this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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No you misunderstand they desperately want them to be trained with their data. They just want them to pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to do so. Twitter is not buckling under the weight of data scraping, Elon is just pissed that companies are data scraping instead paying his exorbitant API fees.
This is the hilarious part to me: some companies might pay these fees, but there will be many more who won’t and will instead use actual web scrapers to get their data anyways. As the number of individuals training LLM models increases in the next couple of years, this will create a much more significant traffic load compared to API calls.
Yeah he doesn’t seem to understand he’s not selling the data, the data is public, he’s selling convenience. And if the convenience isn’t worth the price you’ve set, people will just take the extra effort and avoid the expense.
Exactly. I do selenium scripting as my main task for work, and as soon as I heard about how high the api rates were my first through was "Jesus, it might slower than straight api calls, and the dynamic xpaths might suck, but I could write a script that scrapes the website for cheaper." Twitter is hurting for cash right now, and I imagine his effort to raise funds is the end goal here. He instituted the api policy, learned about another side effect, and continues to with the most extreme, devoid of nuance response each time.
All "in my opinion," of course.