The only useful thing on Twitter that I ever saw was the lovely and tender Dog Rates https://x.com/dog_rates. You could read anonymously and be all aww and schucks about all those good dogs. They've thankfully stopped engaging with this cesspool that it became and moved somewhere else, Instagram perhaps? Somewhere where I can't read without an account, so I don't read it anymore.
Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
41–50 of 106 posts
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#42To 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.
Twitter was "special" because they actually had an API.
No other social media site (besides Reddit) had one. Facebook kind of tried, although theirs was always a lot more limited, and got shut down when it turned out Cambridge Analytica used it for widespread election fraud[1].
Both Twitter and Reddit did basically the same thing at roughly the same time, Twitter just had the misfortune to be under the control of Elon Musk, so the move was perceived as ideological.
[1] As it later turned out, Cambridge Analytica was basically a "nothing burger", they claimed to be able to accomplish a lot while, in reality, accomplishing very little. The damage to interoperability was already done, though.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#43Users 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.
It's gotten dramatically worse since premium started rewarding payouts for engagement/views, alongside zero moderation. Now there's an actual incentive to be a jerk, a spammer, and make repeated bad faith arguments / "just asking questions" -- people reply, your tweet is seen by more people, you get paid a share of ad revenue.
Then you have the regurgitated messages in replies (AI or otherwise) endlessly copied and distorted. Recently it's been 5+ pages until I see a real reply, while I have 3000+ accounts blocked by now. It's getting harder and harder to find the real person who wrote that witty reply, and not the endless blue check accounts who copy-pasted it to farm engagement on their visibility-boosted tweets.
Genuinely getting more and more unusable.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#44The only useful thing on Twitter that I ever saw was the lovely and tender Dog Rates https://x.com/dog_rates . You could read anonymously and be all aww and schucks about all those good dogs. They've thankfully stopped engaging with this cesspool that it became and moved somewhere else, Instagram perhaps? Somewhere where I can't read without an account, so I don't read it anymore.
Here's a few more in my feed (no affiliation)
- https://x.com/contextdogs (out of context dogs)
- https://x.com/_B___S (B&S)
- https://x.com/buitengebieden (Buitengebieden)
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's gotten dramatically worse since premium started rewarding payouts for engagement/views, alongside zero moderation. Now there's an actual incentive to be a jerk, a spammer, and make repeated bad faith arguments / "just asking questions" -- people reply, your tweet is seen by more people, you get paid a share of ad revenue. Then you have the regurgitated messages in replies (AI or otherwise) endlessly copied and d…
Why not, um... stop using it?
Mastodon has a lot of great people, and a lot less of all this stuff.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#46Users 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 never did much with Twitter until I took over the Carolina Code Conference, but it's been by far the easiest place to engage with different tech communities. Just the "Follow All" button that appears after I follow something like Gleam or Roc is hugely helpful.
I probably spend more time on Twitter now than I ever did before.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I know. Because it wasn’t compatible with their aim of showing ads.
And nothing has changed after Twitter went private under Musk, except that the reasons for stuffing unwanted content into users’ timelines are slightly different.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#48To 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.
To continue playing the devil's advocate:
1. Experts can comment, but I think the value of multi person conversational data from forums is uniquely valuable and in short supply relative to just blogposts/news stories on the internet.
2. The absolute economic value of the entire corpus of Twitter is much more valuable than any single boatforum.com like website. So Twitter has a much more incentive to lock itself down than boatforum.com.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#49Many 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!
That makes more sense to disable as SMS is expensive. This is still fairly easy to set up yourself using a tool like IFTTT[1] or similar.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#50Here's a thought: someone "trustworthy" should maintain a Chrome extension or Tapermonkey script that automatically scrapes data from various social media sites in a fully anonymized fashion. As people browse Twitter, Reddit, or XYZ, the posts/comments are sent to some aggregation system. It might be against TOS, but certainly far less than scraping, and you couldn't tell, as it's the user driving what gets scraped.
I don't use Twitter often, but I'd run something like that if there were strong anonymity guarantees. Seems like a win-win for everyone.
Does anything like this exist today?