Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by conzept » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 4:29 PM UTC

shiroiushi wrote: post #98

Nextgrid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The server-oriented aspect of Mastodon was the second-worst decision ever (the first one was the name). Mainstream social media doesn't ask you to pick a server (nor deal with the consequences of it going down), its replacement shouldn't either.

As for the server-oriented aspect, what's the alternative? There's only two ways I see to run a social media service like this: centralized and decentralized. The mainstream ones are centralized, of course: FB, Xitter, etc. You just connect to their web server and do everything there. Any centralized alternative would have be a well-financed corporation able to set up a huge IT infrastructure to accomplish the same t…

"But again, what's the alternative?" Blockhain based social networks would seem the obvious choice. The onramp needs to be easier I feel though. Make the ID-management, posting and global searching easy enough.

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

#102

Post by skeaker » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

ChocMontePy wrote: post #79

xNeil wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

This is cherry-picked to the point of revisionism, no? There used to be dozens and dozens of apps and countless useful bots and other tools that ran off of the API. <1% of those tools surviving the price hike actually further confirms that the price change wasn't reasonable.

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

#103

Post by michaelscrypt » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

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.…

George Hotz aka geohot proposed this some time ago [1] and he called it a vampire attack because it syphons off users from Twitter. [1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampi...

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

#104

Post by asdff » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 7:11 PM UTC

shiroiushi wrote: post #90

asdff wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 harmf…

>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. There's more than one society on Earth, so it's hard to say that "society" "knows" that smoking is bad without specifying the society. As an American who lives outside the US, one striking place where the US clearly outperforms peer nations, in my daily experience, is with smoking: Amer…

Pretty much most people I know are college educated and I know a few smokers still. A couple are social smokers who only really smoke while drinking. Only one smokes enough to take smoke breaks at work. Lots of people on vapes and zyn in the office otherwise. Nicotine is still compelling enough on its own and plenty of people actually like the act of smoking a cigarette.

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

#105

Post by shiroiushi » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 11:44 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #104

shiroiushi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. There's more than one society on Earth, so it's hard to say that "society" "knows" that smoking is bad without specifying the society. As an American who lives outside the US, one striking place where the US clearly outperforms peer nations, in my daily experience, is with smoking: Amer…

Pretty much most people I know are college educated and I know a few smokers still. A couple are social smokers who only really smoke while drinking. Only one smokes enough to take smoke breaks at work. Lots of people on vapes and zyn in the office otherwise. Nicotine is still compelling enough on its own and plenty of people actually like the act of smoking a cigarette.

Interesting; I wonder if this is generational? I'm Gen-X, and no one in my age group smokes unless they're lower-class. It seems, from my observation, that the younger generations in the US have actually been taking up smoking a lot more than the people in my age group.

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

#106

Post by asdff » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:34 PM UTC

shiroiushi wrote: post #105

asdff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much most people I know are college educated and I know a few smokers still. A couple are social smokers who only really smoke while drinking. Only one smokes enough to take smoke breaks at work. Lots of people on vapes and zyn in the office otherwise. Nicotine is still compelling enough on its own and plenty of people actually like the act of smoking a cigarette.

Interesting; I wonder if this is generational? I'm Gen-X, and no one in my age group smokes unless they're lower-class. It seems, from my observation, that the younger generations in the US have actually been taking up smoking a lot more than the people in my age group.

I think its just young people in general smoking. You are gen X. Back in your early 20s I bet just as many of your peers were smoking while drinking and partying as my millennial peers do today. Probably way more honestly considering there weren't vapes or zyn back then.