Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support research and ‘good’ bots

Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by dtrailin on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @04:36PM (#22539411)

Lots of those that build on the Twitter platform gets burned at some point. They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner. Any company doing social media management at some point gets hurt by changing APIs and increasing fees, sometimes causing fatal damage to their business.

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by riffic on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @04:50PM (#22539554)

>They have shown themselves to be a reliable partner

I hope you mean the opposite? Twitter has long been an unreliable partner in the developer ecosystem.

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by bmelton on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @05:41PM (#22540051)

Not sure if edited, but your quote is slightly off. Should be

> They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner

The "not" there feels like it's in an ambiguous spot, but at least gives a faint connotation of the author's intent, which reads as you'd like it to.

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by rhizome on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @05:50PM (#22540133)

Even GP flailed it and put the 'not' in the wrong place. Should be "They have shown themselves not to be a reliable partner."

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by dorkwood on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @06:03PM (#22540285)

Also acceptable would be "they have shown themselves to be a reliable partner... not"

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by a1369209993 on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @06:59PM (#22540839)

That could be interpreted as "they have not shown themselves to be a reliable partner" (ie we don't know) instead of the correct "they have shown themselves to not be a reliable partner" (ie we know they aren't), though.

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by buboard on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @07:09PM (#22540961)

yeah it should be not (themselves to be (a reliable partner))

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by Jaygles on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @05:04PM (#22539666)

Perhaps they mean Twitter is reliably unreliable?

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by TekMol on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @04:41PM (#22539465)

Now that scraping has been deemed legal by the highest curts, how can anybody still get burned by API fees?

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by godzillabrennus on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @05:16PM (#22539799)

Scraping, while legal now, is still not free. A scrape does not give you the delta between two points in time without a completely new scrape. You cannot economically sustainably scrape the entirety of a large site like Twitter.

If I’m wrong I’d love to learn from someone smarter than me.

Even google doesn’t scrape the entire web every day.

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by CaptArmchair on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @06:25AM (#22544581)

You're not wrong. Library of Congress started archiving every public tweet in 2010 but abandoned the effort in 2017 mainly because of the sheer volume.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/26/573609499...

I think it might be feasible to scrape a subset: a single account or a few accounts at most. But even then, you're still fighting problems ranging from wonky HTML generated through JavaScript towards sudden, unannounced changes to the DOM structure. It's not a managed API after all.

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by ceejayoz on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @04:58PM (#22539606)

"Legal" and "won't be interfered with" are not the same thing. That it's legal to scrape doesn't mean they can't put captchas, IP blocks, etc. in your way.

Scraping doesn't really help when publishing tweets, either.

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by colejohnson66 on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @07:15PM (#22541024)

I thought the point of the LinkedIn lawsuit was that they were trying to stop them from scraping?

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Re:Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support resea... by ceejayoz on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @07:44PM (#22541290)

LinkedIn was trying to do so via legal measures (specifically, alleging violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in a C&D letter).

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