I would disagree here, I think it's different for several reasons:
- The volume and velocity of data and API requests needed for X is much larger than scraping the occasional news article. You'd need a huge number of accounts to make it work.
- X has the technology to reliably detect such accounts unless they are incredibly well "hidden" by e.g. crowsourcing requests through regular accounts with normal browsing behavior
- X has the incentive to reliably detect such accounts as it has shown in the past by shutting off data access. It seems to care much more about this than most news websites
I believe the only reason things like Nitter still work is that it's not yet big enough for X to care about and invest resources into guarding against it, especially with all the other stuff going on at X right now. But it's only a matter of time before that changes.
I can tell you that a project is already doing this today for archiving with no signs of mitigations (request denials, poisoning the responses, etc). It’ll likely eventually end up in the usual places when you want to see something from way back in the day.
Sure, but that doesn't make a difference. Even the top 1% of the most requested timelines and tweets are huge amounts of requests. That's many many orders of magnitude more data then new articles and requires a large number of accounts.
>- X has the technology to reliably detect such accounts unless they are incredibly well "hidden"
Has, or had? With massive layoffs, they might not have the staff or know-how left to do this, or the time to implement it.
>- X has the incentive to reliably detect such accounts as it has shown in the past by shutting off data access. It seems to care much more about this than most news websites
OK, but still wanting to do something, and actually doing it, are two different things. I'm not convinced this hollowed-out shell of a company still has such ability.
>especially with all the other stuff going on at X right now. But it's only a matter of time before that changes.
This seems to assume X is going to continue to survive and in fact thrive; I don't think that's a good assumption.
- The volume and velocity of data and API requests needed for X is much larger than scraping the occasional news article. You'd need a huge number of accounts to make it work.
- X has the technology to reliably detect such accounts unless they are incredibly well "hidden" by e.g. crowsourcing requests through regular accounts with normal browsing behavior
- X has the incentive to reliably detect such accounts as it has shown in the past by shutting off data access. It seems to care much more about this than most news websites
I believe the only reason things like Nitter still work is that it's not yet big enough for X to care about and invest resources into guarding against it, especially with all the other stuff going on at X right now. But it's only a matter of time before that changes.