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Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

developer.twitter.com

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Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#101

Post by olalonde »

mthoms wrote: post #97
olalonde wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Elon's position is to defer to the law regarding speech. So it would make sense that censorship is increasing in some countries while decreasing in others. In the US, Twitter was previously censoring a lot of legal speech and I believe that's what mostly concerned him. Edit: I perhaps used "free speech" a bit ambiguously in the previous comment. I edited it to "principles" to avoid causing mo…

It makes sense if he only cares about certain types of speech. Given he censors more overseas than previous Twitter leadership did (without getting banned) - it's really hard to argue he is motivated by principles rather than politics and money. Furthermore, a person who is strongly principled on freedom of speech would not ban people he disagrees with. Yet, he's done that in spades. I mean come on. Can we just stop…

I can't say I have followed this enough to form a strong opinion, but let's say you are right, what would be an alternative motivation? Can we at least agree that this wasn't a decision driven purely by short-term profits? And can we agree that it was done at some personal cost? For example, his public image taking a big hit. Surely, Elon must have anticipated the impending backlash from both advertisers and mainstream media.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#102

Post by kaba0 »

lazyeye wrote: post #74
JohnMakin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are you/have you ever been worth over $100b-$200b? If not... how can you sit there and cast judgement as if you actually know anything about what's going on behind the scenes/at his wealth level?... This is such a hilarious fallacy it barely deserves a response. Hope you enjoy spending $8/month on twitter. His decisions have been objectively bad.

I wonder if Twitter is already generating more revenue now compared to pre-Elon days when it was a massively over-staffed activist organisation.

Yeah all that profit from companies pulling out

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#103

Post by spaceman_2020 »

ThorsBane wrote: post #17
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.

Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

No one is asking for free unlimited access. There’s a jump off point between $0 and $100.

Twitter goes from 0 to 100 to…5000

That’s not reasonable. That’s just plain hostile.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#104

Post by spaceman_2020 »

tracker1 wrote: post #94
tracker1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think they don't care if they turn off developers. The core of their platform is advertising, and API users don't see the ads. I'm also guessing that API usage dramatically outweighs actual users in the past. And while I'd rather see an ad free paid tier, I get it... they were dramatically over-valued and the expenses needed to be reigned in from where they were. It was unsustainable.

I'm not sure that I understand the downvotes... Unless the suggestion is the twitter management absolutely cares about small/indy developers or that they didn't need to cut expenses.

Because its a decision made by someone who clearly has no idea how modern web traffic works. That pricing model looks fine in a world where scrapers and proxies don’t exist. But in our world, they do exist, and small time devs will happily pay $5 for a handful of proxies and scrape the data they want from Twitter directly. You can’t really block them either, especially if they’re indeed small time devs who are just scraping casually.

These devs using scraping tools are loading up entire profiles and tweets, which consumes far more resources than a simple API call that gives them the precise information they want.

Cheap APIs discourage scraping and are most cost effective if you work out the tiers and rate limits.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#105

Post by mthoms »

olalonde wrote: post #101
mthoms wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense if he only cares about certain types of speech. Given he censors more overseas than previous Twitter leadership did (without getting banned) - it's really hard to argue he is motivated by principles rather than politics and money. Furthermore, a person who is strongly principled on freedom of speech would not ban people he disagrees with. Yet, he's done that in spades. I mean come on. Can we just stop…

I can't say I have followed this enough to form a strong opinion, but let's say you are right, what would be an alternative motivation? Can we at least agree that this wasn't a decision driven purely by short-term profits? And can we agree that it was done at some personal cost? For example, his public image taking a big hit. Surely, Elon must have anticipated the impending backlash from both advertisers and mainstre…

We can certainly agree on that. I think the problem is that he's now motivated by ego above all else. Elon is... different.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#106

Post by spaceman_2020 »

gorkish wrote: post #53
herbst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When scraping with good expensive proxies is effectively cheaper than using the API the company is doing something wrong

Or right, depending on your perspective.

Serving API calls is way cheaper than serving scraper bots that load up the full page.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#107

Post by rsynnott »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #62
chimeracoder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think they're probably just overwhelmed with bots, spammers, and "growth hackers". Growth hackers seem to a always think they can seed their user base by aggressive following and spamming their links on every popular thread. They can still do that, but now they gotta pay 100 a month. I bet 90% of them disappear. Maybe this will come as a surprise to you, but spammers aren't using the official API.

Yes, this does come as a surprise to me. Which API are they using?

I'd assume the private API the phone apps use. Using the public API would rather be announcing "HELLO, I AM A BOT" in 6 foot tall neon letters.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#108

Post by rsynnott »

kentm wrote: post #30
giobox wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think the app and service has gotten much worse in several ways post-Elon, I do see way less crypto spam than before FWIW. The "For You" tab now actually sometimes even surfaces tweets I'm interested in too now. Performance and general stability has absolutely fallen for me though, and the launch of the DeSantis campaign on Twitter was a technical embarrassment/disaster as far as I could tell.

For me, the Twitter Blue boost has really led to a general drop in quality. I find that Blue subscribers typically don't say valuable things and are some of the most uninteresting people on the app, and yet they get boosted right to the top.

This was inevitable, and anyone who had ever used social media could have told him that it was a _terrible_ idea. In general, people who have to pay for attention, almost by definition aren't worth paying attention to.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#109

Post by tracker1 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #104
tracker1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that I understand the downvotes... Unless the suggestion is the twitter management absolutely cares about small/indy developers or that they didn't need to cut expenses.

Because its a decision made by someone who clearly has no idea how modern web traffic works. That pricing model looks fine in a world where scrapers and proxies don’t exist. But in our world, they do exist, and small time devs will happily pay $5 for a handful of proxies and scrape the data they want from Twitter directly. You can’t really block them either, especially if they’re indeed small time devs who are just s…

And my point is that they don't care about the $5/month devs. And the scrapers or intermediaries will just expend their own resources. With less overhead on Twitter's backend.

It's pretty easy to throttle browser requests without anyone noticing and blocking excess requests from a single IP block.

That you think they should care, doesn't mean they actually do.

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