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Comment by wraptile | Hacker News Reader

You can scrape twitter pretty easily yourself with an account (lots of free code on github) but that's the thing - you need an account which is legally complicated but for your own personal use you can just create a dummy account and you'll never be blocked.

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Don't they require a phone number? Even if they don't, they probably require email. I don't really want to give them my main email and even less - phone number. So, buying an account seems like less of a hassle, than figuring out where to get a temporary email.

These are all available for couple of cents per email/phone number. I don't want to advertise these services directly but they work very well and you can find them with keywords like "SMS otp code service"

They make it really hard to get an account, no matter how legit you are, but if you eventually get one, you can plug it into your own private Nitter instance.

> and you'll never be blocked.

Youll be instantyl blocked, because accounts without Biometric login and Phone numbers get flagged and asked for validation after 36 hours.

Well that wouldn't be instantly but either of those can be added with almost no real costs at personal-use scale. Throw away phone number for x.com registration is <0.25$. You can bypass all anti-bot and manage your account pool with https://github.com/CloakHQ/CloakBrowser-Manager and mobile IP hotspot. x.com is so heavily botted that your personal 1,000 scrapes per day will not even trigger any alarms.

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