Mike Masnick ✅Jul 1, 2023
This is hilariously stupid. I mean, just painfully stupid. And, yes, it's real.
Show threadAaron Toponce ⚛️Jul 1, 2023

@mmasnick APIs were created as a more efficient way of getting to data versus web scraping. So when he killed API access, of course devs turned back to web scraping to get the data.

No doubt that created additional load on the servers, so he thinks limiting access to the data via requiring an account to view tweets and rate limiting web resources is a good solution.

But now he's just limited ad exposure. Aren't ads a large driver to revenue? So, yeah, this is tremendously stupid.

Show threademmatonkin

@atoponce @mmasnick
I know right. All that whining about the expense of running the API, both from Twitter and Reddit, and I'm sitting there thinking: I'm old enough to remember when engineers built these things for exactly the reasons you describe.

It's like all the actual engineers have left these companies and the techbros running them now are people who've never benchmarked a service in their lives.

Jul 1, 2023 at 6:49pmWeb