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Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

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Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#171

Post by yamtaddle »

Swizec wrote: post #120
barnabee wrote: post #47

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many…

> But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter As the "author" of some 80,000+ tweets (can't find number anymore), their mobile app was unusable. I've been on TweetBot for close to 10 years I think. TweetBot2 was my first mobile twitter client iirc. No more mobile twitter for me. Shame. But probably better this way. It really hasn't felt like a…

Between this and the blue-check thing it's like he doesn't get that the primary draw of the site is high-volume posters and/or famous people who(se PR teams) post. Like, ease of finding and reading (plus interacting with—responding, rewteeting, et c) posts by famous (or at least Internet-famous) power users is the main reason Twitter's a bigger draw than, say, Mastodon. If people just wanted to read their non-famous pals' posts, they could do that on any chat app.

It'd be like YouTube charging top creators for access (sure, the blue checks aren't "access", but they're a huge discovery-aid and solve problems for Twitter) then also cutting off any 3rd-party tools those creators use to make their jobs easier, which would obviously be a giant WTF. Why on earth would you make things more difficult for the very people providing the content that makes your site worth anything to begin with!

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#172

Post by riley_dog »

barnabee wrote: post #47

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many…

> I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at all, but I am going to have to try it.

What exactly leads you to believe it's not a good replacement, especially considering you haven't tried it?

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#173

Post by jmann99999 »

hiidrew wrote: post #77
jmann99999 wrote: post #31

I just don't see the replacement for Twitter as Mastodon -- which it seems the Tweetbot people are targeting. Twitter will likely file for bankruptcy later this year due to the debt burden. However, the replacement for Twitter won't be a Twitter "clone." Things will move on. I'm not smart enough to know what people will move on to... But they will move on.

I wonder what happens after that? 40B acquisition to bankruptcy sounds brutal. I'm sure there's some nuanced financial way they can recover and continue but wow.

At over a billion a year in interest payments to just service the debt is going to be hard. Twitter, before Elon, was already losing a couple hundred million a year. It has to be worse now.

I do agree that Morgan Stanley and the other financiers are going to be the kids without a chair when the music stops.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#174

Post by r00fus »

justinclift wrote: post #40
redox99 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a really good idea

If they did some kind of revenue share (from Twitter Blue) with the third party clients their users are using, it might even provide useful funding for some of the otherwise non-commercial ones.

Twitter could think of this as a kind of lead-generation / user retention system.

Of course, Blue is essentially a bandaid of $8/mo/user over the gaping chest would that is the cost of the leveraged buyout ($13B) so I doubt Musk would consider tearing of pieces of that bandaid for goodwill or lead gen.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#175

Post by peanuty1 »

jjulius wrote: post #79
throwaway092345 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

"It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." - Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#176

Post by yakkityyak »

jackdeansmith wrote: post #161

Honestly a very confusing move for Twitter, third party client users are probably the easiest to monetize users that Twitter has. They have already demonstrated that they get enough value out of the service to go out of their way to use a different client, potentially one that they pay for. Make them pay some monthly fee and everyone is happy?

Has any company tried revenue sharing with 3rd party clients?

Imagine a free tier of tweetbot got a slice of ads clicked in it. Premium ad free modes could be shared too.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#177

Post by smoldesu »

wpietri wrote: post #148
smoldesu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that people have held out way too long. My more nihilistic interpretation is that taking any of Twitter's functionality for granted was a mistake. It's a publicly traded business, and if you didn't want big money to ruin the experience, you shouldn't have put faith in money in the first place. YouTube is on a similar precipice. People think it's irreplaceable because YouTube displaces every competitor. In tru…

Honestly, it was partly my faith in money that made me comfortable with Twitter as a public company. They (gradually and often reluctantly) learned that if they wanted to be a viable business, they had to provide a reasonably safe place for a lot of people. For purely pecuniary reasons, they also thought they needed to be a good partner to people building things related to Twitter. All that has gone by the wayside, o…

They didn't learn much of anything, though. Twitter lost money when they played nice, and they lose less money when they play mean and lean. Either way Twitter was bloated and overvalued, but anything bought with wealth leveraged against Tesla shares can't be worth much in the first place.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#178

Post by ssnistfajen »

sosodev wrote: post #141
gfodor wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is right. A public API radically slows down product iteration since each feature needs to be considered in terms of its blast radius to third party clients. It probably burned the bridge for good this time, but killing the API to speed up product velocity isn’t an insane move if you value that more than the existing 3rd party ecosystem.

That's not really true. Many websites version their API and/or release new features without providing support (at least initially) via the API. That's the route Reddit has taken. There are several features that only work through the official app or website. It can be frustrating as a user of a third party client but it's a much better alternative to cutting everybody off.

Twitter sets a dangerous precedent on API policy although this hasn't been their first time doing so (https://nordicapis.com/twitter-10-year-struggle-with-develop...)

With feature iteration at Reddit accelerating since 2019, they may opt to do the same eventually should a desperate squeeze of user metrics/ad revenue becomes necessary down the road. Public APIs helped Reddit rapidly grow its userbase on a lean crew. It'd be a shame to see that goodwill being burned in the never-ending chase for quarterly performance results.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#179

Post by kemayo »

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…

Oh, I didn't mean letting the clients support them, I meant making the clients support them and feature them how Twitter wanted them to.

E.g. if they wanted to change the notifications defaults everywhere to showing the "verified" notifications first, as a way to promote sales of Twitter Blue... good luck getting the third party clients to go along with that without some serious coercive micromanagement.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#180

Post by peanuty1 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #72
bradgessler wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of unforced errors is insane. Remember when pg was banned from Twitter for mentioning that he had a link to Mastodon on his website? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul...

I followed some of that and it was especially funny that he had just been defending Musk and posting some "well he's a super-genius—you know, like all us rich SV types—so we should give him the benefit of the doubt" sort of stuff, right before that happened. The whole thing was truly beautiful. Overall, Musk's acquisition has provided some excellent entertainment.

"It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." - Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
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