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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

#861

Post by danShumway »

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…

I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But:

A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk's Twitter has indicated that he cares about Open data access or anonymous access to the site, and this follows a general trend of closing down the platform to non-monetizable users. Musk has abundantly shown in the past that he would prefer everyone browsing Twitter be logged into an account.

B) "it's temporary" -- how? You don't have a way to stop this other than forcing login. That situation is not going to change next week. To call this "temporary emergency measures" is so funny; there is no engineering solution for this and you're not going to be able to successfully sue companies for scraping Twitter. Put a captcha in front of it? Sure, let me know how that goes.

You going to wait and see if the AI market collapses in the next month?

If this does turn out to be temporary, it'll only be because of migrations off of Twitter and because of user criticism, because Musk is impulsive and bends easily under pressure. But nothing about the situation Musk is complaining about is going to change next week.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#862

Post by m00x »

danShumway wrote: post #861
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…

I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But: A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk'…

FWIW: I've been scraping the shit out of social media for my AI training. I also do Amazon, AliExpress, etc.

Libs like puppeteer is so good these days that it's impossible to tell real users from fake traffic. Most of the blocks are just IP blocks.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#863

Post by troad »

kibwen wrote: post #102
Macha wrote: post #57

I will miss some of the Ukraine news as twitter was good for that, but that's about it for me at this point.

Here's a Mastodon server that mirrors many Ukraine-related Twitter accounts: https://fed.celp.de/@uanews (Who knows how long it will keep working, of course.)

It has stopped working. It was using nitter.

It's also not a great list. Igor Sushko, for example, is very susceptible to posting unverified things that later turn out to be false.

A much better list is Noah Smith's at: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1492242776825552896. Yes, you now need to log in to see it, unfortunately.

Public Twitter lists seem like the sort of thing that's quite scrape-able though, even behind a login wall. With sufficient caching & semi-randomised access it should be fairly hard to detect which account is doing the scraping.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#864

Post by MagicMoonlight »

xorcist wrote: post #796
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…

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…

Because they want an advantage over competitors who are using the archives already…

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#866

Post by dang »

disillusioned wrote: post #672
dang wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This attitude that: if it ain't broke, don't destroy it, is something I'm finding myself valuing increasingly. I use Stylish to make HN look a bit more readable and prettier, and beyond that, it functions exactly how I want it to and I'm glad to see that the institutional momentum here is a core value.

Move slowly and preserve things.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#867

Post by skydhash »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #649
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. :(

I’m so jaded with the internet at this point. Most phone apps and games are a microtransaction hell. Most social media apps are a race to the bottom with clickbait. Every website is littered with ads and popups and cookie banners. Time to go outside and forget that the online world exists.

I have Starlink, which gives me a US IP when I connect to it, and I was surprised to see the amount of ads people there are subjected. Most don’t do business where I am, so their free tier is effectively without ads for me (except twitch. It choses to show me US ads for some reason).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#868

Post by salawat »

rchaud wrote: post #296
dbg31415 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :( Totally! The internet was better before pay walls / auth walls. I get why we're here today, and I get that the last phase was just about acquiring an audience, and getting people hooked, and now this part of getting everyone to pay was always the plan, but this part really does suck. Just feels like all the services lined up to start shitting on users at the same…

If P2P micropayments could somehow have succeeded, then a different Internet could have been possible. Tipping content creators directly is impossible without megacorporations taking a cut, be it Apple, Paypal, Patreon etc, and their unit economics work better with recurring payments, which lands us in subscription hell. One would almost be tempted to ask for a cheque in the mail like in the old days.

P2P payments/transaction media have been on the way out for decades due to the State's interest in controlling the financial transaction medium as tightly as possible.

The database has doomed us all! For it is the Seed of all Evil in the hands of the Wicked! ...and arguably the Good, but misguided!

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#869

Post by dang »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #766
dang wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

You did say, recently, that you don't like the idea of paid third-party apps using the HN API.[0] I thought that was an odd change for HN. After all, the majority of the value still accrues to the HN owners. In fact, user's that are prepared to pay for an app to access a free website largely comprised of adverts, are typically more valuable than the rest. Those users have money to burn and skin in the game! https://n…

That's a fine point. I just get uncomfortable with it because the currency of HN should be curiosity, not money, so energetically it doesn't feel like a good fit.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#870

Post by develop7 »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #668
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?

Scraping isn’t illegal, and to be honest, I’m not even sure it’s unethical. I’m assuming you think it so — if so, why? I’m not disagreeing, but haven’t given it much thought.

Moreover, isn't making scraping impossible illegal per a couple-of-years-old bill?
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