Recent comments in /f/technology

pilat909 t1_jc0z885 wrote

Reply to Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone | Tiers will start at $500,000 a year for access to 0.3 percent of the company’s tweets. Researchers say that’s too much for too little data by Hrmbee

This will motivate researchers to web scrape to circumvent these restrictions. Twint can scrape tweets and it supports proxies. It can also be multi threaded. A huge hassle and it's prone to breaking when the site changes, but at least there are alternative means to get around this stupid decision.

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Theblackroze t1_jc0y1ce wrote

Reply to comment by vanxblue in Microsoft’s Bing hits 100 million active users thanks to AI chat, Edge browser by ThisLexx

I mean I use neither and the best part, I just say… “search it”. Because most of the people I know use DuckDuckGo and startpage.

Also google with their CAPTCHA bullshit. Waste my time, after 2 or 3 , I get a limitless captcha that turns into hell. So I just deal with a search engine that doesn’t recycle me every times

But again… I am 0000000.1% lol

Google results also are mainstream SEO and ads. I’d rather look for legit websites and sources for info that didn’t swing their way into the top spot by paying the ad company money.

Also with their tracking system that holds your hands across the internet …

A pinch of privacy is 1,000 times better than just giving it up.

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Hrmbee OP t1_jc0l14e wrote

Reply to Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone | Tiers will start at $500,000 a year for access to 0.3 percent of the company’s tweets. Researchers say that’s too much for too little data by Hrmbee

>Twitter’s API is used by vast numbers of researchers. Since 2020, there have been more than 17,500 academic papers based on the platform’s data, giving strength to the argument that Twitter owner Elon Musk has long claimed, that the platform is the “de facto town square.” > >But new charges, included in documentation seen by WIRED, suggest that most organizations that have relied on API access to conduct research will now be priced out of using Twitter. > >It’s the end of a long, convoluted process. On February 2, Musk announced API access would go behind a paywall in a week. (Those producing “good” content would be exempted.) A week later, he delayed the decision to February 13. Unsurprisingly, that deadline also slipped by, as Twitter suffered a catastrophic outage. > >The company is now offering three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform, according to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to WIRED. The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months. > >“I don’t know if there’s an academic on the planet who could afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,” says Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York and a member of the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media—including on Twitter. > >Elissa M. Redmiles, a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, says the new prices are eye-watering. “It’s probably outside of any academic budget I’ve ever heard of,” she says, adding that the price would put off any long-term analysis of user sentiment. “One month of Twitter data isn’t really going to work for the purposes people have,” she says. > >Kenneth Joseph, assistant professor at the University of Buffalo and one of the authors of a recent paper analyzing a day in the life of Twitter, says the new pricing effectively kills his career. “$42,000 is not something I can pay for a single month in any reasonable way,” says. “It totally destroys any opportunity to engage in research in this space, which I’ve in many respects built a career on.” > >The pricing documents were provided to WIRED by a researcher who asked for anonymity, since they are still accessing Twitter data through an existing API agreement and worry it could be terminated if they were identified. They say the new costs were “not viable for the academic community.” > >“No one can afford to pay that,” they say. “Even rich institutions can’t afford to pay half a million a year for a thimbleful of data.”

From a lay perspective, it looks like this kind of pricing scheme for API access is designed to eliminate the possibility of independent research on the platform more than it is to generate revenues for the company.

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