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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

#811

Post by martindbp »

okeuro49 wrote: post #780
worrycue wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise Musk as much as anyone else and charging for API access has hurt a lot of valuable use cases like improving accessibility but … how about not massive scraping a site that doesn’t want you to?

> I despise Musk as much as anyone else I don't despise Musk at all. Don't agree with him on everything, but he is a genuine and interesting person.

He holds views that were the progressive norm 15 years ago, which are now considered bigoted, this is considered unacceptable today. There's a lot I don't agree with him on, like Ukraine, but "despise" is a word I reserve for the likes of Putin.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#812

Post by timeon »

refurb wrote: post #550
renewedrebecca wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radio stations & TV stations use public airwaves and actually (used to, not sure now) had to prove they were acting in the public interest to keep their licenses. Doing public announcements were one way they handled that function.

The internet is a public resource, anyone can “broadcast” on it. In the end it’s still private companies (with the exception of public broadcasters or websites).

Yes, but Parent comment has mentioned licenses for those private companies.

Also is for example BBC private company?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#813

Post by joshvm »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #691
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.

What do you even charge for that? We might never make a repository of human made content with no Ai postings in it ever again. Seems like selling the golden goose to me

It's about $1 per thousand tweets and access to 0.3% of the total volume. I think the subscription is 50M "new" tweets each month? There are other providers who continually scrape Twitter and sell their back catalogue.

https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near...

Researchers are complaining that it's far too high for academic grants. Probably true, but that's no different from other obscenely priced subscriptions like access to satellite imagery (can easily be $1k for a single image which you have no right to distribute). I'm less convinced that it's impossible for them to do research with 50 million tweets a month, or with what data there is available. Most researchers can't afford any of the AI SAAS company subscriptions anyway. Data labelling platforms - without the workers - can cost 10-20k a year. I spoke to one company that wouldn't get out of bed for a contract less than 100k. Most offer a free tier a la Matlab in the hope that students will spin out companies and then sign up. I don't have an opinion on what archival tweets should cost, but I do think it's an opportunity to explore more efficient analyses.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#814

Post by dsab »

justnotworthit wrote: post #106

for the desperate: https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-... add username at end from https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ and https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robotblake/a0f020381c1a91...

Nice, how does it work, when you can use twitter not logged?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#815

Post by blipvert »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #762
Havoc wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disables API, gets scraped, needs more servers. Congrats you played yourself.

Disables API, gets scraped, needs more servers, disables access without logins, gets millions of fake accounts, has to deal with the fake accounts, in the process deletes tons of real accounts, users pissed, scraping continues, server bills keep rising...

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly …

Twitter is maybe at the dog stage. Perhaps it’ll die.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#817

Post by foderking »

Dalewyn wrote: post #448
sebastiennight wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a prediction that will make you happier: This is a temporary thing, that will generate a TON of press (outrage ; praise by the fans at the amazing bold strategy move) and will also generate a TON of signups right as there is a wave of people leaving Reddit. And then it will magically open back up. (More press) And that's the story of pretty much every one of the outrageous/bold/brilliant/terrible strategic dec…

>will also generate a TON of signups I've been meaning to make a Twitter account since I follow a few accounts for some games that I play. Between Twitter not being owned by a loon anymore and finally a reason to overcome my laziness, why not? And yes, I know I'm playing right into Twitter's hand. Whatever, I actually like Musk anyway (an unpopular opinion that will no doubt get me flagged around these parts).

hilarious how this is downvoted

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#818

Post by fieldcny »

kungito wrote: post #804
xorcist wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If there was more value in requiring login than there is in having this public and easily accessible, it would be behind a login form. The current internet has 99% of the time nothing to do with values someone imagined in the 80s

What do you think the webs value is today?

What do you think the webs value was imagined to be in the “80s”?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#819

Post by PostOnce »

londons_explore wrote: post #465
NelsonMinar wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Data pillaging", WTF does that mean? Remember when Twitter used to give archives of tweets to the Library of Congress? And had a firehose for folks to consume as many tweets as they could?

I think it means "someone is crawling our data, perhaps because we made our API cost money, and we don't like it".

It went from $0/mo (as it had been for a long time) to $5000/mo overnight with no middle ground (for access to streaming data, no matter how small the volume).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#820

Post by dist-epoch »

larodi wrote: post #785
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…

Elon is making a point and a reminder for everyone that what you share on social nets like Twitter is basically not owned by you, but the service. Actually I’m surprised this took so long to do, and in the light of doing so shows that perhaps Twitter was sold for its existing content rather than existing or active user base.

> basically not owned by you, but the service.

It's shared ownership. You own it, but give Twitter non-exclusive permission to also use it.

This is why news agencies request permission from a twitter account before sharing a picture they took.

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