Twitter 宣佈要廢掉免費的 API 權限

昨天下午的時候看到這則官方在 Twitter 上提到的消息,要廢掉 free tier 的 API access:

但這邊提到的 paid basic tier 的價錢還沒看到公告。以「API Pricing - It’s very dark out here」這邊看到的價格,目前的 premium plan 超級貴:

這下看起來是真的得搬了,目前有好幾隻程式在上面跑 :o

Twitter 新政策禁止推廣其他社交平台的連結

看到 Paul Graham 這個宣告:

裡面提到的新政策在「Promotion of alternative social platforms policy」這邊,直接禁止其他社交平台:

At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:

  • Prohibited platforms:
    • Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
    • 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

Hacker News 的討論上面,Paul Graham 有回應 (帳號是 pg),他又提出了一些猜測與見解,包含了他覺得這個新政策會被收回:「Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now (twitter.com/paulg)」。

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.

I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out to be. He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one. Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. Those two facts are sufficient to explain most of his behavior.

He could still salvage the situation. He's the sort of person it would be a big mistake to write off. And I hope he does. I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly.

不過的確如他說的,這是個好機會嘗試其他的 social network...

美國人使用社群媒體的情況

在「Social Media Usage by Age」這邊看到的文章,把美國人使用社群媒體的情況做成圖,資料來源是 Pew Research Center 的「Social Media Fact Sheet」這裡。

很明顯的可以看到 Google (Alphabet) 基本上就是 YouTube 一個產品吃天下,而 Facebook (Meta) 有三個產品在滲透,包括 Facebook、InstagramWhatsapp

LinkedIn 在出社會後會開始用,另外 Pinterest 這麼多老人家在用到是很驚奇 XDDD

Twitter 的 Tor Onion 位置

Hacker News 上看到「Twitter is now available on Tor (help.twitter.com)」這篇,講 Twitter 官方的說明裡面有提到 Tor 的 Onion 服務:「About twitter.com supported browsers」。

會用到的網址分別是:

看起來這些開頭為 twitter 的 domain 是撞出來的... 不過還是討問題,如果已經可以用 Tor 的話,exit node 應該夠用?

印度威脅要逮捕 Facebook、WhatsApp 與 Twitter 的員工

The Wall Street Journal 上看到的,印度政府威脅 FacebookWhatsAppTwitter,如果不配合政府的要求提供資料並將內容下架,將會逮捕他們在印度的員工:「India Threatens Jail for Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter Employees」。

這應該是透過上個月才剛過的法令:「Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter Face New Rules in India」。

印度的市場太大,各家社群網站都想要進去,造就了政府的有足夠的能力跟這些大公司談判,而且是具有壓制性的力量。

在去年殺完 Tiktok 後,上個月擴權然後這個月反過來殺這些美國的企業。

美國政府不知道會幫到什麼程度...

Elon Musk 退訂美國總統的 Twitter 帳號

先前因為 cjin 的這則推,跑去追蹤了 @BigTechAlert 這個帳號:

@BigTechAlert 這個帳號會把名人以及大企業的 Twitter 帳號所追蹤與推追蹤的行為找出來,然後發表在 Twitter 上面。

平常 @BigTechAlert 所抓出來的追蹤與退追大家也都習以為常,你去看 @BigTechAlert 的帳號也可以發現沒什麼 retweet & like。

但前幾天這則退訂通知讓不少人 retweet & like,因為是 Elom Musk 退追了 @POTUS 帳號 (也就是 President of the United States):

退追的真實原因不知道,但看到純粹覺得很有趣...

Instagram 改善影片上架速度的方式

不是什麼魔法,其實是改產品面上的規格 (但是發表到 Instagram Engineering 上):「Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram」。

最原始的版本是所有的格式都轉完後才可以上架:

然後把規格改成最高畫質的版本轉完後就可以先上架:

The idea is, instead of blocking until all video versions are available, we can publish the video once the highest-quality video version is available.

然後是把影片切段上傳,所以傳一半就可以先處理一半,變成 pipeline 的概念,但增加程式的複雜度,以及被迫要調整影片品質的參數:

Segmented uploads reduce upload latency in many cases but come with a few tradeoffs. For instance, segmented uploads increase the complexity of the pipeline. There are some quality metrics that are only available per segment at transcode time, such as SSIM. These metrics are not helpful to us on a per segment basis. Therefore, we need to do a duration weighted average of the SSIM of all segments to come up with the SSIM of the whole video. Similarly, handling exceptions is more complex since there are more cases to handle.

另外有一種特例是上傳的影片本身就已經符合伺服器的規格,這樣的話可以直接放行 (不過這樣不會有 security concern 嗎...):

Another performance optimization we use to improve the upload latency and save CPU utilization is something we call a “passthrough” upload. In some cases, the media that is uploaded is already ready for playback on most devices.

都是想的出來而且會帶有 tradeoff 的方法,而不是完全正面的改善 :o