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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

#51

Post by shadowgovt »

miki123211 wrote: post #42
KerrAvon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Elo…

Indeed. CA's impact on election outcomes was likely negligible; Antonio Martínez's "Chaos Monkeys" makes the case that Trump using CA was more indicative of the overall notion that Trump's team was spending money to try a bit of everything (online and offline) and the Clinton campaign wasn't. Their tactical failure was believing they could redirect the money to down-ticket races because Clinton / Trump was such an obvious matchup that they didn't need to spend to win.

What CA did show was that Facebook's statements about protecting user privacy were fundamentally incompatible with the way their API worked, so they had to shut it down because the alternative would have been to just sort of... Let it hang in the air that it wasn't hard for a third-party to build a system to completely bypass user intent in scoping their information.

(I had the misfortune of trying to write a Facebook app about fifteen years prior, and that was my takeaway at the time also... "Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?" Turns out people didn't).

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

bangaladore wrote: post #50

Here'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.…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by WorldMaker »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #30
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.

You could get SMS notifications whenever a user tweeted, too. Imagine signing up for that today!

You could also for a long time send SMS (if you registered your number) to 40404 to tweet to Twitter. It's still in my address book from the era when I was tweeting T9 from dumb phones or using voice-to-SMS to tweet on early smart phones.

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

#54

Post by strictnein »

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.

This obviously varies person to person, but I don't find it to be that. I carefully maintain who I am following (about 600 people and companies, mainly in the infosec / natsec space) and when I start to see bad behavior/content I'm quick to unfollow people. Also, I only use the Following tab, never the For You tab.

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

#55

Post by kllrnohj »

bangaladore wrote: post #50

Here'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.…

Not quite the same, but https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ is in a similar vein of an extension crowd-sourcing a return of data.

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

#56

Post by yojo »

bangaladore wrote: post #50

Here'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.…

Reminds me a little of RECAP (https://free.law/recap), an automated scraper/saver/sharer for PACER (the US court electronic records system).

Obviously the content is very different, but the technology is basically doing what you’re talking about, minus anonymizing the data.

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

#58

Post by radarsat1 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #51
miki123211 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Elo…

Indeed. CA's impact on election outcomes was likely negligible; Antonio Martínez's "Chaos Monkeys" makes the case that Trump using CA was more indicative of the overall notion that Trump's team was spending money to try a bit of everything (online and offline) and the Clinton campaign wasn't. Their tactical failure was believing they could redirect the money to down-ticket races because Clinton / Trump was such an ob…

> Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?

That sentiment goes back pretty far in Facebook's history

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-branded-early-fac...

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

#59

Post by mistermann »

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.

> It has the power to turn the most interesting and smartest people into bitter trolls.

There is tremendous value in having access to large quantities of data demonstrating the various failure modes of relatively intelligent minds. Nothing is being (publicly) done with this data so far, but this will not last forever.

This is something that has always bothered me about the /r/SSC community (and others): the "no culture war topics" constraint + moderators locking threads when the Rationalists start collectively behaving irrationally.

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

#60

Post by KomoD »

danielodievich wrote: post #41

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.

> They've thankfully stopped engaging with this cesspool that it became and moved somewhere else

No, they haven't. They're still actively posting on Twitter.

It's just that if you are viewing a profile logged out you get the most popular tweets instead of the most recent ones.

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