cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/446751
Alternative title: Musk sues data scrapers, blames them for Twitter’s “impaired user experience”
I like this “sue everything” stage of failing.
See: SCO Group’s secretly Microsoft-backed lawsuits against Novell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group%2C_Inc._v._Novell%2C_Inc.
…and if you don’t believe me about being, “secretly backed by Microsoft”:
http://techrights.org/2009/08/07/sco-and-anti-linux-microsoft-lawsuits/
Musk really caught the Trump virus didn’t he? What next, running for president?
Maybe if Twitter provided a reasonably priced API, people wouldn’t have to resort to scrapers.
Scrapers aren’t ever going to use an API, but Twitter could have just blocked unrecognized traffic if they wanted. I’m sure it’s covered by the TOS.
i think what the previous dude said is, people wouldn’t not have resorted to use scrapping if there was a good api. one of the major reason people/organisations choose scrapping is because it’s better than paying insane amounts of money for insane(ly low)amount of api calls.
There was a good API before Elon essentially shut it down. But that is irrelevant.
The reason mass data scraping like OpenAI does would not rely on an API is because they are getting data from the entire Internet (and other sources that aren’t online). They want raw data and they want as much and as varied as possible. It’s much easier, cheaper and practical to build tools that scrape websites generically than to integrate with thousands of completely independent and different APIs.
It’s the same reason that Reddit complaining about “AI taking all of our data” is bullshit. “AI” is just a convenient excuse and the most recent tech buzzword.
How exactly do you expect them to do that? It’s not inherently a trivial problem.
Twitter can remove their servers from the public facing internet if they don’t want the traffic.
Yeah, people think this is like trying to stop drive by bots that are looking for PHP vulnerabilities, it isn’t.
Usually you are attempting to stop someone who is spending their entire day trying to scrape your site. It’s a full time job trying to stop them and even then it’s a cat and mouse game at best.
Still don’t think Elon is going to get anywhere with this though.
Wasn’t their own webapp DDOSing their site last week?
Yes. They had to reverse that because they fucked it up so bad. This seems like the follow up to that - they couldn’t block people from accessing their data without making it worthless, so now they’re going to harass anyone getting their data without paying through the nose for it, even though it has to be publicly available to be useful, in hopes that it will force idiots to pay in.
🍿
You can’t complain about other people impairing user experience when you’ve had like 3 different instances of tanking the servers all by yourself.
