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Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

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Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon has a good point there. Much of the current AI hotness is predicated on stealing peoples content and exploiting the infrastructure that other people have built. I don’t think it’s acceptable. The licenses, compensation models, law, technical solutions, attribution, security and privacy all need time to catch up. Regulation has a role to play as its a bit of a free for all right now. The irony of Elon mentioning…

Why would an AI company start scraping twitter html, instead of using an already existing archive? Something similar to archive.org could earn money from that. If all you want is the content, there's no reason to suck it through a straw. I'd expect those that require real time data, such as stock market bots or sentiment data providers, to scrape twitter (if they don't provide the data by other means, for example the…

> Why would an AI company start scraping twitter html, instead of using an already existing archive?

I can think of a few possible reasons. They might want more up-to-date info, or they might have no real developers and the scraper was created by a business guru who prompted ChatGPT and didn't understand the code that came out.

Given what else Musk has asserted about Twitter, and how often former or current Twitter devs have contradicted him, it may not even be what Musk said.

> Twitter is not higher quality data than any other web page

Eh, depends how much you can infer from retweet, favourites, etc.

Won't be the only such site, but it's probably better training data than blog posts are these days.

But yeah, I absolutely agree that Twitter doing this caused a lot of damage to any orgs, corporate or government, which wanted to be public, anything from restaurants announcing special offers to governments issuing hurricane warnings. Twitter isn't big enough to assume everyone has an account, like Facebook is.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#822

Anybody feel like this is ironically going to accelerate the decline of twitter? I'm never, EVER making a twitter account. However publishers still communicate with me via tweets I could see. Now that I need an account to view tweets, publishers just have a smaller audience. I'll just see the screenshots on reddit anyway :)

> Anybody feel like this is ironically going to accelerate the decline of twitter? If Musks claim today is true ("This platform hit another all-time high in user-seconds last week"), then it is very much not in decline...

Well it likely isn't true [1]. Musk seems to come across more and more as a perpetual liar.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-eng...

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#823

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

I think it will be sort of interesting to see what AI scraping does to the open internet.

I think that we are already putting too much content into Social Media platforms (HN included). Stuff that we sort of ought to self host because then we would actually own it. But will you even want to run your own sites publicly if they are getting scraped? I guess it’s it really a new issue as such, but I imagine it’ll only get worse as the LLM craze continues to rise.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#824

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

But you can buy verified twitter accounts starting from $0,035 per pc. I really don't understand how can it pose any serious roadblock for scrapers.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#825

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

You haven't been able to look at anything but the /explore endpoint for weeks without an account, and the "content" on there has been total garbage.

I was relieved when they started asking for an account this week because now I'll finally be able to break my habit of navigating to Twitter to "see what's happening" only to find a bunch of sports memes, pop music drama, or right-wing trolls pretending like Hunter Biden is the most nefarious person on the planet.

Imo, Elon is lying and he locked everything down for PR so he would make a headline and frame it like his site's content is _so valuable_ that he just had to take drastic measures to stop AI from training on it.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#826
post #573

Can we now finally go back to the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter Internet, before we centralized everything within a few corporations?

Exactly this, I’m happy of what’s happening with twitter and Reddit and the likes, maybe it’s the reality slap the users needed to get back to smaller communities.

I'm actually glad too that these corporate platforms decided to self-immolate. Alternatives are there and they are much more healthy.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#827
post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is making a point and a reminder for everyone that what you share on social nets like Twitter is basically not owned by you, but the service. Actually I’m surprised this took so long to do, and in the light of doing so shows that perhaps Twitter was sold for its existing content rather than existing or active user base.

> basically not owned by you, but the service. It's shared ownership. You own it, but give Twitter non-exclusive permission to also use it. This is why news agencies request permission from a twitter account before sharing a picture they took.

Twitter can delete the post without your consent, so you don't really own it.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"control access and rate limit" Isn't that basically what they did with the API changes?

But they were too stingy with the tiers and too greedy with their prices. Even for minor use cases where you need to make, say, 100 API calls a day, you’ll need to pay $100/month. Which just leads people to scrape.

Why is it twitter that is “stingy” and not the people scrapping so they don’t have to pay?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#829

From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…

Leave it to Musk to create a hair-on-fire emergency out of a regular cup of coffee. "EXTREME"! Please...

But hey, I am eternally grateful. As a super-compulsive Twitter user, I read accounts and my own lists after I log out. This fixes it.

Have your "emergency", Elon.

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