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 Probably it would be theft of service, since the terms of use likely make such "reselling" illegal.
@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 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 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.
@lauren @shuttersparks I absolutely agree that this is a problem, but telling me that I don't have a right to decide what I do with my own property is not the solution. In fact, it's another manifestation of the *exact same problem*. I do not accept that I must choose between letting the politicians tell me how to use my computer or letting the advertisers tell me how to use my computer. I don't accept the manufacturers telling me how I can use my computer either...that battle was mostly lost years ago but some of us are still trying to fight it...
Besides, the Internet has been dying for years, and advertising is a large part of the problem. You used to do a search and end up on a page created by someone willing to put in some work to get that information out into the world. Now you do a search and end up on a page created to copy information from somewhere else and drown it in ads in order to make a quick buck...
@admin @shuttersparks I see activists all the time bitching about search not working for them now. I don't know what planet they're on. Google Search works great for me. I ignore the ads -- and all the ads are marked as such. Bitch bitch bitch.
@lauren @shuttersparks Seriously? I just called to check up on my car that's in the shop, so I did a quick search for the shop. The top result is their official website, yes...but the entire rest of the page are various websites that take the content off their official site and pad it with ads...
@admin @shuttersparks Top result was what you wanted? Right? So what do you care about the rest? What's the problem?
@lauren @shuttersparks Ah, so now you have no problem with people scraping information from other websites as long as they aren't the top result on Google...?
There's a reason the search engine returns more than one result. People do click on those. And yeah, sites like 'hoursguide.com' may not look like the scammiest thing in the world, but it's just repacking someone else's information and surrounding it with...five advertisements before I even scrolled...but I'm sure people who are just looking for the shop's hours see 'hoursguide.com' and click that instead. It costs money to run these servers; people wouldn't do it so much if it wasn't profitable, and if nobody was clicking on it then it wouldn't be profitable.
@admin @shuttersparks Google abides by robots.txt. It will not spider or index data that the site administrator has indicated they do not wish to be so indexed. But I assume you already know that.
@lauren @shuttersparks How is that relevant? Google isn't the one scraping the data, the scammy ad sites are.
@admin @shuttersparks You suggested that Google listing sites like that was somehow wrong. My definition of illicit scraping is the taking in bulk of data from another site to display on your own site when the origin site has specifically indicated (via robots.txt) that they do not want this done.
@lauren @shuttersparks Ah, I see. No, that's not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting that the web being flooded by these kinds of scammy ad sites is a problem. The fact that they fill Google results is merely one data point into how ubiquitous they are.
@admin @shuttersparks They're an annoyance but in the noise as far as I'm concerned compared with the big existential issues facing the Net now.
@lauren @shuttersparks The way I see it, the internet is being destroyed by the same corporate behemoths that are destroying...well...*everything else* too. Social media is a dumpster fire because outrage brings clicks and clicks bring profits. Journalism is dying for pretty much the same reason, they get more and more extreme to put eyeballs on ads. Search is polluted with fake listings to serve ads, shopping is all just ads for Amazon these days, so many email accounts are ad-filled cesspools, video services are full of clickbait to put eyeballs on ads...
The internet is being destroyed because it is profitable to destroy it, and most of those profits are coming from ads.
@admin @shuttersparks No, the Internet is being destroyed by governments and politicians, who are using people saying things (like you just did) as patsies to achieve their own political ends to microcontrol Internet content and users. They are channeling Big Tech hate to their own insidious political ends. No doubt about it.
@lauren @shuttersparks So the billions of dollars these politicians are getting from corporations has no influence at all, it's all about what some random dude posts on social media? lmfao...
@admin @shuttersparks My sense is that politicians on both the right and left have determined that Big Tech Hate is good for them politically, and no, I don't think the influence of those firms on those politicians is anything like it used to be. Past history now. The actions being taken to change Section 230 are proof of this in my view. The conflicting Florida, Texas, and California approaches are clear evidence of this (with Florida/Texas before the Supreme Court right now).
@lauren @shuttersparks There are two things driving the politics. One is profit, the other is division. Making things harder for "big tech" isn't always a problem for big tech. Who is gonna find it easier to implement age verification, Facebook.com or Mastodon.social? Who is more likely to get a SWAT raid if they fuck up vs a letter to their legal team? Now that they're at the top, these companies don't mind restrictions that make things harder for upstart competitors. Meanwhile they keep us fighting each other, worrying about "the other team"...one party screws us, we vote them out. Other party screws us too, we vote them out. First party comes back, screws us some more, so we vote them out...and everyone stays so focused on beating the other guy that we aren't looking at the ways the whole damn system was rigged from the start and getting worse every year...
@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 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.