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. :(
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Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
This wasn’t the case for Twitter API pricing changes. My Twitter usage is down a lot since they killed off 3rd party clients.
> My Twitter usage is down a lot since they killed off 3rd party clients. Every user hostile move they've made basically halves my usage. I used to spend way too much time on Twitter, now it's 10 minutes a week and I don't feel like I miss much.
This EXTREME EMERGENCY that Musk is talking about is not AI - it's Musk himself.
He is killing engagement and ad income, has to slow the bleed, and is now looking under every rock for some gains, GOTO 1.
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#833From 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…
> 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.
But then so is Twitter. They don’t produce any content whatsoever. The data they are having a fit about is not theirs, it’s been volunteered by the users. It’s the same line Reddit is pushing, and it’s bullshit. AI companies scraping the web is no more unethical than Google doing it.
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes no logical sense. Why would the scraping not restart after its unlocked? More realistically, he got a lot of backlash from users and website owners where embedded tweets suddenly stopped showing up.
Presumably they will put some protections in place.
Possibly, but they wrote those protections in ~5 hours? Seems dubious.
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#835Earlier 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.
Was already the case for ICQ. (yes, it was in their ToS)
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#836From 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…
We know that quality data is king, with all due respect to people tweeting, that data is most likely garbage.
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#837Earlier 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 you describe is the Facebook business model. Which seems to be a valid model, but twitter was not built around it and such a pivot would break all business moats around the company.
There was no web in the 80s so not sure what values you refer to, or how they are relevant to today's businesses.
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#838This 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. :(
It's extremely rough around the edges but getting into fediverse content (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) has been extremely rewarding to me. It's like twitter and reddit but 15 years ago (and by that I mostly mean it's janky and full of bugs. Just like the web was 15 years ago!)
The main problem with the fediverse is that none of the people I want to read, post there. And they never will, because they are disparate sociopolitical demographics and the fediverse by design keeps them in separate instances that I at some level need to think about.
The majority use-case requires centralization, which is subject to the network effects that constitute 95% of Twitter's value. Great that it works for you and some others, but it cannot work for most.
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#839Earlier 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.
HTTP Status Code 429 exists for this very purpose. While I sympathise with the idea that services need to protect their content from scraping to power AIs, I can't help but feel its a convenient excuse for these companies to re-implement archaic philosophies about online services. i.e. Killing off 3rd party apps and walling their garden higher, both feel very boomer in their retreat from the openness of the internet that seemed to be en vogue prior to smartphones. Perhaps this is just the transition from engineers building services to business, legal and finance trying to force the profit.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but surely throttling scrapers (at least ones that are not nefarious in their habits) is a problem that can be mitigated server-side, so I find it somewhat galling that its the excuse.
Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
#840So can HN ban twitter.com submissions now that they require a twitter account to view? Please?
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