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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

#71

Post by dividedbyzero »

ThorsBane wrote: post #7
herbst wrote: post #3

Twitter and their V1 api was one of the reasons I fell in love with programming and automation. Today "For hobbyists or prototypes" you pay $100. A month! It's sad.

For me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! There has to be a cost so that an equilibrium between demand and availability is attained. Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special…

> Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world

It's the end of that hobby project, at least for me.

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

#72

Post by tracker1 »

wpm wrote: post #35
ThorsBane wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! There has to be a cost so that an equilibrium between demand and availability is attained. Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special…

I pay $200 a year ($17 a month) for access to a large, productive portion of VMWare's datacenter stack through VMUG. 6x that for access to a social media API is a terrible deal. At $100/mo, Twitter is basically saying "We don't want your business".

That is more likely the case here. They don't see profit from their side to make lower level access between the free and $100/mo tier as worth it... and would rather see corporate backed developers who are likely to have 5+ figure annual contracts than deal with tens of thousands of $10-20/mo subscribers disproportionally using the system.

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

#73

Post by kibwen »

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…

Twitter has been falling over during even moderate load this year, and completely crapped out last night during Musk's embarrassing soiree for Ron DeSantis. Musk is a bootlicking clown who deserves every bit of mockery he gets.

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

#74

Post by lazyeye »

JohnMakin wrote: post #27
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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.

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

#75

Post by olalonde »

likeafox wrote: post #67
olalonde wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My understanding is that Elon is mainly interested in eliminating ideologically and politically motivated censorship. He has recently given an interview on what he calls the "woke mind virus"[0], in which he talks about his views on free speech. Banning links to a Twitter competitor would not necessarily be inconsistent with this objective.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFEaTk--tZo

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

#76

Post by tracker1 »

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.

I tend to prefer the "Following" tab for the most part... yeah, you may miss some tweets, but at least what I see are more of what/who I care to see.

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

#77

Post by theprincess »

stoptrlling wrote: post #58

[flagged]

I'm curious to know what sorts of things you were thinking about when you wrote this. The tone of it reads as emotional and defensive rather than informative. It would probably contribute more to the discussion if you expressed your own ideas rather than attempting to pre-empt the ideas of others by listing them in bullet point format. Wouldn't you agree? :3

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

#78

Post by tracker1 »

davidbarker wrote: post #41
kentm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My experience is the same. Look at any POTUS or White House tweet (or a tweet from any well-known left-of-centre account) and it's reply after reply full of vitriol and hate, all pushed to the top. It's remarkable, and sad.

To be fair, it's the same for any right-of-center account as well. The vitriolic are engaging with opposition as much as anyone. It definitely plays in both directions.

My own take, is I'd like to see the establishment sellouts pushed out at far greater and faster rates, even though I don't necessarily agree with many positions, I don't like the corporatist sellouts and most politicians reach that point within a single term of federal office. There are grassroots efforts in both D & R camps to do just that.

That doesn't even get into the deep establishment in terms of Military Industrial Complex or Pharma/Food revolving doors in place. It's kind of gross. It's honestly at a point, that even if I'm in favor of more Libertarian solutions, while others want Socialism, most can agree, the establishment needs to go first, then can debate on longer term reforms.

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

#79

Post by abeppu »

ThorsBane wrote: post #7
herbst wrote: post #3

Twitter and their V1 api was one of the reasons I fell in love with programming and automation. Today "For hobbyists or prototypes" you pay $100. A month! It's sad.

For me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! There has to be a cost so that an equilibrium between demand and availability is attained. Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special…

> they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever

They _could_ if it supported people building stuff that increased engagement so they could sell more ads.

I think it's mistaken to think of free-to-access APIs as something the company 'gives' to users at some cost to itself. Done well, it facilitates making the platform a richer place, where people spend more time and attention, and which is therefore more valuable. It's hard to do the attribution to definitely say k% of timeline views (and thus ad impressions) wouldn't have happened without API-dependent stuff, but that doesn't mean it's 0%.

Some categories of examples of stuff that I think formerly contributed to engagement but which would just not get built today:

- write only twitter-bots which give information on e.g. earthquakes, public transit delays, in a way which is genuinely informative, and does not enrich the author(s).

- interactive twitter bots which made twitter itself better to use. The most important in this category may have been Threader, which was ultimately acquired by twitter. But it would have been useless / never written under the new rules. Can you imagine trying to call it, and receiving no reply b/c it had exceeded its limit for the day?

- interactive twitter bots which made twitter a platform from which to do other stuff. E.g. your.flowingdata.com was a self-tracking project where you recorded information by tweeting. Treating twitter as a platform, and orienting itself around tracking routine stuff meant that using this project _required_ you to frequently engage with twitter. This was also a free offering, which wouldn't have existed under the current limits.

An ecosystem in which there are high costs to building means less stuff will be built, and the platform overall is less interesting, less compelling, less worth scrolling through an ad to see. Thinking of these APIs as just a cost center is misguided.

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

#80

Post by mthoms »

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…

>his commitment to uphold freedom of speech over profits

For your consideration, here's some evidence to the contrary. Twitter now agrees to 80% of censorship requests from various governments vs 50% previously.

>Twitter’s acquiescence to autocratic or non-liberal regimes is not an exaggeration by critics of the social network. [...] Since Musk’s takeover, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the six-month period from October 2021 to April 2022), fully acceding to 808 of them and partially acceding to 154. In the year prior to Musk taking control, Twitter agreed to 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report (none have been published since October 2022). Following the change of ownership, that figure has risen to 83%, according to the analysis of the data by the technology information portal Rest of World.

Source: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

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