Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API • Hacker News Board

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#51

Post by smoldesu » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 2:09 PM UTC

parker_mountain wrote: post #45

Felkomo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is no need for Twitter to allow you to do that for free just because. From a pure business perspective it's either Twitter dies or Elon pays the bills.

From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.

If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world?

Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their struggle is just part of the modern tech stack. I hate it as much as you do, but calling it "insane" is a hysterical double-standard that crops up just too often on HN.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#52

Post by boudin » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

mrzool wrote: post #50

kbrkbr wrote: post #43

Just migrated my infosec early warning bot (search for #zeroday etc. plus a spam filter) to Mastodon. Goodbye and good riddance Twitter! Thinking also of all these data science courses that need to be updated now, I did two on edX and both had a Twitter project afair. Maybe they just do the same.

> my infosec early warning bot What's the handle? Sounds interesting :)

Would be interested as well!

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#53

Post by iamevn » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

jacooper wrote: post #26

Will this affect SSO with twitter? It should since SSO apps are API V1.1/v2 apps right?

There have been no carveouts announced for SSO. I am migrating as many of my accounts on other websites as I can off of Twitter SSO because it seems likely to me that they'll stop working and I'd lose access to those accounts if I am not proactive.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#54

Post by rchaud » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #51

parker_mountain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.

If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world? Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their…

Apple can nickel and dime developers because a good app on their ecosystem is profitable.

Nobody is making enough profit via the Twitter API to make it worth staying on. Twitter is a distant #3 social network that itself has never really made money.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#55

Post by Finnucane » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 2:30 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #51

parker_mountain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. A more sane way to do this would have been with a public tweet explaining why they were doing it (ad revenue), a 3 month lead time, and an API for helping apps get users to "upgrade" their account.

If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world? Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their…

But this comes after pulling the plug on the third-party apps without a word of warning or even acknowledging that they had done it. So those devs turned around and said, well, guess we'll go work on Mastodon apps now. Presumably there was a noticeable drop in engagement as those users cut back their time on twitter. So now twitter is like you can come back if you pay, but we can't tell you what that will cost.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#56

Post by groffee » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 2:32 PM UTC

dan_pixelflow wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Why? You're freeloading. Pay for the service you use. It's as simple as that.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#57

Post by Yabood » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 3:05 PM UTC

We have a business that relies on the Twitter API. I don’t mind paying to access the API, but the way they’re handling this makes me want to deprecate support for Twitter entirely. I am only learning about this change from this thread. Even worse, we only have 7 days to react.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#58

Post by hmry » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 3:29 PM UTC

That sucks. I have some personal Twitter automation scripts that only make 20 requests per week or so. No way I could justify paying for API access for something small like that.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#59

Post by barbazoo » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

Something that was free is no longer free. More news at 11.

Re: Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

#60

Post by rsynnott » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

Okay, so this one is nearly making me buy into those conspiracy theories that Musk is deliberately breaking Twitter because 4d chess (only nearly; this is incompetence rather than anything else).

There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should:

- A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting said bots. Fun bots are actually probably the biggest thing I miss after having moved to Mastodon (fortunately, the all-important Samuel Pepys bot has come across).

- Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates. If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation. Most of Twitter's important features (retweets, quote tweets, hashtags, etc etc) ultimately originated in third party clients, not from Twitter itself.

- A free API makes it less frictionful for companies to try twitter out for things. If you want to maybe try showing your website status automatically or auto-track customer tweets at you in your support system or whatever, it's easier if you just hook up the app vs if you have to fill out a purchase order for the API access first.

However, whatever about whether a free API is a good idea, it is clearly a _terrible_ idea to kill it on a week's notice. Even for users who _want_ to pay, with only a week's notice many will never hear about it, if their organisation is remotely bureaucratic it's probably not long enough to get the purchase order approved, etc. There's just no possible reasoning to do it this quickly.