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A new and improved Twitter API

blog.twitter.com

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Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#71
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea how it's done in the API? I know you can retrieve a tweet's parent , but not its children .

You have to use the search feature to look for tweets and then look at the parent tweet ID. This is what bots like threadreaderapp, etc do. You can construct it from the bottom up if you know the ID of the last tweet in the thread of responses too, but you wouldn't know that a priori unless the user gives it to your software somehow.

But... that's not a tree -- there's still no way to discover all leaves. That's just a thread/singly linked list.

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#72
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea how it's done in the API? I know you can retrieve a tweet's parent , but not its children .

You have to use the search feature to look for tweets and then look at the parent tweet ID. This is what bots like threadreaderapp, etc do. You can construct it from the bottom up if you know the ID of the last tweet in the thread of responses too, but you wouldn't know that a priori unless the user gives it to your software somehow.

so the api is literally backwards

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conversation threading Actually, this was a major point of API failure when I last tried to use it. Did you know that, with the current API, there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet ? This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread, because you simply can't fetch the thread. So I'll say that, as a casual, social, and informational user of Twitter (i.e. not business,…

> This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread it is possible -- it unfortunately happens to be part of my job description to do so one of the sibling comments basically has it right. you can build it from the bottom up (where "bottom" is the deepest tweet in the thread you know about, one way or another). let me tell you though, i am _very_ excited for this new API, becaus…

Is your work open source/viewable anywhere? I've written a few (probably ToS violating) plugins for Twitter myself, and would be curious to see.

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#74

The final straw for me was when twitter deprecated the years-old auth keys I had used without any issues because I wouldn't register my phone number. If you look at twitter's checkered history, I don't see why anyone would put the effort into a new API without strict guarantees of future usability.

Strict guarantees of usability don't exist. Look how many technologies MS has abandoned.

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#75

One amazing use of the twitter API is to be able to mass delete your favs, rts, and tweets. It's the only thing I use it for as the API and platform as a whole is otherwise hostile. https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete

Shameless plug, Twitter Archive Eraser was designed for mass tweet deletion. As of today it has deleted 3.4 billion tweets https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#76

No word on the most important thing: the limits. Current limits that keep becoming stricter and stricter make the API unusable.

That's what killed off Falcon Pro. The author released a version of the APP with a secret way of putting in your own API keys and I used that for a bit. Then he released a new version, but couldn't just grant the old people access because it would quickly reach the rate limit.

It was about that time I just totally abandoned Twitter.

Use Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey. Fuck lock-ins. ActivyPub forever!

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#77

One amazing use of the twitter API is to be able to mass delete your favs, rts, and tweets. It's the only thing I use it for as the API and platform as a whole is otherwise hostile. https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete

A friend of mine did a blog post on deleting favs recently:

https://tom.eastman.nz/2020/06/what-it-took-to-delete-my-lik...

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#78
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to use the search feature to look for tweets and then look at the parent tweet ID. This is what bots like threadreaderapp, etc do. You can construct it from the bottom up if you know the ID of the last tweet in the thread of responses too, but you wouldn't know that a priori unless the user gives it to your software somehow.

so the api is literally backwards

[deleted]

Re: A new and improved Twitter API

#80
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conversation threading Actually, this was a major point of API failure when I last tried to use it. Did you know that, with the current API, there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet ? This makes it impossible to build tools that, say, allow you to visualize a tweet thread, because you simply can't fetch the thread. So I'll say that, as a casual, social, and informational user of Twitter (i.e. not business,…

> there's no way to retrieve the replies to a tweet My crusty old version of Tweetbot has been doing that for years...? Maybe not perfectly for tweets with hundreds of replies, but well enough.

I'm not sure which hack Tweetbot is using to do this (I think search as noted below), but you can tell it's a hack because it only works for recent-ish tweets. If you go to a tweet a couple weeks old and view details, you can see that it won't fill in the replies.
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