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

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301–310 of 488 posts

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

#301
post #57

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.

Serious question though: If you're a business, is it really a huge deal to part with, idk, maybe $10-$20 a month for the API (idk what it will cost)?

Talking in pure financial terms.

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

#302
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

screenshots?

That is horrible . I quite often click on embedded tweets and then end up spending more time on the site. It's literally a cheap lead in for ad exposure. Musk does not seem to understand how this whole Internet thing works. "If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the ­company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrup…

You believe that there will never be embedded tweets again because twitter is going to charge an unknown amount of money for their API? You have musk derangement syndrome dude

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

#303

- announced at 10pm - basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project - No information to help you make that decision This seems like more management by manchild. I strongly suspect that Musk realized his promises of cutting down bots etc. were failing and that they either couldn't or wouldn't develop abuse detection, so he's decided to solve the problem by making it cost money, with the (perhaps desired)…

> This seems like more management by manchild. "Manchilds" track record in this Game of Life is by and large a testament to how well he understands its rules. And, maybe, how silly they are.

To be fair, having a lot of money is an excellent way to have more money. Having a lot of money and making some lucky gambles in early technology plays is an even better way to have a lot of money. The fact that every company he owns a significant stake in has a 'manage Elon so that everyone else can get things done' team except for twitter and all of them are not doing insane things, except for twitter, seems to be a pretty strong indication that other enterprises he's involved in are not succeeding because of him, but in spite of him.

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

#304
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter wouldn't die if they don't pay bills, someone would buy it for huge discount. It seems like it would be the best way forward, depending on who would buy it. A lot of people don't follow news or Elon drama, the brand still has a lot of value. Especially abroad where news about Elon are much fewer.

It'd have to be a huge discount as they'd be buying the debt along with it. Why would someone want to saddle themselves with an unprofitable debt burden?

BofA/whoever lent $12B or whatever to Twitter/Elon. Ultimately they have to settle for lower payments or get Tesla stock or whatever, and the debt is cleared. Or it defaults. Either way, Twitter the service has no reason to shut down, and doesn't carry that debt further. Once the debt cost is sunk, what matters is future marginal profitability.

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

#305
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing a read-only API still costs Twitter money though. He's trying to make it profitable. Seems obvious that stuff like this would be cut.

Not that obvious, if I was in the same position I wouldn't cut API access, if I was thinking about profits. Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully. My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another, and less links back to Twitter. If I woke up feeling evil (real…

> Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully.

This. I had a brief flirtation with working with people using the Twitter API for research purposes. A very large majority of them didn't care about having the latest tweets coming off the firehose, but instead getting access to all the old data. At least at the time, the latter was much more difficult to do.

Things like using Twitter for real time sentiment analysis does require realtime data, but those applications are more likely to be for-profit, and thus could afford to pay.

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

#306
post #122

At some point I saw speculation that the idea is to turn twitter into some sort of super-app like wechat. If that is true then it makes sense to button down loose "ecosystem" thingies that were setup during a more innocent and hopeful era. This will probably destroy a whole bunch of use-cases and motivations for people and organizations to use twitter, but might retain enough of a core (mostly low-information) user b…

I think that's nothing more than a pipe dream. It seems that Twitter is bordering dysfunctional internally and is hemorrhaging money at the worst possible time (massive debts to support, slowing economy, less accessible loans). I think Twitter's current strategy is desperately trying to make money and stop the losses. Many APIs do have price tiers but it depends upon the business model, if the API is the product, or…

Bordering on dysfunctional internally? Do you have any evidence to support that? Real evidence, so that we aren’t thrashing in a sea of conjecture, speculation and politics. People confidently predicted that twitter would grind to a halt a month or two ago… the rumor gained momentum and everyone was saying it. And it turned out to be nonsense. If people actually required a little evidence before believing things instead of playing make-believe like you then it would save people from looking really stupid and wasting their time with vapid rumors.

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

#308

This will impact the "RSS to Twitter" function form https://ifttt.com right? I have a Twitter bot with a couple thousand followers using Ifttt free plan :/ Looking for an announcement from Ifttt...

I have an Integration of Planet Clojure directly using API (direct posting allows attribution to specific person). So, 8.5k followers will be cut from that news source…

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's too related to cutting down bots. It's about making money from their dataset, which is valid. Why do people think they can hammer an API without paying?

_Their_ dataset? The data comes from the users!

No, the data comes from users' interactions with the platform, and they have to run a massive engineering feat to take all of that and run 24/7. It's expensive and so it's reasonable to charge something
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