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Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

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Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#721

Post by yuuuuuuuu »

zeven7 wrote: post #654
HWR_14 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Musk a major investor in OpenAI? If he said "my data feeds chatgpt, not its competitors", that would make sense, right?

He's been somewhat critical of OpenAI. Specifically the part about it pivoting to a for-profit business. > I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636047019893481474 > I donated the first $100M to OpenAI when it was a non-profit, but have no ownership or control h…

> He's been somewhat critical of OpenAI. Specifically the part about it pivoting to a for-profit business.

Because it was thereby starting to compete with his own for-profit.

He was even asking for a moratorium for 6 months so his company could catch up.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#722

Post by syspec »

kakakiki wrote: post #599

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

Is twitter worth scraping though for AI? I mean, Reddit I get, but twitter content has suuuuch a low signal to noise ratio.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#723

Post by maxlin »

yuuuuuuuu wrote: post #711
benjaminwootton wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon has a good point there. Much of the current AI hotness is predicated on stealing peoples content and exploiting the infrastructure that other people have built. I don’t think it’s acceptable. The licenses, compensation models, law, technical solutions, attribution, security and privacy all need time to catch up. Regulation has a role to play as its a bit of a free for all right now. The irony of Elon mentioning…

This could easily be solved by making the unauthenticated access hard for machines to consume, like introducing delays or some kind of captcha or even just proof of work (reverse some hash). While the authenticated get all the snappiness they want. I'm strictly anti account, so he just lost me as audience. The next walled garden after Facebook and Instagram that won't ever see me again.

It already was semi-hard to machine-read, that is the reason I use Nitter for doing my small-scale continuous scraping of twitter which is now temporarily broken. Nitter is tons easier to parse as it's not reliant on JS, etc, and simpler to create screenshots of with headless chrome.

However if you mean implementing some even worse obfuscation (kind of like FB putting parts of words in different divs etc) that is not really compatible with the situation that this needed to be done as more of a temporary emergency measure. And PoW doesn't sound reasonable because it sets mobile devices against the scraper's servers. If all of this was just so easy, scraping would be dead. Good that it isn't.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#724

Post by troupo »

rchaud wrote: post #274
seanthemon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it but I just can't get into the flow of things, it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? I just want to expel my bowels and doom scroll bad funny memes

> it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. It always looks like there's a lot happening all the time but look deeper and it's a bunch of people offering their weak takes on hot topics to build their brand. What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitt…

> We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter.

I never cared about algorithmic engagement.

Before (and during) the engagement Twitter:

- has everyone you needed there, centralised

- has search, where you can find people and topics you care about

Mastodon has none of that: you have to know which server to join and how to find people and topics. Centralization always beats distribution in convenience.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#726

Post by 7e »

kakakiki wrote: post #599

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

This is a direct consequence of Elon gutting Twitter's infrastructure.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#727

Post by yuuuuuuuu »

maxlin wrote: post #723
yuuuuuuuu wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could easily be solved by making the unauthenticated access hard for machines to consume, like introducing delays or some kind of captcha or even just proof of work (reverse some hash). While the authenticated get all the snappiness they want. I'm strictly anti account, so he just lost me as audience. The next walled garden after Facebook and Instagram that won't ever see me again.

It already was semi-hard to machine-read, that is the reason I use Nitter for doing my small-scale continuous scraping of twitter which is now temporarily broken. Nitter is tons easier to parse as it's not reliant on JS, etc, and simpler to create screenshots of with headless chrome. However if you mean implementing some even worse obfuscation (kind of like FB putting parts of words in different divs etc) that is not…

> And PoW doesn't sound reasonable because it sets mobile devices against the scraper's servers.

Scraper servers and mobile devices have different access patterns though. I I'm reading tweets then I'm fine waiting 1 second for a tweet to load. Page load times for this kind of bloated stuff are super slow anyway, meanwhile my mobile could spend a second or two on some PoW. But if you want to large-scale scrape, you suddenly have to pay for 1bn CPU seconds. And this PoW could even keep continuously increasing per IP. 0.1% with every tweet. Not noticeablr for the casual surfer sitting on the toilet, neck-breaking for scrapers.

> If all of this was just so easy, scraping would be dead. Good that it isn't.

Small-scale scraping could still be provided through API access or just a login.

The reason they are not doing the "easy" thing is that they don't see a need (yet, perhaps). Just get an account, they'd say, and they are right. It works for Instagram too, except for some weirdos who nobody really cares about.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#728

Post by system2 »

nunez wrote: post #110

This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(

HN can run on a $10 droplet with cloudflare cdn. It is a text based forum with relatively low volume visitors.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#729

Post by berkle4455 »

kakakiki wrote: post #599

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

Amusing that I called precisely the cause well before Elon tweeted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542697) and was downvoted for it.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#730

Post by guax »

oefrha wrote: post #686
zerd wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they killed the API, what did they think would happen? It's easier to control access and rate limit with a proper API.

You think companies massively scraping right now would respect API rate limit?

API rate limits are more easily enforceable. If they keep scraping there are methods to detect and thwart behaviour. I don't think twitter has the appropriate talent and work environment to allow proper solutions to be implemented. It's all knee jerk reaction to whatever Elon decides.
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