Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

A couple of months ago some colleagues and I submitted a very basic request practically begging Twitter for access to users’ follower/following graph on the new API. The use case was super-simple and obvious (allow people to import their followers into a new app) and didn’t involve any sort of data mining or spam or anything.

It took days? weeks? to get a generic rejection message from a “no reply” email address. Meanwhile — much irony — A16Z can help apps like Clubhouse get super-access since they were also a huge investor in Twitter.

All of this pro- and anti-web3 stuff is a sign that all of these inter-connected webs of egos in our industry are jostling for power in an ecosystem that doesn’t need them very much. Meanwhile, there are lots of people in other verticals who completely missed the boat on the web investment play who are beginning to realize this is their opportunity to jump in and scale their capital alongside the people on the ground. A major investor / operator shakeup is about to take place.

This kind of social graph access was used by cambridge analytica. That's why you will never get this kind of access to user data via apis, even if the user grants it to you. (Users granted access to the app which then sold the data to cambridge analytica).

I was at a major social media company on 2016 and overnight these kinds of APIs went from promoting user freedom to radioactive. Don't expect anything from these spineless companies with similarly spineless executives that bow to the woke mob at a slight breeze of discontent.

That’s completely incorrect, as this privilege is given out on a “friends of the company” basis. Hence my citation of the Clubhouse example. Moreover, as insiders have indicated, Cambridge Analytica had exactly that sort of privileged relationship with Facebook — normal people couldn’t do what those guys were doing on the FB Platform without raising a lot of eyebrows. I know a ton about that as I was involved in that area about 10 years before you.

> That’s completely incorrect, as this privilege is given out on a “friends of the company” basis

Of course the privileged few get to break the rules, that doesn't refute my point.

> Moreover, as insiders have indicated, Cambridge Analytica had exactly that sort of privileged relationship with Facebook

https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a-guide-...

Maybe they had a privileged relationship with facebook but they got the data from a personality quiz app which requested access to user data (which the users granted).

> I know a ton about that as I was involved in that area about 10 years before you.

Good for you but don't you think that's beside the point?

Let me try to help you two agree.

> you will [generally not] get this kind of access to user data via apis, even if the user grants it to you.

...with the exception that:

> the privileged few get to break the rules

OK?

I haven't seen any evidence of granted access to user-controlled private info, from this convo.

I used data identical to the Cambridge Analytica stuff in 2014 for a project on behalf of the Florida Democratic party (voter mobilization for midterms).

I remember being shocked at the level of detail, and asking the Dem strategist running the project where he got it from. He wouldn't say at first, but eventually he explained about the ecosystem of companies like Cambridge aggregating the graph data.

Nobody cared in the media until 2016, when social media was scapegoated to cover for Hillary's gross underperformance. I was pretty annoyed at the breathless faux outrage I witnessed from people who literally were using the same exact data for their own purposes.

The spineless CEOs is right. Board members too. Silicon Valley players are desperate to maintain their reputations among the pious peers in their social circles, and also are terrified of the media/activist complex killing their ESG scores and bumping them off of certain millennial/genz targeted "socially responsible" investment products. See Tesla having a lower ESG score than Nike if you want an example of how pissing activists off kills your ESG score.

As annoying as that might be, exporting followers seems like a use-case that Twitter might not want to freely support?

of course they don't but at least in europe we have a data portability law that forces companies to let users take their data with them when they leave. the problem is, there is not a proper entity that can bundle the users interests and lawsuits to kick these corporations ass to give us what we own.

A user's friends/followers graph is not their data. It is about a relationship between two users. Should I be allowed to export my Twitter followers into the "Twatter" system? Should I have to get the permission from each follower that they want to be exported?

Who "owns" that relationship? The knowledge of that relationship is necessary for Twitter to run its business, because it has to submit a user's posts to their followers' feeds.

But if I leave Twitter, under GDPR I can ask/make them delete that relationship ("right to be forgotten") but I doubt I can demand that I'm allowed to take a follower's PII, like their Twitter handle, with me to another service.

so your notebook where you write down contacts is not yours? this does not make sense. i own everything about me also who i follow and who follows me.

I disagree. The social graph is the digital property of the user. If I export my twitter data and save it to my hard drive, Twitter cannot enforce the right to be forgotten. They are only expected to delete the user's data on servers they control.

Jack Dorsey personally helped Instagram with this exact feature integration while courting them to be acquired by Twitter. Once that failed he was one of the people who worked to shut this feature off for everyone else, to avoid another situation like that.

His actions say a lot more than all of these re-tweet friendly words he’s been spouting. I’m glad we won’t have to trust people like him or the Twitter Developer team, or need their permission, to succeed in the future.

If I follow you on Twitter or give you access to my contact info on that platform, do you have the right to export and import into another platform? I think thats a core question that we have not collectively answered.

If you give me something that I can read with my eyeballs, then I don't think you should have the right to tell me what I can and can't do with that (absent copyright, or some sort of NDA or other agreement).

Certainly you (or the platform you are using) can put technical measures in place to make it hard for me to do automatic manipulation of that data, but I don't think "the right" has anything to do with it.

> ... absent copyright, or some sort of NDA or other agreement.

I'm pretty sure the caveats you started listing here are exactly the type of interesting question the person you're responding to was trying to invoke.

For instance, in the US, if you are my healthcare provider and are granted access to my medical records, the answer is that you can only do a very restricted set of things with that data. Because we -- the US society -- have decided to create "another agreement" called HIPAA.

There's all sorts of stuff like this. GDPR. PCI-DSS. Government-classified information. Anything your company sends out that's marked confidential. These agreements that you so quickly dismiss are exactly where the interesting conversations around data seem to be happening.

Can you elaborate on the last two sentences?

One of the massive capital flows into the crypto and web3 markets has been from family offices and investment firms that sat around and watched VCs and Silicon Valley firms (like YC!) make billions from the shift to web and mobile interfaces over the past 20 years. Like, imagine your family got pitched Amazon and said “lol nobody needs this,” and now the next gen is in charge of the wealth; or, imagine you are a hedge fund guy watching Tiger Global’s moves and you’re looking for the next major “entry point.”

A lot of activity like this is going on behind the scenes. You also have bleeding-edge innovation in capital through structures like Venture DAOs that will blow up the entire space in ways that people haven’t fully thought through because half of this industry is stuck on the “crypto is a scam” narrative of someone with a 2014 understanding of what’s happening in the space.

but if "where we're going we don't need their money" is true, why is that money useful?

Not sure where you’re getting that statement from. The most important shift taking place right now is the massive increase in both capital velocity (speed at which it’s moving around) and capital diversity (whose money is being used) within crypto/web3 markets. Capitalist societies use capital — money — to accomplish things, so I’m not sure what someone who says “where we’re going we don’t need their money” is talking about...

hm well i m not sure if web1 or web2 needed that much money to take off ...

Remember that the internet was originally developed mostly as a military / university project. It got kick-started by quite a bit of money as well.

Web 2.0 was arguably not as expensive, but then again you could also argue that it was not as big a step. If you think about it, web 2.0 is really just taking web 1.0 and adding a lot of fancy stuff like SPA, new fancy protocols and social media.

Web 3.0 however, depending on which vision of the 3.0 you support, ranges from "just" another upgrade to a completely different thing than what we have today.

And to make it quite simple: Completely different things are loads of work. Work means people need to dedicate their time to it, which means they need to be paid.

You're miscalculating by trillions of dollars of capital investment across Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Data centers, research & development, operations, national infrastructure (eg telecom), chips & hardware, software (R&D to maintenance). Now climb inside any of those segments and walk the horizon of the businesses and costs and what was required to build out what eg semiconductors can do today, or what fiber can do today, or what networks can do today, or what harddrives can do today, or what GPUs can do today, and on and on and on and on it goes.

Do a tally on Google's capital investment since 1998 (year by year and final tally), then tell me Web 2.0 wasn't as expensive; then do it for Apple, Microsoft, AWS, etc. It was drastically more expensive. Web 2.0 also includes China's Internet build-out era, and the global mobile build-out, I really don't need to say anything more than that given the scale everyone here knows we're talking about: Web 2.0 was massively more expensive than Web 1.0, by at least a magnitude globally.

Web 1.0 was laughably trivial in cost compared to Web 2.0. It was petite, tiny, itsy bitsy small, versus scaling to billions of global users across all major economies, and shifting tens of trillions of dollars of GDP online.

Just the entertainment wing of Web 2.0 is larger and more expensive than all of Web 1.0 combined.

> understanding of what’s happening in the space.

Where can I get a concise, recent, high quality and big picture summary of the space? It would be useful because I am out of the loop.

Week in ethereum news may be a good place to start.

There is so much happening in the field that it’s hard to keep track without spending a few weeks full time first to wrap your head around the main concepts.

This is the one you want, a 250 page investment letter covering all aspects(admittedly from one person's view):

https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022...

A full view is actually even bigger than that, but this covers the prominent, well-capitalized and hyped players of the past year, at least.

[Edit: they haven't IPOd]

Seems to have been the worse flying chicken in recent years. But please tell me why how a service based on people chatting in real-time will scale?

Clubhouse is not a public company, at least not the one the OP commenter is talking about.

I stand corrected, it seems people are even investing in the "wrong" company thinking it's Clubhouse.

Isnt it possible to just scrape the /followers page?

Someone can write a browser extension just for that but once it gets popular I'm sure they will try every technical card they have available to prevent it and as a last resource the legal ones.

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