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Hi minimaxir. We have a large number of tokens from our clients and people doing oauth to access our free demo. Since the data is public, we can use any of thes

by spolu 12y ago

Hi minimaxir. We have a large number of tokens from our clients and people doing oauth to access our free demo. Since the data is public, we can use any of these tokens to access hashtags and account followers, etc... Actually, Instagram API limit is pretty high when compared to other platform. Today we have something like 100k tokens available to us, which means we can make 12bn+ calls everyday. Almost like having a firehose. We don't use all of them but we're one of the top users. Though there are at least 10 bigger users than us on the API (according to them of course). Hope it helps!

yid 12y ago
> Since the data is public, we can use any of these tokens to access hashtags and account followers I'm fairly certain this isn't an intended use of the API. Kudos to you for posting your method here, but I wouldn't be surprised if your app gets banned because of this (a lot of people at Instagram read HN).
spolu 12y ago
@yid. I'd be curious to understand why you think they would ban us? For using the tokens this way? Well they know everything about our usage of these tokens, and any analytics tool out there behave similarly, right?
- yid 12y ago
  > For using the tokens this way? Well they know everything about our usage of these tokens, and any analytics tool out there behave similarly, right? Yes, for using what are intended as per-user activity tokens for public scraping (which the user who has been issued the token has not requested). As you said, you can assemble a firehose using this method, and if they'd wanted apps to access a firehose, they'd have come up with an API for it.
  - spolu 12y ago
    > if they'd wanted apps to access a firehose, they'd have come up with an API for it. This is a quite idealistic view of the problem. But it probably holds some truth I have to admit.
tracker1 12y ago
Interesting, when I was at GoDaddy (Website Builder), it seems Facebook had implemented not only a per token limit, but application limits as well that we hit pretty easily. Does Instagram not have the same kind of limits? For those curious, IIRC it took a while to get our account's limits raised, and we had to implement some request caching to stay under the limits as much as possible. All around, it was interesting.
- spolu 12y ago
  Nope they don't... at least not for now :)

by spolu 12y ago

yid 12y ago

> Since the data is public, we can use any of these tokens to access hashtags and account followers I'm fairly certain this isn't an intended use of the API. Kudos to you for posting your method here, but I wouldn't be surprised if your app gets banned because of this (a lot of people at Instagram read HN).

spolu 12y ago

@yid. I'd be curious to understand why you think they would ban us? For using the tokens this way? Well they know everything about our usage of these tokens, and any analytics tool out there behave similarly, right?

yid 12y ago
> For using the tokens this way? Well they know everything about our usage of these tokens, and any analytics tool out there behave similarly, right? Yes, for using what are intended as per-user activity tokens for public scraping (which the user who has been issued the token has not requested). As you said, you can assemble a firehose using this method, and if they'd wanted apps to access a firehose, they'd have come up with an API for it.
- spolu 12y ago
  > if they'd wanted apps to access a firehose, they'd have come up with an API for it. This is a quite idealistic view of the problem. But it probably holds some truth I have to admit.

tracker1 12y ago

Interesting, when I was at GoDaddy (Website Builder), it seems Facebook had implemented not only a per token limit, but application limits as well that we hit pretty easily. Does Instagram not have the same kind of limits? For those curious, IIRC it took a while to get our account's limits raised, and we had to implement some request caching to stay under the limits as much as possible. All around, it was interesting.

spolu 12y ago
Nope they don't... at least not for now :)