Max Subscribers Returned (and duplicates) | YouTube API - youtube-api

[Problem 1]
I am using https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/subscriptions/list for a large channel (1 million subscribers) but after 100 successful pages of results (50 subscribers per page), the API always returns 0 subscribers.
Is there a hard limit of 100 pages or 5,000 subscribers that can be returned?
[Problem 2]
Of the 5,000 Subscribers returned, only 3,577 are unique. The API seems to be returning duplicates in some cases which I know is a long standing issue with getting channel subscribers. Hoping to learn if this will be fixed?

I ran into the second problem today and it seems like the duplicates happens because the default order of the API list is SUBSCRIPTION_ORDER_RELEVANCE
Acceptable values are:
alphabetical – Sort alphabetically.
relevance – Sort by relevance.
unread – Sort by order of activity.
So setting order to be alphabetical solves the problem entirely.

Related

List channel messages $top parameter causes unexpected results

Trying to limit the number of results returned by the List channel messages Graph API. However, when setting $top to e.g. 10, then only 3 messages are returned. When setting it to 30, then 19 messages are returned. Does $top count deleted messages that aren't returned or something like that? Is this a bug?
How do I reliably get the last 10 messages? Do I really have to ask for e.g. 30 and then filter out the rest?
When fetching all users in organization in the C# SDK, I ran into something similar. Running .Distinct() on the result set reduced the number of records to the expected amount.
BaseUrl for client appears to be https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0

Is there any limit to the number of rows returned by API?

I am making a bulk call with 30 posts and daily data of all. Is there any limits to the number of rows that will be returned by the API?
I am having problem getting the results.
Can anyone please help.
YouTube doesn't return any rows ... it's not relational data. That may sound like a pedantic thing to point out, but it's crucial for this next point; the API will return 50 videos at a time, along with tokens to get more results based on the same query, up to a total of 500 ... because the data isn't relational, you can't just "select all rows" that match a certain criteria. Rather, it is probabilistically determining relevance to your search parameters, and after about 500 results the algorithms don't have enough certainty to make additional results relevant.
So in your case, where you can change the date as needed (to allow the algorithms to be more specific), you'll want to do a series of calls; perhaps one at a time (since you have to paginate anyway to get more than 50 results, it's probably not that much more expensive in terms of network bandwidth).

Why limited number of next page tokens?

Through a script I can collect a sequence of videos that search list returns. The maxresults variable was set to 50. The total number items are big in number but the number of next page tokens are not enough to retrieve all the desired results. Is there any way to take all the returned items or it is YouTube restricted?
Thank you.
No, retrieving the results of a search is limited in size.
The total results that you are allowed to retrieve seems to have been reduced to 500 (in the past it was limited to 1000). The api does not allow you to retrieve more from a query. To try to get more, try using a number of queries with different parameters, like: publishedAfter, publishedBefore, order, type, videoCategoryId, or vary the query tags and keep track of getting different video id's returned.
See for a reference:
https://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=4282
BTW. "totalResults" is an estimation and its value can change on the next page call.
See: YouTube API v3 totalResults field is returning 1 000 000 when it shoudn't

Accessing an item beyond start_index=1000 in a YouTube user upload feed

I am currently trying to pull data about videos from a YouTube user upload feed. This feed contains all of the videos uploaded by a certain user, and is accessed from the API by a request to:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME/uploads
Where USERNAME is the name of the YouTube user who owns the feed.
However, I have encountered problems when trying to access feeds which are longer than 1000 videos. Since each request to the API can return 50 items, I am iterating through the feed using max_length and start_index as follows:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME/uploads?start-index=1&max-results=50&orderby=published
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME/uploads?start-index=51&max-results=50&orderby=published
And so on, incrementing start_index by 50 on each call. This works perfectly up until:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME/uploads?start-index=1001&max-results=50&orderby=published
At which point I receive a 400 error informing me that 'You cannot request beyond item 1000.' This confused me as I assumed that the query would have only returned 50 videos: 1001-1051 in the order of most recently published. Having looked through the documentation, I discovered this:
Limits on result counts and accessible results
...
For any given query, you will not be able to retrieve more than 1,000
results even if there are more than that. The API will return an error
if you try to retrieve greater than 1,000 results. Thus, the API will
return an error if you set the start-index query parameter to a value
of 1001 or greater. It will also return an error if the sum of the
start-index and max-results parameters is greater than 1,001.
For example, if you set the start-index parameter value to 1000, then
you must set the max-results parameter value to 1, and if you set the
start-index parameter value to 980, then you must set the max-results
parameter value to 21 or less.
I am at a loss about how to access a generic user's 1001st last uploaded video and beyond in a consistent fashion, since they cannot be indexed using only max-results and start-index. Does anyone have any useful suggestions for how to avoid this problem? I hope that I've outlined the difficulty clearly!
Getting all the videos for a given account is supported, but you need to make sure that your request for the uploads feed is going against the backend database and not the search index. Because you're including orderby=published in your request URL, you're going against the search index. Search index feeds are limited to 1000 entries.
Get rid of the orderby=published and you'll get the data you're looking for. The default ordering of the uploads feed is reverse-chronological anyway.
This is a particularly easy mistake to make, and we have a blog post up explaining it in more detail:
http://apiblog.youtube.com/2012/03/keeping-things-fresh.html
The nice thing is that this is something that will no longer be a problem in version 3 of the API.

Collecting follower/friend Ids of large number of users - Twitter4j

I'm working on a research project which analyses closure patterns in social networks.
Part of my requirement is to collect followers and following IDs of thousands of users under scrutiny.
I have a problem with rate limit exceeding 350 requests/hour.
With just 4-5 requests my limit is exceeding - ie, when the number of followers I collected exceeds the 350 mark.
ie, if I have 7 members each having 50 followers, then when I collect the follower details of just 7 members, my rate exceeds.(7*50 = 350).
I found a related question in stackoverflow here - What is the most effective way to get a list of followers using Twitter4j?
The resolution mentioned there was to use lookupUsers(long[] ids) method which will return a list of User objects... But I find no way in the API to find the screen names of friends/followers of a particular "User" object. Am I missing something here.. Is there a way to collect friends/followers of thousands of users effectively?
(Right now, I'm using standard code - Oauth authentication(to achieve 350 request/hour) followed by a call to twitter.getFollowersIDs)
It's fairly straightforward to do this with a limited number of API calls.
It can be done with two API calls.
Let's say you want to get all my followers
https://api.twitter.com/1/followers/ids.json?screen_name=edent
That will return up to 5,000 user IDs.
You do not need 5,000 calls to look them up!
You simply post those IDs to users/lookup
You will then get back the full profile of all the users following me - including screen name.

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