If you're looking to transition to Mastodon I built a browser extension which might help. The extension injects your Mastodon timeline into Twitter, so you can for example follow some of the bots and accounts that will no longer be on Twitter (the ElonJet account being a particularly good example) and still see their posts on Twitter. It won't be affected by these API changes and should be a nice way to dip your feet into Mastodon if you haven't already.
Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
221–230 of 488 posts
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#222is it really that hard to just not use twitter? I swear to god replace meth with twitter and it’s sad how many addicts there are. Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel. Making bots? Try building something new in the AI space. Need to reach your customers in case your service is down? Just use a different host for ur status.whatever.com and email/sms/whatever else them.
Platform effects with low/no barriers to entry, not to mention the network effects, are not trivially replaced by the general population.
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#223I'm still surprised that anyone expected the acquisition of Twitter by a billionaire with a long demonstrated lack of empathy, social grace or self awareness would go at all well. He started a fire in a movie theater and now wants to lock the doors and raise the price on whatever water and extinguishers are on hand.
Whilst I like the fire analogy a lot. it doesn't capture how much he's on the hook vs what we loose if twitter dies. I will loose...... can't really tell. Elon will have irreparable reputational damage done to him forever.
Will have?
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#224I’ve got a couple of dev accounts on Twitter and I still don’t think I’ve received an email about this. I wonder how many people will find out about this for the first time when their app breaks.
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#225At some point I saw speculation that the idea is to turn twitter into some sort of super-app like wechat. If that is true then it makes sense to button down loose "ecosystem" thingies that were setup during a more innocent and hopeful era. This will probably destroy a whole bunch of use-cases and motivations for people and organizations to use twitter, but might retain enough of a core (mostly low-information) user b…
Who in their right mind would trust twitter with anything more 512 character banal musings after this tumultuous year? Mobile payments or secure messaging? Yikes!
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#226- announced at 10pm - basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project - No information to help you make that decision This seems like more management by manchild. I strongly suspect that Musk realized his promises of cutting down bots etc. were failing and that they either couldn't or wouldn't develop abuse detection, so he's decided to solve the problem by making it cost money, with the (perhaps desired)…
"Free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621259936524300289
Scammers and opinion manipulators aren't using the Twitter API developer program. They're just using the native apps' API keys and posing as real people.
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#227A huge concern that no one seems to be mentioning is that pretty much all academic data sets that used the Twitter API were required by the TOS to only be released publicly with the tweet ids, not the content of the tweet. Some of these have hundreds of thousands of tweets, and the only way to check the work of the researchers, or to build on it, is to use the api to reseed everything yourself. With this new policy t…
It seems to me that as a subject pool, Twitter is extremely bad (like other options that researchers tend pick out of frugality, like Mechanical Turk). Why use it at all?
I think the paper showing that Twitter activity slightly predicted stock movements was incredibly interesting and valuable to know. I'm sure there are plenty of other papers as well, like analyses of Arab spring?
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#228I’ve got a couple of dev accounts on Twitter and I still don’t think I’ve received an email about this. I wonder how many people will find out about this for the first time when their app breaks.
Same boat. And the price/limit is still unknown for this new basic plan.
Fortunately only 1% of my users depends on Twitter API, so I just let them know I might just shutdown Twitter integration by 2/8 and suggest them all move off Twitter to other platforms.
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#229This is why I will never build a company based around a free API from a for-profit company. I'd never be able to sleep well at night knowing that years of work and all the employees/families that depend on the business is dependent on someone who could wake up one day and decide on a whim to end access.
By the same reasoning, one shouldn’t build a company based on any API, regardless of whether it’s free or paid; the existence of a paid API does not automatically guarantee any future pricing or even availability. One could build a company around a paid API only to have the pricing jacked up 10x or the API shut down or neutered in some critical way and end up in, functionally, the same situation.
Not OP, but this is definitely not how OP meant the word "free".
In the context of Twitter, think about free analogy being newsgroups (if you are young enough not to have witnessed it, in the early days of Internet, your ISP would provide you with email box with some space attached to it and a newsgroup access). Newsgroups were functionally very similar to what Twitter does, i.e. they were designed to share news between multiple subscribers of those news.
So, newsgroups weren't free in the sense that you had to pay your ISP to access them (not necessarily billed separately though, typically just a part of a package deal). But they were free in the sense that it was a distributed service provided by multiple (and by that I mean, hundreds) of independent providers, and it was an open standard: if you wanted to become a provider of the service, you wouldn't have to invest a lot into that, just set up yet another server with some freely available software and you are good to go. So, if for some reason your ISP wouldn't connect you to the newsgroups, you'd just go to another one who would (it didn't really matter back in the days and the feature didn't have as wide of an outreach as social networks have today, but, in principle, it would've worked that way).
So, this kind of freedom would've offered better protections against single company deciding the fate of the important part of yours.
Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API
#230One of my first programming jobs involved helping the boss make a twitter sharecropping service. I remember at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I was doing something else by then but it was a good warning to not let myself ever depend too much on sharecropping; over the years I've seen a lot of people learn that lesson the hard way. I've used…
What is a digital sharecropping service? I've never heard of that before.
Sharecropping is of course when a landowner lets someone else farm their land in exchange for a share of the crops they produce. It has the usual tradeoffs, incentives for each party, and dysfunctions at the extremes (like demanding 99.9% share) that any landlord/renter system has. I think I originally came across the expansion to a digital concept here https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper... (which is really just aggregating a couple other links), it was more focused on the phenomenon of social media users creating most of the value (usually without any monetary compensation) for the social media site owners (who did sometimes succeed in converting that to money, though as we see even in Current Year it's not exactly trivial to turn a profit).
Extending the idea of sharecropping again to digital services is just a way of describing a service or business that existentially depends on some other service (or platform or API) not just for survival (so mere dependence on e.g. legitimate payment processors doesn't make one a cropper) but also for the source of most of the value it hopes to expand upon and capture a part of. If that dependency is broken it wouldn't make sense or be feasible to have the service standalone. Social media integration startups are quintessential examples, the corpses are many. What's the point of some random startup that crawls twitter data to e.g. present rich marketing analytics data to its customers if twitter shuts down, or loses almost all its users except for like 1000 randos, or cripples its APIs among other things to make such mass data ingestion infeasible, or directly goes after the startup with lawsuits, or acquires a competitor and integrates equivalent-or-better analytics natively?
Sharecropping isn't necessarily a bad arrangement for either party (and there are cases it can be bad to be the owner). Some companies (e.g. Salesforce with its AppExchange marketplace) thread the needle a lot better when it comes to having a useful platform/pool of existing value for third parties to make useful extensions to and not scaring off new croppers or killing off many existing ones. And some croppers are more careful in selecting whose land to crop on or making their cropper status less of an immediate danger by being able to crop on multiple owners' land at once.