Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

tapbots.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 427 posts

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#151

Post by wpietri »

blowski wrote: post #86
ericmay wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the saying? First they came for the moderation, but I didn't care because they weren't moderating me. Then they fired employees so as to not have to pay severance or whatever but I didn't care because I don't work at Twitter. Then they came for the API and there was noone left to speak for me... Twitter and Elon have already done quite a bit of damage to the company, platform, and reputation. This is just a co…

It’s not like people didn’t speak out for the moderators or employees, just that Musk didn’t listen. If you’re looking for Nazi Germany analogies, perhaps Blitzkrieg is better - quickly destroying its entire userbase.

Some spoke out. But many were in the sickos-yes-yes.png camp of being absolutely gleeful. And a much larger number were indifferent or in the wait-and-see camp.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#153

Post by smith7018 »

masklinn wrote: post #133
kemayo wrote: post #48

Speaking as someone who had mostly been using the first party twitter app in recent years and so wouldn't have been impacted by this even if I was still actively using twitter, this seems pretty poorly done by Musk. Shutting down third party clients? It's arguably a valid decision. They presumably want to consolidate the users into directly controlled clients, where they can be advertised to and can have premium subs…

> and can have premium subscription features prominently featured. The former could have been rolled into the API, but the latter would have been basically impossible. Not so, clients have exclusive keys (whose supply has been highly restricted since they were introduced a few years ago, making gaining any sort of grounds with new clients a challenge). Twitter could have made the validity of these certs / keys condit…

> Twitter could have made the validity of these certs / keys conditional on subscription integration.

With what staff?

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#154

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

erk__ wrote: post #114
wstuartcl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also do not think Musk understands just who the primary userbase on many of these 3rd party apps were -- many of those pesky advertisers/brands that he seems to be both courting and at war with exclusively use api apps for tracking posting/responding and integrations.

One of the big ones Buffer [0] do not believe that they will be impacted this may not be an issue [1] [0]: https://buffer.com [1]: https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1616418191718207488

It would appear that Elon understands his paying customer's after all. Cynical interpretation would be that he just made Twitter API access more scarce and therefore valuable.

Still, mine is just a guess.

edit: Come to think of it, didn't FB eventually moved from super open API to.. friend and family model?

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#155

Post by bredren »

rtkwe wrote: post #131
system16 wrote: post #46

Another short-sighted and bizarre move by a bizarre. fragile, little man. The number of users on third-party clients could not have been significant enough to justify this. At very least, the developers could have been given some notice or an ounce of respect about API access being phased out. Not to mention third-party client users are mostly power users who are responsible for a lot of the content on Twitter that t…

Giving people time would have given time for pressure to actually change the outcome on top of actually requiring planning which doesn't seem to be Musk's forte when it comes to Twitter decisions. The bid more and more seems to have been weird tech bro shitposting that somehow ended in him signing a hilariously one sided contract that's come to this.

It also would have given the devs more time to build and migrate users to clients supporting Mastodon.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#156

Post by tinyhouse »

ceejayoz wrote: post #116
tinyhouse wrote: post #95

Can someone please explain what Twitter blocked exactly? Did they block only 3rs party clients or anyone who is trying to read data from their APIs? From what I know about 15% of their revenue (now probably much more give) is coming from their data services.

They specifically forbade third-party clients that duplicate the Twitter.com / first-party Twitter app experience; Tweetbot, Twitterific, etc.

I see. Thanks. That makes more sense than blocking all users.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#157

Post by ubermonkey »

I wondered, once Musk bought it, how long I'd stay. He's transparently awful, and clearly has no idea what he's doing -- except when he's being aggressively, deliberately terrible -- but I kept checking my Tweetbot feed anyway because I followed a lot of interesting people there.

Then one morning not long ago, Tweetbot wouldn't connect, and I knew immediately what had happened. It seems really, really dumb. I mean, years ago Twitter experimented with trying to force everyone onto their own app, but even then pre-Elon I knew that I didn't want Twitter to become like Facebook. I wanted a chronological feed of the things the accounts I follow posted, and that's all. I don't want to see anything else. I don't want the service to give me shit algorithmically.

Tweetbot gave me that. I figured that as long as i could have that, I'd use Twitter. Now that I can't, I'm out.

And it seems very, very likely that the most interesting and engaging accounts on the service -- which is to say, the ones that make people want to participate -- likely feel similarly, since so many of them have been very verbal fans of Tweetbot or some other 3rd party tool for so long. The tl;dr here is that axing 3rd party clients is just the latest in a long line of very, very stupid things this guy is doing.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#158

Post by jjulius »

sosodev wrote: post #130
jjulius wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't criticize if you can't do better," is never a good take.

Do you think so? Sure, it's usually a dismissive remark but criticism is usually equally low effort. I believe our world would be better off if the millions of critics actually tried to do better than the things they criticize. The vast majority of them would fail but would likely learn to be more understanding. The few that succeed would probably make something that is actually better than the competition!

Generally speaking, it's OK to see a fault and not always have an answer for how to fix it, or to not be the one who's capable of fixing it.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#159

Post by graublau »

blowski wrote: post #86
ericmay wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the saying? First they came for the moderation, but I didn't care because they weren't moderating me. Then they fired employees so as to not have to pay severance or whatever but I didn't care because I don't work at Twitter. Then they came for the API and there was noone left to speak for me... Twitter and Elon have already done quite a bit of damage to the company, platform, and reputation. This is just a co…

It’s not like people didn’t speak out for the moderators or employees, just that Musk didn’t listen. If you’re looking for Nazi Germany analogies, perhaps Blitzkrieg is better - quickly destroying its entire userbase.

ITT comparing 3rd party api limits to nazi germany

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#160

Post by brazzledazzle »

wholinator2 wrote: post #74
TuringTest wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I thought as well. They need money badly, and they have an obvious way to get it - monetize the API so that third party clients can continue using Twitter while building a business on top of it. Yet instead of supporting the strong ecosystem they already have and nurturing a symbiotic relationship with it, they burn it all?

What are these 3 star comments I keep seeing? Bots? Is it the same kind of thing as when redditors comment "this" instead of just upvoting? It keeps cropping up with no explanation or context.

What is a 3 star comment?
Post reply on HN