Tweets are delicious candy. When you eat candies it comes with packaging and a wrapper, like the twitter website interface. API allows software to access the candy without the wrapper or packaging. If Elon removes direct candy access for the bots and other software, the bots will instead take packaged candy. When the bot removes the wrapper from the candy, we call this scraping. The candy packaging is useless to the bot because it just wants the candy. The extra candy packaging is going to cost twitter more money.
API is a way for software to access website data in a block of data. When a human visits a website, there is all sorts of html, css, javascript that gets interpreted by the web browser and makes the website data visually readable for humans. A computer program just wants a block of data, ex: the twitter handle, the tweet text, the tweet time stamp, etc. If a bot can't access an API, it will resort to web scraping, that is loading the full page and extracting whatever data they want from it. Full page loads use much more data than API requests and will cost most bandwidth fees to twitter.
APIs are access points to twitter that twitter has given you access to. You can get whatever twitter decides to reveal to you. Public APIs are available for anyone while private ones are limited.
Data scraping (or screen scraping) is a computer accessing a web page like a human does. It loads it in and then reads the data and then does this over and over again.
APIs are optimized for low resource use (usually) while scraping uses all the resources a human accessing a web page does and the scraper is doing it as fast as possible, possibly thousands of times a second. If you've gotten a CAPTCHA just to open a webpage that CAPTCHA is probably there to prevent data scraping.
HTTP APIs can be queried, eg you can ask for tweets from a specific user (probably) and get just formatted text with the contents of their tweets, and maybe some key stats about the tweet if you want.
Scraping works like a normal web browser, so any images or other stuff like tweets from random other people which you'd see in your browser as a normal user gets sent to a theoretical bot. It basically is forced to be as resource intensive as a normal user, or it would be identifiable and they can stop what they can identify. I'd imagine people will probably just scrape by emulating the mobile app though, that's usually easier when a site/service has it.
If he removes the API, bots are just going to scrape instead which will use more bandwidth and cost more money.
can you explain like i'm 5?
Tweets are delicious candy. When you eat candies it comes with packaging and a wrapper, like the twitter website interface. API allows software to access the candy without the wrapper or packaging. If Elon removes direct candy access for the bots and other software, the bots will instead take packaged candy. When the bot removes the wrapper from the candy, we call this scraping. The candy packaging is useless to the bot because it just wants the candy. The extra candy packaging is going to cost twitter more money.
API is a way for software to access website data in a block of data. When a human visits a website, there is all sorts of html, css, javascript that gets interpreted by the web browser and makes the website data visually readable for humans. A computer program just wants a block of data, ex: the twitter handle, the tweet text, the tweet time stamp, etc. If a bot can't access an API, it will resort to web scraping, that is loading the full page and extracting whatever data they want from it. Full page loads use much more data than API requests and will cost most bandwidth fees to twitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
@dead that was a hella good analogy for tech simpletons like me
APIs are access points to twitter that twitter has given you access to. You can get whatever twitter decides to reveal to you. Public APIs are available for anyone while private ones are limited.
Data scraping (or screen scraping) is a computer accessing a web page like a human does. It loads it in and then reads the data and then does this over and over again.
APIs are optimized for low resource use (usually) while scraping uses all the resources a human accessing a web page does and the scraper is doing it as fast as possible, possibly thousands of times a second. If you've gotten a CAPTCHA just to open a webpage that CAPTCHA is probably there to prevent data scraping.
API lets you ask for a specific part of the website, scraping means you load the entire thing.
HTTP APIs can be queried, eg you can ask for tweets from a specific user (probably) and get just formatted text with the contents of their tweets, and maybe some key stats about the tweet if you want.
Scraping works like a normal web browser, so any images or other stuff like tweets from random other people which you'd see in your browser as a normal user gets sent to a theoretical bot. It basically is forced to be as resource intensive as a normal user, or it would be identifiable and they can stop what they can identify. I'd imagine people will probably just scrape by emulating the mobile app though, that's usually easier when a site/service has it.
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