How much would you pay Elon for access to #Twitter APIs, that Twitter has announced will no longer be free?
@lauren @shuttersparks apparently Nitter does not use the API at all, so you could probably build an alternative API based on their code, and therefore not have to agree to Twitter's API terms...
@admin @shuttersparks I would expect them to get around to defining such workarounds to be outside acceptable use and to be illicit circumvention.
@lauren @shuttersparks Possibly...but I think that would be a difficult argument to make. The limitation would be that it's read-only...but if that's all you need, you can set up that code without ever seeing the Twitter ToS or any link to it, and you aren't accessing anything that's restricted behind a login prompt or other access controls...they could block it and turn it into a game of whack-a-mole but I think claiming "unauthorized access" in a legal sense would be questionable...
@admin @shuttersparks There are already major court cases involving "scraping" of data, it is quite possible that courts will rule against the scrapers in at least some of these cases.
@lauren @shuttersparks So far the 9th circuit at least seems to have ruled multiple times that scraping is legal, and that prohibiting it could be deemed anticompetitive business practices. After multiple appeals there was a partial ruling against the company that was scraping, but that was in part because they were using registered accounts to do so. The initial rulings all seem to have said that scraping is legal even if it violates the terms and even if you're scraping password-protected data...so using logged in accounts the legality is a bit questionable...but there's definitely precedent in your favor if you're only pulling from public pages.
@admin @shuttersparks There's another big case currently.
@admin @shuttersparks Frankly, I view most scraping (as generally defined) to be stealing, whether or not you're pulling from public or private pages.
@lauren @shuttersparks I think it can be stealing if you are presenting that information as your own...same goes for API access...but otherwise it's just how the internet works. You choose to send me some data, I choose how to display it. Is ad block stealing? Are greasemonkey scripts stealing? Is manually editing the DOM stealing? Is changing the text color in your browser settings stealing? These are all functionally the same as scraping, it's just choosing which elements to display and which to discard. And it shouldn't matter if that's done locally or on the cloud or as a service.
@admin @shuttersparks No, these are not all the same at all. And for the record, I consider most ad blocking, as it is generally practiced by most users, to be stealing. Yes.
@lauren @shuttersparks As far as I'm concerned, it's my PC, and I will decide what code gets to run on it. I generally don't block ads exactly because I block entire companies/domains instead...but most ads these days you don't know where they're coming from or what code they're running or anything, it's just website pointing at some random other website and expecting you to run whatever it gives you...even if you trust the site your visiting even they don't necessarily know who exactly is serving you ads...if you want me to see your ads, you can serve them yourself, you can embed them directly in your video, and then I will see them. If you want to tell me "go over there and get an ad", I feel no qualms about saying "no thanks"
@lauren @shuttersparks Besides, ad blocking has always been a thing too, that's the nature of the business. You can rip pages out of newspapers and magazines; you can get up and use the restroom during a TV or radio ad break, or change the channel...I used to just turn the radio off in my car when an ad break came on and make a game of trying to guess when the ads would be over!
A lot of fascists like to pretend that the right to free speech is equivalent to a right to an audience, and I see arguments against ad block to be the same thing. You have a right to play your ads, but you do not have a right to force me to watch or listen to them. The job of the advertiser (or perhaps of the content they are advertising on) is to make me want to.
And if you want to say that I can't view your content until after I've seen the ad, then you can find a way to verify that I've seen the ad before giving me your content. Some sites already do that -- I've seen places that embed certain key words or phrases into ads that you then have to provide in order to access the content.
@admin @shuttersparks Most users of ad blockers don't differentiate. They just want to block anything and everything that may be an ad, with the most expansive interpretations possible. They aren't interested in only blocking badly behaving ads that spew video and audio and drag the page to a halt. Rather, they feel that they deserve it all for free. They don't care how the sites they view -- even the small ones with ads as their only revenue source to keep going -- will fair as a result, they just feel they deserve it all for free. They don't want to pay with money. They don't want to pay with time. They spout "WE ARE THE PRODUCT!" at every opportunity. They are entitgled and selfish and as far as I am concerned, stealing in a ethical sense. Q.E.D.
@shuttersparks @admin You are not characteristic. The entire raison d'etre for most people using ad blockers is to block all ads. Period. FREE FREE FREE!
@lauren @shuttersparks If your so insistent that your content should not be free, you don't have to give it away for free. There's many streaming services that I pay for, largely because I just don't want to use YouTube. You can't block ads on those, because there are no ads. You just can't get the content for free. You have to pay and login.
@admin @shuttersparks Absent a broad micropayment system for the Web, which doesn't exist for a whole bunch of reasons, there is no practical way for most sites to do this. Smaller sites in particular are the most dependent on ad revenue, and ad blockers hurt them disproportionately.
@lauren @shuttersparks Such a system does not exist because nobody has felt the need for it because ad blocking isn't really a problem because it has always happened, it always will happen, and that's accounted for in the advertising payments.
If everyone suddenly decided to start blocking ads, that kind of system would be created. It's not difficult in theory, it's just kinda useless today in practice. But if society at large decides that's how we want to do things because we really can't stand freeloaders, we can certainly do that.
@shuttersparks @admin So what? They annoy me too. Whenever I buy stuff that happens a lot. So what? Worry about the fascists and both parties attempting to destroy Section 230 and force government identification regimes for web site access, using complaints about ads and such as part of their excuse. The anti-ad anti-tracking people are playing right into the hands of the politicians who want to bend this all to their will, and both the Left and Right are complicit.
@lauren @shuttersparks so we shouldn't ever complain about actual problems if "the other team" happens to also be complaining about the same problems...??
@lauren @shuttersparks This is how politicians divide and conquer....
@admin @shuttersparks Most people don't have a clue how much of the Internet they depend upon is so very close to being utterly destroyed, and UGC being decimated. Cases before the Supreme Court right now could accomplish this in the very near future. And efforts based on "protect the children" could very easily force ID regimes on most sites. It's already happening overseas, and there's a push from both parties for it to happen here.
@shuttersparks @admin Politicians are using "Big Tech Hate" to push their agendas for total control of Internet content. They are playing many of the activists like violins.
@shuttersparks @admin You know how much I care about ad trackers? Not a bit. Zero. I care about right wing fascists and far left wackos trying to wreck the Internet. That's what I worry about here.
@lauren @shuttersparks If it's their computer, it's their right to choose what it does. I didn't spend a thousand bucks on a laptop for Twitter, Google, et al to leverage it as a remote node in their network. People have blocked ads for as long as ads have existed, and they will continue to do so for as long as our society is free. Advertisers know that when they pay for the ads. That is a natural part of the transaction. And the more aggressive advertisers become, the greater the number of people who block them, and most of them know that too and try to strike a certain balance.
Legally, there's nothing wrong with ad block. Morally, there's reasonable arguments on both sides. Practically, it's not worth fighting.
@shuttersparks @lauren Twitter has always had pretty strict restrictions on the number of API calls you can make in a given time period. Splitting your own rate limits across your own customers wouldn't be practical.
@shuttersparks @lauren Putting aside the ethical issues of scraping, it's way too easy for Twitter to make minor changes that break scrapers.
My last job involved both working with APIs, including Twitter's, and attempting to scrape. Scraping just wasn't practical a vast majority of the time.
@shuttersparks @lauren In theory, scraping should be easy. But in reality, it gets tricky, fast.
@shuttersparks Probably it would be theft of service, since the terms of use likely make such "reselling" illegal.