Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

omarshehata.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 106 posts

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

#61

Post by numpad0 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #20

To 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…

You having a problem with companies making billions? Why not just regulate that, instead of the latter "...and cumulatively make billions" part?

If companies making billions isn't the part that's problematic, the billions part can be left out, and the real problem can be discussed instead.

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

#62

Post by xNeil »

pavlov wrote: post #47
sunaookami wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's fair - getting back the chronological timeline itself made the purchase a good one in my eyes, alongside the For You feed, which seems to work wonderfully (for me). Not to forget you can literally turn off ads if you want. I seem to be a real minority, but I do genuinely believe Musk has done a great job with Twitter (or X).

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

#63

Post by xNeil »

KerrAvon wrote: post #31
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #20

To 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.

Yes, and Twitter isn't reacting specially in this regard. See Reddit hiking API prices by an absurd amount.

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

#64

Post by rurp »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #20

To 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…

It's tragic that the LLM craze OpenAI kicked off is threatening to ruin one of the greatest common goods ever invented in the open internet. But hey, at least a handful of giant corporations and investors are making money, so I guess that counts as a win.

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

#66

Post by numpad0 »

smileybarry wrote: post #43
yodsanklai wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

Tangential but there's my disappointment to AI in there: they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system.

Both AI believers and doomers insist generative AI could surpass humans by every single metric that matters in social media. All we've got is first Nigerian, then Indian, and now increasingly Pakistani spammers desperately reply bombing trending posts made by 10 years alpha users, as if whoever behind it completely failed to do it and has been wasting gullible human spammer candidates faster than Aperture Science.

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

#68

Post by rchaud »

gspencley wrote: post #36
yodsanklai wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

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, there was a time when Twitter wasn't a toxic mess. It's the last social network that was popular before smartphones took off.

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

#69

Post by rchaud »

numpad0 wrote: post #66
smileybarry wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

Tangential but there's my disappointment to AI in there: they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system. Both AI believers and doomers insist generative AI could surpass humans by every single metric that matters in social media. All we've got is first Nigerian, then Indian, and now increasingly Pakistani spammers desperately reply bombing trending posts made…

> they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system.

The 'they' being the corporations that hired thousands of people from the very countries you're associating with spammers , to review, correct and train AI models?

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

#70

Post by bangaladore »

yojo wrote: post #56
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.

Good find. Yeah, pretty much exactly like this.
Post reply on HN