- 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) side effect of crippling academic/analytic research.
As an amateur network science researcher, I'm pretty steamed. I enjoy doing my own network analyses using tools like Gephi and have monitored probably a hundred breaking news or trending issues, as well as amassing a great collection of academic papers by smarter folk than me. I don't run any kind of app or service that sits on top of Twitter, but those who do run legitimate services are now being held hostage because of the unchecked abuse. Ant the failure to deal with botspam is lamentable. Twitter has refused for years to implement even the simplest things like hashing tweets and looking for collisions, or considering the count of edges to the hashtag graph, or even looking at tweet frequency. Many of their abuse problems will continue unabated; the sellers in the market for bogus twitter accounts are likely delighted because they now have a great excuse to raise prices, even though most of their 'product' is produced by hand with cheap labor in poor countries.
> 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.
Very true, they don’t have to give access to their API for free. My question is, why don’t devs use Puppeteer to spin up a Chromium instance and access Twitter’s data that way?
Twitter could add anti-bot protection like Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA. I’ve seen that make a site unusable with Puppeteer. By “unusable” I mean that correctly solving the CAPTCHA either just gives you another CAPTCHA, or gives the “click if you are human” thing, and clicking that just goes to a CAPTCHA or another “click if you are human”.
It didn’t even require doing anything to/on the page with Puppeteer. Merely using it to open a browser window and then waiting, and using that browser window by hand during the wait to go visit the site that was using Cloudflare anti-bot protection ran into the problem.
IIRC, puppeteer/webdriver things generally work by injecting JS through extension, and their presence can be detected by looking for those objects/functions from JS.
That’s part of the reason that “it’s to stop the bots” is BS. Academia and other similar uses will pay or just stop. Bots and other malicious uses will find work-arounds and just change where the game of whack-a-bot is being played.
I think anyone can request a download of archive of all their data, and removing that would violate at least GDPR. And then do whatever they want with this archive, including uploading to anywhere else. So while it disrupts the current process, it cannot really take the competitors out.
Many people with large Twitter following who use Twitter as the commenting system for their website (think John Gruber) have complained that Twitter mentions ahve been reduced to nothing. It's a silent failure that no one at Twitter has mentionned or acknowledged.
> Am-I the only one surprised the site still hasn't had a major (multi-hour) outage at this point?
Twitter has had at least one multi-hour global outage since Musk took over. This is in addition to at least one outage in Australia, plus outages of other critical services. The API outage happened before the after-the-fact announcement, login and 2FA outages kept people out of the app, etc.
For what it's worth, I cannot access Twitter right now, and DownDetector suggests I'm not alone, so we might be having another outage starting just now.
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.
I would honestly love to see a poll of Mastodon users just to see if they understand that administrators can read everything in an instance, even direct messages between users.
It's going to take a few scandals for this to sink in, but it's such a recipe for disaster.
On Twitter, you at least know that it's only three letter agencies reading your DMs. On Mastodon, it could be some Reddit moderator type that makes it their life mission to destroy you.
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.
What's with these cell phone people calling everything APPS? Hi. They're WEBSITES. Just because you might use a stupid cell phone app to access the stupid website doesn't mean it's no longer a website.
Use the right words and stop recording video vertically. I hate all of you cell phone people.
Sorry, imho it’s best consumed via the mobile app. Indeed all these “web-apps” should just be taken out of the browser and leave it to hypermedia experience. They can be their own native app just as fine
Are you nuts? Yeah I want 10,000 icons on my desktop rather than just one browser.
Man this generation blows. No wonder you're fine with 10 different game publisher clients, 10 different movie publisher clients, and 500 different "apps" to access websites. Keep recording vertically dude. (GEEZUS)
I created a bunch of lists and basically just follow those, rarely engaging. In a way, I am thankful to Elon for helping me shed my compulsive Twitter usage. He unwittingly performed a public service.
You're sounding very confident, so I'm guessing you have a source for that claim?
Besides, even if 90% of the API usage is for scraping and does not impact the bottomline, it's still a smart business decision to leave the API open if the remaining 10% are for posting content that brings in views and thus ad impressions that generate more money than the API costs to run.
That shouldn't be possible, API request limits for 3rd party keys were greatly reduced in 2018 to less than what is available for 1st party clients. Extracted 1st party keys or Web scraping would be used for that purpose.
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).
This is like PE takeovers that sink companies that were previously treading water. It took on a new, ongoing expense that it couldn't afford. The layoffs, the auction, not paying leases, and this, all seem to have some cost cutting angle to them. I don't think it's necessarily because Musk is cheap or sees lots of fat to cut; I think he's desperate to lose less of his original investment.
> Probably shouldn't have landed it with $1bn/year debt payments then, eh.
It's worth remembering the market setting was very different when he made the offer. It's also worth remembering the offer was refused at the time it was made. It was only after the tech market saw a downturn, turning a good offer into an incredible one, was the offer pursued. Around that time, it also looks like he attempted to renegotiate the offer, but that was also refused.
Poor timing of the offer (only knowable in retrospect!) and shareholder obligations more or less forced this situation into existence. Musk made a good offer with a terrible contract; time, shareholders, the board, the legal system, and the stock market turned that terrible contract into a huge payout for shareholders and a signed a death warrant for Twitter.
Musk made a mistake in the way he made the offer for Twitter--but let's not pretend that the legal system isn't equally responsible for forcing the current situation. Even if the previous leadership were open to negotiating a lower buyout (and thus lower debt burden), they would have just opened themselves up to endless shareholder lawsuits had they done so. Their hands were effectively tied once the rest of the tech stock market started going down.
Not that obvious, if I was in the same position I wouldn't cut API access, if I was thinking about profits. Maybe make it heavier cached ("slower" time before new tweets are available, less infrastructure costs) but wouldn't disable it fully. My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another, and less links back to Twitter.
If I woke up feeling evil (really money seeking) I might add some clause to the terms and conditions that you need to prominently display "Powered by Twitter" if you use the API and aggressively check all websites using Twitter API, one way or another.
But I guess my perspective would be considered more long term while Musks management of Twitter seems to be heavily focused on short term.
>My thinking would be that if there is less API access, there is less people accessing tweets, one way or another,
the real problem from a business standpoint is less people trying stuff out and figuring hey maybe I could actually build a business on this, time to move up to the paid tier.
Also no devs at companies have played with twitter api because devs not going to spend money to play, so never say in meeting actually we can solve this with Twitter's api, we just have pay for a licence and I can write the solution! So maybe business look for other ways to solve problems.
> 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 much more difficult to do.
Things like using Twitter for real time sentiment analysis does require realtime data, but those applications are more likely to be for-profit, and thus could afford to pay.
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.
Oh I’m sure. My point was just that the use cases least likely to be able to afford paying are clustered on historical data. And those clustered on real-time data tend to involve $$ anyways
Twitter can be profitable. It made over billion dollars in both 2018 and 2019 on revenues of $3 billion. 2020 was big loss but can blame the pandemic. 2021 was small loss but would have been profitable except for lawsuit settlement.
Without Musk, Twitter would likely have been profitable in 2022. No extra debt, no fleeing advertisers, no massive cuts. Some layoffs like everyone else is doing would probably have been enough.
Twitter was selling ads to companies slashing their ad budgets, not products to consumers with a lot more screen time and a lot less access to stores or to businesses newly dependent on the internet to coordinate their newly remote workforce.
Doubtful. Ad revenue is wayyyyyy down due to the impersonation/brand safety crisis Elon triggered with his erratic product moves. Letting any jokester with $8 impersonate global brands erased hundreds of millions in revenue per quarter from Twitter's bottom line. The debt situation is just an additional financial mismanagement cherry on top.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, but this was before Elon bought it. Twitter easily could have posted profits that year if they did the firings he had ultimately done. I thought that temporality made it clear we are talking in a hypothetical but I guess I wasn't clear.
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?
Twitter API had traditionally been configurable between read-only, read-write, read-write + DM. Most apps request either of the latter two, but you always could.
There's no write-only API keys, all keys come with read permission. If you didn't encounter discussion of any of "Key", "Secret", "Token", "CK/CS" while configuring that, and are thinking of apt/yum/brew installable terminal packages and IFTTT and likes, that package or the IFTTT backend are the apps and the maintainers will have to do something about it.
My bots are set up through dev. I wasn't saying my bots don't have read/write access. Just saying that my bots _only_ actually write, and I was hoping I could perhaps still use them for that purpose without having to pay.
Yeah, I'm seeing mass announcements of shutting down. I think some are holding out small hope that something will change in the next few days. I just checked and I have six active bots.
Musks promises of cutting down on bots only mattered to him and to the degree he made a big deal about it. He could have declared victory whenever and been done with it. Who would have argued.
I think people would have argued with him. There are people that fawn on him one day and then complain that 'the algorithm has shadowbanned them again' the next, and he spends a surprising amount of time engaging with them. It's like some weird parody of an abusive relationship, with the world's erstwhile richest man and uber-CEO earnestly and repeatedly appeasing influencers like 'Catturd.'
To an extent I think this is political theater, as opposed to ineptitude, petulance, or poor financial decision-making. Twitter is an important piece of virtual territory because it's still the platform for breaking news and pretty much every media outlet publishes and promotes stories there, as well as most politicians, govt agencies and so on. Like it or not it is the most 'realtime' mass market platform.
That gives Twitter tremendous strategic importance, even though its social graph is smaller and more ephemeral than Facebook's. Size is not everything; reach matters too. That strategic importance makes it interesting to state and non-state actors, because capture of that territory is loosely equivalent to control of radio broadcasting capacity or printing presses in earlier eras. If you think of Twitter as a magically effective print and distribution store for pamphleteers with a huge secondary ecosystem around it, the shutdown of free API access is essentially a market takeover. Musk was spitballing yesterday and suggesting that from now on API access would cost $100/month and require ID to use.
(It's interesting to me that Google could have owned that space with their News product, although it has always been a one-way thing rather than socially driven. Their failure to own that space is a direct result of their aversion to user configurability and selection.)
You are correct people on the internet would have argued with them. I should have been clearer. His employees at Twitter, the bankers, the minority shareholders of Twitter and the advertisers would have all accepted his claim that "bots have been defeated enough".
I don't know that they would have, but regardless it seems like Elon really cares what the people online say. He's going out of his way to engaging in memes from his "fans".
I would have because all his posts are still full of bot spam and crypto scams... But, he certainly has no shortage of bots that upvote and call him king.
"Free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things."
This is mostly untrue. While it’s possible to stay anonymous you need a phone number, and it can’t be from twilio or other services. It’s been this way for years. I strongly suspect the bots that are unverified use headless browsers. The problem won’t go away.
Agreed, while there are tons of spambots, they are likely scraping Web API and using some backdoor-ish thing to get around requirements than using the documented API.
This announcement and today's ban-wave that followed seemed like someone not accustomed to Twitter just knew there are bots, and thought it to be workable idea to sample global timeline and script ban duplicates, which of course is not workable at all and only maximize harm on real users.
It is trivial to buy 1000's of phone numbers with SMS all available through APIs. You don't even need to keep them. The grey web is filled with many of these services.
If I looked hard enough I could probably buy 10000 verified twitter accounts with API access right now, aged 1 year or older.
Yup. PVAs can be had for a couple of $, with the price going up if they're 'warmed' (with a history of innocuous activity, usually liking celebrity tweets, retweeting the occasional breaking news story or heartwarming puppy video etc).
Furthermore, every time I create an API service, I get immediately banned (before I do anything) over and over until I truly prove that my bot is in good faith. They are super aggressive, and they actively enforce their rules (in the past, I've tried to make bots that reply to folks - that don't follow me - and the bot lasts like four hours).
Yes. But even with an old account, if you sign that up freshly to the developer program they'll force you to provide a phone number, and can require you to go through the approval process for higher API access even if you don't want that.
Scammers and opinion manipulators aren't using the Twitter API developer program. They're just using the native apps' API keys and posing as real people.
Is this kind of thing still possible with Buffer? I don't keep current with twitter manipulation tech. And do Buffer, RoundTeam and Hootsuite use the API directly?
How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts
I can, but made a choice to be opinionated here. The CEO of Twitter leverages clownishness for effect, titling himself (at present) as 'Mr Tweet' and uninhibitedly trolling others, often in crude or aggressive terms. While I could take a Ghandian approach of not reciprocating such negative behavior and instead maintain a diplomatic/academic air of prim neutrality, I think Musk's behavior is strategic in that he asserts social permission to 'act out' as the natural consequence of his wealth and power, whereas his critics are obliged to water down their opinions or suffer reputational attack.
While I certainly don't want to import the combative and shallow standards of Twitter 'debate' to HN, I do think we have a right tp be opinionated, and that my the term 'manchild' labels a specific sort of behavior rather than some petty or crude dig at his appearance or personal life.
Yeah, I think use of that term is warranted by the facts. No need to sugar-coat it.
Indeed, I'd wish that the HN community was more hostile to Musk's bulldozer approach, seeing what it did to both the company, and the engineers. The whole affair has been needlessly destructive -- obnoxiously so -- and his getting away with it harms the profession.
I think the person you’re responding to was trying to help you be more persuasive. You can ignore his advice, but it may mean that a lot of people just ignore you or think you’ve got nothing to say.
IMHO, the name isn’t necessary. Getting names called and deeds attributed is part of the plan, so take steps to not follow the plan if you aren’t trying to be supportive.
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.com before it became PayPal.
He doesn't care about the ecosystem, because its an ecosystem for a completely different busoness than the one he wants Twitter to be. He cares that use of Twitter outside of the 1st party frontends bypasses monetization, so he wants it monetized or gone.
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...
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem.
This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it.
Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.
The number of users kept via the API is not as high as people might think, so I would actually agree that if that's the case, then Musk correctly shut off the API for people who weren't bringing in more benefits than the costs they were incurring.
Frankly the guy designed rockets that landed for the first time ever so I think he probably has the brain capacity to make this calculation.
He might not be great at decisions where people and politics are involved, but this isn’t one of those decisions. But some people here on HN really want to believe he’s an idiot, which he’s not.
Can we please stop saying that the CEO of a company did anything but lead a company (not to downplay the difficulty of leading a company). Musk certainly did not design rockets that land themselves. I highly doubt that he could even write down (let alone solve) the main important equations when asked. It's funny how some execs are attributed with doing everything (Jobs and Musk are the main ones), while nobody would say Adani dug up coal from the ground.
Watching even 1 video of an everyday astronaut interview with Musk makes it completely obvious you are completely wrong. And so do tonnes of testimonials on quora from spacex employees.
Musk is the chief engineer of spacex rockets. He's not just a CEO.
Do a little research before making comments like this.
Twitter API is what publishers use to bring content onto Twitter. That content is a reason why other users visit Twitter. With that content gone, Twitter is a lot less attractive to many.
Will be interesting to observe ... will publishers pay? Will users enjoy without those?
The gp comment is talking about the indirect benefits of having an API, which is a large number of free developers and researchers help you improve your product at a pretty low cost (compared to if you paid them directly
> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem
I'd love to have free API access to all kinds of companies.
Think how much easier and faster it would be booking your travel if all airlines and hotels let you straight in to the raw pricing and availability data from their reservation systems.
Think how much money you could save if retailers exposed all their product availability and pricing data, live.
They don't, because they all regard this stuff as "commercially sensitive".
Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive as you don't typically want the end consumers to see how much profit is being made from them and how much discount is given to wholesalers.
Twitter data is rarely anything to do with pricing, so that's why it's different.
> Business pricing is very often commercially sensitive [..]
I'm not after internal pricing/B2B pricing/discounting, in my thought experiment I "just" want free API access to information that's already on public websites (eg end-user/retail pricing for rooms/flights/widgets). I'm not aware of any airlines/hotels/retailers that allow even that. In bulk, it's commercially sensitive too.
I've heard that they do a lot of price manipulation with holidays, so I can see why they wouldn't want to provide enough data for customers to track prices over time. Also, you'd be bypassing their advertising.
But yeah, it would be great if we didn't have to use their websites to navigate the data.
So back to where we started: what's actually wrong with Twitter deciding to insist on eyeballs on twitter.com instead of scripts pointing at their free API?
I wouldn't say that it's necessarily 'wrong', but I do think it's a bad decision. The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them and generate bad will towards Twitter.
In some ways it reminds me of the Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast licensing shenanigans where the business is annoying people building an ecosystem around their products which arguably adds a lot of value.
> The problem is that they've let people have access and build upon their free API and pulling the rug from under them is going to annoy them [..]
Yup, although we all know that Twitter just the latest example in a loooong line of companies to have pulled this stunt since, well, what feels like forever.
> and generate bad will towards Twitter
I'm fairly ambivalent about this aspect, and I doubt Musk cares much, it's not as though the haters weren't already hating before this latest incident.
If charging for API usage amounts to developer alienation, then why is Apple the most successful business in the world?
Frankly, I don't think Musk much cares for the developers. From a business perspective, he might be right here - developers aren't the ones watching ads or paying for microtransactions, users are. The developers, at his scale, are a liability. Restricting their capabilities and profiting from their struggle is just part of the modern tech stack. I hate it as much as you do, but calling it "insane" is a hysterical double-standard that crops up just too often on HN.
If the App Store had been free for 15 years and then Apple said "if you don't pay us $100 a year in one week, we'll delete your app" then you can bet that Tim Cook would be seeking new opportunities _within hours_. There's a big difference between "this has always cost something" and "this is going from free to paid with _one week's notice_".
I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter in the same way they're additive to Apple at all. If that's true at all, why would Twitter provide services for free? Why would Apple charge at all? (Especially from the beginning).
It's a hard comparison because the value of the Apple ecosystem is so obvious and mutual. Twitter is junk on both sides; unless as a third party dev you just happened to find value in it, in which case you should pay for it.
I understand this is hurting peoples feelings, but it makes complete sense to me from all angles.
> I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter in the same way they're additive to Apple at all.
When did you start using Twitter? Twitter as we know it today is largely a product of the community and third party developers. Retweets, hashtags, quote tweets, the use of a blue bird symbol; all came from either the community at large or specific third party devs. The fun bots also drive a lot of twitter engagement; honestly they're the only real thing I miss on Mastodon (while some of the most important ones did come across, a lot didn't). Third party software also makes Twitter a support system, a status reporting system... The list goes on.
However, beyond all that, even if there was a good argument for killing the API free tier (there is not), no-one sensible would do it with _one week's notice_. This will alienate even commercial users who would be willing to pay. If you're using your CRM's twitter integration to track customer complaints, say, unless you're huge the free API is probably sufficient today. With one week's notice, even assuming you hear about it the first day (most will not) good look getting a purchase order for the API within a week if your company is even remotely bureaucratic (most are).
The patron saint of Dunning-Kruger presumably thinks it's a good idea, but can't imagine anyone else does.
> the advertisers have lost one extra person to sell to
Which is aligned with Musk's strategy thus far, but there's also a good argument to be made that that product should have never been needed if twitter was providing a decent first party client. They should have wanted to provide that to control the advertising. Letting the third parties take that up was a poor strategy -- business-wise that is, I get that people may have liked it and have used it for a long time and are probably sad to lose it.
> I don't see how third party developers are additive to Twitter
Then you're not in the community in which the third party elements(e.g. tweet aggregation, SSO login, fine grained access control) are vital part of. Which may be substantial, or not, and we as the sheep don't know.
You're right and I'm my sheepish hypothesis here is it's not substantial. I think twitter is largely a toy, if it were to completely vanish tomorrow, very little harm would actually be done to anyone. It's like a PMF question, does twitter have third party developers banging on their door with fists full of cash? No, they have a bunch of freeloaders that have built derivative toys.
Apple can nickel and dime developers because a good app on their ecosystem is profitable.
Nobody is making enough profit via the Twitter API to make it worth staying on. Twitter is a distant #3 social network that itself has never really made money.
This is being too generous. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all far larger than Twitter. Reddit is also just barely larger than Twitter, though at that scale you have to consider who has more bots. Twitter claims slightly more MAUs than Snapchat, but since Snapchat isn't a viral network it probably has no bots to speak of, making it larger than Twitter in terms of real users.
But this comes after pulling the plug on the third-party apps without a word of warning or even acknowledging that they had done it. So those devs turned around and said, well, guess we'll go work on Mastodon apps now. Presumably there was a noticeable drop in engagement as those users cut back their time on twitter. So now twitter is like you can come back if you pay, but we can't tell you what that will cost.
You don't need to pay to use Xcode, or to run apps on your own devices. If you publish to the app store I think there is a $99/year fee or something to have your app signed, plus they take 30% of your revenue.
You don't absolutely need to have your code signed, I can give apps to my friends, they just get a warning about it not being signed and potentially unsafe when it's first installed.
So? You need a computer to run any code at all. I bought a used Mac for very cheap last year, the first Apple product I've owned in ~35 years of working in and around the computer industry. I don't feel ripped off.
Twitter wouldn't die if they don't pay bills, someone would buy it for huge discount. It seems like it would be the best way forward, depending on who would buy it. A lot of people don't follow news or Elon drama, the brand still has a lot of value. Especially abroad where news about Elon are much fewer.
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.
The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable. Even if they went bust and the service would be unavailable for a year, the social graph and brand value are important.
One reason Mastodon and others have trouble is that people don't want to follow random people, they want to follow the same people they did on Twitter. It's their community.
Certain communities did make a successful switch, like Apple and Tech journalist communities, but not a lot of other communities.
This seems to be taken as given, but how specifically would you expect someone to simply monetize the social graph? Just because data exists doesn't mean that anyone wants to pay for it.
As for the value of the brand itself, we could say the same thing about Yahoo in 2010.
Dear advertisers, so you want to reach _specific_social_demographic? Good news, I can tell you 500k people who have demonstrated 3 points of identification with that demo in the last 14 days and are minimum 5% likely to interact positively with a promoted tweet from a firm in your market sector.
You can really pull a lot of useful data on someone by just looking at their follow choices, self-identification, and reply/retweeting behavior. And that's before you add all the information Twitter maintains on things like profile views or video plays, or the consistency of entity identification in tweet content etc. I can give you very specific kinds of demographics like 'people who enjoy tweets about dogs and football but not cats or politics.'
This market already exists (I get spam offering customer lead lists every couple of days). I suspect most orgs of a reasonable size are already being bombarded similarly.
Augmenting these lists with Twitter's data might improve/expand the lists bur won't create much extra value imo, because the demand side won't change.
I don't think that's too related to cutting down bots. It's about making money from their dataset, which is valid. Why do people think they can hammer an API without paying?
They already have an enterprise tier for people who want to build commercial stuff on top of Twitter, and they already monetize their datasets and have done for years. How do you expect to sign up students/new developers if they have to pay before they figure out how to use the API?
Well they mentioned "basic tier API", so I guess let's wait for the pricing and capabilities, no? My main criticism is they're not being assholes just for charging for an API access to their data.
In my case I literally just had a bot running to pull in my own following/followers list so I could diff them and then tweet out the result privately so I'd be aware of any changes to it.
It was useful to check to see if someone else decided to softblock me/deactivated their account (and in at least one case, has helped me to reach out to someone in need). That's not "making money from the dataset", it was a hobby project and I imagine the overwhelming majority of Twitter bots are that. (Most of the ones I used to follow generally just scraped various subreddits to tweet out/source fun art to look at).
I'm not gonna pay money to access my own data, Musk can sink in his own shit for that and I don't blame any of those other hobby bot devs for not wanting to do that either.
No, the data comes from users' interactions with the platform, and they have to run a massive engineering feat to take all of that and run 24/7. It's expensive and so it's reasonable to charge something
To be fair, having a lot of money is an excellent way to have more money. Having a lot of money and making some lucky gambles in early technology plays is an even better way to have a lot of money. The fact that every company he owns a significant stake in has a 'manage Elon so that everyone else can get things done' team except for twitter and all of them are not doing insane things, except for twitter, seems to be a pretty strong indication that other enterprises he's involved in are not succeeding because of him, but in spite of him.
It's simple: Use the website. It will never stop working because people use it and you can automate and scrape it just fine. Kind of sucks that you have to go through the effort - but then there is no social media corporation that isn't toxic in some way to it's userbase.
I actually don't mind scraping it that much, and even enjoy the adversarial aspects of writing scrapers. but it makes a lot of high level functionality like filtered streams or historical search much less accessible; I'd probably never have learned a lot of network analysis stuff over the last decade or so if I'd had to to pay to access streaming data first. Also, I think it's going to be harder for academic researchers to get institutional approval to scrape adversarially, so it could put a dent in a lot of social science research by forcing people to chase grants instead of focusing on their code.
It's ironic, for a couple (non-Twitter) projects I wound up scraping because either a) they didn't have an API yet (e.g. early crypto pricing sites) or b) I wasn't confident the API would remain intact over the long term. Kind of depressing.
> I think it's going to be harder for academic researchers to get institutional approval to scrape adversarially
This is a good point about what might happen, but it seems worthwhile to address and fix directly. Personally I don't see why adversarial scraping of a publicly published website should require any more ethical consideration/review than using the suggested API would. Ethical concerns should revolve around humans, not the business desires of non-human entities.
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!
IIRC the twitter website goes to great lengths to mangle itself to prevent ad blockers presumably.
Of course this used to have the side effect of breaking significant swathes of basic browser UX, especially in areas of accessibility. I assume they’re better now than they once were, but given musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic.
> musk’s historical behavior I assume he won’t consider breaking something like accessibility to be bad or problematic.
I don't see why would he spend more to make website less accessible. Not fixing bugs - yes, just about everyone does so. But breaking it intentionally costs money.
Tesla's aren't THE most accessible (by cost) EV out there, but SpaceX def is.
Supposedly the entire accessibility team got laid off [1], so there might not be anyone left to ensure that changes to existing features do not reduce accessibility nor ensure that new features are accessible. Not that I'd expect Musk to care a whole lot about concerns raised in that regard, considering that he supposedly went ahead with Twitter Blue despite significant (and well warranted) concerns from the Trust and Safety team [2]. So Twitter will probably become less and less accessible over time.
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...
> I'm pretty sure you know exactly what the poster meant ...
No, I don't. It obviously is trying to say something about accessibility and SpaceX, but I don't see how the sense of accessbility being discussed in the thread even applies to SpaceX, much less what claim is being made.
Agree. It's quite the jump going from a user-centric website to a space launch company that is used by corporations and governments. Like, okay, I guess SpaceX is extremely accessible compared to other options in the space industry, but why would that have any bearing on how accessible the Twitter website is for you and me day-to-day?
This is a comment thread discussing accessibility at Twitter, in a post about Twitter discontinuing part of its platform. It’s not a place to circlejerk Musk’s achievements, regardless how much you would want that to be so.
Explain, in exact words, what about SpaceX in any way shape or form would indicate that they know how to handle user a11y and how that would transfer over to Twitter— you know, the thing we’re actually discussing here.
Accessibility is not a by cost thing, and you aren't paying to break accessibility, you're paying to break scraping and maintaining accessibility when doing so costs money. It also requires having engineers working to keep the site accessible, but musk fired them.
I think it’s a terrible move to kill the stuff like postybirb that a lot of people use to make posts on multiple websites at once. they’ll have to either change their workflow to make a tweet (annoying) or just abandon twitter altogether. just makes the website worse for practically no benefit.
Does not take much effort. Below is an example using curl. For reading Twitter feeds I just get the JSON and read the "full_text" objects. I have simple custom program I wrote that turns JSON of unlimited size into something like line-delimited JSON so I can use sed, grep and awk on it but HN readers probably prefer jq. For checking out t.co URLs I use HTTP/1.1 pipelining.
Usage for reading is something like (but not identical to)
"ahref" is just a script turns URLs on stdin into simple HTML on stdout
Alternatively if I do not trust the URLs I might use a script called "www" instead of ahref. It takes URLs on stdin and fetches archive.org URLs wrapped in simple HTML to stdout, using the IA's cdx API.
There's no way I would use the Twitter website as it requires enabling Javascript and not for the user's benefit.
This solution isn't pretty but I can easily keep tabs on Twitter feeds without any need for a Twitter account, a Twitter "API key" or a so-called "modern" browser.
You can scrape anything you see in the UI (and sometimes stuff you cannot see). Twitter makes almost no effort to stop people from using their internal APIs, which is why them saying discontinuing the free public API is to stop malicious bots is pretty laughable. Unless they seriously increase their detection abilities for non-approved clients using their internal API, it would take any malicious actor all of a few hours to transition to using the internal API for whatever they want. Honestly, I assumed most bad actors would already be doing this, since things like spamming were already against the ToS of the public API.
Twitter is not alone in using GraphQL this way, having all website visitors use the same token or key. Other websites do it, too, as shown below.
Using GraphQL like this can be an effective dark pattern because to anyone using a "modern" browser that "tech" commpanies control it makes it seem like the text of the website cannot be retrieved without Javascript enabled. That's false, but nonetheless it gets people to enable Javascript because the website explicitly asks them to enable it. Then the website, i.e., "tech" company, can perform telemetry, data collection, surveillance, and other shenanigans.
Sometimes this practice might not be a deliberate dark pattern, it might just be developers who are using Javascript gratuitously. For example, HN search provided by Algolia uses GraphQL. HN puts URLs with pre-selected query terms and a public token ("API key") on the HN website. Everyone that uses those URLs uses the same key.
Unlike Twitter, HN istelf does not ask anyone to enable Javascript. The website works fine without it, including the Algolia search, as shown below.
A huge concern that no one seems to be mentioning is that pretty much all academic data sets that used the Twitter API were required by the TOS to only be released publicly with the tweet ids, not the content of the tweet. Some of these have hundreds of thousands of tweets, and the only way to check the work of the researchers, or to build on it, is to use the api to reseed everything yourself.
With this new policy that practically becomes impossible (the costs would be outrageous for a researcher, much less an individual).
This will have the effect of essentially destroying 15 years worth of social science work that was based on Twitter data, it's all gone.
If you're a researcher who has published a data set with only IDs but have a private version with all tweet data I highly encourage you to publish that internal dataset. I'm putting together some hosting for anyone that needs it, feel free to get in touch and we can take it from there.
I created the Events2012 dataset which has around 120,000,000 tweets reduced from an original sample of several billion. It is now over 10 years old, but still cited and still requested fairly regularly.
Previously, my response has been to send over the Tweet IDs, but now I have a dilemma because I understand the privacy concerns that resulted in the ID only policy but also think that Twitter data offers quite a lot of value to researchers. Interestingly, one of Twitter's policies around this also requires researchers to regularly remove tweets that have been deleted on Twitter from the local copies of their datasets, which of course requires checking each Tweet individually using the API...
It seems to me that as a subject pool, Twitter is extremely bad (like other options that researchers tend pick out of frugality, like Mechanical Turk). Why use it at all?
I think the paper showing that Twitter activity slightly predicted stock movements was incredibly interesting and valuable to know. I'm sure there are plenty of other papers as well, like analyses of Arab spring?
Twitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources.
> Twitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources.
Would anyone have been able to do that without paying? Years ago, someone told me you could get at most 1% of the "firehose" without paying, and if you paid you could get ~10% (however the free sample wasn't a subset of the paid sample, so they still grabbed both and de-duped).
You can do a lot with the 1% sample - indeed you would probably want to filter it further, both because retrieved streams count toward your monthly tweet cap (2 million/mo on the best non-academic free tier, I think 5m or 10m month if you are a postgrad w/institutional affiliation), and because the filtering capabilities are pretty rich. An obvious use case is tracking big political or industrial influencers and estimating their reach and peer cohort by looking at different kinds of engagement they get.
How? I am not a full-fledged network scientist, but I know a whole lot of academics in this space and am good enough to swap tips/find minor math errors. I know quite a lot of people staring down the exact problem you describe.
If no researchers studied Twitter, that would be a massive failure to analyze a major piece of online activity. I believe that no one giving even basic thought to what researchers do would endorse what you just said.
More like a huge new source of sociological data collected at massive scale appears, and you'd be a complete idiot not to study it. I feel your comment is like saying astronomy is a bad career choice because pollution and cloudy weather are likely to limit the scope of your research opportunities.
That clearly wasn't even an issue in the past. It's only since Musk took over that theres been anything said on the possibility of Twitter closing up shop, which as we all know frm Musks' well know history of spewing nonsense, will not happen.
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.
Twitter has $13bn in debt on its balance sheet thanks to the ridiculous purchase price. Last week's bond payment of $300m is on its own, half of what their total net debt was pre-Musk ($600m)[0].
Twitter's revenue last year was $5bn. In a year's time it will probably be a fraction of even that; Twitter's user base isn't growing and isn't going to magically become more valuable in an economy where advertisers are cutting back on spending.
Okay, so this one is nearly making me buy into those conspiracy theories that Musk is deliberately breaking Twitter because 4d chess (only nearly; this is incompetence rather than anything else).
There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should:
- A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting said bots. Fun bots are actually probably the biggest thing I miss after having moved to Mastodon (fortunately, the all-important Samuel Pepys bot has come across).
- Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates. If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation. Most of Twitter's important features (retweets, quote tweets, hashtags, etc etc) ultimately originated in third party clients, not from Twitter itself.
- A free API makes it less frictionful for companies to try twitter out for things. If you want to maybe try showing your website status automatically or auto-track customer tweets at you in your support system or whatever, it's easier if you just hook up the app vs if you have to fill out a purchase order for the API access first.
However, whatever about whether a free API is a good idea, it is clearly a _terrible_ idea to kill it on a week's notice. Even for users who _want_ to pay, with only a week's notice many will never hear about it, if their organisation is remotely bureaucratic it's probably not long enough to get the purchase order approved, etc. There's just no possible reasoning to do it this quickly.
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 debt that he'll be discharging would be about enough to buy a house for every chronically homeless person in the US.
He won't retain ownership of it. The banks are already talking about how they'll run Twitter, since they expected him to default on the $300m interest payment the other day.
> 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 have to pay a premium to buy it back.
There is another card Elon could play - which is not pay the loan and force the banks to declare bankruptcy. Do the banks really want to own Twitter? Can they kick out Elon, get competent management and somehow make themselves whole on the loaned money? That's certainly a scenario, but one that can't look appealing to the banks.
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.
If I recall the Matt Levine newsletter correctly the banks have already discounted the debt so I would think they'd be happy to sell it for less than the original $ value, either to Musk or Musk associates.
As I mentioned, it's already down 40% last I saw. And they will take less, but they aren't going to give it away. One, it sets a bad precedence, and two it's bad business.
ML also mentioned he hoped Twitter would stiff the banks on the first interest payment like they have been doing all their other creditors. It would have been an entertaining game of chicken. The other unknown is if Elon really wants to dump more money into this, though he may feel pot committed. But what if he realizes there is no winning option?
I agreed up until the last point. Unfortunately markets don’t work like that, if we say had $1 bn to buy houses for homeless, the cost per house would very quickly go up as supply decreased.
Then there’s the challenge of transporting homeless individuals to other areas where supply is higher.
Furthermore, many homeless people aren’t homeless because the want to be. Many are afflicted with mental and health problems, that quite frankly, a house wouldn’t solve.
I fully agree that there’s an issue, and we need to do something about it, but these oversimplified ways of looking at economics is detrimental to the real discussions we should be having.
> Most of Twitter's important features (retweets […]) ultimately originated in third party clients,
Not sure about the others, but RTs did not originate with 3rd party clients, but simply organically with users. Back then we did RT @author OriginalText, third party client support for automating this came after it was established and displaying them differently much later.
Whilst I don't disagree with you, I can't think of a single time I've been happy consuming from or interacting with a bot, someones toy project, or another API driven system on Twitter.
You experience obviously varies, but I suspect most people are there to follow people.
> Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates.
You should add the keyword: expensive APIs.
Nobody cares about pay $10 a month to experiment and use the API, especially if it makes things easier to get and not have to explain to some Twitter service why you need access.
It's when they make it expensive that nobody will use it.
I have a discord bot that pulls a twitter feed into Discord & embeds it (server of 10k members). Pretty sure we can't do that anymore, starting next week.
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) side effect of crippling academic/analytic research.
As an amateur network science researcher, I'm pretty steamed. I enjoy doing my own network analyses using tools like Gephi and have monitored probably a hundred breaking news or trending issues, as well as amassing a great collection of academic papers by smarter folk than me. I don't run any kind of app or service that sits on top of Twitter, but those who do run legitimate services are now being held hostage because of the unchecked abuse. Ant the failure to deal with botspam is lamentable. Twitter has refused for years to implement even the simplest things like hashing tweets and looking for collisions, or considering the count of edges to the hashtag graph, or even looking at tweet frequency. Many of their abuse problems will continue unabated; the sellers in the market for bogus twitter accounts are likely delighted because they now have a great excuse to raise prices, even though most of their 'product' is produced by hand with cheap labor in poor countries.