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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

#401

Post by anigbrowl »

nailer wrote: post #267
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)…

> This seems like more management by manchild. You have good points and can probably make them without resorting to insults.

I can, but made a choice to be opinionated here. The CEO of Twitter leverages clownishness for effect, titling himself (at present) as 'Mr Tweet' and uninhibitedly trolling others, often in crude or aggressive terms. While I could take a Ghandian approach of not reciprocating such negative behavior and instead maintain a diplomatic/academic air of prim neutrality, I think Musk's behavior is strategic in that he asserts social permission to 'act out' as the natural consequence of his wealth and power, whereas his critics are obliged to water down their opinions or suffer reputational attack.

While I certainly don't want to import the combative and shallow standards of Twitter 'debate' to HN, I do think we have a right tp be opinionated, and that my the term 'manchild' labels a specific sort of behavior rather than some petty or crude dig at his appearance or personal life.

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

#403

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Yup. PVAs can be had for a couple of $, with the price going up if they're 'warmed' (with a history of innocuous activity, usually liking celebrity tweets, retweeting the occasional breaking news story or heartwarming puppy video etc).

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

#404

Post by theturtletalks »

spacephysics wrote: post #351
robga wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Very true, they don’t have to give access to their API for free. My question is, why don’t devs use Puppeteer to spin up a Chromium instance and access Twitter’s data that way?

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

#405

Post by anigbrowl »

cercatrova wrote: post #110
anigbrowl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to pay to use Xcode, or to run apps on your own devices. If you publish to the app store I think there is a $99/year fee or something to have your app signed, plus they take 30% of your revenue. You don't absolutely need to have your code signed, I can give apps to my friends, they just get a warning about it not being signed and potentially unsafe when it's first installed.

You need to buy a Mac to even develop these apps...

So? You need a computer to run any code at all. I bought a used Mac for very cheap last year, the first Apple product I've owned in ~35 years of working in and around the computer industry. I don't feel ripped off.

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

#407

Post by satvikpendem »

anigbrowl wrote: post #405
cercatrova wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to buy a Mac to even develop these apps...

So? You need a computer to run any code at all. I bought a used Mac for very cheap last year, the first Apple product I've owned in ~35 years of working in and around the computer industry. I don't feel ripped off.

Good for you. In other UI frameworks I don't have to buy their specific hardware just to develop for them.

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

#408

Post by anigbrowl »

kibwen wrote: post #277
Ciantic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dear advertisers, so you want to reach _specific_social_demographic? Good news, I can tell you 500k people who have demonstrated 3 points of identification with that demo in the last 14 days and are minimum 5% likely to interact positively with a promoted tweet from a firm in your market sector.

You can really pull a lot of useful data on someone by just looking at their follow choices, self-identification, and reply/retweeting behavior. And that's before you add all the information Twitter maintains on things like profile views or video plays, or the consistency of entity identification in tweet content etc. I can give you very specific kinds of demographics like 'people who enjoy tweets about dogs and football but not cats or politics.'

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

#409

Post by ramones13 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #404
spacephysics wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true, they don’t have to give access to their API for free. My question is, why don’t devs use Puppeteer to spin up a Chromium instance and access Twitter’s data that way?

That’s part of the reason that “it’s to stop the bots” is BS. Academia and other similar uses will pay or just stop. Bots and other malicious uses will find work-arounds and just change where the game of whack-a-bot is being played.

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

#410

Post by slaymaker1907 »

I can't find any details about the basic API. It's ridiculous to do something like this without giving people concrete details about the paid plan. Also, their current premium plan is astronomically expensive. It's apparently about $150 for 500 requests!
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