421–430 of 488 posts
There is also a massive ban wave is going on, some people are claiming to have lost followers overnight in three to four digits and losing following account as well - mostly content creators with years worth of organic posts. Extra salt to the wounds is the horde of spam bots don't seem too affected, if at all, because they don't show up on Firehose too often, which is probably how this newly implemented spam filteri…
These events where Twitter does something like this trigger visible migration waves, observable from the FediVerse and elsewhere. There are several spikes in graphs over the past few months, that correlate with things like disabling TweetBot et al..
People are giving out advice to those who migrate away from Twitter to unfollow everyone that they were following, but leave the account undeleted to prevent impersonation in the future of a long-standing identity. The unfollowing is in order to not accrue stuff with a zombie account and in order to let the people still sticking with Twitter know that their followers are gone.
This fits with your observations: real followers gone, in a distinct wave, and robot accounts blithely continuing on.
But it means that it isn't banning at all. The people seeing this from the Twitter side and thinking that it's down to some mysterious "ban wave" aren't realizing that people are simply leaving them; voting with their feet. Account figures won't show it, but dropping follower figures and massively curtailed engagement with real people do.
The people who didn't like the politics have gone, or have been ejected. The people who were left exposed to unmoderated attacks have gone. The people who provided or who used the 3rd-party apps have gone. The people who relied upon a free-of-charge API to do all sorts of fun hobbyist and one-person-band things, from pictures of possums every hour to automated posts by artists and content creators, have stated that they're going, and have actually found themselves gone already in some cases within the past 30 hours, well before 2023-02-09.
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.
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.
Luckily the company I worked for was pretty diversified.
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The number of users kept via the API is not as high as people might think, so I would actually agree that if that's the case, then Musk correctly shut off the API for people who weren't bringing in more benefits than the costs they were incurring.
Frankly the guy designed rockets that landed for the first time ever so I think he probably has the brain capacity to make this calculation. He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.
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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
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> 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.
is it really that hard to just not use twitter? I swear to god replace meth with twitter and it’s sad how many addicts there are. Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel. Making bots? Try building something new in the AI space. Need to reach your customers in case your service is down? Just use a different host for ur status.whatever.com and email/sms/whatever else them.
Being able to map the social communication activities of millions of people with well-defined data formats, fine-grained temporal resolution, and in something close to real time is absolutely novel. This jsut says to me you haven't read any serious work in this area.
I wonder how many people have decided that rather than move to Mastodon, Post, Cohost, or any of the other social networks, they don’t really need a Twitter-like service in their lives. How many people are fed up with Twitter and deciding to just drop it rather than move?
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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?
It didn’t even require doing anything to/on the page with Puppeteer. Merely using it to open a browser window and then waiting, and using that browser window by hand during the wait to go visit the site that was using Cloudflare anti-bot protection ran into the problem.