What does HackerNews think of twint?

An advanced Twitter scraping & OSINT tool written in Python that doesn't use Twitter's API, allowing you to scrape a user's followers, following, Tweets and more while evading most API limitations.

Language: Python

#124 in Python
#7 in Twitter
Show HN: Twitter API Reverse Engineered | Apr 2023
Related but archived (scraper): https://github.com/twintproject/twint
Show HN: TweeView – A Tree Visualisation of Twitter Conversations | Sep 2021
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"Basically anything but how Twitter currently does it."

This is what I use when I need to look at a Twitter page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28071491

Saved in a script called "twt", usage as follows

   twt username |twt > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm
Although I use a text-only browser not Firefox so its designed for that. Its not perfect but its better than anything else Ive seen short of https://github.com/twintproject/twint and its still faster and smaller than installing Python.

The future of the web could be that users request JSON and then users create a page to their liking, client-side, using their own Javascript (or whatever language they want to use). As it stands, on todays web a "tech" company, often using Javascript, causes the users browser to request the JSON and then more downloaded Javascript, not controlled by the user, creates a user-hostile page for the user to consume the JSON. Its a Rube Goldberg machine designed for tracking and advertising, not users.

Imagine if the user conscisouly requests the JSON and is then in control of designing the page for herself. What were tweets but short strings of text. Hard to believe that now looking at a Twitter page. Thats because the user isnt in control of the design. Remember the "tech" company does not own the data. Its public information. User-generated content wrapped in user-hostile, developer-generated markup.
A CSV file with 80k tweets from the day of the capitol hill riots | Jan 2021
https://github.com/twintproject/twint

This is a much more advanced OSINT tool which can provide you better information if you really want to search for tweets within a specific area, or around a specific timeframe.

Here is an example command which would give you any tweet containing the word trump within a 50Km radius of DC.

twint -g="38.8935755,-77.0846155,50km" -s "Trump"

Advice to new programmers | Jan 2019
A side note: next time you want to scrape Twitter use https://github.com/twintproject/twint which is relatively faster and use some tricks to avoid scraping defense techniques.