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.
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.
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.
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?