It's always been possible to see the most popular interests and the number of people there are via the site statistics text file, although due to some counting bugs you can ignore the interests with a count of 16777215 and 16777214. (The same information is also available via the Web interface, although Dreamwidth's bot policy states that bots shouldn't screen-scrape HTML output.)
Data mining: Yes, this allows a form of data mining, but nothing you couldn't have gotten before if you were willing to spend a bit of time; data on which interests a given user has has always been accessible in a machine-friendly manner, and given data on enough users it would be possible to gain a good representation of which users have a given interest.
Currently, it's not yet possible to see which users have a given interest in a machine-friendly manner, but this information is available via the Web interface (example), though again, the bot policy states that this shouldn't be screen-scraped. The Web interface is limited to the 500 most recently-active users.
The changes described in this post would not give a machine-friendly access to this data, although the Ideas I mention in the post do revolve around making such access possible, though again limited to the 500 most recently-active users.
None of this (including the Ideas) would allow people to specifically enumerate every user and interest on the entire site; you would not be able to get this information using the user ID or interest ID, only by names. It is true that a fairly large database could be obtained, however.
no subject
Data mining: Yes, this allows a form of data mining, but nothing you couldn't have gotten before if you were willing to spend a bit of time; data on which interests a given user has has always been accessible in a machine-friendly manner, and given data on enough users it would be possible to gain a good representation of which users have a given interest.
Currently, it's not yet possible to see which users have a given interest in a machine-friendly manner, but this information is available via the Web interface (example), though again, the bot policy states that this shouldn't be screen-scraped. The Web interface is limited to the 500 most recently-active users.
The changes described in this post would not give a machine-friendly access to this data, although the Ideas I mention in the post do revolve around making such access possible, though again limited to the 500 most recently-active users.
None of this (including the Ideas) would allow people to specifically enumerate every user and interest on the entire site; you would not be able to get this information using the user ID or interest ID, only by names. It is true that a fairly large database could be obtained, however.
What are your views?