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Nefarious purposes, mostly. I can crawl without rate limits (well, there are rate limits, but it's much harder to hit them), and I also can spam a lot without getting my account flagged (but it eventually gets flagged, of course).

By spamming I don't mean the usual "click on this link and I'll show you my tits" spam; if you create a useful bot that sends "expected" mentions (for example in response to mentions you receive, and not just spam) it will get banned in a matter of hours. With their "secret" tokens, it won't get banned.




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