I despise Musk as much as anyone else and charging for API access has hurt a lot of valuable use cases like improving accessibility but … how about not massive scraping a site that doesn’t want you to?
If it doesn't respect robots.txt, it is unethical.
b) Given Twitter is public, user generated content which they don't own but simply have a license I wouldn't call it unethical in the slightest.
I do a lot of data scraping, so I’m sympathetic to the people who want to do it, but violating the robots.txt (or other published policies) is absolutely unethical, regardless of the license of the content the service is hosting. Another way of describing an unauthorised usecase taking a service offline is a denial of service attack, which (again, if Musk’s description of the problem is accurate) seems to be the issue Twitter was facing, with a choice between restricting services or scaling forever to meet the scrapers requirements.
Personally I would have probably tried to start with a captcha, but all this dogpiling just looks like low effort Musk hate. The prevailing sentiment on HN has become so passionately anti-Musk that it’s hard to view any criticism of him or Twitter here with any credibility.
The only reason these websites and platforms aggregate any content at all is because they're effectively giant public squares.
Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it...
(Clearly it's not a public square, but his position is incoherent).
It is NOT legal to install cameras that record everyone's conversations, much less sell the laundered results.
Pre-2023 people went on Twitter with the expectation that their output would be read by humans.
A traditional search engine is different: It redirects to the original. A bastardized search engine that shows snippets is more questionable, but still miles away from the AI steal.
Expectations =/= reality. And the reality is that bits have been reading comments for over a decade.
When you have financial incentive to build your business on someone’s data and you scrap literally millions if not billions of pages - it’s unethical.
This data is often of great public value. I track conversations around a social issue as part of my work for a non-profit.
I'd counter it's unethical to prevent people from accessing this data.
> great public value
Having been to twitter mostly through the most recent prominent war, man the signal to noise ratio is really low even when being careful about who to follow and who to block. There is so much disinformation, bad takes, uninformed opinions presented as facts, pure evil, etc.
So I guess it could be used for training very specific things or cataloging the underbelly of humanity but for general human knowledge it’s a frigging cesspool.
I do not use the Twitters myself, and actively discourage others from doing so. Sends people bonkers.
We were actually gearing up to switch to paid accounts as we found use cases that could subsidize these efforts... And then the starting price for reasonably small volumes shot up to like $500k/yr.
We have robots.txt. If Google doesn't respect that, it's unethical. Don't you think so?
Not that the people you want to respect that would
Especially since they're not moderating things or anything.
Agreed. However, it's probably covered by their terms of service.
Same thing with the recent reddit kerfuffle. I'd have much preferred a Usenet 2.0 instead of centralizing global communications in the hands of a handful of private companies with associated user-hostile incentive structures.
It's interesting how you assume that most people despise Musk.
I don't despise Musk at all. Don't agree with him on everything, but he is a genuine and interesting person.
Then they followed it up with the old hacker news chestnut of 'whatabout the west'
I don’t think it’s a particularly nuanced point to you
What point and why do you keep saying 'nuance' over and over while giving zero actual information? What are you trying to say and what evidence is there?
Let's think about this super hard. What is the justification for an unprovoked genocidal war? Why are you defending putin?
however ignorant it might be.
Show me where you get your information, lets see the source of this nonsense.
2. If you actually want to hear my opinion, then the realm of geopolitics + good old-fashioned hate of the US government does a number on people's logic, so we get what I can only charitably describe as a parade of non-sequiturs, whataboutisms and other fallacies. And so it can be useful to frame it in the simpler terms, for example you could hardly find anyone even on this site who would condone the forced takeover of parts of people's homes. Literally the same is happening on a scale of the countries.
It cuts right through the bullshit and frequently exposes a lot of hypocrisy, hate, self loathing, racism, etc.
That's an extremely dumb take
Your nonsense straight out of the a Soviet propaganda book doesn't work on me.
Go ask people from Eastern Europe how they felt about 45/50+ years of Soviet imposed governments and regimes.
The West has done awful things but in what way do they excuse the attempted ethnic cleansing of Ukraine?
You’re probably smart enough to understand that out of spite and regret of your country’s history with the Russians your countrymen have more motivation than many others to judge the Russian efforts without any further investigation into the matter.
The same applies for myself, since I’m Finnish. It’s almost sad to see how people abandon all reason and critical thinking skills because of some ingrained belief that “Russia bad”. All of my knowledge of the human nature leads me to believe that they’re no more bad than the next people, and that they probably have some motives to go to a taxing war that we don’t really understand here in the west - seeing as the first casualty in war is the truth.