Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 488 posts

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

#351

Post by spacephysics »

robga wrote: post #215
anigbrowl wrote: post #3

- 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)…

> basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project Even less for some. It seems further apps are being shut down in the run up because they have "violated Twitter Rules and policies”. Such as movetodon [0] - locked out today - a service which helps you connect to the fediverse accounts of twitter users you follow. And reports that debirdify is closed out too. [0] https://mastodon.social/@Tibor/109800904950…

All things considered, that’s not surprising that a company doesn’t want their free API/resources used to make moving to a competitor easier.

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

#352

Post by philistine »

908B64B197 wrote: post #313
rsynnott wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof. I did a last pass migration last night, and noticed that movetodon was broken then, but I assumed it was due to load, rather than... this. End of an era; Twitter is dead. Whatever is left, it's not Twitter.

> End of an era; Twitter is dead. Whatever is left, it's not Twitter. Am-I the only one surprised the site still hasn't had a major (multi-hour) outage at this point? Considering the waves of resignations that hit the automated content filtering and bot mitigation teams, it's no wonder they are getting desperate.

Many people with large Twitter following who use Twitter as the commenting system for their website (think John Gruber) have complained that Twitter mentions ahve been reduced to nothing. It's a silent failure that no one at Twitter has mentionned or acknowledged.

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

#353

Post by spacephysics »

lizzardbraind wrote: post #79
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…

Personally, I like the theory that he's planning to discharge all of the debts he's run up in one fell swoop with a bankruptcy filing. It will be sad, but not unexpected if the courts let him get away with it. I wish I could buy a house with a mortgage in the house's name, make the house declare bankruptcy, and then keep ownership of it. Replace "house" with "Twitter", and that's the gambit. Although, the amount of d…

I agreed up until the last point. Unfortunately markets don’t work like that, if we say had $1 bn to buy houses for homeless, the cost per house would very quickly go up as supply decreased.

Then there’s the challenge of transporting homeless individuals to other areas where supply is higher.

Furthermore, many homeless people aren’t homeless because the want to be. Many are afflicted with mental and health problems, that quite frankly, a house wouldn’t solve.

I fully agree that there’s an issue, and we need to do something about it, but these oversimplified ways of looking at economics is detrimental to the real discussions we should be having.

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

#354

Post by ryantgtg »

numpad0 wrote: post #324
ryantgtg wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this change affect all access? Like, I have half a dozen bots that only write (post rss items). At first I assumed this was only impacting read access (apps that mimic the twitter app), but now I’m not so sure.

There's no write-only API keys, all keys come with read permission. If you didn't encounter discussion of any of "Key", "Secret", "Token", "CK/CS" while configuring that, and are thinking of apt/yum/brew installable terminal packages and IFTTT and likes, that package or the IFTTT backend are the apps and the maintainers will have to do something about it.

My bots are set up through dev. I wasn't saying my bots don't have read/write access. Just saying that my bots _only_ actually write, and I was hoping I could perhaps still use them for that purpose without having to pay.

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

#355

Post by anigbrowl »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #126
anigbrowl wrote: post #3

- 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)…

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).

Agreed, but I don't think scam and spam bots are using the API anyway - rather puppeteering tools built on Selenium or any of many scraping libraries and toolchains.

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

#356

Post by naasking »

tablespoon wrote: post #348
naasking wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources.

> Twitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources. Would anyone have been able to do that without paying? Years ago, someone told me you could get at most 1% of the "firehose" without paying, and if you paid you could get ~10% (however the free sample wasn't a subset…

I meant that you could reconstruct the moment by moment events after the fact. That's where the value for social science comes in.

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

#357

Post by saryant »

jghn wrote: post #305
capableweb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that obvious, if I was in the same position I wouldn't cut API access, if I was thinking about profits. Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully. My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another, and less links back to Twitter. If I woke up feeling evil (real…

> Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully. This. I had a brief flirtation with working with people using the Twitter API for research purposes. A very large majority of them didn't care about having the latest tweets coming off the firehose, but instead getting access to all the old data. At least at the time, the latter was…

Delivering old tweets is actually more expensive than real-time because nothing is cached. Streaming access is pretty much all served out of memory.

I used to lead the search and historical API team at Twitter.

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

#358

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

logifail wrote: post #312
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you'd be bypassing their advertising. Right. So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?

I wouldn't say that it's necessarily 'wrong', but I do think it's a bad decision. The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them and generate bad will towards Twitter.

In some ways it reminds me of the Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast licensing shenanigans where the business is annoying people building an ecosystem around their products which arguably adds a lot of value.

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

#359

Post by anigbrowl »

b800h wrote: post #132
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cutting things that bring people in is a false economy though. It's like a restaurant owner deciding the wait staff should have to pay to work there.

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

#360

Post by shortlived »

jmeister wrote: post #127
anigbrowl wrote: post #3

- 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)…

"Free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621259936524300289

Why are people downvoting jmeister who is just quoting Musk. Don’t shoot the messenger.
Post reply on HN