switched to mastodon, bluesky long ago.
Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not parent, but I did use Mastodon for about a year. I ended up moving back to Twitter because:
1. I just couldn't vibe with the culture there. From my POV, Mastodon is made out of pearl-clutchers and politics.
2. So much drama. The FediSearch drama. The Raspberry Pi incident. It's just so tiring and you feel like you need to walk on eggshells all the time.
3. So much drama. You would just pray that your admin didn't get into a spat with another admin and get defederated. You could get a solo server, but that costs money and you might get blocked by a large server's admin anyway.
4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. Solo, yes, but costs money.
At least with Twitter, the rules are sort of well known, and you can follow anyone there unless they block you personally.
I heard BlueSky is good, though. Haven't tried it yet. Nostr was also another one, to get around the admin drama issue, but it doesn't seem very popular.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#73To 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
The problem is that the users and their capital are not organized enough to suggest or demand for this. On the other side of the table we have the "establishment" which may not be formally organized but has enough shared incentives among itself where the outcomes aren't any different as if it were indeed formally organized and pooling resources.
In this sense we have this intractable push and pull going on with just about any community of sufficient size. We have the users who might want or should want some privacy and respect and other such benefits, and then we have the people who actually invest and build these platforms, who are incentivized to deliver other things than what the users best interest might be. Either you empower users to have more money to be able to roll their own solutions, or you try and set up a world where the incentives of capital perfectly match the needs of the individual or collective of individuals, which is probably impossible to do.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#74Users should just get off this continued tragedy and API access wouldn't be an issue
People should do a lot of things. They shouldn't smoke and they should work out, but here we are in 2024 where the phillip morris stock has outperformed ibm over the last 5 years and the obesity crisis shows no signs of letting up. Knowing something is bad is the first step of course but clearly not enough to drive a real behavioral change, and we aren't even fully in agreement as a society that social media is harmful like how cigarettes or obesity are known to be harmful.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ne…
> 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. I think it's a carryover of general nostalgia for how the Internet "used to be", i.e. before every site with a few million users decided to start experimenting with algorithms to max out user engagement and ad impressions, leading to the hell we see everywhere, from IG to Tiktok. Yes,…
Interesting. That might explain why I dislike it so much. As a middle aged person who grew up with an early iteration of the world wide web for a decade to a decade and a half before Twitter even existed, both smart phones and social media mark a turning point for me from what the Internet "used to be."
Twitter, in my mind (and maybe this is perception and not reality), ushered in infinite scroll and short bites of information. Twitter is to forums what TikTok is to documentaries. I see Twitter and the "mobile revolution" going hand in hand (something that left me behind because I still dislike using a smart phone, generally, and rarely do compared to most other people).
But I guess if you're a great deal younger than me, and you grew up with an Internet where Twitter just always existed, then it might represent some earlier version of the Internet that is drastically different from what you consider to be "contemporary" (though, putting the TikTok mention aside, I'm still not sure what that view of the contemporary Internet is if Twitter is what we're comparing it to).
I guess I'm just so old that I still see Twitter as a relatively new phenomenon. Very different from the nostalgia that I feel for what the world wide web used to be when I was young.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#76To 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…
Practically speaking, 'some' of the money is the same or just as good as 'all' of the money in terms of a functioning economy and not pure capitalism.
People pirate software, yet people still develop and sell it.
Yes, it's not the most profitable thing done alone. Only for those who find the nice combination or feedback loop of 'fit', demand, improvement, and expansion.
If you can make billions off the thing, you can presumably handle some GeoIP/rate limiting... or simply, not caring. Anything that falls through the cracks is categorically insignificant to your grand nature.
To justify it, if one must, consider it a trial. As your friendly neighborhood dealer would say: "The first taste is free".
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#77switched to mastodon, bluesky long ago.
I've been very happy with Mastodon.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#78Twitter was originally a microblogging service that had rss feeds to syndicate things or monitor the microblogs of people/companies that were interesting, it has gone way far off into the fields.
Same journey reddit is making, starting after it prepared to go public.
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a problem for literally every website that isn't completely paywalled. Twitter is not special in this regard.
Yes, and Twitter isn't reacting specially in this regard. See Reddit hiking API prices by an absurd amount.
Fact Check: Reddit didn't hike API prices by an absurd amount.
That was was the story spread far and wide by the Apollo app developer that was believed by the gullible and angry Reddit masses.
But Reddit actually set a reasonable API price, as evidenced by the fact that a year and a half later there are still five 3rd party apps running on reasonable subscriptions:
Infinity For Reddit
Nara For Reddit
Narwhal 2
Now for Reddit
Relay For Reddit
Re: Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
#80Here'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 was thinking of that exact strategy for two scraping problems I have. It would be a good way to gently scrape Berlin.de for appointments, and Immobilienscout24 for new flats.
From what I can tell, it would work fine so long as the user is actively looking at those pages.