Neat boundaries on the Town Square
Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
21–30 of 106 posts
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#22Many 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.
Twitter shut off RSS access over 10 years ago along with their popular 1.1 API.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#23[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.
> Personally I've noticed practically no change.
IME, there's two things that were a bad problem pre-takeover and exploded afterwards: porn spam bots (like bots, follow bots, reply bots) that just acted on keywords in your tweets and Russian disinformation bots that also act on keywords. It has gotten better the last few weeks with the various leaks and a Verfassungsschutz investigation in Germany that uncovered the "Doppelgänger" botnet, but it's still an absurd nuisance.
> 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.
Well... and brands. Brands don't want their advertisements to appear next to someone showing the Nazi salute, calling for executions or whatever garbage they're pushing, and it is measurable both in financial data as well as in the quality of the ads - it used to be household brands, now it's mostly dropshipping, fake mobile game and cryptocurrency scams.
[1] https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1...
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#24Users should just get off this continued tragedy and API access wouldn't be an issue
To me, Twitter is by far the most toxic social network. It has the power to turn the most interesting and smartest people into bitter trolls. Maybe some people get value from it, but it requires serious self discipline to not get dragged into stupid arguments.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#25[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.
Agree. I don't even use the 'for you' feed, and even when I check occasionally I've been able to cater my algorithm so it's purely related to the domain I'm interested in which is rust, startups, and tech news.
But my personal follow feed has all the interesting topics that I follow so it's easy to just stick to that.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#26[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.
I don't notice a political change -- in part because I'm not political at all on Twitter. But there's a LOT of noise on everything. Half the time I can't tell if I'm in the replies to a given post or somewhere else, because so many of the replies are non-sensical.
TikTok has become my "random browsing" feed. But I will go to Twitter and YouTube to get full-length unedited content when I need specific content.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#27> cheaply as possible (put everything in S3 yikes.
To be charitable I hope the author refers to the S3 API here, of which there are several competitors and open source implementations.
Many companies offer "object storage" which is compatible with the S3 API
And there are some open source projects such as Minio which offer the same (and I forget what are the others?)
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#28[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.
You can't escape politics because most domain experts can't resist to engaging in sterile debates. And if you manage to find those who don't, you can't tune your feed to not show you some garbage.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#29The trend of shutting down / charging steeply for API access has fundamentally changed the internet.
Back to the old web scrapping you go.
Yep. Short-sighted companies don't realize that API was a truce, to save money and increase security (e.g. giving user/pass to third-party clients -> OAuth) on both sides. But anything that can be displayed, can be scraped... https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#30Many 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.
You could get SMS notifications whenever a user tweeted, too. Imagine signing up for that today!