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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

#791

Post by sebzim4500 »

smcl wrote: post #788
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…

Sorry I don’t buy it. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter, and we are to understand that there are an enough people scraping to the extent that they had to suddenly take drastic action by shuttering unauthenticated access? Any dev would have told him that those supposedly scraping could simply setup Selenium or some other headless browser to login before scraping. This smells of another failed Musk experiment…

They could but signing in, even in selenium, means agreeing to twitter's TOS. See the LinkedIn scraping case.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#792

Post by jaggirs »

smcl wrote: post #788
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…

Sorry I don’t buy it. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter, and we are to understand that there are an enough people scraping to the extent that they had to suddenly take drastic action by shuttering unauthenticated access? Any dev would have told him that those supposedly scraping could simply setup Selenium or some other headless browser to login before scraping. This smells of another failed Musk experiment…

Yeah no you cant just 'use selenium'. To keep the same scraping volume you might need thousands of accounts and 10x the compute.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#793

Post by tinus_hn »

dang wrote: post #650
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 isn't next. We hate change. (More precisely: we're acutely aware that users hate change, and since we do too, it's kind of an easy call.) Also, the value of HN to YC consists of the community and keeping the community happy is therefore a must. (Did I say happy? More precisely: as happy as possible under the circumstances)

I don’t know how much running the site costs, but I hope the people paying for it keep agreeing with that sentiment.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#794

Post by ddingus »

fatfox wrote: post #562
ddingus wrote: post #453

Like Quora, I view a whole lot less Quora. This kind of crap is how they lost many of their published top writers. Now Twitter. I am better off for these changes. You can be too. Just log out. It will pass.

I'd like to know what happened to Quora. It's now full of Chat GPT answers and self-proclaimed experts who try to sell you their online course on gemstone energy driven entrepreneurship.

That is what happened. Place is a war zone, far cry from the beautiful thing it once was. A hardy few are still slugging away amidst a rising tide of crap. Unless one knows who is who, they are hard to find.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#795

Post by ddingus »

fatfox wrote: post #562
ddingus wrote: post #453

Like Quora, I view a whole lot less Quora. This kind of crap is how they lost many of their published top writers. Now Twitter. I am better off for these changes. You can be too. Just log out. It will pass.

I'd like to know what happened to Quora. It's now full of Chat GPT answers and self-proclaimed experts who try to sell you their online course on gemstone energy driven entrepreneurship.

Lol gemstone... right!

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#796

Post by xorcist »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #683
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…

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…

Why would an AI company start scraping twitter html, instead of using an already existing archive? Something similar to archive.org could earn money from that. If all you want is the content, there's no reason to suck it through a straw.

I'd expect those that require real time data, such as stock market bots or sentiment data providers, to scrape twitter (if they don't provide the data by other means, for example the "firehose", which is another great way to earn money).

None of this makes much sense.

Also, it's much more complicated than it seems. The web works because the data is public. You cannot think of it as "my data". (Especially not twitter, since it is really their users'!) Twitter is not higher quality data than any other web page.

If we accept that thinking, every home page would require a login to see that specific company's phone number of opening hours. Those pieces of data are also valuable, in the right circumstances! And then the web would either not exist or the account system required would be so wide spread that accounts would carry no value and the system would become useless.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#797

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

HWR_14 wrote: post #644
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…

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

He tried to pressure them in 2020 to make him a CEO. They refused, so he pulled promised funding when they were on the brink of bankruptcy. They made a deal with Microsoft instead.

Then in 2022, they blew up and Elon's been spitting venom at them ever since as he missed his chance.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#798

Post by itronitron »

raincole wrote: post #732
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual problem seems to be that a large number entities now want a full copy of the entire site. But why not just... provide it? Charge however much for a box of hard drives containing every publicly-available tweet, mailed to the address of buyer's choosing. Then the startups get their stupid tweets and you don't have any load problems on your servers.

Are you really sure it's legal? In theory it's not different from providing the same information from API or website... but do people working in law think so?

Twitter purchased Gnip years ago, and it's a reseller of social media data. Companies that want all the public tweets, nicely formatted and with proper licensing, can just buy the data from Twitter directly.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#799

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

fleshdaddy wrote: post #708
brabel wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he sold all (I think) of his shares long time ago apparently because of conflict of interest with Tesla.

Wasn’t in a non profit back then? Do they actually have shares? I thought part of the point is they don’t turn a profit to pay out to investors.

He had committed to providing funding to them and was on the board. Being on the board is indeed the only form of control in a non-profit.

He tried to pressure them to make him a CEO, they refused, so he said "no money then, go bankrupt" and quit the board. They made a deal with Microsoft and survived.

Now he's pissed.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#800

Post by SomeBoolshit »

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…

His tweets are as trustworthy as Trump's.
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