I guess he found out that selenium script kiddies like myself can simply scrape the website instead of paying the api fees. It’s not as efficient — or maybe my scripts just suck — but you can’t beat free!
Or, more cynically, they’re making the app more painful to use if you aren’t paying for it.
I could see that, yeah. It’s funny because I was just arguing with someone on Reddit the other day, claiming that making our own API using a scraper would be simple and easy.
I pointed out that scraping can invoke bans and is easily worked around by the service. Apparently Twitter doesn’t know how to detect scraping so just went with “NO ONE USES THE SITE FOR MORE THAN 20 MINUTES A DAY!”
I guess he found out that selenium script kiddies like myself can simply scrape the website instead of paying the api fees. It’s not as efficient — or maybe my scripts just suck — but you can’t beat free!
Or, more cynically, they’re making the app more painful to use if you aren’t paying for it.
I could see that, yeah. It’s funny because I was just arguing with someone on Reddit the other day, claiming that making our own API using a scraper would be simple and easy.
I pointed out that scraping can invoke bans and is easily worked around by the service. Apparently Twitter doesn’t know how to detect scraping so just went with “NO ONE USES THE SITE FOR MORE THAN 20 MINUTES A DAY!”