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

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

#211

Post by pavlov »

philliphaydon wrote: post #167
pavlov wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019.

Barely profitable in 2 years but bleeding money for the rest of its existence including the last 3 years…

Twitter's 2021 wasn't really that bad. They increased revenue about 37% year-over-year to $5 billion, at a loss of $220M.

In the pumped-up investment environment of 2021, that kind of relatively small loss was an acceptable trade-off for such high growth.

The revenue collapse of 2022 is clearly almost entirely due to the new ownership who did their best to destroy advertiser trust, first by spending six months disparaging the company, then by indiscriminately firing moderation and ad sales teams.

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

#212

Post by gonzo41 »

nickjj wrote: post #181

Wow this is disruptive given it's less than 1 week's notice. I've been using a Jekyll plugin for like 4 years to embed tweets on my site. Nothing crazy, just using: https://github.com/rob-murray/jekyll-twitter-plugin Since it uses the API I guess that's going to go away. Sounds like I'll never link another tweet on my site again.

screenshots?

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

#213

Post by gonzo41 »

cdme wrote: post #81

I'm still surprised that anyone expected the acquisition of Twitter by a billionaire with a long demonstrated lack of empathy, social grace or self awareness would go at all well. He started a fire in a movie theater and now wants to lock the doors and raise the price on whatever water and extinguishers are on hand.

Whilst I like the fire analogy a lot. it doesn't capture how much he's on the hook vs what we loose if twitter dies. I will loose...... can't really tell. Elon will have irreparable reputational damage done to him forever.

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

#214

Post by notahacker »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #91
dragonwriter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is. SpaceX is... an accessible EV? What?

Most accessible satellite launcher...

Ah yes, because "what's the relative cost and complexity to procure a launch for my satellite?" is famously a real example of an accessibility problem faced by people with disabilities...

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

#215

Post by robga »

anigbrowl wrote: post #3

- 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)…

> basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project

Even less for some. It seems further apps are being shut down in the run up because they have "violated Twitter Rules and policies”.

Such as movetodon [0] - locked out today - a service which helps you connect to the fediverse accounts of twitter users you follow. And reports that debirdify is closed out too.

[0] https://mastodon.social/@Tibor/109800904950500383

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

#216

Post by brookst »

voytec wrote: post #209
snake_doc wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

API reads/writes don’t generate ad impressions. It’s really that simple. All the bot nonsense is rhetoric.

API calls just grabbing data may not generate impressions but people follow bots that utilize this API and (some) bot-generated content generates interactions: likes, shares, comments. Twitter may be heading closer towards becoming a ghost town.

Yep. Tearing down the ecosystem to support the product.

Whether it’s Elon or someone else, this shows a total lack of understanding of what made Twitter ubiquitous.

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

#217

Post by lizzardbraind »

xena wrote: post #201
Jach wrote: post #194

One of my first programming jobs involved helping the boss make a twitter sharecropping service. I remember at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I was doing something else by then but it was a good warning to not let myself ever depend too much on sharecropping; over the years I've seen a lot of people learn that lesson the hard way. I've used…

What is a digital sharecropping service? I've never heard of that before.

It means that you're farming on someone else's land. Since you don't own the source of your income, the landowner could decide to evict you at any time, taking away your revenue.

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

#219

Post by notahacker »

dragonwriter wrote: post #78
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.

> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem. Musk is trying to monetize every last aspect of current Twitter possible while cutting costs to stave off bankruptcy that his acquisition made imminent long enough to pivot Twitter into a completely different business model centering on being a payment intermediary, apparently to relitigate his firing twice from X.c…

This is true, but I suspect he greatly underestimates how useful the ecosystem is to actually making Twitter relevant enough for a critical mass of people to want to use the first party frontends.

Which is odd, because Elon is someone that definitely will remember AOL, MSN messenger and MySpace being things...

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

#220

Post by Vespasian »

altacc wrote: post #122
college_physics wrote: post #116

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…

Also regulators in on some of Twitters core markets (EU and US) are not to fond of ginormous Techconglomerates at the moment and might have a few words to say about that.

In fact the EU recently passed laws to nip budding "market dominant companies" before they take out all of the competition and bundle lots of unrelated services.

The political climate soured with regards to Big Tech and that's happening across party lines.

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