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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

#431

Post by anigbrowl »

romanovcode wrote: post #145
anigbrowl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, they already have an enterprise tier for business intelligence/market research, and have had for years. This is going to crush the providers of small bots, utilities, social science researchers etc, which are generally free or courtesy services. Right now it looks as if they're proposing to start the pricing at $149/month which allows up to 100 search requests a month, going rapidly into the thousands for any…

Wait, what? 1.5 dollars per API query?

Please disregard, that was an existing tier in their mid-term search API and I mixed up the free (100 requests/month) with the basic (500/month) due to fatigue. The latest (per a Musk tweet some hours ago) is '$100 month plus you have to submit your ID.'

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

#432

Post by callalex »

ajmurmann wrote: post #268
Yabood wrote: post #57

We have a business that relies on the Twitter API. I don’t mind paying to access the API, but the way they’re handling this makes me want to deprecate support for Twitter entirely. I am only learning about this change from this thread. Even worse, we only have 7 days to react.

This! The most striking thing about many of Musk's changes at Twitter isn't the idea behind the change but the appallingly bad execution. Things get rolled out practically over night with no explanation or warning. Same with the unannounced policy changes a few weeks ago. It's as if he'd not only never run a company, but never even worked at one. It feels like the intern is running the ship. Edit: typo "bag" => "bad"

And yet people want me to trust his software to drive a vehicle!

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

#433

Post by 2devnull »

anigbrowl wrote: post #401
nailer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 asser…

I think the person you’re responding to was trying to help you be more persuasive. You can ignore his advice, but it may mean that a lot of people just ignore you or think you’ve got nothing to say.

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

#434

Post by Justsignedup »

I think the main reasoning behind this is to get news orgs to pay to get their articles pushed to twitter. And its less costly than hiring someone to do it.

The point is, as with everything musk, EVERYTHING IS POORLY THOUGHT THROUGH!

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

#435

Post by mturmon »

anigbrowl wrote: post #401
nailer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 asser…

Yeah, I think use of that term is warranted by the facts. No need to sugar-coat it.

Indeed, I'd wish that the HN community was more hostile to Musk's bulldozer approach, seeing what it did to both the company, and the engineers. The whole affair has been needlessly destructive -- obnoxiously so -- and his getting away with it harms the profession.

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

#436

Post by nonbirithm »

Jach wrote: post #199
klez wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm intrigued. How does Japan Twitter works differently than western Twitter? Can you shed some light or provide a link to read about it?

I'm not sure it's all that different, just maybe you see more of it if you interact with JP twitter? Like artists use integrations to share their art on twitter and elsewhere, and lots of various services/games/survey-things prefer or require you to use twitter login instead of making you sign up with them directly and they use the API on their backend for various things. But that happens outside Japan too. I just wo…

> As a JP music fan it makes me happy that so many use youtube these days rather than niconico.

Exactly this, it would be a huge loss if those creators ran away to various obscure Japanese social sites. NicoNico's interface is simply inferior to YouTube's for consuming (they still gate now-ubiquitous UI niceties like thumbnail previews behind a monthly subscription) and it's a huge drag to have to use multiple sites to check everyone's feed for updates. And JP creators frequently have stipulations that their content can't be rehosted anywhere, so you have to fight the bad UX of those obscure sites just to find what you're looking for. It was a coincidental blessing that sites like YouTube Twitter that have (or used to have) a good API and discovery interface saw mass adoption by JP users.

(I know this sounds like an argument against decentralized social networking, because it is.)

Not to mention that JP Twitter really does feel like it has way less drama than the English-speaking side. For me it's just a constant feed of art updates and the occasional meme. Maybe it's because it's impossible for Anglosphere politics to catch on to the same degree over there. It would be a huge loss if a good portion of them moved away.

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

#437

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #341
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does not take much effort. Below is an example using curl. For reading Twitter feeds I just get the JSON and read the "full_text" objects. I have simple custom program I wrote that turns JSON of unlimited size into something like line-delimited JSON so I can use sed, grep and awk on it but HN readers probably prefer jq. For checking out t.co URLs I use HTTP/1.1 pipelining. Usage for reading is something like (but not…

What happens if/when they block that Bearer token?

The token has been the same since at least 2020 when Twitter started using GraphQL instead of REST.

Every person visiting twitter.com is using this same token. The token is neither personal nor private.

What would be the point of changing or blocking it.

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

#438

Post by px1999 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #408
kibwen wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This market already exists (I get spam offering customer lead lists every couple of days). I suspect most orgs of a reasonable size are already being bombarded similarly.

Augmenting these lists with Twitter's data might improve/expand the lists bur won't create much extra value imo, because the demand side won't change.

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

#439

Post by mindslight »

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…

> I think it's going to be harder for academic researchers to get institutional approval to scrape adversarially

This is a good point about what might happen, but it seems worthwhile to address and fix directly. Personally I don't see why adversarial scraping of a publicly published website should require any more ethical consideration/review than using the suggested API would. Ethical concerns should revolve around humans, not the business desires of non-human entities.

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

#440

Post by theturtletalks »

tzs wrote: post #430
theturtletalks wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Twitter could add anti-bot protection like Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA. I’ve seen that make a site unusable with Puppeteer. By “unusable” I mean that correctly solving the CAPTCHA either just gives you another CAPTCHA, or gives the “click if you are human” thing, and clicking that just goes to a CAPTCHA or another “click if you are human”. It didn’t even require doing anything to/on the page with Puppeteer. Merely using it…

I actually face the same issue on Firefox with some websites except I’m not using Puppeteer. I thought it was a glitch with Cloudflare but guess not.
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