[HN Gopher] Twitter's founder admits that shutting down the API ...
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter's founder admits that shutting down the API was "Worst
thing we did"
Author : amitk1
Score : 206 points
Date : 2021-12-23 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.revyuh.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.revyuh.com)
| bern4444 wrote:
| Twitter has recently opened up their APIs quite a bit[0]. I'm
| wondering if it's too late for the developer community now to
| embrace these APIs now that Twitter is "built up" and no longer a
| smaller company.
|
| [0]https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2021/b..
| .
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Now that Jack is out, he seems to be speaking rather freely...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| too much!
| timr wrote:
| They're trying really hard to challenge it with this silly "we
| won't let you read anything without an account" thing they're
| doing.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| For five years, I ran a network of Twitter accounts promoting
| local tech events. They were (uncreatively) called the "Tech
| Events Network" and included ATXTechEvents, DENTechEvents,
| NYC_TechEvents, and 50+ others that would broadcast local
| meetups, even supporting basically unknown tech communities like
| Albuquerque with ABQTechEvents. All received massive traffic,
| engagement (RTs & likes specifically), and became an active
| megaphone for their respective communities.. gaining almost 300k
| followers.
|
| More importantly, the meetups and events they tweeted saw
| attendance rise and more people know about them in general. It
| was great for everyone and I had hundreds of thank you tweets,
| emails, and DMs.
|
| But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations
| hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly
| suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and
| they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I
| even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our
| behalf and zero progress.
|
| After dozens of suspensions, I finally shut it all down. I
| haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech
| communities but that feels off..
| winternett wrote:
| In all honesty, the Shadowban was the worst thing they ever
| did...
|
| I've had 3 accounts, 1 of which has been stuck at sub 130 users
| for over 10 years of posting, no matter what I've tried. That
| would be f*ing impossible on any platform that truly fosters
| creativity and even a scrap of post equality/fairness. There is
| also absolutely no indication nor procedure for contesting a
| limited status placed on social accounts on platforms like
| Twitter, it's all done in secret, which adds insult to injury.
|
| Truth is, the minute you mention anything now that is remotely
| perceived as critical of a platform on the platform, a switch
| is flipped that prevents you from building anything positive
| within that community.
|
| Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's
| exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the
| largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership
| being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things
| really die a slow death these days.
|
| Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable
| growth, and metrics... Focusing on my own site is a lot less
| stressful than relying on the gaslighting and unexplained
| "growth-hobbling" that is now far too typical on social
| sites...
| huijzer wrote:
| > Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable
| growth, and metrics...
|
| Since you don't have social media anymore (or at least
| Twitter), how do you get new traffic to your site? All via
| search engines?
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Tired of hearing "web3" everywhere, it's the one buzzword that
| really disgusts me. Reminds me exactly of the dotcom era. This is
| what happens when the "ideas guy" grifter infiltrates the OSS
| community.
| leshenka wrote:
| I'm only referring to it as web3.0000000000000004 from now on
| riffic wrote:
| the laser eye types don't even acknowledge the federated social
| ecosystem either.
|
| you can have decentralization without blockchains. Just adopt
| the existing standards, or get involved with the W3C / IETF if
| you want to be part of the process defining the next ones.
| numair wrote:
| The only thing annoying about the term "web3" is that it
| downplays the eventual real-world impact of a lot of the
| capital innovations taking place.
|
| Personal lack of understanding doesn't mean that something
| important isn't taking place (which I am guessing is how you
| see things since it's so disgusting to you). Every wave of
| capitalist innovation is filled with shameless promoters and
| wannabes, alongside the legitimate stuff... If that bothers
| you, the messy and chaotic nature of human progress might not
| be your thing.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I'd love to understand more about these capital innovations.
| I've done multiple deep dives over the last year into the
| crypto space and I've come away with the idea that the tech
| is certainly interesting and that there is potential for it
| to alter our financial systems drastically but beyond that I
| haven't made much headway. Do you have any resources you
| could point me to so I can read up on the innovations you're
| speaking of?
| numair wrote:
| https://vitalik.eth.limo is an excellent resource. You'll
| see that his thinking, and the thinking of people like him,
| is a _lot_ more advanced than the thought processes of the
| armchair experts who seem to have dedicated their lives to
| "exposing" this industry to be "one giant scam." I can't
| think of a better resource off the top of my head.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Thank you for that!
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Hmmm, but what exactly is web3? I really struggle to
| understand.
|
| As far as I get is that some people wants to decentralice
| stuff, but I don't really see how is that going to happen.
|
| No offense but everything that has any relationship with
| "decentralization" or "blockchain" is fairly difficult to
| use. And even understanding them superficially is not
| trivial.
| jagger27 wrote:
| "Capital innovations" is a great spin on business as usual VC
| control of capital.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >NOBODY CAN TAKE AWAY API ACCESS OF DEVS ON ETHEREUM, JACK. THAT
| IS THE POINT.
|
| I see this kind of take all the time but people don't seem to
| realize that distributed computing doesn't imply decentralized
| services. Nobody can take away your internet access (well
| technically someone can) but that doesn't help you when you're
| stuck on Facebook. You can always send http over a wire.
|
| Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third
| party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just
| like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who
| don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do
| this on the internet by running their own site.
|
| People aren't going to interact with ethereum at the protocol
| level (except for enthusiasts) for the same reason they're now on
| Twitter and not on Mastodon. Also if "web3" was disintermediated
| VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't
| extract profit from something you don't own.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a
| single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from
| something you don't own.
|
| Then why are VCs pouring money into web3 projects every chance
| they can get?
|
| Web3 has been pitched as a sort of idealized, democratic,
| community-owned concept, but the reality is mostly a bunch of
| projects pitching token sales to speculators who think they can
| sell those tokens to someone else in the future. Investors are
| cashing in by using their publicity to hype the token in
| exchange for some of those tokens to re-sell to other
| speculators. The actual service doesn't actually have to work
| because it's all speculation at this point.
| waprin wrote:
| The dotcom boom was mostly fueled by rabid speculation.
| Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of
| them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is
| the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a
| "greater fool". Some might call it a Ponzi scheme since only
| way investors make money off AMZN or GOOG stock is from new
| investors money coming in.
|
| When I look at projects like ethereum, I see a lot of
| excitement and innovation around how cooperative game theory
| can innovate new business models and ways of coordination.
|
| The way Twitter repeatedly rugpulled devs is a perfect
| example of how broken the web2 model can be. And now the
| founder of Twitter wants to criticize crypto projects for
| taking VC money, as if Twitter somehow didn't take VC money
| and enrich those VCs in its rise to power? The hypocrisy is
| astounding.
|
| As far as the services, the goal posts keep moving. First
| there's no application, then store of value is an
| application, then art collection, then decentralize automatic
| market makers, then social tokens, then decentralized
| autonomous organizations. These are young, immature ideas but
| clearly stuff is happening. Whether it will live up to the
| grandiose promises, we can't say. But if you want to complain
| about the web3 advocates making grandiose promises about how
| their code is going to change the world, well, they stole
| that playbook directly from the likes of the Google and
| Twitter founders.
|
| When Dorsey and Google execs complain about crypto, I'm
| reminded of a quote from HBO's Silicon Valley:
|
| "I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making
| the world a better place better than we are."
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you
| can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool".
|
| No, that's not correct. When you buy a share of a publicly
| traded company (or a private one, for that matter), you are
| literally buying a fraction of their cash on hand, a
| fraction of their business operations, a fraction of their
| trademarks, a fraction of their inventory, and so on. You
| own part of the company.
|
| The difference with cryptocurrency is that people ditched
| the entire ownership of anything and replaced it with just
| a token. It's like if you took a company, hollowed out
| every single thing that made it valuable, and sold the
| shares as novelty stock.
|
| Anyone suggesting that stocks are just fun tokens that
| people trade back and forth doesn't understand what stock
| actually means. I think this misconception is very popular
| in the cryptocurrency world because it justifies the
| existence of tokens and crypto coins that _aren 't_
| actually backed by anything of value. If you're convinced
| that nothing matters and it's all just tokens anyway,
| you're more likely to be persuaded to invest in crypto
| tokens and shun the stock market.
| suikadayo wrote:
| I'm personally hopeful for platforms like http://gm.xyz as they
| go from centralization to decentralizing parts of their app
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't
| extract profit from something you don't own."
|
| You can build business and infrastructure without VC
| involvement. Sometimes it will be healthier for it.
| soneca wrote:
| I would appreciate a list of web3 projects that don't have
| and explicitly don't want to have any VC involvement (or big
| company involvement, as it would mean the same thing).
|
| I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring
| to those projects.
| riffic wrote:
| look at the activitypub ecosystem then, where no one needs
| permission to become a participant, and vc's refuse to even
| acknowledge its existence.
|
| https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-
| fo...
| ognarb wrote:
| the fediverse is in no way related to this
| web3/blockchain bullshit. It's actually more related to
| the original idea of web 3.0 as semantic web due to the
| usage of similar protocols e.g. json-ld.
| fleddr wrote:
| You'll find that VCs, the shortlist of usual suspects, have
| their hands in almost all web3 projects.
|
| And even if they missed one, they'll get in later anyway by
| simply buying the token. Big capital always wins.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I'd be interested in that list as well. All of the major /
| currently most popular ones seem to be in bed with a16z:
| https://a16z.com/portfolio/#crypto
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Yea, but has little to do with OP's point, which was VC
| attention -> (requires, and therefore proves) centralized
| entities. The reverse isn't true, and nobody claimed it to
| be.
| gnu8 wrote:
| We should just euthanize everyone and blow up the planet if
| the only worthwhile reason for doing anything is for VCs to
| extract profit from it. People who think accumulating more
| wealth than they need at the expense of people who are
| starving is ok should be thrown into a volcano.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't fulminate._" It's tedious and repetitive.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| p.s. No, I'm not trying to defend profit-extracting VCs or
| whatever; just trying to defend this place from burning
| itself to a crisp. Comments like this one and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 are just what
| we don't need in that regard.
| yosito wrote:
| > "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on
| top of a distributed infrastructure
|
| Isn't in the opposite? Web3 is a decentralized app that runs on
| top of distributed web2 and centralized infrastructure.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build
| third party owned services on top of a distributed
| infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the
| internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third
| parties can already do this on the internet by running their
| own site.
|
| I always thought that "web3" meant everything was on the
| blockchain. In other words, you could theoretically re-invent
| Twitter as an Ethereum Smart Contract.
|
| In doing so, every "Tweet" would be on the Eth block chain.
| You'd probably want a web page that interacts with the block
| chain to read/post tweets, but even a static HTML file on your
| local hard drive that interacts with Metamask could achieve
| that. You wouldn't need to run a site.
|
| Of course, therein lies a new problem: Scale. A quick Google
| says that there are 6,000 tweets sent per second. Meanwhile,
| the Eth block chain handles what, 10-20 transactions per
| second, and ends up with fees that are several dollars worth of
| Eth? Nobody other than political figures and spammers are going
| to want to pay $5 to send a Tweet.
| bastiantower wrote:
| Layer 2 solutions, specially zk ones like StarkNet, solve the
| scaling issue
| jagger27 wrote:
| And gleefully introduce contradictory trust issues that no
| one asked for.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Apart from scale the bigger issue is incentives and the
| governance of ethereum. It has already forked itself once at
| the orders of the Leadership, so people are rightly worried
| about what will happen after it switches to PoS
| Kranar wrote:
| Not remotely similar at all. Right now if you don't like
| Facebook, there's nothing you can do to change it... but
| hypothetically if Facebook ran its infrastructure on a
| decentralized platform like Ethereum, then anyone could
| trivially fork the entire system with backwards integration.
|
| It's similar to how if someone doesn't like Chrome, they can
| fork Chromium and make their own version of it and keep
| complete compatibility with Chromium. The decentralized web
| does a similar thing except it does it for services instead of
| strictly software. It's a fully transparent and accessible
| ecosystem of services whose entire history is immutable and
| available for anyone to access.
|
| That said, no blockchain technology is remotely close to the
| point where a massive system like Facebook could possibly hope
| to run and it may never get to that point either, it's hard
| enough getting even trivial services to be cost effective on
| Ethereum... but in principle that's the idea.
| zrm wrote:
| The advantage with decentralized services is that they scale
| and distribute costs.
|
| If you want to compete with YouTube in the traditional way,
| better have a CDN, and if it becomes popular even though you're
| not taking in any revenue, the bandwidth bill is getting paid
| with VC money or you're going out of business.
|
| If you can more easily build it on top of something like
| BitTorrent, you don't need the VC money as much. Now what you
| need is a payment system so your creators can get paid.
|
| The more of these pieces get built and work decentralized, the
| less capital it takes to compete without relying on or yourself
| being a centralized service.
| addicted wrote:
| Twitter could have been a much broader tool. There were all sorts
| of workflows that could have been built around Twitter with an
| API.
|
| But unfortunately Twitter is now reduced to being a global
| version of your local coffee shop billboard, at best, and the
| crazy guy calling himself the next Jesus Christ in the public
| square.
| bern4444 wrote:
| There's so much talk about web3 - it's a bit overwhelming - and
| almost feels a bit toxic by all the people shilling it without
| any actual proof (in the form of new products or services).
|
| I have yet to see any product or service that actually leverages
| "web 3 technologies" - whatever that means to you - to create
| something that can't be done with web 2 or that is either
| marginally or substantially better.
|
| This doesn't mean they don't exist. Rather, I don't even
| conceptually understand what a service built on "web 3"
| technologies would accomplish that is distinct from what we have
| today with web 2 technology.
|
| Does anyone have examples beyond crypto currencies as an
| investment and NFTs - which is just digital art?
|
| Fundamentally, many of Web 2.0 is distributed, FB, AWS, Google
| and most tech companies all do massive amounts of working in
| creating distributed systems - distributed databases, distributed
| serverless infrastructure, CDNs etc.
|
| The "centralization" is that there are companies that operate
| these services.
|
| Is the goal of Web 3 to not have companies but have individuals'
| machines running these?
|
| I certainly don't want my personal computer, phone, Alexa etc
| running and supporting someone else's "decentralized
| application".
|
| What is the goal of web 3? I haven't seen any articulate answer
| that clarifies this question in any meaningful way. I'm hoping
| someone here can shed some light for me.
|
| ETA: The only interesting use case I can think of is to simplify
| transfer of ownership of digital assets - ebooks, video games
| etc. Maybe blockchain would be good at simplifying lending of
| these digital assets between friends, stores, etc without the
| need for DRM?
|
| I'd explicitly include TV, movies, and music but very few people
| purchase these 3 categories since streaming came along.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| If you want to cut through all the bullshit then you should
| directly look into web3 the ethereum js browser library. Sadly
| the term seems to have been hijacked in the recent months.
| Additionally you might want to look into ENS and ipfs as
| "mature" web3 projects
| cblconfederate wrote:
| yeah despite whatever VC money they have the perception isn't
| good. Like, suppose i want to add Metamask login to a site.
| It's not easy, plus it forwards all requests to some server. I
| thought where we are going we don't need SPOF!!
| KarlKemp wrote:
| The whole ecosystem is locked in this tiny box that is
| amendable to complete computation. It is impossible to connect
| that paradigm to the real world without, in some way, falling
| back to concepts they reject, like trusting someone's testimony
| that a product was physically delivered.
|
| That's why they copied the concept a second time with NFTs:
| it's a bit awkward to just keep trading fictional currencies
| for other fictional currencies. Now, you can trade something
| _real_ : fictional ownership of fictional "art".
| opportune wrote:
| If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero.
|
| It offers anonymized payments with low fees. Like Bitcoin but
| without the chain being visible to anybody.
|
| Unlike with regular payments, the transactions are anonymous,
| irreversible, and requires no KYC. Most crypto are not fully
| anonymous. Beware other privacy coins based on zksnarks since
| their creators are generally anti-anonymity (in the sense they
| don't want their tokens to be used in illicit transactions and
| have pledged to make that harder - this defeats the entire
| purpose of a privacy coin, and any solution to this would
| reduce privacy).
|
| While monero is not fully anonymous under 100% of cases - it's
| possible to do something to allow transactions to be linked
| back, such as using the same receiving and sending sub
| addresses multiple times for transactions - it's pretty dang
| good. It's pretty close to being digital cash. And the fees are
| pretty low (last I checked maybe $0.10?), which is more or less
| a permanent feature because it has dynamic block sizes.
|
| BTW, for any blockchain, it's a good thing for ex fees to be
| non-zero. Otherwise there is no cost to "spamming" the
| blockchain which congests the network and increases the size of
| the chain (potentially making it harder to host).
|
| It is unfortunately based on POW, but on the bright side it
| uses an asic resistant CPU-based algorithm to prevent
| centralization.
| bern4444 wrote:
| > If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero.
|
| Genuine question, is crypto sometimes not counted as part of
| web3 by people in the space? I understand blockchain
| technology is distinct from crypto currency, but crypto
| always seems to be included as part of web3 no?
|
| I'll check it out.
|
| I know generally one focus of "web 3" is to simplify
| transactions especially by not having to integrate or work
| with credit card companies, local regulations etc especially
| in countries that don't have that infrastructure to as strong
| a degree.
|
| Certainly an admirable goal, and one I'd love to see - but I
| don't believe that a lot of these issues can't be solved
| better and faster with "web 2" technologies (minus the
| anonymous piece which is a fair and clear advantage).
| drog wrote:
| I think that main web3 innovation is more like mindset
| innovation rather than more common technology innovation
| that improves performance, efficiency, etc.
|
| Take bitcoin as an example, of course you can make internet
| money cheaper using centralized service but it would be bad
| because you have to put a lot of trust into someone's
| hands. That culture and mindset grows into whole finance
| applications where you get defi and property rights where
| you get nft. Nft is not only digital art you can use nft to
| represent domain names and this will cut out authority
| middle man out of the equation - your keys your domain,
| it's impossible to do with web2.
|
| Some people dismiss these as important but that's what
| people in crypto are concerned with - replacement of
| unnecessary middleman, gatekeepers, regulations with
| transparent cryptography and code. If you subscribe to this
| values than you add new constraints and previous solutions
| that can be better and faster no longer work.
| opportune wrote:
| I would include general crypto tokens in web3. Though
| monero is not exactly "WWW" which maybe some people think
| is what web3 is on?
|
| The only reason I mention monero is that it's one of the
| only cryptos that is not vaporware (it isn't hyped up based
| on some as-yet unimplemented capabilities) and has real
| world uses (digital cash. Battle tested, most popular token
| for tx on the dark web). You can also imagine that instead
| of being used on the dark web, it can be used to route
| around oppressive regimes or evade censorship. It's
| permissionless _and_ anonymous which is a unique combo for
| payment systems. It also has a decent online ecosystem for
| onboarding from fiat at localmonero.co
| rafale wrote:
| Isn't Uniswap a web3 product? It's the only way to create a
| Dex.
| princekolt wrote:
| The reason you haven't heard a coherent answer to what problems
| web3 is supposed to solve is because there aren't any. It's
| just a continuation of the past 5-10 years of cryptocurrency
| pump and dump schemes (which also include ICOs and NFTs). Just
| a bunch of hot air. As you correctly put it, it's just a bunch
| of opportunists making money off of tech-gullible people.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > NFTs - which is just digital art?
|
| I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a
| particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or
| digitized) art, as far as I know.
| bern4444 wrote:
| Yes, I agree. It's slightly more indirect than digital art
| but the consequence is the same. It's equivalent to
| copyright. I own this thing. Here is the proof - the NFT.
|
| If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can
| license it from me.
|
| It's no different than a standard contract.
| saberience wrote:
| Except an NFT is basically just a link to some JSON which
| has a URL to an image. You could easily make another NFT
| yourself with a different link to the same image, whose NFT
| is the "real one"? How could you prove who made the
| original image and who sold it? NFTs don't any actual
| rights to the image and certainly don't stop people copying
| and using it. It's a load of crap basically.
| ognarb wrote:
| No it's not like copyright. Copyright are legally
| enforceable, NFT aren't.
|
| They are actually a lot of artists that complains that
| their art is stolen and sold as NFT and the platforms that
| allow this, don't want to handle the copyright
| infringements.
| rektide wrote:
| google kills products but twitter lead the way in killing the web
| as an open accessible interactible meta-medium. twitter deeply
| deeply deeply injured the better ideas of the web itself.
| teitoklien wrote:
| Products dont kill good ideas, People who use those products
| do.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| Google PageRank has done more damage to the open web than
| Twitter could ever hope to. At worst, Twitter's just exposed
| the worst qualities of people to a broader audience.
| mperham wrote:
| I have no idea what you are talking about. I remember web
| search before Google existed. PageRank was a massive, huge
| improvement in search results. Literally night and day.
| There's a reason why Google is a verb now.
| Mezzie wrote:
| PageRank was a massive improvement over every other option
| at the time. It was also, in the long run, a terrible idea
| that has a few VERY wrong assumptions built into it. (As
| does web search in general.)
|
| Larry ended up making PageRank because the number of sites
| that linked to a site was the best measure when all links
| were created by humans and the Web wasn't commercialized.
| It was an automation/algorithm for the measure most link
| lists/curators used at the time to determine precedence
| order and importance, but for one thing, that measure only
| works when the sites themselves are vetted first (you
| wouldn't get a link on 'Best Science Links on the WWW'
| unless the author of the site liked your site and was
| convinced it wasn't full of crap).
|
| More broadly, as someone who agrees with OldTimeCoffee but
| thinks it wasn't purposeful, I'd say that search and web
| crawlers won an early war I'm not sure they should have
| won. We can't turn back the clock, but I do wonder what it
| would have looked like if Google were founded 17 years
| after the Web started and not 7.
| onion2k wrote:
| _PageRank was a massive, huge improvement in search
| results._
|
| The emphasis should be on the 'was' there. PageRank was so
| much better than the competition that it gave Google an
| effective monopoly on search. That lack of competition
| meant Google could focus on how to get users to click on
| ads displayed alongside search results rather than how to
| return better results than the competition. Consequently
| _now_ Google search is only OK at returning what you 're
| after, and the page is 50% ads.
|
| Google hasn't been coasting along on the success of search
| for decades though thankfully. A lot of Google tech is
| very, very good (Gmail, Docs, YouTube, GCE, etc). Search is
| still better than the competitors but that's only because
| there's only really Bing. The problem is that it's really
| only Search that drives revenue.
|
| I _strongly_ believe that if anyone made a better search
| engine than Google, and consequently Google 's ad money
| took a nosedive, Google would be faced with an existential
| crisis unlike any other business in history. If Apple are
| building the search product they're rumored to be building
| all Google staff should be very worried because no jobs
| will be safe.
| leobg wrote:
| Peter Thiel's argument precisely.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Apple could even go default no tracking, because iDevice
| owners would willingly hook into opt-in tracking if there
| were app support. Giving everyone else a "free" ride
| would be a no-brainer.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Compared to having a web search that returns only spam?
| Philadelphia wrote:
| Thought you were talking about Google now for a minute.
| It's close to 100% spam, fakey rankings, and the world's
| cheapest SEO content for almost any search.
| vosper wrote:
| Did it? Before Google people were just using other search
| engines, there was always some intermediary deciding what
| links to show you first.
|
| There was lots of competition, and it turned out Google was
| way better at being relevant than everyone else. Now there
| isn't competition, but that's not how it started :)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Altavisa! Lycos!
|
| But even before that, when there were _no_ search engines,
| there were directories (https://dmoz-odp.org/) which tried
| to take a taxonomic approach to the whole web, webrings,
| and putting your URL into print to get people to type it
| in. The latter culminated in an early version of the QR
| code: regular barcodes and the "cuecat" barcode scanner.
| iszomer wrote:
| Astalavista was the darker Altavisa alternative..
| Mezzie wrote:
| Remember when Yahoo was a directory (how I learned the
| word 'hierarchical'!) and there were people who
| maintained sites listing things like new Geocities sites?
|
| I think a lot of the modern Web's problems can be traced
| to the desire to cut out human intermediaries in the
| early Web, mostly to focus on speed and monetization. (No
| curators in the models means no need to PAY curators). I
| also think the rise of the influencer and parasocial
| relationships are trying to fill the void. Most humans
| want human context in information searching. Those of us
| who don't need it are the weird ones, not the standard
| case.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Machine searching could have been good enough, but search
| is an adversarial problem in a way that libraries aren't.
| vkou wrote:
| > Most humans want human context in information
| searching.
|
| No, they don't. Ask any librarian about how many patrons
| of their libraries only interact with them during the
| check-out process.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'm a librarian, actually!
|
| I'd argue that things like our cataloguing process counts
| as 'human context', as do things like our hold and check-
| out systems, library space arrangement, etc. Even if a
| patron doesn't interact with a staff member in person,
| there is a difference between a library and, say, Kindle
| Unlimited from a UX standpoint.
|
| Human context and human curation doesn't necessary mean
| human contact.
|
| Archives are similar: There's a ton of work giving things
| context and making things discoverable even if a
| researcher never talks to the archivist who's done these
| things.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Thank you for your service.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| i m gonna defend twitter as it s the only place where i find
| original thinkers and ideas. And yeah i hate the loss of RSS
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| It used to be that way, but with Twitter's new draconian
| censorship, it's just an echo chamber of stale "approved"
| ideas.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Antisemitism isn't exactly a "new" idea. If people you
| follow are routinely shut down by Twitter, you should maybe
| try some not-quite-as-hatey ideas for a change.
|
| As a point of reference: I follow 1,400 people, including a
| lot in science and art. I can't remember a single person I
| follow being permanently banned.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| i aggressively unfollow people who turn to political
| activists. It is a good source of information but that
| probably has to do with the decline of RSS as well. I think
| as a protocol it is promising, even if it was text-only.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The article has tweets saying they're working to open it back up.
|
| But even if they do, no one is going to trust it sticking around.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I don't think mastodon is a good idea. Don't they already remove
| servers they don't like? A twitter protocol should not be reliant
| on which home server you re on.
| Jaepa wrote:
| I'm not really sure where you're going with this.
|
| Mastodon is a federated system, so there is no _they_. You can
| choose not to federate with groups/nodes you don't want, but
| its basically invite your village type of model. Pro-LGTBQ+
| groups don't have to fediate with neonazi groups, if they don't
| want to.
| tonguez wrote:
| You claim,
|
| "...there is no _they_."
|
| but another poster claims,
|
| "Mastodon can lock those servers out of their directories, or
| out of the main federation-network, though." Which another
| poster referred to as "de-federation".
|
| Which of you is correct? Is there a "_they_"?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Well, i think _they_ is "everyone". I dont follow the space
| but it seemed most (all?) servers federate with a limited
| subset of other servers. Kinda balkanized
| riffic wrote:
| Mastodon's not the only player in the federated social space,
| just the app with the biggest footprint.
|
| You can get a WordPress blog, install the ActivityPub plugin,
| and you're now a fediverse actor which other actors can then
| subscribe to.
|
| Mastodon's cool and all but let's not conflate this piece of
| software with the bigger network.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I wonder if there's an alternative protocol that is fully
| peer-to-peer.
| fleddr wrote:
| Early days:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| thanks i forgot about that. actually doubt it will bear
| fruit as twitter has a vested interest not to let this
| grow. More likely some kid will come up with a better
| idea
| fleddr wrote:
| Well, the new CEO was a leader of that project, so let's
| see.
| riffic wrote:
| bluesky's not even a protocol though. At best you could
| call it a working group.
|
| I'd personally call it "vaporware".
|
| and look at the talk page, I said the same thing a few
| weeks ago:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bluesky_(protocol)
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Mastodon itself can't actually remove servers, any more than
| they can remove someone else's website, because servers are
| hosted by other people on others' computers. Mastodon can lock
| those servers out of their directories, or out of the main
| federation-network, though.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| yeah , defederation. it would be better to have a protocol
| that doesnt allow that.
| russdpale wrote:
| So if someone spun a child porn instance, we should all be
| forced to see that in our federated timeline?
|
| Come on, get real.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| no but it could be up to the receiver address to choose
| what to block.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| That's literally how it works now
| riffic wrote:
| email works the same way.
|
| If I, as the email admin of xyzcorp.biz get too many spammy
| emails from your domain, you can expect to be blocked /
| defederated.
|
| are we dismissing smtp now as a protocol?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| email servers block by content/address though, not only
| entire domains
| dada78641 wrote:
| I think this is the correct way of doing it. Anyone can
| start their own instance and their own federation.
|
| It'd actually be a massive breach of freedom if you were
| somehow not allowed to shut out servers from your Mastodon
| federation--kind of like not having the freedom to block
| someone on Twitter.
| dre_bot wrote:
| 3rd party twitter clients were the greatest era of Twitter before
| they killed the API. I tried to deal with the official app until
| they started showing people's likes and random accounts in my
| feed. You want to talk about infuriating? I was done and never
| went back.
| apple4ever wrote:
| Well if only that founder could have been CEO who would have had
| the power to change that decision...
| pessimizer wrote:
| If somebody whisked him back in a time machine, he'd regret
| doing exactly the same thing again.
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| Choosing an ego-maniacal wannabe-improv-comedian to run the
| company wasn't a great idea either.
| partiallypro wrote:
| One thing I used to like about old Twitter was Favstar which used
| the Twitter API to help you find the funniest tweets, accounts,
| etc. You could reward tweet of the day etc. Twitter is much more
| of a closed box now and it's a little harder to find your
| community.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Worst thing we did
|
| Well, for the business, maybe. The rampant censorship and double-
| standards have been far, far worse for the world and society in
| general.
| giobox wrote:
| It was one of the worst things they did for a sizeable subset
| of users and devs; for "the business" though it may well have
| made sense in financial terms at the time. With the public API
| before it was heavily locked down I mainly used it in third
| party Twitter clients to avoid seeing the (revenue generating)
| ads in the official Twitter apps - I know many others who did
| the same. An open, freely usable Twitter API can actively hurt
| revenues at a time when Twitter desperately needed to
| demonstrate ability to generate profits.
|
| As long as Twitter remains a publicly traded company, I imagine
| this unhappy continuum between "Twitter as universal protocol
| for short messaging" and "Twitter as large publicly traded
| software company" will always put competing pressures on how
| open a standard Twitter can ever really become.
| xoa wrote:
| > _With the public API before it was heavily locked down I
| mainly used it in third party Twitter clients to avoid seeing
| the (revenue generating) ads in the official Twitter apps - I
| know many others who did the same. An open, freely usable
| Twitter API can actively hurt revenues at a time when Twitter
| desperately needed to demonstrate ability to generate
| profits._
|
| I wonder if they ever investigated just making API access
| paid, not free? Users were paying for 3rd party clients
| making use of the API just because they liked them so much
| better already, so clearly there was some money in it. And it
| seems like the Venn diagram of "using client to avoid seeing
| ads" and "already running, or soon would run, adblock in the
| browser" would be pretty darn near a circle. Pretty trivial
| though to make API access require a paid token per
| account/user, and heavy Twitter users might well put down
| $1-10/month to use their client of choice.
|
| Don't know, maybe just an artifact of the era. At the time on
| the web in general it just seems like there was this real
| aversion to any sort of paid offerings even if they were pure
| bonuses for heavy users with no actual content hidden at all.
| That's changed a lot since then, but still particularly for a
| company desperate for hard revenue and facing controversy
| over a specific somewhat power-user feature, a bit curious
| they didn't just try to monetize it. Doesn't seem like an
| honest presentation of that would even bother that particular
| subset, certainly not more then having it axed entirely.
| bagels wrote:
| I'd argue almost the opposite: The worst thing for society done
| by twitter is the promotion of all the virulent garbage speech
| which is then parroted by the media.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| And I'd, in turn, amend that comment to strike the gratuitous
| swipe at "the media".
|
| At least "the media" I consume does not "parrot" social media
| toxicity. It may mention it if it gets traction, as is their
| job.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > And I'd, in turn, amend that comment to strike the
| gratuitous swipe at "the media".
|
| You're flat out wrong, until the media you consume don't
| report anything at all about politics and at that point
| it's hard to call it media any more - simple reason: many
| politicians and even some companies communicate mostly with
| Twitter "soundbites" instead of holding press conferences.
| [deleted]
| numair wrote:
| A couple of months ago some colleagues and I submitted a very
| basic request practically begging Twitter for access to users'
| follower/following graph on the new API. The use case was super-
| simple and obvious (allow people to import their followers into a
| new app) and didn't involve any sort of data mining or spam or
| anything.
|
| It took days? weeks? to get a generic rejection message from a
| "no reply" email address. Meanwhile -- _much irony_ -- A16Z can
| help apps like Clubhouse get super-access since they were also a
| huge investor in Twitter.
|
| All of this pro- and anti-web3 stuff is a sign that all of these
| inter-connected webs of egos in our industry are jostling for
| power in an ecosystem that doesn't need them very much.
| Meanwhile, there are lots of people in other verticals who
| completely missed the boat on the web investment play who are
| beginning to realize this is their opportunity to jump in and
| scale their capital alongside the people on the ground. A major
| investor / operator shakeup is about to take place.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Isnt it possible to just scrape the /followers page?
| friedman23 wrote:
| This kind of social graph access was used by cambridge
| analytica. That's why you will never get this kind of access to
| user data via apis, even if the user grants it to you. (Users
| granted access to the app which then sold the data to cambridge
| analytica).
|
| I was at a major social media company on 2016 and overnight
| these kinds of APIs went from promoting user freedom to
| radioactive. Don't expect anything from these spineless
| companies with similarly spineless executives that bow to the
| woke mob at a slight breeze of discontent.
| numair wrote:
| That's completely incorrect, as this privilege is given out
| on a "friends of the company" basis. Hence my citation of the
| Clubhouse example. Moreover, as insiders have indicated,
| Cambridge Analytica had _exactly_ that sort of privileged
| relationship with Facebook -- normal people _couldn't_ do
| what those guys were doing on the FB Platform without raising
| a lot of eyebrows. I know a _ton_ about that as I was
| involved in that area about 10 years before you.
| friedman23 wrote:
| > That's completely incorrect, as this privilege is given
| out on a "friends of the company" basis
|
| Of course the privileged few get to break the rules, that
| doesn't refute my point.
|
| > Moreover, as insiders have indicated, Cambridge Analytica
| had exactly that sort of privileged relationship with
| Facebook
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a-
| guide-...
|
| Maybe they had a privileged relationship with facebook but
| they got the data from a personality quiz app which
| requested access to user data (which the users granted).
|
| > I know a ton about that as I was involved in that area
| about 10 years before you.
|
| Good for you but don't you think that's beside the point?
| oneepic wrote:
| Let me try to help you two agree.
|
| > you will [generally not] get this kind of access to
| user data via apis, even if the user grants it to you.
|
| ...with the exception that:
|
| > the privileged few get to break the rules
|
| OK?
| reasonabl_human wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the last two sentences?
| numair wrote:
| One of the massive capital flows into the crypto and web3
| markets has been from family offices and investment firms
| that sat around and watched VCs and Silicon Valley firms
| (like YC!) make billions from the shift to web and mobile
| interfaces over the past 20 years. Like, imagine your family
| got pitched Amazon and said "lol nobody needs this," and now
| the next gen is in charge of the wealth; or, imagine you are
| a hedge fund guy watching Tiger Global's moves and you're
| looking for the next major "entry point."
|
| A lot of activity like this is going on behind the scenes.
| You also have bleeding-edge innovation in capital through
| structures like Venture DAOs that will blow up the entire
| space in ways that people haven't fully thought through
| because half of this industry is stuck on the "crypto is a
| scam" narrative of someone with a 2014 understanding of
| what's happening in the space.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| but if "where we're going we don't need their money" is
| true, why is that money useful?
| numair wrote:
| Not sure where you're getting that statement from. The
| most important shift taking place right now is the
| massive increase in both capital velocity (speed at which
| it's moving around) and capital diversity (whose money is
| being used) within crypto/web3 markets. Capitalist
| societies use capital -- money -- to accomplish things,
| so I'm not sure what someone who says "where we're going
| we don't need their money" is talking about...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| hm well i m not sure if web1 or web2 needed that much
| money to take off ...
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Remember that the internet was originally developed
| mostly as a military / university project. It got kick-
| started by quite a bit of money as well.
|
| Web 2.0 was arguably not as expensive, but then again you
| could also argue that it was not as big a step. If you
| think about it, web 2.0 is really just taking web 1.0 and
| adding a lot of fancy stuff like SPA, new fancy protocols
| and social media.
|
| Web 3.0 however, depending on which vision of the 3.0 you
| support, ranges from "just" another upgrade to a
| completely different thing than what we have today.
|
| And to make it quite simple: Completely different things
| are loads of work. Work means people need to dedicate
| their time to it, which means they need to be paid.
| adventured wrote:
| You're miscalculating by trillions of dollars of capital
| investment across Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
|
| Data centers, research & development, operations,
| national infrastructure (eg telecom), chips & hardware,
| software (R&D to maintenance). Now climb inside any of
| those segments and walk the horizon of the businesses and
| costs and what was required to build out what eg
| semiconductors can do today, or what fiber can do today,
| or what networks can do today, or what harddrives can do
| today, or what GPUs can do today, and on and on and on
| and on it goes.
|
| Do a tally on Google's capital investment since 1998
| (year by year and final tally), then tell me Web 2.0
| wasn't as expensive; then do it for Apple, Microsoft,
| AWS, etc. It was drastically more expensive. Web 2.0 also
| includes China's Internet build-out era, and the global
| mobile build-out, I really don't need to say anything
| more than that given the scale everyone here knows we're
| talking about: Web 2.0 was massively more expensive than
| Web 1.0, by at least a magnitude globally.
|
| Web 1.0 was laughably trivial in cost compared to Web
| 2.0. It was petite, tiny, itsy bitsy small, versus
| scaling to billions of global users across all major
| economies, and shifting tens of trillions of dollars of
| GDP online.
|
| Just the entertainment wing of Web 2.0 is larger and more
| expensive than all of Web 1.0 combined.
| skyeto wrote:
| As annoying as that might be, exporting followers seems like a
| use-case that Twitter might not want to freely support?
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| of course they don't but at least in europe we have a data
| portability law that forces companies to let users take their
| data with them when they leave. the problem is, there is not
| a proper entity that can bundle the users interests and
| lawsuits to kick these corporations ass to give us what we
| own.
| numair wrote:
| Jack Dorsey personally helped Instagram with this exact
| feature integration while courting them to be acquired by
| Twitter. Once that failed he was one of the people who worked
| to shut this feature off for everyone else, to avoid another
| situation like that.
|
| His actions say a lot more than all of these re-tweet
| friendly words he's been spouting. I'm glad we won't have to
| trust people like him or the Twitter Developer team, or need
| their permission, to succeed in the future.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| New Journalism: turning tweets into clickbait editorials
| Ergo19 wrote:
| New? No. There's actually a solid decade of practice by now.
| Sunspark wrote:
| I used to be active on Twitter. I had a third party client I
| really liked, I had it configured just right and used the service
| a lot. Then Twitter the corporation with the API removal crippled
| the third party clients in the interests of pushing their "one
| true client" vision so that the vision of a previous CEO or
| whatever would come true, that Twitter be a curated river of news
| and not interactions with people as much.
|
| You know what happened? I stopped using Twitter and only very
| infrequently pop into it now.
| cletus wrote:
| Dorsey joins a long list of founders who were ousted (effectively
| or actually) or it simply became too uncomfortable to stay [1]
| who then go on to criticize their former empire.
|
| 9 times out of 10 I find such criticism to be completely self-
| serving (eg to promote their new venture or agenda), a product of
| bitterness at the exit, a chance to take a swipe at the powers-
| that-be or a combination thereof.
|
| Twitter's developer API followed a typical pattern: do anything
| you can to get traction for your platform. This includes being
| "open" to encourage developers to build stuff on your platform.
| Then, when you don't need them anymore, ditch them. From a purely
| business point of view, he wasn't wrong for doing it. It just
| surprises me that anyone is still shocked when this happens again
| (and again... and again...).
|
| Those who are still bitter at getting locked out will champion
| this quote of course.
|
| Take this quote:
|
| > "IN THE BEGINNING, TWITTER WAS SO OPEN THAT MANY SAW THE
| POTENTIAL TO BECOME A DECENTRALIZED INTERNET STANDARD, SUCH AS
| THE SMTP (EMAIL SENDING) PROTOCOL. FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS,
| ALL REASONABLE AT THE TIME, WE TOOK A DIFFERENT PATH AND WE
| INCREASINGLY CENTRALIZE TWITTER. BUT A LOT HAS CHANGED OVER THE
| YEARS".
|
| Put another way: they chose to be a business. No business chooses
| to create a federated system, at least no successful business (to
| date). There's simply no reason to. The problems with spam and
| abuse of the phone networks, email, texting, etc are largely a
| result of predictably bad actors in an "open" federated system.
|
| The people who call for open standards either aren't a business
| or they're losing to the industry leader and they want "open
| standards" to not die.
|
| [1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/twitter-did-jack-
| dor...
| vkou wrote:
| > TWITTER WAS SO OPEN THAT MANY SAW THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME A
| DECENTRALIZED INTERNET STANDARD, SUCH AS THE SMTP (EMAIL
| SENDING) PROTOCOL. FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS, ALL REASONABLE
| AT THE TIME,
|
| Given that there was exactly one proprietary twitter 'network',
| I would not say that none of those reasons were 'reasonable' at
| the time. They were just wishful thinking in bed with corporate
| marketing.
|
| I don't think a lot of tech people quite understand what a
| public good looks like, but Twitter was never it. From day one,
| it was built as a walled garden, and any access you have to it
| is through the benevolence of its operators.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Twitter's developer API followed a typical pattern: do
| anything you can to get traction for your platform. This
| includes being "open" to encourage developers to build stuff on
| your platform. Then, when you don't need them anymore, ditch
| them.
|
| From my recollections.. Twitter was a company that had a user
| base, but no plans or strategy to become actually profitable
| off that base. They, like many companies at the time, seemed to
| assume that if you just build the big "next generation open
| platform" that money would just start falling from the sky...
| somehow.
|
| Ultimately, the red line meets the black line, and you have to
| turn to VCs who push you into the most obvious solution: Shut
| down all the "open platform" dead weight and start pushing
| advertising.
|
| I don't think these are intentional moves but rather the
| natural consequence of certain types of silicon valley business
| "plans."
| fleddr wrote:
| You're right that somebody who made billions from a problematic
| system comes across as hypocritical when he turns around to
| burn it.
|
| That said, there's something pure and genuine in him. Real
| regret, it doesn't come across as an act. And let's face it,
| Twitter has never really grown up. It's not really a
| functioning business.
| Traster wrote:
| Let's be clear about what has happened here though - Dorsey
| saved Twitter when he first returned, but he completely
| failed to run it as a business. No monetization, anemic
| growth and a complete failure to become a real competitor in
| the sector. Every other comparable tech company grew
| massively over the last 6 years and Twitter is basically the
| same value it was when he came back as CEO. And also let's
| remember why he is stepping down - this only came after
| investors came in and said "Hey, you've done a bad job, we
| need someone new"- and not for nothing, the 6 years of lack
| of value matched 6 years of failure to innovate. His
| criticism might be genuine, but at the same time, he was in
| charge. It's difficult to beleive him when suddenly the week
| after he lost responsibilty, he gained a vision for how to
| fix twitter.
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