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The translation of this is: We're trying even harder to kill any and all 3rd party applications. 300 tweets per 3 hours global rate limit is bonkers. My favor
by kevin_b_er 8y ago
The translation of this is: We're trying even harder to kill any and all 3rd party applications. 300 tweets per 3 hours global rate limit is bonkers. My favorite twitter app for android is probably dead after this.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoOn the plus side, signal to noise is about to skyrocket on Twitter.
- urda 8y agoExtremely doubtful in reality though, it's still going to be all noise.
- mevile 8y agoIt's always been about how you follow people. I have a few twitter accounts: one where I follow people I know and devs and it's very noisy. It's nearly unusable, it's full of political rants, even from well known devs, angry tweets, just not very useful. I don't read it much. The other twitter account I follow people who write funny tweets, and that account is a goldmine. I love it. I like almost every tweet. Nobody follows this account, it's just like a read only twitter and it's amazing. I have a third twitter account for local news, I follow the local fire department, police, local news, local businesses, and it's also super great. Twitter's android app makes it easy to switch between accounts, it's basically just like different feeds.
- slg 8y agoThis will make maintaining an army of bots more expensive. It does little to actually stop it.
- Splines 8y agoThe API only makes it easy for the good guys to use twitter.
- taytus 8y agoA little more expensive maybe. Most bot farms have a LOT of dev accounts, multiple apps, ways to automatically create an app, etc. This is not a solution against bots.
- toephu2 8y agoSo you don't believe price effects the creation and maintenance of bots? When maintaining an army of bots becomes more expensive than the amount of money they are making from it, they will stop doing it.
- existencebox 8y agoHaving dabbled in the space a bit: (on the less-malicious side, scraping for archiving, I imagine pro bot-writers are far beyond me.) There's an upper bound to "bot complexity"; that being the complexity you want to impose on a normal user. For many sites (e.g. instagram) it's often easier to just "pretend to be a normal user" and hit it from a headless browser. You lose some functionality, but at least for my needs, that's always been a sufficient fallback. As such, I've always been of the opinion that the primary function of API limitations is to punish/limit/extract more money from the good participants.
- slg 8y agoSure, it affects things at the margins. However that is all this does. The biggest outcry against bots is not the low margin spam/advertising related stuff. People learn to ignore that type of content almost as soon as they start using the internet. The real troubling bots are those used for harassment, influencing financial markets, and influencing political discourse. The first was never about pricing. The latter two are still amazingly cost effective. I would bet they would have to go up by an order of magnitude or two before the pricing effects start having a real impact.
- slig 8y agoHow so? What's stopping bad actors from using their official client's secret (found on mobile apps binary)?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoScarcity enforces efficiency. API monitoring stops bad actors; doesn't matter much if you extract the creds from a binary blob if the usage pattern begins to deviate from the norm, invalidating the creds and forcing a creds cycle.
- slig 8y agoInvalidating creds would mean millions of users blocked overnight, which is something they would never do, too much friction for the vast majority of the users.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWith these changes (limits), you’re not having millions of users. Those days are long gone. API access is now effectively for ancillary or supporting tools.
- arbie 8y agoAre you implying the official client no longer uses their own API?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI'm implying that non-official consumers of the Twitter API are slowly being relegated to second class citizens. Not knocking it, it makes sense from a platform integrity perspective. It is what it is.