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Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

omarshehata.substack.com

11–20 of 106 posts

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#11
Funny, just now I've been playing around with the various tweet deleters and trying to get something working; presently I think I'm about to settle on something involving a basic screen macro recorder thing, like one of the iterations of AHK.

I'm somewhat surprised that this space feels relatively dormant compared to the more complex stuff out there.

(APIs suck)

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#12

Many moons ago Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) feeds for each user so you could use any old news aggregator to keep up to date.

But that's too sensible and user-friendly. It would be obviously weird and wrong if they inserted ads and Musk's tweets into someone's RSS feed. Yet showing those unwanted insertions is the whole purpose of the company now.

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#13

> cheaply as possible (put everything in S3 yikes.

feedback is very much needed

For reference, this is the GitHub issue: https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive/issues/72

Cheapest is to stay away from anything related to the big clouds, especially Amazon with their "premium bandwidth" charges.

I'd probably spin up a storage box from Hetzner (or similar service for dedicated servers) as a first step, as you get unmetered connection. It should last you a pretty long while as most content will be fetched from caches.

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#14
> What if I could ask patio’s archive: “what are some good books to read about [topic]” or “what advice would you give to someone trying to get a job at Stripe”

Or what if I could ask: "Given Omer Shehata's Twitter history, formulate a phishing scam that he would be likely vulnerable to".

The problem I see with here is that there are far more bad actor use cases for identifiable user data than good. In my opinion the main reason most social networks have stopped doing public by default and now do private by default is because not doing so opens them up to Cambridge Analytica type scandals where people don't realise what they're signing up for.

Personally if you do this, I would be very clear with your users that by submitting their data it will be made available publicly in an identifiable form. And that even if they revoke their data from your service it's possible for their data will continue to be archived by others, possibly for malicious reasons.

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#17

[flagged]

Twitter is excellent if you're looking for a social network where you can consume content and interact with domain experts in various fields.

In my experience it's really only those who go there for politics that get annoyed by it – perviously it was the right-wingers who were angry because it was too left-wing, and now it's left-wingers who think it's too right-wing.

Personally I've noticed practically no change.

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#18
post #5

The trend of shutting down / charging steeply for API access has fundamentally changed the internet.

The whole point of the Internet up until about 2019 was that it was so cheap to host information it was basically free. If your site scaled up, you covered the hosting costs with ads or donations or something. The expensive part was finding content, so "user generated content" sites had to entice users to post stuff. That resulted in an implicit social contract with the users; these sites lived in fear of the users taking their content elsewhere.

Now the Web is expensive for some reason, and users have become so dependent on a small number of sites as a communications medium that the megacorporations running them feel like they have infinite leverage, and the social contract of user-generated content is completely forgotten.

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#19

Users should just get off this continued tragedy and API access wouldn't be an issue

A lot of users/communities are stuck because of network effects & the long history of posts (they still reference them, like living wikis) These pipeline tools can help people migrate if they want without losing that history & network (my prediction is once people see what's possible with an open API, that'll further motivate user migration, or for twitter to open up again)

> the long history of posts (they still reference them, like living wikis)

As someone with a multitude of cat photo threads, 100x this.

While I'm around on Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, the "post history" aspect is my most pressing issue with Mastodon. Like, when you move your account, you cannot take your old posts to the new server - you're straight out of luck if your instance decides to call it quits for whatever reason. And even if the instance doesn't give up, being unable to view old(er) photos is something I very commonly notice on a bunch of Mastodon servers.

Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

#20
To play the devil's advocate. If you were running a large public forum, and you knew that many companies had started to scrape all data off your site, and were going to cumulatively make billions off that data, and some of those billions will come from polluting your forum with crap content, would you continue running your site in the open?

What is the game theory here? Twitter cooperates and OpenAI defects, and we call that a win?

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