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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

#951

Post by satvikpendem »

highwayman47 wrote: post #369
jug wrote: post #85

Ugh, what an eventful time of social media this has been. First Twitter API, then Reddit API, so today Apollo and many more Reddit clients shut down, and now Nitter. :-( I'm happy Lemmy is kind of taking off. I think it's helped more than Mastodon because it's less realtime/feed focused and slower paced. It also doesn't require you to form a friend circle to benefit. Instead, the community is waiting for you already.…

What we had before was a low interest rate phenomenon.

Indeed, I thought HN of all places would understand that the last 15 years were a bubble of zero interest rates. Now, companies have to be profitable or die.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#952

Post by satvikpendem »

jug wrote: post #85

Ugh, what an eventful time of social media this has been. First Twitter API, then Reddit API, so today Apollo and many more Reddit clients shut down, and now Nitter. :-( I'm happy Lemmy is kind of taking off. I think it's helped more than Mastodon because it's less realtime/feed focused and slower paced. It also doesn't require you to form a friend circle to benefit. Instead, the community is waiting for you already.…

I like tildes much more than lemmy, to be honest.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#953

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dredmorbius wrote: post #940
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual problem seems to be that a large number entities now want a full copy of the entire site. But why not just... provide it? Charge however much for a box of hard drives containing every publicly-available tweet, mailed to the address of buyer's choosing. Then the startups get their stupid tweets and you don't have any load problems on your servers.

So, I'd just made that suggestion myself a few moments ago. That said, there are concerns with data aggregation, as patterns and trends become visible which aren't clear in small-sample or live-stream (that is, available in near-time to its creation) data. And the creators of corpora such as Twitter, Facebook YouTube, TikTok, etc., might well have reason to be concerned. This isn't idle or uninformed. I've done data…

This is a legitimate concern, but whether the people doing the analysis get the data via scraping vs. a box of hard drives is pretty irrelevant to it. To actually solve it you would need the data to not be public.

One of the things you could do is reduce the granularity. So instead of showing that someone posted at 1:23:45 PM on Saturday, July 1, 2023, you show that they posted the week of June 25, 2023. Then you're not going to be doing much time of day or day of week analysis because you don't have that anymore.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#954

Post by M2Ys4U »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #950
harshreality wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't throw around the word "stealing" so loosely. Scraping data from a public website is not "stealing". It might be a violation of the terms of service, but then you have the whole issue of click-through (formerly shrink-wrap) licenses and contracts of adhesion. If someone isn't vetting you and potentially signing you to a more meaningful contract before giving you access, for free, to data, then using that…

There are much bigger issues. 1. Users or one might say content creators don't own their data. Not just do those platform owners make a lot of money with the content (which they have a license to, as per site ToS) but then you have third parties scraping it now for commercial products. Using the data to train models that are then sold back to some of the same social media users who produced the content for free in th…

Theft requires the victim to be deprived of their property.

Nobody is deprived of their property, intellectual or otherwise, when this stuff happens, thus is it not right to call it stealing.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#955

Post by photonthug »

ahoka wrote: post #905
photonthug wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment. The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances , is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you clic…

“it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter” This is not true. Communities can be browsed without login on their home instances.

Good example of irritating comment that led to the odyssey above. What you say also appears to not be true. The correct assertion is maybe: If you can find an instance, and if the instance is configured to allow anonymous, then you can browse communities. Since nothing is ranked or searchable, then if you're willing to do that for N instances and M communities, enduring server errors/login screens the whole way, maybe you can find decent content after weeks of brute-force labor. This isn't practical for someone who just wants to spend a few minutes finding a replacement for /r/math and /r/physics or whatever.

For the short term at least, since discoverability is so broken, I think those who want to advocate for Lemmy will be better served by just linking to content or curating indexes of active communities. It's not that useful to anyone if the focus is always about pretending everything is fine, or presenting prospective users with totally useless machine-generated indexes where we cannot tell the test-servers from production.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#956

Post by notfed »

syspec wrote: post #722
kakakiki wrote: post #599

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…

Is twitter worth scraping though for AI? I mean, Reddit I get, but twitter content has suuuuch a low signal to noise ratio.

> Reddit I get

Reddit is a cesspool of misinformation and phallic references.

I guess there may be certain subreddits/tweeters that someone might want to train on, but I dont understand why.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#957

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #947
ricardobayes wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ambiguous what GP refers to as "next", but if it's the Eternal September part, I believe HN unfortunately already suffers a lot from it. In my subjective opinion, comment quality took a nosedive in the past 2-3 months or so. That said, I have no idea how to fix it, if it needs fixing at all.

Paralleling what dang's said here, I've been looking at 17 years of HN front page activity over the month or so, and am starting to tackle the question of topic drift and/or focus over that period. I've been sort of live-blogging the experience on the Fediverse: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics >, as well as in some of my HN posts. My current tack involves looking at sites (as reported in pare…

More on "UNCLASSIFIED": there are 36,520 of those sites.

It's not practical to list all of them. But we can randomly sample. And large-sample statistics start to apply at about n=30, so let's just grab 30 of those sites at random using `sort -R | head -30`:

   1  sfg.io
   1  extroverteddeveloper.com
   2  letmego.com
   1  thestrad.com
   2  bombmagazine.org
   1  domlaut.com
   1  bootstrap.io
   1  jumpdriveair.com
   2  desmos.com
   1  leo32345.com
   1  echopen.org
   1  schd.ws
   1  web3us.com
   7  akkartik.name
   1  bcardarella.com
   1  cancerletter.com
   1  platinumgames.com
   1  industrytap.com
   2  worldoftea.org
   1  motion.ai
   1  vectorly.io
   2  enterprise.google.com
   1  lift-heavy.com
   1  davidpeter.me
   1  panoye.com
   3  thestrategybridge.org
   2  fontsquirrel.com
   1  kettunen.io
   1  moogfoundation.org
   2  elekslabs.com
That's a few foundations, a few blogs, a corporate site (enterprise.google.com), and something about tea, all with a small number of posts (1--7).

I'm looking at some slightly larger samples (60--100) here on my own system, and can actually make some comparisons across samples (to see how much variance there is) which can give some more information on tuning what I would expect to find under the "UNCLASSIFIED" sites.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#958

Post by tracerbulletx »

larodi wrote: post #785
benjaminwootton wrote: post #683

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…

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.

It's not though. They have a very permissive license but they don't have any actual IP ownership.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#959

Post by saltminer »

naasking wrote: post #911
smcl wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I don’t buy it. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter, and we are to understand that there are an enough people scraping to the extent that they had to suddenly take drastic action by shuttering unauthenticated access? Any dev would have told him that those supposedly scraping could simply setup Selenium or some other headless browser to login before scraping. This smells of another failed Musk experiment…

> Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter, and we are to understand that there are an enough people scraping to the extent that they had to suddenly take drastic action by shuttering unauthenticated access Suppose 1 million people are accessing Twitter at any given time. An actual person might only be making 1 request / second. That's 1 million requests / second. Suppose there are 100 AI companies scraping Twitter…

> A bot like this can make thousands to tens of thousands of requests per second.

You don't need to use a bot to do this, Twitter literally did this to themselves through their own buggy code https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639474671754723

If Silicon Valley was still being produced, this would make for a great episode.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#960

Post by talldatethrow »

hedora wrote: post #151

Uggh. I only use twitter to follow critical (life-and-death) emergency broadcasts from our local fire department. Is there a viable alternative for them to use now that twitter is going to block most of our county’s residents?

How did you really use it for emergency info if you weren't logged in? You'd find out there was an emergency and manually go check for details?

I'd think most of the power of posting emergencies on Twitter would be notifications?

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