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

omarshehata.substack.com

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

#31

Post by KerrAvon »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #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 c…

This is a problem for literally every website that isn't completely paywalled. Twitter is not special in this regard.

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

#32

Post by KerrAvon »

kypro wrote: post #17
lenerdenator wrote: post #15

[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.

Helping to prop up the site's racist, neo-nazi owner doesn't bother you at all?

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

#33

Post by bcrosby95 »

gary_0 wrote: post #18
rasengan wrote: 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 t…

Hosting information isn't expensive, trying to justify your billion dollar valuation is.

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

#34

Post by nunobrito »

It has been difficult to rescue data from Twitter even before purchase. On our case it was relevant because this is online digital history for the people in my country.

The only thing we can is motivate more people to use open platforms like NOSTR where API or data/identity handling is completely different.

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

#35

Post by crystal_revenge »

throw0101a wrote: post #7

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.

Social media used to be about content sharing, but it's clear that it's far more profitable to keep your users on your site at all times and keep the content they create in house rather than linked somewhere else.

HN is probably the last true aggregator site left that I know of.

It's partly why the web is so much worse. There's really no reason to create content outside of a walled platform is it is getting increasingly difficult to find an audience for it. Even blogging is an uphill battle since more and more social media sites penalize link sharing (they want you to create the content on their platform and leave it there).

That's why it's not surprising that these APIs are disappearing since the fundamental model has changed.

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

#36

Post by gspencley »

yodsanklai wrote: post #24
criticalfault wrote: post #9

Users 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.

I've tried to "get" Twitter since the early days. I've created a couple of Twitter accounts over the years to support various creative endeavours but I've never found myself getting much value out of it as a user.

I heard that it's original use-case was that back 2008 there were no good ways to do group messaging over SMS on a cell phone. That's a problem and solution that I can understand.

But as a broader social network? I don't get it.

Things that bother me to the point that they are deal breakers:

- The character limits (there is nothing worse in life than reading through a x/N self-reply to read something long ... I'd rather file a tax return)

- Showing me posts from pages I don't follow in the feed (in 99% of the cases I'm aware of that page/profile already and have chosen not to follow it because I don't like them)

- Ads in the news feed

Some have said that they like Twitter for getting news. I have way better options for that.

I know that I'm not representative of the typical person, generally speaking, but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular. And it's not that I'm hating on something I don't know anything about ... I've honestly tried to use it and get value out of it, but I've never found anything of value on offer.

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

#37

Post by crystal_revenge »

kypro wrote: post #17
lenerdenator wrote: post #15

[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.

While Twitter has absolutely degraded in quality over the past year or so, it is one of the last places were experts still interact with people.

I remember in the early days of Reddit it was pretty common to interact with all sorts of relatively well known people in their field. Now it's just soccer moms and bot farms.

While there are still a few experts lurking around HN, I've noticed this has declined as well over time. In part I suspect because the HN crowd has increasingly become surprisingly less technically expert on average.

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

#38

Post by OmarShehata »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #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 c…

Alternatively, build a private invite only dataset of specific communities. Scale horizontally instead of having one single central dataset! That's still a huge win for user ownership.

It doesn't have to be one company controlling who gets access, the users can decide this

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

#39

Post by theexgenesis »

kypro wrote: post #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…

Dev here.

Cognitive security vulnerabilities like this are the thing I'm most concerned about. I think it's right to be very upfront about risks like these, and I'm even considering if we want to walk back the fully public thing and make it private / invite-only instead.

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

#40

Post by nerdjon »

lenerdenator wrote: post #15

[flagged]

While I have noticed an issue with certain voices seemingly being amplified a bit more.

It is hard to argue that Twitter is still where many of these conversations are happening. People already have their followers there and unless you have a big name that can easily get people to move over to something, it is going to be pretty hard to move.

Personally I have tried to rebuild on other platforms but the engagement keeps happening on twitter even when I make the same posts on the new alternatives.

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