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It’s because of AI scraping. Wait until you realize ‘verified’ paid accounts will be a necessity in the future to prove personhood unless we toss it all in the

It’s because of AI scraping. Wait until you realize ‘verified’ paid accounts will be a necessity in the future to prove personhood unless we toss it all in the wind and create a national id system which guess what, you’ll be tracked by. Which way brave one? You will lose an arm or a leg. You get to choose

singleshot_ 3y ago
> Which way brave one? Probably the same way my grandparents did.
Retr0id 3y ago
Why should Twitter care about AI scraping, beyond the load it causes to their servers? Scraping isn't new, and I don't think the overall rate of scraping has changed much since the advent of AI - it only needs to be scraped once, then it's in a dataset (I don't have any stats to back this up, though)
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  If you have a company building AI on top of Twitter's data, it could've been a company Twitter itself could've built. It's the feeling of lost money for them.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    The API has been wide open until 2023, so if there was anything of value, I think we would have seen something by now. Musk would also have been focused on that instead of trying to become WeChat US.
- lenkite 3y ago
  According to Musk, below: Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said. “It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation. Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience." To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day
hmcq6 3y ago
I think you're overestimating the value of raw text. A large unsorted dataset is not "free" for AI companies. Without API access there's very little useful information that can be scraped from a tweet. In my opinion, Twitter just wanted to convert lurkers to make it look like the platform isn't dying.
literalAardvark 3y ago
As if paying 5 bucks is going to be tough for an agent.
Nextgrid 3y ago
I'm not convinced AI scraping has anything to do with it. A company resourceful enough to develop & train AI is fully capable of setting up infrastructure to massively create bot accounts to bypass the loginwall.

singleshot_ 3y ago

> Which way brave one? Probably the same way my grandparents did.

Retr0id 3y ago

Why should Twitter care about AI scraping, beyond the load it causes to their servers? Scraping isn't new, and I don't think the overall rate of scraping has changed much since the advent of AI - it only needs to be scraped once, then it's in a dataset (I don't have any stats to back this up, though)

a_bonobo 3y ago
If you have a company building AI on top of Twitter's data, it could've been a company Twitter itself could've built. It's the feeling of lost money for them.
- rchaud 3y ago
  The API has been wide open until 2023, so if there was anything of value, I think we would have seen something by now. Musk would also have been focused on that instead of trying to become WeChat US.
lenkite 3y ago
According to Musk, below: Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said. “It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation. Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience." To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day

hmcq6 3y ago

I think you're overestimating the value of raw text. A large unsorted dataset is not "free" for AI companies. Without API access there's very little useful information that can be scraped from a tweet. In my opinion, Twitter just wanted to convert lurkers to make it look like the platform isn't dying.

literalAardvark 3y ago

As if paying 5 bucks is going to be tough for an agent.

Nextgrid 3y ago

I'm not convinced AI scraping has anything to do with it. A company resourceful enough to develop & train AI is fully capable of setting up infrastructure to massively create bot accounts to bypass the loginwall.