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

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451–460 of 488 posts

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

#451
post #444
post #442

Is there some law which says Musks other assets cannot be seized when the inevitable bankruptcy happens? Is see a lot of "it's 4d chess" comments and I keep thinking: wait, he has all these other assets: in the jurisdictions I live in he would be forced to meet his debts from Tesla and spacex shares.

The debt is Twitter's, not Musk's personally.

Fair. I didn't understand his cretinous allies had let him avoid any personal liability. I almost hope he does wreck it so that Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi investors takes a bath. Schadenfreude.

https://www.afr.com/technology/looming-twitter-interest-paym....

But, he's got $26b in it. He won't retain control unless he stands by the debts of the others, he'll be last in line for repayment if he wants to own it according to the AFR write up.

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

#452
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though a lot of the API usage is for content scraping, analytics and surveillance ("we are monitoring the internet for you")

You're sounding very confident, so I'm guessing you have a source for that claim? Besides, even if 90% of the API usage is for scraping and does not impact the bottomline, it's still a smart business decision to leave the API open if the remaining 10% are for posting content that brings in views and thus ad impressions that generate more money than the API costs to run.

It's the main usage described in the "Twitter Files" (internal docs of Twitter which were openly leaked on Twitter).

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

#453
post #215

- 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…

I would honestly love to see a poll of Mastodon users just to see if they understand that administrators can read everything in an instance, even direct messages between users.

It's going to take a few scandals for this to sink in, but it's such a recipe for disaster.

On Twitter, you at least know that it's only three letter agencies reading your DMs. On Mastodon, it could be some Reddit moderator type that makes it their life mission to destroy you.

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

#454
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…

I would honestly love to see a poll of Mastodon users just to see if they understand that administrators can read everything in an instance, even direct messages between users. It's going to take a few scandals for this to sink in, but it's such a recipe for disaster. On Twitter, you at least know that it's only three letter agencies reading your DMs. On Mastodon, it could be some Reddit moderator type that makes it…

How is that any different from threaded news groups, forums, and reddit threads?

And because this must be true for every admin on every server on the internet... thank you dang (when you read this)!

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

#455

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.

Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel. 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.

You’re right I haven’t. The overall harms caused by social media far outweigh any personal interest in knowing the actual discord they cause or worse having that information misused so our personal autonomy suffers.

Feel free to take me not seriously. I don’t particularly care that much about this or that. I said what I wanted.

Use that for research x 7 billion people.

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

#456
post #422

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…

One thing to consider: 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…

That’s Musk cult speech, cut that out.

Your boss messed up again, not knowing the community norms and thinking it won’t be a big deal, and it was, and his subordinates are running around rolling it back.

And you’re trying to set a new narrative for damage control. STFU and go away.

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

#457
post #430

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…

IIRC, puppeteer/webdriver things generally work by injecting JS through extension, and their presence can be detected by looking for those objects/functions from JS.

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

#458
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…

IMHO, the name isn’t necessary. Getting names called and deeds attributed is part of the plan, so take steps to not follow the plan if you aren’t trying to be supportive.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Every person visiting twitter.com is using this same token. Be interesting to see if that stays the same when they're charging for the API but leaving a huge loophole with this token.

Twitter is not alone in using GraphQL this way, having all website visitors use the same token or key. Other websites do it, too, as shown below.

Using GraphQL like this can be an effective dark pattern because to anyone using a "modern" browser that "tech" commpanies control it makes it seem like the text of the website cannot be retrieved without Javascript enabled. That's false, but nonetheless it gets people to enable Javascript because the website explicitly asks them to enable it. Then the website, i.e., "tech" company, can perform telemetry, data collection, surveillance, and other shenanigans.

Sometimes this practice might not be a deliberate dark pattern, it might just be developers who are using Javascript gratuitously. For example, HN search provided by Algolia uses GraphQL. HN puts URLs with pre-selected query terms and a public token ("API key") on the HN website. Everyone that uses those URLs uses the same key.

Unlike Twitter, HN istelf does not ask anyone to enable Javascript. The website works fine without it, including the Algolia search, as shown below.

Usage is

   1.sh query > 1.json

   #!/bin/sh

   curl -A "" -d '{"query":"$@","analyticsTags":["web"],"page":0,"hitsPerPage":30,"minWordSizefor1Typo":4,"minWordSizefor2Typos":8,"advancedSyntax":true,"ignorePlurals":false,"clickAnalytics":true,"minProximity":7,"numericFilters":[],"tagFilters":["story",[]],"typoTolerance":"min","queryType":"prefixNone","restrictSearchableAttributes":["title","comment_text","url","story_text","author"],"getRankingInfo":true}' "https://uj5wyc0l7x-3.algolianet.com/1/indexes/Item_production_sort_date/query?x-algolia-agent=Algolia%20for%20JavaScript%20(4.0.2)%3B%20Browser%20(lite)&x-algolia-api-key=8ece23f8eb07cd25d40262a1764599b1&x-algolia-application-id=UJ5WYC0L7X"

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

#460
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IIRC, puppeteer/webdriver things generally work by injecting JS through extension, and their presence can be detected by looking for those objects/functions from JS.

Isn’t there a stealth plugin that can hide the injected JavaScript?
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