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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

#61

Post by chatmasta »

iudqnolq wrote: post #36
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.

My For You tab is excellent. But as to the rest I have to disagree. I get the same number of spam DMs, and I don't see better replies to big accounts. They are real people, but they're tiny follower and accounts who aren't relevant but paid for blue.

I agree the For You tab is quite good, and is certainly better than the "recommended" tab was pre-acquisition. I wouldn't normally like being a "reply guy," but the For You tab ensures that even with hardly any followers, I can get targeted engagement when posting a reply on an extremely niche subject like package.json exports or iptables. And in turn, the algorithm responds by showing me more of that content in the future. That's the sort of positive feedback loop I appreciate, and one that will encourage more people like me (However, it also seems to interpret "hate viewing" as "high interest" in terms of engagement. Sometimes I'll look at an account just one time, often by searching for it, in order to see some Tweet that's in the news or generating controversy. And then a few days later I'll start seeing Tweets from similar accounts in the "for you" tab, which I definitely don't want to see.

On other websites with recommendation algorithms, like YouTube, I can avoid this effect by viewing ragebait content in an incognito window, effectively curating my algorithm by opting out of it for content I don't want affecting future recommendations. But I can't do that with Twitter, because the login wall requires authentication to view more than the top three replies to a tweet. I wish there were some way to give the algorithm more intentional feedback on its recommendations.

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

#62

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

chimeracoder wrote: post #60
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're probably just overwhelmed with bots, spammers, and "growth hackers". Growth hackers seem to 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.

> 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?

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

#63

Post by kstrauser »

tmpz22 wrote: post #21

Effort spent on lower tiers takes away from higher tiers that make actual amounts of money for twitter. They don't want the $10/mo student because realistically that student is only going to be a drain on Twitter. They want the $100/mo "amateur" who has an actual shot at growing to a $1000/mo or beyond tier. If they don't blow up they want that user to stop paying and being a net-drain on Twitter's constrained and ex…

Except without those free accounts, the others have no value. Who's going to spend $5000/month so they can talk to only other people who pay $5000/month?

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

#64

Post by SeanAnderson »

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.

I agree with what you're saying at a high level - there's no such thing as free lunch forever, but I disagree sharply in terms of cost/scale necessary for profitability.

$100/mo gets a hobbyist:

- Low-rate limit access to suite of v2 endpoints

- 3,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the user level

- 50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level

- 10,000/month Tweets read-limit rate cap

Elon talks about the average size of a tweet as 100 bytes (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065?lang...) so we're talking about writing 5.3MB of data and reading 1MB of data per month.

There's no world where that costs $100, $10, or even $1. My GoogleFi plan costs me $10/1GB.

It's wildly apparent that Twitter is overstating the value of the service they provide to the detriment to their users. They aren't trying to offer break-even prices for hobbyists.

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

#65

Post by olalonde »

willio58 wrote: post #6

The shear amount of floundering that twitter has done since Elon bought it is hilarious as a non-user. I do feel bad for the people who just like using twitter though, like every other week the checkmark means something different. I hear the trending tab is overrun with crypto spam now. Elon really knows how to shake up a company! And by shake up I mean destroy one step at a time.

He cut Twitter's expenses significantly while avoiding reliability issues (a feat that debunked several predictions by tech "experts" on HN about potential major outages) and while adding several new useful features. Admittedly, his decision to unban several controversial figures was debatable from a business standpoint, at least in the short term. However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, based on principles rather than profits.

Your impression is probably heavily biased by traditional media, who in general do not like him one bit.

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

#66

Post by tracker1 »

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?

TBH, if it were me, I'd probably be using something like playwrite/puppeteer against a real instance of Chrome browser. I mean, you won't get the scale/throughput of the Enterprise API, but probably good enough with browser profiles to be able to mostly fool Twitter and do what you need/want.

That said, the free tier is probably good enough if you're relaying posts/information for most legit users, and the $100/month tier probably isn't good enough for businesses centered around deep Twitter API usage. Probably a net positive for society overall.

Aside: I'd rather pay $5-10/month for an ad free experience (there's so many of them now) than the blue checkmark and related features.

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

#67

Post by likeafox »

olalonde wrote: post #65
willio58 wrote: post #6

The shear amount of floundering that twitter has done since Elon bought it is hilarious as a non-user. I do feel bad for the people who just like using twitter though, like every other week the checkmark means something different. I hear the trending tab is overrun with crypto spam now. Elon really knows how to shake up a company! And by shake up I mean destroy one step at a time.

He cut Twitter's expenses significantly while avoiding reliability issues (a feat that debunked several predictions by tech "experts" on HN about potential major outages) and while adding several new useful features. Admittedly, his decision to unban several controversial figures was debatable from a business standpoint, at least in the short term. However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, based on…

>However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, underscoring his commitment to uphold freedom of speech over profits.

Why did the same commitment to speech over profit not apply to his decision making when he filtered Substack, or Mastadon URLs?

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

#68

Post by tracker1 »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #64
ThorsBane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with what you're saying at a high level - there's no such thing as free lunch forever, but I disagree sharply in terms of cost/scale necessary for profitability. $100/mo gets a hobbyist: - Low-rate limit access to suite of v2 endpoints - 3,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the user level - 50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level - 10,000/month Tweets read-limit rate cap Elon talks about…

There's more to posting/saving a tweet than just the data sent over the wire. There's many indexes, notifications and other analysis that happens. The free tiers of the API usage are what was bringing Twitter to it's knees in terms of overhead, not the actual users.

And bots using a browser with actual interaction patterns that at least resemble a person (not pulling through hundreds of messages in under a half a second or posting in 10ms after the form loads) is much more of a throttle, especially with per-ip rate limiting in place than the raw API access.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #64
ThorsBane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with what you're saying at a high level - there's no such thing as free lunch forever, but I disagree sharply in terms of cost/scale necessary for profitability. $100/mo gets a hobbyist: - Low-rate limit access to suite of v2 endpoints - 3,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the user level - 50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level - 10,000/month Tweets read-limit rate cap Elon talks about…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by tracker1 »

d4mi3n wrote: post #31
ThorsBane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This misses the point that the op is making: $100/minus cost prohibitive for anybody looking to use the API casually or explore deeper integrations for it. You might be able to get a solo developer to pay $5 - $20 USD per month to trial something, but few will be willing to drop $1.2k/year for marginal gains.

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.
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