makes a lot of high level functionality like filtered streams or historical search much less accessible; I'd probably never have learned a lot of network analysis stuff over the last decade or so if I'd had to to pay to access streaming data first. Also, I think it's going to be harder for academic research…

Also quality residential proxies are pricey. You need to rate limit and rotate both IP and puppeteer fingerprint when adversarially scraping.

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

#297

Post by hgsgm »

ianburrell wrote: post #291
ozim wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Twitter was never profitable to start with.

Twitter can be profitable. It made over billion dollars in both 2018 and 2019 on revenues of $3 billion. 2020 was big loss but can blame the pandemic. 2021 was small loss but would have been profitable except for lawsuit settlement. Without Musk, Twitter would likely have been profitable in 2022. No extra debt, no fleeing advertisers, no massive cuts. Some layoffs like everyone else is doing would probably have been…

2020 was great for most online product revenue. Why is Twitter different?

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

#298

Post by unboxingelf »

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%...

Aside: can someone explain to me how IPFS, in this specific case, is any better than a typical 3rd party service storing the data?

The linked announcement says they use a pinning service “web3.storage”. Web3.storage says it stores data on FileCoin. Neither website tells me how and where the actual data is stored, except “IPFS”.

From reading the IPFS docs, a pinning service is akin to a node that has a copy of the files and is always online. If your decentralized network relies on a central node(s), how is this decentralized?

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

#299

Post by jillesvangurp »

ecmascript wrote: post #121

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…

Exactly. The way I see it, Twitter was a zombie company for quite a few years. Not sustainable the way it was. Lots of bots, obnoxious people, scammers, spammers, etc. and not a whole lot of positive stuff happening from a business point of view. Bloated big silicon valley company long out of ideas on how to fix things. Hiring more people and trying to be woke clearly wasn't helping.

The notion that this could just have gone on as is was never a plan. Musk is applying shock therapy to maybe nudge it in the direction of resembling a healthy company again. Maybe he'll kill the company. Maybe it will work. But this is better than the failed social experiment it had turned into. The API of course had some valid uses but it was also the tool of choice for bots, advertisers, marketing bureaus, etc. The message is very clear for those: you are welcome to stay but expect to pay for the privilege. I think this probably gets rid of a lot of crap.

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

#300

Post by hgsgm »

pessimizer wrote: post #241
krageon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The website is awful. It's horrific. It was the worst site I visited regularly until I started using Nitter instances. I'd rather not know what is going on than go to it. I wish they'd wind the UI back 10 years, to back when it was pleasant to browse.

The point is that the website is an API, irrelevant if it is a good or bad UI.
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