Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023 • Hacker News Board

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#81

Post by 98codes » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

barnabee wrote: post #47

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many…

> I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot.

I had thought since they first started locking down 3rd party apps years ago that if/when they ever had a "Twitter Pro" or whatever, that allowing subscribed users to use a third party app would be part of it. After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter?

I assumed rational thinking on their part, I suppose.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#82

Post by drcongo » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

barnabee wrote: post #47

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many…

There's a truly excellent, open-source Mastodon client called Ice Cubes which hit the App Store yesterday. The very first thing I did was donate the maximum possible IAP.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#83

Post by akovaski » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

barnabee wrote: post #47

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many…

> I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app

Tweetbot apparently cost $6/year, so are you saying you would donate $60/year if they released an open source Mastodon client? Are there other open source apps you donate to?

I'm genuinely curious how people approach payment/donations for open source software, I'm not trying to pull some gotcha on you. I don't donate to any open source projects, but I feel that I probably should.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#84

Post by jjcm » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

A part of me is curious what would happen if all of these 3rd party clients banded together to create their own separate backend - surely it wouldn't be that hard to get a clone of Twitter going. There's likely a strong correlation with people who use 3rd party clients and people who are power users, so you'd have a strong social network from the start.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#85

Post by jchw » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

rideontime wrote: post #58

barnabee wrote: post #47

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many…

Keep in mind that "fewer ads" is (and likely will forever be) "coming soon," because Elon promised it before doing the math.

He also complained pretty bad about the "algorithmic" feed when he was in the process of acquiring Twitter. In the past the Twitter website would periodically switch you to it, with some kind of backoff, presumably hoping deeply that you would not notice. Now, it doesn't do that... there is just no URL that goes to the latest feed, you need to select it every time you load the page.

I'm not really a Twitter user, but I can only assume that he thought "I'm going to do things right" until seeing the balance sheet.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#86

Post by blowski » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

ericmay wrote: post #76

barnabee wrote: post #47

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many…

What's the saying? First they came for the moderation, but I didn't care because they weren't moderating me. Then they fired employees so as to not have to pay severance or whatever but I didn't care because I don't work at Twitter. Then they came for the API and there was noone left to speak for me... Twitter and Elon have already done quite a bit of damage to the company, platform, and reputation. This is just a co…

It’s not like people didn’t speak out for the moderators or employees, just that Musk didn’t listen. If you’re looking for Nazi Germany analogies, perhaps Blitzkrieg is better - quickly destroying its entire userbase.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#87

Post by tptacek » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

If you're not paying attention to Mastodon now, a think to know about Tapbots and Ivory, their new ActivityPub client, is that their TestFlight betas, which they release in batches of a thousand or so at a time, last for just a couple minutes before they're all snapped up; there seems to be pretty huge demand for it.

With a decent client (I've bounced around a couple of them so far), even in a beta state, the experience of writing and interacting with people on "Mastodon" is better than it was on Twitter. I'm bummed out when I have to talk on Twitter now.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#88

Post by drcongo » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

throwaway092345 wrote: post #65

system16 wrote: post #46

Another short-sighted and bizarre move by a bizarre. fragile, little man. The number of users on third-party clients could not have been significant enough to justify this. At very least, the developers could have been given some notice or an ounce of respect about API access being phased out. Not to mention third-party client users are mostly power users who are responsible for a lot of the content on Twitter that t…

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Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#89

Post by wstuartcl » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

cmelbye wrote: post #59

wstuartcl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also do not think Musk understands just who the primary userbase on many of these 3rd party apps were -- many of those pesky advertisers/brands that he seems to be both courting and at war with exclusively use api apps for tracking posting/responding and integrations.

Which 3rd party apps specifically were used by marketers and are now banned?

Having worked with many PR/Marketing/Media brand teams I do not know of one group that utilized twitter client in any of their workflows -- they all used a mix of third party clients for reading and other integrations/clients for posting and managing conversations and ad work. Sure much of the API surface area for latter still works but there was a goodly portion of impacted folks on these clients that were the same people that were on the same teams that impact ad spend and brand usage.

Re: Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

#90

Post by chc4 » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

I've been on twitter since 2009 and have 100k+ tweet. Since they've killed all third-party clients I've basically stopped using twitter, and have no intention of using the (bad) official client. Good job Elon!