How much would you pay Elon for access to #Twitter APIs, that Twitter has announced will no longer be free?
@lauren What's to stop someone from setting up a service that gives access to the API for free or a tiny fee?
@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.