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His team apparently had a tough time verifying the data due to API rate limits. > While Twitter has provided some information, that information has come with s
by minimaxir 4y ago
His team apparently had a tough time verifying the data due to API rate limits.
> While Twitter has provided some information, that information has come with strings attached, use limitations or other artificial formatting features, which has rendered some of the information minimally useful to Mr. Musk and his advisors. For example, when Twitter finally provided access to the eight developer “APIs” first explicitly requested by Mr. Musk in the May 25 Letter, those APIs contained a rate limit lower than what Twitter provides to its largest enterprise customers. Twitter only offered to provide Mr. Musk with the same level of access as some of its customers after we explained that throttling the rate limit prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from performing the analysis that he wished to conduct in any reasonable period of time.
> Additionally, those APIs contained an artificial “cap” on the number of queries that Mr. Musk and his team can run regardless of the rate limit—an issue that initially prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from completing an analysis of the data in any reasonable period of time. Mr. Musk raised this issue as soon as he became aware of it, in the first paragraph of the June 29 Letter: “we have just been informed by our data experts that Twitter has placed an artificial cap on the number of searches our experts can perform with this data, which is now preventing Mr. Musk and his team from doing their analysis.” That cap was not removed until July 6, after Mr. Musk demanded its removal for a second time.
- outside1234 4y agoThey had firehose access - there was no limiting
- ben_jones 4y agoA lot of these rate limits would have been designed off the rubble of the Cambridge Analytica scandals, and would've been designed to prevent a lot of analysis. I still find it dubious that they couldn't long poll sufficient samples. I'd love to see the raw feedback of Musk's "Data Experts" versus whatever awful telephone game it became through several layers of Executives and Lawyers. I wonder if Musk just has a nepotistic data team next to him.
- fooey 4y agothe contract says they can't make any demands that have materially adverse effect on the company if he was hitting up against rate limits, it's easy for Twitter to call his requests adverse
- mft_ 4y agoHow would it be adverse? Are you suggesting his data scientists are querying the API so much that they are DDoSing Twitter?
- erichocean 4y agoThey gave higher rate limits to existing enterprise customers. Pretty hard to argue that is was "adverse" in that case.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y agohe had access to the Firehose, which streams all the data, so his complaints about the other API ring false (which they removed the limits on anyways, according to elon -- but again, the API was a subset of the Firehose access he already had) it seems more likely that he was upset that he had access to all of Twitter's data via the Firehose, but being impulsive and incompetent in the field of bot detection (having had zero experience), he has absolutely no way to produce a trustworthy report on bots which contradicts Twitter's report so, he's just complaining about limits he used to have on an API he doesn't need to avoid producing a report he can't produce that requires expertise he doesn't have
- richwater 4y agoAPIs aren't the only way to deliver data
- whimsicalism 4y ago> when Twitter finally provided access to the eight developer “APIs” first explicitly requested by Mr. Musk in the May 25 Letter, those APIs contained a rate limit lower than what Twitter provides to its largest enterprise customers. Twitter only offered to provide Mr. Musk with the same level of access as some of its customers after we explained that throttling the rate limit prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from performing the analysis that he wished to conduct So... they asked for an API, were provided with it, wanted an API with higher caps, and were provided with it. Their problem is that Twitter didn't properly anticipate the need?