Post AXGIBXx84s0a3gzdGi by eaton@phire.place
 (DIR) More posts by eaton@phire.place
 (DIR) Post #AXGIBSFLIF0oMRT5pA by eaton@phire.place
       2023-07-01T18:17:18Z
       
       2 likes, 2 repeats
       
       The sudden chaos as Twitter — a service built on the idea of shouting your shower thoughts to the world — locks everything behind a registration wall, jacks up prices, AND gets demonstrably less stable for the PAYING customers is a hilarious demonstration off the fact that Musk isn’t actually good at business, just at being a rich guy.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXGIBU6CPCt26fCoqm by eaton@phire.place
       2023-07-01T18:32:05Z
       
       2 likes, 4 repeats
       
       Even funnier that the current weirdness is an obvious result of the batshit API pricing.Anyone interested in low end tinkering wa suddenly incentivized to sidestep the API and just scrape the oEmbed or web endpoints, and they did. So he locked out unregistered visitors and killed embedding, which broke every citation of a tweet on the Internet.Then people start using logged in sessions to get that data. So he limits *actual logged in users* to only viewing 600 tweets per day.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXGIBW82rJYGOy5K0O by eaton@phire.place
       2023-07-01T18:35:52Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       It’s an entirely predictable cycle; scraping Twitter was way more of a hassle than using its API… when the API was low-cost.And every action Musk takes to lock out “freeloaders” reduces the incremental value of access to the service at all — making the ROI of those insane API costs for devs and businesses built on Twitter even worse.Which incentivizes finding ways around the API, which restarts the loop.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXGIBXx84s0a3gzdGi by eaton@phire.place
       2023-07-01T18:45:39Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Like, *I* was scraping Twitter! This week! I’d downloaded my Twitter Archive, with 15y of favorites. But the archive doesn’t include who wrote those tweets or *when they were from*, so I wrote a script that pings the oEmbed endpoint and parsed the html for user handle and date.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXGIBZp37sjXrDECx6 by eaton@phire.place
       2023-07-01T18:49:46Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Ideally, the Twitter Archive would just include that; it’s not like the data’s not there already, they just didn’t include it, and also locked down the *API* endpoint that used to make looking it up easy.This insistence on extracting maximum value from the API, rather than using it to make *relying on Twitter easier,* could easily be a death spiral. It’s the social media equivalent of CVS putting every product behind lock and key to prevent toothbrush shoplifting.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXGIBbhK9Zk5fpd4Bk by eaton@phire.place
       2023-07-01T18:55:51Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Imagine a dude buys a movie theater and gets angry that the “free popcorn refills” policy theoretically allows moviegoers to get endless refills and resell the popcorn outside.So he kills free refills and starts charging by the kernel.