[...] the dumbest possible person to buy Twitter and probably explains why he has failed to get rid of spam/bot replies and made it so much worse since taking over and instead of fixing things is spending his time (and money) being unbelievably petty with banning or removing verified status from faggot livestreamers.
I mean he's a genuine troglodyte when it comes to tech. Bots on the internet aren't a new thing. We've been fighting bots since the very inception of mass internet, even in the 90s there were 'bots'. Adbots, linker bots, spam basically originated with bots. It is a game of cat and mouse. The fact that this nigger even thought that he could get rid of bots and then the tech illiterate MAGAts bought it is even worse.
What did he do to get rid of bots? Jacked up the API prices. Wow, no one ever thought of that, I guess.
Now, here's why that's a bad idea :
When you have an API, it allows the users to only request the relevant information. If you want the follow count of an account, you can ask Twitter to give you that and it will return that data. In this transaction, only the relevant information is provided, decreasing the CPU and memory load on the backend, the servers.
Having an API for any popular website is thus a good idea to reduce costs.
How does having an API reduce costs?
If instead, you don't have an API for a popular site, any popular site, it doesn't matter. What third party developers will have to do is load every page entirely, scrape that data and reformat it to deliver in desired form to their users. What this results in is for a very small amount of relevant information, the site (in this case Twitter) will have to send out the entire page's data.
What makes this problem worse is trying to fight it with captchas or partial loading. You see, what Twitter's jeets are trying to do is denying service after it detects scraping. Guess what the scrapers do? They just have a bunch of IPs and user agents to swap with to fool Twitter into thinking its another new user visiting the page from somewhere else or on some other device which then compounds the load further and thus, the costs.
There's many ways to go about losing less or maybe even turning a profit with APIs, too.
