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What's the use case for Twitter to allow outside write API access? If twitter banned all API write access, what would be the problem? The vast majority of peo
by mozumder 9y ago
What's the use case for Twitter to allow outside write API access?
If twitter banned all API write access, what would be the problem?
The vast majority of people would still use Twitter via the app or their website, and it would obviously solve a lot of spam problem. But do we really need automated emergency alerts that don't filter through a human?
- nradov 9y agoHow would it solve the spam problem? People would just write bots that work through the website by scripting headless browsers.
- mozumder 9y agoAt the browser level you have Captcha, which is a lot more expensive to spam - you need a human somewhere to overcome - than an API.
- bdcravens 9y agoDepends on your definition of expensive. Captcha solving goes for around 1/10 a cent per catcha. (obviously pricier than free, but if you want to blast out 1000 tweets a day, that'd cost you $1)
- tedivm 9y agoYou don't need a human for captcha. You can put together software pretty easily now that'll solve some captchas some of the time, and with automation even a 5% success rate means you can still get thousands of accounts.
- icebraining 9y agoThey could easily detect and ban accounts that failed 95% of captchas, though.
- tedivm 9y agoThe captcha tends to be during signup, not just any general request. Otherwise third party clients wouldn't work at all. So there isn't any "account" with 95% failure, only IP addresses that fit that. However, spreading requests to multiple IP addresses can help get around that, and botnet rental is pretty cheap these days (cheaper than the captcha prices that have been quoted).
- icebraining 9y agoThe captcha tends to be during signup, not just any general request. Otherwise third party clients wouldn't work at all The post that started this thread was about thought experiment of Twitter killing off their API. So that third party clients wouldn't work is a given. And since they wouldn't work, there's no reason why Twitter couldn't show a captcha many more times after signup.
- RandomInteger4 9y agoWhy would they completely limit API write access when there's a less nuclear route to prevent abuse as detailed in the article?
- threeseed 9y agoJust a few use cases. I suspect there are quite a lot: 1) Allowing a delay between creation and posting e.g. Buffer. 2) Posting updates to Twitter whenever CMS content changes e.g. Wordpress. 3) Large companies who need tools that work across all social media sites e.g. Hootsuite. 4) RSS -> Twitter.
- mozumder 9y agoThose all are automated spam, and doesn't really facilitate discussion. They just increase noise on the platform. Edit: Reminder that Twitter filters out posts that don't receive much interaction.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- exolymph 9y agoLol @ you assuming that anything a company posts is spam. You can just unfollow them.
- threeseed 9y agoNot everything in Twitter is about discussion. Much of the platform is dedicated to users wanting to follow products, brands, services etc. For them the services I listed are a critical necessity. You can argue all of it is spam but then by that definition so is most of the web.
- vidarh 9y agoPretty much none of what I use Twitter for is discussion. You're assuming everyone uses Twitter for a very specific, limited purpose.
- AznHisoka 9y agoI think there is an argument that automating tweeting leads to more spam even though there are some legitimate use cases. The NYTimes automating tweeting a link to an article after its published provides value. Yet that same functionality allows spammers to tweet links to their spam automatically as well. Likewise with scheduling, etc. Anecdotally, before 2010 (when scheduling tweets became popular) I remember Twitter being much more active and discussion oriented, hence I paid more attention to my feed. Now i only use Twitter to search for specific things (ie is AWS down)
- talaketu 9y agofor example, the tweets by @newsycombinator are posted via API.
- mozumder 9y agoAnd if you look at that account there's no real interaction going on with it for an account that has 175k followers.
- vidarh 9y agoAnd yet it has that many followers, some portion of presumably see some utility in receiving those tweets, even if that utility does not match your idea of what they should do with it.