I am 99% sure that this is not a real thing and that you're using all of these words incorrectly.
When was Substack illegally scraping Twitter data? What Twitter data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779
> What Twitter data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
I have no proof of this. It's just speculation. I also don't have an iDevice so I can't install the app and look for myself.
But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week, combined with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is being mass-scraped, combined with the launch of Threads this week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
Like, what would that even mean? Do you really think Meta is going to launch a Twitter competitor and just wholesale impersonate accounts and their content? If not, what even are you implying?
(from the "proof" link where Elon was accusing Substack of scraping:)
>2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
lol, reading that still makes me chuckle. I can't believe people eat his crap up even when the circumstances make it clear that he's backpeddaling and desperately trying to save face.
If someone could marry the two, in a non profit Wikipedia sort of way, with decent Democratic way to moderate and vote on new features etc, we could kill two birds with one stone and replace both Twitter and Reddit.
But linking to an Elon Musk tweet does not on its face change anything about my prior that this is not a real thing and that you're using all of these words incorrectly. Elon thinks everything that is personally inconvenient to him is illegal. He's threatened legal action in the past over advertisers just not buying ads from him.
He just says stuff. But you have to apply some critical thinking here -- what would it even look like to "bootstrap" Threads with Twitter data? These words mean things, if Threads is being bootstrapped with stolen data, there should be Twitter data on Threads -- accounts should be mirrored, content should be mirrored, there should be something. Is there?
> But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week, combined with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is being mass-scraped, combined with the launch of Threads this week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
The timing of Threads launching this week is probably a direct response to gestures wildly around at the state of Twitter right now. I find it incredibly unlikely that Instagram launching Threads crippled Twitter's infrastructure.
Particularly given that Elon Musk himself claimed (also likely incorrectly) that it was AI companies crippling the site, not rival social networks.
Boy do I have a cosmic bridge to sell you!
b) It is legal and ethical to scrape public data. Especially when that data is owned by its users and not by Twitter.
c) The far more likely explanation for Twitter's rate limiting is that they didn't pay their AWS/Google bill and rather than cut the service off they limited its bandwidth and/or compute capacity.