I Stopped Writing TikTok Scrapers. Five Lines of Python Replaced Them.

If your TikTok scraper still uses Playwright + custom selectors, this post will annoy you. Good. Read it anyway. I burned three weekends last quarter on a "minimal" TikTok scraper. Selector-first, headless, the works. Worked beautifully for nine days. Then TikTok shipped a layout change at 2am UTC and my fixtures became fiction. The honest answer most devs avoid: for known platforms with stable APIs around them, you should not be writing the scraper. You should be calling someone's actor. Stop o