It looks like it might be the end of the road for our bot that archives tweets about Kingsborough Community College. Recently, the official @twitterdev account announced the impending end to the free tier of the Twitter API. On top of that, Mr. Musk himself suggested that the new replacement basic paid tier should cost $100/month, which is wildly prohibitive for our library. There’s still a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what these announcements mean for bot makers, but the gist of it is that it is not looking good for our archive.

The archive has run more or less continuously since February 2015, which is quite a good run, in my opinion. I’ve documented some of the technical bits here, here and here. We now have a dauntingly huge collection of tweets, which will hopefully serve as grist for someone’s analyses down the road. I am tempted to have a go at extracting some insights from the data set myself over the coming weeks. For now, while I’m sad that the archive is probably ending imminently, I’m happy that it ran successfully for so long.

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