Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Not that obvious, if I was in the same position I wouldn't cut API access, if I was thinking about profits. Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully. My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another, and less links back to Twitter.

If I woke up feeling evil (really money seeking) I might add some clause to the terms and conditions that you need to prominently display "Powered by Twitter" if you use the API and aggressively check all websites using Twitter API, one way or another.

But I guess my perspective would be considered more long term while Musks management of Twitter seems to be heavily focused on short term.

View on HN

>My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another,

the real problem from a business standpoint is less people trying stuff out and figuring hey maybe I could actually build a business on this, time to move up to the paid tier.

Also no devs at companies have played with twitter api because devs not going to spend money to play, so never say in meeting actually we can solve this with Twitter's api, we just have pay for a licence and I can write the solution! So maybe business look for other ways to solve problems.

> Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully.

This. I had a brief flirtation with working with people using the Twitter API for research purposes. A very large majority of them didn't care about having the latest tweets coming off the firehose, but instead getting access to all the old data. At least at the time, the latter was much more difficult to do.

Things like using Twitter for real time sentiment analysis does require realtime data, but those applications are more likely to be for-profit, and thus could afford to pay.

Delivering old tweets is actually more expensive than real-time because nothing is cached. Streaming access is pretty much all served out of memory.

I used to lead the search and historical API team at Twitter.

Right, the 30 day search API is still 100 request/mo for the sandbox and 500/mo for the bottom paid tier (which I think is $150/mo). Would love to hear more from you about this experience, whether in blog form or commentary. I use the filtered stream API a lot and the search API a bit.

Oh I’m sure. My point was just that the use cases least likely to be able to afford paying are clustered on historical data. And those clustered on real-time data tend to involve $$ anyways

We gave academic researchers free access to the full archive search API to help cover that use case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com