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0 pointsmschuster911y ago0 comments

> What beautiful doublethink.

Given just how many AI bots scrape up everything they can, oftentimes ignoring robots.txt or any rate limits (there have been a few complaint threads on HN about that), I can hardly blame the operators of large online services just cutting off data feeds.

Twitter however didn't stop their data feeds due to AI or because they wanted money, they stopped providing them because its new owner does everything he can to hinder researchers specializing in propaganda campaigns or public scrutiny.

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hluska1y ago

What was Reddit’s excuse? They did roughly the same thing (and have just as much garbage content).

In other words, why is it wrong for X but okay for Reddit? If you ignore one individual’s politics, the two services did the same thing.

mschuster91OP1y ago

Reddit shut their API access down only very recently, after the AI craze went off. Twitter did so right after Musk took over, way before Reddit, way before AI ever went nuts.

dotnet001y ago

X shut down API access in Feb 2023, Reddit shut theirs down at the end of June of the same year. Just barely 6 months apart.

Furthermore, while X had also only announced this in February, Reddit announced their API shutdown just 2 months later in April.

And, to further add to that, X was pretty upfront that they think they have access to a large and powerful dataset in X and didn't want to give it out for free. Reddit used very similar wording when announcing their changes.

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