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Great write up. But, yes, this project was 100% doomed from the start — it’s essentially “violate Twitter TOS as a service.” I recall seeing the link title on H
by ramphastidae 5y ago
Great write up. But, yes, this project was 100% doomed from the start — it’s essentially “violate Twitter TOS as a service.” I recall seeing the link title on HN (“ Show HN: Download Twitter data without API keys”) and thinking, wow, no chance that will last a day.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThere is a business model there, but it isn't "write 50 lines to talk to the Twitter API", it's "play cat & mouse with Twitter's anti-scraping techniques". The latter is absolutely valuable and you can make money off it, but it requires significant resources - access to a large pool of IP addresses, an decent engineering team to be able to defeat the protections in a timely manner (as they change constantly) and either be based in a jurisdiction where you can ignore Twitter's lawsuits or have enough cash to litigate it out.