50years50cents t1_jc23n0w wrote on March 13, 2023 at 2:14 PM

Anyone think this might be a deliberate method of preventing researchers from tracking and quantifying hate speech on the platform?

mecha_flake t1_jc26agy wrote on March 13, 2023 at 2:33 PM

If that's true, it's a stupid way to attempt that. There is nothing stopping people from just scraping Twitter's front end. That means Twitter pays a ton more money because they have to serve much more data.

APIs are a much more efficient way to serve specific data sets.

UnkleRinkus t1_jc2hwiy wrote on March 13, 2023 at 3:52 PM

They will rate limit the number of queries coming from a given IP address. Then someone will develop an agent that will support crowd sourcing this across thousands of users, and then either Twitter's servers will hopefully crumble under the load or their AWS bills will skyrocket, either of which will accelerate the fall.

Elon is about to discover the Streisand effect.

mecha_flake t1_jc2muq0 wrote on March 13, 2023 at 4:24 PM

Exactly. Either give people a way to do what they are trying to do or they will find a much less desirable path forward.

tundey_1 t1_jc2yo43 wrote on March 13, 2023 at 5:41 PM

Also, Elmo doesn't have that many developers to spare. He's starting a costly war that he doesn't have the resources to fight. Kinda like what a person who refuses to pay his bills and would rather be sued by the King of England!

Amaranthine t1_jc558ao wrote on March 14, 2023 at 2:40 AM

I already see “Rate Limit Exceeded” in the official Twitter iOS app lmao. I’m sure it’s much easier to get around this using a normal browser, but it’s probably going to be made more and more annoying over time -_-

FamousSuccess t1_jc290co wrote on March 13, 2023 at 2:52 PM

I was thinking the same. API being closed will now shift a huge proportion of querying to scraping. They'll definitely see an uptick in server loads.

Funny enough it would not shock me to see Twitter scale down their server/hardware to mirror their expected data demands as a result. But I could see this back firing pretty quickly when a couple github projects find their way to mainstream and near-plugin ready twitter scrapers are slamming the site 24/7

Going to be interesting to watch play out

mecha_flake t1_jc29ws6 wrote on March 13, 2023 at 2:58 PM

I don't play the market, but watching Elmo do something stupid with Twitter and then watching how it affects $TSLA has become a new hobby.

tundey_1 t1_jc2ygj7 wrote on March 13, 2023 at 5:40 PM

But Elmo is a stupid man who has loan interest payments coming up.