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Introducing the 4chan API
- astrojams 14y agoThis could transform 4chan as mobile and desktop clients are created. God I hate the web interface.
- kineticflow 14y agoThere already were plenty of ("native") mobile and desktop clients, although they worked by parsing HTML.
- unkoman 14y agoThe mobile adapted web interface is pretty good now.
- JD557 14y agoThere are already mobile clients for android and, IIRC there were clients for iOS but were banned from the app store due to some kind of infringement (I think it was adult content) So I don't think a lot of stuff is going to change, excluding the diminishing server load that happened with old clients/extensions.
- jasimq 14y agoThis is interesting. Would surely give it a try and integrate with our app
- terhechte 14y agoSadly read-only, though it's not much work parsing the HTML and faking a submit through a Post request. Good luck submitting a 4chan app to Apple's app store though :)
- Lockyy 14y agoThey have already existed. They all got pulled recently.
- afhof 14y agoI feel kinda silly just having spent the long weekend writing a threaded 4chan scraper. This is a super welcome change though. Even if you don't visit 4chan regularly you can't ignore the VAST amount of content people upload there. I imagine some interesting statistics will come of this ( I know I plan to).
- cs702 14y agoEven if you don't visit 4chan regularly you can't ignore the VAST amount of content people upload there. I imagine some interesting statistics will come of this. That was my reaction too. Beyond statistics, this will make it easier to develop all sorts of user-facing and machine-to-machine applications -- for sharing, grouping, ranking, and linking items, and even for 'overlaying' the content on top of other social networks. I'd expect the API to be grow and mature over time, and am curious to see what comes out of this experiment.
- phogster 14y agoI don't know. Getting an API to 4chan is like getting a parking pass to the local garbage dump. What statistics are you actually mining here?
- nvmc 14y agoThere is plenty of excellent content (consequently, statistics), you just have to look a little harder. I would hazard a guess that you've taken a quick glance and dismissed the entire community. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
- calinet6 14y agoThe first thing that jumps to mind with this is... "Oh $#!*." I don't know why, but it scares me what could come out of this.
- 54mf 14y agoCame to post this. The only redeemable value in 4chan, in my opinion, is that the fact that posts aren't archived makes for a very interesting social experiment. An API firehose pretty much puts an end to that.
- joethompson 14y agoThere are actually plenty of third party archives for 4chan boards, some that have been running for 4+ years.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ANTSANTS 14y agoSelective archives (users vote to archive a thread) have been around since at least 2007: http://4chanarchive.org/ http://4chanarchive.org/ http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html Full board archives have been around for quite some time as well: http://easymodo.net/ http://easymodo.net/ (the original complete archiver, now dead) http://archive.foolz.us/ http://archive.foolz.us/ https://archive.installgentoo.net/ https://archive.installgentoo.net/ etc. I'd say the fact that your posts are most likely to be forgotten, even if it is archived, is much more of a negative aspect of the site than a positive. How many times have I spent 30 minutes on a post, only for no one to respond to it, or worse, realize that the thread 404'd? It makes you look at yourself and wonder why you bothered. Forced anonymity is the interesting part of imageboards -- the text BBS equivalents to anonymous imageboards, based off the original 2chan, manage to maintain a very similar flavor while featuring permanent archival of all posts, and enjoy longer-form discussion as a result.
- moot 14y ago
- ddod 14y agoCould someone explain to me how this could be leveraged (or if it could be) to gather a sort of stream of messages, a la the Twitter streaming API or reddit.com/r/all/comments.json? I'd be interested in doing some language statistics and comparing them to the aforementioned networks.
- zevyoura 14y agoElsewhere in the comments here, moot said, "We'll have indexes and a catalog view soon." So for now, you need the thread id.
- angersock 14y agoSomething I just cobbled together: curl http://api.4chan.org/b/res/423418552.json | python -mjson.tool curl http://api.4chan.org/b/res/423418552.json | json_pp Example for grabbing a thread and prettyprinting the JSON of it. Because, you know, we need more 4chan in the house. (EDIT: brief skimming of the comments indicates it may be semi-offensive, so be warmed. We're skimming /b/, after all.)
- xefer 14y agoIt still requires scrapping to discover the thread ids though does it not?
- moot 14y agoWe'll have indexes and a catalog view soon.
- angersock 14y agoAre some of the threads not rendered to JSON yet? i.e., do we only get it for new threads?
- moot 14y agoAll of the old threads were rebuilt, so everything should have a JSON representation.
- aneisf 14y agoThat's great news. No hope for a posting API I presume?
- moot 14y agoProbably not. Since we don't have user accounts, and already have a bit of a spam problem, I'd be pretty worried about what a real POST API might bring.
- tarice 14y agoWhat I'm taking away from the comments below is: "Everything that could be done with this API has already been done using HTML parsing. This development will simply make those applications faster." Truth?
- evolve2k 14y agoRegarding financial sustability, have you thought about charging for the new API?
- joethompson 14y agoI'm sure this is about trying to improve site performance, and charging for it would inevitably cause everyone to continue scraping the HTML, thus defeating the point.
- 3143 14y agoCan anyone repost the info for those of us who can't (or prefer not to) visit 4chan at work?
- jonny_eh 14y agoEvery thread will be available as JSON.
- bootload 14y ago"... The decision to release an API was partially out of necessity, but also because I'm curious to see how people will use it. ..." And who. The API just made a group of intelligence hackers very happy indeed.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Jagat 14y agoI'm a new graduate student in an American university. As part of my Data Mining/NLP project, I'm wondering if I can do something cool with this fresh API. Any ideas?
- nyan_sandwich 14y agocreate a markov chain 4chan slang generator. track usages of phrases over time. (thinking of the recent evolution of "rustled my jimmies" derivatives) See what topics are trending Fuck maybe I should build some of this...
- kami8845 14y agodo you have some more ideas? these are really good
- nyan_sandwich 14y agoum... make a 4chan app that lets users up/downvote threads, then builds a naive bayesian model of what keywords (eg. "toasting epic bread") are correllated with the kind of threads you like. Netflix-like. A sort of automatic cream-extractor. de-anonymizer based on posting times, writing style, what baits them to respond, etc. The Thread-Local unique ID's would help, giving you more stuff that you knew came from same user. Don't know if this one is practical. Kindof scraping the bottom here... That's it for now.
- volaski 14y agoForgive me if this is a noob question, but does 4chan restrict embedding of images.4chan.org images from external urls? I was just playing around with the API and it seems all the images are rendered as the placeholder image that says "4chan.org". If this is true, I don't know how to utilize this API to make something valuable since all I can do is get the url or text. Somebody please enlighten me. Thanks!
- a_bonobo 14y agoWhy would you hotlink to 4chan-pictures? These get deleted with their thread once the thread hits page 10, anyway, which can happen in under 5 minutes (on the more active boards like /b/)
- lnanek2 14y agoThis sort of protection is usually done by checking the referrer header, which is trivial to set when retrieving something programmatically or when using standard tools like wget. The API seems focused on reducing the processing costs of browser extensions that let the user view the page, but add extra features to the page, anyway. Those would probably still seem like a normal browser view of the image to the site by default even if browser plugins can't perform the trivial client sent header change (not sure if the browser plugin API exposes it).