Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 488 posts

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

#361

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

hgsgm wrote: post #304
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. The question then is how much the lenders are willing to settle for or whether it'll need to go through bankruptcy first.

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

#362

Post by andrekandre »

mrguyorama wrote: post #314
908B64B197 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> End of an era; Twitter is dead. Whatever is left, it's not Twitter. Am-I the only one surprised the site still hasn't had a major (multi-hour) outage at this point? Considering the waves of resignations that hit the automated content filtering and bot mitigation teams, it's no wonder they are getting desperate.

Twitter still has like 1000 heavily dedicated (either because they love elon or getting fired means getting deported) which means they can fight a lot of fires and keep things going.

  > getting fired means getting deported
i wonder what percent of workers left are in that position?

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

#363

Post by anigbrowl »

saryant wrote: post #357
jghn wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Delivering old tweets is actually more expensive than real-time because nothing is cached. Streaming access is pretty much all served out of memory. I used to lead the search and historical API team at Twitter.

Right, the 30 day search API is still 100 request/mo for the sandbox and 500/mo for the bottom paid tier (which I think is $150/mo). Would love to hear more from you about this experience, whether in blog form or commentary. I use the filtered stream API a lot and the search API a bit.

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

#364

Post by actionablefiber »

matwood wrote: post #246
lizzardbraind wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I like the theory that he's planning to discharge all of the debts he's run up in one fell swoop with a bankruptcy filing. It will be sad, but not unexpected if the courts let him get away with it. I wish I could buy a house with a mortgage in the house's name, make the house declare bankruptcy, and then keep ownership of it. Replace "house" with "Twitter", and that's the gambit. Although, the amount of d…

> I like the theory that he's planning to discharge all of the debts he's run up in one fell swoop with a bankruptcy filing. And that theory is incorrect. If Twitter goes into bankruptcy, the shareholders are wiped out. Ownership goes to the banks. He could be trying to drive the cost of the debt down (supposedly already down 40% on the open market), so he can buy it. But, the banks aren't stupid. He will absolutely…

If the banks seize Twitter, do they really have to own and operate it? They only need to be able to flip it for at least the value of the $13B liability it collateralized, plus whatever associated legal and tax costs. Twitter is probably not worth $44B anymore but supposing they can seize it before its users and assets and brand have all gone to zero, I imagine that there is someone somewhere who is willing to gamble $13B for the opportunity to own Twitter, pick up the pieces and try to restore their credibility and value prop, and try to take it public with at least a $20B valuation so they can cash out at a nice profit.

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

#366

Post by ehsankia »

anigbrowl wrote: post #355
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your problem could be solved by providing read-only API for free - you don't need to write access to do academic research (unless you want to influence the discourse).

Agreed, but I don't think scam and spam bots are using the API anyway - rather puppeteering tools built on Selenium or any of many scraping libraries and toolchains.

Even if they were, who's more likely to pay for an API, the scammer making shit ton of money from tricking twitter users, or the hobby dev making a cool integration with Twitter that brings people to Twitter?

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

#367

Post by Khoth »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #301
Yabood wrote: 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.

> idk what it will cost

That's the problem GP means. It's less than a week until it happens, and nobody knows how much it's going to cost, how you convert your free account to a paying account, whether auth is also going to be paid, etc etc

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

#368

Post by criddell »

I wonder how many people have decided that rather than move to Mastodon, Post, Cohost, or any of the other social networks, they don’t really need a Twitter-like service in their lives. How many people are fed up with Twitter and deciding to just drop it rather than move?

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

#369

Post by Consultant32452 »

kibwen wrote: post #266
pessimizer wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website is awful. It's horrific. It was the worst site I visited regularly until I started using Nitter instances. I'd rather not know what is going on than go to it. I wish they'd wind the UI back 10 years, to back when it was pleasant to browse.

I look forward to someone teaching Elon Musk what version control is, resulting in him wholesale rolling back Twitter's entire stack to 2008. At last, Twitter is written in Ruby again!

Do you remember, I think it was 2020, when there was a big "hack" and tons of blue check accounts started posting fraud links?

Two important take-aways from that:

1) The attackers just pulled the old "Hey, I'm from IT service desk and need your password."

2) Apparently every engineer had god mode in production

I can't imagine what scary monsters are in that codebase.

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

#370

Post by freejazz »

ozim wrote: post #257
masklinn wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's trying to make it profitable. Might have been smart to not make it unprofitable in the first place.

I think Twitter was never profitable to start with.

If Twitter pulled the layoffs Musk did, without having taken on his debt, it would have posted profits that quarter.
Post reply on HN