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> My god, what a bad idea. The concentration of power in controlling what news people see is one of the huge problems of modern times. Which is one of the reas

by tetrep 10y ago

> My god, what a bad idea. The concentration of power in controlling what news people see is one of the huge problems of modern times. Which is one of the reasons I do not use Twitter. They wield a great deal of power, including the explicit disallowing of archives of deleted tweets[0], aka they will block you from using their service if you attempt to (publicly) archive information transmitted across it. It's like erasing logs from a program that has side-effects, or heck, even the "right" to be forgotten[1]. I dislike the idea that such power to destroy information is granted explicitly to any entity. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/12/an-interview-with-the-anonymous-founder-of-postghost/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/12/an-interview-with-the-anon... [1]: I understand this is a contentious topic, but I think that society should accept that people are capable of change, rather than having us whitewash our pasts to appear as if we were always however we currently are. Those who forget their pasts are doomed to not respect or appreciate how both individuals and society can radically alter their courses of actions and ideals over time. It truly is as bad as erasing the bad things groups of people have done in the past.

ultramancool 10y ago
Writing a scraper for this is trivial and it's not like you're going to get caught if you're just scraping a few big name people. I definitely think this would be a good idea for political candidates and such, who the public should really have this sort of information about... A quick script that could do this with a few people and store the info locally might be a good idea, then we'd take this out of the hands of Twitter. Maybe a little PyQt GUI that can sit in your tray and scrape twitter accounts or watch via their websocket API and notify you when a tweet is deleted.

by tetrep 10y ago

ultramancool 10y ago

Writing a scraper for this is trivial and it's not like you're going to get caught if you're just scraping a few big name people. I definitely think this would be a good idea for political candidates and such, who the public should really have this sort of information about... A quick script that could do this with a few people and store the info locally might be a good idea, then we'd take this out of the hands of Twitter. Maybe a little PyQt GUI that can sit in your tray and scrape twitter accounts or watch via their websocket API and notify you when a tweet is deleted.