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At the browser level you have Captcha, which is a lot more expensive to spam - you need a human somewhere to overcome - than an API.
by mozumder 9y ago
At 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.