this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Text feed are the lightest weight most cachable thing you can serve. The costliest part of the text component is the mixer that ranks the content. The companies scraping them don't care about the ranking they just want bulk tweets. That's what the API is for. Elon charged them insane rates so they all went off the API that cost Twitter a tiny fraction to serve and instead the API consumers switched to crawling the website instead, which costs Twitter orders of magnitude more, but is free for scrapers. Elon is indeed a stable genius.
Holy shit, I hadn't stopped to realize your point there!!! Of course any AI scrapers would just start bit crawler accounts, if any of them weren't already doing that as well. Along with any other info scrapers out there - I can only think of the one example tbh