[HN Gopher] Twitter's founder admits that shutting down the API ... ___________________________________________________________________ Twitter's founder admits that shutting down the API was "Worst thing we did" Author : amitk1 Score : 206 points Date : 2021-12-23 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.revyuh.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.revyuh.com) | bern4444 wrote: | Twitter has recently opened up their APIs quite a bit[0]. I'm | wondering if it's too late for the developer community now to | embrace these APIs now that Twitter is "built up" and no longer a | smaller company. | | [0]https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2021/b.. | . | Overtonwindow wrote: | Now that Jack is out, he seems to be speaking rather freely... | cblconfederate wrote: | too much! | timr wrote: | They're trying really hard to challenge it with this silly "we | won't let you read anything without an account" thing they're | doing. | caseysoftware wrote: | For five years, I ran a network of Twitter accounts promoting | local tech events. They were (uncreatively) called the "Tech | Events Network" and included ATXTechEvents, DENTechEvents, | NYC_TechEvents, and 50+ others that would broadcast local | meetups, even supporting basically unknown tech communities like | Albuquerque with ABQTechEvents. All received massive traffic, | engagement (RTs & likes specifically), and became an active | megaphone for their respective communities.. gaining almost 300k | followers. | | More importantly, the meetups and events they tweeted saw | attendance rise and more people know about them in general. It | was great for everyone and I had hundreds of thank you tweets, | emails, and DMs. | | But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations | hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly | suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and | they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I | even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our | behalf and zero progress. | | After dozens of suspensions, I finally shut it all down. I | haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech | communities but that feels off.. | winternett wrote: | In all honesty, the Shadowban was the worst thing they ever | did... | | I've had 3 accounts, 1 of which has been stuck at sub 130 users | for over 10 years of posting, no matter what I've tried. That | would be f*ing impossible on any platform that truly fosters | creativity and even a scrap of post equality/fairness. There is | also absolutely no indication nor procedure for contesting a | limited status placed on social accounts on platforms like | Twitter, it's all done in secret, which adds insult to injury. | | Truth is, the minute you mention anything now that is remotely | perceived as critical of a platform on the platform, a switch | is flipped that prevents you from building anything positive | within that community. | | Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's | exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the | largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership | being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things | really die a slow death these days. | | Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable | growth, and metrics... Focusing on my own site is a lot less | stressful than relying on the gaslighting and unexplained | "growth-hobbling" that is now far too typical on social | sites... | huijzer wrote: | > Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable | growth, and metrics... | | Since you don't have social media anymore (or at least | Twitter), how do you get new traffic to your site? All via | search engines? | mise_en_place wrote: | Tired of hearing "web3" everywhere, it's the one buzzword that | really disgusts me. Reminds me exactly of the dotcom era. This is | what happens when the "ideas guy" grifter infiltrates the OSS | community. | leshenka wrote: | I'm only referring to it as web3.0000000000000004 from now on | riffic wrote: | the laser eye types don't even acknowledge the federated social | ecosystem either. | | you can have decentralization without blockchains. Just adopt | the existing standards, or get involved with the W3C / IETF if | you want to be part of the process defining the next ones. | numair wrote: | The only thing annoying about the term "web3" is that it | downplays the eventual real-world impact of a lot of the | capital innovations taking place. | | Personal lack of understanding doesn't mean that something | important isn't taking place (which I am guessing is how you | see things since it's so disgusting to you). Every wave of | capitalist innovation is filled with shameless promoters and | wannabes, alongside the legitimate stuff... If that bothers | you, the messy and chaotic nature of human progress might not | be your thing. | ianbutler wrote: | I'd love to understand more about these capital innovations. | I've done multiple deep dives over the last year into the | crypto space and I've come away with the idea that the tech | is certainly interesting and that there is potential for it | to alter our financial systems drastically but beyond that I | haven't made much headway. Do you have any resources you | could point me to so I can read up on the innovations you're | speaking of? | numair wrote: | https://vitalik.eth.limo is an excellent resource. You'll | see that his thinking, and the thinking of people like him, | is a _lot_ more advanced than the thought processes of the | armchair experts who seem to have dedicated their lives to | "exposing" this industry to be "one giant scam." I can't | think of a better resource off the top of my head. | ianbutler wrote: | Thank you for that! | spaniard89277 wrote: | Hmmm, but what exactly is web3? I really struggle to | understand. | | As far as I get is that some people wants to decentralice | stuff, but I don't really see how is that going to happen. | | No offense but everything that has any relationship with | "decentralization" or "blockchain" is fairly difficult to | use. And even understanding them superficially is not | trivial. | jagger27 wrote: | "Capital innovations" is a great spin on business as usual VC | control of capital. | Barrin92 wrote: | >NOBODY CAN TAKE AWAY API ACCESS OF DEVS ON ETHEREUM, JACK. THAT | IS THE POINT. | | I see this kind of take all the time but people don't seem to | realize that distributed computing doesn't imply decentralized | services. Nobody can take away your internet access (well | technically someone can) but that doesn't help you when you're | stuck on Facebook. You can always send http over a wire. | | Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third | party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just | like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who | don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do | this on the internet by running their own site. | | People aren't going to interact with ethereum at the protocol | level (except for enthusiasts) for the same reason they're now on | Twitter and not on Mastodon. Also if "web3" was disintermediated | VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't | extract profit from something you don't own. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a | single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from | something you don't own. | | Then why are VCs pouring money into web3 projects every chance | they can get? | | Web3 has been pitched as a sort of idealized, democratic, | community-owned concept, but the reality is mostly a bunch of | projects pitching token sales to speculators who think they can | sell those tokens to someone else in the future. Investors are | cashing in by using their publicity to hype the token in | exchange for some of those tokens to re-sell to other | speculators. The actual service doesn't actually have to work | because it's all speculation at this point. | waprin wrote: | The dotcom boom was mostly fueled by rabid speculation. | Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of | them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is | the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a | "greater fool". Some might call it a Ponzi scheme since only | way investors make money off AMZN or GOOG stock is from new | investors money coming in. | | When I look at projects like ethereum, I see a lot of | excitement and innovation around how cooperative game theory | can innovate new business models and ways of coordination. | | The way Twitter repeatedly rugpulled devs is a perfect | example of how broken the web2 model can be. And now the | founder of Twitter wants to criticize crypto projects for | taking VC money, as if Twitter somehow didn't take VC money | and enrich those VCs in its rise to power? The hypocrisy is | astounding. | | As far as the services, the goal posts keep moving. First | there's no application, then store of value is an | application, then art collection, then decentralize automatic | market makers, then social tokens, then decentralized | autonomous organizations. These are young, immature ideas but | clearly stuff is happening. Whether it will live up to the | grandiose promises, we can't say. But if you want to complain | about the web3 advocates making grandiose promises about how | their code is going to change the world, well, they stole | that playbook directly from the likes of the Google and | Twitter founders. | | When Dorsey and Google execs complain about crypto, I'm | reminded of a quote from HBO's Silicon Valley: | | "I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making | the world a better place better than we are." | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you | can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool". | | No, that's not correct. When you buy a share of a publicly | traded company (or a private one, for that matter), you are | literally buying a fraction of their cash on hand, a | fraction of their business operations, a fraction of their | trademarks, a fraction of their inventory, and so on. You | own part of the company. | | The difference with cryptocurrency is that people ditched | the entire ownership of anything and replaced it with just | a token. It's like if you took a company, hollowed out | every single thing that made it valuable, and sold the | shares as novelty stock. | | Anyone suggesting that stocks are just fun tokens that | people trade back and forth doesn't understand what stock | actually means. I think this misconception is very popular | in the cryptocurrency world because it justifies the | existence of tokens and crypto coins that _aren 't_ | actually backed by anything of value. If you're convinced | that nothing matters and it's all just tokens anyway, | you're more likely to be persuaded to invest in crypto | tokens and shun the stock market. | suikadayo wrote: | I'm personally hopeful for platforms like http://gm.xyz as they | go from centralization to decentralizing parts of their app | ClumsyPilot wrote: | "VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't | extract profit from something you don't own." | | You can build business and infrastructure without VC | involvement. Sometimes it will be healthier for it. | soneca wrote: | I would appreciate a list of web3 projects that don't have | and explicitly don't want to have any VC involvement (or big | company involvement, as it would mean the same thing). | | I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring | to those projects. | riffic wrote: | look at the activitypub ecosystem then, where no one needs | permission to become a participant, and vc's refuse to even | acknowledge its existence. | | https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist- | fo... | ognarb wrote: | the fediverse is in no way related to this | web3/blockchain bullshit. It's actually more related to | the original idea of web 3.0 as semantic web due to the | usage of similar protocols e.g. json-ld. | fleddr wrote: | You'll find that VCs, the shortlist of usual suspects, have | their hands in almost all web3 projects. | | And even if they missed one, they'll get in later anyway by | simply buying the token. Big capital always wins. | clpm4j wrote: | I'd be interested in that list as well. All of the major / | currently most popular ones seem to be in bed with a16z: | https://a16z.com/portfolio/#crypto | KarlKemp wrote: | Yea, but has little to do with OP's point, which was VC | attention -> (requires, and therefore proves) centralized | entities. The reverse isn't true, and nobody claimed it to | be. | gnu8 wrote: | We should just euthanize everyone and blow up the planet if | the only worthwhile reason for doing anything is for VCs to | extract profit from it. People who think accumulating more | wealth than they need at the expense of people who are | starving is ok should be thrown into a volcano. | dang wrote: | " _Please don 't fulminate._" It's tedious and repetitive. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | p.s. No, I'm not trying to defend profit-extracting VCs or | whatever; just trying to defend this place from burning | itself to a crisp. Comments like this one and | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 are just what | we don't need in that regard. | yosito wrote: | > "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on | top of a distributed infrastructure | | Isn't in the opposite? Web3 is a decentralized app that runs on | top of distributed web2 and centralized infrastructure. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | > Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build | third party owned services on top of a distributed | infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the | internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third | parties can already do this on the internet by running their | own site. | | I always thought that "web3" meant everything was on the | blockchain. In other words, you could theoretically re-invent | Twitter as an Ethereum Smart Contract. | | In doing so, every "Tweet" would be on the Eth block chain. | You'd probably want a web page that interacts with the block | chain to read/post tweets, but even a static HTML file on your | local hard drive that interacts with Metamask could achieve | that. You wouldn't need to run a site. | | Of course, therein lies a new problem: Scale. A quick Google | says that there are 6,000 tweets sent per second. Meanwhile, | the Eth block chain handles what, 10-20 transactions per | second, and ends up with fees that are several dollars worth of | Eth? Nobody other than political figures and spammers are going | to want to pay $5 to send a Tweet. | bastiantower wrote: | Layer 2 solutions, specially zk ones like StarkNet, solve the | scaling issue | jagger27 wrote: | And gleefully introduce contradictory trust issues that no | one asked for. | cblconfederate wrote: | Apart from scale the bigger issue is incentives and the | governance of ethereum. It has already forked itself once at | the orders of the Leadership, so people are rightly worried | about what will happen after it switches to PoS | Kranar wrote: | Not remotely similar at all. Right now if you don't like | Facebook, there's nothing you can do to change it... but | hypothetically if Facebook ran its infrastructure on a | decentralized platform like Ethereum, then anyone could | trivially fork the entire system with backwards integration. | | It's similar to how if someone doesn't like Chrome, they can | fork Chromium and make their own version of it and keep | complete compatibility with Chromium. The decentralized web | does a similar thing except it does it for services instead of | strictly software. It's a fully transparent and accessible | ecosystem of services whose entire history is immutable and | available for anyone to access. | | That said, no blockchain technology is remotely close to the | point where a massive system like Facebook could possibly hope | to run and it may never get to that point either, it's hard | enough getting even trivial services to be cost effective on | Ethereum... but in principle that's the idea. | zrm wrote: | The advantage with decentralized services is that they scale | and distribute costs. | | If you want to compete with YouTube in the traditional way, | better have a CDN, and if it becomes popular even though you're | not taking in any revenue, the bandwidth bill is getting paid | with VC money or you're going out of business. | | If you can more easily build it on top of something like | BitTorrent, you don't need the VC money as much. Now what you | need is a payment system so your creators can get paid. | | The more of these pieces get built and work decentralized, the | less capital it takes to compete without relying on or yourself | being a centralized service. | addicted wrote: | Twitter could have been a much broader tool. There were all sorts | of workflows that could have been built around Twitter with an | API. | | But unfortunately Twitter is now reduced to being a global | version of your local coffee shop billboard, at best, and the | crazy guy calling himself the next Jesus Christ in the public | square. | bern4444 wrote: | There's so much talk about web3 - it's a bit overwhelming - and | almost feels a bit toxic by all the people shilling it without | any actual proof (in the form of new products or services). | | I have yet to see any product or service that actually leverages | "web 3 technologies" - whatever that means to you - to create | something that can't be done with web 2 or that is either | marginally or substantially better. | | This doesn't mean they don't exist. Rather, I don't even | conceptually understand what a service built on "web 3" | technologies would accomplish that is distinct from what we have | today with web 2 technology. | | Does anyone have examples beyond crypto currencies as an | investment and NFTs - which is just digital art? | | Fundamentally, many of Web 2.0 is distributed, FB, AWS, Google | and most tech companies all do massive amounts of working in | creating distributed systems - distributed databases, distributed | serverless infrastructure, CDNs etc. | | The "centralization" is that there are companies that operate | these services. | | Is the goal of Web 3 to not have companies but have individuals' | machines running these? | | I certainly don't want my personal computer, phone, Alexa etc | running and supporting someone else's "decentralized | application". | | What is the goal of web 3? I haven't seen any articulate answer | that clarifies this question in any meaningful way. I'm hoping | someone here can shed some light for me. | | ETA: The only interesting use case I can think of is to simplify | transfer of ownership of digital assets - ebooks, video games | etc. Maybe blockchain would be good at simplifying lending of | these digital assets between friends, stores, etc without the | need for DRM? | | I'd explicitly include TV, movies, and music but very few people | purchase these 3 categories since streaming came along. | WanderPanda wrote: | If you want to cut through all the bullshit then you should | directly look into web3 the ethereum js browser library. Sadly | the term seems to have been hijacked in the recent months. | Additionally you might want to look into ENS and ipfs as | "mature" web3 projects | cblconfederate wrote: | yeah despite whatever VC money they have the perception isn't | good. Like, suppose i want to add Metamask login to a site. | It's not easy, plus it forwards all requests to some server. I | thought where we are going we don't need SPOF!! | KarlKemp wrote: | The whole ecosystem is locked in this tiny box that is | amendable to complete computation. It is impossible to connect | that paradigm to the real world without, in some way, falling | back to concepts they reject, like trusting someone's testimony | that a product was physically delivered. | | That's why they copied the concept a second time with NFTs: | it's a bit awkward to just keep trading fictional currencies | for other fictional currencies. Now, you can trade something | _real_ : fictional ownership of fictional "art". | opportune wrote: | If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero. | | It offers anonymized payments with low fees. Like Bitcoin but | without the chain being visible to anybody. | | Unlike with regular payments, the transactions are anonymous, | irreversible, and requires no KYC. Most crypto are not fully | anonymous. Beware other privacy coins based on zksnarks since | their creators are generally anti-anonymity (in the sense they | don't want their tokens to be used in illicit transactions and | have pledged to make that harder - this defeats the entire | purpose of a privacy coin, and any solution to this would | reduce privacy). | | While monero is not fully anonymous under 100% of cases - it's | possible to do something to allow transactions to be linked | back, such as using the same receiving and sending sub | addresses multiple times for transactions - it's pretty dang | good. It's pretty close to being digital cash. And the fees are | pretty low (last I checked maybe $0.10?), which is more or less | a permanent feature because it has dynamic block sizes. | | BTW, for any blockchain, it's a good thing for ex fees to be | non-zero. Otherwise there is no cost to "spamming" the | blockchain which congests the network and increases the size of | the chain (potentially making it harder to host). | | It is unfortunately based on POW, but on the bright side it | uses an asic resistant CPU-based algorithm to prevent | centralization. | bern4444 wrote: | > If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero. | | Genuine question, is crypto sometimes not counted as part of | web3 by people in the space? I understand blockchain | technology is distinct from crypto currency, but crypto | always seems to be included as part of web3 no? | | I'll check it out. | | I know generally one focus of "web 3" is to simplify | transactions especially by not having to integrate or work | with credit card companies, local regulations etc especially | in countries that don't have that infrastructure to as strong | a degree. | | Certainly an admirable goal, and one I'd love to see - but I | don't believe that a lot of these issues can't be solved | better and faster with "web 2" technologies (minus the | anonymous piece which is a fair and clear advantage). | drog wrote: | I think that main web3 innovation is more like mindset | innovation rather than more common technology innovation | that improves performance, efficiency, etc. | | Take bitcoin as an example, of course you can make internet | money cheaper using centralized service but it would be bad | because you have to put a lot of trust into someone's | hands. That culture and mindset grows into whole finance | applications where you get defi and property rights where | you get nft. Nft is not only digital art you can use nft to | represent domain names and this will cut out authority | middle man out of the equation - your keys your domain, | it's impossible to do with web2. | | Some people dismiss these as important but that's what | people in crypto are concerned with - replacement of | unnecessary middleman, gatekeepers, regulations with | transparent cryptography and code. If you subscribe to this | values than you add new constraints and previous solutions | that can be better and faster no longer work. | opportune wrote: | I would include general crypto tokens in web3. Though | monero is not exactly "WWW" which maybe some people think | is what web3 is on? | | The only reason I mention monero is that it's one of the | only cryptos that is not vaporware (it isn't hyped up based | on some as-yet unimplemented capabilities) and has real | world uses (digital cash. Battle tested, most popular token | for tx on the dark web). You can also imagine that instead | of being used on the dark web, it can be used to route | around oppressive regimes or evade censorship. It's | permissionless _and_ anonymous which is a unique combo for | payment systems. It also has a decent online ecosystem for | onboarding from fiat at localmonero.co | rafale wrote: | Isn't Uniswap a web3 product? It's the only way to create a | Dex. | princekolt wrote: | The reason you haven't heard a coherent answer to what problems | web3 is supposed to solve is because there aren't any. It's | just a continuation of the past 5-10 years of cryptocurrency | pump and dump schemes (which also include ICOs and NFTs). Just | a bunch of hot air. As you correctly put it, it's just a bunch | of opportunists making money off of tech-gullible people. | pessimizer wrote: | > NFTs - which is just digital art? | | I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a | particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or | digitized) art, as far as I know. | bern4444 wrote: | Yes, I agree. It's slightly more indirect than digital art | but the consequence is the same. It's equivalent to | copyright. I own this thing. Here is the proof - the NFT. | | If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can | license it from me. | | It's no different than a standard contract. | saberience wrote: | Except an NFT is basically just a link to some JSON which | has a URL to an image. You could easily make another NFT | yourself with a different link to the same image, whose NFT | is the "real one"? How could you prove who made the | original image and who sold it? NFTs don't any actual | rights to the image and certainly don't stop people copying | and using it. It's a load of crap basically. | ognarb wrote: | No it's not like copyright. Copyright are legally | enforceable, NFT aren't. | | They are actually a lot of artists that complains that | their art is stolen and sold as NFT and the platforms that | allow this, don't want to handle the copyright | infringements. | rektide wrote: | google kills products but twitter lead the way in killing the web | as an open accessible interactible meta-medium. twitter deeply | deeply deeply injured the better ideas of the web itself. | teitoklien wrote: | Products dont kill good ideas, People who use those products | do. | OldTimeCoffee wrote: | Google PageRank has done more damage to the open web than | Twitter could ever hope to. At worst, Twitter's just exposed | the worst qualities of people to a broader audience. | mperham wrote: | I have no idea what you are talking about. I remember web | search before Google existed. PageRank was a massive, huge | improvement in search results. Literally night and day. | There's a reason why Google is a verb now. | Mezzie wrote: | PageRank was a massive improvement over every other option | at the time. It was also, in the long run, a terrible idea | that has a few VERY wrong assumptions built into it. (As | does web search in general.) | | Larry ended up making PageRank because the number of sites | that linked to a site was the best measure when all links | were created by humans and the Web wasn't commercialized. | It was an automation/algorithm for the measure most link | lists/curators used at the time to determine precedence | order and importance, but for one thing, that measure only | works when the sites themselves are vetted first (you | wouldn't get a link on 'Best Science Links on the WWW' | unless the author of the site liked your site and was | convinced it wasn't full of crap). | | More broadly, as someone who agrees with OldTimeCoffee but | thinks it wasn't purposeful, I'd say that search and web | crawlers won an early war I'm not sure they should have | won. We can't turn back the clock, but I do wonder what it | would have looked like if Google were founded 17 years | after the Web started and not 7. | onion2k wrote: | _PageRank was a massive, huge improvement in search | results._ | | The emphasis should be on the 'was' there. PageRank was so | much better than the competition that it gave Google an | effective monopoly on search. That lack of competition | meant Google could focus on how to get users to click on | ads displayed alongside search results rather than how to | return better results than the competition. Consequently | _now_ Google search is only OK at returning what you 're | after, and the page is 50% ads. | | Google hasn't been coasting along on the success of search | for decades though thankfully. A lot of Google tech is | very, very good (Gmail, Docs, YouTube, GCE, etc). Search is | still better than the competitors but that's only because | there's only really Bing. The problem is that it's really | only Search that drives revenue. | | I _strongly_ believe that if anyone made a better search | engine than Google, and consequently Google 's ad money | took a nosedive, Google would be faced with an existential | crisis unlike any other business in history. If Apple are | building the search product they're rumored to be building | all Google staff should be very worried because no jobs | will be safe. | leobg wrote: | Peter Thiel's argument precisely. | pessimizer wrote: | Apple could even go default no tracking, because iDevice | owners would willingly hook into opt-in tracking if there | were app support. Giving everyone else a "free" ride | would be a no-brainer. | pjc50 wrote: | Compared to having a web search that returns only spam? | Philadelphia wrote: | Thought you were talking about Google now for a minute. | It's close to 100% spam, fakey rankings, and the world's | cheapest SEO content for almost any search. | vosper wrote: | Did it? Before Google people were just using other search | engines, there was always some intermediary deciding what | links to show you first. | | There was lots of competition, and it turned out Google was | way better at being relevant than everyone else. Now there | isn't competition, but that's not how it started :) | pjc50 wrote: | Altavisa! Lycos! | | But even before that, when there were _no_ search engines, | there were directories (https://dmoz-odp.org/) which tried | to take a taxonomic approach to the whole web, webrings, | and putting your URL into print to get people to type it | in. The latter culminated in an early version of the QR | code: regular barcodes and the "cuecat" barcode scanner. | iszomer wrote: | Astalavista was the darker Altavisa alternative.. | Mezzie wrote: | Remember when Yahoo was a directory (how I learned the | word 'hierarchical'!) and there were people who | maintained sites listing things like new Geocities sites? | | I think a lot of the modern Web's problems can be traced | to the desire to cut out human intermediaries in the | early Web, mostly to focus on speed and monetization. (No | curators in the models means no need to PAY curators). I | also think the rise of the influencer and parasocial | relationships are trying to fill the void. Most humans | want human context in information searching. Those of us | who don't need it are the weird ones, not the standard | case. | pjc50 wrote: | Machine searching could have been good enough, but search | is an adversarial problem in a way that libraries aren't. | vkou wrote: | > Most humans want human context in information | searching. | | No, they don't. Ask any librarian about how many patrons | of their libraries only interact with them during the | check-out process. | Mezzie wrote: | I'm a librarian, actually! | | I'd argue that things like our cataloguing process counts | as 'human context', as do things like our hold and check- | out systems, library space arrangement, etc. Even if a | patron doesn't interact with a staff member in person, | there is a difference between a library and, say, Kindle | Unlimited from a UX standpoint. | | Human context and human curation doesn't necessary mean | human contact. | | Archives are similar: There's a ton of work giving things | context and making things discoverable even if a | researcher never talks to the archivist who's done these | things. | pessimizer wrote: | Thank you for your service. | cblconfederate wrote: | i m gonna defend twitter as it s the only place where i find | original thinkers and ideas. And yeah i hate the loss of RSS | innocentoldguy wrote: | It used to be that way, but with Twitter's new draconian | censorship, it's just an echo chamber of stale "approved" | ideas. | KarlKemp wrote: | Antisemitism isn't exactly a "new" idea. If people you | follow are routinely shut down by Twitter, you should maybe | try some not-quite-as-hatey ideas for a change. | | As a point of reference: I follow 1,400 people, including a | lot in science and art. I can't remember a single person I | follow being permanently banned. | cblconfederate wrote: | i aggressively unfollow people who turn to political | activists. It is a good source of information but that | probably has to do with the decline of RSS as well. I think | as a protocol it is promising, even if it was text-only. | TigeriusKirk wrote: | The article has tweets saying they're working to open it back up. | | But even if they do, no one is going to trust it sticking around. | cblconfederate wrote: | I don't think mastodon is a good idea. Don't they already remove | servers they don't like? A twitter protocol should not be reliant | on which home server you re on. | Jaepa wrote: | I'm not really sure where you're going with this. | | Mastodon is a federated system, so there is no _they_. You can | choose not to federate with groups/nodes you don't want, but | its basically invite your village type of model. Pro-LGTBQ+ | groups don't have to fediate with neonazi groups, if they don't | want to. | tonguez wrote: | You claim, | | "...there is no _they_." | | but another poster claims, | | "Mastodon can lock those servers out of their directories, or | out of the main federation-network, though." Which another | poster referred to as "de-federation". | | Which of you is correct? Is there a "_they_"? | cblconfederate wrote: | Well, i think _they_ is "everyone". I dont follow the space | but it seemed most (all?) servers federate with a limited | subset of other servers. Kinda balkanized | riffic wrote: | Mastodon's not the only player in the federated social space, | just the app with the biggest footprint. | | You can get a WordPress blog, install the ActivityPub plugin, | and you're now a fediverse actor which other actors can then | subscribe to. | | Mastodon's cool and all but let's not conflate this piece of | software with the bigger network. | cblconfederate wrote: | I wonder if there's an alternative protocol that is fully | peer-to-peer. | fleddr wrote: | Early days: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) | cblconfederate wrote: | thanks i forgot about that. actually doubt it will bear | fruit as twitter has a vested interest not to let this | grow. More likely some kid will come up with a better | idea | fleddr wrote: | Well, the new CEO was a leader of that project, so let's | see. | riffic wrote: | bluesky's not even a protocol though. At best you could | call it a working group. | | I'd personally call it "vaporware". | | and look at the talk page, I said the same thing a few | weeks ago: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bluesky_(protocol) | fennecfoxen wrote: | Mastodon itself can't actually remove servers, any more than | they can remove someone else's website, because servers are | hosted by other people on others' computers. Mastodon can lock | those servers out of their directories, or out of the main | federation-network, though. | cblconfederate wrote: | yeah , defederation. it would be better to have a protocol | that doesnt allow that. | russdpale wrote: | So if someone spun a child porn instance, we should all be | forced to see that in our federated timeline? | | Come on, get real. | cblconfederate wrote: | no but it could be up to the receiver address to choose | what to block. | albertgoeswoof wrote: | That's literally how it works now | riffic wrote: | email works the same way. | | If I, as the email admin of xyzcorp.biz get too many spammy | emails from your domain, you can expect to be blocked / | defederated. | | are we dismissing smtp now as a protocol? | cblconfederate wrote: | email servers block by content/address though, not only | entire domains | dada78641 wrote: | I think this is the correct way of doing it. Anyone can | start their own instance and their own federation. | | It'd actually be a massive breach of freedom if you were | somehow not allowed to shut out servers from your Mastodon | federation--kind of like not having the freedom to block | someone on Twitter. | dre_bot wrote: | 3rd party twitter clients were the greatest era of Twitter before | they killed the API. I tried to deal with the official app until | they started showing people's likes and random accounts in my | feed. You want to talk about infuriating? I was done and never | went back. | apple4ever wrote: | Well if only that founder could have been CEO who would have had | the power to change that decision... | pessimizer wrote: | If somebody whisked him back in a time machine, he'd regret | doing exactly the same thing again. | lil_dispaches wrote: | Choosing an ego-maniacal wannabe-improv-comedian to run the | company wasn't a great idea either. | partiallypro wrote: | One thing I used to like about old Twitter was Favstar which used | the Twitter API to help you find the funniest tweets, accounts, | etc. You could reward tweet of the day etc. Twitter is much more | of a closed box now and it's a little harder to find your | community. | commandlinefan wrote: | > Worst thing we did | | Well, for the business, maybe. The rampant censorship and double- | standards have been far, far worse for the world and society in | general. | giobox wrote: | It was one of the worst things they did for a sizeable subset | of users and devs; for "the business" though it may well have | made sense in financial terms at the time. With the public API | before it was heavily locked down I mainly used it in third | party Twitter clients to avoid seeing the (revenue generating) | ads in the official Twitter apps - I know many others who did | the same. An open, freely usable Twitter API can actively hurt | revenues at a time when Twitter desperately needed to | demonstrate ability to generate profits. | | As long as Twitter remains a publicly traded company, I imagine | this unhappy continuum between "Twitter as universal protocol | for short messaging" and "Twitter as large publicly traded | software company" will always put competing pressures on how | open a standard Twitter can ever really become. | xoa wrote: | > _With the public API before it was heavily locked down I | mainly used it in third party Twitter clients to avoid seeing | the (revenue generating) ads in the official Twitter apps - I | know many others who did the same. An open, freely usable | Twitter API can actively hurt revenues at a time when Twitter | desperately needed to demonstrate ability to generate | profits._ | | I wonder if they ever investigated just making API access | paid, not free? Users were paying for 3rd party clients | making use of the API just because they liked them so much | better already, so clearly there was some money in it. And it | seems like the Venn diagram of "using client to avoid seeing | ads" and "already running, or soon would run, adblock in the | browser" would be pretty darn near a circle. Pretty trivial | though to make API access require a paid token per | account/user, and heavy Twitter users might well put down | $1-10/month to use their client of choice. | | Don't know, maybe just an artifact of the era. At the time on | the web in general it just seems like there was this real | aversion to any sort of paid offerings even if they were pure | bonuses for heavy users with no actual content hidden at all. | That's changed a lot since then, but still particularly for a | company desperate for hard revenue and facing controversy | over a specific somewhat power-user feature, a bit curious | they didn't just try to monetize it. Doesn't seem like an | honest presentation of that would even bother that particular | subset, certainly not more then having it axed entirely. | bagels wrote: | I'd argue almost the opposite: The worst thing for society done | by twitter is the promotion of all the virulent garbage speech | which is then parroted by the media. | KarlKemp wrote: | And I'd, in turn, amend that comment to strike the gratuitous | swipe at "the media". | | At least "the media" I consume does not "parrot" social media | toxicity. It may mention it if it gets traction, as is their | job. | mschuster91 wrote: | > And I'd, in turn, amend that comment to strike the | gratuitous swipe at "the media". | | You're flat out wrong, until the media you consume don't | report anything at all about politics and at that point | it's hard to call it media any more - simple reason: many | politicians and even some companies communicate mostly with | Twitter "soundbites" instead of holding press conferences. | [deleted] | numair wrote: | A couple of months ago some colleagues and I submitted a very | basic request practically begging Twitter for access to users' | follower/following graph on the new API. The use case was super- | simple and obvious (allow people to import their followers into a | new app) and didn't involve any sort of data mining or spam or | anything. | | It took days? weeks? to get a generic rejection message from a | "no reply" email address. Meanwhile -- _much irony_ -- A16Z can | help apps like Clubhouse get super-access since they were also a | huge investor in Twitter. | | All of this pro- and anti-web3 stuff is a sign that all of these | inter-connected webs of egos in our industry are jostling for | power in an ecosystem that doesn't need them very much. | Meanwhile, there are lots of people in other verticals who | completely missed the boat on the web investment play who are | beginning to realize this is their opportunity to jump in and | scale their capital alongside the people on the ground. A major | investor / operator shakeup is about to take place. | cblconfederate wrote: | Isnt it possible to just scrape the /followers page? | friedman23 wrote: | This kind of social graph access was used by cambridge | analytica. That's why you will never get this kind of access to | user data via apis, even if the user grants it to you. (Users | granted access to the app which then sold the data to cambridge | analytica). | | I was at a major social media company on 2016 and overnight | these kinds of APIs went from promoting user freedom to | radioactive. Don't expect anything from these spineless | companies with similarly spineless executives that bow to the | woke mob at a slight breeze of discontent. | numair wrote: | That's completely incorrect, as this privilege is given out | on a "friends of the company" basis. Hence my citation of the | Clubhouse example. Moreover, as insiders have indicated, | Cambridge Analytica had _exactly_ that sort of privileged | relationship with Facebook -- normal people _couldn't_ do | what those guys were doing on the FB Platform without raising | a lot of eyebrows. I know a _ton_ about that as I was | involved in that area about 10 years before you. | friedman23 wrote: | > That's completely incorrect, as this privilege is given | out on a "friends of the company" basis | | Of course the privileged few get to break the rules, that | doesn't refute my point. | | > Moreover, as insiders have indicated, Cambridge Analytica | had exactly that sort of privileged relationship with | Facebook | | https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a- | guide-... | | Maybe they had a privileged relationship with facebook but | they got the data from a personality quiz app which | requested access to user data (which the users granted). | | > I know a ton about that as I was involved in that area | about 10 years before you. | | Good for you but don't you think that's beside the point? | oneepic wrote: | Let me try to help you two agree. | | > you will [generally not] get this kind of access to | user data via apis, even if the user grants it to you. | | ...with the exception that: | | > the privileged few get to break the rules | | OK? | reasonabl_human wrote: | Can you elaborate on the last two sentences? | numair wrote: | One of the massive capital flows into the crypto and web3 | markets has been from family offices and investment firms | that sat around and watched VCs and Silicon Valley firms | (like YC!) make billions from the shift to web and mobile | interfaces over the past 20 years. Like, imagine your family | got pitched Amazon and said "lol nobody needs this," and now | the next gen is in charge of the wealth; or, imagine you are | a hedge fund guy watching Tiger Global's moves and you're | looking for the next major "entry point." | | A lot of activity like this is going on behind the scenes. | You also have bleeding-edge innovation in capital through | structures like Venture DAOs that will blow up the entire | space in ways that people haven't fully thought through | because half of this industry is stuck on the "crypto is a | scam" narrative of someone with a 2014 understanding of | what's happening in the space. | cblconfederate wrote: | but if "where we're going we don't need their money" is | true, why is that money useful? | numair wrote: | Not sure where you're getting that statement from. The | most important shift taking place right now is the | massive increase in both capital velocity (speed at which | it's moving around) and capital diversity (whose money is | being used) within crypto/web3 markets. Capitalist | societies use capital -- money -- to accomplish things, | so I'm not sure what someone who says "where we're going | we don't need their money" is talking about... | cblconfederate wrote: | hm well i m not sure if web1 or web2 needed that much | money to take off ... | 7steps2much wrote: | Remember that the internet was originally developed | mostly as a military / university project. It got kick- | started by quite a bit of money as well. | | Web 2.0 was arguably not as expensive, but then again you | could also argue that it was not as big a step. If you | think about it, web 2.0 is really just taking web 1.0 and | adding a lot of fancy stuff like SPA, new fancy protocols | and social media. | | Web 3.0 however, depending on which vision of the 3.0 you | support, ranges from "just" another upgrade to a | completely different thing than what we have today. | | And to make it quite simple: Completely different things | are loads of work. Work means people need to dedicate | their time to it, which means they need to be paid. | adventured wrote: | You're miscalculating by trillions of dollars of capital | investment across Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. | | Data centers, research & development, operations, | national infrastructure (eg telecom), chips & hardware, | software (R&D to maintenance). Now climb inside any of | those segments and walk the horizon of the businesses and | costs and what was required to build out what eg | semiconductors can do today, or what fiber can do today, | or what networks can do today, or what harddrives can do | today, or what GPUs can do today, and on and on and on | and on it goes. | | Do a tally on Google's capital investment since 1998 | (year by year and final tally), then tell me Web 2.0 | wasn't as expensive; then do it for Apple, Microsoft, | AWS, etc. It was drastically more expensive. Web 2.0 also | includes China's Internet build-out era, and the global | mobile build-out, I really don't need to say anything | more than that given the scale everyone here knows we're | talking about: Web 2.0 was massively more expensive than | Web 1.0, by at least a magnitude globally. | | Web 1.0 was laughably trivial in cost compared to Web | 2.0. It was petite, tiny, itsy bitsy small, versus | scaling to billions of global users across all major | economies, and shifting tens of trillions of dollars of | GDP online. | | Just the entertainment wing of Web 2.0 is larger and more | expensive than all of Web 1.0 combined. | skyeto wrote: | As annoying as that might be, exporting followers seems like a | use-case that Twitter might not want to freely support? | jFriedensreich wrote: | of course they don't but at least in europe we have a data | portability law that forces companies to let users take their | data with them when they leave. the problem is, there is not | a proper entity that can bundle the users interests and | lawsuits to kick these corporations ass to give us what we | own. | numair wrote: | Jack Dorsey personally helped Instagram with this exact | feature integration while courting them to be acquired by | Twitter. Once that failed he was one of the people who worked | to shut this feature off for everyone else, to avoid another | situation like that. | | His actions say a lot more than all of these re-tweet | friendly words he's been spouting. I'm glad we won't have to | trust people like him or the Twitter Developer team, or need | their permission, to succeed in the future. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | New Journalism: turning tweets into clickbait editorials | Ergo19 wrote: | New? No. There's actually a solid decade of practice by now. | Sunspark wrote: | I used to be active on Twitter. I had a third party client I | really liked, I had it configured just right and used the service | a lot. Then Twitter the corporation with the API removal crippled | the third party clients in the interests of pushing their "one | true client" vision so that the vision of a previous CEO or | whatever would come true, that Twitter be a curated river of news | and not interactions with people as much. | | You know what happened? I stopped using Twitter and only very | infrequently pop into it now. | cletus wrote: | Dorsey joins a long list of founders who were ousted (effectively | or actually) or it simply became too uncomfortable to stay [1] | who then go on to criticize their former empire. | | 9 times out of 10 I find such criticism to be completely self- | serving (eg to promote their new venture or agenda), a product of | bitterness at the exit, a chance to take a swipe at the powers- | that-be or a combination thereof. | | Twitter's developer API followed a typical pattern: do anything | you can to get traction for your platform. This includes being | "open" to encourage developers to build stuff on your platform. | Then, when you don't need them anymore, ditch them. From a purely | business point of view, he wasn't wrong for doing it. It just | surprises me that anyone is still shocked when this happens again | (and again... and again...). | | Those who are still bitter at getting locked out will champion | this quote of course. | | Take this quote: | | > "IN THE BEGINNING, TWITTER WAS SO OPEN THAT MANY SAW THE | POTENTIAL TO BECOME A DECENTRALIZED INTERNET STANDARD, SUCH AS | THE SMTP (EMAIL SENDING) PROTOCOL. FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS, | ALL REASONABLE AT THE TIME, WE TOOK A DIFFERENT PATH AND WE | INCREASINGLY CENTRALIZE TWITTER. BUT A LOT HAS CHANGED OVER THE | YEARS". | | Put another way: they chose to be a business. No business chooses | to create a federated system, at least no successful business (to | date). There's simply no reason to. The problems with spam and | abuse of the phone networks, email, texting, etc are largely a | result of predictably bad actors in an "open" federated system. | | The people who call for open standards either aren't a business | or they're losing to the industry leader and they want "open | standards" to not die. | | [1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/twitter-did-jack- | dor... | vkou wrote: | > TWITTER WAS SO OPEN THAT MANY SAW THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME A | DECENTRALIZED INTERNET STANDARD, SUCH AS THE SMTP (EMAIL | SENDING) PROTOCOL. FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS, ALL REASONABLE | AT THE TIME, | | Given that there was exactly one proprietary twitter 'network', | I would not say that none of those reasons were 'reasonable' at | the time. They were just wishful thinking in bed with corporate | marketing. | | I don't think a lot of tech people quite understand what a | public good looks like, but Twitter was never it. From day one, | it was built as a walled garden, and any access you have to it | is through the benevolence of its operators. | akira2501 wrote: | > Twitter's developer API followed a typical pattern: do | anything you can to get traction for your platform. This | includes being "open" to encourage developers to build stuff on | your platform. Then, when you don't need them anymore, ditch | them. | | From my recollections.. Twitter was a company that had a user | base, but no plans or strategy to become actually profitable | off that base. They, like many companies at the time, seemed to | assume that if you just build the big "next generation open | platform" that money would just start falling from the sky... | somehow. | | Ultimately, the red line meets the black line, and you have to | turn to VCs who push you into the most obvious solution: Shut | down all the "open platform" dead weight and start pushing | advertising. | | I don't think these are intentional moves but rather the | natural consequence of certain types of silicon valley business | "plans." | fleddr wrote: | You're right that somebody who made billions from a problematic | system comes across as hypocritical when he turns around to | burn it. | | That said, there's something pure and genuine in him. Real | regret, it doesn't come across as an act. And let's face it, | Twitter has never really grown up. It's not really a | functioning business. | Traster wrote: | Let's be clear about what has happened here though - Dorsey | saved Twitter when he first returned, but he completely | failed to run it as a business. No monetization, anemic | growth and a complete failure to become a real competitor in | the sector. Every other comparable tech company grew | massively over the last 6 years and Twitter is basically the | same value it was when he came back as CEO. And also let's | remember why he is stepping down - this only came after | investors came in and said "Hey, you've done a bad job, we | need someone new"- and not for nothing, the 6 years of lack | of value matched 6 years of failure to innovate. His | criticism might be genuine, but at the same time, he was in | charge. It's difficult to beleive him when suddenly the week | after he lost responsibilty, he gained a vision for how to | fix twitter. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-23 23:00 UTC)