X Corp. lawsuit says unidentified scrapers forced Twitter to impose rate limits.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/446751

Alternative title: Musk sues data scrapers, blames them for Twitter’s “impaired user experience”

    • QHC@lemmy.world
      191·
      1 year ago

      Scrapers aren’t ever going to use an API, but Twitter could have just blocked unrecognized traffic if they wanted. I’m sure it’s covered by the TOS.

      • spiderman@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        15·
        1 year ago

        i think what the previous dude said is, people wouldn’t not have resorted to use scrapping if there was a good api. one of the major reason people/organisations choose scrapping is because it’s better than paying insane amounts of money for insane(ly low)amount of api calls.

        • QHC@lemmy.world
          13·
          1 year ago

          There was a good API before Elon essentially shut it down. But that is irrelevant.

          The reason mass data scraping like OpenAI does would not rely on an API is because they are getting data from the entire Internet (and other sources that aren’t online). They want raw data and they want as much and as varied as possible. It’s much easier, cheaper and practical to build tools that scrape websites generically than to integrate with thousands of completely independent and different APIs.

          It’s the same reason that Reddit complaining about “AI taking all of our data” is bullshit. “AI” is just a convenient excuse and the most recent tech buzzword.

          • pewter@lemmy.world
            3·
            1 year ago

            They are largely mad because of how effective the AI is. If data was being used just to improve Swype for texting people would care less. I care more about artists’ complaints about getting replaced than big tech companies complaining that content they didn’t create is being used to create things.

            Also I decided to read openAI’s GPT2 paper and they were pretty clear about their created dataset:

            "Instead, we created a new web scrape which emphasizes document quality. To do this we only scraped web pages which have been curated/filtered by humans. Manually filtering a full web scrape would be exceptionally expensive so as a starting point, we scraped all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma. This can be thought of as a heuristic indicator for whether other users found the link interesting, educational, or just funny.

            The resulting dataset, WebText, contains the text subset of these 45 million links."

            That’s a nice sized dataset from real people that’s already somewhat filtered by quality. They were totally scraping Reddit very specifically and now that people see it’s effective, anyone else who wants to make their own chatgpt or wants to improve their models will do the same.

            • QHC@lemmy.world
              2·
              1 year ago

              Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

              It’s worth noting here for context that:

              • scraping the outbound links is very different than all of the user comments, which would put more load on Reddit’s servers and also be easier to claim “belongs” to Reddit (it doesn’t but they argue otherwise)
              • this shows that OpenAI was not using, let alone abusing, Reddit’s API as claimed
        • tempest@lemmy.ca
          51·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, people think this is like trying to stop drive by bots that are looking for PHP vulnerabilities, it isn’t.

          Usually you are attempting to stop someone who is spending their entire day trying to scrape your site. It’s a full time job trying to stop them and even then it’s a cat and mouse game at best.

          Still don’t think Elon is going to get anywhere with this though.

        • Jaysyn@kbin.social
          84·
          1 year ago

          Twitter can remove their servers from the public facing internet if they don’t want the traffic.

          • Billiam@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 year ago

            Twitter very much does not want that to happen. Remember two weeks ago when Musk reversed his decision to block anyone but registered users from seeing tweets because Google started removing links to Twitter since they were dead?

            Right-wingers don’t just want to be bigoted assholes with megaphones, they want to make sure decent people have to hear them too.

        • QHC@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          The same way any large web service would identify a sudden increase in traffic, whether malicious or not. For the servers I manage, we end up dealing with more unintentionally out-of-control bots than we do legitimate hack or DDoS attempts.

  • Chozo@kbin.social
    11·
    1 year ago

    Pretty sure Elon knows this is unwinnable. Data scraping isn’t illegal, unless you can prove that the scrapers intended to cause harm to Twitter in the process. He’s doing this to harass whoever made him make an embarrassing mistake with the rate limits. He has a history of spending a stupid amount of money to (unsuccessfully) save face.

  • epicsninja@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 year ago

    You can’t complain about other people impairing user experience when you’ve had like 3 different instances of tanking the servers all by yourself.

  • Billiam@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    “You can’t impair the user experience! Only I can do that!” -Elon “Emerald Mine Money” Musk

  • kowcop@aussie.zone
    7·
    1 year ago

    It is amazing to remember what Twitter was before Musk, and what it is now. This is one bloke, supposedly a business genius