Musk really is putting sterling work into his application to become the brand ambassador of the Dunning Kruger effect.
Twitter API Page
81–90 of 104 posts
Re: Twitter API Page
#82I don't know whether killing Tweetbot was intentional or deliberate. However I was a pretty heavy user of Twitter - scrolling through my timeline on the tram, in cafes, on the toilet or whenever I had a spare moment. I assumed that the API outage was temporary so I didn't download the "official" app, and figured I'd just wait a day or so for Tweetbot to be fixed. It's now been ~3 days, I don't miss not having Twitter…
Twitter was making no money off you so I doubt Elon Musk will care.
Not sure why you've been downvoted, you've called out the most likely concern.
Despite the APIs bringing in some money, I doubt they've covered the ad revenue loss, especially in recent years as more and more advertisers started using Twitter at scale, and as more of the world joined Twitter.
The audience using these APIs via Tweetbot, Twitterific, etc, has become an ever smaller percentage of Twitter's userbase. It's probably not even worth the effort to figure out how to better monetize the APIs, given the small audience.
And not everyone is so desperate to avoid the algo timeline that they're willing to pay a 3rd party app.
Personally, I was a Tweetbot user from around 2013 to 2018, but I kept switching over to the first party app more and more, as Twitter started to add more features that weren't available to Tweetbot. And then I discovered I was spending all my time in the first party app anyway because of the algo timeline, so I quit using Tweetbot.
Re: Twitter API Page
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter was making no money off you so I doubt Elon Musk will care.
That thinking only works for so long. If you drive away enough users, eventually your network effect starts to weaken making it easier for even more users to leave. I also think it's an odd decision now that they're exposing view count to users. Driving away users on third party clients will cause that number to drop.
> If you drive away enough users
We don't have any hard numbers but I'm curious why you think network effects would apply here.
Twitter's audience is not the same as it was 10 years ago, when the tech/tech-adjacent Twitter audience made a huge fuss over API access, and they were probably generating close to a majority of the content at that time.
I think it's likely this group is too small to matter now.
Re: Twitter API Page
#84I would like to thank Elon for helping me to kick of my doom scrolling Twitter addiction. My usage has been dropping perceptibly over the last 3 months as my feed has gotten stale however now that my Twitter client hasn't had any new tweets in the last 3 days I may finally be able to kick the habit for good.
if your self-control really that bad?
Re: Twitter API Page
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
PagerDuty engineer here. There is much to discuss with respect to "Websites of all sizes are designed to largely self operate with no manual intervention for decent periods of time." The phrase "decent periods of time" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You also said "Otherwise all large websites would be down during holidays, etc." What makes you think large websites don't go down in some fashion or another durin…
The problem happens over time when both properties begin to fail after changes are made to the system by people unfamiliar with the system, and make worse when sudden failures are addressed by the same people, which creates a feedback loop of failures. Eventually the system becomes unusable. Generally companies don't lay off huge swatches of people randomly, so this kind of bit rot is fairly rare. My last employer on…
> My last employer one day had virtually every system fail in the world at the same time due to a hidden dependency on some routing in a single data center; it took 8 hours to restart all the systems since that had not happened before. It was a fun slack to follow.
I think every company eventually has at least once of these. It is usually a wake up call to the company that what used to work when they had N number of users no longer scales with 10x the traffic…
(It also usually has a lot of “I told you so” moments too)
Re: Twitter API Page
#86It reminds me of: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes." I understand that Twitter no longer employs a comms team, so no comms on that particular issue. But... has the revolution come?
It's is a ruse from the communication dept. They are inciting the revolution all that time.
Re: Twitter API Page
#87I would like to thank Elon for helping me to kick of my doom scrolling Twitter addiction. My usage has been dropping perceptibly over the last 3 months as my feed has gotten stale however now that my Twitter client hasn't had any new tweets in the last 3 days I may finally be able to kick the habit for good.
if your self-control really that bad?
Yes.
Re: Twitter API Page
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The "For You" & "Following" tabs are exactly what I have wanted for ages. Just so we’re all on the same page, these options always existed behind the sparkle menu. The sparkle menu has been removed in favor of tabs but the content has always been there. FYP was the default unless you hit sparkle -> latest tweets.
No this isn’t the same thing, I am convinced I largely used to only see things from followers and certainly never and big breasted random women. And Chelsea, Man United and Sp*rs fans - no thanks! The sparkle used to be about chronological feed ordering vs hate/AI based tweet ordering.
Here’s proof I was correct, downvoters: https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/how-to-view-tweet...
Re: Twitter API Page
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter was making no money off you so I doubt Elon Musk will care.
I thought about this, so I wasn't seeing the sponsored tweets ... but I don't see why they couldn't have just modified the feed they provided to Tweetbot, Twitterific et al to include these ads. I agree that Elon doesn't care, but he probably should care that heavy users like me can be so quickly and easily lost. And in addition to being more bad PR, 3rd party developers will interpret this as a clear signal not to i…
His goal is to reduce costs, not increase or maintain the user base.
Re: Twitter API Page
#90Weren't third party Twitter clients already banned several years ago?
Yes, around 2012. A few years later, its CEO apologized and restored it. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-apolo...
So it’s not something completely controversial that Twitter management broke third party platforms, those that might cut into their advertising and data collection machinery.
Incidentally, this is the Tragedy of the Commons that keeps breaking messaging interoperability and stillbirthed the whole pindaric ode that was UDDI SOA, a Corporate oriented declination of TBL’s Semantic Web